Books: Hawthorne and His Circle
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Julian Hawthorne >> Hawthorne and His Circle
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"CLAUSILIA BUBIGUNIA
"This handsome and elegant little shell is found in mossy places, or
in old ruins, such as the Coliseum--where it is found in immense
numbers--or the Palace of the Caesars. But in Italy it is common in
any mossy ruin, in the small, moss-covered holes, where it is seen at
the farthest extremity. After a rain they always crawl out of their
places of concealment in such numbers that one would think it had been
raining clausilias. The shell, in large and fine specimens, is
five-eighths of an inch in length. The young are very small and look
like the top part of the spire of the adults. This shell is also
largest in the middle, shaped something like a grain of wheat. It has
nine whorls, marked by small white lines, which look like fine white
threads of sewing-cotton; and just below them are marks which look
like very fine and very small stitches of white cotton. The color of
the shell, down to next to the last whorl, is a brown color, but the
very last whorl is a little lighter. The shell is covered all over
with fine lines, but they need to be looked at through a
magnifying-glass, they are so fine. The lip is turning out, and very
thin; inside there are three ridges, two on the top part of the mouth,
and the other, which is very small, is below. The shell, when the
animal is out of it, is semi-transparent, and the little colomella, or
pillar, can be indistinctly seen through."
There follows a detailed and loving description of the animal
inhabiting the shell, which I must reserve for a future edition. Of
another species of snail, Helix strigata, our learned author observes
that "This shell is, when dead, one of those which is found on the
banks of the Tiber. It is a strange circumstance that, although it is
a land shell, it should be found more on the banks of a river than
anywhere else, and also only on the banks of the Tiber, for it is not
found on the banks of any other river. Any one would think that dead
shells were gifted with the power of walking about, for certainly it
is an inexplicable wonder how they got there." Of Helix muralis we are
informed that "The Romans eat these snails, not the whole of them, but
only their feet. In ancient times the most wealthy people used to eat
snails, and perhaps they ate the very ones which the poorest people
eat nowadays. It is most probable, for there are a great many
different kinds of snails round Rome, and the Romans would probably
select the best." I may perhaps be permitted to remark that the correct
orthography of this writer fills me with astonishment, inasmuch as in
later life I have reason to know that he often went astray in this
respect. Of the uniform maturity of the literary style, I have no need
to speak.
Eddy's father was in the habit of giving him an income of two or three
pauls a week, dependent on his good behavior and punctual preparation
of his lessons; and since Eddy was always well behaved and faithful in
his studies, the income came in pretty regularly. Eddy saved up this
revenue with a view to buying himself a microscope, for the better
prosecution of his zoological labors; being, also, stimulated thereto
by the fact that I already possessed one of these instruments, given
me by my father a year or two before. Mine cost ten shillings, but
Eddy meant to get one even more expensive. I had, too, a large volume
of six hundred pages on The Microscope, Its History, Construction, and
Uses, by Jabez Hogg, the contents of which I had long since learned by
heart, and which I gladly communicated to my friend. At length Eddy's
economies had proceeded so far that he was able to calculate that on
his twelfth birthday he would possess a fortune of five scudi, and he
decided that he would buy a microscope at that figure; it is needless
to add that the microscope had long since been selected in the shop,
and was decidedly superior to mine. We could hardly contain our
impatience to enter upon the marvellous world whereof this instrument
was the key; that twelfth birthday seemed long in coming, but at last
it came.
I was to go with my friend to the shop to see him make the purchase;
and I was at his house betimes in the morning. But what a stupendous
surprise awaited me! Eddy was too much excited to say anything; with a
face beaming with emotion, he led me into the sitting-room, and there,
upon the table, was a microscope. But such a microscope! It was of
such unheard-of magnificence and elaborateness that it took my breath
away, and we both stood gazing at it in voiceless rapture. It was tall
and elegant, shining with its polished brass and mirrors, and its
magnifying powers were such as to disclose to us the very heart of
nature's mystery. It was quiet Mr. Thompson's birthday present to his
son. That gentleman sat smiling in his armchair by the window, and
presently he said, with a delightful archness, "Well, Eddy, I suppose
you are ready to give me back all that money you've been collecting?"
