Books: Hawthorne and His Circle

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[IMAGE: HIRAM POWERS]

His daughters, as I have said, were lovely creatures. Powers was at
this time modelling an ideal bust of a woman, and one day I went into
his studio expecting to find Bob there, but the studio was empty but
for the bust, which I now had an opportunity to contemplate at my ease
for the first time. I thought it very beautiful, and there was
something about the face which reminded me of somebody, I could not
decide who. Just then a portiere in the doorway parted, and in came a
living bust, a reality in warm flesh and blood, compared with which
the ideal seemed second-rate. It belonged to one of Powers's
daughters, who had come for a sitting; she was serving as her father's
model. Upon seeing the unexpected boy, fixed there in speechless
admiration, the young lady uttered a scream and vanished. I now knew
whom the face of the clay effigy reminded me of, and afterwards when I
saw beautiful statues I thought of her, and shook my head.

My father and Powers took a strong fancy to each other, and met and
talked a great deal. As I just said now, spiritualism was a fad at
that time, and Powers was pregnant with marvels which he had either
seen or heard of, and which he was always ready to attempt to explain
on philosophical grounds. My father would listen to it all, and both
believe it and not believe it. He felt, I suppose, that Powers was
telling the truth, but he was not persuaded that all the truth was in
Powers's possession, or in any one else's. Powers also had a great
deal to say concerning the exoteric and esoteric truths of sculpture;
his racy individuality marked it all. He would not admit that there
was any limit to what might be done with marble; and when my father
asked him one day whether he could model a blush on a woman's cheek,
he said, stoutly, that the thing was possible. My father, as his
manner was with people, went with the sculptor as far as he chose to
carry him, accepting all his opinions and judgments, and becoming
Powers, so far as he might, for the time being, in order the better to
get to the root of his position. And then, afterwards, he would return
to his own self, and quietly examine Powers's assertions and theories
in the dry light. My father was two men, one sympathetic and
intuitional, the other critical and logical; together they formed a
combination which could not be thrown off its feet.

We had already met the Brownings in London; but at this period they
belonged in Italy more than anywhere else, and Florence formed the
best setting for the authors both of Aurora Leigh and of Sordello.
They lived in a villa called Casa Guidi, and with them was their son,
a boy younger than myself, whom they called Pennini, though his real
name was something much less fastidious. Penni, I believe, used to be
an assistant of Raphael early in the sixteenth century, and Pennini
may have been nicknamed after him. His mother, who was an extravagant
woman on the emotional and spiritual plane, made the poor little boy
wear his hair curled in long ringlets down his back, and clad him in a
fancy costume of black velvet, with knickerbockers and black silk
stockings; he was homely of face, and looked "soft," as normal boys
would say. But his parents were determined to make an ideal
dream-child of him, and, of course, he had to submit. I had the
contempt for him which a philistine boy feels for a creature whom he
knows he can lick with one hand tied behind his back, and I had
nothing whatever to say to him. But Pennini was not such a mollycoddle
and ass as he looked, and when he grew up he gave evidence enough of
having a mind and a way of his own. My mother took him at his mother's
valuation, and both she and my father have expressed admiration of the
whole Browning tribe in their published journals. Mrs. Browning seemed
to me a sort of miniature monstrosity; there was no body to her, only
a mass of dark curls and queer, dark eyes, and an enormous mouth with
thick lips; no portrait of her has dared to show the half of it. Her
hand was like a bird's claw. Browning was a lusty, active, energetic
person, dashing and plunging this way and that with wonderful impetus
and suddenness; he was never still a moment, and he talked with
extraordinary velocity and zeal. There was a mass of wild hair on his
head, and he wore bushy whiskers. He appeared very different twenty
years later, when I met him in London, after his wife's death; he was
quiet and sedate, with close-cut silvery hair and pointed beard, and
the rather stout, well-dressed figure of a British gentleman of the
sober middle class. It is difficult to harmonize either of these
outsides with the poet within--that remarkable imagination, intellect,
and analytical faculty which have made him one of the men of the
century. There was a genial charm in Browning, emphasized, in this
earlier time, with a bewildering vivacity and an affluence of
courtesy. In his mature phase he was still courteous and agreeable
when he chose to be so, but was also occasionally supercilious and
repellent, and assiduously cultivated smart society. I once asked him,
in 1879, why he made his poetry so often obscure, and he replied,
frankly, that he did so because he couldn't help it; the inability to
put his thoughts in clear phrases had always been a grief to him. This
statement was, to me, unexpected, and it has a certain importance.

