steps which led echoingly up to the second story of the house. My sister
exclaims in delight concerning the whole scene: 'This villa,--you have
no idea how delightful it is! I think there must be pretty nearly a
hundred rooms in it, of all shapes, sizes, and heights. The walls are
never less than five feet thick, and sometimes more, so that it is
perfectly cool. I should feel very happy to live here always. I am
sitting in the loggia, which is delightful in the morning freshness. Oh,
how I love every inch of that beautiful landscape!' The tower and the
adjacent loggia were the features that preŽminently sated our thirst for
suggestive charm, and they became our proud boast and the chief
precincts of our daily life and social intercourse. The ragged gray
giant looked over the road-walls at its foot, and beyond and below them
over the Arno valley, rimmed atop with azure distance, and touched with
the delicate dark of trees. Internally, the tower (crowned, like a rough
old king of the days of the Round Table, with a machicolated summit) was
dusty, broken, and somewhat dangerous of ascent. Owls that knew every
wrinkle of despair and hoot-toot of pessimism clung to narrow crevices
in the deserted rooms, where the skeleton-like prison frameworks at the
unglazed windows were in keeping with the dreadful spirits of these
unregenerate anchorites. The forlorn apartments were piled one above the
other until the historic cylinder of stone opened to the sky. In
contrast to the barrenness of the gray inclosures, through the squares
of the windows throbbed the blue and gold, green and lilac, of Italian
heavens and countryside....
"Some of the rooms at MontaŁto I studiously avoided. The forlorn cavern
of a parlor, or ballroom, I remember to have seen only once. There was a
painful vacuum where good spirits ought to have been. Along the walls
were fixed seats, like those in the apse of some morally fallen
cathedral, and they were covered with blue threadbare magnificence that
told the secrets of vanity. Heavy tables crowded down the centre of the
room. I came, saw, and fled. The oratory was the most thrilling place of
all. It opened out of my sister's room, which was a large, sombre
apartment. It was said to attract a frequently seen ghost by the force
of its profound twilight and historic sorrows; and my sister, who was
courageous enough to startle a ghost, highly approved of this corner of
her domain. But she suddenly lost her buoyant taste for disembodied
spirits, and a rumor floated mistily about that Una had seen the
wretched woman who could not forget her woes in death. In 'Monte Beni'
this oratory is minutely pictured, where 'beneath the crucifix ... lay a
human skull ... carved in gray alabaster, most skillfully done ... with
accurate imitation of the teeth, the sutures, the empty eye-caverns.'
Everywhere the intense picturesqueness gave material, at MontaŁto, for
my father's romance."
Amid such surroundings the new romance was sketched out, but not very
much progress could have been made with it. In October the family
returned to Rome by way of Siena, where some happy days were spent with
Story,--a town which impressed Hawthorne almost temperamentally,
standing apart in his mind with Perugia. "A thoughtful, shy man," he
says, "might settle down here with the view of making the place a home,
and spend many years in a sombre kind of happiness." At Rome they
settled again in the Piazza Poli, and entered on the winter days with
much happiness, feeling acquainted now and partly at home in the city.
But a misfortune came to them in the illness of Una, who was taken with
Roman fever, and her life was despaired of. Hawthorne always took his
sorrows hard, and he suffered much in this period of anxiety, enduring
in his stoic way the heavy pressure; happily the doctor proved mistaken
in his confidence that the child would die, and though her illness was
long, she gradually recovered strength. It was during her convalescence
that Pierce came to Rome, and Hawthorne found in his friendship a great
support and comfort. It is plain that Pierce was the only man that
Hawthorne loved with his full heart, and he had come to recognize the
great place this friendship held in his life. His loyalty to Pierce was
a true tribute, and its expression does honor to both men:--
"I have found him here in Rome, the whole of my early friend, and even
better than I used to know him; a heart as true and affectionate, a mind
much widened and deepened by the experience of life. We hold just the
same relation to one another as of yore, and we have passed all the
turning-off places, and may hope to go on together, still the same dear
friends, as long as we live. I do not love him one whit the less for
having been President, nor for having done me the greatest good in his
power; a fact that speaks eloquently in his favor, and perhaps says a
little for myself. If he had been merely a benefactor, perhaps I might
not have borne it so well; but each did his best for the other, as
friend for friend."
