the society which it was natural for him to mingle with, and several of
his hosts were untiring in their efforts to please him and render him
comfortable. He was by no means incapable of social intercourse,
notwithstanding his retired habits; the capacity had never been
developed by early breeding or by later necessity, and though on his
return home, the change in him was noticeable, even under the influence
of his foreign travels he remained a silent, difficult, and evasive
person in society. When he was among his own old and familiar friends,
such as Bridge or Pierce, or with new companions whom he accepted into
his circle, such as Fields, he was open enough and took his share
genially and sometimes jovially, as well as when he was with the
American sea captains or his old associates in Salem; but the touch of
social formality, the presence of a stranger, the ways and habits of
conventionality shut him up in impenetrable reserve and made him
temporarily miserable. In England, however, he was compelled to meet and
be met in the ordinary intercourse of men and women, and he fared much
better than might have been anticipated. Very greatly to the surprise of
his friends he proved an excellent after-dinner speaker, not only on the
public occasions where the sense of his official station as a
representative of his country would have spurred him to acquit himself
well, but also at private parties and in purely personal relations. Like
many silent men he was a good listener, and his sensitiveness and mental
alertness gave the impression of more sympathy than perhaps he felt. He
made himself agreeable, at all events, and he submitted to an amount of
human fellowship that was astonishing to himself. The novelty of the
society he entered, doubtless, attracted him, and fed his curiosity, as
it certainly was an excitement to his wife. They had lived all their
lives in a community so much simpler in all the furnishings of refined
living, so much less characterized by the material luxuries of wealth,
than this in which they now found themselves, that the mere sight of the
houses, dinners, and liveries was a new experience, and they observed
them like country cousins. The manners of this society, also, arrested
their attention. It was inevitable that Hawthorne should maintain an
aloofness from all this, nevertheless, with the natural democratic
questioning of the reality of the courtesy, the propriety of the system,
the kind and quality of the social results. He felt the appeal that this
life made, he perceived its fitness to the soil, he saw it as a growth
that belonged in its place; but he was thoroughly glad that there was
nothing like it in his own country. There is not the slightest hint in
any word of his that he regarded himself as an ambassador of friendship
in a foreign country or thought that it was any part of his duty to
cultivate international good feeling: he felt himself politically,
socially, fundamentally, an alien in England, and he preferred to be so;
what first struck him were those obvious differences that distinguish
the two peoples, and these remained most prominently in his mind. He was
a stranger when he landed at Liverpool, and he never suffered the least
tincture of naturalization while he was in the country.
This attitude determines the point of view in his notes and
reminiscences. He was an observer, close and accurate and interested;
but he had not that sympathy which seeks to understand, to interpret, to
justify what one sees, and to put one's self in accord with it. He had
his standards already well fixed, and his limitations which he was not
sufficiently aware of to desire to escape. He had, too, the critical
spirit which is a New England trait, and with this went its natural
attendant, the habit of speaking his mind. In writing down his
impressions of English manners and institutions and people, he behaved
exactly as he had done in his records of similar things at home; there
was no difference in his method or in the character of what he said; he
was telling what he saw with that indifference to how it would strike
other people which comes near to being unconsciousness. He was a good
deal surprised when he discovered that the English did not relish what
he said; he protested that he had done them more than justice, that they
were too easily hurt, and as for hating them, he adds, "I would as soon
hate my own people." There is no ill-nature in "Our Old Home;" there is
only the clearly expressed, bare, unsympathetic statement of what he had
seen, touched here and there with that irony and humor which were apt to
mix with his view of men and things. So the people at Salem had thought
he did them injustice in his sketch of his native home, and he in turn
had told them that he had treated them very considerately, without
enmity or ill feeling of any kind, and in fact what he had written
"could not have been done in a better or kindlier spirit nor with a
livelier effect of truth." He had written of England in precisely the
same way, with that remorseless adherence to his own impression which
was second nature to him, and with that willingness to see the wrong
side of things that he disliked, to minimize human nature when it bored
him, and to get a grim humor out of his victims, which was also a part
of his endowment. In all this, as in some other parts of Hawthorne's
personality, there is a reminder of Carlyle. The hard judgment he wrote
down of Margaret Fuller, for example, and the humorous extravagance of
his visit to Martin Tupper, are not to be paralleled except in Carlyle's
reminiscences; there was the same unflinching rigor, the same cold
obtuseness, the same half-wearied contempt for what excited their humor
in both men. In his vexation of spirit Hawthorne is especially
suggestive of some discomfortable cousinship between them; and he was
often vexed in spirit. He was, it would seem, especially burdened by the
material comfort of England, in which he found a grossness but little
consonant with his own taste and spirit, and he made of this the type of
things English, as it is easy to do:--
"The best thing a man born in this island can do is to eat his beef and
mutton and drink his porter, and take things as they are; and think
thoughts that shall be so beefish, muttonish, portish, and porterish,
that they shall be matters rather material than intellectual. In this
way an Englishman is natural, wholesome, and good; a being fit for the
present time and circumstances, and entitled to let the future alone!"
