Hawthorne

Final story from Hawthorne's Mosses From an Old Manse in the Vintage pb Hawthorne's Short Stories is The Artist of the Beautiful in which H takes a bit of a new direction. This is another one of his stories in the "American vein" - which he helped establish - about loners and outsiders but in this instance it's one of his few about the life and struggles of an artist. He takes on the topic indirectly: his artist is a young man obsessed with capturing the beauty of nature in a minute mechanical device , a toy butterfly in fact. Unlike the various scientists and witches who tamper w nature in other H stories this artist is a sorrowful but deeply sympathetic figure. He cuts himself off from society and more specifically from the woman he loves from afar to pursue his art: he is a failed watchmaker and she marries a brawny and utterly conventional blacksmith. The artist looks from outside at their relationship and knows he could never have such a marriage but he is devoted to his pursuit of the beautiful. Hawthorne has many passages reflecting on the life of the artist: I don't know much about Hawthorne's life but suspect that at least to others he has a life of conventional success but this story may give a window onto the struggles and doubts that plagued him. Other writers in his wake have written on this theme most notably and similarly Thomas Mann in Tonio Kroger.

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