Classics: good and bad

I've just finished the American classic The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The plotting is predictable, the dialogue dreadful, the characters stereotyped. A Goodreads review describes the sentences as the sort that contain three or four points within them so that you lose all sense of what the author is trying to say long before you have reached the end. Another felt as if the author was looking over his shoulder proudly pointing out the good bits, such as the repeated symbolism of redness.

And it's a 'classic'.

Moby-Dick is another classic. It may be a masterpiece but it is tremendously flawed. It seems as if Melville forgot, half way through, that Ismael is the narrator and dragged in scenes which Ismael could never have observed.

Most classics are great. But some aren't. One is left wondering why anyone suggested they were.