“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. Jam
eson 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 mediaeval 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.
It was in Rome, too, that I first came in contact with death. It aroused my liveliest curiosity, but, as I remember, no alarm; partly, I suspect, because I was unable to believe that there was anything real in the spectacle. The scene has been woven into the texture of the Italian romance; it is there described almost as it actually presented itself to the author's observation. A dead monk of the Capuchin order lay on a bier in the nave of their church, and while we looked at him a stream of blood flowed from his nostrils. We went down afterwards, I recollect, into the vaults, and saw the fine, Oriental loam in which the body was to lie; and it seems to me there were arches and other architectural features composed of skulls and bones of long-dead brothers of the order. He must have been a fantastic and saturnine genius who first suggested this idea.
Another subterranean expedition of ours was to the Catacombs, the midnight passages of which seemed to be made of bones, and niches containing the dust of unknown mortality, which were duskily revealed in the glimmer of our moccoli as we passed along in single file. Sometimes we came to chambers, one of which had in it a bier covered with glass, in which was a body which still preserved some semblance of the human form. There were occasional openings in the vaulted roof of the corridors, but for the most part the darkness was Egyptian, and for a few moments a thrill of anxiety was caused by the disappearance either of my sister Una or of Ada Shepard; I forget which. They were soon found, but the guide read us a homily upon the awful peril of lifelong entombment which encompassed us. But the air was dry and cool, and the whole adventure, from my point of view, enjoyable.
Again, we went down a long flight of steps somewhere near the Forum, till we reached a pitch-black place, where we waited till a guide came up from still lower depths, down into which we followed him — each with a moccolo — till we felt level earth or stone beneath our feet, and stood in what I suppose is as lightless a hole as can exist in nature. It was wet, too, and the smell of it was deadly and dismal. This, however, was the prison in which the old Romans used to confine important prisoners, such as Jugurtha and the Apostle Peter; and here they were strangled to death or left to starve. It was the Mamertine Prison. I did not like it. I also recall the opening of an oubliette in the castle of San Angelo, which affected me like a nightmare. Before leaving Concord, in 1853, I had once tumbled through a rotten board into a well, dug by the side of the road ages before, and had barely saved myself from dropping to the bottom, sixty feet below, by grabbing the weeds which grew on the margin of the hole. I was not much scared at the moment; but the next day, taking my father to the scene of the accident, he remarked that had I fallen in I never could have got out again; upon which I conceived a horror of the well which haunts me in my dreams even to this day. Only a tuft of grass between me and such a fate! I was, therefore, far from comfortable beside the oubliette, and was glad to emerge again into the Roman sunshine.
One night we climbed the Pincian Hill, and saw, far out across Rome, the outlines of St. Peter's dome in silver light. While we were thinking that nothing could be more beautiful, all of a sudden the delicate silver bloomed out into a golden glory, which made everybody say, “Oh!” Was it more beautiful or not? Theoretically, I prefer the silver illumination; but, as a matter of fact, I must confess that I liked the golden illumination better. We were told that the wonder was performed by convicts, who lay along the dome and applied their matches to the lamps at the word of command, and that, inasmuch as the service was apt to prove fatal to the operators, these convicts were allowed certain alleviations of their condition for doing it. I suppose it is done by electricity now, and the convicts neither are killed nor obtain any concessions. Such are the helps and hindrances of civilization!
Shortly after this, on a cool and cloudy night, I was down in the Piazza, del Popolo and saw the fireworks, the only other pyrotechnic exhibition I had witnessed having been a private one in Rock Park, which, I think, I have described. This Roman one was very different, and I do not believe I have ever since seen another so fine. The whole front of the Pincian was covered with fiery designs, and in the air overhead wonderful fiery serpents and other devices skimmed, arched, wriggled, shot aloft, and detonated. A boy accepts appearances as realities; and these fireworks doubtless enlarged my conceptions of the possibilities of nature, and substantiated the fables of the enchanters.
[IMAGE: THE MARBLE FAUN]
The Faun of Praxiteles, as the world knows, attracted my father, though he could not have visited it often; for both in his notes and in his romance he makes the same mistake as to the pose of the figure: “He has a pipe,” he says in the former, “or some such instrument of music in the hand which rests upon the tree, and the other, I think, hangs carelessly by his side.” Of course, the left arm, the one referred to, is held akimbo on his left hip. That my father's eyes were, however, already awake to the literary and moral possibilities of the Faun is shown by his further observations, which are much the same as those which appear in the book. “The whole person,” he says, “conveys the idea of an amiable and sensual nature, easy, mirthful, apt for jollity, yet not incapable of being touched by pathos. The Faun has no principle, nor cou
ld comprehend it, yet is true and honest by virtue of his simplicity; very capable, too, of affection. He might be refined through his feelings, so that the coarser, animal part of his nature would be thrown into the background, though liable to assert itself at any time. Praxiteles has only expressed the animal part of the nature by one (or, rather, two) definite signs — the two ears, which go up in a little peak, not likely to be discovered on slight inspection, and, I suppose, they are covered with downy fur. A tail is probably hidden under the garment. Only a sculptor of the finest imagination, most delicate taste, and sweetest feeling would have dreamed of representing a faun under this guise; and, if you brood over it long enough, all the pleasantness of sylvan life, and all the genial and happy characteristics of the brute creation, seem to be mixed in him with humanity — trees, grass, flowers, cattle, deer, and unsophisticated man.” This passage shows how much my father was wont to trust to first impressions, and even more on the moral than on the material side. He recognized a truth in the first touch — the first thought — which he was wary of meddling with afterwards, contenting himself with slightly developing it now and then, and smoothing a little the form and manner of its presentation. The finest art is nearest to the most veritable nature — to such as have the eye to see the latter aright. Rome, like other ancient cities which have fallen from the positive activity of their original estate, has one great advantage over other places which one wishes to see (like London, for instance), that the whole business of whoever goes there, who has any business whatever, is to see it; and when the duty-sights have been duly done, the sight-seer then first begins to live his true life in independence and happiness, going where he lists, staying no longer than he pleases, and never knowing, when he sallies forth in the morning, what, or how many, or how few things he will have accomplished by nightfall.
Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) Page 655