Hawthorne’s English Note-books are the least interesting of that series, on account of the literal descriptions of castles, abbeys, scenery and palaces, with which they abound. The perfectly cultivated condition of England and Scotland, so far as he went in the latter country, is not stimulating to the imagination; for, as he says somewhere, even the trees seemed to be thoroughly domesticated. They are excellent reading for Americans who have never been to England, or for those who wish to renew their memories in regard to certain places there—perhaps better for the latter than for the former; and there are fine passages in them, especially his descriptions of the old abbeys and Gothic cathedrals, which seem to have delighted him more than the gardens at Blenheim and Eton, and to have brought to the surface a rare quality in his nature, or otherwise hidden in its depths,—his enthusiasm. Never before did words fail him until he attempted to describe the effect of a Gothic cathedral,—the time-honored mystery of its arches, the sober radiance of its stained windows, and the solemn aspiration of its lofty vault. As Schiller says, they are the monuments of a mighty civilization of which we know only too little.
Hawthorne’s object in writing these detailed accounts of his various expeditions becomes apparent from a passage in his Note-book, of the date of August 21, 1856, in which he says: “In my English romance, an American might bring a certain tradition from over the sea, and so discover the cross which had been long since forgotten.” It may have been his intention from the first to write a romance based on English soil, but that soil was no longer productive of such intellectual fruit, except in the form in which Dickens dug it up, like peat, out of the lower classes. We find Francis Bennoch writing to Hawthorne after his return to America, {Footnote: Mrs. Lathrop, 310.} hoping to encourage him in this direction, but without apparent effect. Instead of a romance, he made a collection of essays from those portions of his diary which were most closely connected together, enlarging them and rounding them out, which he published after his return to America, in the volume we have often referred to as “Our Old Home.” But as truthful studies of English life and manners Mrs. Hawthorne’s letters, though not always sensible, are much more interesting than her husband’s diary.
When Doctor Johnson was inquired of by a lady why he defined “pastern” in his Dictionary as the knee of a horse, he replied, “Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance;” and if Hawthorne had been asked a year afterwards why he went to Scotland in the summer of 1857, instead of to the Rhine and Switzerland, he might have given a similar excuse. In this way he missed the grandest and some of the most beautiful scenery in Europe. He could not, however, have been ignorant of the attractions of Paris, and yet he lingered in England until the following January, and then went over to that metropolis of fashion at a most unseasonable time. He had, indeed, planned to leave England in October, {Footnote: English Note-book, December, 1857.} and does not explain why he remained longer. He made a last visit to London in November, where he became reconciled to his fellow-townsmen of Salem, in the person of Edward Silsbee, of whom he writes as “a man of great intelligence and true feeling, absolutely brimming over with ideas.” Mr. Silsbee was an amateur art critic and connoisseur, who often made himself serviceable to American travellers in the way of a gentleman-cicerone. He went with the Hawthorne family to the Crystal Palace, where there were casts of all famous statues, models of architecture, and the like, and gave Hawthorne his first lesson in art criticism. Hawthorne indicated a preference for Michel Angelo’s statue of Giuliano dé Medici, called “Il Pensero;” also for the “Perseus” of Cellini, and the Gates of the Florentine Baptistery by Lorenzo Ghiberti. If we except the other statues of Michel Angelo, these are the most distinguished works in sculpture of the modern world.
Hawthorne went to Italy as naturally as the salmon ascends the rivers in spring. His artistic instinct drew him thither as the original home of modern art and literature, and perhaps also his interest in the Latin language, the single study which he cared for in boyhood. Does not romance come originally from Roma,—as well as Romulus? He wished to stand where Cæsar stood, to behold the snowy Soracte of Horace, and to read Virgil’s description of an Italian night on Italian ground. It is noticeable that he cared little or nothing for the splendors of Paris, the glittering peaks of Switzerland, medical-musical Vienna, or the grand scholarship and homely sweetness of old Germany.
Of all the Anglo-Saxon writers who have celebrated Italy, Byron, Shelley, Rogers, Ruskin and the two Brownings, none were more admirably equipped for it than Hawthorne. We cannot read “The Romance of Monte Beni” without recognizing a decidedly Italian element in his composition,—not the light-hearted, subtle, elastic, fiery Italian, such as we are accustomed to think them, but the tenderly feeling, terribly earnest Tuscan, like Dante and Savonarola. The myrtle and the cypress are both emblematic of Italian character, and there was more of the latter than the former, though something of either, in Hawthorne’s own make-up.
The Hawthornes left London on January 6, and, reaching Paris the following day, they made themselves comfortable at the Hotel du Louvre. However, they only remained there one week, during which it was so cold that they saw little and enjoyed little. They went to Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Madeleine, and the Champs Elysees, but without being greatly impressed by what they beheld. Hawthorne does not mention a single painting or statue among the art treasures of the Louvre, which if rivalled elsewhere are certainly unsurpassed; but Hawthorne began his studies in this line by an examination of the drawings of the old masters, and confesses that he was afterward too much fatigued to appreciate their finished paintings.
