. . .
It makes me miserable with a hopeless sense of inefficiency to write about these things; but it is a pity anybody should die without seeing an antique painted window, with the bright Italian sunshine glowing through it. This is the “dim, religious light” that Milton speaks of; but I doubt whether he saw these windows when he was in Italy, or any but those faded, or dusty and dingy ones, of the English cathedrals; else he would have illuminated that word “dim” with some epithet that should not chase away the dimness, yet should make it shine like a million of rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and topazes—bright in themselves, but dim with tenderness and reverence, because God Himself was shining through them. I hate what I have said.
. . .
We looked pretty thoroughly through the gallery, and I saw many pictures that impressed me; but, among such a multitude, with only one poor mind to take note of them, the stamp of each new impression helps to obliterate a former one. I am sensible, however, that a process is going on—and has been, ever since I came to Italy—that puts me in a state to see pictures with less toil, and more pleasure, and makes me more fastidious, yet more sensible of beauty where I saw none before. It is the sign, I presume, of a taste still very defective, that I take singular pleasure in the elaborate imitations of Van Mieris, Gerard Duow, and other old Dutch wizards who painted such brass-pots that you can see your face in them, and such earthen jugs that they will surely hold water; and who spent weeks and months in turning a foot or two of canvass into a perfect, microscopic illusion of some homely scene. For my part, I wish Raphael had painted the Transfiguration in this style, at the same time preserving his breadth and grandeur of design; nor do I believe that there is any real impediment to the combination of the two styles, except that no possible span of human life would suffice to cover a quarter part of the canvas of the Transfiguration with such touches as Gerard Duow’s. But one feels the vast scope of this wonderful art, when we think of two excellences so far apart as that of this last painter and Raphael. I pause a good while, too, before the Dutch paintings of fruit and flowers, where tulips and roses acquire an immortal bloom; and grapes have kept the freshest juice in them for two or three hundred years. Often, in these pictures, there is a bird’s nest, every straw perfectly represented, and the stray feather, or the down that the mother-bird plucked from her bosom, with the three or four small, speckled eggs, that seem as if they might be yet warm. These petty miracles have their use in assuring us that painters really can do something that takes hold of us in our most matter of fact moods; whereas, the merits of the grander style of art may be beyond our ordinary appreciation, and leave us in doubt (nine times out of ten that we look at them) whether we have not befooled ourselves with a false admiration. Until we learn to appreciate the cherubs and angels that Raphael scatters through the blessed air, in a picture of the Nativity, it is not amiss to look at a Dutch fly settling on a peach, or a humble-bee burying himself in a flower.
. . .
I looked again at Michael Angelo’s Fates to-day, but cannot satisfactorily make out what he meant by them. One of them—she who holds the distaff—has her mouth open, as if uttering a cry, and might be fancied to look somewhat irate. The second, who holds the thread, has a pensive air, but is still, I think, pitiless at heart. The third sister looks closely and coldly into the eyes of the last-mentioned, meanwhile cutting the thread with a pair of shears. Michael Angelo, if I may presume to say so, wished to vary the expression of these three sisters, and give each a different one, but did not see precisely how; inasmuch as all the fatal Three are united, heart and soul, in one purpose. It is a very impressive group. But, as regards the interpretation of this, or any other profound picture, there are likely to be as many as there are spectators. It is very curious to read criticisms upon pictures, and upon the same face in a picture, and by men of taste and feeling, and to see what different conclusions they arrive at. Each man interprets the hieroglyphic in his own way; and the painter, perhaps, had a meaning which none of them have reached; or possibly he put forth a riddle without himself knowing the solution. There is such a necessity, at all events, of helping the painter out with the spectator’s own resources of feeling and imagination, that you never can be sure how much of the picture you have yourself made. There is no doubt that the public is, to a certain extent, right and sure of its ground, when it declares, through a series of ages, that a certain picture is a great work. It is so; a great symbol, proceeding out of a great mind; but if it means one thing, it seems to mean a thousand, and often opposite things.
