Europe, as exhibited in his "English Note-Books" and "French and Italian
Note-Books." But in these records three things are especially
observable. He goes to Europe as unperturbed, with an individual mood as
easily sustained, as he would enter Boston or New York. He carries no
preconception of what may be the most admirable way of looking at it.
There has never been a more complete and charming presentment of a
multitude of ingenuous impressions common to many travellers of widely
differing endowment than here, at the same time that you have always
before you the finished writer and the possible romancer, who suddenly
and without warning flashes over his pages of quiet description a far,
fleeting light of delicious imagination. It is as if two brothers, one a
dreamer, and one a well-developed, intellectual, but slightly stoical
and even shrewd American, dealing exclusively in common-sense, had gone
abroad together, agreeing to write their opinions in the same book and
in a style of perfect homogeneity. Sometimes one has the blank sheet to
himself, sometimes the other; and occasionally they con each other's
paragraphs, and the second modifies the ideas of the first. It is
interesting to note their twofold inspection of Westminster Hall, for
example. The understanding twin examines it methodically, finding its
length to be eighty paces, and its effect "the ideal of an immense
barn." The reasoning and imagining one interposes to this, "be it not
irreverently spoken"; and also conjures up this splendid vision: "I
wonder it does not occur to modern ingenuity to make a scenic
representation, in this very hall, of the ancient trials for life or
death, pomps, feasts, coronations, and every great historic incident ...
that has occurred here. The whole world cannot show another hall such as
this, so tapestried with recollections." But in any case it is always
apparent that the thought is colored by a New World nurture. From this
freshness of view there proceeded one result, the searching,
unembarrassed, yet sympathetic and, as we may say, cordial criticism of
England in "Our Old Home." But it also gave rise to the second notable
quality, that exquisite apprehension of the real meaning of things
European, both institutions and popular manners and the varied products
of art. At times, Hawthorne seems to have been born for the one end of
adding this final grace of definition which he so deftly attaches to the
monuments of that older civilization. He brings a perception so keen and
an innate sympathy so true for everything beautiful or significant, that
the mere flowing out of this fine intellectual atmosphere upon the objects
before him invests them with a quality which we feel to be theirs, even
while we know that it could not have become _ours_ without his aid.
A breath of New England air touches the cathedral windows of the Old World,
and--I had almost said--bedims them with a film of evanescent frost-work;
yet, as that lingers, we suddenly discern through the veil a charm, a
legendary fascination in their deep-gemmed gorgeousness, which, although
we have felt it and read of it before, we never seized till now. I speak,
of course, from the American point of view; though in a great measure the
effect upon foreign readers may be similar. But I fancy a special
appropriateness for us in the peculiar mixture of estimation and
enthusiasm which forms the medium through which Hawthorne looks at the
spectacle of transatlantic life and its surroundings. He visits the
British Museum, and encounters only disappointment at the mutilated
sculptures of the Parthenon; but out of this confession, which is truth,
slowly arises the higher truth of that airy yet profound response with
which he greets the multiform mute company of marble or painted shapes
that form the real population of Rome.
Even there, he has much dissent to make, still; and we may not find
it at all essential or beneficial to follow each of his deviations
ourselves. But however we may differ with him, it is impossible not to
feel sure that within this circle of contradictions, of preference for
new frames and of his friend Thompson's pictures to all but a very few
of the old masters', somewhere within there is a perfectly trustworthy
aesthetic sensibility which grasps the "unwritten rules of taste," the
inmost truth of all art. This inmost secret is, however we may turn it,
a matter of paradox, and the moment it professes to be explained, that
moment are the gates of the penetralia shut upon us. The evasiveness and
the protest, then, with which Hawthorne discourses to himself as he
wanders through the galleries of Europe, are the trembling of the
needle, perfectly steadfast to the polar opposites of truth, yet
quivering as with a fear that it may be unsettled by some artificial
influence from its deep office of inner constancy. And as if, in this
singular world, all truth must turn to paradox at the touch of an index
finger, that almost faulty abstention from assuming the European tone
which has made Hawthorne the traveller appear to certain readers a
little crude,--that very air of being the uncritical and slightly
puzzled American is precisely the source of his most delightful
accuracies of interpretation.
