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Fantasy Fan, v. 2, issue 5, whole no. 17, January 1935

Page 69

January, 1935, THE FANTASY FAN     69

immutable law. Evil, a very real force to Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a lurking and conquering adversary; and the visible world becomes in his fancy a theater of infinite tragedy and woe, with unseen, half-existent influences hovering over it and through it, battling for supremacy and moulding the destinies of the hapless mortals who form its vain and self-deluded population. The heritage of American weirdness was his to a most intense degree, and he saw a dismal throng of vague spectres behind the common phenomena of life; but he was not disinterested enough to value impressions, sensations, and beauties of narration for their own sake. He must needs weave his phantasy into some quietly melancholy fabric of didactic or allegorical cast, in which his meekly resigned cynicism may display with naive moral apprrisal the perfidy of a human race which he cannot cease to cherish and mourn despite his insight into its hypocrisy. Supernatural horror, then, is never a primary object with Hawthorne; though its impulses were so deeply woven into his personality that he cannot help suggesting it with the force of genius when he calls upon the unreal world to illustrate the pensive sermon he wishes to preach.
Hawthorne's intimations of the weird, always gentle, elusive, and restrained, may be traced throughout his work. The mood that produced them found one delightful vent in the Teutonised retelling of classic myths for children contained in "A Wonder Book" and "Tanglewood Tales," and at other times exercised itself in casting a certain strangeness and intangible witchery or malevolence over events not meant to be actually supernatural; as in the macabre posthumous novel "Dr. Grimshawe's Secret," which invests with a peculiar sort of repulsion a house existing to this day in Salem, and abutt[[upside down "i"]ng on the ancient Charger Street Ground. In "The Marble Faun," whose design was sketched out in an Italian villa reputed to be haunted, a tremendous background of genuine phantasy and mystery palpitates just beyond the common reader's sight; and glimpses of fabulous blood in mortal veins are hinted at during the course of a romance which cannot help being interesting despite the persistent incubus of moral allegory, anti-Popery propaganda, and a Puritan prudery which caused the late D. H. Lawrence to express a longing to treat the author in a highly undignified manner. "Septimius Felton," a posthumous novel whose idea was to have been elaborated and incorporated into the unfinished "Dolliver Romance," touches on the Elixir of Life in a more or less capable fashion; whilst the notes for a never-written tale to be called "The Ancestral Footstep," shows what Hawthorne would have done with an intensive treatment of an old English superstition--that of an ancient and accursed line whose members left footprints of blood as they walked--which appears incidentally in both "Septimius Felton" and "Dr. Grimshawe's Secret."
(Mr. Lovecraft tells you m ore about Nathaniel Hawthorne in the next issue. Don't miss Part Seventeen).

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January, 1935, THE FANTASY FAN 69 immutable law. Evil, a very real force to Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a lurking and conquering adversary; and the visible world becomes in his fancy a theater of infinite tragedy and woe, with unseen, half-existent influences hovering over it and through it, battling for supremacy and moulding the destinies of the hapless mortals who form its vain and self-deluded population. The heritage of American weirdness was his to a most intense degree, and he saw a dismal throng of vague spectres behind the common phenomena of life; but he was not disinterested enough to value impressions, sensations, and beauties of narration for their own sake. He must needs weave his phantasy into some quietly melancholy fabric of didactic or allegorical cast, in which his meekly resigned cynicism may display with naive moral apprrisal the perfidy of a human race which he cannot cease to cherish and mourn despite his insight into its hypocrisy. Supernatural horror, then, is never a primary object with Hawthorne; though its impulses were so deeply woven into his personality that he cannot help suggesting it with the force of genius when he calls upon the unreal world to illustrate the pensive sermon he wishes to preach. Hawthorne's intimations of the weird, always gentle, elusive, and restrained, may be traced throughout his work. The mood that produced them found one delightful vent in the Teutonised retelling of classic myths for children contained in "A Wonder Book" and "Tanglewood Tales," and at other times exercised itself in casting a certain strangeness and intangible witchery or malevolence over events not meant to be actually supernatural; as in the macabre posthumous novel "Dr. Grimshawe's Secret," which invests with a peculiar sort of repulsion a house existing to this day in Salem, and abutt[[upside down "i"]ng on the ancient Charger Street Ground. In "The Marble Faun," whose design was sketched out in an Italian villa reputed to be haunted, a tremendous background of genuine phantasy and mystery palpitates just beyond the common reader's sight; and glimpses of fabulous blood in mortal veins are hinted at during the course of a romance which cannot help being interesting despite the persistent incubus of moral allegory, anti-Popery propaganda, and a Puritan prudery which caused the late D. H. Lawrence to express a longing to treat the author in a highly undignified manner. "Septimius Felton," a posthumous novel whose idea was to have been elaborated and incorporated into the unfinished "Dolliver Romance," touches on the Elixir of Life in a more or less capable fashion; whilst the notes for a never-written tale to be called "The Ancestral Footstep," shows what Hawthorne would have done with an intensive treatment of an old English superstition--that of an ancient and accursed line whose members left footprints of blood as they walked--which appears incidentally in both "Septimius Felton" and "Dr. Grimshawe's Secret." (Mr. Lovecraft tells you m ore about Nathaniel Hawthorne in the next issue. Don't miss Part Seventeen).