Chapter VI: Part 6

_Nathaniel Hawthorne._--The greatest genius among American writers of romance, by many held to be the supreme literary artist of America, was Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was peculiarly a product of New England and frankly admitted that New England was quite as large a lump of earth as his heart could take in. His ancestor, William Hathorne, came to the New World in 1630, in the ship with John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley, and became a leader in the colony. Hathorne’s son John was one of the judges in the witchcraft trials at Salem in 1691. The grandfather and father of Nathaniel Hawthorne were both sea-captains. The novelist was born at Salem on July 4, 1804. Four years later, his father, never apparently a robust man, died at Surinam, and the widowed mother began to live in a deep seclusion which could not fail to have its effect upon the quick sensibilities of her son. In 1818, the family removed to Raymond, on the shore of Sebago Lake, in Maine, where his grandfather Manning owned large tracts of land. Hawthorne’s boyhood environment, therefore, was not widely different from that of Fenimore Cooper. But he was more of a reader than Cooper. As a boy, he became familiar with Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, Clarendon, Froissart, Rousseau, and Godwin. Entering Bowdoin College, he was graduated in 1825 in the class with Longfellow. While he did not distinguish himself in his studies, he became a respectable Latin and English scholar; and he devoted much time to reading in the little library of the Athenæan Society. At graduation, he ranked eighteenth in a class of thirty-eight. Meanwhile his family had returned to Salem, and thither Hawthorne now went, to begin a period of literary apprenticeship. It was seemingly a bold undertaking to attempt to live by his pen; however, he seems to have drifted into the attempt through aversion to a more active life. In 1828, he published anonymously a novel called “Fanshawe,” dealing with some of his college experiences and recalling vaguely the methods of Scott. Some characters, it must be said, are vigorously conceived, and here and there the volume gave promise of the author’s future skill; but there is about the whole a suggestion of unreality, not to say crudeness. The book found, as it deserved, an indifferent public, and Hawthorne subsequently recalled as many copies as he could procure and burned them. For several years, he continued to live in seclusion, contributing stories and sketches to various annuals and periodicals. For the stories he got $35 each. In March, 1837, having been encouraged by his friend Horatio Bridge, he published the first volume to appear with his name, “Twice-Told Tales.” They were eighteen in number, being only half of the stories he is known to have printed up to this time. The “Tales” gave Hawthorne a considerable reputation; Longfellow praised it in _The North American Review_, then influential in literary affairs. Again helped by his friends, in January, 1839, Hawthorne assumed the position of weigher and gauger in the Boston Custom-House. At first, the novelty of contact with the practical world interested him; but he soon found that his work, always monotonous, left him no time or strength for writing, and he was not sorry to lose his post when the Whigs came into power in 1841. For a few months, he tried life at Brook Farm, thinking that in this new community he should find a suitable way of combining manual and intellectual labour; but the work was too hard, and he had too little opportunity for writing. Accordingly in 1842 he left the Farm, married Miss Sophia A. Peabody, to whom he had been engaged for four years, and settled at the Old Manse, an idyllic retreat at Concord, Massachusetts. Meanwhile, he had published (1841) two volumes of historical tales for young people, “Grandfather’s Chair” and “Famous Old People”; and to these he now added a third series, “The Liberty Tree,” as well as a second series of “Twice-Told Tales” and a volume of “Biographical Stories for Children” (1842). Of these, none except the “Tales” rises much above the level of respectable writing to sell. In the next four years, Hawthorne wrote for periodicals some eighteen more tales, which, together with a number of earlier uncollected stories, he republished in 1846 as “Mosses from an Old Manse.” Hawthorne now returned to his native Salem as surveyor of customs (1846-9), and proved an able administrator of the office. Another period of literary barrenness ensued, but in 1847 he resumed his writing and produced a few tales. The idea of a longer romance had come to him, and after his dismissal from office in 1849 he found the leisure necessary for writing “The Scarlet Letter.” Once more, then, he exchanged the world of affairs for that realm of the imagination where he was so much more at home. Working resolutely amid sickness and poverty, he at length completed the splendid romance, the publication of which distinguishes the year 1850 in American letters as Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” and Wordsworth’s “Prelude” do in English poetry. Hawthorne had now entered upon a period of great productivity. In the next two years he published “The House of the Seven Gables” (1851), “A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys” (1851), “The Snow Image and Other Tales” (1851), “Tanglewood Tales,” (1852), “The Blithedale Romance” (1852), a tale based on his Brook Farm life, and a campaign “Life of Franklin Pierce,” his college friend, now a candidate for the Presidency. Promptly after his election, President Pierce made Hawthorne consul at Liverpool, an office which he held from July, 1853, until September, 1857. Though rich in experience and in fruitful observation, his life in England was outwardly quiet and uneventful. The years 1857-9 the Hawthornes spent in Italy, where they mingled somewhat more with the world than had been their wont. The fruit of the Italian life was “The Marble Faun” (1860), written in Italy and at Redcar, on the shore of the North Sea, and published in England as “Transformation.” Returning to America in 1860, Hawthorne passed the next four years at the Wayside, Concord. In 1863 he contributed “Our Old Home” to _The Atlantic Monthly_ and began “The Dolliver Romance,” which he was destined not to finish. He died suddenly on May 18, 1864, at Plymouth, N. H., while on a journey to the New Hampshire lakes in search of health.

His literary remains must be at least mentioned. In 1868 appeared “Passages from American Note-Books”; in 1870, “Passages from English Note-Books”; and in 1871, “Passages from French and Italian Note-Books.” These volumes throw much light on Hawthorne’s favourite haunts and wandering propensities, as well as his eagerness for minute observation. “Septimius Felton, or, The Elixir of Life” (1871) was to be a story, placed in Revolutionary times, of a man who sought earthly immortality. The theme was a powerful one; but Hawthorne’s strength was evidently exhausted, and the story must be pronounced a failure. The last works to appear were “The Dolliver Romance” (1876) and “Doctor Grimshaw’s Secret,” which are fragmentary and ineffective studies of the same theme as “Septimius Felton.” Their failure, in all probability, was due not only to the waning of Hawthorne’s powers but also to the difficulties attending the theme itself.

