One phase of the Concord romancer’s art results in stories which seem perhaps as somber, strange and morbid as those of Poe:  “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” “Rapacinni’s Daughter,” “The Birth Mark.”  They stand, of course, for but one side of his power, of which “The Great Stone Face” and “The Snow Image” are the brighter and sweeter.  Thus Hawthorne’s is a broader and more diversified accomplishment in the form of the tale.  But the likeness has to do with subject-matter, not with the spirit of the work.  The gloomiest of Hawthorne’s short stories are spiritually sound and sweet:  Poe’s, on the contrary, might be described as unmoral; they seem written by one disdaining all the touchstones of life, living in a land of eyrie where there is no moral law.  He would no more than Lamb indict his very dreams.  In the case of Hawthorne there is allegorical meaning, the lesson is never far to seek:  a basis of common spiritual responsibility is always below one’s feet.  And this is quite as true of the long romances as of the tales.  The result is that there is spiritual tonic in Hawthorne’s fiction, while something almost miasmatic rises from Poe, dropping a kind of veil between us and the salutary realities of existence.  If Poe be fully as gifted, he is, for this reason, less sanely endowed.  It may be conceded that he is not always as shudderingly sardonic and removed from human sympathy as in “The Cask of Amontillado” or “The Black Cat”; yet it is no exaggeration to affirm that he is nowhere more typical, more himself.  On the contrary, in a tale like “The Birth Mark,” what were otherwise the horror and ultra-realism of it, is tempered by and merged in the suggestion that no man shall with impunity tamper with Nature nor set the delight of the eyes above the treasures of the soul.  The poor wife dies, because her husband cares more to remove a slight physical defect than he does for her health and life.  So it cannot be said of the somber work in the tale of these two sons of genius that,

“A common grayness silvers everything,”

since the gifts are so differently exercised and the artistic product of totally dissimilar texture.  Moreover, Poe is quite incapable of the lovely naivete of “The Snow Image,” or the sun-kissed atmosphere of the wonder-book.  Humor, except in the satiric vein, is hardly more germane to the genius of Hawthorne than to that of Poe; its occasional exercise is seldom if ever happy.

Although most literary comparisons are futile because of the disparateness of the things compared, the present one seems legitimate in the cases of Poe and Hawthorne, superficially so alike in their short-story work.

IV