On January 19 they reached Marseilles, and two days later they embarked on that dreary winter voyage, so pleasant at an earlier season, for Civita Vecchia; and on the 20th they rolled into the Eternal City, with such sensations as one may imagine. On the 24th they located themselves for the season in the Palazzo Larazani, Via Porta Pinciana. {Footnote. Italian Note-book.}
Nemo similis Homeri.—There is nothing like the charm of a first visit to Rome. The first sight of the Forum, with its single pathetic column, brings us back to our school-days, to the study of Cæsar and the reading of Plutarch; and the intervening period drops out of our lives, taking all our care and anxiety with it. In England, France, Germany, we feel the weight of the present, but in Rome the present is like a glass window through which we view the grand procession of past events. Whatis, becomes of less importance than what was, and for the first time we feel the true sense of our indebtedness to the ages that have gone before. We bathe deep in the spirit of classical antiquity, and we come out refreshed, enlarged and purified. We return to the actualities of to-day with a clearer understanding, and better prepared to act our part in them.
Hawthorne did not feel this at first. He arrived in inclement weather, and it was some weeks before he became accustomed to the climatic conditions—so different from any northern atmosphere. He hated the filth of the much-neglected city, the squalor of its lower classes, the narrowness of its streets, and the peculiar pavement, which, as he says makes walking in Rome a penitential pilgrimage. He goes to the carnival, and his penetrating glance proves it to be a sham entertainment.
But in due course he emerges from this mood; he rejoices in the atmospheric immensity of St. Peter’s; he looks out from the Pincian hill, and seesNivea Soracteas Horace beheld it; and he is overawed (if Hawthorne could be) by the Forum of Trajan and the Column of Antoninus. He makes a great discovery, or rediscovery, that Phidias’s colossal statues of Castor and Pollux on the Monte Cavallo are the finest figures in Rome. They are late Roman copies, but probably from Phidias,—not by Lysippus or Praxiteles; and he felt the presence of Michel Angelo in the Baths of Diocletian. It is not long before he goes to the Pincian in the afternoon to play at jack-stones with his youngest daughter.
William W. Story, the American sculptor, would seem to have been a former acquaintance. His father, the famous law lecturer, lived in Salem during Hawthorne’s youth, but afterward removed to Cambridge, where the younger Story was educated, and there married an intimate friend of Mrs. James Russell Lowell. This brought him into close relations with Lowell, Longfellow, and their most intimate friends. He was something of a poet, and more of a sculptor, but, inheriting an independent fortune and living in the Barberini Palace, he soon became more of an Englishman than an American, a tendency which was visibly increased by a patent of nobility bestowed on him by the King of Naples.
Hawthorne soon renewed William Story’s acquaintance, and found him modelling the statue of Cleopatra, of which Hawthorne has given a somewhat idealized description in “The Marble Faun.” This may have interested him the more from the fact that he witnessed its development under the sculptor’s hands, and saw that distinguished historical person emerge as it were out of the clay, like a second Eve; but he makes a mental reservation that it would be better if English and American sculptors would make a freer use of their chisels—of which more hereafter. Story was a light-hearted, discursive person, with a large amount of bric-à-brac information, who could appreciate Hawthorne either as a genius or as a celebrity. He soon became Hawthorne’s chief companion and social mainstay in Rome, literally avade mecum, and we may believe that he exercised more or less influence over Hawthorne’s judgment in matters of art.
Hawthorne listened to Story, and read Mrs. Jameson, although Edward Silsbee had warned him against her as an uncertain authority; but Hawthorne depended chiefly on his own investigations. He and his wife declined an invitation to Mrs. Story’s masquerade, and lived very quietly during this first winter in Rome, making few acquaintances, but seeing a good deal of the city. They went together to all the principal churches and the princely galleries; and beside this Hawthorne traversed Rome from one end to the other, and across in every direction, sometimes alone, or in company with Julian, investigating everything from the Mamartine prison, in which Jugurtha was starved, to the catacombs of St. Calixtus and the buffaloes on the Campagna. The impression which Conway gives, that he went about sight-seeing and drinking sour wine with Story and Lothrop Motley, is not quite correct, for Motley did not come to Rome until the following December, and then only met Hawthorne a few times, according to his own confession. {Footnote: Mrs. Lathrop, 406.} We must not forget, however, that excellent lady and skilful astronomer, Miss Maria Mitchell, who joined the Hawthorne party in Paris, and became an indispensable accompaniment to them the rest of the winter.
Hawthorne also became acquainted with Buchanan Read, who afterward painted that stirring picture of General Sheridan galloping to the battle of Cedar Run; and on March 12 Mr. Read gave a party, at his Roman dwelling, of painters and sculptors, which Hawthorne attended, and has entered in full, with the moonlight excursion afterward, in “The Marble Faun.” There Hawthorne met Gibson, to whom he refers as the most distinguished sculptor of the time. So he was, in England, but there were much better sculptors in France and in Germany. Gibson’s personality interested Hawthorne, as it well might, but he saw clearly that Gibson was merely a skilful imitator of the antique, or, as he calls him, a pagan idealist. He also made acquaintance with two American sculptors, a Yankee and a girlish young woman, whose names are prudently withheld; for he afterward visited their studios, and readily discovered that they had no real talent for their profession.