Florence, September 1858
We have heard a good deal about spiritual matters of late, especially of wonderful incidents that attended Mr Hume’s visit to Florence, two or three years ago. Mrs. Powers told my wife a very marvellous thing;—how that, when Mr. Hume was holding a séance in her house, and several persons present, a great scratching was heard in a neighboring closet. She addressed the spirit, and requested it not to disturb the company then, as they were busy with other affairs, promising to converse with it on a future occasion. On a subsequent night, accordingly, the scratching was renewed, with the utmost violence; and in reply to Mrs. Powers’s questions, the spirit assured her that it was not one, but legion, being the ghosts of twenty seven monks, who were miserable and without hope! The house, now occupied by Powers, was formerly a convent, and I suppose these were the spirits of all the wicked monks that had ever inhabited it;—at least, I hope that there were not such a number of damnable sinners extant at any one time. These ghostly Fathers must have been very improper persons in their life-time, judging by the indecorousness of their behavior even after death, and in such dreadful circumstances; for they showed a disposition to make free with Mrs. Powers’ petticoats, and once went so far as to lift them as high as her knees. It was not ascertained, I believe, that they desired to have anything done for their eternal welfare, or that their situation was capable of amendment anyhow; but, being exhorted to refrain from further disturbances, they took their departure, after making the sign of the cross on the breast of each person present. This was very singular in such reprobates, who, by their own confession, had forfeited all claim to be benefitted by that holy symbol; it curiously suggests that the forms of religion may still be kept up, in Purgatory and Hell itself. The sign was made in a way that conveyed the sense of something devilish and spiteful; the perpendicular line of the cross being drawn gently enough, but the transverse one sharply and violently, so as to leave a painful impression. Perhaps the monks meant thus to express their contempt and hatred for heretics; and how queer, that this antipathy should survive their own damnation! But I cannot help hoping that the case of these poor devils may not be so desperate as they think. They cannot be wholly lost, because their desire for communication with mortals shows that they need sympathy—therefore are not altogether hardened—therefore, with loving treatment, may be restored.
A great many other wonders took place, within the knowledge and experience of Mrs. Powers. She saw, not one pair of hands only, but many. The head of one of her dead children—a little boy—was laid in her lap, not in ghastly fashion, as a head out of the coffin and the grave, but just as the living child might have laid it on his mother’s knees. It was invisible, by the by; and she recognized it by the features and the character of the hair, through the sense of touch. Little hands grasped hers;—in short, these soberly attested incredibilities are so numerous that I forget nine-tenths of them, and judge the others too cheap to be written down. Christ spoke the truth, surely, in saying that men would not believe, “though one rose from the dead.” In my own case, the fact makes absolutely no impression.
. . .
Italy beats us, I think, in musquitoes; they are horribly pungent little particles of Satan. I do believe the Devil multiplies himself by the million, and infests our nights in this guise. They possess strange intelligence, and exquisite acuteness of sight and smell—prodigious audacity, and caution to match it, insomuch that they
venture on the most hazardous attacks and get safe off. They absolutely creep into bed, and bite us in our strong holds. One of them flew into my mouth, the other night, and stung me far down in my throat; but luckily I coughed him up in halves. They are bigger than American musquitoes, and, if you crush them, after one of their feasts, it makes a terrific blood-spot. It is a sort of suicide—at least a shedding of one’s own blood—to kill them; but it gratifies the old Adam to do it. It shocks me to feel how revengeful I am; but it is impossible not to impute a certain malice and intellectual venom to these diabolical insects. I wonder whether our health, at this season of the year, requires that we should be kept in a state of irritation, and so the musquitoes are Nature’s prophetic remedy for some disease; or whether we are made for the musquitoes, not they for us. It is possible—just possible—that the infinitesimal doses of poison which they infuse into us are a homœpathic safeguard against pestilence; but medicine never was administered in a more disagreeable way.
. . .
I wish our great Republic had the spirit to do as much, according to its vast means, as Florence did for sculpture and architecture, when it was a Republic; but we have the meanest government, and the shabbiest—and, if truly represented by it, are the meanest and shabbiest people—known in history. And yet, the less we attempt to do for art the better, if our future attempts are to have no better result than such brazen troopers as the equestrian statue of General Jackson, or even such naked respectabilities as Greenough’s Washington. There is something false and affected in our highest taste for art; and I suppose, furthermore, we are the only people who seek to decorate their public institutions, not by the highest taste among them, but by the average, at best.
Marseilles, May 1859
Wednesday was the day fixed for our departure from Rome, and after breakfast, I walked to the Pincian, and saw the garden and the city, and the Borghese Grounds, and St Peter’s, in an earlier sunlight than ever before. Methought they never looked so beautiful; nor the sky so bright and blue. I saw Soracte on the horizon, and I looked at everything as if for the last time; nor do I wish ever to see any of these objects again, though no place ever took so strong a hold of my being, as Rome, nor ever seemed so close to me, and so strangely familiar. I seem to know it better than my birth place, and to have known it longer; and though I have been very miserable there, and languid with the effects of the atmosphere, and disgusted with a thousand things in daily life, still I cannot say I hate it—perhaps might fairly own a love for it. But (life being too short for such questionable and troublesome enjoyments) I desire never to set eyes on it again.
V
THE LAST YEARS 1860-1864
EDITOR’S NOTE
In 1860, the Hawthornes returned to their home in Concord, Massachusetts, for the first time in seven years. Back in his tower study at the Wayside, he resumed work on the “English romance” he had put aside, a year or more earlier, to write The Marble Faun. But for some reason, the story would not unfold. “I spend two or three hours a day in my sky-parlor,” he wrote to his publisher, “and spread a quire of paper on my desk; but no very important result has followed, thus far.” After two more fruitless drafts, he abandoned the project and began another, again producing three preliminary drafts to little purpose.
