Hawthorne's Theory of Art

Authors(s): R. K. Gupta
Source: American Literature, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Nov., 1968), pp. 309-324
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2923768
Accessed: 25-03-2016 20:43 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American
Literature

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:43:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Hawthorne's Theory of 4rt

R. K. GUPTA

Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur

I HE FOCUS OF HAWTHORNE CRITICISM in recent years has been on

L his thought rather than on his art. Hawthorne's theology and

philosophy, his social and political ideas, his attitude toward Puri-

tanism and Transcendentalism-these have been analyzed with a

minuteness which one may at times find overpowering. But his

theory of art, which is unquestionably central to an understanding

of his work, has not received the attention it deserves.' And yet the

subject is of sufficient importance to call for exploration in depth

and detail. For, as Virginia Woolf says, "until we know how the

novelist orders his world, the ornaments of that world, which the

critics press upon us, the adventures of the writer, to which biog-

raphers draw attention, are superfluous possessions of which we can

make no use."2 A study of Hawthorne's theory of art will high-

light his artistic preferences, illuminate major aspects of his literary

technique, and thus give us a clearer view of the way in which he

1 am grateful to Professors Hyatt Waggoner, Terence Martin, and William Mulder

for their helpful suggestions, and to the American Studies Research Center, Hyderabad, for

a research fellowship which enabled me to complete this study.

Scattered remarks on Hawthorne's theory of art are to be found in Austin Warren,

Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne: Representative Selections (New York, I934), pp.

lxi-lxxiii; F. 0. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, I94I), pp. I92-27I;

Arlin Turner, "Hawthorne as Self-Critic," South Atlantic Quarterly, XXXVII, I32-I38

(April, I938); Roy Harvey Pearce, "Hawthorne and the Twilight of Romance," Yale

Review, XXXVII, 487-506 (March, I948); Jesse Bier, "Hawthorne on the Romance: His

Prefaces Related and Examined," Modern Philology, LIII, I7-24 (Aug., I955); Harry H.

Clark, "Hawthorne's Literary and Aesthetic Doctrines as Embodied in His Tales," and

Robert Kimbrough, "'The Actual and the Imaginary': Hawthorne's Concept of Art in

Theory and Practice," both in Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts,

and Letters, L, 25I-275 and 277-293 (I96I). These are useful and often illuminating

studies of certain aspects of Hawthorne's literary theory, but none of them can be said to be

a sustained and comprehensive treatment of it. Millicent Bell's otherwise excellent full-

length study, Hawthorne's View of the Artist (New York, I962), is somewhat vitiated

by her disproportionate emphasis on what she calls Hawthorne's distrust of the artist

and the artistic process. Finally, Charles Foster's "Hawthorne's Literary Theory," PMLA,

LVII, 24I-254 (March, I942), is admirable in insight and comprehensive in treatment,

but his approach and emphasis are substantially different from mine.

2 "Robinson Crusoe," The Common Reader: Second Series (London, I932), p. 52.

This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:43:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

3IO American Literature

"orders his world" and a better appreciation of the "ornaments of

that world."

Perhaps the best method of leading into Hawthorne's theory of

art is by way of two prefatory remarks. First, although Hawthorne

was a meticulous artist, he seldom indulged in elaborate literary

theorizing. This is not to say that he was an untutored genius who

groped his way to effective artistic achievement by some happy

chance or instinct. In fact, Hawthorne was keenly aware of the

problems posed by his craft, frequently and deeply thought about

them, and expressed his conclusions-his artistic ideals and prefer-

ences-modestly, it is true, almost apologetically, but nonetheless

convincingly, in his prefaces and tales. However, since his explicit

statements do not furnish us with enough data to reconstruct his

theory of art, any attempt to elucidate this theory will have to be

based to a considerable extent upon inference and deduction.