Hawthorne was one of the shyest of men. Kenyon, in “The Marble Faun,” says: “Between man and man there is always an insuperable gulf”; such a gulf at any rate separated Kenyon’s creator from the rest of mankind. Always fond of solitude, he lived in a world of his own, apart from humankind; longing at times for more familiar converse with men, but never quite successful in establishing cordial relations (outside of his own family) with any but a few friends. Possessed of an exquisitely sensitive nature, he made no effort to conceal the pleasure which honest praise afforded him; and he was easily rebuffed by the coolness of his public. Perhaps the bane of his life was self-distrust. Each of his books when first written seemed to him well-nigh worthless. James T. Fields has told of the difficulty with which he extracted from Hawthorne the first manuscript of “The Scarlet Letter.” “Thus it is with winged horses,” says Hawthorne in “The Chimæra,” “and with such wild and solitary creatures. If you can catch and overcome them, it is the surest way to win their love.” Such was the devotion with which Hawthorne repaid those who had “captured” him that their confident encouragement greatly strengthened and inspired him. As might be supposed, however, with the world at large he was lacking in sympathy. His point of view was fixed; he could not see the world with the eyes of another. This helps to account for the effect of harshness and asperity which his chapter on “The Custom House” in “The Scarlet Letter” had upon the people of Salem whom he there described; and for the similar effect of the descriptions of English life in “Our Old Home” upon the English people in general. As Professor Woodberry remarks, too, he had “the critical spirit which is a New England trait, and with this went its natural attendant, the habit of speaking his mind.” He had, moreover, deeply rooted prejudices and a natural hatred of shams. He disliked literary friendships. While in England, for example, he remained a stranger to the brilliant literary set in London where he might have been warmly welcomed. He saw Tennyson once in Manchester, but made no effort to meet the poet. Another of his aversions concerned the manifestations of spiritualism--rappings, tipping of tables, spirit writing, and the like; he was a good hater of shams in general.

To his family, Hawthorne was always deeply devoted. When his mother died, although there had always been “a sort of coldness of intercourse” between them, he spoke of the time as the darkest hour he had ever lived through. His wife worshipped him, and the attitude of his children is sufficiently indicated by the words of his son Julian: “In my thought of him he has a quality not to be described; that is associated with the early impressions which make the name of home beautiful; with a child’s delight in the glory of nature; with a boy’s aspirations towards a pure and generous career; with intimate conceptions of truth, bravery, and simplicity.”

So much for the man; what now, shall be said of the artist? In the first place, as he was the peculiar product of New England Puritanism, so his genius was in a sense confined to setting forth New England and the problems of New England Calvinism. Even when he lays the scene of his tale in Rome, there is the same interest in the working out of the consequences of sin, and part of the characters are Americans living in the Eternal City. Hawthorne still stands alone in having given supreme literary expression to that earnest and virile if narrow and at times misguided life of early New England; its pathos, its tragedy, its legacy to modern times. Then it must be observed that in doing this he places himself in the ranks of the great masters in deducing from the individual the general experience; from the particular the universal moral life. In his earlier years he delighted in allegory, of which the “Tales” and the “Mosses” are full; and he was always fond of symbolism. Lady Eleanore’s mantle, for example, is a symbol of pride; the scarlet letter is a symbol of sin; no less is Donatello a symbol, a type of universal innocence tasting of the knowledge of good and evil--the missing link, as it were, in the evolution of moral instincts. Hawthorne constantly describes the unseen in terms of the seen, the spiritual world by means of the every day, material world.

The “Tales” have been most elaborately characterised by Professor Woodberry in his admirable biography.[7] Many of them are intrinsically slight--descriptions of the common events of daily life, always somewhat moralised, and to an increasing extent as the author grew older. In some the fancy has free rein, as in “The Seven Vagabonds” and “The Great Stone Face.” In “Tales of the Province House” and many others Hawthorne skilfully wove threads of colonial history with the rich woof of his imagination to produce a splendid romantic pageant. Sometimes he treats of individuals, as in “David Swan” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; often he studies the group, or the crowd, as in the “The Celestial Railroad,” “The Christmas Banquet,” “The Procession of Life.” In all, he studies the moral life and tries to understand the significance of some phase of universal human experience.

“The Scarlet Letter” has been called by Mr. James “the most distinctive piece of prose fiction that was to spring from American soil.” It is a grim tragedy, in which the consequences of sin are depicted with a simplicity, a steady movement, and a relentlessness characteristic of the tragedies of Euripides. Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale living agonised lives which moved steadily towards the day of expiatory shame; Roger Chilingworth, outwardly the wise, benevolent physician, inwardly the ghastly demon gloating over his victim--these figures indeed move us to pity and fear, and give us a new sense of the depth and mystery of our human life, which no man liveth to himself alone, but which must be interpreted as the expression and result of racial upstriving through myriads of years. “The Scarlet Letter” is indeed, as Mr. W. C. Brownell says,[8] the Puritan “Faust”; and many will doubtless agree with him in calling it “our one prose masterpiece.”

