HAWTHORNE
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foundest truths side by side with the idlest jest, and utter one or the
other apparently without distinguishing which is the most valuable,
or assigning any considerable value to either. The resemblance between
the marble faun and their living companion had made a deep half–
serious, half-mirthful impression on these three friends, and had
taken them into a certain airy region, lifting up, as it is so pleasant to
feel them lifted, their heavy earthly feet from the actual soil of life.
The world had been set afloat, as it were, for a moment, and relieved
them, for just so long, of all the customary responsibility for what they
thought and said." It is merely the conversation of "creative" persons
that Hawthorne says he is describing, but we surmise that he would
wish us to have in mind as well the works of art which they create,
that he means to define the relation in which the artist stands to the
world.
If
that is so, we will not fail to observe that what Hawthorne
emphasizes in his account of this relation is not the power of the
artistic imagination but the intractability of the world. For a brief
moment the artist takes flight from it, and sometimes he can even
seem to set the very world afloat; but only for so long as his words
are being uttered; when again he falls silent, the world is no longer
a balloon and his feet walk again on earth, on "the actual soil of life."
Of possible conceptions of the artist's relation to the world, this is
indeed a very modest one. And
if
at any time in our judgment of
Hawthorne we become aware, as indeed we must, of moments when
his power as an artist seems insufficient to the occasion, we might
reasonably attribute what weakness we discern in his art to a con–
ception of the artist's manner of dealing with the world which is less
bold and intransigent than it might be.
When it comes to power-to, as we say, sheer power-Hawthorne
is manifestly inferior to Kafka. Of Kafka's power an impressive index
is the fact that his version of man's dark odyssey proceeds without
touching upon cases of conscience. In such relations between man and
man as are represented in Kafka's work, it is never a possibility that
one man can help or injure another. The idea "I did him wrong"
is foreign to his mind. The idea "I did wrong" is of course omni–
present, but this means only "I did not do the required thing, that
which the Law demands; and therefore I shall be punished." What
an intransigence of imagination is needed to conceive man's spiritual
life as having no discernible connection with morality! And not only
