Books: Hawthorne and His Circle
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Julian Hawthorne >> Hawthorne and His Circle
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Besides the Venus and the populace, we saw various particular persons.
I went with my father to the bank, and saw a clerk give him a long
roll of bright gold coins, done up in blue paper; and we visited, or
were visited by, a Miss MacDaniel and her mother, two Salem women, "of
plain, New England manners and appearance," wrote my father, "and they
have been living here for nearly two years. The daughter was formerly
at Brook Farm. The mother suffered so much from seasickness on the
passage that she is afraid to return to America, and so the daughter
is kept here against her will, and without enjoyment, and, as I judge,
in narrow circumstances. It is a singular misfortune. She told me that
she had been to the Louvre but twice since her arrival, and did not
know Paris at all." This looks like a good theme for Mr. Henry James.
We called on the American minister to Paris, Judge John Young Mason, a
simple and amiable personage. He was rubicund and stolid, and talked
like a man with a grievance; but, as my father afterwards remarked, it
was really Uncle Sam who was the aggrieved party, in being mulcted of
seventeen thousand dollars a year in order that the good old judge
should sleep after dinner in a French armchair. The judge was
anticipating being superseded in his post, but, as it turned out, was
not driven to seek second-rate employment to support himself in his
old age; he had the happiness to die in Paris the very next year.
But the most agreeable of our meetings was with Miss Maria Mitchell,
the astronomer, who, like ourselves, was stopping a few days in Paris
on her way to Rome. She desired the protection of our company on the
journey, though, as my father remarked, she looked well able to take
care of herself. She was at this time about forty years old; born in
Nantucket; the plainest, simplest, heartiest of women, with a face
browned by the sun, of which she evidently was accustomed to see as
much as of the other stars in the heavens. Her mouth was resolute and
full of expression; but her remarkable feature was her eyes, which
were dark and powerful, and had the kindest and most magnetic look of
comradeship in them. Her dark hair was a little grizzled. She was
dressed in plain gray, and was active and energetic in her movements.
She was, as the world knows, a woman of unusual intellect and
character; but she had lived alone with her constellations, having
little contact with the world or practical knowledge of it, so that in
many respects she was still as much a child as I was, and I
immediately knew her for my friend and playmate and loved her with all
my heart. There was a charming quaintness and innocence about her, and
an immense, healthy curiosity about this new old world and its
contents. She had a great flow of native, spontaneous humor, and could
say nothing that was not juicy and poignant. She was old-fashioned,
yet full of modern impulses and tendencies; warmhearted and impulsive,
but rich in homely common-sense. Though bold as a lion, she was,
nevertheless, beset with the funniest feminine timidities and
misgivings, due mainly, I suppose, to her unfamiliarity with the ways
of the world. There was already a friendship of long standing between
her and Miss Shepard, and they did much of their sightseeing during
the coming year together, and debated between themselves over the
statues and pictures. Her talk with us children was of the fine,
countrified, racy quality which we could not resist; and in the
evenings, as we journeyed along, she told us tales of the stars and
gave us their names. On the steamer going to Genoa, one night, she
pointed out to me the constellation Orion, then riding high aloft in
glittering beauty, and I kindly communicated to my parents the
information that the three mighty stars were known to men as O'Brien's
Belt. This was added to the ball of jolly as a household word.
[IMAGE: MARIA MITCHELL]
Miss Mitchell's trunk was contributed to our mountain, when we set out
anew on our pilgrimage, with a result at first deplorable, for the
number of our own pieces of luggage being known and registered in the
official documents, it turned out, at our first stopping-place, that
the trunk of our new companion had been substituted for one of our
own, which, of course, was left behind. It was ultimately recovered, I
believe, but it seemed as if the entire world of French officialdom
had to be upheaved from its foundations in order to accomplish it.
