This is the dank effluence that, mingling with the sweeter and freer air
of his own reveries, has made so many people shudder on entering the
great romancer's shadowy but serene domain.
And just here it is advisable to triangulate our ground, by bringing
Milton, Bunyan, and Hawthorne together in a simultaneous view. Wide
apart as the first two stand, they seem to effect a kind of union in
this modern genius; or, rather, their influence here conjoins, as the
rays from two far-separated stars meet in the eye of him who watches the
heavens for inspiration. Something of the peculiar virtue of each of
these Puritan writers seems to have given tone to Hawthorne's no less
individual nature. In Bunyan, who very early laid his hand on
Hawthorne's intellectual history, we find a very fountain-head of
allegory. His impulse, of course, was supremely didactic, only so much
of mere narrative interest mixing itself with his work as was
inseparable from his native relish for the matter of fact; while in
Milton's poetry the clear aesthetic pleasure held at least an exact
balance with the moral inspiration, and, as we have just seen, perhaps
outweighed it at times. The same powerful, unrelaxing grasp of allegory
is found in the American genius as in Bunyan, and there likewise comes
to light in his mind the same delight in art for art's sake that added
such a grace to Milton's sinewy and large-limbed port. In special cases
the allegorical motive has distinctly got the upper hand, in Hawthorne's
work; yet even in those the artistic integument, that marvellous verbal
style, those exquisite fancies, are not absent: on the contrary, in the
very instances where Hawthorne has most constantly and clearly held to
the illustration of a single idea, and made his fiction fit itself most
absolutely to the jewelled truth it holds,--in these very causes, I say,
the command of his genius over literary resources is generally shown by
an unusual splendor of means applied to the ideal end in view.
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