Eddy grinned radiantly. He spent his savings for microscope-slides
and other appurtenances, and for weeks thereafter he could hardly take
his eye away from the object-lens. He was luminous with happiness, and
I reflected his splendor from my sympathetic heart. Dear old Eddy! In
after years he entered West Point and became a soldier, and he died
early; I never saw him after parting from him in Italy in 1859. But he
is still my first friend, and there has been no other more dear.
I am not aware that Rome has ever been described from the point of
view of a twelve-year-old boy, and it might be worth doing; but I have
delayed attempting it somewhat too long; the moving pictures in my
mind have become too faded and confused. And yet I am surprised at the
minuteness of some of my recollections; they have, no doubt, been kept
alive by the numerous photographs of Rome which one carries about, and
also by the occasional perusal of The Marble Faun and other Roman
literature. But much is also due to the wonderful separateness which
Rome retains in the mind. It is like nothing else, and the spirit of
it is immortal. It seems as if I must have lived a lifetime there; and
yet I cannot make out that our total residence in the city extended
over fourteen months. Certainly no other passage of my boyhood time
looms so large or is rooted so deep.
But the passion for Rome (unless one be a Byron) is not a plant of
sudden growth, and I dare say that, during those first frigid weeks, I
may have shared my father's whimsical aversion to the city. He has
described, in his journals, how all things seemed to be what they
should not; and he was terribly disgusted with the filth that defiled
the ruins and the street corners. He was impressed by the ruins, but
deplored their nakedness. "The marble of them grows black or brown, it
is true," says he, "and shows its age in that way; but it remains hard
and sharp, and does not become again a part of nature, as stone walls
do in England; some dry and dusty grass sprouts along the ledges of a
ruin, as in the Coliseum; but there is no green mantle of ivy
spreading itself over the gray dilapidation." We stumbled upon the
Fountain of Trevi in one of our early rambles, not knowing what it
was. "One of these fountains," writes my father, referring to it,
"occupies the whole side of a great edifice, and represents Neptune
and his steeds, who seem to be sliding down with a cataract that
tumbles over a ledge of rocks into a marble-bordered lake, the
whole--except the fall of water itself--making up an exceedingly
cumbrous and ridiculous affair." He goes to St. Peter's, and "it
disappointed me terribly by its want of effect, and the little justice
it does to its real magnitude externally; as to the interior, I am not
sure that it would not be even more grand and majestic if it were less
magnificent, though I should be sorry to see the experiment tried. I
had expected something dim and vast, like the great English
cathedrals, only more vast and dim and gray; but there is as much
difference as between noonday and twilight." The pictures, too, were
apt in these first days to go against the grain with him.
Contemplating a fresco representing scenes in purgatory, he broke
forth: "I cannot speak as to the truth of the representation, but, at
all events, it was purgatory to look at this poor, faded rubbish.
Thank Heaven, there is such a thing as whitewash; and I shall always
be glad to hear of its application to old frescoes, even at the
sacrifice of remnants of real excellence!" Such growlings torture the
soul of the connoisseur; but the unregenerate man, hearing them, leaps
up and shouts for joy. He found the old masters, in their sacred
subjects, lacking in originality and initiative; and when they would
represent mythology, they engendered an apotheosis of nakedness. His
conclusion was that "there is something forced, if not feigned, in our
taste for pictures of the old Italian school." Of the profane
subjects, he instances the Fornarina, "with a deep bright glow on her
face, naked below the waist, and well pleased to be so, for the sake
of your admiration--ready for any extent of nudity, for love or
money--the brazen trollop that she is! Raphael must have been capable
of great sensuality to have painted this picture of his own accord,
and lovingly." These are the iconoclasms of the Goth and Vandal at
their first advent to Rome. They remained to alter their mood, and
extol what they had before assaulted; and so did my father, as we
shall see presently. But at first he was sick and cold and
uncomfortable; and he consoled himself by hitting out at everything,
in the secret privacy of his diary, since opened to the world. With
warmer weather came equanimity and kinder judgments; but there is a
refreshing touch of truth and justice even in these mutterings of
exasperation.
