Burnt Sienna--The Aquila Nera--A grand, noble, gentle
creature--The most beautiful woman in the world--Better
friends than ever--A shadow brooded--Boys are whole-souled
creatures--Franklin Pierce--Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon,
Donatello--The historian of the Netherlands--When New
England makes a man--The spell of Trevi--An accession of
mishaps--My father's mustache--Three steps of stone, the
fourth, death--Havre, Redcar, Bath, London, Liverpool.
Siena is distant from Florence, in a direct line, not more than fifty
miles, but the railway turns the western flank of the mountains, and
kept us full three hours on the trip. I had long been familiar with a
paint in my color-box called Burnt Sienna, and was now much interested
to learn that it was made of the yellow clay on which the city of Siena
stands; and when I discovered for myself that this clay, having formed
the bed of some antediluvian ocean, was full of fossil shells, I
thought that Siena was a place where I would do well to spend one of my
lifetimes. The odd, parti-colored architecture of the town did not
so much appeal to me, and certainly the streets and squares were less
attractive in themselves than either the Roman or the Florentine ones.
The shells were personally ugly, but they were shells, and fossils into
the bargain, and they sufficed for my happiness.
The Storys had a villa in Siena, and my father certainly had in the back
part of his mind an idea of settling there, or elsewhere in Italy, now
or later; but after ten days we were on our travels again. There were
no ruins to be seen, that I remember, but many churches and frescoes and
old oil-paintings, which I regarded with indifference. Mediaeval remains
did not attract me like classic ones. It was here that Story drew the
caricatures which I have already spoken of, and from the windows of the
room, as the twilight fell, we could see the great comet, then in its
apogee of brilliance. Where will the world be when it comes again? We
had rooms at the Aquila Nera, looking out on the venerable, gray Palazzo
Tolomei. The narrow streets were full of people; the steepness and
irregularity of the thoroughfares of the city produced a feeling of
energy and activity in the midst of the ancient historic peace. Siena
is, I believe, built about the crater of an extinct volcano. The old
brick wall of the city was still extant, running up hill and down,
and confining the rusty heaps of houses within its belt. There were
projecting balconies, crumbling with age, and irregular arcades,
resembling tunnels hewn out of the solid rock. From the windows of
our sitting-room in the hotel we commanded the piazza, in front of the
Palazzo Tolomei, with a pillar in the midst of it, on which was a group
of Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf, the tradition of the city
being that it was founded during the epoch of the Roman kings. My mother
made a sketch of this monument in her little sketch-book, and my father,
according to a common custom of his, sat for an hour at the window
one day and made a note of every person who passed through the little
square, thus getting an idea of the character of the local population
not otherwise obtainable. I can imagine that, were one born in Siena,
one might conceive an ardent affection for it; but, in spite of its
picturesqueness, it never touched my heart like Rome or Florence, or
even London or Paris. I left it without regret, but with specimens of
its fossils in my pockets.
It often happens with miracles that they occur in doubles or trebles, in
order, I suppose, to suggest to us that they may be simply instances
of an undiscovered law. Gaetano was a miracle, and he was followed by
Constantino, who, though of an altogether different human type, was
of no less sweet and shining a nature than the other. He was a grand,
noble, gentle creature, and my mother soon dubbed him "The Emperor,"
though it may be doubted whether the original emperor of that name was
as good a man as ours; he was certainly not nearly so good-looking. He
was only the driver of our _vettura_ from Siena to Rome, but there was
a princely munificence in his treatment of us that made us feel his
debtors in an indefinitely greater sum than that which technically
discharged our obligations. He was massive, quiescent, oxlike, with
great, slow-moving, black eyes. He had the air of extending to us the
hospitalities of Italy, and our journey assumed the character of a royal
progress. He was especially devoted to my small sister Rose, and often,
going up the hills, he would have her beside him on foot, one of his
great hands clasping hers, while with the other he wielded the long whip
that encouraged the horses. His garments were of the humblest fashion,
but he so wore them as to make them seem imperial robes. My mother
caught an excellent likeness of him as he sat before her on the driver's
seat. The second trip was as enjoyable as the first, though it was two
or three days shorter. The route was west of our former one, passing
through Radicofani, incrusted round its hill-top; and Bolsena, climbing
backward from the poisonous shore of its beautiful lake; and Viterbo,
ugly and beggar-ridden, though famous forever on account of the war for
Galiana waged between Viterbo and Rome. In the front of an old church in
the town I saw the carved side of her sarcophagus, incorporate with the
wall. She was the most beautiful woman in the world in her day, and in
the fight for the possession of her her townsmen overcame the Romans,
but the latter were permitted, as a salve for their defeat, to have one
final glimpse of Galiana as they marched homeward without her. From
a window in a tower of one of the gates of the city, therefore, her
heavenly face looked forth and shed a farewell gleam over the dusty,
defeated ranks of Rome as they filed past, up-looking. The tale is as
old as the incident itself, but I always love to recall it; there is in
it something that touches the soul more inwardly than even the legend of
Grecian Helen.