In “The House of the Seven Gables,” Hawthorne returns to the present and studies the workings of heredity. Less gloomy than the earlier story, this one is still sombre and in part removed from the world of objective reality. Real enough, to be sure, are the commonplace features of daily life at the Seven Gables, the pinched features and heroic heart of Hepzibah, and the homely philosophising of Uncle Venner; but Jaffrey and Clifford Pyncheon are at best shadowy and unreal. Holgrave, too, belongs to a type which, common enough in the days of Brook Farm Fourierism, has now well-nigh passed away. Phœbe Pyncheon is one of the most delicate and exquisite of all Hawthorne’s portraits; as Dr. Holmes wrote to the author, “the flavour of the sweet-fern and the bayberry are not truer to the soil than the native sweetness of our little Phœbe.” It is interesting to note that when the book appeared Hawthorne wrote to his friend Horatio Bridge:

“The House of the Seven Gables,” in my opinion, is better than
“The Scarlet Letter”; but I should not wonder if I had refined upon
the principal character a little too much for popular appreciation,
nor if the romance of the book should be somewhat at odds with the
humble and familiar scenery in which I invest it. But I feel that
portions of it are as good as anything I can hope to write.

More able critics than one have pronounced “The Blithedale Romance” the most perfect of Hawthorne’s stories. Although he wrote to George William Curtis that the story had essentially nothing to do with Brook Farm, it is certain that the community formed more than a background for the story, and furnished some of its incidents and the traits of some of the characters. Thus the romance may be said to approach more closely to real life than any other of the greater works. The characters are drawn with great distinctness of outline: Hollingsworth the reformer, earnest, stern, engrossed in his reform undertaking to the point of selfishness; Miles Coverdale, the dreamer, who bears the ear-marks of his artist creator, always a spectator of, rather than a participant in, the life at Blithedale; Priscilla, the timid maid who seemed to have dropped down from the clouds and sought protection in this retreat; Zenobia with her splendid beauty, her refinement, her ardour, her despair when disillusionment comes--all these are highly individualised. It has been complained, and with justice, that neither Zenobia nor Priscilla is a typical New England girl; but something may perhaps be conceded to the romantic atmosphere of the tale; the author did not promise a transcript from prosaic real life. The plot halts now and then, and does not move steadily and convincingly to its climax. The inserted story of “The Veiled Lady” does not materially further the plot. Yet as a whole the romance is a searching and remarkable presentment of Hawthorne’s views of reform. He was never a reformer; he distrusted the excess of zeal, the narrowness of vision too often characteristic of the more ardent reformers of his day; and with great skill he has here set forth the illusory hopes, the discouragement, the sense of impotence and defeat that must attend the outcome of radical schemes for human improvement which are not grounded on sound and wide knowledge of man’s nature.

Probably the most popular, as it was the most ambitious, of all the romances, has been “The Marble Faun.” With consummate skill the author maintains the mystery necessary for the romantic atmosphere and at the same time draws in clear outlines the four characters in the little drama--this miniature world-tragedy, this “story of the fall of man repeated,” as Miriam says. As Mr. Lathrop has pointed out, moreover, with the main theme, itself of abiding interest, is joined a study of the psychology of Beatrice Cenci’s story; but, without stopping where Shelley stopped, Hawthorne went on to show how Miriam and Donatello might “work out their purification.” Thus while the romance may, as one critic avers, “begin in mystery and end in mist,” the end is nevertheless full of hope.

Hawthorne has never been, and doubtless never will be, a popular novelist. His stories are for the few, the thoughtful readers who are willing to read old favourites over and over again. But there will always be such persons, haply in increasing numbers; and for them Hawthorne will continue to be a unique personality, the “high untrammelled thinker,” the interpreter of spiritual mysteries.

_Charles Sealsfield._--Although not mentioned by most historians of American literature, the Austrian novelist Carl Postl (“Charles Sealsfield,” 1793-1864) deserves to be recalled here from the fact that his works deal chiefly with American life and in their English form enjoyed considerable popularity in America. Born in Poppitz, Moravia, he became at first a priest of the order of the Kreuzherren von Pöltenberg; but, having broken with Catholic dogma, he fled from the cloister and arrived in New York in 1823 as Charles Sealsfield. He remained in America until 1832, travelling extensively and making close studies of life and character. His first novel, “Tokeah, or The White Rose; an Indian Tale” (Philadelphia, 1828), was republished at Zurich in 1833 as “Der Legitime und die Republikaner”; while never a popular story in America, it seems, as Professor Faust has discovered,[9] to have furnished Mrs. Jackson with some hints for her “Ramona” and Charles F. Hoffman with a _motif_ for his “Vigil of Faith.” After his return to Europe Sealsfield published, among other things, “Transatlantische Reiseskizzen” (1833), translated as “Life in the New World, or Sketches of American Society” (1844), which originally appeared in _The New York Mirror_ in 1827-8 and which furnished Simms with some scenes for “Guy Rivers”; “Nathan der Squatter Regulator” (1837), translated as “Life in Texas” (1845); “Der Virey und die Aristokraten, oder Mexiko im Jahre 1812” (1834); “Morton, oder Die grosse Tour” (1835); “Das Cajütenbuch, oder Nationale Charakteristiken” (1841), translated as “The Cabin Book” (1844), which furnished Mayne Reid with the last ten chapters of his “Wild Life” without change; and “Süden und Norden” (1842-3), translated as “North and South, or Scenes and Adventures in Mexico” (1844). In his vigorous delineations of the crude American life of the twenties and thirties, Sealsfield exhibited great enthusiasm, a wide range of observation which overlooked nothing and which measured impartially, and a comprehension of the true inwardness of our young institutions such as no native American of his day possessed. If his exaggerating brush failed of the touch of an artist, he created some characters, such as Morton and Nathan Strong, who deserve immortality as typical Americans, and described with inimitable fidelity “the dauntless squatter and sturdy pioneer, the Southern planter and patriarchal slave-holder, the grasping millionaire and his emissaries, the New York dandy and the society belle, the taciturn Yankee sea-captain and the hot-blooded Kentuckian, the utilitarian alcalde and the reformed desperado.”

