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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Short studies of American authors 4 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature 2 0 Browse Search
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Short studies of American authors, Hawthorne. (search)
must, after all, be such a thing as literary art, and that he must represent one of the very highest types of artist. Through Hawthorne's journals we trace the mental impulses by which he first obtained his themes. Then in his unfinished Septimius Felton, fortunately unfinished for this purpose,--we see his plastic imagination at work in shaping the romance; we watch him trying one mode of treatment, then modifying it by another; always aiming at the main point, but sometimes pausing to elabre me, as I write, a photograph of one of Raphael's rough sketches, drawn on the back of a letter: there is a group of heads, then another group on a different scale; you follow the shifting mood of the artist's mind; and so it is in reading Septimius Felton. In all Hawthorne's completed works, the pencilling is rubbed out, and every trace of the preliminary labor has disappeared. One of the most characteristic of Hawthorne's literary methods is his habitual use of guarded under-statements a