By the middle of October we were back again in Rome, and though we were
now in new lodgings, the feeling was that of getting home after travels.
The weather was fine, and we revisited the familiar ruins and gardens,
and renewed our acquaintance with our favorite statues and pictures with
fresh enjoyment. Eddy Thompson and I found each other better
friends than ever--we had written each other laborious but sincerely
affectionate letters during our separation--and he and I, with one or
more favored companions sometimes, perambulated Rome incessantly, and
felt that the world had begun again. But by the 1st of November there
came to pass an untoward change, and our rejoicing was changed to
lamentation. First, my father himself had a touch of malaria, which
clouded his view of all outward things; and then my sister Una,
disregarding the law which provides that all persons must be in-doors
in Rome by six o'clock in the evening, caught the veritable Roman fever,
and during four months thereafter a shadow brooded over our snug little
lodgings in the Piazza, Poli. "It is not a severe attack," my father
wrote at the beginning, "yet it is attended by fits of exceeding
discomfort, occasional comatoseness, and even delirium to the extent
of making the poor child talk in rhythmic measure, like a tragic
heroine--as if the fever lifted her feet off the earth; the fever being
seldom dangerous, but is liable to recur on slight occasion hereafter."
But, as it turned out, Una's attack was of the worst kind, and she
sank and sank, till it seemed at last as if she must vanish from us
altogether. Eddy and I held melancholy consultations together, for Eddy,
besides being my special crony and confidant, had allowed himself to
conceive a heroic and transcendental passion for my sister--one of the
antique, Spenserian sort--and his concern for her condition was only
less than mine. So we went about with solemn faces, comforting each
other as best we might. I remember, when the crisis of the fever
was reached, taking him into a room and closing the door, and there
imparting to him the news that Una might not recover. We stared drearily
into each other's faces, and felt that the world would never again be
bright for us. Boys are whole-souled creatures; they feel one thing at a
time, and feel it with their might.
However, Una safely passed her crisis, thanks mainly to the wonderful
nursing of her mother, and by carnival-time was able to be out again and
to get her share of sugar-plums and flowers. But my mother was exhausted
by her ceaseless vigils in the sick-room, and my father, as I have
before intimated, never recovered from the long-drawn fear; it sapped
his energies at the root, and the continued infirmity of Una's health
prevented what chance there might have been of his recuperation. Yet for
the moment he could find fun and pleasure in the carnival, and he felt
as never before the searching beauty of the Borghese, the Pincian, and
the galleries. He was also comforted by the companionship of his friend
Franklin Pierce, who, his Presidential term over, had come to Europe to
get the scent of Washington out of his garments. There was a winning,
irresistible magnetism in the presence of this man. Except my father,
there was no man in whose company I liked to be so much as in his. I
had little to say to him, and demanded nothing more than a silent
recognition from him; but his voice, his look, his gestures, his gait,
the spiritual sphere of him, were delightful to me; and I suspect that
his rise to the highest office in our nation was due quite as much to
this power or quality in him as to any intellectual or even executive
ability that he may have possessed. He was a good, conscientious,
patriotic, strong man, and gentle and tender as a woman. He had the
old-fashioned ways, the courtesy, and the personal dignity which are
not often seen nowadays. His physical frame was immensely powerful and
athletic; but life used him hard, and he was far from considerate of
himself, and he died at sixty-five, when he might, under more favorable
conditions, have rounded out his century.
