Professing himself the special apostle of the
beautiful in art, he nevertheless forces upon us continually the most
loathsome hideousness and the most debasing and unbeautiful horror. This
passionate, unhelmed, errant search for beauty was in fact not so much a
normal and intelligent desire, as an attempt to escape from interior
discord; and it was the discord which found expression, accordingly,
instead of the sense of beauty,--except (as has been said) in fragments.
Whatever the cause, his brain had a rift of ruin in it, from the start,
and though his delicate touch often stole a new grace from classic
antiquity, it was the frangibility, the quick decay, the fall of all
lovely and noble things, that excited and engaged him. "I have imbibed
the shadows of fallen columns," he says in one of his tales, "at Balbec,
and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin."
Always beauty and grace are with him most poetic in their overthrow, and
it is the shadow of ruined grandeur that he receives, instead of the
still living light so fair upon them, or the green growth clinging
around them. Hawthorne, too, wandered much amid human ruin, but it was
not with delight in the mere fact of decay; rather with grieving over
it, and the hope to learn how much of life was still left in the wreck,
and how future structures might be made stronger by studying the sources
of failure. One of the least thoughtful remarks which I have heard
touching Hawthorne was this, that his books could not live because they
dealt with the "sick side" of human nature.
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