Now, from all this we gather inference as to the deep sources
of Hawthorne's humor. I sometimes think that Thalia was the daughter,
and not the sister, of Melpomene. As to actual exhibition of humor,
Hawthorne's is made a diffusive medium to temper the rays of tragedy
with, and never appears in such unmixed form as that of Irving. So that
even though we must confess a smaller mental calibre in the latter, we
may gladly grant him a superiority in his special mood of fun.
An excellent English critic, Leslie Stephen, lately wrote: "Poe is a
kind of Hawthorne and _delirium tremens_." This announcement,
however, betrays a singular misapprehension. When Hawthorne's tales
first appeared, they were almost invariably taken to bear an intimate
and direct relation to the author's own moods; while Poe's were supposed
to be daring flights of pure imagination, or ingenious attempts to prove
theories held by the writer, but were not charged directly to his own
experience. Time has shown that the converse was the case. The psychical
conditions described by Hawthorne had only the remotest connection with
any mood of his own; they were mainly translations, into the language of
genius, of certain impressions and observations drawn from the world
around him. After his death, the Note-Books caused a general rustle of
surprise, revealing as they did the simple, wholesome nature of this
strange imaginer; yet though he there speaks--surely without prejudice,
because without the least knowledge that the world would ever hear
him--of "the objectivity" of his fictions, critics have not yet wholly
learned how far apart from himself these creations were.
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