It was not so much, I suppose, that Rome was cold as that my father
had expected it to be otherwise. When one is in a place where
tradition and association invite the soul forth to be warmed and
soothed and rejoiced, and the body, venturing out, finds nothing but
chill winds and frigid temperature and discomfort, the shock is much
greater and more disagreeable than if one had been in some northern
Canada or Spitzbergen, where such conditions are normal. Ice in the
arctic circle is all right and exhilarating, but in the Piazza of St.
Peter's it is an outrage, and affects the mind and heart even more
than the flesh.
Circumstances caused my father to pass through several distinct phases
of feeling while he was in Rome. First, his own indisposition and the
inclement weather depressed and exasperated him.
Time, in due course, brought relief in these respects, and he began to
enjoy himself and his surroundings. Anon, the springs of creative
imagination, long dormant in him, were roused to activity by thoughts
connected with the Faun of Praxiteles in the Capitol. He now became
happy in the way of his genius and immediately took a new interest in
all things, looking at them from the point of view of possible
backgrounds or incidents for the romance which had begun to take form
in his mind. He describes what he saw con amore, and all manner of
harmonious ideas bloom through his thoughts, like anemones and other
flowers in the Villa Pamphili and the Borghese. This desirable mood
continued until, after our return to Rome from the Florentine visit,
my sister caught the Roman fever. She lay for weeks in danger of
death; and her father's anxiety about her not only destroyed in him
all thoughts of literary production and care for it, but made even
keeping his journal no longer possible for him. That strain, so long
continued, broke him down, and he never recovered from it so as to be
what he had been before. Nevertheless, when she became convalescent,
the reaction from his dark misgivings made him, for a time, as
light-hearted as a boy; and, the carnival happening to be coincident
with her recovery, he entered into the fun of it with a zest and
enjoyment that surprised himself. But, again, it presently became
evident that her recovery was not complete, and probably never would
be so; the injury to her health was permanent, and she was liable to
recurrences of disease. His spirits sank again, not so low as before,
but, on the other hand, they never again rose to their normal level.
It was in this saddened mood that he once more took up the Roman
romance and finished it; it is a sad book, and when there is a ray of
sunshine across the page, it has a melancholy gleam. After we
returned to Concord, his apprehensions concerning Una's unsound
condition were confirmed; and, in addition, the bitter cleavage
between North and South inspired in him the gloomiest forebodings. A
wasting away of his whole physical substance ensued; and he died,
almost suddenly, while in years he might be considered hardly past the
prime of his life. A sensitive eye can trace the effects of the
death-blow all through The Marble Faun, and still more in Septimius
and Grimshawe, published after his death. In The Dolliver Romance
fragment, which was the last thing he wrote, there is visible once
more some reminiscence of the old sunshine of humor that was so often
apparent in his time of youth and vigor; but it, too, has a sad touch
in it, such as belongs to the last rays of the star of day before it
sinks below the horizon forever. Night follows, and the rest is
silence.
XV
The Roman carnival in three moods--Apples of Sodom--Poor, battered,
wilted, stained hearts--A living protest and scourge--Dulce est
desipere in loco--A rollicking world of happy fools--Endless sunshine
of some sort--Greenwich Fair was worth a hundred of it--They thundered
past, never drawing rein--"Senza moccolo!"--Nothing more charming and
strange could be imagined--Girls surprised in the midst of dressing
themselves--A Unitarian clergyman with his fat wife--Apparent license
under courteous restraint--He laughed and pelted and was
pelted--William Story, as vivid as when I saw him last--A too facile
power--A deadly shadow gliding close behind--Set afire by his own
sallies--"Thy face is like thy mother's, my fair child!"--Cleopatra in
the clay--"War nie sein Brod mit thranen ass."
