“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.
American reviewers were equally puzzled by “The Marble Faun,” and,
although it was generally praised here, the literary critics treated it
in rather a cautious manner, as if it contained material of a dangerous
nature. The _North American_, which should have devoted five or six
pages to it, gave it less than one; praising it in a conventional and
rather unsympathetic tone. Longfellow read it, and wrote in his diary,
“A wonderful book; but with the old, dull pain in it that runs through
all Hawthorne’s writings.” There was always something of this dull pain
in the expression of Hawthorne’s face.
ANALYSIS OF “THE MARBLE FAUN”
It is like a picture, or a succession of pictures, painted in what the
Italians call the _sfumato_, or “smoky” manner. The book is pervaded
with the spirit of a dreamy pathos, such as constitutes the mental
atmosphere of modern Rome; not unlike the haze of an Indian summer day,
which we only half enjoy from a foreboding of the approach of winter.
All outlines are softened and partially blurred in it, as time and decay
have softened the outlines of the old Roman ruins. We recognize the same
style with which we are familiar in “The Scarlet Letter,” but influenced
by a change in Hawthorne’s external impressions.
It is a rare opportunity when the work of a great writer can be traced
back to its first nebulous conception, as we trace the design of a
pictorial artist to the first drawing that he made for his subject.
Although we cannot witness the development of the plot of this romance
in Hawthorne’s mind, it is much to see in what manner the different
elements of which it is composed, first presented themselves to him, and
how he adapted them to his purpose.
The first of these in order of time was the beautiful Jewess, whom he
met at the Lord Mayor’s banquet in London; who attracted him by her
_tout ensemble_, but at the same time repelled him by an indefinable
impression, a mysterious something, that he could not analyze. There
would seem, however, to have been another Jewess connected with the
character of Miriam; for I once heard Mrs. Hawthorne narrating a story
in which she stated that she and her husband were driving through London
in a cab, and passing close to the sidewalk in a crowded street they saw
a beautiful woman, with black hair and a ruddy complexion, walking
with the most ill-favored and disagreeable looking Jew that could
be imagined; and on the woman’s face there was an expression of such
deep-seated unhappiness that Hawthorne and his wife turned to each
other, and he said, “I think that woman’s face will always haunt me.”
I did not hear the beginning of Mrs. Hawthorne’s tale, but I always
supposed that it related to “The Marble Faun,” and it would seem as
if the character of Miriam was a composite of these two daughters of
Israel, uniting the enigmatical quality of one with the unfortunate
companionship of the other, and the beauty of both.
As previously noticed, the portrait of Beatrice Cenci excited a deeply
penetrating interest in Hawthorne, and his reflections on it day after
day would naturally lead him to a similar design in regard to the
romance which he was contemplating. The attribution of a catastrophe
like Beatrice’s to either of the two Jewesses, would of course be
adventitious, and should be considered in the light of an artistic
privilege.
The “Faun” of Praxiteles in the museum of the Capitol next attracted his
attention. This is but a poor copy of the original; but he penetrated
the motive of the sculptor with those deep-seeing eyes of his, and there
is no analysis of an ancient statue by Brunn or Furtwängler that equals
Hawthorne’s description of this one. It seems as if he must have looked
backward across the centuries into the very mind of Praxiteles, and he
was, in fact, the first critic to appreciate its high value. The perfect
ease and simple beauty of the figure belong to a higher grade of art
than the Apollo Belvedere, and Hawthorne discovered what Winckelmann had
overlooked. He immediately conceived the idea of bringing the faun to
life, and seeing how he would behave and comport himself in the modern
world--in brief, to use the design of Praxiteles as the mainspring of a
romance. In the evening of April 22, 1858, he wrote in his journal:
[Illustration: STATUE OF PRAXITELES’ RESTING FAUN, WHICH HAWTHORNE HAS
DESCRIBED AND BROUGHT TO LIFE IN THE CHARACTER OF DONATELLO]
“I looked at the Faun of Praxiteles, and was sensible of a peculiar
charm in it; a sylvan beauty and homeliness, friendly and wild at once.
It seems to me that a story, with all sorts of fun and pathos in
it, might be contrived on the idea of their species having become
intermingled with the human race; a family with the faun blood in them,
having prolonged itself from the classic era till our own days. The tail
might have disappeared, by dint of constant intermarriages with ordinary
mortals; but the pretty hairy ears should occasionally reappear
in members of the family; and the moral instincts and intellectual
characteristics of the faun might be most picturesquely brought out,
without detriment to the human interest of the story.”
