Lights from Dark Corners: Works of Art in "The Prophetic Pictures" and "The Artist of the Beautiful"

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LIGHTS FROM DARK CORNERS: WORKS OF ART IN "THE PROPHETIC PICTURES" AND "THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL" Stephanie Fay* When Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote "in this dismal and squalid chamber, fame was won" in his journal, he was indeed "projecting his inward feelings onto the room where he had experienced them," but he was also implying that he sensed a disjunction between the artist himself and his works, between the vagaries of artistic genesis and the unaccountable splendor of works of art.1 While this disjunction is a recurrent theme of Hawthorne's tales about artists, Hawthorne adumbrates it most fully in "The Prophetic Pictures" (1837) and "The Artist of the Beautiful " (1844).z Hawthorne may have been troubled by the artist's character—the artists of his tales are neither engaging nor admirable— but even so he insisted on the efficacy of the artist's works. Unlike Emerson, who turned to the artist to understand the work of art, Hawthorne , in his journal entry and in his tales, suggests looking with sympathetic awareness at the work itself. His descriptions of the artists' works in his fiction do precisely this, and these descriptions suggest in both "The Prophetic Pictures" and "The Artist of the Beautiful" that works of art are subtler and more compelling than the painter of the first tale claims or the maker of the butterfly conceives. To put the matter more simply and more schematically, although Hawthorne's narratives do tend to undercut the artist characters, these narratives also describe works that transcend the artists' shortcomings. By analogy these works of art confirm Hawthorne's rueful—or hopeful—comment on his own art: however characteristically "dismal and squalid" the chambers of the artist's mind, the finished work can have its own lambency. In "The Prophetic Pictures" and "The Artist of the Beautiful," Hawthorne portrays two related issues: the inadequacy of the artist and the sufficiency of the work of art. Hawthorne suggests the artist's inadequacy in a complex interplay between the narrator's viewpoint and the larger narrative's revision of this limited account. Several critical readings of both tales point out the difference between the narrators' assessments of the artists, generally positive but partial, and the narratives ' fuller but less admiring characterizations.3 Attention to Hawthorne 's strategy in describing the artists' works can usefully augment *Stephanie Fay teaches at the University of California, Davis, where she is working on Hawthorne and Henry James. This article is her first publication. 16Stephanie Fay these readings: skeptical as he was about men who are artists, Hawthorne nonetheless endorsed their works for their aesthetic value in the fictional world and their symbolic value in the fictional narrative. Despite a limited experience with art and artists, Hawthorne described works of art and speculated on their meaning long before visiting Manchester, where the 1857 exhibition "gave him an unprecedented opportunity to develop his aesthetic faculty."4 Reflecting both the historical situation of American artists and, perhaps, the narrowness of his own early experience, Hawthorne's artists in "The Prophetic Pictures" and "The Artist of the Beautiful" are solitary beings who enjoy neither the consolation of a domestic circle nor the stimulation of an "aesthetic company." Hawthorne's assessment of the artist's situation in these tales is ironic: either because of solitude or a failing of character, both the unnamed painter and Owen Warland exaggerate their powers, miscalculating either the significance or the value of their works. The portrait painter confuses perceptiveness with prophetic power; Owen Warland, in making the butterfly, persuades himself of his own extraordinary ability to "spiritualize" his mechanical creature. His work on the butterfly , however, comes to seem more like wizardry than artistry to a reader of the tale, especially when the narrative offers a more convincing proof of his genius in another work for which he makes no claims: the presentation box for the butterfly. Although Hawthorne creates a sense of the artist's work in "The Prophetic Pictures" through the accretion oí details in the narrative and evokes Owen Warland's ebony box in "The Artist of the Beautiful" in a single passage, the works of art nonetheless represent a unified aesthetic . They express...