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The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne

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"In a year's time, with the advantage of access to this magnificent
gallery, I think I might come to have some little knowledge of
pictures. At present I still know nothing; but am glad to find myself
capable, at least, of loving one picture better than another. I am
sensible, however, that a process is going on, and has been ever since
I came to Italy, that puts me in a state to see pictures with less
toil, and more pleasure, and makes me more fastidious, yet more
sensible of beauty where I saw none before."

Hawthorne belongs to the same class of amateur critics as Shelley and
Goethe, who, even if their opinions cannot always be accepted as final,
illuminate the subject with the radiance of genius and have an equal
value with the most experienced connoisseurs.

* * * * *

The return of the Hawthornes to Rome through Tuscany was even more
interesting than their journey to Florence in the spring, and they
enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a _vetturino_ who would seem
to have been the Sir Philip Sidney of his profession, a compendium of
human excellences. There are such men, though rarely met with, and we
may trust Hawthorne's word that Constantino Bacci was one of them; not
only a skilful driver, but a generous provider, honest, courteous,
kindly, and agreeable. They went first to Siena, where they were
entertained for a week or more by the versatile Mr. Story, and where
Hawthorne wrote an eloquent description of the cathedral; then over the
mountain pass where Radicofani nestles among the iron-browed crags
above the clouds; past the malarious Lake of Bolsena, scene of the
miracle which Raphael has commemorated in the Vatican; through Viterbo
and _Sette Vene_; and finally, on October 16, into Rome, through
the Porta' del Popolo, designed by Michel Angelo in his massive style,
--Donati's comet flaming before them every night. Thompson, the portrait
painter, had already secured a furnished house, No. 68 Piazza Poli, for
the Hawthornes, to which they went immediately.

Since the death of Julius Cæsar, comets have always been looked upon as
the forerunners of pestilence and war, but wars are sometimes
blessings, and Donati's discovery proved a harbinger of good to Italy,
--but to the Hawthornes, a prediction of evil. Continually in
Hawthorne's Italian journal we meet with references to the Roman
malaria, as if it were a subject that occupied his thoughts, and
nowhere is this more common than during the return-journey from
Florence. Did it occur to him that the lightning might strike in his
own house? No sensible American now would take his children to Rome
unless for a very brief visit; and yet William Story brought up his
family there with excellent success, so far as health was concerned.

We can believe that Hawthorne took every possible precaution, so far as
he knew, but in spite of that on November 1 his eldest daughter was
seized with Roman fever, and for six weeks thereafter lay trembling
between life and death, so that it seemed as if a feather might turn
the balance.

She does not appear to have been imprudent. Her father believed that
the "old hag" breathed upon her while she was with her mother, who was
sketching in the Palace of the Cæsars; but the Palatine Hill is on high
ground, with a foundation of solid masonry, and was guarded by French
soldiers, and it would have been difficult to find a more cleanly spot
in the city. A German count, who lived in a villa on the Cælian Hill,
close by, considered his residence one of the most healthful in Rome.
Miss Una had a passionate attachment for the capital of the ancient
world; and it seems as if the evil spirit of the place had seized upon
her, as the Ice Maiden is supposed to entrap chamois hunters in the
Alps.

One of the evils attendant on sickness in a foreign country is, the
uncertainty in regard to a doctor, and this naturally leads to a
distrust and suspicion of the one that is employed. Even so shrewd a
man as Bismarck fell into the hands of a charlatan at St. Petersburg
and suffered severely in consequence. Hawthorne either had a similar
experience, or, what came to the same thing, believed that he did. He
considered himself obliged to change doctors for his daughter, and this
added to his care and anxiety. During the next four months he wrote not
a word in his journal (or elsewhere, so far as we know), and he visibly
aged before his wife's eyes. He went to walk on occasion with Story or
Thompson, but it was merely for the preservation of his own health. His
thoughts were always in his daughter's chamber, and this was so
strongly marked upon his face that any one could read it. Toward the
Ides of March, Miss Una was sufficiently improved to take a short look
at the carnival, but it was two months later before she was in a
condition to travel, and neither she nor her father ever wholly
recovered from the effects of this sad experience.




