Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) (741 page)

CHAPTER XVI

“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.”