XV

The Roman carnival in three moods--Apples of Sodom--Poor,

battered, wilted, stained hearts--A living protest and

scourge--Dulce est desipere in loco--A rollicking world of

happy fools--Endless sunshine of some sort--Greenwich Fair

was worth a hundred of it--They thundered past, never

drawing rein--"Senza moccolo!"--Nothing more charming and

strange could be imagined--Girls surprised in the midst of

dressing themselves--A Unitarian clergyman with his fat

wife--Apparent license under courteous restraint--He laughed

and pelted and was pelted--William Story, as vivid as when I

saw him last--A too facile power--A deadly shadow gliding

close behind--Set afire by his own sallies--"Thy face is

like thy mother's, my fair child!"--Cleopatra in the clay--

"War nie sein Brod mit thranen ass."

THE Roman carnival opened about a month after our arrival in Rome. The

weather was bad nearly all the time, and my father's point of view was

correspondingly unsympathetic. The contrast between his mood now and a

year later, when he was not only stimulated by his daughter's recovery

from illness, but, also, was looking at everything rather as the

romancer than as the man, is worth bringing out. My father likewise

describes the carnival in the romance; there we see it in a third

phase--as art. But the passages in the note-books are written from the

realistic stand-point. In her transcriptions of the journals for the

press my mother was always careful to omit from the former everything

that had been "used" in the book; the principle, no doubt, was sound,

but it might be edifying for once, in a way, to do just the opposite, in

order to mark, if we choose to take the trouble, what kind of changes or

modifications Hawthorne the romancer would make in the work of my father

the observer of nature. Take your Marble Faun and turn to two of the

latter chapters and compare them with the corresponding pages in my

excerpts from the journals in the Biography. In the latter you will

find him always in a critical and carping humor; seeing everything

with abundant keenness, but recognizing nothing worth while in it.

The bouquets, he noticed, for example, were often picked up out of the

street and used again and again; "and," he adds, "I suppose they aptly

enough symbolized the poor, battered, wilted, stained hearts that had

flown from one hand to another along the muddy pathway of life, instead

of being treasured up in one faithful bosom. Really, it was great

nonsense."

It is true--such uncongenial interpretation--if you feel that way about

it. And I remember, in my rambles along the famous thoroughfare, seeing

a saturnine old fellow in a dingy black coat and slouch hat, with a sour

snarl on his unprepossessing features, who made it his business, all

day, to cuff and kick the little boys whom he caught throwing confetti,

or picking up the fallen bouquets, and to shove the latter down into

the sewer which ran beneath the street, through the apertures opening

underneath the curb. He seemed to have stationed himself there as

a living protest and scourge against and of the whole spirit of the

carnival; to hate it just because the rest of the world enjoyed it, and

to wish that he might make everybody else as miserable and uncharitable

as he was. He was like a wicked and ugly Mrs. Partington, trying to

sweep back the Atlantic of holiday merriment with his dirty mop. But

this crabbed humor of his, while it made him conspicuous against the

broad background of gayety, of course had no effect on the gayety

itself. The flood of laughter, jocundity, and semi-boisterous frolic

continued to roll up and down the Corso all day long, never attempting

to be anything but pure nonsense, indeed, but achieving, nevertheless,

the wise end of nonsense in the right time and place--that of refreshing

and lightening the mind and heart. Dulce est desipere in loco--that old

saw might have been made precisely to serve as the motto of the Roman

carnival; and very likely it was actually suggested to its renowned

author by some similar sport belonging to the old Roman days, before

Christianity was thought of. The young fellows--English, American, or

of whatever other nationality--would stride up and down the overflowing

street hour after hour, clad in linen dust-coats down to their heels,

with a bag of confetti slung on one side and another full of bouquets on

the other; and they would plunge a warlike hand into the former and hurl

ammunition at their rivals; or they would, pick out a bunch of flowers

from the latter for a pretty girl--not that the flowers were worth

anything intrinsically, nor was that their fault--but just to show

the fitting sentiment. There was only one rule, the unwritten one that

everybody was to take everything that came with a smile or a laugh, and

never get angry at anything; and this universal good-humor lifted the

whole affair into a wholesome and profitable sphere. Then there was

the double row of carriages forever moving in opposite directions, and

passing within easy arm's-reach of each other; and the jolly battle was

waged between their occupants, with side conflicts with the foot-farers

at the same time. And as the same carriages would repass one another

every forty minutes or so, the persons in them would soon get to

recognize one another; and, if they were of the sterner sex, they would

be prepared to renew desperate battle; or if there was a pretty girl or

two in one of them, she would be the recipient of a deluge of flowers

or of really pretty bonbons. It was all play, all laughter, all a

new, rollicking world of happy fools, of comic chivalry, of humorous

gallantry. For my part, I thought it was the world which I had been born

to live in; and I was too happy in it to imagine even that anybody could

be less happy than I was. My sole grief was when my supply of confetti

had given out, and I had no money to buy more. I used to look at

those great baskets at the street-corners, filled with the white

agglomeration, with longing eyes, and wish I had it all in my pockets.

