POE, HAWTHORNE, MELVILLE
aspects of the American literature of the early nineteenth century.
The most significant imaginative writers of the period were Poe,
Melville and Hawthorne. All these men were primarily concerned
with giving expression to their own view of life rather than with
realistic social observation. Their work, nevertheless, illuminates the
social background, although the sociological inferences which can be
drawn from it may appear somewhat strange to those who know pre–
Civil War America only from its political and intellectual history.
In their personal temperament and standards of value these
three writers were utterly different from each other. Poe, a victim
of acute neurotic insecurities, attributed a pseudo-religious significance
to the enjoyment of "Beauty" and tried to use it as a means of escape
into a dream-world of his own crcation. Melville fought a long battle
with his environment and was never able either to repudiate it or to
come to terms with it. Hawthorne, the most nearly normal of the
three, was more successful in adjusting to reality chiefly because he
was a man of low emotional pressure who made few demands. Yet
in spite of these differenq:s, the same general framework of experience,
defining the problems with which they were concerned and determ–
ining their expectations, can be traced through the writings of all three
men. What they have in common with each other is more fundamental
than the divergencies.
The most essential resemblance between them is that they all
as<lume the individual to be isolated and regard this isolation as a
problem. What is lacking in their framework of experience is any
sense of society as a kind of organic whole to which the individual
belongs and in which he has his appointed place. And lacking the
notion of social continuity and tradition, they lack also the corres–
ponding metaphysical conception of the natural universe as an ordered
unity which harmonizes with human ideals. In this respect their view
of life differs from that of most European writers; and if we go
back to earlier periods of history, the difference becomes more marked.
Elizabethan literature, for example, is pervaded with the belief in
both a cosmic and a social order, although it displays also a strong
sense of the possibility of chaos; the tension between order and chaos
is,
in fact, its central theme. But for the Americans there is no under–
lying order, and each individual must find his own way of dealing
with chaos.
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