Books: Hawthorne and His Circle

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My father enjoyed the church more after each visit to it. But it was
the confessionals and their significance that most interested him.
"What an institution the confessional is! Man needs it so, that it
seems as if God must have ordained it." And he dwells upon the idea
with remarkable elaboration and persistence. Those who have followed
the painful wanderings of heart-oppressed Hilda to the carven
confessional in the great church, where she found peace, will
recognize the amply unfolded flower of this seed. What I supposed to
be my notion of St. Peter's looking like the enlargement of some
liliputian edifice is also there, though I had forgotten it till I
myself reread the pages. In this book of my memories, which is also
the book of my forgettings, I must walk to and fro freely, if I am to
walk at all. None can tell the secret origin of his thoughts.

Besides the monumental and artistic features of Rome, the human side
of it appealed to me. There was something congenial in the Romans,
and, indeed, in the Italians generally, so that I seemed to be
renewing my acquaintance with people whom I had partly forgotten. I
picked up the conversational language with unusual ease, perhaps owing
to the drilling in Latin which my father had given me; and I liked the
easy, objectless ways of the people, and the smiles which so readily
took the place of the sallow gravity which their faces wore in repose.
But it was the Transteverini women who chiefly attracted me; they wore
an antique costume familiar enough in paintings, and they claimed to
be descendants of the ancient race; they had the noble features and
bearing which one would have looked for in such descendants, at all
events. Looking in their dark, haughty eyes, one seemed to pass back
through the terrible picturesqueness of mediaeval Italy, with its
Borgias and Bella Donnas, its Lorenzos and Fornarinas, to the Rome of
Nero, Augustus, Scipio, and Tarquin. Eddy and I would sometimes make
excursions across the river to Transtevere, and stroll up and down
those narrow streets, imagining all manner of suitable adventures and
histories for the inhabitants, stalking there in their black and
scarlet and yellow habiliments, and glancing imperially from under the
black brows of their dark countenances. One afternoon during the
carnival I was in a dense crowd in the piazza, towards the lower end
of the Corso, and found myself pushed into the neighborhood of a
singularly beautiful young woman of this class, dressed in the height
of her fashion, who was slowly making her way in my direction through
the press. All at once a man, smartly clad in the garb of recent
civilization, stepped in front of her and said something to her; what
it was I knew not. She drew herself back, as from something poisonous
or revolting, and the expression of her face became terrible. At the
same time her right hand went swiftly to the masses of her sable hair,
and as swiftly back again, armed with the small, narrow dagger which
these women wear by way of hair-pin. Before the unhappy creature who
had accosted her knew what was happening, she thrust the dagger, with
a powerful movement--while her white teeth showed, set edge to edge,
through her drawn lips--deep into his body. As he collapsed forward
she drew the weapon upward, putting the whole strength of her body
into the effort, and actually ripped the man open. Down he fell at
her feet. There was a score or more of Roman citizens within
arm's-reach of her at the moment; no one spoke, still less attempted
to restrain her. On the contrary, as she turned they respectfully
opened a way for her through the midst of them, and none made an offer
to assist the dying wretch who lay writhing and faintly coughing on
the cobble-stone pavement of the piazza. I was soon elbowed quietly
away from the spot where he lay; I caught a glimpse of the crimson
head-dress of his slayer passing away afar amid the crowd; presently
the cocked hat of a gendarme appeared from another direction,
advancing slowly against manifest obstructions; everybody seemed to
get in his way, without appearing to intend it. Such was the attitude
towards assassination of the Roman people in those days. I have often
thought over the incident since then. Their sympathy is with private
vengeance, never with ordained statute law. They love to use the
poniard and to see it used, and will do their best to shield the
users. Pity for the victim they have none; they assume that he has his
deserts. For that matter, my own sympathies, filled though I was with
horror at the spectacle of actual murder done before my eyes, were
wholly with the savage beauty, and not with the fatuous creature who
had probably insulted her. It is needless to say that the women of
Transtevere were not so often called upon to resent insults as are the
ladies of New York and other American cities. They did not wait for
policemen or for "leagues of chivalry" to avenge them.

