ch I have said elsewhere strikes me as the nearest
approach that Hawthorne has made to the complete creation of a
_person_. She is more concrete than Hester or Miriam, or Hilda or
Phoebe; she is a more definite image, produced by a greater
multiplicity of touches. It is idle to inquire too closely whether
Hawthorne had Margaret Fuller in his mind in constructing the figure
of this brilliant specimen of the strong-minded class and endowing her
with the genius of conversation; or, on the assumption that such was
the case, to compare the image at all strictly with the model. There
is no strictness in the representation by novelists of persons who
have struck them in life, and there can in the nature of things be
none. From the moment the imagination takes a hand in the game, the
inevitable tendency is to divergence, to following what may be called
new scents. The original gives hints, but the writer does what he
likes with them, and imports new elements into the picture. If there
is this amount of reason for referring the wayward heroine of
Blithedale to Hawthorne's impression of the most distinguished woman
of her day in Boston, that Margaret Fuller was the only literary lady
of eminence whom there is any sign of his having known, that she was
proud, passionate, and eloquent, that she was much connected with the
little world of Transcendentalism out of which the experiment of Brook
Farm sprung, and that she had a miserable end and a watery grave--if
these are facts to be noted on one side, I say; on the other, the
beautiful and sumptuous Zenobia, with her rich and picturesque
temperament and physical aspects, offers many points of divergence
from the plain and strenuous invalid who represented feminine culture
in the suburbs of the New England metropolis. This picturesqueness of
Zenobia is very happily indicated and maintained; she is a woman, in
all the force of the term, and there is something very vivid and
powerful in her large expression of womanly gifts and weaknesses.
Hollingsworth is, I think, less successful, though there is much
reality in the conception of the type to which he belongs--the
strong-willed, narrow-hearted apostle of a special form of redemption
for society. There is nothing better in all Hawthorne than the scene
between him and Coverdale, when the two men are at work together in
the field (piling stones on a dyke), and he gives it to his companion
to choose whether he will be with him or against hi