The illness of Una had thrown a shadow over these last days at Rome, and
it was in any case necessary to take her away. In a characteristic
outburst Hawthorne writes to Fields:--
"I bitterly detest Rome, and shall rejoice to bid it farewell forever;
and I fully acquiesce in all the mischief and ruin that has happened to
it, from Nero's conflagration downward. In fact, I wish the very site
had been obliterated before I ever saw it."
They left Rome late in May and went by sea to Marseilles, and after a
rapid journey up the Rhone and to Geneva went by Paris to London. The
return to England was somewhat like homecoming, and during this second
residence Hawthorne shows a more sympathetic and contented spirit. He
determined to finish his romance here, and settled first at Whitby and
afterwards at Redcar, and still later he migrated to Leamington; but the
romance was mainly put into shape at Redcar, where the necessary
conditions of solitude were best realized. He lived very much as when he
had written his other works at home, writing in the morning and spending
the rest of the day with the children out of doors on the sands. He
finished the book on November 8, and it was published early the
following spring. [Footnote: _The Marble Faun_, or the Romance of
Monte Beni. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of "The Scarlet Letter."
Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1860. 12mo. 2 vols., pp. 283; 288.]
Hawthorne came to the writing of "The Marble Faun" after his genius was
matured, with his temperament fully ripened, his intellectual and moral
and artistic nature consonant in its varied play, and at the height of
his literary powers. The story is in one sense a culmination, and it is
perhaps his most complete expression of life; but it is less
characteristic of him, less peculiarly his own, than the American tales,
notwithstanding its greater breadth, its finer beauty, and its more
profound mystery. In method he develops nothing new; the scheme, the
manner, the tone are the same already made familiar. He had recourse to
his life abroad for the realism of the scene, and took out of his
note-books and memory the whole visible world of his romance, precisely
as he had formerly utilized the New England village life and the Brook
Farm experience. He has drunk in the charm of Italy and absorbed the
picturesque and artistic atmosphere of Rome and its religious
impressiveness; he has taken most delicately and harmoniously into his
sensitive temperament the loveliness and the power of both the world of
the past and the world of art, and he renders them back in description
as they were mirrored in himself; the stir of Roman life, its antiquity,
its still and immutable forms of picture and sculpture, are given back
with full sympathy and as clearly as the autumn woodland of the old
Puritan town in his first romance; and this realism, for such it is
notwithstanding its glamour, is the substance of the tale, though it is
all surface, just as was the case with "The House of the Seven Gables."
He has done for Rome and Italy what he there did for Salem, different as
the effect may seem, owing to the greater nobility and dignity of the
material.
He has also in the management of the story confined himself, as was his
wont, to a few characters, Donatello, Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon, each
strictly isolated in peculiar individuality, and offering the
opportunity for powerful contrasts; and he has allowed his imagination
to find its spring in the symbolism of a physical object, here the
marble statue of the faun, and let his moral scheme evolve out of the
brooding of his thought upon the spiritual thing thus suggested for the
play of meditation. The plot itself, though more definitely disclosed in
its main incident of crime, which is made central in the narrative, is
of the simplest sort, and no more than enough to provide corporal fact
sufficient to give the body of event and situation; and, for the rest,
the story both before and after is left wholly vague, the mystery of
Donatello's fate repeating the mystery of Miriam's past. In this he
showed again his indifference to what became of his characters when they
had fulfilled their function artistically; he had no human sympathy with
their personal fortunes. This peculiarity is only another phase of the
fact that crime itself did not interest him in its mortal career. The
use he found in crime was only as the means by which sin was generated
in the soul; and his concern was with the latter, not the former.