The ascetic and intellectual element, which was large in his ideal past,
was revolted by these things, just as the democratic instincts of his
nature were shocked by the aristocratic system of society with its
social results. He was, too, always in a certain sense homesick; not
that he was anxious to go home or looked forward to his return with
great pleasure, but he was a man out of place, and had lost the natural
harmonies between the outer and the inner life. He had taken a house at
Rock Park, a suburb of Liverpool, but he could not make a home out of
it, and his account of his residence there gives the whole interior
atmosphere of his English stay.
"I remember to this day the dreary feeling with which I sat by our first
English fireside and watched the chill and rainy twilight of an autumn
day darkening down upon the garden, while the preceding occupant of the
house (evidently a most unamiable personage in his lifetime) scowled
inhospitably from above the mantelpiece, as if indignant that an
American should try to make himself at home there. Possibly it may
appease his sulky shade to know that I quitted his abode as much a
stranger as I entered it."
It is plain to see that he rather endured than enjoyed English life,
notwithstanding the true pleasures he found and the kind friends he
made. He was a stranger, taking a stranger's view and with much
suspicion of his surroundings, anticipating something hostile in them
and forestalling it with his own defenses not too friendly in aspect; in
a word he was a foreigner, and he never lost the sense of being in a
country not his own, to which he felt superior in all essential matters.
Some regret has been expressed that he did not come into closer contact
with English literary life, and especially with the more famous writers
of the day. He did not even make the acquaintance of Dickens, Thackeray,
Tennyson, Carlyle, George Eliot, to name the most important, nor was he
really introduced to the best intellectual life of England at all. He
met several second-rate writers, and he knew the Brownings more
particularly in Italy. It is not likely, however, that much was lost by
this failure to get into touch with the great masters of his own art or
with English thinkers and poets in general. Hawthorne had never cared
for such society in his own country, and it was probably by his own
choice that he missed the literary sets in London. The distaste that he
felt for society seems to have taken an aggravated form where his own
craft was concerned, whether through self-consciousness, or the memory
of his years of obscurity, or for whatever reason; perhaps he had known
authors enough at Concord and had no spirit of adventure left in that
direction. His own genius was solitary, and in his friendships literary
sympathy had no share, for he neither received nor gave it; in fact, if
he became familiar with an author, such as Thoreau or Ellery Channing or
Herman Melville, it was with the man, not the author. The terms on which
he stood with Longfellow and Emerson are those on which, at the
happiest, he might have met Thackeray, Tennyson, or Carlyle; but, though
speculation must be vain, it is far more probable that he would have
found little congeniality with any one of the three. Lord Houghton
appears to have made an effort to take him about, but with so little
success that he thought Hawthorne had taken a dislike to him. As it was,
Hawthorne saw quite enough, and more than he desired, of literary
England; it was mostly weariness to him.
It must be acknowledged that the manners and institutions of the
country, and its people for the most part, were little to Hawthorne's
taste, and he showed this in his book about them; but, for all that, he
found the country interesting and often lovely in its picturesque
antiquity and softnesses of light and color, and he appreciated to the
full the literary and historical sentiment that most appeals to
Americans of like education and breeding. He made many excursions in
different parts of England, and visited Scotland and the Isle of Man,
and he lingered in many towns and villages and was disposed to haunt old
places with a pilgrim devotion. He loved the face of the country, too,
and notwithstanding its misted and dreary skies, especially over
Liverpool, he found some good words for its weather, its seasons, its
long days, and all its out-door look. He went about with the mind and
senses of a tourist, satiating his instincts for minute and detailed
observation and writing it all down; in a spirit, too, of enjoyment and
discovery; and out of this satisfaction of his inveterate habits of
observing and noting and walking about with no other end in view, just
as if he were taking an autumn stroll in Salem, came the felicity of the
English notes, which after all deductions is very great in its own field
of delicate sentiment and realistic grasp and the atmosphere of a mind.
