Slava Bart: Response to Hawthorne and His Mosses

It is curious how an essay which is supposed to explain the merits of a writer barely contains any actual criticism in the academic sense. Moreover, it is half fiction, half creative nonfiction. Melville is not so much interested in describing the precise details of Hawthorne’s style as in inspiring admiration in Hawthorne – and in what he considers great writing in general – by affecting us through heightened language and fancy.

I think the essay is a good expression of how writers, rather than critics, understand and react to literature. Unlike the pragmatic, analytical mind of the critic who believes that to understand is to produce a precise formula, the writer (or at least Melville’s kind of writer) approaches the text already coming from a place of private fantasy, a world rediscovered and reinvented in a way none dared to imagine before (hence the fictional opening part of the essay) and seeks to find not a neat formula, but affect and rapture, a primarily intuitive, emotional experience. Hence Melville’s talk of the “sane madness” of truth and his passing dismissal of critical analysis:

“He is immeasurably deeper than the plummet of the mere critic. For it is not the brain that can test such a man; it is only the heart. You cannot come to know greatness by inspecting it; there is no glimpse to be caught of it, except by intuition” (522).