_William Leggett_ (1802-39), after spending some time at Georgetown College, accompanied his family in 1819 to make a settlement on the prairies of Illinois. He spent the years 1822-26 as a midshipman in the navy. His experiences of pioneer and sea life were graphically portrayed in “The Rifle,” published in 1828 in _The Atlantic Souvenir_, and in “Tales by a Country Schoolmaster” (1835). For the remainder of his life he was engaged in journalism, from 1829 till 1836 as one of the editors of _The Evening Post_.

_Southern Novelists._--Thus far we have considered no native Southern writer of fiction. The novel ripened late in the South; indeed, only one writer of fiction of the first rank was produced by the South before the Civil War. Yet in the varied and picturesque life of the aristocratic planters, the frontiersmen, the “poor whites,” and the negroes there were rich materials for the artist and the story-teller, who in due time began to avail themselves of their opportunity. “The Valley of the Shenandoah” (1824) by George Tucker (1775-1861), though reprinted in England and translated into German, possesses slight worth, and little more can be said of his “Voyage to the Moon” (1827), a satirical romance; yet these works gave promise of better things from the South. William A. Carruthers (1806-72), a voluminous contributor to magazines, wrote two novels, “The Cavaliers of Virginia” (1832) and “The Knights of the Horseshoe” (1845), which, in spite of serious defects, deal with colonial days in Virginia in a genial, vigorous, and unhackneyed manner.

“Davy” Crockett (1786-1836), crude, unlettered hunter, backwoodsman, and Congressman, published, in his “Autobiography” (1834), a collection of thrilling narratives of adventure remarkable for directness, vividness, and virility. The “Georgia Scenes, Characters, and Incidents” (1835) of Augustus B. Longstreet (1790-1870), who was for many years a college president, revealed the curious traits of the poor whites or “Crackers” of Georgia. “The Partisan Leader” (1836) by Nathaniel Beverley Tucker (1784-1851) dealt with the encroachments of the Federal Government upon the rights of the States, and prophesied with startling and accurate logic the terrible disruption which occurred a quarter of a century later. If artistically imperfect, it is a stirring tale, intense in its action, and of heroic strain. But it can scarcely be said that any of these works now survive. They are mainly important as illustrating the evolution of Southern fiction. With Kennedy and Simms, however, the South takes a high place in the fiction of America.

_John Pendleton Kennedy._--For John Pendleton Kennedy (1795-1870), literature was never more than a pastime, a fact much to be regretted. Kennedy belonged to a prominent and wealthy family. He was born in Baltimore, was graduated from Baltimore College in 1812, and studied law. Entering political life, he employed his pen effectively in the defence of his political principles, but occasionally amused himself with ventures in lighter forms of literature. His first work of importance, “Swallow Barn” (1832), was distinctly declared not to be a novel; and indeed the action is of slight importance. His main purpose in writing it was to give, in connection with a slender plot, a picture of manners and customs in Virginia toward the end of the eighteenth century. Here is no subtle characterisation; the persons of the narrative are drawn broadly and naturally and the story moves easily, if a little slowly, to its end. The local scenery and institutions are delineated with the utmost fidelity. Frank Meriwether, the prosperous country gentleman and magistrate, has been called a Virginia Sir Roger de Coverley; and there is throughout observed the same quiet good humour, the same cheerful atmosphere, the same genial optimism that one finds in the pages of Addison. “Horse-Shoe Robinson, a Tale of the Tory Ascendency” (1835), was a story of early Tory days in South Carolina, and is now generally considered the best novel written in the South before the Civil War. The action centres about the battle of King’s Mountain (1780), which is vividly and accurately described. The intrepid valour of the backwoods patriot, the bitterness and horror of civil war, the relieving and characteristic humour of primitive frontier life, are well portrayed. The blacksmith Galbraith Robinson is a typical American, worthy to rank with Cooper’s Leatherstocking, and possibly truer to nature than Cooper’s more famous creation. In 1838 appeared Kennedy’s third novel, “Rob of the Bowl: a Legend of St. Inigoes,” a story of Colonial Maryland and the struggles of the Catholic settlers, with which are interwoven traditions of the piratical “Brethren of the Coast.” Nor must we fail to mention the humorous chronicle entitled “Quodlibet: Containing some Annals thereof, by Solomon Secondthought, Schoolmaster” (1840), in which are described the vagaries and absurdities of an early Presidential election. Had Kennedy made literature the serious business of life he would have won more lasting fame. As it is, he deserves to be more widely read than he is.[10]

