But it is apt to spoil two good things--a story
and a moral, a meaning and a form; and the taste for it is responsible
for a large part of the forcible-feeble writing that has been
inflicted upon the world. The only cases in which it is endurable is
when it is extremely spontaneous, when the analogy presents itself
with eager promptitude. When it shows signs of having been groped and
fumbled for, the needful illusion is of course absent and the failure
complete. Then the machinery alone is visible, and the end to which it
operates becomes a matter of indifference. There was but little
literary criticism in the United States at the time Hawthorne's
earlier works were published; but among the reviewers Edgar Poe
perhaps held the scales the highest. He at any rate rattled them
loudest, and pretended, more than any one else, to conduct the
weighing-process on scientific principles. Very remarkable was this
process of Edgar Poe's, and very extraordinary were his principles;
but he had the advantage of being a man of genius, and his
intelligence was frequently great. His collection of critical sketches
of the American writers flourishing in what M. Taine would call his
_milieu_ and _moment_, is very curious and interesting reading, and
it has one quality which ought to keep it from ever being completely
forgotten. It is probably the most complete and exquisite specimen of
_provincialism_ ever prepared for the edification of men. Poe's
judgments are pretentious, spiteful, vulgar; but they contain a great
deal of sense and discrimination as well, and here and there,
sometimes at frequent intervals, we find a phrase of happy insight
imbedded in a patch of the most fatuous pedantry. He wrote a chapter
upon Hawthorne, and spoke of him on the whole very kindly; and his
estimate is of sufficient value to make it noticeable that he should
express lively disapproval of the large part allotted to allegory in
his tales--in defence of which, he says, "however, or for whatever
object employed, there is scarcely one respectable word to be said....
The deepest emotion," he goes on, "aroused within us by the happiest
allegory _as_ allegory, is a very, _very_ imperfectly satisfied sense
of the writer's ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have
preferred his not having attempted to overcome.... One thing is clear,
that if allegory ever establishes a fact, it is by dint of overturning
a fiction;" and Poe has furthermore the courage to