f 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 lackin