_William Gilmore Simms._--One of the most prolific of American novelists was William Gilmore Simms. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, April 17, 1806, he was early left, by the death of his mother and the removal of his father to Tennessee, to the care of his grandmother, from whom he learned many a weird tale of peril and adventure. From the poor schools of his time he gained little, though he became an omnivorous reader. Apprenticed to a druggist, at eighteen he turned to the study of law. A long visit to his father in the South-west gave him a good opportunity to study the primitive life of the backwoodsmen, a life which he afterward described inimitably. At twenty he married and in another year he was admitted to the bar. Successful from the first, he resolutely turned, however, from the practice of law to a literary life. He had become well known as a poet when his first prose tale, “Martin Faber, the Story of a Criminal,” appeared in 1833, revealing the influence of William Godwin and Brockden Brown, but also independent skill in the construction of an interesting narrative. In “Guy Rivers” (1834), a description of Georgia in the turbulent days of the gold fever, Simms began a series of border romances which, though marred by a slipshod style and by roughness of construction, are nevertheless in the main readable on account of the rapidity and energy of the narrative. In “The Yemassee” (1835), a story of the strife between South Carolina and the Indians in 1715, Simms is perhaps at his best, and his stirring narrative strongly reminds one of, though it does not rival, the work of Cooper. Then came a trilogy, “The Partisan” (1835), “Mellichampe: a Legend of the Santee” (1836), and “Katharine Walton, or The Rebel of Dorchester” (1851), in which he portrays every phase of social life in Charleston during the Revolutionary War, and delineates the military careers of Marion, Pickens, Moultrie, Sumter, and Hayne. Between 1836 and 1859 he published some twenty-five other novels and stories, generally in two volumes each, the best of which are “The Kinsmen” (1841), afterwards known as “The Scout,” (1854), “The Sword and the Distaff,” now known as “Woodcraft” (1852), “The Forayers, or The Raid of the Dog-Days” (1855), its sequel, “Eutaw” (1856), and “The Cassique of Kiawah” (1859). He also wrote numerous short stories for various periodicals; one of these, “Grayling, or Murder Will Out,” published in _The Gift_ for 1842, was pronounced by Poe the best ghost story he had ever read. A collection of thirteen of Simms’ best stories was published in 1845-46 under the title of “The Wigwam and the Cabin.” Notwithstanding his immense popularity before the Civil War, Simms is now well-nigh forgotten. Although a conscientious workman, he wrote much too rapidly to produce permanent literature, and his faulty style and his excessive fondness for portraying in detail scenes of carnage and crime strongly repel the reader of to-day. After the Civil War, which Simms did much to bring on and from which he suffered severe losses, his popularity rapidly waned, and he tried in vain to make good his losses. He died in his native city on June 11, 1870, having composed this epitaph for himself: “Here lies one who, after a reasonably long life, distinguished chiefly by unceasing labours, has left all his better works undone.”

His remarkable achievement in the pioneer days of American letters, on the whole, entitles him to be remembered with gratitude; and the verdict of Poe, who ranked Simms, as a novelist, just below Cooper and Brockden Brown, has not been impugned.[11]

_Edgar Allan Poe._--No American writer is more difficult to judge than Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), whether as a man or as a writer; and perhaps no other writer has received more attention from critics, not only in America but also in Europe. Poe was born in Boston of Southern parents, in the year which saw the birth of Tennyson, Darwin, Gladstone, and Holmes. His mother, Elizabeth Arnold Poe, was an actress, who died in 1811 of consumption; his father, David Poe, Jr., for a time a strolling player, was a man of little force; tradition represents him as dying young, a victim of consumption and alcoholism. Adopted after his mother’s death by John Allan of Richmond, Virginia, the boy Edgar Poe was wondered at and spoiled by his foster-parents, who were people of means and position. When they went abroad in 1815, Poe was entered at the Manor House School, Stoke Newington, near London; here he remained five years, imbibing the influences of a half-rural scene whose ancient buildings and historical associations have since been swallowed up by the metropolis. From 1820 to 1825 he was at school in Richmond. As a child, Poe was beautiful and clever; as a youth he was superior rather than abnormal. He learned quickly though not accurately; for the inaccuracy his teachers were in part to blame. He was lithe, swift of foot, an excellent swimmer, and, though proud and self-centred, could play the leader among his fellows. By the time he was ready for college, he showed the effects of indulgence on the part of the Allans, being imperious and wilful, unduly sensitive as to his state of orphanage, and squandering his too abundant pocket-money. During his brief residence at the University of Virginia (1826), Poe maintained high scholarship in Latin and French, but lived the life of his companions, drinking (though apparently not to excess) and incurring gambling debts which his guardian repudiated. Set to work in the counting-room of Mr. Allan, the young man rebelled and ran away to Boston, probably under an assumed name, and without capital save a sheaf of immature poems. He soon enlisted as a private in the army, made his peace with his guardian, and was sent to West Point. Here again he proved a clever student; but, purposely neglecting the routine, in 1831 he was discharged.

Obliged henceforth to depend on his own resources, Poe now approached almost to the point of starvation, when by his “Manuscript Found in a Bottle” (1833) he gained a prize of one hundred dollars offered by the Baltimore _Saturday Visiter_, and through John P. Kennedy, whom Poe called “the first true friend I ever had,” obtained temporary relief for his wants and help in getting literary work. He now became a contributor to, and soon the literary editor of, _The Southern Literary Messenger_. His numerous stories and criticisms did much to make the magazine successful and famous. In 1836 Poe married his beautiful cousin Virginia Clemm, who lacked three months of being fourteen years of age; but family ties could not prevent his morally weak nature from occasional indulgence in drugs and intoxicants, and his irregularities in January, 1837, brought about his dismissal from the editorial chair of the _Messenger_, for which, however, he continued to write. For a time the Poes now lived in New York, practically supported by Mrs. Clemm, who conducted a boarding-house. Here he completed and published his longest story, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” (1838), a tale of an Antarctic cruise as far south as the 84th parallel, based on Benjamin Morell’s “Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Seas and Pacific” (1832) with frequent dashes of Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner,” but full of such situations of blood-curdling horror and such highly imaginative landscape-painting as only the genius of Poe could produce. The years 1838-44 Poe spent in Philadelphia. In 1839 he collected and published his “Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque.” He wrote constantly for _Graham’s Magazine_, of which he was editor from 1840 till 1843; critiques, essays, and tales flowed from his pen. In imaginative story-telling, this was the period of his best work. His occasional lapses into intoxication are partly explained by the fits of insanity brought on by anxiety over the precarious condition of his wife, who in 1841 ruptured a blood-vessel while singing and who hovered between life and death for six years. The year 1844 found him back in New York, associated first with N. P. Willis on _The Evening Mirror_ and later with Charles F. Briggs on _The Broadway Journal_. The publication of “The Raven” in the _Mirror_ (January 29, 1845) and of his “Tales” (1845) greatly increased his reputation; but with curious and fatal perversity he proceeded to make enemies by trying to palm off upon the Boston Lyceum (October 16, 1845) a juvenile poem, “Al Aaraaf,” as a new work and by sharply castigating his literary contemporaries in “The Literati of New York.” The next year he removed his family to Fordham, a suburb of New York. Here his young wife died in 1847, of consumption; and he never really recovered from the shock. He conceived various literary enterprises; but he had become virtually a physical and moral wreck, unable to work except at long intervals. Toward the end of 1848 he proposed marriage to Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, a Providence poet, and was accepted; but the match was broken off in consequence of Poe’s drinking to excess. He now determined to go South to lecture and procure funds with which to publish a magazine to be called _The Stylus_. At Philadelphia he had an attack of delirium tremens. Recovering, he went on to Richmond, where he spent the summer of 1849. He proposed marriage to an old flame, Mrs. Sarah Elmira Shelton, then a widow, who gave him some encouragement. About this time he signed a pledge to abstain from all intoxicating drinks, and made a new start in life. A lecture at the Exchange Hotel brought him some $1500; and with this in his pocket he started for New York to close up some business and take Mrs. Clemm back with him; but stopping in Baltimore _en route_ he was induced to drink some wine, went on a debauch, and a few days later (October 7th) died in a hospital of brain fever. There is ground for believing that he had been drugged by political toughs on election day (October 3d) and carried to various polls to vote for the Whig candidates.