In the second place, it must be conceded that Hawthorne's ideas

on art are not systematic and comprehensive enough to be elevated

to the status of a philosophy. Whereas Henry James approached

critical problems intellectually and presented them with the neat-

ness and precision of a logician, Hawthorne's understanding of the

problems posed by his medium was largely intuitive, and his pres-

entation of them is full of apparent ambiguities and self-contradic-

tions. Hawthorne's ideas on the aesthetics of fiction are to be found

in a fragmentary form in his novels, prefaces, and tales, and in

order to arrive at his literary theory, one has not only to piece them

together patiently and industriously, but one has also somehow to

clear the obscurities and remove or explain away the contradictions.

However-and this is a point which will bear some belaboring-if

we take into account all that Hawthorne says about art and are

fully alive to the tone and mood and the context in which he says it,

if we balance one statement against another and consider the whole

body of critical material in the light of his literary practice, we

shall find that Hawthorne's ideas on literature and art, disparate as

they may seem to a superficial view, do in reality constitute a unified

whole and are characterized by sanity, maturity, and consistency.

In fact, for all his seeming diffidence and self-depreciation, Haw-

thorne was so deeply convinced of the rightness of some of his

This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:43:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Hawthorne's Theory of Art 3II

fundamental aesthetic convictions that his expression of them is not

only insistent, but emphatic, and even repetitious.

At the center of Hawthorne's aesthetics lies his theory of creative

imagination and of the part it plays in transmuting reality into art.

Hawthorne believed that literature should be based upon reality.

He admired the novels of Anthony Trollope because he found them

"solid and substantial ... and just as real as if some giant had hewn

a great lump out of the earth."3 In "A Virtuoso's Collection," when

the Virtuoso asks the narrator to rub Aladdin's lamp and desire

either a palace or a cottage, the narrator, I think, expresses Haw-

thorne's own respect for material reality when he says, "I might

desire a cottage . . . but I would have it founded on sure and

stable truth, not on dreams and fantasies. I have learned to look

for the real and the true."4 Similarly, the narrator in "The Hall of

Fantasy," confronted by the wild and the chimerical, insists upon

the value of "earthliness" and murmurs: "The poor old earth ....

She has faults enough, in all conscience, but I cannot bear to have

her perish" (p. 293). In the Preface to Twice-Told Tales Haw-

thorne insists that for all their tenuity, his tales and sketches are

not the "written communications of a solitary mind with itself"

or the "talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart," but

"attempts . . . to open an intercourse with the world." Hawthorne

himself was a keen and accurate observer and could describe an

environment with minute fidelity to detail.

But Hawthorne was not an advocate of what Harry H. Clark

calls "kodak literalism."5 He set no store by mere accuracy of

transcription. In "Old Ticonderoga: A Picture of the Past" he

portrays the guide as a dull and uninspired person, because although

the guide's description was "as accurate as a geometrical theorem,"

it divested the fort of all its romantic beauty. With his "lectures on

8The American Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart (New Haven, I932), p. XCii.

' The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Garden City, N. Y., I959), p. 440.

Subsequent references to this text will be incorporated parenthetically in the body of the

essay. References to The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne,

ed. Norman Holmes Pearson (New York, I937), will also be incorporated in the text of

the essay but preceded by the initial NHP.

"Hawthorne's Literary and Aesthetic Doctrines as Embodied in His Tales," Trans-

actions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, L, 252 (I96I).

This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:43:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

312 American Literature

ravelins, counterscarps, angles, and covered ways," he "made it an

affair of brick and mortar and hewn stone, arranged on certain

regular principles, having a good deal to do with mathematics, but

nothing at all with poetry."6 In his review of Whittier's Super-

naturalism in New England Hawthorne criticizes Whittier for his

unimaginative treatment of traditionary lore. In art Hawthorne

did not look for a slavish imitation of nature, but for a substitution

of nature by "something that may stand instead of and suggest

the truth." What the artist substitutes for nature (external reality)

is imaginative or spiritual reality. Hawthorne believed that in art

the process of idealization was not only legitimate but absolutely

indispensable. Without idealization, he felt, there could be no art.

The world of art and the world of reality are closely related but

not identical, nor is the former a mere copy of the latter. This is

not to say that art distorts reality or presents it in a garbled form. In

fact, idealized or spiritual reality is not less but more real than

material reality: the "poet's ideal" is the "truest truth" (p. 47I).