Towards the French soldiers I was cordially disposed. Their dark-blue
tunics and baggy, red peg-tops were never out of sight, and though I
had seen troops in England, and had once observed the march of a
British regiment in Liverpool going to embark for the Crimea (whence,
I believe, very few of this particular regiment returned), yet the
conception of a resident army first came to me in Rome. About the
French army of those days still hovered the lustre bestowed upon it by
the deeds of the great Napoleon, which their recent exploits in the
Crimea had not diminished. There were among them regiments of fierce
and romantic looking zouaves, with Oriental complexions and
semi-barbaric attire, marching with a long swing, and appearing savage
and impetuous enough to annihilate anything; and there was also a
brigade, the special designation of which I have forgotten, every man
of which was a trained athlete, and whose drill was something
marvellous to witness. But the average French soldier was simply a
first-class soldier, good-natured, light-hearted, active, trim, and
efficient; in height averaging not more than five foot six; carrying
muskets which seemed out of proportion large, though they handled them
lightly enough, and wearing at their sides a short sword, like the
sword of ancient Rome, which was also used as a bayonet. There was
always a drill or a march in progress somewhere, and sentinels paced
up and down before the palaces. The officers were immensely
impressive; the young ones had wasp waists, surpassing those of the
most remorseless belles of fashion; and the old ones were, en
revanche, immensely stout in that region, as if outraged nature were
resolved to assert herself at last. But, young or old, their swords
were sun-bright and lovely to behold--I used to polish my own little
weapon in vain in the attempt to emulate them. Hopelessly envious was
I, too, of the heroic chests of these warriors (not knowing them to be
padded, as the waists were corseted), and I would swell out my own
little pectoral region to its utmost extent as I walked along the
streets, thereby, though I knew it not, greatly benefiting my physical
organism. Of course I had no personal commerce with the officers, but
the rank and file fraternized with me and my companions readily; there
was always a number of them strolling about Rome and its environs on
leave, in pairs or groups, and they were just as much boys as we were.
They would let me heft their short, strong swords, and when they
understood that I was gathering shells they would climb lightly about
the ruins, and bring me specimens displayed in their broad, open
palms. Our conversation was restricted to few words and many grunts
and gestures, but we understood one another and were on terms of gay
camaraderie. A dozen years afterwards, when there was war between
France and Germany, my sympathies were ardently with the former, and
great were my astonishment and regret at the issue of the conflict.
Man for man, and rightly led and managed, I still believe that Gaul
could wipe up the ground with the Teuton, without half trying. But
there were other forces than those of Moltke and Bismarck fighting
against poor France in that fatal campaign. She was wounded in the
house of her friends.

XVII

Miss Lander makes a bust--The twang of his native place--Wholly unlike
anybody else--Wise, humorous Sarah Clarke--Back to the Gods and the
Fleas--Horace Mann's statue--Miss Bremer and the Tarpeian Rock--"I was
in a state of some little tremor"--Mrs. Jameson and Ruskin--Most
thorough-going of the classic tragedies--A well-grown calf--An
adventure in Monte Testaccio--A vision of death--A fantastic and
saturnine genius--A pitch-black place--Illuminations and
fireworks--The Faun-Enjoying Rome--First impressions--Lalla's curses.

While my father was conscientiously making acquaintance with the
achievements of old-time art, modern artists were trying to practise
their skill on him; he had already sat to Cephas Giovanni Thompson,
and he was now asked to contribute his head to the studio of a certain
Miss Lander, late of Salem, Massachusetts, now settled, as she
intended, permanently in Rome. "When I dream of home," she told him,
"it is merely of paying a short visit and coming back here before my
trunk is unpacked." Miss Lander was not a painter, but a sculptor,
and, in spite of what my father had said against the nude in
sculpture, I think he liked clay and marble as a vehicle of art better
than paint and canvas. At all events, he consented to give her
sittings. He was interested in the independence of her mode of life,
and they got on very comfortably together; the results of his
observation of her appear in the references to Hilda's and Miriam's
unhampered ways of life in The Marble Faun. She had, as I recall her,
a narrow, sallow face, sharp eyes, and a long chin. She might have
been thirty years old. Unlike Miss Harriet Hosmer, who lived not far
away, Miss Lander had no attractiveness for us children. I have reason
to think, too, that my father's final opinion of her was not so
favorable as his first one. Except photographs, no really good
likeness of my father was ever taken; the portrait painted in
Washington, in 1862, by Leutze, was the least successful of them all.
The best, in my opinion, was an exquisitely wrought miniature of him
at the age of thirty, which I kept for a long time, till it was stolen
by a friend in London in 1880.