THE Roman carnival opened about a month after our arrival in Rome. The
weather was bad nearly all the time, and my father's point of view was
correspondingly unsympathetic. The contrast between his mood now and a
year later, when he was not only stimulated by his daughter's recovery
from illness, but, also, was looking at everything rather as the
romancer than as the man, is worth bringing out. My father likewise
describes the carnival in the romance; there we see it in a third
phase--as art. But the passages in the note-books are written from the
realistic stand-point. In her transcriptions of the journals for the
press my mother was always careful to omit from the former everything
that had been "used" in the book; the principle, no doubt, was sound,
but it might be edifying for once, in a way, to do just the opposite,
in order to mark, if we choose to take the trouble, what kind of
changes or modifications Hawthorne the romancer would make in the work
of my father the observer of nature. Take your Marble Faun and turn to
two of the latter chapters and compare them with the corresponding
pages in my excerpts from the journals in the Biography. In the latter
you will find him always in a critical and carping humor; seeing
everything with abundant keenness, but recognizing nothing worth while
in it. The bouquets, he noticed, for example, were often picked up out
of the street and used again and again; "and," he adds, "I suppose
they aptly enough symbolized the poor, battered, wilted, stained
hearts that had flown from one hand to another along the muddy pathway
of life, instead of being treasured up in one faithful bosom. Really,
it was great nonsense."
It is true--such uncongenial interpretation--if you feel that way
about it. And I remember, in my rambles along the famous thoroughfare,
seeing a saturnine old fellow in a dingy black coat and slouch hat,
with a sour snarl on his unprepossessing features, who made it his
business, all day, to cuff and kick the little boys whom he caught
throwing confetti, or picking up the fallen bouquets, and to shove the
latter down into the sewer which ran beneath the street, through the
apertures opening underneath the curb. He seemed to have stationed
himself there as a living protest and scourge against and of the whole
spirit of the carnival; to hate it just because the rest of the world
enjoyed it, and to wish that he might make everybody else as miserable
and uncharitable as he was. He was like a wicked and ugly Mrs.
Partington, trying to sweep back the Atlantic of holiday merriment
with his dirty mop. But this crabbed humor of his, while it made him
conspicuous against the broad background of gayety, of course had no
effect on the gayety itself. The flood of laughter, jocundity, and
semi-boisterous frolic continued to roll up and down the Corso all day
long, never attempting to be anything but pure nonsense, indeed, but
achieving, nevertheless, the wise end of nonsense in the right time
and place--that of refreshing and lightening the mind and heart. Dulce
est desipere in loco--that old saw might have been made precisely to
serve as the motto of the Roman carnival; and very likely it was
actually suggested to its renowned author by some similar sport
belonging to the old Roman days, before Christianity was thought of.
The young fellows--English, American, or of whatever other
nationality--would stride up and down the overflowing street hour
after hour, clad in linen dust-coats down to their heels, with a bag
of confetti slung on one side and another full of bouquets on the
other; and they would plunge a warlike hand into the former and hurl
ammunition at their rivals; or they would, pick out a bunch of flowers
from the latter for a pretty girl--not that the flowers were worth
anything intrinsically, nor was that their fault--but just to show the
fitting sentiment. There was only one rule, the unwritten one that
everybody was to take everything that came with a smile or a laugh,
and never get angry at anything; and this universal good-humor lifted
the whole affair into a wholesome and profitable sphere. Then there
was the double row of carriages forever moving in opposite directions,
and passing within easy arm's-reach of each other; and the jolly
battle was waged between their occupants, with side conflicts with the
foot-farers at the same time. And as the same carriages would repass
one another every forty minutes or so, the persons in them would soon
get to recognize one another; and, if they were of the sterner sex,
they would be prepared to renew desperate battle; or if there was a
pretty girl or two in one of them, she would be the recipient of a
deluge of flowers or of really pretty bonbons. It was all play, all
laughter, all a new, rollicking world of happy fools, of comic
chivalry, of humorous gallantry. For my part, I thought it was the
world which I had been born to live in; and I was too happy in it to
imagine even that anybody could be less happy than I was. My sole
grief was when my supply of confetti had given out, and I had no money
to buy more. I used to look at those great baskets at the
street-corners, filled with the white agglomeration, with longing
eyes, and wish I had it all in my pockets. I picked up the fallen
bouquets, muddy or not, with no misgiving, and flung them at the girls
with the unquestioning faith of boyhood. I looked up at the people in
the windows and on the draped balconies with romantic emotions, and
exchanged smiles and beckonings with them. The February days were
never long enough for me; I only wished that the whole year was made
up of those days; if it rained, or was cold, I never knew it. There
was an endless sunshine of some sort which sufficed for me. But my
father, at this epoch, could catch not a glimpse of it. "I never in my
life knew a shallower joke than the carnival at Rome; such a rainy and
muddy day, too; Greenwich Fair (at the very last of which I assisted)
was worth a hundred of it."