In "A Select Party" also Hawthorne presents the world of ideality

as more real than physical reality. Even the confirmed materialist

Robert Danforth in "The Artist of the Beautiful" intuitively recog-

nizes the superiority of art over external reality when he says about

Owen's mechanical butterfly that it "does beat all nature" (p. 435) .

The artist studies "Nature with such tender love that she takes him

to her intimacy, enabling him to reproduce her in landscapes that

seem the reality of a better earth, and yet are but the truth of the

very scenes around us, observed by the painter's insight and inter-

preted for us by his skill" (NHP, p. 666). He presents the universal

beneath the particular, "the life within the life," the reality freed

from accidents and irrelevancies. As the painter in "The Prophetic

Pictures" says, it is the artist's "gift-his proudest, but often a

melancholy one-to see the inmost soul, and, by a power in-

definable even to himself, to make it glow or darken upon the

canvas, in glances that express the thought and sentiment of years"

(p. 95). The painter himself paints pictures in which "the whole

6 The House of the Seven Gables and The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales

(Boston, I883), P. 592.

' As Richard Harter Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark (Norman,

Okla., I964), p. 78, puts it, "the imaginative work of art" is "Natural, yet superior to

Nature in that it embodies Nature's essence."

This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:43:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Hawthorne's Theory of Art 3I3

mind and character were brought out on the countenance, and con-

centrated into a single look, so that, to speak paradoxically, the

originals hardly resembled themselves so strikingly as the portraits

did" (p. 92). Similarly, in The Marble Faun Miriam's sketches

of domestic scenes are described as being "so finely and subtilely

idealized that they seemed such as we may see at any moment, and

everywhere" (NHP, p. 615).

The artist, then, seeks to capture the essence, the spirit, the ideal

rather than any of its adventitious manifestations. In "The Artist

of the Beautiful" Owen strives toward the Platonic Idea of Beauty:

he seeks to produce "a beauty that should attain to the ideal which

Nature has proposed to herself in all her creatures, but has never

taken pains to realize" (p. 432).8 Toward the end of the story,

Owen's butterfly is described as "Nature's ideal butterfly . . . not in

the pattern of such faded insects as flit among earthly flowers, but

of those which hover across the meads of paradise for child-angels

and the spirits of departed infants to disport themselves with" (p.

434). Hawthorne here emphasizes the fact that art goes beyond mere

surface occurrences of life and captures the essentials of human

experience. In this, Hawthorne the romanticist comes surprisingly

close to the classical Aristotelian doctrine that poetry is more philo-

sophical than history.9

The idealized truth of art is, of course, not synonymous with

fantasy or daydream. Art may ignore surface aspects of life, it may

modify external reality to convey spiritual truth, but it must remain

faithful and true to the fundamental facts of human experience.

The shaping process of art, Hawthorne would say, is a rigorous and

creative process which has nothing in common with wishful think-

ing. When Lewis W. Mansfield sent his poem "The Morning

Watch" to Hawthorne for his opinion, Hawthorne, in his com-

ments on the poem, conceded that "in a story like this, it is allow-

able, and highly advisable, (as you yourself have felt) to have as

much mist and glorified fog as possible, diffused about on all sides."

8 As Rudolph Von Abele remarks in "Baby and Butterfly," Kenyon Review, XV, 282

(Spring, 1953), "the creative process for Warland is one of generalization from a multi-

tude of percepts of imperfect individuals to a notion of the perfect, and typical, indi-

vidual."

9 For this insight, I am indebted to Charles Foster, "Hawthorne's Literary Theory,"

PMLA, LVII, 241-254 (March, 1942).

This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:43:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

3I4 American Literature

"But still," he went on to insist, "there should be a distinct pathway

to tread upon-a clue that the reader shall confide in, as being firmly

fastened somewhere."'" In "Drowne's Wooden Image" Drowne's

masterpiece elicits from the artist Copley a praise which Hawthorne

perhaps considered the highest possible for a work of art. "It is,"

says Copley, "as ideal as an antique statue, and yet as real as any

lovely woman whom one meets at a fireside or in the street" (p. 363).

