But it is at just this point that the philosopher begins. Accepting many truths from many scientists, the philosopher compares, reconciles, and correlates them, and thus builds out of them a structure of belief. But this structure of belief remains abstract and theoretic in the mind of the philosopher. It is now the artist's turn. Accepting the correlated theoretic truths which the scientist and the philosopher have given him, he endows them with an imaginative embodiment perceptible to the senses. He translates them back into concrete terms; he clothes them in invented facts; he makes them imaginatively perceptible to a mind native and induced to actuality; and thus he gives expression to the truth.
This triple process of the scientific discovery, the philosophic understanding, and the artistic expression of truth has been explained at length, because every great writer of fiction must pass through the entire mental process. The fiction-writer differs from other seekers for the truth, not in the method of his thought, but merely in its subject-matter. His theme is human life. It is some truth of human life that he endeavors to discover, to understand, and to announce; and in order to complete his work, he must apply to human life an attention of thought which is successively scientific, philosophic, and artistic. He must first observe carefully certain facts of actual life, study them in the light of extended experience, and induce from them the general laws which he deems to be the truths which underlie them. In doing this, he is a scientist. Next, if he be a great thinker, he will correlate these truths and build out of them a structure of belief. In doing this, he is a philosopher. Lastly, he must create imaginatively such scenes and characters as will illustrate the truths he has discovered and considered, and will convey them clearly and effectively to the minds of his readers. In doing this, he is an artist.
But although this triple mental process (of scientific discovery, philosophic understanding, and artistic expression) is experienced in full by every master of fiction, we find that certain authors are interested most in the first, or scientific phase of the process, others in the second, or philosophic phase, and still others in the third, or artistic phase. Evidently Emile Zola is interested chiefly in a scientific investigation of the actual facts of life, George Eliot in a philosophic contemplation of its underlying truths, and Gabriele D'Annunzio in an artistic presentation of the dream-world that he imagines. Washington Irving is mainly an artist, Tolstoi mainly a philosopher, and Jane Austen mainly a scientifically accurate observer. Few are the writers, even among the greatest masters of the art, of whom we feel, as we feel of Hawthorne, that the scientist, the philosopher, and the artist reign over equal precincts of their minds. Hawthorne the scientist is so thorough, so accurate, and so precise in his investigations of provincial life that no less a critic than James Russell Lowell declared the "House of the Seven Gables" to be "the most valuable contribution to New England history that has yet been made." Hawthorne the philosopher is so wise in his understanding of crime and retribution, so firm in his structure of belief concerning moral truth, that it seems that he, if any one, might give an answer to that poignant cry of a despairing murderer,—
"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?"[1]
And Hawthorne the artist is so delicate in his sensitive and loving presentation of the beautiful, so masterly both in structure and in style, that his work, in artistry alone, is its own excuse for being. Were it not for the confinement of his fiction—its lack of range and sweep, both in subject-matter and in attitude of mind,—his work on this account might be regarded as an illustration of all that may be great in the threefold process of creation.