Such was the pathetic and tragic career of one of the most brilliant of American literary men. Few lives have been the subjects of so much controversy. In estimating his character, justice must be tempered with mercy; and this is the easier now that it is seen that, during at least the latter part of his life, his mental condition was abnormal if not pathological.[12] He inherited tendencies which he was unable to control, and with which his environment wholly unfitted him to cope. When sober and sane, he was a quiet, well-bred, and refined gentleman, who could talk fascinatingly and in whom women found “a peculiar and irresistible charm”; he was capable, moreover, of working hard and efficiently. When under the influence of opium or intoxicating liquors, he was a wholly different man, with whom, fortunately, we are not here concerned. With the two exceptions of his wife and mother-in-law, he formed no close and lasting attachments. He was always deeply self-centred and found it impossible to enter sympathetically into the lives, sorrows, and aspirations of others. Thus his sensitive temperament more and more withdrew into itself and found its kindred in the phantasms of his powerful imagination.

Poe’s genius is probably best expressed in his tales. They are not bulky in extent; in the Putnam edition they fill five octavo volumes. Many of them are marred by journalistic looseness and mannerisms--too much use of the parenthesis, the too constant recurrence of favourite words and phrases. Occasionally he misses good opportunities for telling dramatic effects and contrasts; and in general it may be admitted that the element of human passion, “save in its minor chords of sorrow and despair,” is notably absent from his works. A passionate lover himself, his artistic genius was not concerned with the ordinary love-story. His lack of a sense of humour, too, has been remarked. His attempts to be humorous cannot be pronounced successful. Finally, some of his tales, “Arthur Gordon Pym” for example, contain matter so repulsive that the wonder is that any person could endure reading them, much less writing them.

Yet the fact remains that on a large number of these tales is the unmistakable stamp of genius. It may be well to recall the classification of them adopted by Messrs. Stedman and Woodberry. We have first the “Romances of Death,” of which the most famous are “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia,” and “Eleonora”; then come the “Old World Romances,” of which “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” are probably most read. In the second volume we find three groups, “Tales of Conscience, Natural Beauty, and Pseudo-Science,” the last including his “MS. Found in a Bottle” and “Hans Pfaall.” In the third are “Tales of Ratiocination,” including the famous “Gold-Bug,” the harrowing “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and the perfect detective story “The Purloined Letter”; and “Tales of Illusion,” including the horrible “Oblong Box.” Then come the “Extravaganzas and Caprices” and lastly the two “Tales of Adventure and Exploration,” namely, “Arthur Gordon Pym” and “Julius Rodman.” It will be evident that Poe achieved success in two markedly distinct classes of tales: those in which a purely intellectual puzzle is worked out, and those in which a definite emotional effect is produced. The “Tales of Ratiocination” were the forerunners of a long line of “detective stories”--by Gaboriau, De Boisgobey, Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, and others,--in none of which does one find a keener analytical mind than that of Monsieur Dupin. “The Gold-Bug” undoubtedly suggested to Stevenson some features of “Treasure Island.” Likewise in such stories as “Hans Pfaall,” Poe was the pioneer in compounding flights of imagination with bits of popular science, being followed by Jules Verne and others of his class. Of the tales charged with emotion, the best are probably the three “Romances of Death” mentioned above. In these, it has been said, we see the highest reach of the romantic element in Poe’s genius. The lady Ligeia is pure spirit, without human qualities, the maiden of a dream. The framework of the tale is slight; it is merely a prose-rhapsody on the theme expressed in the words of old Glanvill, “Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his own feeble will.” This theme, the supremacy of mind over matter, was one over which Poe busied himself much; but to scientific thought on the subject he contributed little of value. It has been pointed out, however, that Poe was the first to write this sort of tale, the “psychical story,” in which Stevenson and others later outdid him. He was a subtle psychologist of certain moods and qualities, and understood the fiercer passions of terror and remorse as have few other men; of this, “William Wilson” furnishes abundant proof. But his range is limited, and most readers, tired, like the Lady of Shalott, of shadows, soon long to change his world of mystery and madness and death for the real world of sane and kindly, if commonplace, men and women.