After a few weeks in Casa Bella, opposite Powers's house, Florence
grew so hot that we were glad of an opportunity to rent the Villa
Montauto, up on the hill of Bellosguardo, less than a mile beyond the
city gate. The villa, with two stories and an attic, must have been
nearly two hundred feet long, and was two or three rooms deep; at the
hither end rose a tower evidently much older than the house attached
to it. Near the foot of the tower grew an ancient tree, on a
projecting branch of which we soon had a swing suspended, and all of
us children did some very tall swinging. There was a little girl of
ten belonging to the estate, named Teresa, an amiable, brown-haired,
homely little personage. We admitted her to our intimacy, and swung
her in the swing till she screamed for mercy. The road from Florence,
after passing our big iron gate on the east, continued on westward,
beneath the tower and the parapet of the grounds; beyond extended the
wide valley of the Arno, with mountains hemming it in, and to the left
of the mountains, every evening, Donati's comet shone, with a golden
sweep of tail subtending twenty degrees along the horizon. The peasant
folk regarded it with foreboding; and I remember seeing in the
book-shops of Rome, before we left, pamphlets in both Italian and
English, with such titles as "Will the great comet, now rapidly
approaching, strike the earth?" It did not strike the earth, but it
afforded us a magnificent spectacle during our stay in Montauto, and
the next year it was followed by war between Austria and France and
the evacuation of Venice.

The elevation of Bellosguardo sloped from the villa north and east,
and this declivity was occupied by a podere of some dozen acres, on
which grew grape-vines, olive and fig trees. Every morning, about ten
o'clock, the peasants on the estate would come in loaded with grapes,
which they piled up on a large table in the reception-hall on the
ground floor. We ate them by handfuls, but were never able to finish
them. Between times we would go out among the fruit trees and devour
fresh figs, luscious with purple pulp. I had three or four rooms to
myself at the western extremity of the house; they were always cool on
the hottest days. There I was wont to retire to pursue my literary
labors; I was still writing works on conchology. My sister Una had
rooms on the ground floor, adjoining the chapel. They were haunted by
the ghost of a nun, and several times the candle which she took in
there at night was moved by invisible hands from its place and set
down elsewhere. Ghostly voices called to us, and various unaccountable
noises were heard now and then, both within and without the house; but
we children did not mind them, not having been bred in the fear of
spirits. Indeed, at the instance of Mrs. Browning, who was often with
us, we held spirit seances, Miss Shepard being the medium, though she
mildly protested. Long communications were written down, but the
sceptics were not converted, nor were the believers discouraged. "I
discern in the alleged communications from my wife's mother," wrote my
father, "much of her own beautiful fancy and many of her preconceived
ideas, although thinner and weaker than at first hand. They are the
echoes of her own voice, returning out of the lovely chambers of her
heart, and mistaken by her for the tones of her mother."

Almost every day some of us made an incursion into Florence. The town
itself seemed to me more agreeable than Rome; but the Boboli Gardens
could not rival the Borghese, and the Pitti and Uffizi galleries were
not so captivating as the Vatican and the Capitol. However, the
Cascine and the Lung' Arno were delightful, and the Arno, shallow and
placid, flowing through the midst of the city, was a fairer object
than the muddy and turbulent Tiber. Men and boys bathed along the
banks in the afternoons and evenings; and the Ponte Vecchio, crowded
with grotesque little houses, was a favorite promenade of mine. There
was also a large marketplace, where the peasant women sold the produce
of their farms. My insatiable appetite for such things prompted me
often to go thither and eat everything I had money to buy. One day I
consumed so many fresh tomatoes that I had a giddiness in the back of
my head, and ate no more tomatoes for some years. But the place I
best liked was the great open square of the Palazzo Vecchio, with the
statues of David and of Perseus under the Loggia dei Lanzi, a retreat
from sun and rain; and the Duomo and Giotto's Campanile, hard by. The
pavements of Florence, smooth as the surface of stone canals, were
most soothing and comfortable after the relentless, sharp
cobble-stones of Rome; the low houses that bordered them seemed to
slumber in the hot, still sunshine. What a sunshine was that! Not
fierce and feverish, as in the tropics, but soft and intense and
white. Who would not live in Florence if he could? I think my father
would have settled there but for his children, to whom he wished to
give an American education. The thought was often in his mind; and he
perhaps cherished some hope of returning thither later in life, and
letting old age steal gently upon him and his wife in the delicious
city. But the Celestial City was nearer to him than he suspected.