I picked up the fallen bouquets, muddy or not, with no misgiving, and

flung them at the girls with the unquestioning faith of boyhood. I

looked up at the people in the windows and on the draped balconies with

romantic emotions, and exchanged smiles and beckonings with them. The

February days were never long enough for me; I only wished that the

whole year was made up of those days; if it rained, or was cold, I never

knew it. There was an endless sunshine of some sort which sufficed for

me. But my father, at this epoch, could catch not a glimpse of it. "I

never in my life knew a shallower joke than the carnival at Rome; such

a rainy and muddy day, too; Greenwich Fair (at the very last of which I

assisted) was worth a hundred of it."

The masking day, and the ensuing night of the moccolo, were the

culminating features of the carnival; and it was on the afternoon of

this day, I think, that the horse-race, with bare-backed horses, took

place. The backs of these horses, though bare of riders, had attached

to them by strings little balls with sharp points in them, which, as the

horses ran, bobbed up and down, and did the office of spurs. The race

was preceded by a thundering gallop of cavalry down the whole length

of the Corso (the street having been cleared of carriages beforehand),

ostensibly to prevent anybody from being run over by the race-horses;

but, as a matter of fact, if any one were killed, it was much more

likely to be by the ruthless riding of these helmeted dragoons than by

the riderless steeds. They thundered past, never drawing rein, no matter

what stood or ran in their way; and then, after an interval, during

which the long crowds, packed back on the opposite sidewalks, craned

forward as far as they dared to see them, came the eight or ten racers

at a furious pace. They were come and gone in a breath; and finally,

after the body of them were passed, came a laggard, who had been left at

the post, and was trying to make up for lost time. I believe it was this

horse who actually killed somebody on the course. The race over, back

into the street thronged the crowd, filling it from wall to wall; then

there was a gradual thinning away, as the people went home for supper;

and finally came the night and the moccoli, with the biggest crowd of

all. I was there with my twist of moccolo and a box of matches; except

the moccoli, there was no other illumination along the length of the

Corso. But their soft lights were there by myriads, and made a lovely

sight, to my eyes at least. "Senza moccolo!" was the universal cry;

young knights-errant, singly or in groups, pressed their way up and

down, shouting the battle-cry, and quenching all lights within reach,

while striving to maintain the flame of their own; using now the whisk

of a handkerchief, now a puff of breath, now the fillip of a finger;

contriving to extinguish a fair lady's taper with the same effusion of

vain words wherewith they told her of their passion. Most of the ladies

thus assailed sat in the lower balconies, elevated only a foot or two

above the level of the sidewalk; but those in the higher retreats made

war upon one another, and upon their own cavaliers; none was immune from

peril. The cry, uttered at once by such innumerable voices far and near,

made a singular murmur up and down the Corso; and the soft twinkling of

the lights, winking in and out as they were put out or relighted, gave

a singular fire-fly effect to the whole illumination. It seemed to me

then, and it still seems in the retrospect, that nothing more charming

and strange could be imagined; and through it all was the constant

blossoming of laughter, more inextinguishable than the moccoletti

themselves. The colors of the tapestries and stuffs dependent from the

windows and balconies glowed out in light, or were dimmed by shadow; and

the faces of the thousandfold crowd of festival-makers glimmered forth

and were lost again on the background of the night, like the features of

spirits in the glimpses of a dream. How long it all lasted I know not;

but it had its term, like other mortal things, even in this fairyland of

carnival; and when the last light was out the carnival was no more, and

Lent, unawares, had softly settled down upon us with the darkness.

But let us now listen to my father when, for the second time, he made

proof of the carnival in the year following our return from Florence,

and after Una had left her sick-room and could be at his side. "The

weather has been splendid," he writes, "and the merriment far more free

and riotous than as I remember it in the preceding year. Tokens of

the festival were seen in flowers on street-stands, or borne aloft on

people's heads, while bushels of confetti were displayed, looking like

veritable sugarplums, so that a stranger might have thought that the

whole commerce and business of stern old Rome lay in flowers and sweets.