Hawthorne would have heartily agreed with Melville's view that

fiction, like religion, "should present another world, and yet one

to which we feel the tie." For Hawthorne, idealization was not a

form of romantic escapism; it was a grappling with the actualities

of life to wrest from them their inner meaning. It was not an

attempt to shy away from facts, but to dissolve away the "grosser

actualities," the "stony excrescence of prose," with which facts are

covered, and to bring out "their most delicate and divinest colors,"

their "poetry."" As Foster says, "the emphasis on idealization in

art did not lead Hawthorne to regard art as a realm independent of

or superior to life."'2 It is true that those who "never find their

way" into the Hall of Fantasy lead "but half a life-the meaner

and earthlier half" (p. 29I). But, on the other hand, those who

"make their whole abode and business here, and contract habits

which unfit them for all the real employments of life" are "un-

fortunates" (p. 29I). Although a romance does not have to "aim at

a very minute fidelity" to external details, it "sins unpardonably so

far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart" (NHP,

p. 243). As Hyatt Waggoner puts it in his excellent statement of

Hawthorne's position regarding art and reality, Hawthorne

is proposing a life test for art's truth, without at all suggesting that the

artist should abdicate, leaving "fact" and Nature in control. The internal

world, the chamber of the heart where imagination operates freely, the

world of dream, is the peculiar realm of the artist, and Hawthorne returns

to it after his excursion into an apparently meaningless external reality

has served its purpose. But the internal world is embedded in an ex-

ternal world, which it may ignore only at its peril. The imagination must

0 In his letter to Lewis W. Mansfield, dated Feb. Io, I850, quoted by Harold Blodgett,

"Hawthorne as Poetry Critic: Six Unpublished Letters," American Literature, XII, 177-178

(May, 1940).

"-Our Old Home (Boston, I876), p. 154.

12 P. 253.

This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:43:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Hawthorne's Theory of Art 3I5

remain responsible, even while it guards its freedom. No mere daydream-

ing will do.'3

The artist, then, must keep his feet firmly planted on the "great,

round, solid" earth. He must not, like Sylph Etherege, give vent

to unchecked imagination, or, like the poet in "The Great Car-

buncle," become one whose "ordinary diet was fog, morning mist,

and a slice of the densest cloud within reach, sauced with moonshine,

whenever he could get it" (p. 82). It is true that he should never

become so entangled in fact as to lose sight of spiritual truth. But

then his life of imagination must be balanced by a strict regard for

tangible reality. In his best work Hawthorne himself keeps this

vantage point. Even The Scarlet Letter, for all its multiplicity of

meaning and complexity of symbolism, has a setting which is both

precise and solid. The town and the Puritan society are described

in such concrete detail that one finds them completely credible.

This is also true of the characters (Hester and Dimmesdale, for

example) which, though replete with moral and symbolic mean-

ing, are by no means deficient in verisimilitude. Julian Hawthorne's

remark that Hawthorne "does not float vaguely in mid-air, but takes

his stand somewhere near the center of things" is certainly not

true of all his fiction. But it is true of his best fiction.

II

Hawthorne's view of the nature and operation of creative

imagination, and his famous, rather artificial, but insistently drawn

distinction between the "Novel" and the "Romance" can only be

understood in the light of his conception of art as an idealized

presentation of reality. If idealization is the essence of the artistic

process, the imagination is the agent. It is the faculty of imagina-

tion which transmutes the raw material of reality into the finished

product of art. It is the imagination which enables the artist to

select, compress, and develop events and materials in such a way as

to lift them from the plane of the particular and make them take

on a meaning which is universal.'4 The imagination of the artist

13 Hawthorne: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., I963), pp. 36-37. At another

point, but in the same context, Waggoner says, "Art is more like myth than like docu-

ment, but there are true myths and false myths, and art had better be true" (p. 34).

14 Millicent Bell says in Hawthorne's View of the Artist, p. IOO: "By means of the

This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:43:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

3I6 American Literature

serves to "bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the

shadows of the picture" (NHP, p. 243). It is a light which hides what-

ever is "unworthy to be noticed" and gives "effect to every beautiful

and noble attribute" (p. 239). It spiritualizes details and invests

them "with a quality of strangeness and remoteness" (NHP, p. I05).