He has projected on such a background and out of such a group of
characters an analytic study of the nature of evil, and this is his main
theme, overlaid as it is with all the decorative beauty of his
interpretation of Italy. He had formerly set forth the history of sin in
the heart, taking the evil for granted and reflecting upon it as a thing
given; he now looks backward and is engaged with the genesis of sin in a
natural man, the coming of sin into the world of nature; and yet this is
not all, but he endeavors to think about the meaning of evil, the reason
for sin's existence, the old problem fundamental in thought about the
spiritual life. It cannot be regarded as a matter on which he came to
any satisfactory conclusion or even uttered any novel reflections; and
it is this that gives its lack of firmness to the work on the ethical
side. Donatello is made into a living soul of a higher capacity by his
experience of crime; but Hawthorne suggests that evil serves a good
purpose in this only with much reluctance, and indeed he may almost be
said to reject this explanation. Donatello became "a sadder and a wiser
man," and with that old phrase the issue for him seems to be summed. It
is noticeable that, as in "The Scarlet Letter," there is no question of
how this soul that has come into a miserable consciousness is to be
healed; and it is remarkable that the only consolation the Church can
give is vouchsafed by Hawthorne to the heretic Hilda, but not to the
child of its own bosom. Hawthorne, if he indicates through Kenyon his
ideas, seems to advise, as elsewhere, letting the dead past bury its
dead while Donatello and Miriam should go on to what self-sacrificing
life they can find. Unsatisfactory as the story is, merely as a tale, it
is less vague than the central truth, the moral theme which it embodies.
The truth is that after all, in the ethical sphere of the story,
Hawthorne has given no more than his meditations, very much at random,
upon sin as it appears in the world of nature, and the way in which his
chosen characters react under its influence. Hilda is as innocent as
Donatello, but her soul frees itself from the contact; and Miriam is as
guilty, yet she alone is unaffected by the crime in her essential
nature, so far as appears. She is the most vital character in the book,
having touches in her of both Hester and Zenobia; the three women are
all of one kind in their different environment, and Miriam is the most
human of the three,--strong, assertive, practical as they all are, and
also entirely resourceless in their tragedies.
The romance is not of a kind to sustain very firm critical handling, for
its structure is thus weak, not merely in the plot but in its ethical
meaning; if the former is left unwrought, so the latter is left
unclarified. The power of the work lies rather in its artistic effects,
independent of any purpose Hawthorne had in writing; his genius was
creative in its own right, and when he had once brought the background,
the characters, and the idea together, they in a certain sense took life
and built up their own story, while his hand linked picture to picture
in the unfolding scene, with a free play of sentiment, fancy, and
meditation round about them. Intense points show out, as if by an inner
and undesigned brilliancy. The companionship of Donatello, full of the
freshness and laughter of the early world, with Miriam tracked by her
own terrible secret, is itself a startling situation, and the effecting
of their union by a crime, which paralyzes the love of one while it
creates the love of the other, is the work of a master imagination.
Hilda in her dove-cote, keeping the perpetual lamp burning at the
Virgin's shrine and taking into her heart the lovely pictures of old
time as a pool reflects heaven in its quiet depths, is a figure of
sensitive purity, rendered symbolically, with the same truth and
delicacy as Donatello, though so opposed in contrast to his natural
innocence blighted and stained; even the quality of mercilessness, which
Hawthorne gave her out of his own heart, she turns to favor and to
prettiness, till it seems to belong to her as a part of her chastity of
nature. The reduplication of the characters in the world of art about
them, though it is frequently resorted to by Hawthorne, does not grow
monotonous; but by this method he rather animates the external world, as
if picture and statue and tower had absorbed life and were permeated
with its human emotion. The faun is, perhaps, a somewhat hard symbol,
and needs to be vitalized in Donatello before its truth is felt to be
alive; but the drawing that reproduces the model as the demon's face,
the sketches of Miriam portraying a woman's revengeful mischief, the
sights that Donatello and Kenyon shape out of the sunset, the
benediction of the statue of the pontiff, the evasive eyes of Beatrice
felt in Hilda, Donatello, and Miriam, are instances of borrowed or
attributed life, which illustrate how constantly and effectively
Hawthorne uses this means of expression, and it is the chief means by
which he has integrated and harmonized the various material into a whole
artistically felt. It is an error, however, to force his interpretation
too far, as in the attempt to see in the Beatrice portrait a shadow of
Miriam's mystery; if such a thought crossed his mind, it left no record
of itself, and he was as ignorant as others of Miriam's actual past, one
may be sure. That unwillingness to be gazed upon, of which he makes so
much, recurring to it again and again and most pointedly in Donatello,
was the simplest and primary symbol to him, apparently, of the shock of
sin, whether it were in the victim like Beatrice or the participant like
Donatello or the spectator like Hilda. In Miriam it is less felt,
because to her the knowledge of evil had come in her earlier career.