My father had written nothing, not even his journal, during the period
of Una's illness; but he began to work again now, being moved thereto
not only as a man whose nature is spontaneously impelled to express
itself on the imaginative side, but also in order to recoup himself for
some part of the loss of the ten thousand dollars which he had loaned to
John O'Sullivan, which, it was now evident, could never be repaid.
His first conception of the story of The Marble Faun had been as a
novelette; but he now decided to expand it so as to contain a large
amount of descriptive matter; and although the strict rules of artistic
construction may have been somewhat relaxed in order to admit these
passages, there is no doubt that the book gained thereby in value as a
permanent addition to literature, the plot, powerful though it is, being
of importance secondary to the creation of an atmosphere which
should soften the outlines and remove the whole theme into a suitable
remoteness from the domain of matter-of-fact. The Eternal City is, after
all, as vital a portion of the story as are the adventures of Miriam,
Hilda, Kenyon, and Donatello. They could not have existed and played
their parts in any other city of the world.
In selecting local habitations for the creatures of his imagination, he
strolled into the Via Portoghese, and there found the "Virgin's Shrine,"
which, with minor modifications, was to become the home of Hilda. I
quote from his journal the description of the actual place as he saw
it. "The tower in the Via Portoghese," he says, "has battlements
and machicolations, and the upper half of it is covered with gray,
ancient-looking stucco. On the summit, at one corner, is the shrine of
the Virgin, rising quite above the battlements, and with its lamp before
it. Beneath the machicolations is a window, probably belonging to the
upper chamber; and there seems to be a level space on the top of the
tower. Close at hand is the facade of a church, the highest pinnacle of
which appears to be at about the same level as the battlements of
the tower, and there are two or more stone figures (either angels or
allegorical) ornamenting the top of the facade, and, I think, blowing
trumpets. These personages are the nearest neighbors of any person
inhabiting the upper story of the tower, and the sound of their angelic
trumpets must needs be very loud in that close vicinity: The lower story
of the palace extends out and round the lower part of the tower, and
is surrounded by a stone balustrade. The entrance from the street is
through a long, arched doorway and passage, giving admittance into a
small, enclosed court; and deep within the passage there is a very broad
staircase, which branches off, apparently, on one side, and leads to the
height of the tower. At the base of the tower, and along the front of
the palace, the street widens, so as to form something like a small
piazza, in which there are two or three bakers' shops, one or two
shoe-shops, a lottery-office, and, at one corner, the stand of a woman
who sells, I think, vegetables; a little further, a stand of oranges.
Not so many doors from the palace entrance there is a station of French
soldiers and a sentinel on duty. The palace, judging from the broad
staircase, the balustraded platform, the tower itself, and other tokens,
may have been a grand one centuries ago; but the locality is now a
poor one, and the edifice itself seems to have fallen to unaristocratic
occupants. A man was cleaning a carriage in the enclosed court-yard,
but I rather conceive it was a cab for hire, and not the equipage of a
dweller in the palace."
