"
The "virtuous mind," whom supernatural horrors may "startle well
but not astound," sometimes finds a melancholy pleasure in
beguiling weaker mortals into haunted ruins to watch their firm
nerves tremble. Sometimes too, though a man be wholly innocent of
the desire to alarm, he is led astray, whether he will or not,
among the terrors of the invisible world. Grey ghosts steal into
his imagination unawares. It was so that they came to Nathaniel
Hawthorne, who speaks sorrowfully of "gaily dressed fantasies
turning to ghostly and black-clad images of themselves." He would
gladly have written a "sunshiny" book, but was capriciously fated
to live ever in the twilight, haunted by spectres and by "dark
ideas." He fashions his tales of terror delicately and
reluctantly, not riotously and shamelessly like Lewis and
Maturin.
An innate reticence and shyness of temper held Hawthorne, as if
by a spell, somewhat aloof from life, and no one realised more
clearly than he the limitations that his detachment from humanity
imposed upon his art.
Of _Twice-Told Tales_ he writes regretfully:
"They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in
too retired a shade... Instead of passion there is
sentiment and even in what purport to be pictures of
actual life we have allegory, not always so warmly
dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be
taken into the reader's mind without a shiver.
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