The Death of the Artist

Abstract

Emerson somewhere called The Marble Faun “mere mush;” but he was not skilled in the art of reading fiction. So far from being mush, it is a distinctly unpleasant piece of work, exhibiting in copious detail the inner stresses that were within a few years to make sustained creative effort totally impossible for Hawthorne. In other words, Hawthorne himself to the contrary — “... if I have written anything well, it should be this Romance, for I have never thought or felt more deeply, or taken more pains...”¹ — it is an almost total loss. In the case of an artist as inwardly disquieted as Hawthorne, prolonged and careful work might, after all, be likely to make things worse instead of better. It is of course true that his donnees were often jotted down years before the works of which they were the “germs” were written; The Scarlet Letter, finished in 1850, harks back to a tale called “Endicott and the Red Cross,” published in 1837. Yet there is no evidence to suggest that he resorted to elaborate scenariowork before or during the act of composition; so that, given the initial notion, he apparently worked the books out as he went along. Under such circumstances, violent inner stress, by pressing him to finish up, could keep a book from wandering and dying out at last of inanition. Looseness and deceleration is characteristic of the writing of so-called “inspiration” artists when inspiration ebbs; and in The Scarlet Letter, as we have noticed, Hawthorne was hounded by internal compulsions in a concentrated way which, by the time of The Marble Faun, had apparently died out.