The third greatest distinction of his foreign observation is its entire
freedom from specialism. Perhaps this cannot be made to appear more
clearly than in the contrast presented by his "English Note-Books" and
"Our Old Home" to Emerson's "English Traits," and Taine's "Notes on
England." The latter writer is an acute, alert, industrious, and
picturesque comparer of his own and a neighboring country, and is
accompanied by a light battery of literary and pictorial criticism,
detached from his heavier home armament. Emerson, on the other hand,
gives us probably the most masterly and startling analysis of a people
which has ever been offered in the same slight bulk, unsurpassed, too,
in brilliancy and penetration of statement. But the "English Traits" is
as clear, fixed, and accurate as a machinist's plan, and perhaps a
little too rigidly defined. Hawthorne's review of England, though not
comparable to Emerson's work for analysis, has this advantage, that its
outline is more flexible and leaves room for many individual
discriminations to which it supplies an easily harmonized groundwork.
Emerson and Taine give us their impressions of a foreign land: Hawthorne
causes us to inhale its very atmosphere, and makes the country ours for
the time being, rather than an alien area which we scrutinize in
passing. Yet here and there he partakes of the very qualities that are
dominant with Emerson and Taine. "Every Englishman runs to 'The Times'
with his little grievance, as a child runs to his mother," is as
epigrammatic as anything in "English Traits"; [Footnote: No one, I
think, has so well defined our relation to the English as Hawthorne, in
a casual phrase from one of his printed letters: "We stand in the light
of posterity to them, and have the privileges of posterity." This, on
London, ought to become proverbial: "London is like the grave in one
respect,--any man can make himself at home there; and whenever a man
finds himself homeless elsewhere, he had better die, or go to London."]
and there is a tendency in his pages to present the national character
in a concrete form, as the French writer gives it. But, in addition,
Hawthorne is an artist and a man of humor; and renders human character
with a force and fineness which give it its true value as being, after
all, far weightier and dearer to us than the most important or famous of
congealed _results_ of character. Withal a wide and keen observer
and a hospitable entertainer of opinions, he does not force these upon
us as final. Coming and going at ease, they leave a mysterious sense of
greater wisdom with us, an indefinable residue of refined truth.
It is a natural question, why did not Hawthorne write an English
romance, as well, or rather than an Italian one? More than half his stay
abroad was north of the Channel, and one would infer that there could
have been no lack of suggestion there. "My ancestor left England," he
wrote, "in 1630. I return in 1853. I sometimes feel as if I myself had
been absent these two hundred and twenty-three years, leaving England
just emerging from the feudal system, and finding it, on my return, on
the verge of republicanism." Herein lay a source of romantic
possibilities from which he certainly meant to derive a story. But the
greater part of his four years in England was spent in Liverpool, where
his consular duties suppressed fiction-making. [Footnote: And it was not
till he reached the villa of Montauto at Florence that he could write:--
"It is pleasant to feel at last that I am really away from America,--a
satisfaction that I never enjoyed as long as I stayed in Liverpool,
where it seemed to me that the quintessence of nasal and hand-shaking
Yankee-dom was continually filtered and sublimated through my consulate,
on the way outward and homeward. I first got acquainted with my own
countrymen there. At Rome, too, it was not much better. But here in
Florence, and in the summer-time, and in this secluded villa, I have
escaped out of all my old tracks, and am really remote."]
Hawthorne's genius was extremely susceptible to every influence about
it. One might liken its quality to that of a violin which owes its fine
properties to the tempering of time and atmosphere, and transmits
through its strings the very thrill of sunshine that has sunk into its
wood. His utterances are modulated by the very changes of the air. In
one of his letters from Florence he wrote:--
"Speaking of romances, I have planned two, one or both of which I could
have ready for the press in a few months if I were either in England or
America. But I find this Italian atmosphere not favorable to the close
toil of composition, although it is a very good air to dream in. I must
breathe the fogs of old England or the east-winds of Massachusetts, in
order to put me into working trim."
But though England might be his workshop for books dreamed of in Italy,
yet the aspect of English life seems much more fittingly represented by
his less excursively imaginative side, as in "Our Old Home," than in a
romance. Perhaps this is too ingenious a consolation; but I believe we
may much better spare the possible English romance, than we could have
foregone the actual Italian one.