CHAPTER XVI

"THE MARBLE FAUN": 1859-1860


What the Roman carnival was a hundred and fifty years ago, when the
Italian princes poured out their wealth upon it, and when it served as
a medium for the communication of lovers as well as for social and
political intrigue, which sometimes resulted in conflicts like those of
the Montagues and Capulets, can only be imagined. Goethe witnessed it
from a balcony in the Corso, and his carnival in the second part of
"Faust" was worked up from notes taken on that occasion; but it is so
highly poetized that little can be determined from it, except as a
portion of the drama. By Hawthorne's time the aristocratic Italians had
long since given up their favorite holiday to English and American
travellers,--crowded out, as it were, by the superiority of money; and
since the advent of Victor Emmanuel, the carnival has become so
democratic that you are more likely to encounter your landlady's
daughter there than any more distinguished person. Hawthorne's
description of it in "The Marble Faun" is not overdrawn, and is one of
the happiest passages in the book.

The carnival of 1859 was an exceptionally brilliant one. The Prince of
Wales attended it with a suite of young English nobles, who, always
decorous and polite on public occasions, nevertheless infused great
spirit into the proceedings. Sumner and Motley were there, and Motley
rented a balcony in a palace, to which the Hawthornes received general
and repeated invitations. On March 7, Miss Una was driven through the
Corso in a barouche, and the Prince of Wales threw her a bouquet,
probably recognizing her father, who was with her; and to prove his
good intentions he threw her another, when her carriage returned from
the Piazza, del Popolo. The present English sovereign has always been
noted for a sort of journalistic interest in prominent men of letters,
science, and public affairs, and it is likely that he was better
informed in regard to the Hawthornes than they imagined. Hawthorne
himself was too much subdued by his recent trial to enter into the
spirit of the carnival, even with a heart much relieved from anxiety,
but he sometimes appeared in the Motleys' balcony, and sometimes went
along the narrow sidewalk of the Corso, "for an hour or so among the
people, just on the edges of the fun." Sumner invited Mrs. Hawthorne to
take a stroll and see pictures with him, from which she returned
delighted with his criticisms and erudition.

A few days later Franklin Pierce suddenly appeared at No. 68 Piazza
Poli, with that shadow on his face which was never wholly to leave it.
The man who fears God and keeps his commandments will never feel quite
alone in the world; but for the man who lives on popularity, what will
there be left when that forsakes him? Hawthorne was almost shocked at
the change in his friend's appearance; not only at his gray hair and
wrinkled brow, but at the change in his voice, and at a certain lack of
substance in him, as if the personal magnetism had gone out of him.
Hawthorne went to walk with him, and tried to encourage him by
suggesting another term of the presidency, but this did not help much,
for even Pierce's own State had deserted him,--a fact of which
Hawthorne may not have been aware. The companionship of his old friend,
however, and the manifold novelty of Rome itself, somewhat revived the
ex-President, as may be imagined; and a month later he left for Venice,
in better spirits than he came.

They celebrated the Ides of March by going to see Harriet Hosmer's
statue of Zenobia, which was afterward exhibited in America. Hawthorne
immediately detected its resemblance to the antique,--the figure was in
fact a pure plagiarism from the smaller statue of Ceres in the
Vatican,--but Miss Hosmer succeeded in giving the face an expression of
injured and sorrowing majesty, which Hawthorne was equally ready to
appreciate.

On this second visit to Rome he became acquainted with a sculptor,
whose name is not given, but who criticised Hiram Powers with a rather
suspicious severity. He would not allow Powers "to be an artist at all,
or to know anything of the laws of art," although acknowledging him to
be a great bust-maker, and to have put together the "Greek Slave" and
the "Fisher-Boy" very ingeniously. "The latter, however (he says), is
copied from the Spinario in the _Tribune_ of the Uffizi; and the
former made up of beauties that had no reference to one another; and he
affirms that Powers is ready to sell, and has actually sold, the 'Greek
Slave,' limb by limb, dismembering it by reversing the process of
putting it together. Powers knows nothing scientifically of the human
frame, and only succeeds in representing it, as a natural bone-doctor
succeeds in setting a dislocated limb, by a happy accident or special
providence." [Footnote: Italian Note-book, 483.]

