The Artist and the Fly: Some Notes on Puritanism and Romanticism in Hawthorne

Abstract

The reader who comes for the first time upon a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne entitled 'The Artist of the Beautiful' will rightly expect an exploration, in Hawthorne's characteristic fusion of symbol and allegory, of the aesthetic aims and impulses of art. He will probably expect (especially if he is familiar with 'The Prophetic Pictures' in Hawthorne's earlier Twice-Told Tales) a story of a painter; and, if he has encountered 'The Birth-Mark', he will be prepared for a warning against the dangers of too assiduous a striving after perfect beauty. It may come as something of a surprise that Hawthorne has chosen a watchmaker to symbolize the artist and a mechanical butterfly as the work of art. By the I84os, when this story was written, the aesthetic theories of Romanticism had established the imagination as the 'shaping spirit' of art and, indeed, as the agent by which the beautiful is apprehended and understood; they had also asserted the pre-eminence of the beauty of nature. The point is made by another commentator in a quite different context: 'The characteristic Romantic analogies which describe the operation of both art and life are drawn direct from nature: nightingales, sensitive plants, erupting volcanoes. The artist and his work operate as nature itself seemed to do, spontaneously, organically, mysteriously. The characteristic eighteenthcentury analogies tend to be drawn, instead, from human craftsmanship: clocks, machines, garden mazes, theatres'.1 Hawthorne's symbolism in this story, therefore, may seem to be anachronistic; it may appear to handicap him, or even, by reducing the artist to the technically-skilful craftsman, to belittle either the role of the creative imagination or the spontaneity and function of art itself.