This statue served to concentrate the various speculative objects which
had been hovering before Hawthorne’s imagination during the past winter,
and when he reached Florence six weeks later, the chief details of the
plot were already developed in his mind.
Hilda and Kenyon are, of course, subordinate characters, like the first
walking lady and the first walking gentleman on the stage. They are the
sympathetic friends who watch the progress of the drama, continually
hoping to be of service, but still finding themselves powerless to
prevent the catastrophe. It was perhaps their unselfish interest in
their mutual friends that at length taught them to know each other’s
worth, so that they finally became more than friends to one another.
True love, to be firmly based, requires such a mutual interest or common
ground on which the parties can meet,--something in addition to the
usual attraction of the sexes. Mrs. Hawthorne has been supposed by some
to have been the original of Hilda; and by others her daughter Una.
Conway holds an exceptional opinion, that Hilda was the feminine
counterpart of Hawthorne himself; but Hilda is only too transparent a
character, while Hawthorne always was, and still remains, impenetrable;
and there was enough of her father in Miss Una, to render the same
objection applicable in her case. Hilda seems to me very much like Mrs.
Hawthorne, as one may imagine her in her younger days; like her in her
mental purity, her conscientiousness, her devotion to her art,--which
we trust afterwards was transformed into a devotion to her husband,--her
tendency to self-seclusion, her sensitiveness and her lack of decisive
resolution. She is essentially what they call on the stage an _ingenue_
character; that is, one that remains inexperienced in the midst of
experience; and it is in this character that she contributes to the
catastrophe of the drama.
If Hawthorne appears anywhere in his own fiction, it is not in “The
Blithedale Romance,” but in the rôle of Kenyon. Although Kenyon’s
profession is that of a sculptor, he is not to be confounded with
the gay and versatile Story. Neither is he statuesque, as the English
reviewer criticised him. He is rather a shadowy character, as Hawthorne
himself was shadowy, and as an author always must be shadowy to his
readers; but Kenyon is to Hawthorne what Prospero is to Shakespeare,
and if he does not make use of magic arts, it is because they no
longer serve their purpose in human affairs. He is a wise, all-seeing,
sympathetic mind, and his active influence in the play is less
conspicuous because it is always so quiet, and so correct.
It will be noticed that the first chapter and the last chapter of this
romance have the same title: “Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, Donatello.” This is
according to their respective ages and sexes; but it is also the terms
of a proportion,--as Miriam is to Hilda, so is Kenyon to Donatello.
As the experienced woman is to the inexperienced woman, so is the
experienced man to the inexperienced man. This seems simple enough, but
it has momentous consequences in the story. Donatello, who is a type of
natural but untried virtue, falls in love with Miriam, not only for her
beauty, but because she has acquired that worldly experience which he
lacks. Hilda, suddenly aroused to a sense of her danger in the isolated
life she is leading, accepts Kenyon as a protector. The means in this
proportion come together and unite, because they are the mean terms, and
pursue a medium course. The extremes fly apart and are separated, simply
because they are extremes. But there is a spiritual bond between them,
invisible, but stronger than steel, which will bring them together
again--at the Day of Judgment, if not sooner.
All tragedy is an investigation or exemplification of that form of human
error which we call sin; a catastrophe of nature or a simple error of
judgment may be tragical, but will not constitute a tragedy without the
moral or poetic element.
In “The Scarlet Letter,” we have the sin of concealment and its
consequences. The first step toward reformation is confession, and
without that, repentance is little more than a good intention.
In “The House of the Seven Gables,” Hawthorne has treated the sin of
hypocrisy--a smiling politician who courts popularity and pretends to
be everybody’s friend, and agrees with everybody,--only with a slight
reservation. There may be occasions on which hypocrisy is a virtue; but
the habit of hypocrisy for personal ends is like a dry rot in the heart
of man.
In “The Blithedale Romance,” we find the sin of moral affectation.
Neither Hollingsworth nor Zenobia is really what they pretend themselves
to be. Their morality is a hollow shell, and gives way to the first
effective temptation. Zenobia betrays Priscilla; and is betrayed in turn
by Hollingsworth,--as well as the interests of the association which had
been committed to his charge.
The kernel of “The Marble Faun” is _original sin_. It is a story of
the fall of man, told again in the light of modern science. It is a
wonderful coincidence that almost in the same months that Hawthorne was
writing this romance, Charles Darwin was also finishing his work on
the “Origin of Species;” for one is the moral counterpart of the other.