We may judge, from "the style, the matter, and the drift" of this
discourse, that it emanated from the same sculptor who is mentioned, in
"Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife," as having traduced Margaret Fuller
and her husband Count Ossoli. As Tennyson says, "A lie that is half a
truth is ever the blackest of lies," and this fellow would seem to have
been an adept in unveracious exaggeration. It is remarkable that
Hawthorne should have given serious attention to such a man; but an
English critic said in regard to this same incident that if Hawthorne
had been a more communicative person, if he had talked freely to a
larger number of people, he would not have been so easily prejudiced by
those few with whom he was chiefly intimate. To which it could be
added, that he might also have taken broader views in regard to public
affairs.

Hawthorne was fortunate to have been present at the discovery of the
St. Petersburg "Venus," the twin sister of the "Venus dé Medici," which
was dug up in a vineyard outside the Porta Portese. The proprietor of
the vineyard, who made his fortune at a stroke by the discovery,
happened to select the site for a new building over the buried ruins of
an ancient villa, and the "Venus" was discovered in what appeared to
Hawthorne as an old Roman bath-room. The statue was in more perfect
preservation than the "Venus dé Medici," both of whose arms have been
restored, and Hawthorne noticed that the head was larger and the face
more characteristic, with wide-open eyes and a more confident
expression. He was one of the very few who saw it before it was
transported to St. Petersburg, and a thorough artistic analysis of it
is still one of the _desiderata_. The difference in expression,
however, would seem to be in favor of the "Venus dé Medici," as more in
accordance with the ruling motive of the figure.

Miss Una Hawthorne had not sufficiently recovered to travel until the
last of May, when they all set forth northward by way of Genoa and
Marseilles, in which latter place we find them on the 28th, enjoying
the comfort and elegance of a good French hotel. Thence they proceeded
to Avignon, but did not find much to admire there except the Rhone; so
they continued to Geneva, the most pleasant, homelike resting place in
Europe, but quite deficient in other attractions.

It seems as if Hawthorne's Roman friends were somewhat remiss in not
giving him better advice in regard to European travelling. At Geneva he
was within a stone's throw of Chamounix, and hardly more than that of
Strasburg Cathedral, and yet he visited neither. Why did he go out of
his way to see so little and to miss so much? He went across the lake
to visit Lausanne and the Castle of Chillon, and he was more than
astonished at the view of the Pennine Alps from the deck of the
steamer. He had never imagined anything like it; and he might have said
the same if he had visited Cologne Cathedral. Instead of that, however,
he hurried through France again, with the intention of sailing for
America the middle of July; but after reaching London he concluded to
remain another year in England, to write his "Romance of Monte Beni,"
and obtain an English copyright for it.

He left Geneva on June 15, and as he turned his face northward, he felt
that Henry Bright and Francis Bennoch were his only real friends in
Great Britain. There could hardly have been a stronger contrast than
these two. Bright was tall, slender, rather pale for an Englishman,
grave and philosophical. Bennoch was short, plump, lively and jovial,
with a ready fund of humor much in the style of Dickens, with whom he
was personally acquainted. Yet Hawthorne recognized that Bright and
Bennoch liked him for what he was, in and of himself, and not for his
celebrity alone.

Bright was in London when Hawthorne reached there, and proposed that
they should go together to call on Sumner, [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii.
223.] who had been cured from the effects of Brooks's assault by an
equally heroic treatment; but Hawthorne objected that as neither of
them was Lord Chancellor, Sumner would not be likely to pay them much
attention; to which Bright replied, that Sumner had been very kind to
him in America, and they accordingly went. Sumner was kind to
thousands,--the kindest as well as the most upright man of his time,--
and no one in America, except Longfellow, appreciated Hawthorne so
well; but he was the champion of the anti-slavery movement and the
inveterate opponent of President Pierce. I suppose a man's mind cannot
help being colored somewhat by such conditions and influences.

Hawthorne wished for a quiet, healthful place, where he could write his
romance without the disturbances that are incident to celebrity, and
his friends recommended Redcar, on the eastern coast of Yorkshire, a
town that otherwise Americans would not have heard of. He went there
about the middle of July, remaining until the 5th of October, but of
his life there we know nothing except that he must have worked
assiduously, for in that space of time he nearly finished a book
containing almost twice as many pages as "The Scarlet Letter."
Meanwhile Mrs. Hawthorne entertained the children and kept them from
interfering with their father (in his small cottage), by making a
collection of sea-mosses, which Una and Julian gathered at low tides,
and which their mother afterward dried and preserved on paper. On
October 4th Una Hawthorne wrote to her aunt, Elizabeth Peabody:

"Our last day in Redcar, and a most lovely one it is. The sea seems to
reproach us for leaving it. But I am glad we are going, for I feel so
homesick that I want constant change to divert my thoughts. How
troublesome feelings and affections are."