In "The Marble Faun" Hawthorne's genius took a more daring and
impressive range than ever before, and showed conclusively--what,
without this testimony, would most likely have been questioned, or even
by some denied--that his previous works had given the arc of a circle
which no English or American writer of prose fiction besides himself has
even begun to span. It is not alone that he plucks from a prehistoric
time--"a period when man's affinity with nature was more strict, and his
fellowship with every living thing more intimate and dear"--this
conception of Donatello, the fresh, free, sylvan man untouched by sin or
crime. Donatello must rank with a class of poetic creations which has
nearly become extinct among modern writers: he belongs to the world of
Caliban, Puck, and Ariel. But besides this unique creation, the book
reveals regions of thought wide, ruin-scarred, and verdurously fair as
the Campagna itself, winning the mind back through history to the
primitive purity of man and of Christianity. I recoil from any attempt
at adequate analysis of this marvellous production, for it is one of
those works of art which are also works of nature, and will present to
each thoughtful reader a new set of meanings, according to his
individuality, insight, or experience. The most obvious part of the
theme is that which is represented in the title, the study of the Faun's
nature; and this embraces the whole question of sin and crime, their
origin and distinction. But it is not the case, as has been assumed,
that in this study the author takes the position of advocate to a theory
that sin was requisite to the development of soul in man. For, though he
shows that remorse developed in Donatello "a more definite and nobler
individuality," he also reminds us that "sometimes the instruction comes
without the sorrow, and oftener the sorrow teaches no lesson that abides
with us"; and he illustrates this in the exquisite height of
spirituality to which Hilda has attained through sinlessness. He is not,
I say, the advocate of a theory: this charge has been made by
self-confident critics, who saw only the one idea,--that of a
Beneficence which has so handled sin, that, instead of destroying man,
"it has really become an instrument most effective in the education of
intellect and soul." This idea is several times urged by Miriam and
Kenyon, but quickly rejected each time; first by Kenyon, and then by
Hilda; so that, while it is suggested, it is also shown to be one which
human nature cannot trust itself to dwell upon. But the real function of
the author is that of a profound religious teacher. The "Romance of
Monte Beni" is, as Miriam plainly says, the story of the fall of man
repeated. It takes us with fearless originality to the source of all
religious problems, affirming,--as one interpreter [Footnote: See an
unsigned article, "The Genius of Hawthorne," in the Atlantic Monthly for
September, 1868.] has said,--"the inherent freedom of man," and
illustrating how he may choose the good or the evil. Donatello is the
ideal of the childlike nature on the threshold of history who has lived
without choosing either, up to the time when his love and defence of
Miriam involve him in crime. Father Antonio, "the spectre of the
catacombs," and Miriam's persecutor, is the outcome of a continual
choice of evil and of utter degradation. These two extremes, more widely
asunder than Prospero and Caliban, Hawthorne has linked together in his
immense grasp of the inmost laws of life, and with a miraculous nicety
of artistic skill. Then comes Donatello's fall, illustrating the genesis
of sin from crime, in accordance with the Biblical story of Cain; and
this precipitates an examination, not only of the result upon Donatello
himself, but of the degree in which others, even the most guiltless, are
involved. There is first the reaction upon and inculpation of Miriam,
whose glance had confirmed Donatello's murderous intent; only a glance,
yet enough to involve her in the doom of change and separation--of sin
in short--which falls upon the Faun. And in Hilda's case, it is the
simple consciousness of another's guilt, which is "almost the same as if
she had participated" in it. The mutual relations of these persons, who
are made to represent the whole of society, afford matter for infinite
meditation, the artistic and moral abstract of which the author has
given.
But with this main theme is joined a very marvellous and intricate study
of the psychology of Beatrice Cenci's story, in a new form. Miriam is a
different woman placed in the same circumstances which made the Cenci
tragedy. In the "French and Italian Note-Books," Hawthorne describes the
look he caught sight of in Guido's picture,--that "of a being
unhumanized by some terrible fate, and gazing out of a remote and
inaccessible region, where she was frightened to be alone, but where no
human sympathy could reach her." It was of this single insight that both
Miriam and Hilda were born to his mind. He reproduces this description,
slightly modified, in the romance (Vol. I. Chap. XXIII.): "It was the
intimate consciousness of her father's guilt that threw its shadow over
her, and frightened her into" this region. Now, in the chapter called
"Beatrice," quite early in the story, he brings out between Miriam and
Hilda a discussion of Beatrice and her history. It is evident, from the
emphasis given by the chapter-title, that this subject is very deeply
related to the theme of the romance; and no theory can explain Miriam's
passionate utterances about the copy of Guido's portrait, except that