The masking day, and the ensuing night of the moccolo, were the
culminating features of the carnival; and it was on the afternoon of
this day, I think, that the horse-race, with bare-backed horses, took
place. The backs of these horses, though bare of riders, had attached
to them by strings little balls with sharp points in them, which, as
the horses ran, bobbed up and down, and did the office of spurs. The
race was preceded by a thundering gallop of cavalry down the whole
length of the Corso (the street having been cleared of carriages
beforehand), ostensibly to prevent anybody from being run over by the
race-horses; but, as a matter of fact, if any one were killed, it was
much more likely to be by the ruthless riding of these helmeted
dragoons than by the riderless steeds. They thundered past, never
drawing rein, no matter what stood or ran in their way; and then,
after an interval, during which the long crowds, packed back on the
opposite sidewalks, craned forward as far as they dared to see them,
came the eight or ten racers at a furious pace. They were come and
gone in a breath; and finally, after the body of them were passed,
came a laggard, who had been left at the post, and was trying to make
up for lost time. I believe it was this horse who actually killed
somebody on the course. The race over, back into the street thronged
the crowd, filling it from wall to wall; then there was a gradual
thinning away, as the people went home for supper; and finally came
the night and the moccoli, with the biggest crowd of all. I was there
with my twist of moccolo and a box of matches; except the moccoli,
there was no other illumination along the length of the Corso. But
their soft lights were there by myriads, and made a lovely sight, to
my eyes at least. "Senza moccolo!" was the universal cry; young
knights-errant, singly or in groups, pressed their way up and down,
shouting the battle-cry, and quenching all lights within reach, while
striving to maintain the flame of their own; using now the whisk of a
handkerchief, now a puff of breath, now the fillip of a finger;
contriving to extinguish a fair lady's taper with the same effusion of
vain words wherewith they told her of their passion. Most of the
ladies thus assailed sat in the lower balconies, elevated only a foot
or two above the level of the sidewalk; but those in the higher
retreats made war upon one another, and upon their own cavaliers; none
was immune from peril. The cry, uttered at once by such innumerable
voices far and near, made a singular murmur up and down the Corso; and
the soft twinkling of the lights, winking in and out as they were put
out or relighted, gave a singular fire-fly effect to the whole
illumination. It seemed to me then, and it still seems in the
retrospect, that nothing more charming and strange could be imagined;
and through it all was the constant blossoming of laughter, more
inextinguishable than the moccoletti themselves. The colors of the
tapestries and stuffs dependent from the windows and balconies glowed
out in light, or were dimmed by shadow; and the faces of the
thousandfold crowd of festival-makers glimmered forth and were lost
again on the background of the night, like the features of spirits in
the glimpses of a dream. How long it all lasted I know not; but it
had its term, like other mortal things, even in this fairyland of
carnival; and when the last light was out the carnival was no more,
and Lent, unawares, had softly settled down upon us with the darkness.