There was a magical old man in Florence named Kirkup, an Englishman,
though he had dwelt abroad so many years that he seemed more
Florentine than the Florentines themselves. He had known, in his
youth, Byron, Shelley, Hunt, and Edward Trelawney. After that famous
group was disparted, Kirkup, having an income sufficient for his
needs, came to Florence and settled there. He took to antiquarianism,
which is a sort of philtre, driving its votaries mildly insane, and
filling them with emotions which, on the whole, are probably more
often happy than grievous. But Kirkup, in the course of his researches
into the past, came upon the books of the necromancers, and bought and
studied them, and began to practise their spells and conjurations; and
by-and-by, being a great admirer and student of Dante, that poet
manifested himself to him in his lonely vigils and told him many
unknown facts about his career on earth, and incidentally revealed to
him the whereabouts of the now-familiar fresco of Dante on the wall of
the Bargello Chapel, where it had been hidden for ages beneath a coat
of whitewash. In these occult researches, Kirkup, of course, had need
of a medium, and he found among the Florentine peasants a young girl,
radiantly beautiful, who possessed an extraordinary susceptibility to
spiritual influences. Through her means he conversed with the
renowned dead men of the past times. But one day Regina (such was the
girl's name), much to the old man's surprise, gave birth to a child.
She herself died, in Kirkup's house, soon after, and on her death-bed
she swore a solemn oath on the crucifix that the baby's father was
none other than Kirkup himself. The poor old gentleman had grown so
accustomed to believing in miracles that he made little ado about
accepting this one also; he received the child as his daughter, and
made provision for her in his will. No one had the heart or thought it
worth while to enlighten him as to certain facts which might have
altered his attitude; but it was well known that Regina had a lover, a
handsome young Italian peasant, much more capable of begetting
children than of taking care of them afterwards.

These interesting circumstances I did not learn until long after
Florence had receded into the distance in my memory. But one
afternoon, with my father and mother, I entered the door of a queer
old house close to the Ponte Vecchio; I was told that it had formerly
been a palace of the Knights Templars. We ascended a very darksome
flight of stairs, and a door was opened by a strange little man. He
may have been, at that time, some seventy years my senior, but he was
little above my height; he had long, soft, white hair and a flowing
white beard; his features bore a resemblance to those of Bulwer
Lytton, only Bulwer never lived to anything like Mr. Kirkup's age. Old
as he was, our host was very brisk and polite, and did the honors of
his suite of large rooms with much grace and fantastic hospitality.
Dancing about him, and making friends freely with us all meanwhile,
was the little girl, Imogen by name, who was accredited as the
octogenarian's offspring. She was some four or five years of age, but
intellectually precocious, though a complete child, too. Mr. Kirkup
said that she, like her beautiful mother, was a powerful medium, and
that he often used to communicate through her with her mother, who
would seem to have kept her secret even after death. The house was
stuffed full of curiosities, but was very dirty and cobwebby; the
pictures and the books looked much in need of a caretaker. The little
child frolicked and flitted about the dusky apartments, or seated
herself like a butterfly on the great tomes of magic that were piled
in corners. Nothing could be stronger or stranger than the contrast
between her and this environment. My father wrote it all down in his
journal, and it evidently impressed his imagination; and she and
Kirkup himself--_mutatis mutandis_--appear in Dr. Grimshawe's Secret,
and again, in a somewhat different form, in The Dolliver Romance.
There was even a Persian kitten, too, to bear little Imogen company.
But no fiction could surpass the singularity of this withered old
magician living with the pale, tiny sprite of a child of mysterious
birth in the ghost-haunted rooms of the ancient palace.

It seemed as if the world of the occult were making a determined
attack upon us during this Florentine sojourn; whichever way we turned
we came in contact with something mysterious. In one of my father's
unpublished diaries he writes, in reference to the stories with which
he was being regaled by Powers, the Brownings, and others, that he was
reminded "of an incident that took place at the old manse, in the
first summer of our marriage. One night, about eleven o'clock, before
either my wife or I had fallen asleep (we had been talking together
just before), she suddenly asked me why I had touched her shoulder?
The next instant she had a sense that the touch was not mine, but that
of some third presence in the chamber. She clung to me in great
affright, but I got out of bed and searched the chamber and adjacent
entry, and, finding nothing, concluded that the touch was a fancied
one. My wife, however, has never varied in her belief that the
incident was supernatural and connected with the apparition of old Dr.
Harris, who used to show himself to me daily in the reading-room of
the Boston Athenaeum. I am still incredulous both as to the doctor's
identity and as to the reality of the mysterious touch. That same
summer of our honeymoon, too, George Hillard and his wife were sitting
with us in our parlor, when a rustling as of a silken robe passed from
corner to corner of the room, right among my wife and the two guests,
and was heard, I think, by all three. Mrs. Hillard, I remember, was
greatly startled. As for myself, I was reclining on the sofa at a
little distance, and neither heard the rustle nor believed it."