Our route lay through Lyons to Marseilles. At Lyons I remember only
the enormous hotel where we slept the first night, with corridors
wandering like interminable streets, up-stairs and down, turning
corners, extending into vistas, clean-swept, echoing, obscure, lit
only by the glimmering candle borne by our guide. We seemed to be
hours on our journey through these labyrinths; and when at last we
reached our rooms, they were so cold and so unwarmable that we were
fain to journey back again, up and down, along and athwart, marching
and countermarching past regiments of closed doors, until at length we
attained the region of the hotel dining-saloon, where it was at least
two or three degrees less cold than elsewhere. After dinner we had to
undertake a third peregrination to bed, and a fourth the next morning
to get our train. The rooms of the hotel were on a scale suited to
the length of the connecting thoroughfares, and the hotel itself stood
hard by a great, empty square with a statue in the middle of it. But
the meals were not of a corresponding amplitude. And I think it was at
the railway station of this town that the loss of the trunk was
discovered.
The region from Lyons to Marseilles, along the valley of the Rhone,
with the lower ranges of the Alps on our left hand, was much more
picturesque than anything France had shown us hitherto. Ancient
castles crowned many of the lower acclivities; there were villages in
the vales, and presently vineyards and olive groves. The Rhone, blue
and swift as its traditions demanded, kept us close company much of
the way; the whole range of country was made for summer, and the
wintry conditions under which we saw it seemed all the more improper.
It must have been near midnight when our train rolled into the station
at Marseilles, and my pleasure in "sitting up late" had long become
stale.
The sun shone the next morning, and, being now in the latitude of
Florence and such places, it could not help being hot, though the
shaded sides of the streets were still icy cold; and most of the
streets were so narrow that there was a great deal of shade. The
whole population seemed to be out-of-doors and collecting in the sun,
like flies, a very animated and voluble population and of a democratic
complexion; the proportion of poor folks was noticeable, and the
number of women, who seemed to camp out in the squares and
market-places, and there gossip and do their knitting, as other women
might at their firesides; but here the sun is the only fire. But a
good deal of the bustle this morning was occasioned by the news from
Paris that an attempt to assassinate Napoleon III. had been made the
day before; had we remained one day longer in Paris we might have
assisted at the spectacle. The Marseilles people seemed to take it
comfortably; nobody was very sorry that the attempt had been made, nor
very glad that it had not succeeded. It was something to talk about.
It was ten years more before the French got thoroughly used to the
nephew of his uncle and decided that he was, upon the whole, a good
thing; and soon after they lost him. And for a decade after Sedan,
chatting with the boulevardiers in Paris, they would commonly tell me
that they wished they had the empire back again. Perhaps they will
have it, some day.
There was a great deal of filth in Marseilles streets and along her
wharves and in the corners of her many public squares; and even our
hotel, the "Angleterre," was anything but clean; it was a tall, old
rookery, from the windows of our rooms in which I looked down into an
open space between the strange, old buildings, and saw a juggler do
his marvels on a bit of carpet spread on the pavement, while a woman
handed him the implements of magic out of a very much travelled and
soiled deal-box. Later in the day, when the place was deserted, I
heedlessly flung out of the window the contents of a glass of water,
and, looking after it in its long descent, I was horrified to see
approaching a man of very savage and piratical aspect, with a terrible
black beard and a slouch hat. As luck would have it, the water struck
him full on the side of the face, probably the first time in many a
year that he had felt the impact of the liquid there. I withdrew my
head from the window in alarm, mingled with the natural joy that a boy
cannot help feeling at such a catastrophe; and by-and-by, when I felt
certain that he must have passed on, I peeped out again, but what were
my emotions at beholding him planted terribly right under the window
where he had been baptized, and staring upward with a blood-thirsty
expression. I immediately drew back again, but too late--our eyes had
met, and he had made a threatening gesture at me. I now felt that a
very serious thing had happened, and that if I ventured out upon the
streets again I should assuredly be assassinated; that it would be no
mere attempt, as in the case of the Emperor, but a pronounced success.
