Milton had many chances, many resources of
power to rely on; but by grasping boldly at the effect of authenticity
he loses that one among the several prizes within his reach. I do not
know that I am right, but all this seems to me to argue a certain
dividing and weakening influence exerted by the imagination which uses
religious or superstitious dread for the purposes of beauty; while that
which discourses confidently of the passage from this to another life,
with all the several stages clearly marked, and floods the whole scene
with a vivid and inartificial light from "the powers and terrors of what
is yet unseen," affects the mind with every atom of energy economized
and concentred.
Leaving the literary question, we may bring this conclusion to bear upon
the Puritans and Salem, as their history affected Hawthorne. I have said
that a gradual suffusion of the marvellous overspreads the comparatively
arid annals of the town, if one reviews them amid the proper influences;
and I have touched upon the two phases of imagination which, playing
over the facts, give them this atmosphere. Now if what I guess from the
contrast between Milton and Bunyan be true, the lower kind of
imagination--that is, imagination deformed to credulity--would be likely
to be the more impressive. This uncanny quality of superstition, then,
is the one which insensibly exudes from the pages of New England's and
perhaps especially of Salem's colonial history, as Hawthorne turns them.
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