John Lothrop Motley, the historian of the Netherlands, had come to Rome
this winter and brought his family with him. I believe my father had met
Motley in America; at all events, we saw a good deal of him now. He
was an exceedingly handsome man, not only on account of the beauty
of physical features which marked him, but in the sensitiveness and
vividness of expression which constantly illuminated them. He was at
this time about five-and-forty years of age, and lacked a couple of
inches of six feet in height. His hair, a dark, chestnut brown, had the
hyacinthine wave through it, and was slightly streaked with gray;
his beard, which was full and rather short, was likewise wavy; he was
quietly and harmoniously dressed, but the artistic temperament declared
itself in a touch of color in his cravat. His voice was melodious and
finely modulated; his bearing gravely cheerful and very courteous. No
type of man finer than Motley's has existed in modern times; all the
elements of the best and purest society were illustrated in him. He had
the depth of the scholar, the breadth and self-poise of the man of the
world, the genial warmth of the human fellow-creature, and, over all,
the harmonizing, individualizing charm of the artist. When New England
gathers her resources to make a man she achieves a result hardly to be
surpassed.
The Storys were also in Rome during these last months of our stay, and
Miss Mitchell, I think, still lingered in her little lodgings in the Via
Bocca di Leone. Miss Cushman likewise reappeared for a time, with all
her former greatness and fascination, and many other friends, new and
old, made that spring season memorable. As the moment for our departure
drew near, the magical allurement of Rome laid upon us a grasp more
than ever potent; it was impossible to realize that we were leaving it
forever. On the last evening we walked in the moonlight to the fountain
of Trevi, near our lodgings, and drank of the water--a ceremony which,
according to tradition, insures the return of the drinker. It was the
25th of May, forty-four years ago. None of us has gone back since then,
and, of the five who drank, three have passed to the country whence
no traveller returns. For my own part, as a patriotic American nearly
thirteen years old, I had no wish ever again to see Rome, and declared
myself glad to turn my back upon it, not that I had any fault to find
with it--I had always had a good time there--but my imagination was full
of my native land, with which nothing else could be comparable. I did
not learn of the fabled spell of Trevi until afterwards; then I scoffed
at and defied it, and possibly Rome may have decided that it could do
without me.
The railway to Civita Vecchia had just been completed, and we passed
swiftly over the route which had been so full of dangers and discomforts
eighteen months before. Embarking on the steamer for Marseilles, we kept
on thence to Avignon, where we spent about a week. This venerable
town had few attractions for me; I did not much care for the
fourteenth-century popes, nor for the eighteenth-century silks, nor even
for Petrarch and Laura; and the architecture of the palace, after I had
tried to sketch it, ceased to exhilarate me. My father was in no mood
for sight-seeing, either, but he went through it all conscientiously. My
mother, of course, enjoyed herself, but she met with an accident. While
sketching some figures of saints and monsters that adorned the arch of
the northern portal of the palace, she made an incautious movement and
sprained her ankle. The pain was excessive for the moment, but it soon
passed off, so as to enable her to limp back to our hotel. But the next
day the pain was worse; my father had a headache, a rare affliction with
him; I had caught a bad cold from swimming in the arrowy Rhone, and Una
and Miss Shepard were both in a state of exhaustion from sight-seeing;
and in this condition the journey to Geneva had to be made. We had
intended to remain there but a day, but we stayed longer, breathing the
pure air from the Alps, and feeling better as we breathed. I stood on
a bridge and looked down at that wonderful azure water rushing into the
lovely lake; I looked up and beheld those glorious mountains soaring
into the sky, and I forgot Rome and Florence, and almost America, in my
joy. Everything that life needs for life seemed present there.
We got into a little steamer and made the trip up the lake, the
mountains all about us. Up to this time I had imagined that the
acclivities in the north of England and in Scotland were mountains. We
sat on deck, in the stern of the steamer, my father gazing out and up
from beneath the rim of his soft felt hat, with his dark cloak over his
shoulders. He looked revived and vigorous again. Shortly before we left
Rome he had ceased to shave his upper lip, for what reason I know not;
I think it was simply indisposition to take that trouble any longer. My
mother had at first gently protested; she did not want his upper lip and
mouth to be hidden. But as the brown mustache, thick and soldier-like,
appeared, she became reconciled, and he wore it to the end of his life.
"Field-Marshal Hawthorne" James T. Fields used to call him after we got
home. Owing to the preponderance of expression of the upper part of his
head, the addition did not change his look as much as might have been
expected; we soon got used to it, and, inasmuch as all his photographs
were taken after the mustache was established, the world does not know
him otherwise.