Hawthorne was thoroughly happy in indulging his wandering propensity in
such voyages of discovery; especially in London he found a city that
satisfied his idea of it, and he seems to have busied himself there for
days and weeks in merely going about from point to point and seeing the
spectacle of its vast and varied life. Hawthorne's English experiences
will, perhaps, be best realized, if he is thought of apart from
literature, as a man much identified with the shipping interests and
commercial society of Liverpool, and attending to this business rather
doggedly and wearily, not especially liking the place or the people,
whose ways and notions he was instinctively against, being himself a
settled New Englander of a strong race type; and yet, besides this, a
man who managed in his four years' residence to see a great deal of the
length and breadth of England, as a summer tourist might visit its
shrines on pilgrimage. This describes his life, nevertheless, only from
the outside; as soon as one opens his note-books, his personality
changes the impression, and pervades even his least sympathetic pages
with a human quality that wins on the reader in spite of all
reservations, and one sees how in the face of his prejudices and
limitations England was saved to him by his literary faculty, the
interests, susceptibilities, and powers that were his as a man of
letters. One finds in his experience, too, besides the consul and the
man of letters, a kindly and simple manhood of a more primitive element,
the human heart in its own original right, as in the well-known incident
of the workhouse child who was so strangely drawn to him. Of the humane
actions, however, of which any record remains, none is so honorable as
his considerateness, generosity, and conscientiousness in his
correspondence with Delia Bacon, whom he endured and befriended with
infinite patience and delicacy; the letters which he wrote to her show
his character in a very noble light, and bring out one side of his life
which has little illustration, his habitual thoughtfulness for the weak.
One recalls his care for his Brook Farm friend Farley at Concord, for
example; and all his relations with what one may call the wayside
acquaintance of life were to his honor.
One other incident must also find a place here, which completes an
earlier story and rounds out his own conception of integrity. On coming
to Liverpool he had incurred heavy expenses, but six months of his more
fortunate days had not gone by before he sent to Hillard the money which
his friends had given to him in his sore need at Salem while he was
writing "The Scarlet Letter." His own words best express the feelings
which led him to make this restitution:--
Liverpool, _December 9, 1853._
Dear Hillard,--I herewith send you a draft on Ticknor for the sum (with
interest included) which was so kindly given me by unknown friends,
through you, about four years ago.
I have always hoped and intended to do this, from the first moment when
I made up my mind to accept the money. It would not have been right to
speak of this purpose before it was in my power to accomplish it; but it
has never been out of my mind for a single day, nor hardly, I think, for
a single working hour. I am most happy that this loan (as I may fairly
call it, at this moment) can now be repaid without the risk on my part
of leaving my wife and children utterly destitute. I should have done it
sooner; but I felt that it would be selfish to purchase the great
satisfaction for myself, at any fresh risk to them. We are not rich, nor
are we ever likely to be; but the miserable pinch is over.
The friends who were so generous to me must not suppose that I have not
felt deeply grateful, nor that my delight at relieving myself from this
pecuniary obligation is of any ungracious kind. I have been grateful all
along, and am more so now than ever. This act of kindness did me an
unspeakable amount of good; for it came when I most needed to be assured
that anybody thought it worth while to keep me from sinking. And it did
me even greater good than this, in making me sensible of the need of
sterner efforts than my former ones, in order to establish a right for
myself to live and be comfortable. For it is my creed (and was so even
at that wretched time) that a man has no claim upon his
fellow-creatures, beyond bread and water and a grave, unless he can win
it by his own strength or skill. But so much the kinder were those
unknown friends whom I thank again with all my heart.
* * * * *
This money must have been the first he had saved, and he could now spare
it from his income. In the four years that he held the consulate he had
held to his main purpose of laying by a competency, and when he
resigned, on August 31, 1857, his mind was at ease with regard to the
future for himself and his family. His gratitude for this late won
independence, humble as it was, must have been deeply felt, as is
apparent from his letters at the time; a great weight had been lifted
from his spirit, and his happiness was such as only a man with his ideas
of personal independence could realize. He proposed now to linger in
Europe for some time longer; and when he was relieved from his duties in
the fall he went with the family through France to Italy, hoping that
the southern winter would be of benefit to Mrs. Hawthorne's still
uncertain health.