I did not tell my fears to any of my family--I had not, to say the
truth, informed any of them of the incident which had imperilled my
life, but I no longer felt any curiosity to see more of Marseilles,
and was sincerely thankful when I found myself, betimes next morning,
on board the Calabrese, bound for Genoa. I never saw my murderer
again, but I could make a fair likeness of him, I believe, to-day.
The trip to Genoa, and onward to Civita Vecchia, lasted two or three
days, the steamer generally pursuing her course by night and laying up
by day.
The first morning, soon after sunrise, found us approaching the bay of
Genoa, with the sun rising over the Mediterranean on our right and
throwing its light upon the curving acclivity on which the city
stands. The water had a beautiful blue-green color and was wonderfully
clear, so that, looking down through it over the ship's side, as we
glided slowly to our moorings, I saw sea-weeds and blocks of marble
and other marine curiosities which reawakened my old passion for
aquariums. Indeed, to be candid with the reader--as is my study
throughout this narrative--nothing in Genoa the Superb itself has, I
find, remained with me so distinctly as that glimpse of the floor of
the bay through the clear sea-water. I did not care to go up into the
town and see the palaces and churches; I wanted to stay on the beach
and hunt for shells--Italian shells--and classical or mediaeval
sea-anemones. Of course, I had to go up into the town; and I saw, no
doubt, the churches and the palaces, with their rooms radiant with the
mellow brilliance of precious marbles and painted ceilings, and
statues and pictures, under the personal conduct of no less an
individual than Salvator Rosa himself--for that was the name of our
guide--and for years afterwards I never doubted that he was the
creator of the paintings which, in Rome and elsewhere, bore his
signature. I say I must have seen these things, but in memory I cannot
disentangle them from the innumerable similar objects which I beheld,
later, in other Italian cities; their soft splendor and beautiful art
could not hold their own for me beside that cool translucence of the
Mediterranean inlet, with its natural marvels dimly descried as'I bent
over the boat's side. It was for that, and not for the other, that my
heart yearned, and that became a part of me, all the more, no doubt,
that it was denied me. Our aim in the world is beauty and happiness;
but we are late in learning that they exist in the will and
imagination, and not in this or that accredited and venerable thing or
circumstance that is mechanically obtruded on our unready attention.
If you were put down in the Garden of Eden, and told that you might
stay there an hour and no more, what would you do? How would you
"improve" your time? Would you run to and fro, and visit the spot
where Adam first stood erect, and the place where he sat when he named
the animals, and the thymey bank on which he slept while Eve was
taking form from his rib, and the tree on which grew the fruit of the
knowledge of good and evil, and the precise scene of the temptation
and the fall, and the spot on which stood the altars on which Cain and
Abel offered their sacrifices, and where, presently, wrathful Cain
rose up against his brother and slew him? Would you make sure of all
these set sights in order that you might reply satisfactorily to the
cloud of interviewers awaiting you outside the Garden? Or would you
simply throw yourself down on the grass wherever the angel happened to
leave you, and try to see or to realize or to recall nothing, but
passively permit your soul to feel and experience and grow what way it
would, prompted by the inner voice and guided by the inner light,
heedless of what the interviewers were expecting and of what duty and
obligation and the unique opportunity demanded? It is worth thinking
about. It may be conceded that there is some risk to run.