According to the old maxim, however, we must take the artist for what he is. Poe chose his material and his setting as his artistic genius guided him; that he made skilful use of this material there can be little doubt. Within his narrow range, he is absolute master. His intensity, his eloquence, his skill in the choice and repetition of words force the reader to yield to the spell and believe for the moment even in the impossible. His limitations have been well set forth by Professor Woodberry:

Being gifted with the dreaming instinct, the myth-making faculty,
the allegorising power, and with no other poetic element of high
genius, he exercised his art in a region of vague feeling, symbolic
ideas, and fantastic imagery, and wrought his spell largely through
sensuous effects of colour, sound, and gloom, heightened by lurking
but unshaped suggestions of mysterious meanings.

Symbolism is indeed evident throughout his imaginative works; in “The Black Cat,” for example, remorse is indicated by the cat’s flaming eye; in “William Wilson,” a guilty conscience is the man’s double. Of ornamentation there is plenty; Poe revelled in a wealth of beautiful images of Oriental and Gothic splendour.

In some of his tales, Poe reveals a certain kinship with Hawthorne. Both are fond of dwelling in a remote world. Both depict states of the soul; brief experiences; evanescent dreams. But Hawthorne’s is always a moral world; Poe’s, while never immoral, is prevailingly unmoral. In Hawthorne’s tales we are never long forgetful of the Puritan heritage of conscience; Poe’s indifference to moral issues is a not surprising result of his cavalier temperament. Both writers undoubtedly owe something to the weird imagination of Ernst Hoffmann (1776-1822); Poe also continues the literary tradition of Mrs. Radcliffe, “Monk” Lewis, and the “Tales of Terror.” Comparison with these writers suggests two other facts: first, that Poe was not a novelist, but a writer of short stories; he knew little about ordinary life, and nothing of human character, save through study of his own; he preferred a small canvas whereon his picture should be painted with Pre-Raphaelite fidelity and elaborate pains, and was unable or unwilling to undertake a work on the scale of what we now call novels; secondly, that he was always a romancer, with a bias for medievalism as pronounced as if his characters wore armour and his pages were full of tournaments and chivalry.

If Poe has often been without honour in his own country and in England, he has been enthusiastically received on the Continent. In France he early became known through the magnificent translation of Charles Baudelaire, and his influence has never waned.[13] In Spain, Italy, and Germany he continues to be widely read and is generally regarded as the foremost man of letters hitherto produced by America. Time, that relentless and perverse critic, has given him a place of honour among the makers of world-literature, and his fame is secure.

=Some Minor Writers.=--At the novel-writing contemporaries of Kennedy, Simms, and Poe we can take but a passing glance. James Lawson (1799-1880), a Scotchman who, graduating from the University of Glasgow, came to America in 1815 and engaged in the mercantile and insurance business, is remembered for his “Tales and Sketches by a Cosmopolite” (1830), mainly relating to Scottish domestic life and romance. He was a friend of Edwin Forrest and Gilmore Simms. Richard Penn Smith (1799-1854) was the author of “The Forsaken” (1831), a novel of the American Revolution still worth reading. Henry William Herbert (1807-58), eldest son of the Rev. William Herbert, dean of Manchester, was graduated from the University of Cambridge with distinction in 1829 and in 1830 came to America, engaging in teaching Greek and writing for magazines. In 1834 he published a historical novel, “The Brothers, a Tale of the Fronde,” which he had begun in _The American Monthly Magazine_; following it up with “Cromwell” (1837), “Marmaduke Wyvil” (1843), and “The Roman Traitor” (1848), a romance founded on the conspiracy of Catiline. He also wrote many tales and sketches of romantic incidents in European history. As a writer on sports, under the name of “Frank Forester,” he became a popular authority, and may be said to have been the first writer who introduced field sports into American fiction.

Robert Montgomery Bird (1805-54), a native of Delaware, began his literary career by writing tragedies; one of these, “The Gladiator,” was frequently played by Edwin Forrest. His first two novels, “Calavar” (1834) and “The Infidel” (1835), were descriptions of life in Mexico during the Spanish conquest; while “Nick of the Woods, or The Jibbenainosay” (1837), powerfully portrayed the thirst for vengeance aroused in American backwoodsmen, and thus sharply contrasted the real Indians with the somewhat idealised types in Cooper’s stories. He also wrote “Sheppard Lee” (1836), “The Hawks of Hawk Hollow” (1835), and “The Adventures of Robin Day” (1839), a romantic novel of adventure. Although conscientious, he was not a skillful writer, and his extravagant and exciting tales are no longer read. Theodore Sedgwick Fay (1807-98), a New York lawyer and journalist, was the author of “Norman Leslie” (1835), a somewhat tame and highly moralised picture of life in New York City at the beginning of the century; its poverty of artistic merit excited the wrath of Poe, who helped to consign it to a merciful oblivion. Fay also wrote two novels directed against the practice of duelling: “The Countess Ida” (1840), the scene of which is laid in Europe, and “Hoboken, a Romance of New York” (1843), the action of which takes place in a locality notorious for the duels fought there. In 1835 appeared “Grace Seymour” by Hannah F. Lee (1780-1865), a story for the young, and, like the stories of Fay, with a moral purpose. In “Clinton Bradshaw” (1835), Frederick William Thomas (1811-66) painted with moderate success the social life of New York in the early years of the century. Like Fay, however, Thomas was too easily led from the path of artistic virtue by his desire to improve the minds of his readers. Thomas also wrote “East and West” (1836), in which he ably described a Mississippi steamboat race, and “Howard Pinckney” (1840), a novel of contemporary life in which both plot and character are handled not without skill.

_Daniel Pierce Thompson._--The moral and educational improvement of the reader is likewise an evident purpose in the work of Daniel Pierce Thompson (1793-1868), a Vermont jurist, whose “May Martin, or The Money-Digger” appeared in 1835. His most famous work, which is still widely read, was “The Green Mountain Boys, a Romance of the Revolution” (1840), in which are described the early methods of fighting the Indians. Other stories of New England life from his pen were “Locke Amsden, or The Schoolmaster” (1845), in which he evidently drew upon his own experience, “Lucy Hosmer” (1848), “The Rangers, or The Tory’s Daughter” (1851), a story dealing with the Revolutionary campaigns of 1777 in Vermont, “Tales of the Green Mountains” (1852), “Gaut Gurley, or The Trappers of Lake Umbagog” (1857), and “The Doomed Chief” (1860).

