e, which is always the result of an artist's attempt
to project himself into an atmosphere in which he has not a
transmitted and inherited property. An English or a German writer (I
put poets aside) may love Italy well enough, and know her well enough,
to write delightful fictions about her; the thing has often been done.
But the productions in question will, as novels, always have about
them something second-rate and imperfect. There is in _Transformation_
enough beautiful perception of the interesting character of Rome,
enough rich and eloquent expression of it, to save the book, if the
book could be saved; but the style, what the French call the _genre_,
is an inferior one, and the thing remains a charming romance with
intrinsic weaknesses.

Allowing for this, however, some of the finest pages in all Hawthorne
are to be found in it. The subject, as I have said, is a particularly
happy one, and there is a great deal of interest in the simple
combination and opposition of the four actors. It is noticeable that
in spite of the considerable length of the story, there are no
accessory figures; Donatello and Miriam, Kenyon and Hilda, exclusively
occupy the scene. This is the more noticeable as the scene is very
large, and the great Roman background is constantly presented to us.
The relations of these four people are full of that moral
picturesqueness which Hawthorne was always looking for; he found it in
perfection in the history of Donatello. As I have said, the novel is
the most popular of his works, and every one will remember the figure
of the simple, joyous, sensuous young Italian, who is not so much a
man as a child, and not so much a child as a charming, innocent
animal, and how he is brought to self-knowledge and to a miserable
conscious manhood, by the commission of a crime. Donatello is rather
vague and impalpable; he says too little in the book, shows himself
too little, and falls short, I think, of being a creation. But he is
enough of a creation to make us enter into the situation, and the
whole history of his rise, or fall, whichever one chooses to call
it--his tasting of the tree of knowledge and finding existence
complicated with a regret--is unfolded with a thousand ingenious and
exquisite touches. Of course, to make the interest complete, there is
a woman in the affair, and Hawthorne has done few things more
beautiful than the picture of the unequal complicity of guilt between
his immature and dimly-puz