Nevertheless, such things affect one in a degree. Here is a straw to
show which way the wind of doctrine was blowing with my father: We
were in Siena immediately after the date of our Florentine residence,
and he and I, leaving the rest of the family at our hotel, sallied
forth in quest of adventures. "We went to the cathedral," he writes,
"and while standing near the entrance, or about midway in the nave, we
saw a female figure approaching through the dimness and distance, far
away in the region of the high altar; as it drew nearer its air
reminded me of Una, whom we had left at home. Finally, it came close
to us, and proved to be Una herself; she had come, immediately after
we left the hotel, with Miss Shepard, and was looking for objects to
sketch. It is an empty thing to write down, but the surprise made the
incident stand out very vividly." Una was to pass near the gates of
the next world a little while later, and doubtless my father often
during that dark period pictured her to himself as a spirit. To make
an end of this subject, I will quote here my father's account of a
story told him by Mrs. Story when we were living in Rome for the
second time. The incident of the woman's face at the carriage window
reappears in The Marble Faun. "She told it," he says, "on the authority
of Mrs. Gaskell, to whom the personages were known. A lady, recently
married, was observed to be in a melancholy frame of mind, and fell
into a bad state of health. She told her husband that she was haunted
with the constant vision of a certain face, which affected her with an
indescribable horror, and was the cause of her melancholy and illness.
The physician prescribed travel, and they went first to Paris, where
the lady's spirits grew somewhat better, and the vision haunted her
less constantly. They purposed going to Italy, and before their
departure from Paris a letter of introduction was given them by a
friend, directed to a person in Rome. On their arrival in Rome the
letter was delivered; the person called, and in his face the lady
recognized the precise reality of her vision. By-the-bye, I think the
lady saw this face in the streets of Rome before the introduction took
place. The end of the story is that the husband was almost immediately
recalled to England by an urgent summons; the wife disappeared that
very night, and was recognized driving out of Rome, in a carriage, in
tears, and accompanied by the visionary unknown. It is a very foolish
story, but told as truth. Mrs. Story also said that in an Etruscan
tomb, on the Barberini estate, the form and impression, in dust, of a
female figure were discovered. Not even a bone of her was left; but
where her neck had been there lay a magnificent necklace, all of gold
and of the richest workmanship. The necklace, just as it was found
(except, I suppose, for a little furbishing), is now worn by the
Princess Barberini as her richest adornment. Mrs. Story herself had
on a bracelet composed, I think, of seven ancient Etruscan scorabei in
carnelian, every one of which has been taken from a separate tomb, and
on one side of each was engraved the signet of the person to whom it
had belonged and who had carried it to the grave with him. This
bracelet would make a good connecting link for a series of Etruscan
tales, the more fantastic the better!"

On the first day of October, 1859, we left Florence by railway for
Siena on our way back to Rome. There had been no drawbacks to our
enjoyment of the city and of our villa and of the people we had met.
We departed with regret; had we stayed on there, instead, and not
again attempted the fatal air of the Seven Hills, our after chronicles
might have been very different. But we walk over precipices with our
eyes open, or pass safely along their verge in the dark, and only the
Power who made us knows why. Providence takes very long views.

XIX

Burnt Sienna--The Aquila Nera--A grand, noble, gentle creature--The
most beautiful woman in the world--Better friends than ever--A shadow
brooded--Boys are whole-souled creatures--Franklin Pierce--Miriam,
Hilda, Kenyon, Donatello--The historian of the Netherlands--When New
England makes a man--The spell of Trevi--An accession of mishaps--My
father's mustache--Three steps of stone, the fourth, death--Havre,
Redcar, Bath, London, Liverpool.