Paul Akers, a Maine Yankee, with the twang of his native place still
strong in him after ten years in Rome, was another sculptor of our
acquaintance; he was very voluble, and escorted us about Rome, and
entertained us at his own studio, where he was modelling his best
group, "The Drowned Fisher-boy," as he called it. The figure is
supposed to be lying at the bottom of the sea, face upward, with a
fragment of rock supporting on its sharp ridge the small of the
back--a most painful and uncomfortable attitude, suggesting that even
in death there could be no rest for the poor youth. Mr. Akers was
rather sharply critical of his more famous brother-artists, such as
Greenough and Gibson, and was accused by them, apparently not wholly
without justification, of yielding too much to the influence of other
geniuses in the designing of his groups. But he was a sensible and
obliging little personage, and introduced us to the studios of several
of his fellow-artists in Rome, some of which were more interesting
than his own.

Bright little Miss Harriet Hosmer, with her hands in her
jacket-pockets, and her short hair curling up round her velvet cap,
struts cheerfully forth out of the obscurity of the past in my memory;
her studio, I think, adjoined that of Gibson, of whom I remember
nothing whatever. Her most notable production at that time was a Puck
sitting on a toadstool, with a conical shell of the limpet species by
way of a cap; he somehow resembled his animated and clever creator.
Miss Hosmer's face, expressions, gestures, dress, and her
manifestations in general were perfectly in keeping with one another;
there never was a more succinct and distinct individuality; she was
wholly unlike anybody else, without being in the least unnatural or
affected. Her social manner was of a persistent jollity; but no doubt
she had her grave moments or hours, a good and strong brain, and a
susceptibility to tragic conceptions, as is shown by the noble figure
of her Zenobia. This figure I saw in clay in her studio during our
second season in Rome. Miss Hosmer's talk was quick, witty, and
pointed; her big eyes redeemed her round, small-featured face from
triviality; her warm heart glowed through all she said and did. Her
studio was a contrast to the classicality of Gibson's, whose
influence, though she had studied under him during her six years'
residence in Rome, had affected her technique only, not her
conceptions or aims in art. We all liked her much. She was made known
to us, I believe, through the medium of grave, wise, humorous Sarah
Clarke, the sister of the James Freeman Clarke who married my mother
to my father, and who, twenty-two years later, read over my father the
burial service. Sarah Clarke was often abroad; she was herself an
admirable artist in water-color, and was always a dear friend of my
mother's. After we had returned to Concord, in 1860, Miss Hosmer wrote
to us, and one of her letters has been preserved; I quote it, because
it is like her:

"MY DEAR MRS. HAWTHORNE,--It is not unlikely that you may be somewhat
surprised to hear from me; but after you have received the four dozen
letters which, sooner or later, I intend writing you, you will cease
to be so. I begin at the present moment with the first of the
forty-eight, partly for business and partly for pleasure. Reversing,
then, the order of things which some unknown but well-regulated-minded
individual considered to be correct, I will go in for pleasure first,
under which head I seek information respecting the health and
well-being of all members of your family. It seems cruel that you
should go off to the glorious Republic when there are other places in
Rome besides the Piazza Poli. Now that you are safely out of it, I
must try to persuade you that it was the most unhealthy place in the
whole city, not only because I really believe it to be so, but that
malaria may not be mingled and cherished with every remembrance of
this delicious, artistic, fleay, malarious paradise. But I suppose
little short of a miracle would transport you here again, not only
because Una is probably becoming the size of Daniel Lambert, in her
native air, but because Julian is probably weaving a future
President's chair out of the rattans he is getting at school. However
that may be, the result is the same, I fear, as to your getting back
to the Gods and the Fleas; and I must look forward to a meeting in
America. Well, as that carries me over the ocean, in my mind's eye,
Mrs. Hawthorne, the business clause of my epistle is suggested--and
it is this: I have just had a letter from my best of friends, Mr.
Crow, of St. Louis [she had studied anatomy in St. Louis before coming
to Rome], who has been passing the summer in New York and Boston, and
he writes: 'They are talking in Boston of a monument to the memory of
Mr. Horace Mann, and I have said to one of the active men engaged in
it that if you could have the commission I would subscribe handsomely
towards it.' Now, it occurred to me that perhaps you or yours might
have an opportunity of saying a good word for me, in which case I
would have you know how pleased and grateful I should be. You may not
have the occasion offered you, but if it chances, I commend myself to
you distintamente, and trust to your good-nature not to consider me
pushing for having suggested it. I send this through our well-beloved
Sarah Clarke, and hope it will arrive before 1861. When you have
nothing better to do, pray give me a line, always in care of Pakenham
& Hooker. Good-bye, dear Mrs. Hawthorne--my best love to Mr.
Hawthorne and the chicks--and the best wish I can make is that you are
all as fat as yours always affectionately,

