though Hilda,
one might have fancied, has by far the strongest cause for emotion. And
yet, after reading the two descriptions--both excellent in their
way--one might fancy that the two young ladies had exchanged burdens.
Lucy Snowe is as tragic as the innocent confidante of a murderess;
Hilda's feelings never seem to rise above that weary sense of melancholy
isolation which besieges us in a deserted city. It is needless to ask
which is the best bit of work artistically considered. Hawthorne's style
is more graceful and flexible; his descriptions of the Roman Catholic
ceremonial and its influence upon an imaginative mind in distress are
far more sympathetic, and imply a wider range of intellect. But Hilda
scarcely moves us like Lucy. There is too much delicate artistic
description of picture-galleries and of the glories of St. Peter's to
allow the poor little American girl to come prominently to the surface.
We have been indulging with her in some sad but charming speculations,
and not witnessing the tragedy of a deserted soul. Lucy Snowe has very
inferior materials at her command; but somehow we are moved by a
sympathetic thrill: we taste the bitterness of the awful cup of despair
which, as she tells us, is forced to her lips in the night-watches; and
are not startled when so prosaic an object as the row of beds in the
dormitory of a French school suggests to her images worthy rather of
stately tombs in the aisles of a vast cathedral, and recall dead dreams
of an elder world and a mightier race long frozen in death. Comparisons
of this kind are almost inevitably unfair; but the difference between
the two illustrates one characteristic--we need not regard it as a
defect--of Hawthorne. His idealism does not consist in conferring
grandeur upon vulgar objects by tinging them with the reflection of deep
emotion. He rather shrinks than otherwise from describing the strongest
passions, or shows their working by indirect touches and under a
side-light. An excellent example of his peculiar method occurs in what
is in some respects the most perfect of his works, the 'Scarlet Letter.'
There, again, we have the spectacle of a man tortured by a life-long
repentance. The Puritan Clergyman, reverenced as a saint by all his
flock, conscious of a sin which, once revealed, will crush him to the
earth, watched with a malignant purpose by the husband whom he has
injured, unable to summon up the moral courage to tear off the veil, and
make t