I next find myself in a coach, with four horses harnessed to it,
trundling along the road from Civita Vecchia to Rome; for of Monaco I
recall nothing, nor of Leghorn; and though we passed within sight of
Elba, I saw only a lonely island on our starboard beam. As for the
coach, it was a necessity, if we would continue our journey, for the
railroad was still in the future in 1858. The coach-road was not only
as rugged and uneasy as it had been any time during the past three
hundred years, but it was outrageously infested by banditti; and,
indeed, a robbery had taken place on it only a week or two before. For
miles and miles on end it was totally destitute of dwellings, and
those that we saw might well have been the harboring-places of
iniquity. Moreover, we were so long delayed in making our start that
it was already afternoon before we were under way, and finally one of
our horses gave out ere we were many miles advanced, compelling us to
hobble along for the remainder of the trip at reduced speed. As the
shades of evening began to fall, we saw at intervals sundry persons
lurking along the roadway, clad in long cloaks and conical hats, with
the suggestion of the barrel of a musket about them, and it is
probable that we were preserved from a tragic fate only by the
fortunate accident that we were just behind the mail-coach and might
theoretically have hailed it for help had we been attacked. Meanwhile,
my father, with ostensible pleasantry, suggested that we should hide
our gold coin (of which we carried a considerable store) in various
queer, out-of-the-way receptacles. I remember that an umbrella was
filled with a handful or two of the shining pieces, and stuck with
studied carelessness through the straps in the roof of the vehicle.
This was regarded by us children as excellent sport, though I think
there was a lingering feeling of apprehension in the bottom of my
soul. My father kept a moderate sum in napoleons in his pockets, so
that, should the worst happen, the bandits might fancy it was our all.
But then there was our mountain of luggage, incredibly strapped on the
top of the conveyance, and behind it, and no reasonable bandits, one
would suppose, could have failed to be satiated with that. However, it
was written that we were to reach Rome unscathed, albeit long after
dark, and though we did not get past the Porta del Popolo without
suffering legalized robbery on the part of the custom-house officials.
But by that time we were so weary, downcast, and chilled that
depredation and outrage could not rouse or kindle us.
We ended, at last, in one of those refrigerator hotels to which our
travels had made us accustomed, in one of the hollow, dull, untoward
caverns of which I was presently put to bed and to sleep. "Oh, Rome,
my country, City of the Soul!" Oh, Byron, were you an Esquimau?
XIV
Our unpalatial palace--"Cephas Giovanni"--She and George Combe turned
out to be right--A rousing temper--Bright Titian hair--"All that's
left of him"--The pyramidal man of destiny--The thoughts of a boy are
long, long thoughts--Clausilia Bubigunia--Jabez Hogg and the
microscope--A stupendous surprise--A lifetime in fourteen months--My
father's jeremiades--"Thank Heaven, there is such a thing as
whitewash!"--"Terrible lack of variety in the old masters"--"The
brazen trollop that she is!"--Several distinct phases of
feeling--Springs of creative imagination roused--The Roman fever--A
sad book--Effects of the death-blow--The rest is silence.
We arrived in Rome on the 17th of January, 1858, at eleven o'clock at
night. After a day or two at Spillman's Hotel, we moved into lodgings
in the Via Porta Pinciana, the Palazzo Larazani. The street extended
just below the ridge of the Pincian Hill, and was not far from the
broad flight of steps mounting upward from the Piazza d' Espagna, on
the left as you go up. In spite of its resounding name, our new
dwelling had not a palatial aspect. It was of no commanding height or
architectural pretensions; a stuccoed edifice, attached on both sides
to other edifices. The street, like other Roman streets, was narrow;
it was dirty like them, and, like them, was paved with cobble-stones.
The place had been secured for us by (I think) our friends the
Thompsons; Mr. Thompson--the same man who had painted my father's
portrait in 1853--had a studio hard by. The Thompsons had been living
in Rome for five years or more, and knew the Roman ropes. They were
very comfortable people to know; indeed, Rome to me would have been a
very different and less delightful place without them, as will
hereafter appear. The family consisted of Cephas Giovanni Thompson,
the father and artist; his wife and his two sons and one daughter.
