es and differences between
Poe and Hawthorne are obvious. The latter never deals in physical
horror: his morbidest tragedy is of a spiritual kind; while once
only--in the story entitled "William Wilson"--Poe enters that field of
ethical romance which Hawthorne constantly occupies. What he has in
common with Irving is chiefly the attitude of spectatorship, and the
careful refinement of the style, so different from the loud, brassy
manner of modern writing. Hawthorne never uses slang, dialect, oaths, or
colloquial idioms. The talk of his characters is book talk. Why is it
that many of us find this old-fashioned elegance of Irving and Hawthorne
irritating? Is it the fault of the writer or of the reader? Partly of
the former, I think: that anxious finish, those elaborately rounded
periods have something of the artificial, which modern naturalism has
taught us to distrust. But also, I believe, the fault is largely our
own. We have grown so nervous, in these latter generations, so used to
short cuts, that we are impatient of anything slow. Cut out the
descriptions, cut out the reflections, _coupez vos phrases_. Hawthorne's
style was the growth of reverie, solitude, leisure--"fine old leisure,"
whose disappearance from modern life George Eliot has lamented. On the
walls of his study at the "Wayside" was written--though not by his own
hand--the motto, "There is no joy but calm."

Sentiment and humor do not lie so near the surface in Hawthorne as in
Irving. He had a deep sense of the ridiculous, well shown in such
sketches as "P's Correspondence" and "The Celestial Railroad"; or in the
description of the absurd old chickens in the Pyncheon yard, shrunk by
in-breeding to a weazened race, but retaining all their top-knotted
pride of lineage. Hawthorne's humor was less genial than Irving's, and
had a sharp satiric edge. There is no merriment in it. Do you remember
that scene at the Villa Borghese, where Miriam and Donatello break into
a dance and all the people who are wandering in the gardens join with
them? The author meant this to be a burst of wild maenad gaiety. As such
I do not recall a more dismal failure. It is cold at the heart of it.
It has no mirth, but is like a dance without music: like a dance of deaf
mutes that I witnessed once, pretending to keep time to the inaudible
scrapings of a deaf and dumb fiddler.

Henry James says that Hawthorne's stories are the only good American
historical fiction; and Woodberry says th