h fattened out of him,"
says Mr. Lowell: "Jonathan is conscious still that he lives in the World
of the Unseen as well as of the Seen." It is not enough to catch a ghost
white-handed and to hale him into the full glare of the electric light.
A brutal misuse of the supernatural is perhaps the very lowest
degradation of the art of fiction. But "to mingle the marvellous rather
as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor than as any actual portion
of the substance," to quote from the preface to "The House of the Seven
Gables," this is, or should be, the aim of the writer of Short-stories
whenever his feet leave the firm ground of fact as he strays in the
unsubstantial realms of fantasy. In no one's writings is this better
exemplified than in Hawthorne's; not even in Poe's. There is a propriety
in Hawthorne's fantasy to which Poe could not attain. Hawthorne's
effects are moral where Poe's are merely physical. To Poe the situation
and its logical development and the effects to be got out of it are all
he thinks of. In Hawthorne the situation, however strange and weird, is
only the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual struggle.
Ethical consequences are always worrying Hawthorne's soul; but Poe did
not know that there were any ethics.

There are literary evolutionists who, in their whim of seeing in every
original writer a copy of some predecessor, have declared that Hawthorne
is derived from Tieck, and Poe from Hoffmann, just as Dickens modelled
himself on Smollett and Thackeray followed in the footsteps of Fielding.
In all four cases the pupil surpassed the master,--if haply Tieck and
Hoffmann can be considered as even remotely the masters of Hawthorne and
Poe. When Coleridge was told that Klopstock was the German Milton, he
assented with the dry addendum, "A very German Milton." So is Hoffmann a
very German Poe, and Tieck a very German Hawthorne. Of a truth, both Poe
and Hawthorne are as American as any one can be. If the adjective
American has any meaning at all, it qualifies Poe and Hawthorne. They
were American to the core. They both revealed the curious sympathy with
Oriental moods of thought which is often an American characteristic,
Poe, with his cold logic and his mathematical analysis, and Hawthorne,
with his introspective conscience and his love of the subtile and the
invisible, are representative of phases of American character not to be
mistaken by any one who has given thought to the influence of