Hawthorne did not read scientific and philosophical books, but he may
have heard something of Darwin’s undertaking in England, as well as
Napoleon’s prophetic statement at St. Helena, that all the animals form
an ascending series, leading up to man. [Footnote: Dr. O’Meara’s “A
Voice from St. Helena.”] The skeleton of a prehistoric man discovered
in the Neanderthal cave, which was supposed to have proved the Darwinian
theory, does not suggest a figure similar to the “Faun” of Praxiteles,
but the followers of Darwin have frequently adverted to the Hellenic
traditions of fauns and satyrs in support of their theory. Hawthorne,
however, has made a long stride beyond Darwin, for he has endeavored to
reconcile this view of creation with the Mosaic cosmogony; and it
must be admitted that he has been fairly successful. The lesson that
Hawthorne teaches is, that evil does not reside in error, but in
neglecting to be instructed by our errors. It is this which makes the
difference between a St. Paul and a Nero. The fall of man was only
apparent; it was really a rise in life. The Garden of Eden prefigures
the childhood of the human race. Do we not all go through this idyllic
moral condition in childhood, learning through our errors that the only
true happiness consists in self-control? Do not all judicious parents
protect their children from a knowledge of the world’s wickedness, so
long as it is possible to prevent it,--and yet not too long, for then
they would become unfitted for their struggle with the world, and in
order to avoid the pitfalls of mature life they must know where the
pitfalls are. It is no longer essential for the individual to pass
through the Cain and Abel experience--that has been accomplished by
the race as a whole; but it is quite possible to imagine an incipient
condition of society in which the distinction of justifiable homicide in
self-defence (which is really the justification of war between nations)
has not yet obtained.
Hawthorne’s Donatello is supposed to belong, in theory at least, to
that primitive era; but it is not necessary to go back further than the
feudal period to look for a man who never has known a will above his
own. Donatello seizes Miriam’s tormentor and casts him down the Tarpeian
Rock,--from the same instinct, or clairvoyant perception, that a hound
springs at the throat of his master’s enemy. When the deed is done
he recognizes that the punishment is out of all proportion to the
offence,--which is in itself the primary recognition of a penal
code,--and more especially that the judgment of man is against him. He
realizes for the first time the fearful possibilities of his nature, and
begins to reflect. He is a changed person; and if not changed for the
better yet with a possibility of great improvement in the future. His
act was at least an unselfish one, and it might serve as the argument
for a debate, whether Donatello did not do society a service in ridding
the earth of such a human monstrosity. Hawthorne has adjusted the moral
balance of his case so nicely, that a single scruple would turn the
scales.
The tradition among the Greeks and Romans, of a Golden Age, corresponds
in a manner to the Garden of Eden of Semitic belief. There may be some
truth in it. Captain Speke, while exploring the sources of the Nile,
discovered in central Africa a negro tribe uncontaminated by European
traders, and as innocent of guile as the antelopes upon their own
plains; and this suggests to us that all families and races of men may
have passed through the Donatello stage of existence.
Hawthorne’s master-stroke in the romance is his description or analysis
of the effect produced by this homicide on the different members of the
group to which he has introduced us. The experienced and worldly-wise
Kenyon is not informed of the deed until his engagement to Hilda, but
he has sufficient reason to suspect something of the kind from the
simultaneous disappearance of Donatello and the model, as well as from
the sudden change in Miriam’s behavior. Yet he does not treat Donatello
with any lack of confidence. He visits him at his castle of Monte Beni,
which is simply the Villa Manteuto somewhat idealized and removed into
the recesses of the Apennines; he consoles him in his melancholy humor;
tries to divert him from gloomy thoughts; and meanwhile watches with a
keen eye and friendly solicitude for the _denouement_ of this mysterious
drama. If he had seen what Hilda saw, he would probably have left Rome
as quickly as possible, never to return; and Donatello’s fate might have
been different.
The effect on the sensitive and inexperienced Hilda was like a horrible
nightmare. She cannot believe her senses, and yet she has to believe
them. It seems to her as if the fiery pit has yawned between her and the
rest of the human race. Her position is much like that of Hamlet, and
the effect on her is somewhat similar. She thrusts Miriam from her with
bitterness; yet forms no definite resolutions, and does she knows not
what; until, overburdened by the consciousness of her fatal secret, she
discloses the affair to an unknown priest in the church of St.
Peter. Neither does she seem to be aware at any time of the serious
consequences of this action.
