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Several critical readers of Henry James's Hawthorne, including James himself, have called the book "little." But it is not a small achievement; first published well over a century ago, it remains an essential text in American cultural history. Writing for the English Men of Letters series, James was the only American contributor, Hawthorne the only American subject. Seven years earlier, in a review of Hawthorne's French and Italian Notebooks, James had called Hawthorne "the last pure American." And many years later in his autobiographical Notes of a Son and Brother James would look back to 1864, when he was six weeks shy of his twenty-first birthday, and recall his anguished "loyal cry" on hearing of Hawthorne's death.
Edmund Wilson was not altogether accurate when he famously claimed in The Shock of Recognition (1943 ) that Hawthorne was "the first extended study ever made of an American writer." Before it there had been "The Cult of Poe" both in America and France, valuable "appreciations" of Walt Whitman starting as early as the 1860s, and William Gilmore Simms's "extended" critical assessments of James Fenimore Cooper. But Wilson was surely right to rank Hawthorne as "still one of the best." James correctly placed The Scarlet Letter for us as "the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country," and claimed that
Something might at last be sent to Europe as exquisite in quality as anything that had been received, and the best of it was that the thing was absolutely American; it belonged to the soil, to the air; it came out of the very heart of New England.
But what James so graciously gave with one hand he abruptly took away with the other. In The Scarlet Letter, he says,
there is a great deal of symbolism; there is, I think, too much. It is overdone at times, and becomes mechanical; it ceases to be impressive, and grazes triviality. We feel that he goes too far, and is in danger of crossing the line that separates the sublime from its intimate neighbor. We are tempted to say that this is not moral tragedy, but physical comedy.
Words to gladden the hearts of all those poor high school students who learned to hate literature and...