It conjures into existence "beings and objects grander and more

beautiful than we can anywhere find in reality" (NHP, p. 6I3).

Thus, the imagination beautifies objects and presents them in their

"most delicate and divinest colors." It must, however, be noted,

and it is a point of some importance and one which is often ignored,

that for Hawthorne the imagination is by no means a merely beauti-

fying and idealizing faculty. It is a faculty which also enables the

artist to burrow into the depth of reality. It is an "inward eye"

which, fresh, undimmed by custom, and undeceived by appearances,

perceives objects not visible to the physical eye. If, on the one hand,

the imagination, like the moonlight in "The Custom House," en-

velopes objects in an aura of romance and beauty, it also, on the

other hand, like the mirror in "Feathertop" and "Dr. Heidegger's

Experiment," uncovers the veneer of superficial appearance and gives

a glimpse into the very heart of reality.'5

Hawthorne's much-discussed distinction between the romance

and the novel does not possess much critical validity today. The

"latitude" which he pleaded for in the treatment of external details

is now taken for granted by the novelists. Hawthorne perhaps

thought that by insisting that the events and characters described

by him were imaginary both in fact and intention, he would antici-

pate and thereby protect himself from the charge of unreality which

might otherwise be brought against him. However, although from

an objective critical standpoint, Hawthorne's distinction may not

have much meaning today, it is of great relevance to a discussion of

Imagination, the artist aspires to knowledge of the pure forms, the Platonic absolutes,

which, according to transcendental philosophy, Nature is constantly in the process of

approximating."

1b The mirror in Hawthorne is very clearly a symbol of reality; it reflects truth as

opposed to the physical (and often deceptive) appearance of the object. "I am half con-

vinced," says Hawthorne, "that the reflection is indeed the reality-the real thing which

Nature imperfectly images to our grosser sense" (American Notebooks, p. I70). And in

The House of the Seven Gables he describes the mirror as "a kind of window or doorway

into the spiritual world" (NHP, p. 4I2).

This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:43:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Hawthorne's Theory of Art 317

his own work, and one cannot arrive at a proper understanding of

the content and technique of his fiction unless one takes it into

account.

The novel, Hawthorne says in the Preface to The House of the

Seven Gables, "is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not

merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of

man's experience." The romance, on the other hand, has "a certain

latitude, both as to its fashion and material," and although it must

never "swerve aside from the truth of the human heart," it has

"fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great

extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation." If we consider

these statements carefully, we shall find that Hawthorne is not here

distinguishing between two forms of fiction of which one deals

with reality and the other does not. In fact, the two forms-the

novel and the romance-are similar in that they both deal with

reality. But, and this is the crux of the matter, their ways of look-

ing at reality and of presenting it are radically different. While the

novelist fritters away his energy in an exact notation of surface

details, the romancer can ignore these details and concentrate on a

presentation of the fundamental facts of human behavior. While the

novelist, tied down, like the historian, to the requirement of a rigid

adherence to facts, presents only the particular, the romancer, who,

like the poet, can modify facts and fashion them into meaningful

patterns, is able to present the universal. This whole problem is

closely related to Hawthorne's view that art presents reality in an

idealized form. The novelist has a minimum of freedom to idealize

and manipulate facts. He has to present material reality with com-

plete accuracy. Unlike the romancer, he cannot ignore the par-

ticular for the typical. The romancer, on the other hand, can

ignore material reality, idealize facts, and delineate universal human

experience. Although Hawthorne never says explicitly that the

romance is superior to the novel, I think that it is clear from his

view of the artistic process as essentially an idealizing process that

he considered the romancer to be more of an artist than the novelist.