[Footnote: Mrs. Lathrop, 35 a.]

One can see that it was a pleasant place even after the days had begun
to shorten, which they do very rapidly in northern England. From
Redcar, Hawthorne went to Leamington, where he finished his romance
about the first of December, and remained until some time in March,
living quietly and making occasional pedestrian tours to neighboring
towns. He was particularly fond of the walk to Warwick Castle, and of
standing on the bridge which crosses the Avon, and gazing at the walls
of the Castle, as they rise above the trees--"as fine a piece of
English scenery as exists anywhere; the gray towers and long line of
windows of the lordly castle, with a picturesquely varied outline;
ancient strength, a little softened by decay." It is a view that has
often been sketched, painted and engraved.

The romance was written, but had to be revised, the least pleasant
portion of an author's duties,--unless he chooses to make the index
himself. This required five or six weeks longer, after which Hawthorne
went to London and arranged for its publication with Smith & Elder, who
agreed to bring it out in three volumes--although two would have been
quite sufficient; but according to English ideas, the length of a work
of fiction adds to its importance. Unfortunately, Smith & Elder also
desired to cater to the more prosaic class of readers by changing the
name of the romance from "The Marble Faun" to "Transformation," and
they appear to have done this without consulting Hawthorne's wishes in
the matter. It was simply squeezing the title dry of all poetic
suggestions; and it would have been quite as appropriate to change the
name of "The Scarlet Letter" to "The Clergyman's Penance," or to call
"The Blithedale Romance" "The Suicide of a Jilt." If Smith & Elder
considered "The Marble Faun" too recondite a title for the English
public, what better name could they have hit upon than "The Romance of
Monte Beni"? Would not the Count of Monte Beni be a cousin Italian, as
it were, to the Count of Monte Cristo? We are thankful to observe that
when Hawthorne published the book in America, he had his own way in
regard to this point.

It was now that a new star was rising in the literary firmament, not of
the "shooting" or transitory species, and the genius of Marian Evans
(George Eliot) was casting its genial penetrating radiance over Great
Britain and the United States. She was as difficult a person to meet
with as Hawthorne himself, and they never saw one another; but a friend
of Mr. Bennoch, who lived at Coventry, invited the Hawthornes there in
the first week of February to meet Bennoch and others, and Marian Evans
would seem to have been the chief subject of conversation at the table
that evening. What Hawthorne gathered concerning her on that occasion
he has preserved in this compact and discriminating statement:

"Miss Evans (who wrote 'Adam Bede') was the daughter of a steward, and
gained her exact knowledge of English rural life by the connection with
which this origin brought her with the farmers. She was entirely self-
educated, and has made herself an admirable scholar in classical as
well as in modern languages. Those who knew her had always recognized
her wonderful endowments, and only watched to see in what way they
would develop themselves. She is a person of the simplest manners and
character, amiable and unpretending, and Mrs. B---- spoke of her with
great affection and respect."

There is actually more of the real George Eliot in this summary than in
the three volumes of her biography by Mr. Cross.

Thorwaldsen's well-known simile in regard to the three stages of
sculpture, the life, the death and the resurrection, also has its
application to literature. The manuscript is the birth of an author's
work, and its revision always seems like taking the life out of it; but
when the proof comes, it is like a new birth, and he sees his design
for the first time in its true proportions. Then he goes over it as the
sculptor does his newly-cast bronze, smoothing the rough places and
giving it those final touches which serve to make its expression
clearer. Hawthorne was never more to be envied than while correcting
the proof of "The Marble Faun" at Leamington. The book was given to the
public at Easter-time; and there seems to have been only one person in
England that appreciated it, even as a work of art--John Lothrop
Motley. The most distinguished reviewers wholly failed to catch the
significance of it; and even Henry Bright, while warmly admiring the
story, expressed a dissatisfaction at the conclusion of it,--although
he could have found a notable precedent for that in Goethe's "Wilhelm
Meister." The _Saturday Review_, a publication similar in tone to
the New York _Nation_, said of "Transformation:"

[Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 250.]

