Quotation from: Hawthorne (English Men of Letters Series, Edited by John Morley)Written by: Henry James |
|
The faults of the book are, to my sense, a want of reality and an abuse of the fanciful element--of a certain superficial symbolism. The people strike me not as characters, but as representatives, very picturesquely arranged, of a single state of mind; and the interest of the story lies, not in them, but in the situation, which is insistently kept before us, with little progression, though with a great deal, as I have said, of a certain stable variation; and to which they, out of their reality, contribute little that helps it to live and move. I was made to feel this want of reality, this over-ingenuity, of _The Scarlet Letter_, by chancing not long since upon a novel which was read fifty years ago much more than to-day, but which is still worth reading--the story of _Adam Blair_, by John Gibson Lockhart. This interesting and powerful little tale has a great deal of analogy with Hawthorne's novel--quite enough, at least, to suggest a comparison between them; and the comparison is a very interesting one to make, for it speedily leads us to larger considerations than simple resemblances and divergences of plot.
|
| PREVIOUS GROUP HOME SITE HOME NEXT |
| Old Dominion University CS Dept Designed by Joan A. Smith for the CRATE project Created: 2007-2-22T13:32:56Z Part of the CratePreservation2 Project Change Tag: ~~ 0 ~~ |
| Part of a series of experiments in web preservation under the direction of Michael L. Nelson, Ph.D. |