Siena is distant from Florence, in a direct line, not more than fifty
miles, but the railway turns the western flank of the mountains, and
kept us full three hours on the trip. I had long been familiar with a
paint in my color-box called Burnt Sienna, and was now much interested
to learn that it was made of the yellow clay on which the city of
Siena stands; and when I discovered for myself that this clay, having
formed the bed of some antediluvian ocean, was full of fossil shells,
I thought that Siena was a place where I would do well to spend one of
my lifetimes. The odd, parti-colored architecture of the town did not
so much appeal to me, and certainly the streets and squares were less
attractive in themselves than either the Roman or the Florentine ones.
The shells were personally ugly, but they were shells, and fossils
into the bargain, and they sufficed for my happiness.

The Storys had a villa in Siena, and my father certainly had in the
back part of his mind an idea of settling there, or elsewhere in
Italy, now or later; but after ten days we were on our travels again.
There were no ruins to be seen, that I remember, but many churches and
frescoes and old oil-paintings, which I regarded with indifference.
Mediaeval remains did not attract me like classic ones. It was here
that Story drew the caricatures which I have already spoken of, and
from the windows of the room, as the twilight fell, we could see the
great comet, then in its apogee of brilliance. Where will the world be
when it comes again? We had rooms at the Aquila Nera, looking out on
the venerable, gray Palazzo Tolomei. The narrow streets were full of
people; the steepness and irregularity of the thoroughfares of the
city produced a feeling of energy and activity in the midst of the
ancient historic peace. Siena is, I believe, built about the crater of
an extinct volcano. The old brick wall of the city was still extant,
running up hill and down, and confining the rusty heaps of houses
within its belt. There were projecting balconies, crumbling with age,
and irregular arcades, resembling tunnels hewn out of the solid rock.
From the windows of our sitting-room in the hotel we commanded the
piazza, in front of the Palazzo Tolomei, with a pillar in the midst of
it, on which was a group of Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf, the
tradition of the city being that it was founded during the epoch of
the Roman kings. My mother made a sketch of this monument in her
little sketch-book, and my father, according to a common custom of
his, sat for an hour at the window one day and made a note of every
person who passed through the little square, thus getting an idea of
the character of the local population not otherwise obtainable. I can
imagine that, were one born in Siena, one might conceive an ardent
affection for it; but, in spite of its picturesqueness, it never
touched my heart like Rome or Florence, or even London or Paris. I
left it without regret, but with specimens of its fossils in my
pockets.

It often happens with miracles that they occur in doubles or trebles,
in order, I suppose, to suggest to us that they may be simply
instances of an undiscovered law. Gaetano was a miracle, and he was
followed by Constantino, who, though of an altogether different human
type, was of no less sweet and shining a nature than the other. He was
a grand, noble, gentle creature, and my mother soon dubbed him "The
Emperor," though it may be doubted whether the original emperor of
that name was as good a man as ours; he was certainly not nearly so
good-looking. He was only the driver of our _vettura_ from Siena to
Rome, but there was a princely munificence in his treatment of us that
made us feel his debtors in an indefinitely greater sum than that
which technically discharged our obligations. He was massive,
quiescent, oxlike, with great, slow-moving, black eyes. He had the air
of extending to us the hospitalities of Italy, and our journey assumed
the character of a royal progress. He was especially devoted to my
small sister Rose, and often, going up the hills, he would have her
beside him on foot, one of his great hands clasping hers, while with
the other he wielded the long whip that encouraged the horses. His
garments were of the humblest fashion, but he so wore them as to make
them seem imperial robes. My mother caught an excellent likeness of
him as he sat before her on the driver's seat. The second trip was as
enjoyable as the first, though it was two or three days shorter. The
route was west of our former one, passing through Radicofani,
incrusted round its hill-top; and Bolsena, climbing backward from the
poisonous shore of its beautiful lake; and Viterbo, ugly and
beggar-ridden, though famous forever on account of the war for Galiana
waged between Viterbo and Rome. In the front of an old church in the
town I saw the carved side of her sarcophagus, incorporate with the
wall. She was the most beautiful woman in the world in her day, and in
the fight for the possession of her her townsmen overcame the Romans,
but the latter were permitted, as a salve for their defeat, to have
one final glimpse of Galiana as they marched homeward without her.
From a window in a tower of one of the gates of the city, therefore,
her heavenly face looked forth and shed a farewell gleam over the
dusty, defeated ranks of Rome as they filed past, up-looking. The tale
is as old as the incident itself, but I always love to recall it;
there is in it something that touches the soul more inwardly than even
the legend of Grecian Helen.

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