It is commonly true of Hawthorne's romances that the interest centres
in one strongly defined protagonist, to whom the other characters are
accessory and subordinate,--perhaps we should rather say a ruling Idea,
of which all the characters are fragmentary embodiments. They remind us
of a symphony of Beethoven's, in which, though there be variety of
parts, yet all are infused with the dominant motive, and heighten its
impression by hints and far-away suggestions at the most unexpected
moment. As in Rome the obelisks are placed at points toward which
several streets converge, so in Mr. Hawthorne's stories the actors and
incidents seem but vistas through which we see the moral from different
points of view,--a moral pointing skyward always, but inscribed with
hieroglyphs mysteriously suggestive, whose incitement to conjecture,
while they baffle it, we prefer to any prosaic solution.
Nothing could be more original or imaginative than the conception of
the character of Donatello in Mr. Hawthorne's new romance. His likeness
to the lovely statue of Praxiteles, his happy animal temperament, and
the dim legend of his pedigree are combined with wonderful art to
reconcile us to the notion of a Greek myth embodied in an Italian of
the nineteenth century; and when at length a soul is created in this
primeval pagan, this child of earth, this creature of mere instinct,
awakened through sin to a conception of the necessity of atonement, we
feel, that, while we looked to be entertained with the airiest of
fictions, we were dealing with the most august truths of psychology,
with the most pregnant facts of modern history, and studying a profound
parable of the development of the Christian Idea.
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