It is in rendering this spiritual shock, disturbing the very seat of
life, that Hawthorne best succeeds in the moral part of his subject; and
it is by awakening some answering vibration in his readers that he
imparts to the romance that universal interest which makes it rank so
high as it does in the literature of the soul's life. He was not,
however, very apt in the mechanics of his art, and in lieu of structure
such as a man of far less faculty might be an adept in, he finds in his
imagined tale a principle of life itself; his work is seldom well
reasoned, but it has vital germs of thought, emotion, and action, and
these are loosed into activity and grow of themselves, and he fosters
and develops them in his richly brooding mind. So, here, the spiritual
shock, which is the central spring of the romance, is allowed to
transmit itself in every direction, and he lays bare its workings. It is
saddest in Donatello in the moment when he heard the cry of the falling
wretch, when he turned cold at Miriam's touch, when he lost his kinship
with the wild creatures he loved; and it is fixed in his unquiet,
evasive eyes. One loves Donatello, and of no other character of
Hawthorne can it be said that it wins affection; and one wishes that, if
he must have a soul, he might have come into it in some way of natural
kindness dissociated from a moral theory. This theory--and here is the
one discord--is, after all, felt to be an exotic in the Italian air.
Donatello has been puritanized, and though the character may be a
perfect symbolic type, it has nothing racial in it; and to be racial was
Donatello's charm. It is the same wherever the story is taken up; it is
charming as an artistic work, but when one begins to think about it, the
method of approach is proved to be wrong because it solves nothing and
ends in futility. It is throughout a Puritan romance, which has wandered
abroad and clothed itself in strange masquerade in the Italian air.
Hawthorne's personality pervades it, like life in a sensitive hand. It
is the best and fullest and most intimate expression of his temperament,
of the man he had come to be, and takes the imprint of his soul with
minute delicacy and truth. It is a meditation on sin, but so made
gracious with beauty as to lose the deformity of its theme; and it
suffers a metamorphosis into a thing of loveliness. To us it is in
boyhood our dream of Italy, and in after years the best companion of
memory; it is also a romance of nature and art, and of the mystery of
evil, shot through with such sunshine gleams, with the presence of pure
color and divine forms, as to seem like the creations of that old mythic
Mediterranean world which, though it held shapes of terror, was the most
beautiful land that the imagination has ever known.
VIII.
LAST YEARS.
Hawthorne reached Concord, on his home journey, late in June, 1860, and
took possession of the Wayside almost unobserved. He had intended to
improve the house and grounds, and set about the task; the well-known
tower, in memory of the tower of MontaŁto, was added for his study, and
some other changes were made, but his funds, which were diminished by an
unfortunate loan, were insufficient to enable him to do all he desired.
He was welcomed by his old Concord friends, and began again the
agreeable village life he had formerly known; but he mingled more on
equal terms with other people than had been his custom before his
foreign residence had forced him into some share of society. He went not
infrequently to the Saturday Club in Boston, and though always a silent
and reserved person in such gatherings, his enjoyment of these occasions
was as great as he could ever derive from literary companionship, and
many of the members were old and familiar acquaintances. It was at home,
however, that he spent his days, working in his study over his writing,
and pacing the footpath on the hill-ridge back of his house, and from
time to time going to the seaside at Beverly or in Maine with his son
Julian for a companion. His health was not so firm as it had been. A
change seems to have fallen on him with some suddenness on his return to
America; for some years, ever since the hard winter of "The Scarlet
Letter" at Salem, he had complained of fatigue in writing and of
lassitude and slowness of mind; after the winter in Rome he felt this
with new weariness, as he says when he practically ended his notebooks
in Switzerland, not having the vital impulse to continue them, and in
the intervening time he had completed "The Marble Faun;" now he began
perceptibly to lose physical force, to grow thin, and to lack energy. He
wrote a good deal, sitting down to his desk and "blotting successive
sheets of paper as of yore;" but with little satisfaction to himself.