"Cephas Giovanni," being interpreted, means plain Peter John; and it
was said (though, I believe, unjustifiably) that Peter John had been
the names originally given to Thompson by his parents at the
baptismal-font, but that his wife, who was a notable little woman, a
sister of Anna Cora Mowatt, the actress, well known in America and
England seventy years ago, had persuaded him to translate them into
Greek and Italian, as more suitable to the romantic career of an
artist of the beautiful. I fancy the story arose from the fact that
Mrs. Thompson was a woman who, it was felt, might imaginably conceive
so ambitious a project. She was small, active, entertaining, clever,
and "spunky," as the New-Englanders would have said; indeed, she had a
rousing temper, on occasion. Her husband, on the other hand, had the
mildest, wisely smiling, philosophic air, with a low, slow voice, and
a beard of patriarchal fashion and size, though as yet it was a rich
brown, with scarcely a thread of silver in it. Brown and abundant,
also, was his hair; he had steady, bright, brown eyes, and was rather
under the average height of Anglo-Saxon man. But for all this
mild-shining aspect of his, his dark eyebrows were sharply arched, or
gabled rather; and my mother, who had absorbed from her former friend,
George Combe, a faith in the betrayals of phrenology, expressed her
private persuasion that good Mr. Thompson had a temper, too. She and
George Combe turned out to be right in this instance, though I am not
going to tell the tale of how we happened to be made acquainted with
the fact. Little thunder-storms once in a while occur in human skies
as well as in the meteorological ones; and the atmosphere is
afterwards all the sweeter and softer. No people could be more good,
honest, and kind than the Thompsons.
There was no other artist in Rome who could paint as well as Mr.
Thompson. That portrait of my father, to which reference has been
made, which now hangs in my house, looks even better, as a painting,
to-day than it did when it was fresh from his easel. Rubens could not
have laid on the colors with more solidity and with truer feeling for
the hues of life. But the trouble with Thompson was that he had never
learned how to draw correctly; and this defect appeared to some extent
in his portraits as well as in his figures. The latter were graceful,
significant, full of feeling and character; but they betrayed a
weakness of anatomical knowledge and of perspective. They had not the
conventional incorrectness of the old masters preceding Raphael, but
an incorrectness belonging personally to Thompson; it was not
excessive or conspicuous to any one, and certainly not to Thompson
himself. But his color redeemed all and made his pictures permanently
valuable. He was at this time painting a picture of Saint Peter being
visited by an angel, which was rich and beautiful; and he had some
sketches of a series based on Shakespeare's Tempest; and standing on
one side in the studio was a glowing figure of a woman in Oriental
costume, an odalisque, or some such matter, which showed that his
sympathy with life was not a restricted one. Later in our acquaintance
he fell in love with the bright Titian hair of my sister Rose, and
made a little portrait of her, which was one of his best likenesses,
apart from its admirable color; it even showed the tears in the
child's eyes, gathering there by reason of her antipathy to posing.
Cora Thompson, the daughter, was the most good-natured and
sunny-tempered of girls; she may have been fifteen at this time; she
inherited neither the handsomeness of her father nor the sharp-edged
cleverness of her mother; but she was lovable. Of the two boys, the
younger was named Hubert; he was about ten years old, small of his
age, and not robust in make or constitution. He was, however, a smart,
rather witty youth, a little precocious, perhaps, and able to take
care of himself. Some five and twenty years after the date of which I
am now writing I was at a large political dinner in New York and was
there introduced to a Mr. Thompson, who was the commissioner of public
works, and a party boss of no small caliber and power. He was an
immense personage, physically likewise, weighing fully three hundred
pounds, and, though not apparently advanced in years, a thorough man
of the world and of municipal politics. After we had conversed for a
few minutes, I was struck by a certain expression about my
interlocutor's eyebrows that recalled long-forgotten days and things.
I remembered that his name was Thompson, and had an impression that
his initials were H. O. "Are you little Hubert Thompson?" I suddenly
demanded. "Why, of course I am--all that's left of him!" he replied,
with a laugh. So this was the boy whom, a quarter of a century before,
I could have held out at arm's-length. We talked over the old days
when we played together about the Roman streets and ruins. Nothing
more reveals the essential strangeness of human life than this meeting
after many years with persons we have formerly known intimately, who
are now so much changed in outward guise. We feel the changes to be
unreal, and yet, there they are! Grover Cleveland was being groomed
for his first Presidential term then; Hubert was one of his supporters
in New York, and he presented me to the pyramidal man of destiny.