which supposes her own situation to be that of Beatrice. This chapter is
full of the strongest hints of the fact. Miriam's sudden resemblance to
the picture, at the instant when she so yearns to grasp the secret of
Beatrice's view of her own guilt or innocence; her ardent defence of
Beatrice's course, as "the best virtue possible under the
circumstances," when Hilda condemns it; her suggestion that, after all,
only a woman could have painted the poor girl's thoughts upon her face,
and that _she herself_ has "a great mind to undertake a copy,"
giving it "what it lacks";--all these things point clearly. But there is
a mass of inferential evidence, besides; many veiled allusions and
approaches to a revelation, as well as that very marked description of
the sketches in which Miriam has portrayed in various moods a "woman
acting the part of a revengeful mischief towards man," and the hint, in
the description of her portrait of herself, that "she might ripen to be
what Judith was, when she vanquished Holofernes with her beauty, and
slew him for too much adoring it." There is no need to pursue the proof
further: readers will easily find it on re-examining the book. But what
is most interesting, is to observe how Hawthorne has imagined two women
of natures so widely opposed as Hilda and Miriam under a similar
pressure of questionable blood-guiltiness. With Miriam, it is a guilt
which has for excuse that it was the only resort against an unnatural
depravity in Father Antonio. But as if to emphasize the indelibleness of
blood-stains, however justly inflicted, we have as a foil to Miriam the
white sensitiveness of Hilda's conscience, which makes her--though
perfectly free from even the indirect responsibility of Miriam--believe
herself actually infected. In both cases, it is the shadow of crime
which weighs upon the soul; but Miriam, in exactly the position of
Beatrice Cenci, is a more complex and deep-colored nature than she; and
Hilda, differently affected by the same question of conscience, is a
vastly spiritualized image of the historic sufferer. Miriam, after the
avenging of her nameless wrong, doubts, as Beatrice must have done,
whether there be any guilt in such avengement; but being of so different
a temperament, and having before her eyes the effect of this murder upon
the hitherto sinless Faun, the reality of her responsibility is brought
home to her. The clear conscience of Hilda confirms it. Thus by taking
two extremes on either side of Beatrice,--one, a woman less simply and
ethereally organized, and the other one who is only indirectly connected
with wrong or crime,--Hawthorne seems to extract from the problem of
Beatrice all its most subtle significance. He does not coldly condemn
Beatrice; but by re-combining the elements of her case, he succeeds in
magnifying into startling distinctness the whole awful knot of crime and
its consequence, which lies inextricably tangled up within it. How
different from Shelley's use of the theme! There is certainly nothing in
the "Marble Faun" to equal the impassioned expression of wrong, and the
piercing outcry against the shallow but awful errors of human justice,
which uplift Shelley's drama. But Shelley stops, on the one side, with
this climax:--
"O plead
With famine or wind-walking pestilence,
Blind lightning or the deaf sea, not with man!"
And on the side of the moral question, he leaves us with Beatrice's
characterization of the parricide,
"Which is, or is not, what men call a crime."
Hawthorne, on the contrary, starts from this latter doubt. "The foremost
result of a broken law," he says, "is ever an ecstatic freedom." But
instead of pausing to give this his whole weight, as Shelley does, he
distinctly pronounces the murder of Miriam's degraded father to be
crime, and proceeds to inquire how Miriam and Donatello may work out
their purification. So that if the first part of the romance is the Fall
of Man repeated, the second part is the proem to a new Paradise
Regained; and the seclusion of the sculptor and the Faun, and their
journey together to Perugia, seasoned with Kenyon's noble and
pure-hearted advice, compose a sort of seven-times-refined Pilgrim's
Progress. Apt culmination of a genius whose relations to Milton and
Bunyan we found to be so suggestive! The chief means which Kenyon offers
for regeneration is that Miriam and the Faun shall abandon any hope of
mutual joy, and consecrate themselves to the alleviation of misery in
the world. Having by violence and crime thrust one evil out of life,
they are now by patience and benevolence to endeavor to exorcise others.
At the same time, remarking that Providence has infinitely varied ways
of dealing with any deed, Hawthorne leaves a possibility of happiness
for the two penitents, which may become theirs as "a wayside flower,
springing along a path that leads to higher ends." But he also shows, in
Donatello's final delivering of himself up to justice, the wisdom of
some definite judgment and perhaps punishment bestowed by society. Thus,
avenues of thought are opened to us on every side, which we are at
liberty to follow out; but we are not forced, as a mere theorist would
compel us, to pursue any particular one to the exclusion of the others.
In all we may find our way to some mystic monument of eternal law, or
pluck garlands from some new-budded bough of moral truth. The romance is
like a portal of ebony inlaid with ivory,--another gate of
dreams,--swinging softly open into regions of illimitable wisdom. But
some pause on the threshold, unused to such large liberty; and these cry
out, in the words of a well-known critic, "It begins in mystery, and
ends in mist."