Meanwhile, his journalism continued seemingly unchecked. Between October 1860 and September 1863, he revised a dozen or so excerpts from the English journals for publication, serially, in Atlantic Magazine, then together in the collection called Our Old Home. And in the summer of 1862, he published “Chiefly About War Matters,” drawn from the journal he kept during a trip to Washington, D.C., and the battlefield at Bull Run. But Our Old Home was the end. In May of 1864 he set out with his old friend Franklin Pierce for a tour of northern New England and died in his sleep, on the eighteenth, at an inn in Plymouth, New Hampshire.
Of the two romances Hawthorne left unfinished at his death, the first attempts the story of a young American who has some reason to suppose that he is the rightful heir to an English title and estate. The second has to do with the searches of another American (young in the first two drafts, old in the third) for a potion that will let him live forever. Now known, respectively, as “The American Claimant” and “The Elixir of Life,” these two aborted projects fill more than a thousand printed pages in the Centenary Edition, testifying either to Hawthorne’s conviction that each one, in turn, held out some elusive promise worth months and months of repeatedly frustrated pursuit, or else simply to his inability, after decades of increasing fame, to lay down his pen and quit the public stage.
Whatever it was that kept him at his desk, neither of the two stories, in spite of endless attempts to find out, seems to know what it is about or where it is headed or how to proceed. In both cases, the main character is looking for something: the American claimant, for the talisman that will prove his claim; the seeker after immortality, for the secret of the elixir vitae. But neither of them knows what that wanted object might be, what it might look like, or how it might work. Not even their reasons for thinking such a thing exists or for wanting it are made perfectly clear. As a result, it is nearly impossible not to read their baffled strivings as a fictive dramatization of the author’s own efforts to get on with his book.
In this respect, among others, the two stories are really one. As in a feverish dream, the same personages—old bachelor scholars, dark and fair women, bewitched housekeepers, English hospitalers, Italianate villains—keep reappearing under different names; the same event—a man’s obsessive quest that removes him from the normal world and any chance for love—happens over and over; the same obscure emblems—bloody footprints, magic flowers, coffers filled with hair, giant spiders, windowless rooms—show up repeatedly; with each rehearsal leading only to another round of the same ilk.
Most of all, though, these two stories are alike in their dependence on emblematic figures—whether characters, events, or objects—to make them go, and on the obscure purport of those emblems to point out a path ahead. Although pages of journalizing continue to appear, these discursive passages seem less designed to pad out a formulaic plot than to help Hawthorne find in his theme of noble ancestry or human immortality the story that will let it unfold. After a decade or more in virtual retirement, the “imaginative, thoughtful” style is back at work, trying to hear and understand its own shadowy promptings.
This impression of an attempt on Hawthorne’s part to return to his early ways of writing fiction has some external evidence to confirm it. Ideas of an American claimant, a bloody footprint, and the elixir of life all appear in the American notebooks, kept twenty or more years earlier. Some of the characters—the old scholar and his lovely ward, who is loved by two friends, one robust and sociable, the other a withdrawn dreamer—show up as early as Fanshawe. But if Hawthorne did think to reclaim the emblematic themes and style of the tales, he was to be disappointed. Years of disuse and distrust since The Scarlet Letter had robbed them of the power to mean anything that might motivate and guide a story.
Although the several drafts of these two unfinishable romances all seem to mean something they can’t quite grasp, the conclusion is unavoidable that they get nowhere because they finally mean nothing—nothing, that is, beyond the demise of Hawthorne’s once potent emblematic style. About the most one can say for them is that they illuminate aspects of his earlier fiction: the questions often asked by narrators of the tales regarding the meanings of emblematic details or the unforeseeable outcome of the action; the narrator’s repeated editorial comments on the course and progress of The House of the Seven Gables; Coverdale’s efforts, in The Blithedale Romance, to learn how the other characters are related; the pointless question, in The Marble Faun, regarding Donatello’s ears. From this late coign of vantage, the problems of the unfinished romances can be seen to have begun a long way back and to have been increasing ever since The Scarlet Letter.
In these abortive drafts lies the wreckage of one of his centur
y’s great literary talents—in some ways, the greatest of them all: a born artist whose culture would not let him believe completely in his art but whose artistic instincts would not let him believe completely in anything else. Up through The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne’s fiction is, as Emily Dickinson said of the given world, “a haunted house”—a dark interior standing for the heart and filled with the elusive specters of departed truths. Thereafter, his fiction is, as Dickinson said of anything made, rather than naturally given, “a house that tries to be haunted” but fails because its former visitants have been denied, and nothing artificial will take their place.
Of the following excerpts from the unfinished romances, the first, from “The American Claimant,” shows Hawthorne still a wizard stylist in the essayistic mode. The rest, from “The Elixir of Life,” show him (in the person of his characters) successively disturbed by the outbreak of the Civil War, unable to concentrate, puzzled by his own manuscript, and amused by his frailty. Interspersed among these plainly autobiographical passages are others from letters he wrote at the time to his publisher and friends.
The Portable Hawthorne (Penguin Classics) Page 44