"A mystery is set before us to unriddle; at the end the author turns
round and asks us what is the good of solving it. That the impression
of emptiness and un-meaningness thus produced is in itself a blemish to
the work no one can deny. Mr. Hawthorne really trades upon the honesty
of other writers. We feel a sort of interest in the story, slightly and
sketchily as it is told, because our experience of other novels leads
us to assume that, when an author pretends to have a plot, he has one."

The _Art Journal_ said of it: [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 249.]

"We are not to accept this book as a story; in that respect it is
grievously deficient. The characters are utterly untrue to nature and
to fact; they speak, all and always, the sentiments of the author;
their words also are his; there is no one of them for which the world
has furnished a model."

And the London _Athenaeum_ said: [Footnote: Ibid., ii. 244.]

"To Mr. Hawthorne truth always seems to arrive through the medium of
the imagination.... His hero, the Count of Monte Beni, would never have
lived had not the Faun of Praxiteles stirred the author's
admiration.... The other characters, Mr. Hawthorne must bear to be
told, are not new to a tale of his. Miriam, the mysterious, with her
hideous tormentor, was indicated in the Zenobia of 'The Blithedale
Romance.' Hilda, the pure and innocent, is own cousin to Phoebe in 'The
House of the Seven Gables'."

If the reviewer is to be reviewed, it is not too much to designate
these criticisms as miserable failures. They are not even well written.
Henry Bright seemed to be thankful that they were no worse, for he
wrote to Hawthorne: "I am glad that sulky _Athenaeum_ was so
civil; for they are equally powerful and unprincipled." The writer in
the _Athenaeum_ evidently belonged to that class of domineering
critics who have no literary standing, but who, like bankers' clerks,
arrogate to themselves all the importance of the establishment with
which they are connected. Fortunately, there are few such in America.
No keen-witted reader would ever confound the active, rosy, domestic
Phoebe Pyncheon with the dreamy, sensitive, and strongly subjective
Hilda of "The Marble Faun;" and Hawthorne might have sent a
communication to the _Athenaeum_ to refresh the reviewer's memory,
for it was not Zenobia in "The Blithedale Romance" who was dogged by a
mysterious persecutor, but her half-sister--Priscilla. Shakespeare's
Beatrice and his Rosalind are more alike (for Brandes supposes them to
have been taken from the same model) than Zenobia and Miriam; and the
difference between the persecutors of Priscilla and Miriam, as well as
their respective methods, is world-wide; but there are none so blind as
those who are enveloped in the turbid medium of their self-conceit.

The pure-hearted, chivalrous Motley read these reviews, and wrote to
Hawthorne a vindication of his work, which must have seemed to him like
a broad belt of New England sunshine in the midst of the London fog. In
reference to its disparagement by so-called authorities, Motley said:
[Footnote: Mrs. Lathrop, 408.]

"I have said a dozen times that nobody can write English but you. With
regard to the story which has been slightingly criticised, I can only
say that to me it is quite satisfactory. I like those shadowy, weird,
fantastic, Hawthornesque shapes flitting through the golden gloom which
is the atmosphere of the book. I like the misty way in which the story
is indicated rather than revealed. The outlines are quite definite
enough, from the beginning to the end, to those who have imagination
enough to follow you in your airy flights; and to those who complain---

"I beg your pardon for such profanation, but it really moves my spleen
that people should wish to bring down the volatile figures of your
romance to the level of an everyday novel. It is exactly the romantic
atmosphere of the book in which I revel."

The calm face of Motley, with his classic features, rises before us as
we read this, illumined as it were by "the mild radiance of a hidden
sun." He also had known what it was to be disparaged by English
periodicals; and if it had not been for Froude's spirited assertion in
his behalf, his history of the Dutch Republic might not have met with
the celebrity it deserved. He was aware of the difference between a
Hawthorne and a Reade or a Trollope, and knew how unfair it would be to
judge Hawthorne even by the same standard as Thackeray. He does not
touch in this letter on the philosophical character of the work,
although that must have been evident to him, for he had said enough
without it; but one could wish that he had printed the above statement
over his own name, in some English journal.

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