Poor Hubert died, lamentably, not long after. He was a good and
affectionate son. He was perhaps too kind-hearted and loyal for the
political role which he enacted.
The elder Thompson boy was called Edmund, or, in my vernacular, Eddy.
There were in his nature a gravity, depth, and sweetness which won my
heart and respect, and we became friends in that intimate and complete
way that seems possible only to boys in their early teens. For that
matter, neither of us was yet over twelve; I think Eddy was part of a
year my junior. But you must search the annals of antiquity to find
anything so solid and unalterable as was our friendship. He was the
most absolutely good boy I ever knew, but by no means goody-goody; he
had high principles, noble ambitions, strong affections, the sweetest
of tempers; his seriousness formed a healthy foil to my own more
impetuous and hazardous character. "The thoughts of a boy are long,
long thoughts"; and not in many long lifetimes could a tithe of the
splendid projects we resolved upon have been carried out. We were
together from morning till night, month after month; we walked
interminably about Rome and frequented its ruins, and wandered far out
over the Campagna and along the shores of famous Tiber. We picked up
precious antique marbles, coins, and ancient curiosities of all sorts;
we hunted for shells and butterflies and lizards; our hearts were
uplifted by the martial music of the French army bands, which were
continually resounding throughout Rome; and we admired the gleaming
swords of the officers and the sharp, punctual drill and marching of
the red-legged rank and file. We haunted the lovely Villa Borghese,
the Pincian Hill, the Villa Pamphili Doria; we knew every nook and
cranny of the Palace of the Csesars, the Baths of Caracalla, the Roman
Forum, the Coliseum, the Egerian Grove; we were familiar with every
gate that entered Rome; we drank at every fountain; we lingered
through the galleries of the Vatican and of the Capitol; we made St.
Peter's Church our refuge in inclement weather; we threaded every
street and by-way of the city; we were on friendly and confidential
terms with the custode of every treasure. And all the time we talked
about what we thought, what we felt, what we would do; there is no
looking backward in boys' confidences; they live in the instant
present and in the infinite future. Eddy and I arranged to spend one
lifetime in Central Africa, in emulation of the exploits of David
Livingstone; there, freed from all civilized burdens, we would live,
and we would run, catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl our lances
in the sun. At another epoch of our endless lives we would enter the
army and distinguish ourselves in heroic war; we would have swords
like sunbeams and ride steeds like Bucephalus. Then, and interleaved
with all this, as it were, there was an immense life of natural
history; we would have a private museum to rival the famous ones of
nations. Eddy was especially drawn towards insects, while my own
predilection was still for conchology; and both of us spent hours
every week in classifying and arranging our respective collections,
not to speak of the time we devoted to hunting for specimens. Eddy
had a green net at the end of a stick, and became very skilful in
making his captures; and how we triumphed over a "swallow-tail," so
difficult to catch, or an unfamiliar species! Eddy had his pins and
his strips of cork, and paper boxes; and his collections certainly
were fairer to look upon, to the ordinary view, than mine; moreover,
his was the more scientific mind and the nicer sense of order. For the
display of my snail-shells I used bits of card-board and plenty of
gum-arabic; and I was affluent in "duplicates," my plan being to get a
large card and then cover it with specimens of the shell, in serried
ranks. I also called literature to my aid, and produced several little
books containing labored descriptions of my collection, couched, so
far as possible, in the stilted and formal phraseology of the
conchological works to which I had access, but with occasional
outbursts after a style of my own. Here is a chapter from one of them;
a pen-and-ink portrait of the shell is prefixed to the original essay:
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