"HARRIET HOSMER."

All the influence which my father and mother possessed was given to
Miss Hosmer's cause, but some other person got the commission. I
remember, too, that my mother, at Mrs. Mann's request, was at great
pains to make drawings for the face of the statue which now confronts
from the slopes of Beacon Hill the culture and intelligence of Boston,
which Horace Mann did so much to promote. But he was not a subject
which accommodated itself readily to the requirements of plastic art.
There is a glimpse of Miss Hosmer in one of my father's diaries, which
I will reproduce, for the sake of indicating his amused and benevolent
attitude towards her. "She had on," says he, "a neat little jacket, a
man's shirt-bosom, and a cravat with a brooch in it; her hair is cut
short, and curls jauntily round her bright and smart little
physiognomy; and, sitting opposite me at table, I never should have
imagined that she terminated in a petticoat any more than in a fish's
tail. However, I do not mean to speak disrespectfully of Miss Hosmer,
of whom I think very favorably; but, it seems to me, her reform of the
female dress begins with its least objectionable part, and is no real
improvement."

One evening we visited Miss Bremer, the novelist, of Sweden, who was
then near the end of her foreign travels, which had begun with her
visit to America in 1849. She had met my father in Lenox, and had
written of him in the book of her travels. She was a small woman, with
a big heart and broad mind, packed full of sense, sentiment, and
philanthropy. She had an immense nose, designed, evidently, for some
much larger person; her conversation in English, though probably
correct, was so oddly accented that it was difficult to follow her.
She was a very lovable little creature, then nearing her sixtieth
year. Most of her voluminous literary work was done. Her house in Rome
was near the Capitol and the Tarpeian Rock; and after we had
forgathered with her there for a while, she accompanied us forth--the
moon being up--to see the famous precipice. It was to this incident
that we owe the scene in The Marble Faun, the most visibly tragic in
my father's writings. "The court-yard," he writes in his notes, "is
bordered by a parapet, leaning over which we saw a sheer precipice of
the Tarpeian Rock, about the height of a four-story house; not that
the precipice was a bare face of rock, but it appeared to be cased in
some sort of cement, or ancient stone-work, through which the primeval
rock, here and there, looked grimly and doubtfully. Bright as the
Roman moonlight was, it would not show the front of the wall, or rock,
so well as I should have liked to see it, but left it pretty much in
the same degree of dubiety and half-knowledge in which the
antiquarians leave most of the Roman ruins. Perhaps this precipice may
have been the Traitor's Leap; perhaps it was the one on which Miss
Bremer's garden verges; perhaps neither of the two. At any rate, it
was a good idea of the stern old Romans to fling political criminals
down from the very height of the Capitoline Hill on which stood the
temples and public edifices, symbols of the institutions which they
sought to violate." But there was no tragic suggestion in our little
party, conducted about by the prattling, simple, affectionate little
woman, so homely, tender, and charitable. "At parting," wrote my
father, "she kissed my wife most affectionately on each cheek,
'because,' she said, 'you look so sweetly'; and then she turned
towards myself. I was in a state of some little tremor, not knowing
what might be about to befall me, but she merely pressed my hand, and
we parted, probably never to meet again. God bless her good heart, and
every inch of her little body, not forgetting her red nose, big as it
is in proportion to the rest of her! She is a most amiable little
woman, worthy to be the maiden aunt of the whole human race!"

