Concerning Nathaniel Hawthorne and Art as Magic

To Plotinus, a proto-New England philosopher, it seemed that a kind of sympathetic magic united men with the stars. “True magic” to him seemed to be internal to All, “and match-making, prayer and musical incantation are shadows of the primal love and sorcery given in nature,” he wrote. For Nathaniel Hawthorne, a proto-Freudian novelist, and R. W. Emerson, a proto-Einsteinian cosmologist, both readers of Greek philosophy, the idea was an exciting and extremely fruitful one. Emerson's use of it never became involved, obviously, with plot devices or even with his aesthetics, as it did in Hawthorne's case, and one must, in fact, in reading Hawthorne, infer from Plotinus' statement that not only the making of pictures, statues and other works of art, but also the finished objects themselves, shadow nature's “primal sorcery,” her transcendental magic or oversoul. One sees that Hawthorne is a lesser or greater psychological novelist in so far as the things which motivate his plots and on which he bases his examinations of “primal love,” are potent things saturated with personality.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Tradition of Gothic Romance, a study of his sources, Jane Lundblad points out that Hawthorne seems first to have met the idea of the true-magic reflecting picture or the sorcery-endowed art object in the Gothick novels which he read as a young man, and she assembles a great deal of important evidence to support her contention. Hawthorne's early experience with talking portraits