Though the book was very successful, few readers grasped the profounder
portions. It is a vast exemplar of the author's consummate charm as a
simple storyteller, however, that he exercised a brilliant fascination
over all readers, notwithstanding the heavy burden of uncomprehended
truths which they were obliged to carry with them. Some critics complain
of the extent to which Roman scenery and the artistic life in Rome have
been introduced; but, to my mind, there is scarcely a word wasted in the
two volumes. The "vague sense of ponderous remembrances" pressing down
and crowding out the present moment till "our individual affairs are but
half as real here as elsewhere," is essential to the perspective of the
whole; and nothing but this rich picturesqueness and variety could avail
to balance the depth of tragedy which has to be encountered; so that the
nicety of art is unquestionable. It is strange, indeed, that this great
modern religious romance should thus have become also the ideal
representative of ruined Rome--the home of ruined religions--in its
aesthetic aspects. But one instance of appreciation must be recorded
here, as giving the highest pitch of that delightful literary fellowship
which Hawthorne seems constantly to have enjoyed in England. His friend
John Lothrop Motley, the historian, wrote thus of "The Marble Faun,"
from Walton-on-Thames, March 29, 1860:--
"Everything that you have ever written, I believe, I have read many
times, and I am particularly vain of having admired 'Sights from a
Steeple,' when I first read it in the Boston 'Token,' several hundred
years ago, when we were both younger than we are now; of having detected
and cherished, at a later day, an old Apple-Dealer, whom, I believe, you
have unhandsomely thrust out of your presence, now that you are grown so
great. But the 'Romance of Monte Beni' has the additional charm for me,
that it is the first book of yours that I have read since I had the
privilege of making your personal acquaintance. My memory goes back at
once to those walks (alas, not too frequent) we used to take along the
Tiber, or in the Campagna; ... and it is delightful to get hold of the
book now, and know that it is impossible for you any longer, after
waving your wand as you occasionally did then, indicating where the
treasure was hidden, to sink it again beyond plummet's sound.
"I admire the book exceedingly.... It is one which, for the first
reading, at least, I didn't like to hear aloud.... If I were composing
an article for a review, of course, I should feel obliged to show cause
for my admiration; but I am only obeying an impulse. Permit me to say,
however, that your style seems, if possible, more perfect than ever.
Where, O where is the godmother who gave you to talk pearls and
diamonds?... Believe me, I don't say to you half what I say behind your
back; and I have said a dozen times that nobody can write English but
you. With regard to the story, which has been somewhat 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 suppose that nothing less than an illustrated edition, with
a large gallows on the last page, with Donatello in the most pensile of
attitudes,--his ears revealed through a white nightcap,--would be
satisfactory. 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 every-day romance.... The way
in which the two victims dance through the Carnival on the last day is
very striking. It is like a Greek tragedy in its effect, without being
in the least Greek."
To this Hawthorne replied from Bath (April 1, 1860); and Mr. Motley has
kindly sent me a copy of the letter.
MY DEAR MOTLEY:--You are certainly that Gentle Reader for whom all my
books were exclusively written. Nobody else (my wife excepted, who
speaks so near me that I cannot tell her voice from my own) has ever
said exactly what I loved to hear. It is most satisfactory to be hit
upon the raw, to be shot straight through the heart. It is not the
quantity of your praise that I care so much about (though I gather it
all up most carefully, lavish as you are of it), but the kind, for you
take the book precisely as I meant it; and if your note had come a few
days sooner, I believe I would have printed it in a postscript which I
have added to the second edition, because it explains better than I
found possible to do the way in which my romance ought to be taken....
Now don't suppose that I fancy the book to be a tenth part as good as
you say it is. You work out my imperfect efforts, and half make the book
with your warm imagination; and see what I myself saw, but could only
hint at. Well, the romance is a success, even if it never finds another
reader.
We spent the winter in Leamington, whither we had come from the
sea-coast in October. I am sorry to say that it was another winter of
sorrow and anxiety.... [The allusion here is to illness in the family,
of which there had also been a protracted case in Rome]. I have engaged
our passages for June 16th.... Mrs. Hawthorne and the children will
probably remain in Bath till the eve of our departure; but I intend to
pay one more visit of a week or two to London, and shall certainly come
and see you. I wonder at your lack of recognition of my social
propensities. I take so much delight in my friends, that a little
intercourse goes a great way, and illuminates my life before and
after....
Your friend,
NATH. HAWTHORNE.