But let us now listen to my father when, for the second time, he made
proof of the carnival in the year following our return from Florence,
and after Una had left her sick-room and could be at his side. "The
weather has been splendid," he writes, "and the merriment far more
free and riotous than as I remember it in the preceding year. Tokens
of the festival were seen in flowers on street-stands, or borne aloft
on people's heads, while bushels of confetti were displayed, looking
like veritable sugarplums, so that a stranger might have thought that
the whole commerce and business of stern old Rome lay in flowers and
sweets. One wonders, however, that the scene should not be even more
rich and various when there has been so long a time (the immemorial
existence of the carnival) to prepare it, and adorn it with shapes of
gayety and humor. There was an infinite number of clowns and
particolored harlequins; a host of white dominoes; a multitude of
masks, set in eternal grins, or with monstrous noses, or made in the
guise of monkeys, bears, dogs, or whatever beast the wearer chooses to
be akin to; a great many men in petticoats, and almost as many girls
and women, no doubt, in breeches; figures, too, with huge, bulbous
heads and all manner of such easy monstrosities and exaggerations..
It is strange how the whole humor of the thing, and the separate humor
of each individual character, vanishes the moment I try to grasp it
and describe it; and yet there really was fun in the spectacle as it
flitted by--for instance, in the long line of carriages a company of
young men in flesh-colored tights and chemises, representing a party
of girls surprised in the midst of dressing themselves, while an old
nurse in the midst of them expressed ludicrous horror at their
predicament. Then the embarrassment of gentlemen who, while quietly
looking at the scene, are surrounded by groups of maskers, grimacing
at them, squeaking in their ears, hugging them, dancing round them,
till they snatch an opportunity to escape into some doorway; or when a
poor man in a black coat and cylinder hat is whitened all over with a
half-bushel of confetti and lime-dust; the mock sympathy with which
his case is investigated by a company of maskers, who poke their
stupid, pasteboard faces close to his, still with the unchangeable
grin; or when a gigantic female figure singles out some shy, harmless
personage, and makes appeals to his heart, avowing her passionate love
in dumb show, and presenting him with her bouquet; and a hundred other
nonsensicalities, among which the rudest and simplest are not the
least effective. A resounding thump on the back with a harlequin's
sword, or a rattling blow with a bladder half full of dried pease or
corn, answers a very good purpose. There was a good deal of absurdity
one day in a figure in a crinoline petticoat, riding on an ass and
almost filling the Corso with the circumference of crinoline from side
to side. Some figures are dressed in old-fashioned garbs, perhaps of
the last century, or, even more ridiculous, of thirty years ago, or in
the stately Elizabethan (as we should call them) trunk hose, tunics,
and cloaks of three centuries since. I do not know anything that I
have seen queerer than a Unitarian clergyman (Mr. Mountford), who
drives through the Corso daily with his fat wife in a one-horse
chaise, with a wreath of withered flowers and oak leaves round his
hat, the rest of his dress remaining unchanged, except that it is well
powdered with the dust of confetti. That withered wreath is the
absurdest thing he could wear (though, perhaps, he may not mean it to
be so), and so, of course, the best. I can think of no other masks
just now, but will go this afternoon and try to catch some more." You
see, he has that romance in view again. "Clowns, or zanies," he
resumes, after fresh inspection, "appear in great troupes, dancing
extravagantly and scampering wildly; everybody seems to do whatever
folly comes into his head; and yet, if you consider the matter, you
see that all this apparent license is kept under courteous restraint.
There is no rudeness, except the authorized pelting with confetti or
blows of harlequins' swords, which, moreover, are within a law of
their own. But nobody takes rough hold of another, or meddles with his
mask, or does him any unmannerly violence. At first sight you would
think that the whole world had gone mad, but at the end you wonder how
people can let loose all their mirthful propensities without
unchaining the mischievous ones. It could not be so in America or in
England; in either of those countries the whole street would go mad in
earnest and come to blows and bloodshed were the populace to let
themselves loose to the extent we see here. All this restraint is
self-imposed and quite apart from the presence of the soldiery."
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