The question which now arises is: what relevance does Haw-

thorne's distinction between the novel and the romance have to the

study of his literary technique, which, after all, is the thing that

ultimately matters? It seems to me that a good deal of adverse

This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:43:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

3I8 American Literature

criticism of Hawthorne stems from an inability to see the point

of his distinction between the novel, which is largely concerned with

facts, and the romance, which is concerned with truth. Melville, for

example, was critical of the impalpable, tenuous quality of Haw-

thorne's tales: "He does not patronize the butcher-he needs roast

beef done rare." Similarly, Henry James says that "Hawthorne

. . . was not in the least a realist-he was not to my mind enough

of one."''6 It is, I think, not only unjust but downright futile to

blame a writer for not doing what he did not want, and did not

consider worth his while, to do. Hawthorne, to be sure, has done

himself considerable disservice by adopting an apologetic tone and

self-defensive posture in his allusions to his own work. In fact, he

need not have been apologetic of what he considered to be lack of

realism in his fiction. He was more of a realist than many of the

so-called realistic novelists, and his realism was of a kind superior

to and of more enduring significance than theirs-a realism of theme

and character as opposed to the realism of circumstance. However,

the point is that it would be unfair to blame Hawthorne for not

possessing the realistic novelist's solidity or his tenacious hold upon

surface details of life. For all his avowed taste for realism, Haw-

thorne knew that he had no aptitude for the conventions and tech-

niques of the realistic novel. Not for him, he realized, were the

"humorous coloring" and the "picturesque force" (NHP, p. io6) of

style. He was seldom at his best when he tried to delineate with

complete fidelity to detail what he had seen or experienced. He

deliberately removed the scenes of his drama away from the sphere

of everyday reality so that his "fancy-pictures" may not be brought

into "positive contact with the realities of the moment" (NHP, p.

244). He usually wrote at his best when his characters and events

were a little removed from the here-and-now, either in space or in

time, so that he would get a perspective, view them from a distance

and with detachment. In this, he differed from Melville, who was

at his best only when he became passionately involved with his

subject. For Hawthorne, emotion became the material of art only

when it was "recollected in tranquillity." In the Preface to Our

Old Home he says: "The Present, the Immediate, the Actual, has

proved too potent for me. It takes away not only my scanty faculty

" Hawthorne (Ithaca, N. Y., I956), p. 52.

This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:43:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Hawthorne's Theory of Art 319

but even my desire for imaginative composition." His descriptive

and historical pieces (such as "Mrs. Bullfrog" and Our Old Home)

do not represent his really memorable work, and his fiction remains

valuable to us largely as an expression of his deepest perceptions about

man and nature.

Herein lies the reason for the pervasive use of symbolism in

Hawthorne's work. Hawthorne regarded symbolism as the chief

avenue of communication with the spiritual world. Like Emerson

and other transcendentalists, he believed in the pre-eminence of

spirit over matter. Hence his preoccupation with symbolism, his

habit of looking at material facts as "pasteboard masks," unim-

portant in themselves, but significant as emblematic of spiritual

truths.

III

To Hawthorne art was the result of an acute need for self-

expression. The act of literary composition, he says in "The Custom

House," was for him a "toil" that "stilled an unquiet impulse" (NHP,

p. IO9) in him. But if art was a form of self-expression, it was not

only, but much more than, that. The artist, Hawthorne would have

agreed with Hulme and Eliot, does not have a personality to express

but a medium to use. He did not approve of the idea of the writer

wearing his heart upon his sleeve. The artist, he felt, should not

indulge in "confidential depths of revelation." "The inmost Me"

should be kept "behind its veil" (NHP, p. 85).

On the question of the relation between and the comparative

value of content and form in a literary work, Hawthorne does not

explicitly say much. But from his incidental remarks, one can

piece together a consistent view. Hawthorne believed content to

be of greater importance than form. He set no store by technical

accomplishment unaccompanied by meaningful content. In "The

Canterbury Pilgrims" he describes form as the "material body"

and thought as its "celestial soul" (p. 49). His emphasis is on

the artist's vision and inspiration rather than on the technical quali-

ties of the art work. Beauty of form and clarity of outline are, no

doubt, essential. But the all-important qualities which a work of

art must possess are vitality of thought and sincerity of emotion.

The products of Drowne's "mechanical and wooden cleverness" (p.