One wonders, however, that the scene should not be even more rich and

various when there has been so long a time (the immemorial existence

of the carnival) to prepare it, and adorn it with shapes of gayety

and humor. There was an infinite number of clowns and particolored

harlequins; a host of white dominoes; a multitude of masks, set in

eternal grins, or with monstrous noses, or made in the guise of monkeys,

bears, dogs, or whatever beast the wearer chooses to be akin to; a great

many men in petticoats, and almost as many girls and women, no doubt, in

breeches; figures, too, with huge, bulbous heads and all manner of such

easy monstrosities and exaggerations.. It is strange how the whole

humor of the thing, and the separate humor of each individual character,

vanishes the moment I try to grasp it and describe it; and yet there

really was fun in the spectacle as it flitted by--for instance, in the

long line of carriages a company of young men in flesh-colored tights

and chemises, representing a party of girls surprised in the midst of

dressing themselves, while an old nurse in the midst of them expressed

ludicrous horror at their predicament. Then the embarrassment of

gentlemen who, while quietly looking at the scene, are surrounded by

groups of maskers, grimacing at them, squeaking in their ears, hugging

them, dancing round them, till they snatch an opportunity to escape into

some doorway; or when a poor man in a black coat and cylinder hat is

whitened all over with a half-bushel of confetti and lime-dust; the mock

sympathy with which his case is investigated by a company of maskers,

who poke their stupid, pasteboard faces close to his, still with the

unchangeable grin; or when a gigantic female figure singles out some

shy, harmless personage, and makes appeals to his heart, avowing her

passionate love in dumb show, and presenting him with her bouquet; and a

hundred other nonsensicalities, among which the rudest and simplest

are not the least effective. A resounding thump on the back with a

harlequin's sword, or a rattling blow with a bladder half full of dried

pease or corn, answers a very good purpose. There was a good deal of

absurdity one day in a figure in a crinoline petticoat, riding on an ass

and almost filling the Corso with the circumference of crinoline from

side to side. Some figures are dressed in old-fashioned garbs, perhaps

of the last century, or, even more ridiculous, of thirty years ago, or

in the stately Elizabethan (as we should call them) trunk hose, tunics,

and cloaks of three centuries since. I do not know anything that I have

seen queerer than a Unitarian clergyman (Mr. Mountford), who drives

through the Corso daily with his fat wife in a one-horse chaise, with a

wreath of withered flowers and oak leaves round his hat, the rest of his

dress remaining unchanged, except that it is well powdered with the dust

of confetti. That withered wreath is the absurdest thing he could wear

(though, perhaps, he may not mean it to be so), and so, of course, the

best. I can think of no other masks just now, but will go this afternoon

and try to catch some more." You see, he has that romance in view again.

"Clowns, or zanies," he resumes, after fresh inspection, "appear in

great troupes, dancing extravagantly and scampering wildly; everybody

seems to do whatever folly comes into his head; and yet, if you consider

the matter, you see that all this apparent license is kept under

courteous restraint. There is no rudeness, except the authorized pelting

with confetti or blows of harlequins' swords, which, moreover, are

within a law of their own. But nobody takes rough hold of another, or

meddles with his mask, or does him any unmannerly violence. At first

sight you would think that the whole world had gone mad, but at the

end you wonder how people can let loose all their mirthful propensities

without unchaining the mischievous ones. It could not be so in America

or in England; in either of those countries the whole street would go

mad in earnest and come to blows and bloodshed were the populace to

let themselves loose to the extent we see here. All this restraint is

self-imposed and quite apart from the presence of the soldiery."

This mood, we see, is far more gentle and sympathetic than the former

one; there is sunshine within as well as without; and, indeed, I

remember with what glee my father took part in the frolic, as well as

looked on at it; he laughed and pelted and was pelted; he walked down

the Corso and back again; he drove to and fro in a carriage; he mounted

to Mr. Motley's balcony and took long shots at the crowd below. The

sombre spirit of criticism had ceased, for a time, to haunt him.

[IMAGE: WILLIAM WETMORE STORY]

We went quite often to the studio of William Story, whom my father had

slightly known in Salem before he became a voluntary exile from America.