Miriam, more experienced even than Kenyon, is not affected by the
death of her tormentor so much directly as she is by its influence on
Donatello. Hitherto she had been indifferently pleased by his admiration
for her; now the tables are turned and she conceives the very strongest
attachment for him. She follows him to his castle in disguise, dogs his
footsteps on the excursion which he and Kenyon make together, shadows
his presence again in Rome, and is with him at the moment of his arrest.
This is all that we know of her from the time of her last unhappy
interview with Hilda. Her crime consisted merely in a look,--the
expression of her eyes,--and the whole world is free to her; but her
heart is imprisoned in the same cell with Donatello. There is not a more
powerful ethical effect in Dante or Sophocles.
A certain French writer [Footnote: Name forgotten, but the fact is
indelible.] blames Hilda severely for her betrayal of Miriam (who was
at least her best friend in Rome), and furthermore designates her as an
immoral character. This, we may suppose, is intended for a hit at New
England Puritanism; and from the French stand-point, it is not unfair.
Hilda represents Puritanism in its weakness and in its strength. It is
true, what Hamlet says, that “conscience makes cowards of us all,” but
only true under conditions like those of Hamlet,--desperate emergencies,
which require exceptional expedients. On the contrary, in carrying out a
great reform like the abolition of slavery, the education of the blind,
or the foundation of national unity, a man’s conscience becomes a tower
of strength to him. As already intimated, what Hilda ought to have done
was, to leave Rome at once, and forever; but she is no more capable of
forming such a resolution, than Hamlet was of organizing a conspiracy
against his usurping uncle. When, however, the priest steps out from
the confessional-box and attempts to make a convert of Hilda,--for which
indeed she has given him a fair opening,--she asserts herself and
her New England training, with true feminine dignity, and in fact has
decidedly the best of the argument. It is a trying situation, in which
she develops unexpected resources. Hawthorne’s genius never shone forth
more brilliantly than in this scene at St. Peter’s. It is Shakespearian.
Much dissatisfaction was expressed when “The Marble Faun” was first
published, at the general vagueness of its conclusion. Hawthorne’s
admirers wished especially for some clearer explanation of Miriam’s
earlier life, and of her relation to the strange apparition of the
catacombs. He answered these interrogatories in a supplementary chapter
which practically left the subject where it was before--an additional
piece of mystification. In a letter to Henry Bright he admitted that he
had no very definite scheme in his mind in regard to Miriam’s previous
history, and this is probably the reason why his readers feel this vague
sense of dissatisfaction with the plot. I have myself often tried to
think out a prelude to the story, but without any definite result.
Miriam’s persecuting model was evidently a husband who had been forced
upon her by her parents, and would not that be sufficient to account for
her moods of gloom and despondency? Yet Hawthorne repeatedly intimates
that there was something more than this. Let us not think of it. If the
tale was not framed in mystery, Donatello would not seem so real to us.
Do not the characters in “Don Quixote” and “Wilhelm Meister” spring up
as it were out of the ground? They come we know not whence, and they go
we know not whither. It is with these that “The Marble Faun” should be
classed and compared, and not with “Middle-march,” “Henry Esmond,” or
“The Heart of Midlothian.”
[Illustration: TORRE MEDIAVALLE DELLA SCIMMIA (HILDA’S TOWER), OF THE
VIA PORTOGHESE AT ROME, WHERE HAWTHORNE REPRESENTS HILDA TO HAVE LIVED
AND TENDED THE LAMP AT THE VIRGIN’S SHRINE ON THE TOP OF THE TOWER]
Goethe said, while looking at the group of the “Laocoön,” “I think
that young fellow on the right will escape the serpents.” This was not
according to the story Virgil tells, but it is true to natural history.
Similarly, it is pleasant to think that the Pope’s mercy may ultimately
have been extended to Donatello. We can imagine an aged couple living a
serious, retired life in the castle of Monte Beni, childless, and to a
certain extent joyless, but taking comfort in their mutual affection,
and in acts of kindness to their fellow-mortals.
In order to see Hilda’s tower in Rome, go straight down from the Spanish
Steps to the Corso, turn to the right, and you will soon come to the Via
Portoghese (on the opposite side), where you will easily recognize the
tower on the right hand. The tower is five stories in height, set in the
front of the palace, and would seem to be older than the building about
it; the relic, perhaps, of some distinguished mediaeval structure. The
odd little shrine to the Virgin, a toy-like affair, still surmounts
it; but its lamp is no longer burning. It was fine imagination to place
Hilda in this lofty abode.