If you
touch him too lightly, you raise unsatisfied curiosity, not fear. It may
be easy to shudder, but it is difficult to teach shuddering.
In prose, a good example of the over vague is Miriam's mysterious
visitor--the shadow of the catacombs--in "Transformation; or, The Marble
Faun." Hawthorne should have told us more or less; to be sure his
contemporaries knew what he meant, knew who Miriam and the Spectre were.
The dweller in the catacombs now powerfully excites curiosity, and when
that curiosity is unsatisfied, we feel aggrieved, vexed, and suspect that
Hawthorne himself was puzzled, and knew no more than his readers. He has
not--as in other tales he has--managed to throw the right atmosphere
about this being. He is vague in the wrong way, whereas George Sand, in
_Les Dames Vertes_, is vague in the right way. We are left in _Les Dames
Vertes_ with that kind of curiosity which persons really engaged in the
adventure might have felt, not with the irritation of having a secret
kept from us, as in "Transformation."
In "Wandering Willie's Tale" (in "Redgauntlet"), the right atmosphere is
found, the right note is struck. All is vividly real, and yet, if you
close the book, all melts into a dream again. Scott was almost equally
successful with a described horror in "The Tapestried Chamber." The idea
is the commonplace of haunted houses, the apparition is described as
minutely as a burglar might have been; and yet we do not mock, but
shudder as we read.
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