Mr. Story was at this time a small, wiry, nervous personage, smiling

easily, but as much through nervousness as from any inner source or

outward provocation of mirth, and as he smiled he would stroke his

cheeks, which were covered with a short, brown beard, with the fingers

and thumb of his right hand, while wrinkles would appear round his

bright, brown eyes. "He looks thin and worn already," wrote my father;

"a little bald and a very little gray, but as vivid as when I saw him

last; he cannot, methinks, be over thirty-seven." He was thirty-nine in

1858. "The great difficulty with him, I think, is a too facile power,"

my father goes on; "he would do better things if it were more difficult

for him to do merely good ones. Then, too, his sensibility is too quick;

being easily touched by his own thoughts, he cannot estimate what is

required to touch a colder and duller person, and so stops short of the

adequate expression." He commented on the vein of melancholy beneath

the sparkle of his surface, as if, in the midst of prosperity, he was

conscious of a "deadly shadow gliding close behind." Boys of twelve are

not troubled with insight, unless of that unconscious, intuitive kind

that tells them that a person is likeable, or the reverse, no matter

what the person may do or say. I liked Mr. Story, and thought him as

light of spirit as he seemed; not that he was not often earnest enough

in his talks with my father, to whom he was wont to apply himself with

a sort of intensity, suggesting ideas, and watching, with his nervous

smile, my father's reception of them; plunging into deep matters, beyond

my comprehension, dwelling there a few minutes, and then emerging again

with a sparkle of wit; he was certainly very witty, and the wit was

native and original, not memorized. When he got into the current of

drollery, he would, as it were, set himself afire by his own sallies,

and soar to astonishing heights, which had an irresistible contagion

for the hearers; and he would sometimes, sitting at a table with pen and

paper at hand, illustrate his whimsicalities with lightning sketches

of immense cleverness, considering their impromptu character. I have

preserved a sheet of letter-paper covered with such drawings. The

conversation had got upon Byron, whom Mr. Story chose to ridicule; as he

talked, he drew a head of "Byron as he thought he was," followed by one

of "Byron as he was," and by another of "Byron as he might have been,"

showing a very pronounced negro type. Then he made a portrait of "Ada,

sole daughter of my house and heart," and wrote under it, "Thy face was

like thy mother's, my fair child!" a hideous, simpering miss, with

a snub nose and a wooden mouth--"A poet's dream!" He also showed the

appearance of the Falls of Terni, "as described by Byron," and

added studies of infant phenomena, mother's darlings, a Presidential

candidate, and other absurdities, accompanying it all with a running

comment and imaginative improvisations which had the charm of genius in

them, and made us ache with laughter, young and old alike. Such a

man, nervous, high-strung, of fine perceptions and sensibilities, must

inevitably pass through rapid and extreme alternations of feeling; and,

no doubt, an hour after that laughing seance of ours, Mr. Story was

plunged deep in melancholy. Yet surely his premonitions of evil were

unfulfilled; Story lived long and was never other than fortunate.

Perhaps he was unable to produce works commensurate with his

conceptions; but unhappiness from such a cause is of a noble sort, and

better than most ordinary felicities.

I remember very well the statue of Cleopatra while yet in the clay.

There she sat in the centre of the large, empty studio, pondering on

Augustus and on the asp. The hue of the clay added a charm to the figure

which even the pure marble has not quite maintained. Story said that he

never was present while the cast of one of his statues was being made;

he could not endure the sight of the workmen throwing the handfuls of

plaster at the delicate clay. Cleopatra was substantially finished, but

Story was unwilling to let her go, and had no end of doubts as to the

handling of minor details. The hand that rests on her knee--should the

forefinger and thumb meet or be separated? If they were separated, it

meant the relaxation of despair; if they met, she was still meditating

defiance or revenge. After canvassing the question at great length with

my father, he decided that they should meet; but when I saw the marble

statue in the Metropolitan Museum the other day I noticed that they

were separated. In the end the artist had preferred despair. Such things

indicate the man's character, and, perhaps, explain his failure to reach

the great heights of art. He could not trust a great idea to manage

itself, but sought subtler expression through small touches, and thus,

finally, lost the feeling of the larger inspiration. A little more of

the calm, Greek spirit would have done him good.

He had many projects for other statues, which he would build up in fancy

before my father and discuss with him. His words and gestures made the

ideas he described seem actual and present, but he seldom got them

into marble; he probably found, upon trial, that they did not belong to

sculpture. He had the ambition to make marble speak not its own language

merely, but those of painting and of poetry likewise; and when this

proved impossible he was unhappy and out of conceit with himself, On

the other hand, he did good work in poetry and in prose; but neither

did these content him. After all, my father's observation hit the mark;

things came too easy to him. Goethe speaks the word for him:

"Wer nie sein Brod mit thranen ass,

Er kennt euch nicht, ihr ewige Machte!"