Quotation from: Hawthorne (English Men of Letters Series, Edited by John Morley)

Written by: Henry James


Adam Blair, like Arthur Dimmesdale, is a Calvinistic minister who
becomes the lover of a married woman, is overwhelmed with remorse at
his misdeed, and makes a public confession of it; then expiates it by
resigning his pastoral office and becoming a humble tiller of the
soil, as his father had been. The two stories are of about the same
length, and each is the masterpiece (putting aside of course, as far
as Lockhart is concerned, the _Life of Scott_) of the author. They
deal alike with the manners of a rigidly theological society, and even
in certain details they correspond. In each of them, between the
guilty pair, there is a charming little girl; though I hasten to say
that Sarah Blair (who is not the daughter of the heroine but the
legitimate offspring of the hero, a widower) is far from being as
brilliant and graceful an apparition as the admirable little Pearl of
_The Scarlet Letter_. The main difference between the two tales is the
fact that in the American story the husband plays an all-important
part, and in the Scottish plays almost none at all. _Adam Blair_ is
the history of the passion, and _The Scarlet Letter_ the history of
its sequel; but nevertheless, if one has read the two books at a short
interval, it is impossible to avoid confronting them. I confess that a
large portion of the interest of _Adam Blair_, to my mind, when once I
had perceived that it would repeat in a great measure the situation of
_The Scarlet Letter_, lay in noting its difference of tone. It threw
into relief the passionless quality of Hawthorne's novel, its element
of cold and ingenious fantasy, its elaborate imaginative delicacy.
These things do not precisely constitute a weakness in _The Starlet
Letter_; indeed, in a certain way they constitute a great strength;
but the absence of a certain something warm and straightforward, a
trifle more grossly human and vulgarly natural, which one finds in
_Adam Blair_, will always make Hawthorne's tale less touching to a
large number of even very intelligent readers, than a love-story told
with the robust, synthetic pathos which served Lockhart so well. His
novel is not of the first rank (I should call it an excellent
second-rate one), but it borrows a charm from the fact that his
vigorous, but not strongly imaginative, mind was impregnated with the
reality of his subject. He did not always succeed in rendering this
reality; the expression is sometimes awkward and poor. But the reader
feels that his vision was clear, and his feeling about the matter very
strong and rich. Hawthorne's imagination, on the other hand, plays
with his theme so incessantly, leads it such a dance through the
moonlighted air of his intellect, that the thing cools off, as it
were, hardens and stiffens, and, producing effects much more
exquisite, leaves the reader with a sense of having handled a splendid
piece of silversmith's work. Lockhart, by means much more vulgar,
produces at moments a greater illusion, and satisfies our inevitable
desire for something, in the people in whom it is sought to interest
us, that shall be of the same pitch and the same continuity with
ourselves. Above all, it is interesting to see how the same subject
appears to two men of a thoroughly different cast of mind and of a
different race. Lockhart was struck with the warmth of the subject
that offered itself to him, and Hawthorne with its coldness; the one
with its glow, its sentimental interest--the other with its shadow,
its moral interest. Lockhart's story is as decent, as severely draped,
as _The Scarlet Letter_; but the author has a more vivid sense than
appears to have imposed itself upon Hawthorne, of some of the
incidents of the situation he describes; his tempted man and tempting
woman are more actual and personal; his heroine in especial, though
not in the least a delicate or a subtle conception, has a sort of
credible, visible, palpable property, a vulgar roundness and relief,
which are lacking to the dim and chastened image of Hester Prynne.
But I am going too far; I am comparing simplicity with subtlety, the
usual with the refined. Each man wrote as his turn of mind impelled
him, but each expressed something more than himself. Lockhart was a
dense, substantial Briton, with a taste for the concrete, and
Hawthorne was a thin New Englander, with a miasmatic conscience.

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