This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:43:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

320 American Literature

362) remain "worthless abortions" (p. 362) because, although "re-

markably clever" (p. 360), they lack "that deep quality, be it of

soul or intellect, which bestows life upon the lifeless and warmth

upon the cold" (p. 36i). Since art immortalizes, nothing but the

very best ideas should be entrusted to its keeping. In The Marble

Faun, speaking of marble as a medium, Hawthorne says: "it in-

sures immortality to whatever is wrought in it, and therefore makes

it a religious obligation to commit no idea to its mighty guardian-

ship, save such as may repay the marble for its faithful care, its

incorruptible fidelity, by warming it with an ethereal life" (NHP,

p. 667). In the same novel Hawthorne criticizes certain Italian

painters for their "deficiency of earnestness and absolute truth"

(NHP, p. 785), and speaks admiringly of Miriam's sketches of

domestic scenes because he finds that "the feeling and sympathy in

all of them were deep and true" (NHP, p. 6I5).

Hawthorne's emphasis upon the importance of content, however,

should not lead us to think that he underestimated the value of form

or was negligent as craftsman. Hawthorne was perhaps the most

careful artist of his time and had a rare and exquisite sense of

structure and style. He emphasizes the value of unity and structure

in a work of art by using architectural images to describe the process

of creation. In the Preface to The House of the Seven Gables he

says that he "trusts not to be considered as unpardonably offending

by laying out a street that infringes upon nobody's private rights,

and appropriating a lot of land which had no visible owner, and

building a house of materials long in use for constructing castles in

the air." There is, of course, no real opposition between content and

form. In a successful work of art, a serious and profound theme

is projected through a form which is beautiful and symmetrical.

But, on the other hand, emphasis varies, and although Hawthorne

considered both "fashion and material"-means and matter-of

crucial importance, his stress was on the latter.

It follows from this that Hawthorne was no believer in the

doctrine of art for art's sake. He believed in art as an instrument

in the service of humanity. "If art had not strayed away from its

legitimate paths and aims," he says in The Marble Faun, "it ought

to soften and sweeten the lives of its worshippers, in even a more

exquisite degree than the contemplation of natural objects" (NHP,

This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:43:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Hawthorne's Theory of Art 32I

p. 786). Art should accomplish "a higher end than that of pleasing

the eye." It should "take hold of the mind""7 and aim at a "high

treatment of heroic subjects, or the delicate evolution of spiritual,

through material beauty" (NHP, p. 668). But Hawthorne was too

much of an artist to consider sheer didacticism of much value. The

moral, he believed, should not be obtrusive. It must be subsumed

in the very texture of a work and felt as an emergent attitude rather

than as an appended and extractable lesson. He would have agreed

with Virginia Woolf that "when a philosophy is not consumed in a

novel, when we can underline this phrase with a pencil, and cut out

that exhortation with a pair of scissors and paste the whole into a

system, it is safe to say that there is something wrong with the

philosophy or with the novel or with both."'8 Hawthorne himself

says in the Preface to The House of the Seven Gables:

When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective opera-

tion, it is usually through a far more subtile process than the ostensible

one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore,

relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod,-or,

rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly,-thus at once depriving

it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude.

A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening

at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction,

may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more

evident, at the last page than at the first.

Unfortunately, Hawthorne did not always resist the temptation

to preach and moralize. Too often he committed what Poe called

"The Heresy of the Didactic." But in his best work, his practice is

consistent with his theory, and he contrives, as Henry James says,

"by an exquisite process, best known to himself," to "transmute"

his "heavy moral burden into the very substance of the imagina-

tion, to make it evaporate in the light and charming fumes of

artistic production."19

IV

The process of creation is for Hawthorne an intuitive rather than

7 Quoted by Millicent Bell, p. 4I.

:"'"The Novels of George Meredith," The Common Reader: Second Series, pp. 233-

234.

19p. 46.