Venerable Mrs. Jameson, author of a little library of writings on
Italian art, was likewise of our company occasionally; and she evinced
a marked liking for my father, which was remarkable, inasmuch as he
was able to keep no sort of pace with her in her didactic homilies,
which were delivered with a tranquil, ex-cathedra manner, befitting
one who was the authority on her subject; one would no more have
thought of questioning her verdicts than those of Ruskin; but I should
have liked to see the latter and her together, with a difference
between them. Her legs were less active than her mind, and most of
our expeditions with her were made in carriages, from which she
dispensed her wisdom placidly as we went along, laying the dust of our
ignorance with the droppings of her erudition, like a watering-cart.
However, she so far condescended from her altitudes as to speak very
cordially of my father's books, for which he expressed proper
acknowledgment; and she had a motherly way of holding his hand in hers
when he took leave of her, and looking maternally in his face, which
made him somewhat uneasy. "Were we to meet often," he remarked,

"I should be a little afraid of her embracing me outright--a thing to
be grateful for, but by no means to be glad of!" We drove one day to
some excavations which had just been opened near the tomb of Cecilia
Metella, outside the walls of Rome. Both Christian and Roman graves
had been found, and they had been so recently discovered that, as my
father observed, there could have been very little intervention of
persons (though much of time) between the departure of the friends of
the dead and our own visit. The large, excavated chambers were filled
with sarcophagi, beautifully sculptured, and their walls were
ornamented with free-hand decoration done in wet plaster, a marvellous
testimony to the rapid skill of the artists. The sarcophagi were
filled with the bones and the dust of the ancient people who had once,
in the imperial prime of Rome, walked about her streets, prayed to her
gods, and feasted at her banquets. My father remarked on the fact that
many of the sarcophagi were sculptured with figures that seemed
anything but mournful in their demeanor; but Mrs. Jameson said that
there was almost always, in the subject chosen, some allusion to
death, instancing the story of Meleager, an Argonaut, who, I think,
slew the Calydonian boar, and afterwards his two uncles, who had tried
to get the boar's hide away from Meleager's beloved Atalanta;
whereupon the young hero was brought to death by his mother, who in
turn killed herself. It is one of the most thoroughgoing of the
classic tragedies, and was a favorite theme for the sculptors of
sarcophagi. Certainly, in the sarcophagi of the Vatican the
bas-reliefs are often scenes of battle, the rush of men and horses,
and the ground strewn with dead; and in others, a dying person seems
to be represented, with his friends weeping along the sides of the
sarcophagus; but often, too, the allusion to death, if it exists at
all, is very remote. The old Romans, like ourselves, had individual
ways of regarding the great change; according to their mood and faith,
they were hopeful or despairing. But death is death, think of it how
we will.

I think it was on a previous occasion that I went with my father,
afoot, along this same mighty Appian Way, beside which rise so many
rounded structures, vast as fortresses, containing the remains of the
dead of long ago, and culminating in the huge mass of the Cecilia
Metella tomb, with the mediseval battlements on its summit. And it was
on that walk that we met the calf of The Marble Faun: "A well-grown
calf," my father says in his notes, "who seemed frolicsome, shy, and
sociable all at the same time; for he capered and leaped to one side,
and shook his head, as I passed him, but soon came galloping behind
me, and again started aside when I looked round." How little I
suspected then (or the bull-calf either, for that matter) that he was
to frolic his way into literature, and go gambolling down the ages to
distract the anxious soul of the lover of Hilda! Another walk of ours
was to the huge, green mound of the Monte Testaccio; it was, at that
period, pierced by numerous cavities, in the dark coolness of which
stores of native wines were kept; and they were sold to customers at
the rude wooden tables in front of the excavations, in flasks shaped
like large drops of water, protected with plaited straw. When,
nowadays, in New York or other cities here, I go to an Italian
restaurant, I always call for one of these flasks, and think, as I
drink its contents, of that afternoon with my father. It was the first
time I had been permitted to taste a fermented liquor. I liked it very
much, and got two glasses of it; and when we rose to depart I was
greatly perplexed, and my father was vastly tickled, to discover a
lack of coherence between my legs and my intentions. It speedily
passed off, for the wines are of the lightest and airiest description;
but when, a little later on in life, I came to read that Horatian
verse describing how, turning from barbaric splendors such as the
Persians affect, he binds his brows with simple myrtle, and sips,
beneath the shadow of his garden bower, the pure vintage of the native
grape, I better appreciated the poetry of the theme from having
enjoyed that Testaccionesque experience.

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