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 remark that the
_Pilgrim's Progress_ is a "ludicrously overrated book." Certainly, as
a general thing, we are struck with the ingenuity and felicity of
Hawthorne's analogies and correspondences; the idea appears to have
made itself at home in them easily. Nothing could be better in this
respect than _The Snow-Image_ (a little masterpiece), or _The Great
Carbuncle_, or _Doctor Heidegger's Experiment_, or _Rappacini's
Daughter_. But in such things as _The Birth-Mark_ and _The
Bosom-Serpent_, we are struck with something stiff and mechanical,
slightly incongruous, as if the kernel had not assimilated its
envelope. But these are matters of light impression, and there would
be a want of tact in pretending to discriminate too closely among
things which all, in one way or another, have a charm. The charm--the
great charm--is that they are glimpses of a great field, of the whole
deep mystery of man's soul and conscience. They are moral, and their
interest is moral; they deal with something more than the mere
accidents and conventionalities, the surface occurrences of life. The
fine thing in Hawthorne is that he cared for the deeper psychology,
and that, in his way, he tried to become familiar with it. This
natural, yet fanciful familiarity with it, this air, on the author's
part, of being a confirmed _habitué_ of a region of mysteries and
subtleties, constitutes the originality of his tales. And then they
have the further merit of seeming, for what they are, to spring up so
freely and lightly. The author has all the ease, indeed, of a regular
dweller in the moral, psychological realm; he goes to and fro in it,