There are literary evolutionists who, in their whim of seeing in every original writer a copy of some predecessor, have declared that Hawthorne is derived from Tieck, and Poe from Hoffmann, just as Dickens modelled himself on Smollett and Thackeray followed in the footsteps of Fielding.  In all four cases the pupil surpassed the master,—­if haply Tieck and Hoffmann can be considered as even remotely the masters of Hawthorne and Poe.  When Coleridge was told that Klopstock was the German Milton, he assented with the dry addendum, “A very German Milton.”  So is Hoffmann a very German Poe, and Tieck a very German Hawthorne.  Of a truth, both Poe and Hawthorne are as American as any one can be.  If the adjective American has any meaning at all, it qualifies Poe and Hawthorne.  They were American to the core.  They both revealed the curious sympathy with Oriental moods of thought which is often an American characteristic, Poe, with his cold logic and his mathematical analysis, and Hawthorne, with his introspective conscience and his love of the subtile and the invisible, are representative of phases of American character not to be mistaken by any one who has given thought to the influence of nationality.

As to which of the two was the greater, discussion is idle, but that Hawthorne was the finer genius few would deny.  Poe, as cunning an artificer of goldsmith’s work and as adroit in its vending as was ever M. Josse, declared that “Hawthorne’s distinctive trait is invention, creation, imagination, originality,—­a trait which in the literature of fiction is positively worth all the rest.”  But the moral basis of Hawthorne’s work, which had flowered in the crevices and crannies of New-England Puritanism, Poe did not concern himself with.  In Poe’s hands the story of “The Ambitious Guest” might have thrilled us with a more powerful horror, but it would have lacked the ethical beauty which Hawthorne gave it and which makes it significant beyond a mere feat of verbal legerdemain.  And the subtile simplicity of “The Great Stone Face” is as far from Poe as the pathetic irony of “The Ambitious Guest.”  In all his most daring fantasies Hawthorne is natural, and, though he may project his vision far beyond the boundaries of fact, nowhere does he violate the laws of nature.  He had at all times a wholesome simplicity, and he never showed any trace of the morbid taint which characterizes nearly all Poe’s work.  Hawthorne, one may venture to say, had the broad sanity of genius, while we should understand any one who might declare that Poe had mental disease raised to the n’th.