This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:43:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

322 American Literature

intellectual process, and effects contrived "with malice aforethought"

are less important than the flash of inspiration. Hawthorne seems

to accept without reservation (at least in theory) the romantic

doctrine of inspiration. The act of creation is a mysterious, in-

explicable act which evades logical analysis. It calls for the "very

highest state to which a human spirit can attain, in its loftiest

aspirations" (p. 367). The artist works a miracle beyond his own

comprehension. "This image!" exclaims Drowne, ". . . I have

wrought it in a kind of dream" (p. 367). Similarly, Kenyon in The

Marble Faun achieves his most significant effects "independent of

his own will." He lets "his hands work uncontrolled with the

clay, somewhat as a spiritual medium, while holding a pen, yields

it to an unseen guidance other than that of her own will" (NHP,

p. 746). As Roy R. Male says, "Transformation of material into

art must ultimately remain a mystery, a miracle. Like human con-

version, it is consummated in a moment of immediate apprehension

that comes as a reward for intellectual discipline and sympathetic

understanding."20 In "The Prophetic Pictures" the artist is com-

pared to the magician. In fact, Hawthorne goes so far as to suggest

that genius and mental disorder are allied. "He has gone mad";

Copley thinks about Drowne, "and thence has come this gleam of

genius" (p. 364).

But, in spite of his affinities with romantic aesthetics, Hawthorne

had no patience with work carelessly or shoddily done. Although

he believed hard work by itself to be of little value, he also knew

that without it no one could become a great artist. The process of

creation, he would say, has its agonies as well as its ecstasies. In

"The Custom House" and The Marble Faun he uses the imagery

of the smithy to demonstrate the necessity of application in artistic

effort. In the torpid atmosphere of the custom house, he says, his

imagination refused to function effectively and "the characters of

the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable by

any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge" (NHP, p. I04).

Similarly, in The Marble Faun Kenyon, speaking of his bust of

Cleopatra, says: "I kindled a great fire within my mind, and

threw in the material,-as Aaron threw the gold of the Israelites

20 Hawthorne's Tragic Vision (Austin, Texas, I957), p. i66.

This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:43:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Hawthorne's Theory of Art 323

into the furnace,-and in the midmost heat uprose Cleopatra, as

you see her" (NHP, p. 663).

Hawthorne believed that the world of art was autonomous,

subject to no laws except its own. When Copley suggests to Drowne

that he should not paint his wooden image, Drowne says: "Let

others do what they may with marble, and adopt what rules they

choose. If I can produce my desired effect by painted wood, those

rules are not for me, and I have a right to disregard them" (p. 363).

In a letter to Mansfield, Hawthorne says: "I doubt whether any

desirable influence is ever exercised by a foreign judgment on

works of imagination, in respect to which the author himself should

be despotic and autocratical."21 Hawthorne is not suggesting that

the artist can or should live in isolation from society. In fact, noth-

ing is more clearly stated in Hawthorne than his belief that art must

always subserve life. What he is asserting here is the independence

of art and its superiority to externally imposed rules.

Art, Hawthorne would say, is its own reward. At one point, he

comes close to Croce's expressionism and suggests that what is

important is the artist's vision and not the art work through which

he tries to communicate it to the world. "When the artist rose

high enough to achieve the beautiful," he says in an oft-quoted

passage, "the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal

senses became of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed

itself in the enjoyment of the reality" (p. 437). Since the artist

imagines things "too high for mortal faculties to execute" (NHP,

p. 8o8), and since the most finished work of art is but an imperfect

copy of the artist's vision, the vision itself is much more precious

than the physical form in which it is embodied.

Thus it appears that Hawthorne's ideas on art, disjointed as they

may seem to be, do in reality form a meaningful pattern and a

consistent point of view. Although Hawthorne did not approach

fiction with the prayers and fastings of a Henry James or a Flaubert,

there can be no doubt that he devoted deep and serious reflection to

the problems and techniques of fiction-writing. His aesthetic theory

is of great value in itself as a great artist's view of art, and it takes

21 Quoted by Blodgett, p. I76.

This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:43:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

324 A merican Literature

on added significance through its intimate application to his literary

technique. For his literary technique is an exemplification of his

literary theory; it is nothing but his aesthetics translated into

practice. The two are interdependent, and each illuminates the

other.

This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:43:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms