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The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne

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About a year before this, Congress had given Hiram Powers a commission
to model a colossal statue of _America_ for the Capitol at
Washington. This he had done, and the committee in charge accepted his
design,--Hawthorne also writes admiringly of it,--but it was also
necessary to receive the approval of the President, and this Buchanan
with his peculiar obstinacy refused to give. Powers was left without
compensation for a whole year of arduous labor, and Hawthorne for once
was thoroughly indignant. He wrote in his diary:

"I wish our great Republic had the spirit to do as much, according to
its vast means, as Florence did for sculpture and architecture when it
was a republic.... And yet the less we attempt to do for art the
better, if our future attempts are to have no better result than such
brazen troopers as the equestrian statue of General Jackson, or even
such naked respectabilities as Greeneough's Washington."

Perhaps Powers' "America" was a fortunate escape, and yet it does not
seem right that any enlightened government should set such a pitfall
for honest men to stumble into. There certainly ought to be some
compensation in such cases. The experience of history hitherto has been
that, whereas painting and literature have nourished under all forms of
government, sculpture has only attained its highest excellence in
republics like Athens, Rhodes, Florence, and Nuremberg; so that upon
this line of argument there is good hope for America in the future.




CHAPTER XV

HAWTHORNE AS ART CRITIC: 1858


Nearly one-third of the Italian Note-book is devoted to the criticisms
or descriptions of paintings, statues, and architecture, for which we
can be only too thankful as coming from such a bright, penetrating, and
ingenious intelligence. It is much in their favor that Hawthorne had
not previously undertaken a course of instruction in art; that he wrote
for his own benefit, and not for publication; and that he was not
biased by preconceived opinions. It cannot be doubted that he was
sometimes influenced by the opinions of Story, Powers, and other
artists with whom he came in contact; but this could have happened only
in particular cases, and more especially in respect to modern works of
art. When Hawthorne visited the galleries he usually went alone, or
only accompanied by his wife.

The only opportunities for the study of aesthetics or art criticism,
fifty years ago, were to be found in German universities. Kugler's
handbook of painting was the chief authority in use, rather academic,
but correct enough in a general way. Ruskin, a more eloquent and
discriminating writer, had devoted himself chiefly to celebrating the
merits of Turner and Tintoretto, but was never quite just to Florentine
art. Mrs. Jameson followed closely after Kugler, and was the only one
of these that Hawthorne appears to have consulted. Winckelmann's
history of Greek sculpture, which was not a history in the proper sense
of the word, had been translated by Lodge, but Hawthorne does not
mention it, and it would not have been much assistance to him if he had
read it. Like Winckelmann and Lessing, however, he admired the
"Laocoön,"--an admiration now somewhat out of fashion.

There can be no final authority in art, for the most experienced
critics still continue to differ in their estimates of the same
painting or statue. More than this, it is safe to affirm that any one
writer who makes a statement concerning a certain work of art at a
given time, would have made a somewhat different statement at another
time. In fact, this not unfrequently happens in actual practice; for
all that any of us can do is, to reproduce the impression made on us at
the moment, and this depends as much on our own state of mind, and on
our peculiarities, as on the peculiarities of the picture or statue
that we criticise. It is the same in art itself. If Raphael had not
painted the "Sistine Madonna" at the time he did, he would have
produced a different work. It was the concentration of that particular
occasion, and if any accident had happened to prevent it, that pious
and beautiful vision would have been lost to the world.

It requires years of study and observation of the best masters to
become a trustworthy art critic, and then everything depends of course
upon the genius of the individual. It has happened more than once that
a wealthy American, with a certain kind of enthusiasm for art, has
prepared himself at a German university, has studied the science of
connoisseurship, and has become associate member of a number of foreign
societies, only to discover at length that he had no talent for the
profession. Hawthorne enjoyed no such advantages, nor did he even think
of becoming a connoisseur. His whole experience in the art of design
might be included within twelve months, and his original basis was
nothing better than his wife's water-color painting and the mediocre
pictures in the Boston Athenaeum; but he brought to his subject an eye
that was trained to the closest observation of Nature and a mind
experienced beyond all others [Footnote: At least at that time.] in the
mysteries of human life. He begins tentatively, and as might be
expected makes a number of errors, but quite as often he hits the nail,
where others have missed it. He learns by his mistakes, and steadily
improves in critical faculty. Hawthorne's Italian Note-book is a unique
record, in which the development of a highly organized mind has
advanced from small beginnings to exceptional skill in a fresh
department of activity.

Hawthorne brought with him to Italy the Yankee preference for newness
and nicety, which our forefathers themselves derived from their
residence in Holland, and there is no city in Europe where this
sentiment could have troubled him so much as in Rome. He disliked the
dingy picture-frames, the uncleanly canvases, the earth-stains and
broken noses of the antique statues, the smoked-up walls of the Sistine
Chapel, and the cracks in Raphael's frescos. He condemns everything as
rubbish which has not an external perfection; forgetting that, as in
human nature, the most precious treasures are sometimes allied with an
ungainly exterior. Yet in this he only echoes the impressions of
thousands of others who have gone to the Vatican and returned
disconsolate, because amid a perplexing multitude of objects they knew
not where to look for consummate art. One can imagine if an experienced
friend had accompanied Hawthorne to the Raphael stanza, and had pointed
out the figures of the Pope, the cardinal, and the angelic boys in the
"Mass at Bolsena," he would have admired them without limitation. He
quickly discovered Raphael's "Transfiguration," and considered it the
greatest painting that the world contains.

The paintings in the princely collections in Rome are, with the
exception of those in the Borghese gallery, far removed from princely.
A large proportion of their best paintings had long since been sold to
the royal collections of northern Europe, and had been replaced either
by copies or by works of inferior masters. In the Barberini palace
there are not more than three or four paintings such as might
reasonably detain a traveller, and it is about the same in the Ludovisi
gallery. There was not a grain of affectation in Hawthorne; he never
pretended to admire what he did not like, nor did he strain himself
into liking anything that his inner nature rebelled against.

Hawthorne's taste in art was much in advance of his time. His quick
appreciation of the colossal statues of Castor and Pollux on the
Quirinal is the best proof of this. Ten years later it was the fashion
in Rome to deride those statues, as a late work of the empire and
greatly lacking in artistic style. Brunn, in his history of ancient
sculpture, attributes them to the school of Lysippus, a contemporary of
Alexander, which Brunn certainly would not have done if he had
possessed a good eye for form. Vasari, on the contrary, a surer critic,
considered them worthy to be placed beside Michel Angelo's "David"; but
it remained for Furtwängler to restore them to their true position as a
work of the Periclean age, although copied by Italian sculptors. They
must have been the product of a single mind, [Footnote: On the base of
one is _Opus Phidiae_, and on that of the other, _Opus Praxitelis._]
either Phidias, Alcameres, or the elder Praxiteles--if there ever was
such a person; and they have the finest figures of any statues in Rome
(much finer than the dandified "Apollo Belvedere") and also the most
spirited action.

Hawthorne went to the Villa Ludovisi to see the much-vaunted bas-relief
of Antinous, which fifty years ago was considered one of the art
treasures of the city; but a more refined taste has since discovered
that in spite of the rare technical skill, its hard glassy finish gives
it a cold and conventional effect. Hawthorne returned from it
disappointed, and wrote in his diary:

"This Antinous is said to be the finest relic of antiquity next to the
Apollo and the Laocoön; but I could not feel it to be so, partly, I
suppose, because the features of Antinous do not seem to me beautiful
in themselves; and that heavy, downward look is repeated till I am more
weary of it than of anything else in sculpture."

The Greek artist of Adrian's time attempted to give the face a pensive
expression, but only succeeded in this heavy downward look.

Hawthorne felt the same disappointment after his first visit to the
sculpture-gallery of the Vatican. "I must confess," he wrote, "taking
such transient glimpses as I did, I was more impressed with the extent
of the Vatican, and the beautiful order in which it is kept and its
great sunny, open courts, with fountains, grass, and shrubs ... than
with the statuary." The Vatican collection has great archaeological
value, but, with the exception of the "Laocoön," the "Meleager," the
"Apollo," and a few others, little or no artistic value. The vast
majority of the statues there are either late Roman works or cheap
Roman copies of second-rate Hellenic statues. Some of them are
positively bad and others are archaic, and Hawthorne was fully
justified in his disatisfaction with them. He noticed, however, a
decided difference between the original "Apollo" and the casts of it
with which he was familiar. On a subsequent visit he fails to observe
the numerous faults in Canova's "Perseus," and afterwards writes this
original statement concerning the "Laocoön":

"I felt the Laocoön very powerfully, though very quietly; an immortal
agony with a strange calmness diffused through it, so that it resembles
the vast age of the sea, calm on account of its immensity; as the
tumult of Niagara, which does not seem to be tumult, because it keeps
pouring on forever and ever."

Professor E. A. Gardner and the more fastidious school of critics have
recently decided that the action of the "Laocoön" is too violent to be
contained within the proper boundaries of sculpture; but Hawthorne
controverts this view in a single sentence. The action is violent, it
is true, but the _impression_ which the statue makes on him is not
a violent one; for the greatness of the art sublimates the motive. It
is a tragedy in marble, and Pliny, who had seen the works of Phidias
and Praxiteles, placed Agesander's "Laocoön" above them all. This,
however, is a Roman view. What Hawthorne wrote in his diary should not
always be taken literally. When he declares that he would like to have
every artist that perpetrates an allegory put to death, he merely
expresses the puzzling effects which such compositions frequently
exercise on the weary-minded traveller; and when he wishes that all the
frescos on Italian walls could be obliterated, he only repeats a
sentiment of similar strain. Perhaps we should class in the same
category Hawthorne's remark concerning the Elgin marbles in the British
Museum, that "it would be well if they were converted into paving-
stones." There are no grander monuments of ancient art than those
battered and headless statues from the pediment of the Parthenon (the
figures of the so-called "Three Fates" surpass the "Venus of Melos"),
and archaeologists are still in dispute as to what they may have
represented; but the significance of the subject before him was always
the point in which Hawthorne was interested. Julian Hawthorne says of
his father, in regard to a similar instance:

"Of technicalities,--difficulties overcome, harmony of lines, and so
forth,--he had no explicit knowledge; they produced their effect upon
him of course, but without his recognizing the manner of it. All that
concerned him was the sentiment which the artist had meant to express;
the means and method were comparatively unimportant." [Footnote: J.
Hawthorne, ii. 193.]

The technicalities of art differ with every clime and every generation.
They belong chiefly to the connoisseur, and have their value, but the
less a critic thinks of them in making a general estimate of a painting
or statue, the more likely he is to render an impartial judgment.
Hawthorne's analysis of Praxiteles's "Faun," in his "Romance of Monte
Beni," being a subject in which he was particularly interested, is
almost without a rival in the literature of its kind; and this is the
more remarkable since the copy of the "Faun" in the museum of the
Capitol is not one of the best, at least it is inferior to the one in
the Glyptothek at Munich. It seems as if Hawthorne had penetrated to
the first conception of it in the mind of Praxiteles.

The Sistine Chapel, like the Italian scenery, only unfolds its beauties
on a bright day, and Hawthorne happened to go there when the sky was
full of drifting clouds, a time when it is difficult to see any object
as it really is. It may have been on this account that he entirely
mistook the action of the Saviour in Michel Angelo's "Last Judgment."
Christ has raised his arm above his head in order to display the mark
where he was nailed to the cross, and Hawthorne presumed this, as many
others have done, to be an angry threatening gesture of condemnation,
which would not accord with his merciful spirit. He appreciated the
symmetrical figure of Adam, and the majestic forms of the prophets and
sibyls encircling the ceiling, and if he had seen the face of the
Saviour in a fair light, he might have recognized that such divine
calmness of expression could not coexist with a vindictive motive.
This, however, can be seen to better advantage in a Braun photograph
than in the painting itself.

Hawthorne goes to the Church of San Pietro in Vincolo to see Michel
Angelo's "Moses," but he does not moralize before it, like a certain
Concord artist, on "the weakness of exaggeration;" nor does he
consider, like Ruskin, that its conventional horns are a serious
detriment. On the contrary he finds it "grand and sublime, with a beard
flowing down like a cataract; a truly majestic figure, but not so
benign as it were desirable that such strength should hold." An
Englishman present remarked that the "Moses" had very fine features,--
"a compliment," says Hawthorne, "for which the colossal Hebrew ought to
have made the Englishman a bow."

[Footnote: Italian Note-book, p. 164.]

Perhaps the Englishman really meant that the face had a noble
expression. The somewhat satyr-like features of the "Moses" would seem
to have been unconsciously adopted, together with the horns, from a
statue of the god Pan, which thus serves as an intermediate link
between the "Moses" and the "Faun" of Praxiteles; but he who cannot
appreciate Michel Angelo's "Moses" in spite of this, knows nothing of
the Alpine heights of human nature.

Of all the paintings that Hawthorne saw in Rome none impressed him so
deeply as Guido's portrait of Beatrice Cenci, and none more justly. If
the "Laocoön" is the type of an old Greek tragedy, a strong man
strangled in the coils of Fate, the portrait of Beatrice represents the
tragedy of mediaeval Italy, a beautiful woman crushed by the downfall
of a splendid civilization. The fate of Joan of Arc or of Madame Roland
was merciful compared to that of poor Beatrice. Religion is no
consolation to her, for it is the Pope himself who signs her death-
warrant. She is massacred to gratify the avarice of the Holy See. Yet
in this last evening of her tragical life, she does find strength and
consolation in her dignity as a woman. Never was art consecrated to a
higher purpose; Guido rose above himself; and, as Hawthorne says, it
seems as if mortal man could not have wrought such an effect. It has
always been the most popular painting in Rome, but Hawthorne was the
first to celebrate its unique superiority in writing, and his discourse
upon it in various places leaves little for those that follow.

It may have been long since discovered that Hawthorne's single weakness
was a weakness for his friends; certainly an amiable weakness, but
nevertheless that is the proper name for it. When Phocion was Archon of
Athens, he said that a chief magistrate should know no friends; and the
same should be true of an authoritative writer. Hawthorne has not gone
so far in this direction as many others have who had less reason to
speak with authority than he; but he has indicated his partiality for
Franklin Pierce plainly enough, and his over-praise of Hiram Powers and
William Story, as well as his under-praise of Crawford, will go down to
future generations as something of an injustice to those three artists.

[Illustration: GUIDO RENI'S PORTRAIT OF BEATRICE CENCI, PAINTED WHILE
SHE WAS IN PRISON, WHICH SUGGESTED TO HAWTHORNE THE PLOT OF "THE MARBLE
FAUN"]

It is not necessary to repeat here what Hawthorne wrote concerning
Powers' Webster. The statue stands in front of the State House at
Boston, and serves as a good likeness of the famous orator, but more
than that one cannot say for it. The face has no definable expression,
and those who have looked for a central motive in the figure will be
pleased to learn what it is by reading Hawthorne's description of it,
as he saw it in Powers' studio at Florence. A sculptor of the present
day can find no better study for his art than the attitudes and changes
of countenance in an eloquent speaker; but which of them can be said to
have taken advantage of this? Story made an attempt in his statue of
Everett, but even his most indulgent friends did not consider it a
success. His "George Peabody," opposite the Bank of England, could not
perhaps have been altogether different from what it is.

What chiefly interested Story in his profession seems to have been the
modelling of unhappy women in various attitudes of reflection. He made
a number of these, of which his "Cleopatra" is the only one known to
fame, and in the expression of her face he has certainly achieved a
high degree of excellence. Neither has Hawthorne valued it too highly,
--the expression of worldly splendor incarnated in a beautiful woman on
the tragical verge of an abyss. If she only were beautiful! Here the
limitations of the statue commence. Hawthorne says, "The sculptor had
not shunned to give the full, Nubian lips and other characteristics of
the Egyptian physiognomy."

Here he follows the sculptor himself, and it is remarkable that a
college graduate like William Story should have made so transparent a
mistake. Cleopatra was not an Egyptian at all. The Ptolemies were
Greeks, and it is simply impossible to believe that they would have
allied themselves with a subject and alien race. This kind of small
pedantry has often led artists astray, and was peculiarly virulent
during the middle of the past century. The whole figure of Story's
"Cleopatra" suffers from it. Hawthorne says again, "She was draped from
head to foot in a costume minutely and scrupulously studied from that
of ancient Egypt." In fact, the body and limbs of the statue are so
closely shrouded as to deprive the work of that sense of freedom of
action and royal abandon which greets us in Shakespeare's and
Plutarch's "Cleopatra." Story might have taken a lesson from Titian's
matchless "Cleopatra" in the Cassel gallery, or from Marc Antonio's
small woodcut of Raphael's "Cleopatra."

Perhaps it is not too much to say of Crawford that he was the finest
plastic genius of the Anglo-Saxon race. His technique may not have been
equal to Flaxman's or St. Gaudens', but his designs have more of
grandeur than the former, and he is more original than the latter.
There are faults of modelling in his "Orpheus," and its attitude
resembles that of the eldest son of Niobe in the Florentine gallery,--
although the Niobe youth looks upward and Orpheus is peering into
darkness,--its features are rather too pretty; but the statue has
exactly what Powers' "Greek Slave" lacks, a definite motive,--that of
an earnest seeker,--which pervades it from head to foot; and it is no
imaginary pathos that we feel in its presence. There is, at least, no
imitation of the antique in Crawford's "Beethoven," for its conception,
the listening to internal harmonies, would never have occurred to a
Greek or a Roman. Even Hawthorne admits Crawford's skill in the
treatment of drapery; and this is very important, for it is in his
drapery quite as much as in the nude that we recognize the superiority
of Michel Angelo to Raphael; and the folds of Beethoven's mantle are as
rhythmical as his own harmonies. The features lack something of
firmness, but it is altogether a statue in the grand manner.

Hawthorne is rather too exacting in his requirements of modern
sculptors. Warrington Wood, who commenced life as a marble-worker,
always employed Italian workmen to carve his statues, although he was
perfectly able to do it himself, and always put on the finishing
touches,--as I presume they all do. Bronze statues are finished with a
file, and of course do not require any knowledge of the chisel.

In regard to the imitation of antique attitudes, there has certainly
been too much of it, as Hawthorne supposes; but the Greeks themselves
were given to this form of plagiarism, and even Praxiteles sometimes
adopted the motives of his predecessors; but Hawthorne praises Powers,
Story, and Harriet Hosmer above their merits.

The whole brotherhood of artists and their critical friends might rise
up against me, if I were to support Hawthorne's condemnation of modern
Venuses, and "the guilty glimpses stolen at hired models." They are not
necessarily guilty glimpses. To an experienced artist the customary
study from a naked figure, male or female, is little more than what a
low-necked dress at a party would be to many others. Yet the instinct
of the age shrinks from this exposure. We can make pretty good Venuses,
but we cannot look at them through the same mental and moral atmosphere
as the contemporaries of Scopas, or even with the same eyes that Michel
Angelo saw them. We feel the difference between a modern Venus and an
ancient one. There is a statue in the Vatican of a Roman emperor, of
which every one says that it ought to wear clothes; and the reason is
because the face has such a modern look. A raving Bacchante may be a
good acquisition to an art museum, but it is out of place in a public
library. A female statue requires more or less drapery to set off the
outlines of the figure and to give it dignity. We feel this even in the
finest Greek work--like the "Venus of Cnidos."

In this matter Hawthorne certainly exposes his Puritanic education, and
he also places too high a value on the carving of button-holes and
shoestrings by Italian workmen. Such things are the fag-ends of
statuary.

His judgment, however, is clear and convincing in regard to the tinted
Eves and Venuses of Gibson. Whatever may have been the ancient practice
in this respect, Gibson's experiment proved a failure. Nobody likes
those statues; and no other sculptor has since followed Gibson's
example. The tinting of statues by the Greeks did not commence until
the time of Aristotle, and does not seem to have been very general.
Their object evidently was, not so much to imitate flesh as to tone
down the crystalline glare of the new marble. Pausanias speaks of a
statue in Arcadia, the drapery of which was painted with vermilion, "so
as to look very gay." This was of course the consequence of a late and
degraded taste. That traces of paint should have been discovered on
Greek temples is no evidence that the marble was painted when they were
first built.

It may be suspected that Hawthorne was one of the very few who have
seen the "Venus dé Medici" and recognized the true significance of the
statue. The vast majority of visitors to the Uffizi only see in it the
type of a perfectly symmetrical woman bashfully posing for her likeness
in marble, but Hawthorne's perception in it went much beyond that, and
the fact that he attempts no explanation of its motive is in accordance
with the present theory. He also noticed that statues had sometimes
exercised a potent spell over him, and at others a very slight
influence.

Froude says that a man's modesty is the best part of him. Notice that,
ye strugglers for preferment, and how beautifully modest Hawthorne is,
when he writes in his Florentine diary:

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