The times were unfavorable to peace of mind and the quiet of literary
occupation. Secession began soon after he arrived, and war followed in
the spring with that outburst of passionate devotion to the Union which
was transforming all his neighborhood into a camp and sending all the
youth of his people to the battle southward. To Hawthorne, being in such
imperfect sympathy with this feeling and the causes which gave it
passion, the war was only vexation and disaster, with much
meaninglessness, foolishness, uselessness, however he might try to look
at it with Northern eyes. In nothing is his natural detachment from life
so marked as in this incapacity to understand the national life in so
supreme a crisis and under the impulse of so profound a passion. He
stood aloof from it, unmoved in his superannuated conservatism, as
abroad he had stood aloof from the English life wrapped in his
imperturbable New England breeding. He was obliged to take some stand in
his own mind, and he naturally went with his own State, never having
been really an American, on the national scale, but only a New
Englander, as he confessed. During his life at Liverpool, four years
before, he had made up his mind which side he would be on, when the
prospect of war began to loom up as a possibility, and wrote briefly to
Bridge about it:--
"I regret that you think so doubtfully (or, rather, despairingly) of the
prospects of the Union; for I should like well enough to hold on to the
old thing. And yet I must confess that I sympathize to a large extent
with the Northern feeling, and think it is about time for us to make a
stand. If compelled to choose, I go for the North. At present we have no
country--at least, none in the sense an Englishman has a country. I
never conceived, in reality, what a true and warm love of country is
till I witnessed it in the breasts of Englishmen. The States are too
various and too extended to form really one country. New England is
quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in.
"Don't let Frank Pierce see the above, or he would turn me out of
office, late in the day as it is. However, I have no kindred with, nor
leaning towards, the abolitionists."
In the first flush of the war he felt the contagion of the patriotic
thrill, and was with his friends a "war Democrat;" but his mind was
filled with reservations. On May 26, 1861, he again writes to Bridge:--
"The war, strange to say, has had a beneficial effect upon my spirits,
which were flagging woefully before it broke out. But it was delightful
to share in the heroic sentiment of the time, and to feel that I had a
country,--a consciousness which seemed to make me young again. One thing
as regards this matter I regret, and one thing I am glad of. The
regrettable thing is that I am too old to shoulder a musket myself, and
the joyful thing is that Julian is too young. He drills constantly with
a company of lads, and means to enlist as soon as he reaches the minimum
age. But I trust we shall either be victorious or vanquished before that
time. Meantime, though I approve the war as much as any man, I don't
quite understand what we are fighting for, or what definite result can
be expected. If we pummel the South ever so hard, they will love us none
the better for it; and even if we subjugate them, our next step should
be to cut them adrift. If we are fighting for the annihilation of
slavery, to be sure it may be a wise object, and offer a tangible
result, and the only one which is consistent with a future union between
North and South. A continuance of the war would soon make this plain to
us, and we should see the expediency of preparing our black brethren for
future citizenship by allowing them to fight for their own liberties,
and educating them through heroic influences. Whatever happens next, I
must say that I rejoice that the old Union is smashed. We never were one
people, and never really had a country since the Constitution was
formed."
Six months later he writes again with nearly the same point of view,
accepting in fact the theory of disunion as the only possible result:--
"I am glad you take such a hopeful view of our national prospects so far
as regards the war; but my own opinion is that no nation ever came safe
and sound through such a confounded difficulty as this of ours. For my
part I don't hope, nor indeed wish, to see the Union restored as it was.
Amputation seems to me much the better plan, and all we ought to fight
for is the liberty of selecting the point where our diseased members
shall be lop't off. I would fight to the death for the northern slave
States and let the rest go."
It is this despair of the Union that characterizes his attitude
throughout, and with it goes also an absence of belief in the Union; but
one feels that he is not deeply interested in the matter for its own
sake. Thus after another interval he again writes to Bridge, February
14, 1862:--
"Frank Pierce came here and spent a night, a week or two since, and we
mingled our tears and condolences for the state of the country. Pierce
is truly patriotic, and thinks there is nothing left for us but to fight
it out, but I should be sorry to take his opinion implicitly as regards
our chances in the future. He is bigoted to the Union, and sees nothing
but ruin without it; whereas I (if we can only put the boundary far
enough south) should not much regret an ultimate separation."