The view became more and more enchanting as we penetrated farther into
the depths of the embrace of the mountains, and at last, at its most
ravishing point, the lake ceased, and the lonely little pile of dingy
white masonry, which is Chillon, appeared. Few works of man have a
more romantic interest than this castle; but, seen from the lake, its
environment was too much for it. Had it plunged downward into the smooth
waters and vanished, its absence would not have been marked in that
stupendous landscape. But it improved greatly upon closer acquaintance;
and when we stood in its vaults, and saw the pillar to which the
prisoner was chained, and the hole in the floor, with its three steps of
stone, and the fourth of death, we felt that Chillon was not unequal to
its reputation.
After leaving Chillon and Geneva our faces were turned homeward, and we
hastened our steps. My father wrote to England to engage our passage for
the first of August. We were now at midsummer. We returned to Paris, and
after a few days there proceeded to Havre, in order to see Ada Shepard
safe on board her steamer for home; her Wanderjahre was over, and
she was now to be married to Henry Clay Badger. We were sorry to say
good-bye to her; she had been a faithful and valuable element in our
household, and she had become a dear friend and comrade. She stood
waving her handkerchief to us as her steamer slipped away down the
harbor. She, too, was sorry for the parting. She once had said to me: "I
think your father is the wisest man I ever knew; he does not seem ever
to say much, but what he does say is always the truest and best thing
that could be said."
From Havre we crossed the Channel to Southampton, and were soon in
London. Boston and Concord were only six weeks distant. Such, at any
rate, had been the original design. But after we reached London
the subject of the English copyright of The Marble Faun came up for
discussion. Henry Bright introduced Mr. Smith, of the firm of Smith,
Elder & Company, who made such proposals for the English publication
of the book as were not to be disregarded; but, in order to make them
available, it was necessary that the manuscript should be completed in
England. Nothing but the short sketch of it was as yet in existence; it
could not be written in much less than a year; either the English
offer must be rejected, or we must stay out that year in her Majesty's
dominions. My father decided, not altogether unwillingly, perhaps, to
stay. He had written in his journal a few weeks before: "Bennoch and
Henry Bright are the only two men in England to whom I shall be much
grieved to say farewell; but to the island itself I cannot bear to say
that word as a finality. I shall dreamily hope to come back again at
some indefinite time, rather foolishly, perhaps, for it will tend to
take the substance out of my life in my own land. But this, I suspect,
is apt to be the penalty of those who stay abroad and stay too long."
But my father could not write in London, and, casting about for a
fitting spot, he finally fixed upon the remote hamlet of Redcar, far up
on the bleak coast of Redcar, in Yorkshire. It was not far from Whitby,
where we had been two or three years before. The gray German Ocean
tumbled in there upon the desolate sands, and the contrast of the scene
with those which we had been of late familiar with made the latter, no
doubt, start forward intensely in the romancer's imagination. So there
he wrote and wrote; and he walked far along the sands, with his boy
dogging his steps and stopping for shells and crabs; and at a certain
point of the beach, where the waves ran over a bar and formed a lake a
few feet in depth, he would seat himself on a tussock of sand-grass,
and I would undress and run into the cold water and continue my
swimming-lessons, which had been begun in Stockbridge Bowl, continued in
Lake Leman, and were now brought to a satisfactory conclusion. Both my
feet were finally off the bottom, and I felt the wonderful sensation of
the first cousin to flying. While I floundered there my father looked
off towards the gray horizon, and saw the visions of Hilda, Miriam,
Kenyon, and Donatello which the world of readers was presently to behold
through his eyes. As we walked home in the twilight, the dull-red glow
of the sunset would throw the outlines of the town into dark shadows,
and shed a faint light on the surf roaming in from the east. I found,
in my old album, the black silhouette of the scene which I made one day.
The arms of an old mill are flung appealingly upward, the highest object
of the landscape, above the irregular sky-line of the clustering houses.