Life in Italy proved far more agreeable than it had been in England, and
there were periods in it when Hawthorne enjoyed as great happiness in
the placid course of the days as he ever experienced. For the first time
in his life he was free from the necessity of labor, and he had recently
escaped from that practical business of affairs and daily duties which
was always irksome to him. The change, too, from the dark skies of
England and its grimy Liverpool materialism to an atmosphere of sun and
warmth and artistic beauty was itself enough to reanimate his spirit;
and he found at once some congenial society, and not a few who seemed to
him like old friends. He appears for the first time in his life really
to live with other people, not as an occasional visitant coming out of
his hermitage, but as one of themselves. He sought out Story, who was an
old neighbor at Salem, though he had known him only slightly, and under
his guidance he mixed with the American artists then in Rome,--Miss
Hosmer, Thompson, Kopes, and Miss Lander,--as well as with others of the
foreigners resident there, Miss Bremer, Mrs. Jameson, and Bryant among
the rest; and he became good friends with Motley and his family, whose
companionship he enjoyed in a very natural, frank way. The picturesque
ruins of Home, its gardens and fountains and the sky and air appealed to
him, as if to new senses or at least to senses newly awakened and
developed; and he was sensibly attracted by the artistic works on every
hand. He was not wholly uncultivated in art, though his aesthetic sense
had been rather a hope than a reality all through his life. He had
written to his wife before marriage, nearly twenty years ago, "I never
owned a picture in my life; yet pictures have been among the earthly
possessions (and they are spiritual ones too) which I most coveted;" and
in his tales there is a recurring reference to pictures as a part of his
imaginative world. The influence of his wife's artistic tastes in his
home life had also been a kind of preparation for appreciation of the
masterpieces, many of which had long been familiar to his eyes and
thoughts in reproductions. In his Boston days he use to visit such
collections of pictures as were accessible to him, and he knew sculpture
somewhat through casts. Such cultivation, however, was at best a very
limited and incomplete preparation, and did not preserve him from the
tourist's weariness of galleries. He had wished in London that the Elgin
marbles had all been reduced to lime. There was something pictorial in
his genius, but painting was slower to give up its secrets to him than
sculpture, which, being a more abstract art and simpler in intention, as
well as nearer to the living form, made the easier appeal to him. He did
not respond to Italian painting very perfectly at the best, and his
education hardly proceeded farther than an appreciation of the softer
and brighter works of Guido and Raphael, nor did he ever free himself
from the intellectual prepossessions of his mind. He did not become even
an amateur in art, and he probably knew it; he had begun too late to
enter that world; and he contented himself with a moral sympathy, an
apprehension of idea and feeling, rather than the seeing eye and
understanding heart by which one takes possession of the artistic world
as a free citizen there. It was not an important matter, however; his
comments on art have only a personal interest, lighting up his own
nature; but, within his limits, he enjoyed a new and great experience,
one that illumined and softened his mind, in his wanderings about the
galleries and churches and his sittings in artists' studios. The
contemporary and native world of Italy he attended to but very little,
noting its picturesque aspects somewhat, but taking the slightest
interest in its people; if he had felt a barrier between himself and the
English, here was a gulf of difference that it was hopeless to attempt
to pass over, and he left the Italians in the inaccessible foreignness
in which he found them.
The first four months were spent at Rome, in this gradual opening of his
mind to the new impressions of the city, so fascinating to his
imagination, and in establishing himself and his family in the new
society of their daily life. Late in May, 1858, they went north by the
carriage road, and settled at Florence in the Casa Bella, near Casa
Guidi, where the Brownings were, and not far from Powers's studio. In
August they took possession of the old villa of MontaŁto on the hill of
Bellosguardo, near the city, which is so closely associated with
Hawthorne's Italian days as the tower of Monte Beni. Here he began to
write "The Marble Faun," shutting himself up for an hour or two every
day in the stern effort, as he describes it, of coming "to close grip
with a romance which I have been trying to tear out of my mind." The
scene of his labors was quite remote, such a place as he liked to have
to write in, and he was undisturbed unless it were by the Spiritualism
of the Browning villa, where Mrs. Browning was a believer; and, perhaps
under the influence of this association, Mrs. Hawthorne showed more
plainly her natural inclination to a more than curious interest in the
phenomena. She was, indeed, somewhat a believer in the power of
communication with the spiritual world, and its near presence and
influence in our lives. The seclusion of the villa of MontaŁto was very
grateful to Hawthorne, and he writes of it to Fields with almost a
home-feeling, as if he had again found a lodging place at least for his
wandering Penates:--
"It is pleasant to feel at last that I am really away from America--a
satisfaction that I never really enjoyed as long as I stayed in
Liverpool, where it seemed to me that the quintessence of nasal and
hand-shaking Yankeedom was gradually filtered and sublimated through my
consulate, on the way outward and homeward. I first got acquainted with
my own countrymen there. At Rome, too, it was not much better. But here
in Florence, and in the summer-time, and in this secluded villa, I have
escaped out of all my old tracks, and am really remote. I like my
present residence immensely. The house stands on a hill, overlooking
Florence, and is big enough to quarter a regiment, insomuch that each
member of the family, including servants, has a separate suite of
apartments, and there are vast wildernesses of upper rooms into which we
have never yet sent exploring expeditions. At one end of the house there
is a moss-grown tower, haunted by owls and by the ghost of a monk who
was confined there in the thirteenth century, previous to being burnt at
the stake in the principal square of Florence. I hire this villa, tower
and all, at twenty-eight dollars a month; but I mean to take it away
bodily and clap it into a romance, which I have in my head, ready to be
written out."
The kind of life that was led by the family is more vividly sketched by
his daughter in her reminiscences of the time, and her pages afford the
only full companion picture to those of the Old Manse and the Berkshire
cottage, and to some extent supply the lack of that autobiographic
background to "The Marble Faun" which the reader misses in Hawthorne's
own preface.