_Hall_, _Hildreth_, _Hoffman_.--While Thompson was delineating Vermont life, James Hall (1793-1868) wrote of the then far West. Born in Philadelphia, Hall saw service in the War of 1812, and in 1820 went to Illinois and engaged in law and newspaper work. His “Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the West” (1835) and several later volumes of tales are characterised by a natural and easy style, much skill in narrative, and general fidelity to detail. The distinction of writing the first of the army of anti-slavery novels belongs to the historian Richard Hildreth (1807-65). “Archy Moore” (1837) was republished in England, being reviewed by _The Spectator_ and other papers. A rather extravagant narrative, it purports to be the autobiography of a Virginia slave during the War of 1812. A second edition with a continuation was published in 1852 as “The White Slave.” Charles Fenno Hoffman (1806-84), after studying at Columbia College and preparing for the bar, practised law for three years in New York, then abandoned it for journalism and literature. He was the founder of _The Knickerbocker Magazine_, associated later, for many years, with the name of its editor, Lewis Gaylord Clark, and was connected with various other periodicals. His two novels, “Greyslaer” (1840), founded on the celebrated Beauchamp murder case in Kentucky,--a novel of intense interest which reminds some readers of Cooper,--and “Vanderlyn” (published serially in _The American Monthly Magazine_ in 1837), like his other writings, reflect a generous and refined character. His promising career was cut short in 1849 by insanity.

_William Ware._--In March, 1836, there appeared in _The Knickerbocker Magazine_ the first of a series of “Letters from Palmyra,” which aroused much interest. They purported to be written by a young Roman noble who visited Palmyra in the reign of Zenobia. They vividly presented the everyday life of the Roman Empire and at once gave their author high rank as a classical scholar. William Ware (1797-1852) graduated from Harvard College in 1816 and became a Unitarian clergyman; for some years he edited _The Christian Examiner_. The “Letters from Palmyra” were published in book form in 1837; the book is now called “Zenobia,” from the title of the English reprint. It was followed in 1838 by a sequel, “Probus,” in which the last persecution of Roman Christians is ably and energetically described. The title of this book was afterward changed to “Aurelian.” His third novel, “Julian, or Scenes in Judea” (1841), narrated many episodes in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the crucifixion forming a powerful climax to the story.

_Mathews and Briggs._--A highly imaginative and somewhat absurd romance entitled “Behemoth, a Legend of the Mound-Builders” (1839) was the work of Cornelius Mathews (1817-89), a New York dramatist and magazine writer. His “Career of Puffer Hopkins” (1841) set forth some phases of contemporary political life; it first appeared serially in _Arcturus_, which Mathews edited in 1840-42. Another novel of his was “Moneypenny, or The Heart of the World” (1850), a story of city and country life. All of Mathews’ stories, however, have a journalistic flavour. In the same year with Mathews, Charles Frederick Briggs (1840-77), a New York journalist, entered the ranks of the novelists with his “Adventures of Harry Franco, a Tale of the Great Panic” (1839), following it with “The Haunted Merchant” (1843) and “The Trippings of Tom Pepper” (1847). All of his novels have a certain value as humorous pictures of New York City life; through them runs a vein of amusing satire. Briggs was later the first editor of _Putnam’s Monthly_.

_Henry W. Longfellow._--It was in 1839 also that Longfellow published his once popular “Hyperion, a Romance,” in which, in connection with a pathetic love story, he mainly sought, in the style of Richter, to convey his romantic impressions of the life and traditions of the Old World. The volume is charged, if not surcharged, with sentiment. Paul Flemming’s enthusiasm for the quaint and picturesque in European lore and scenery takes us back to the days when Continental Europe was for Americans a land of romance, and when visits to the Old World were still not accomplished without difficulty and had not lost their novelty. Of a wholly different texture is the only other prose tale written by Longfellow, “Kavanagh, a Tale,” which appeared in 1849 and which probably suffered by coming so near the romantic and fascinating “Evangeline.” It is a bookish and uneventful story of New England life; Hawthorne said of it, “Nobody but yourself would dare to write so quiet a book.” Yet it is written in a characteristically graceful style, and shows that the scholar-poet was a good observer of the life around him, though he could not give that life an air of reality in his portraiture.

_John Lothrop Motley._--The fame of Motley’s historical work has obscured the reputation of his fiction. “Morton’s Hope, or The Memoirs of a Provincial” (1839), like “Hyperion,” recalls the interest in German university life which was becoming general in America--a life which Motley vividly describes. From Germany the hero returns to participate in the American Revolution, in which he distinguishes himself. In “Merry Mount, a Romance of the Massachusetts Colony” (1849), Motley utilised the story of Thomas Morton, the jolly Royalist who with his followers settled near Boston in 1626 and whose revelry shocked his staid Puritan neighbours. As a historical picture, it has high value. Both of these novels, abounding in carefully wrought descriptions and gleams of genuine humour, deserved greater success than they had.

_Caroline M. Kirkland._--A similar service was done for life in Michigan by Caroline M. Kirkland (1801-64), whose humorous and lively descriptions of frontier life, “A New Home; Who’ll Follow?” (1839), “Forest Life” (1842), and “Western Clearings” (1846), were in their day successful and popular. Mrs. Kirkland’s early works were published over the pen-name of “Mrs. Mary Clavers.” Her literary career extended over a quarter of a century, and she was long a popular contributor to magazines and annuals.