There is also, on the next page, a water-color drawing of a sailor in a
blue jersey and a sou'wester, standing, with his hands in his pockets,
on the beach beside one of the boats of the region--a slender,
clipper-built craft, painted yellow below and black above, good for oars
or sail. Her bow rests on a shaft connecting two wheels, for convenience
of running her down into the water. There was a dozen or more of these
boats always ready on the beach in front of our lodgings. These lodgings
were just back of the esplanade, which, during our sojourn, was treated
to a coat of tar from end to end--a delightful entertainment for us
children--and I have loved the smell of tar ever since. There is little
else that I remember about Redcar, except that, in the winter, there
was skating on a part of the beach; but it was "salt ice," and not to be
compared with the skating I was to enjoy a year or two later in Concord,
which I shall describe if ever I come to that epoch in my narrative.
From Redcar, with the romance more than half done, we went south to our
old Leamington, which seemed half like home; and there the loveliness of
an English spring at its best came to greet us, and there the book was
finished, and sent to the printer. We spent a month or two at Bath, and
found it very pleasant; my father rested from his labors, except the
proof-reading; and I was instructed in the use of the broadsword by an
old Peninsular officer, Major Johnstone, who had fought at Waterloo,
and had the bearing of such majors as Thackeray puts into Vanity Fair. I
once asked him whether he had ever killed a man; it was on the day when
he first allowed me to use a real broadsword in our lesson. "Well,"
replied the major, hesitatingly, "I was riding in a charge, and there
came a fellow at me, with his sword up, and made a swing for my head. I
dodged, and his blade just grazed me; but I let him have it, downright,
at the same moment, and I caught him where the neck joins the shoulder,
and he went down, and I went on, and what became of him I don't know; I
hope nothing serious!" The major sighed and looked serious himself. "And
was this the sword?" I demanded, balancing the heavy weapon in my hand.
"No--no--it wasn't that one," said the major, hastily. "I've never used
the other since! Now, then, sir, if you please, on guard!"
We went to London, and there were our old friends Bright and Bennoch,
and the Motleys appeared from Italy, and a book called (by the
publishers) Transformation came out in three volumes, being the latest
romance by the author of The Scarlet Letter. The title was not bestowed
with my father's consent. He had, at the publishers' request, sent them
a list of several titles, beginning with The Marble Faun, and among
others on the list was "The Faun's Transformation." The publishers took
the "Transformation," and left out "The Faun." My father laughed, but
let it go. The book was to come out under its proper title in America,
and he was indifferent as to what they called it in England.
The end of our tarrying in the Old World was now at hand. Seven years
had we lived there, and we were eager and yet loath to go. My father's
friends gathered about him, men who had hardly so much as heard his name
a little while ago, but who now loved him as a brother. For a few days
Mrs. Blodgett's hospitable face glowed upon us once more, and pale Miss
Williams, and trig little Miss Maria, and many of the old captains
whom we had known. It was the middle of June, and the sun shone even in
Liverpool. Our red-funnelled steamer lay at her moorings in the yellow
Mersey, with her steam up. It was not The Niagara, but on her bridge
stood our handsome little Captain Leitch, with his black whiskers,
smiling at us in friendly greeting. How much had passed since we had
seen him last! How much were we changed! What experiences lay behind us!
What memories would abide with us always! My father leaned on the rail
and looked across the river at the dingy, brick building, near the
wharves, where he had spent four wearisome but pregnant years. The big,
black steamer, with her little, puffing tug, slipped her moorings, and
slid slowly down the stream. After a few miles the hue of the water
became less turbid, the engines worked more rapidly and regularly.
Liverpool was now a smoky mass off our starboard quarter. It sank and
dwindled, till the smoke alone was left; the blue channel spread around
us; we were at sea, and home lay yonder, across three thousand miles
of tumbling waves. But my father still leaned on the rail, and looked
backward towards the old home that he loved and would never see again.
It was the hour for good-bye; there would come another hour for the
other home and for welcome.