If we feel inclined to quarrel with Hawthorne anywhere, it is in his disparagement of Crawford. There might be two opinions in regard to the slavery question, but there never has been but one as to the greatest of American artists. It was a pity that his friend Hillard could not have been with Hawthorne at this time to counteract the jealous influences to which he was exposed. He writes no word of regret at the untimely death of Crawford, but goes into his studio after that sad event and condemns his work. Only thegenrefigure of a boy playing marbles, gives him any satisfaction there; although a plea of extenuation might be entered in Hawthorne’s favor, for statues of heroic size could not be seen to greater disadvantage than when packed together in a studio. The immense buttons on the waistcoats of our revolutionary heroes seem to have startled him on his first entrance, and this may be accepted as an indication of the rest. Yet the tone of his criticism, both in the “Note-book” and in “The Marble Faun,” is far from friendly to Crawford. He does not refer to the statue of Beethoven, which was Crawford’s masterpiece, nor to the statue of Liberty, which now poses on the lantern of the Capitol at Washington,—much too beautiful, as Hartmann says, for its elevated position, and superior in every respect to the French statue of Liberty in New York harbor.
Hawthorne had already come to the conclusion that there was a certain degree of poison in the Roman atmosphere, and in April he found the climate decidedly languid, but he had fallen in love with this pagan capital and he hated to leave it. Mrs. Anna Jameson arrived late in April; a sturdy, warm-hearted Englishwoman greatly devoted to art, for which her books served as elementary treatises and pioneers to the English and Americans of those days. She was so anxious to meet Hawthorne that she persuaded William Story to bring him and his wife to her lodgings when she was too ill to go forth. They had read each other’s writings and could compliment each other in all sincerity, for Mrs. Jameson had also an excellent narrative style; but Hawthorne found her rather didactic, and although she professed to be able “to read a picture like a book,” her conversation was by no means brilliant. She had contracted an unhappy marriage early in life, and found an escape from her sorrows and regrets in this elevated interest.
It was just before leaving Rome that Hawthorne conceived the idea of a romance in which the “Faun” of Praxiteles should come to life, and play a characteristic part in the modern world; the catastrophe naturally resulting from his coming into conflict with a social organization for which he was unfitted. This portion of Hawthorne’s diary is intensely interesting to those who have walked on classic ground.
On May 24 Hawthorne commenced his journey to Florence with avetturinoby easy stages, and one can cordially envy him this portion of his Italian sojourn; with his devoted wife and three happy children; travelling through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world,—nearly if not quite equal to the Rhineland—without even the smallest cloud of care and anxiety upon his sky, his mind stored with mighty memories, and looking forward with equal expectations to the prospect before him,—bella Firenze, the treasure-house of Italian cities; through sunny valleys, with their streams and hill-sides winding seaward; up the precipitous spurs of the Apennines, with their old baronial castles perched like vultures’ nests on inaccessible crags; passing through gloomy, tortuous defiles, guarded by Roman strongholds; and then drawn up by white bullocks over Monte Somma, and to the mountain cities of Assisi and Perugia, older than Rome itself; by Lake Trasimenus, still ominous of the name of Hannibal; over hill-sides silver-gray with olive orchards; always a fresh view and a new panorama, bounded by the purple peaks on the horizon; and over all, the tender blue of the Italian sky. Hawthorne may have felt that his whole previous life, all he had struggled, lived and suffered for, was but a preparation for this one week of perfectly harmonious existence. Such vacations from earthly troubles come but rarely in the most fortunate lives, and are never of long duration.
When they reached Florence, they found it, as Rose Hawthorne says, very hot—much too hot to enjoy the city as it should be enjoyed. Her reminiscences of their life at Florence, and especially of the Villa Manteüto, have a charming freshness and virginal simplicity, although written in a somewhat high-flown manner. She succeeds, in spite of her peculiar style, in giving a distinct impression of the old chateau, its surroundings, the life her family led there, and of the wonderful view from Bellosguardo. One feels that beneath the disguise of a fashionable dress there is an innocent, sympathetic, and pure-spirited nature.
The Hawthornes arrived in Florence on the afternoon of June 3, and spent the first night at the Albergo della Fontano, and the next day obtained apartments in the Casa del Bello, opposite Hiram Powers’ studio, and just outside of the Porta Romana. Hawthorne made Mr. Powers’ acquaintance even before he entered the city, and Powers soon became to him what Story had been in Rome. The Brownings were already at Casa Guidi,—still noted in the annals of English poesy,—and called upon the Hawthornes at the first notice of their arrival. Alacrity or readiness would seem to have been one of Robert Browning’s prominent characteristics. Elizabeth Browning’s mind was as much occupied with spiritism as when Hawthorne met her two years previously at Monckton Milnes’s breakfast; an unfortunate proclivity for a person of frail physique and delicate nerves. Neither did she live very long after this. Her husband and Hawthorne both cordially disapproved of these mesmeric practices; but Mrs. Browning could not be prevented from talking on the subject, and this evidently produced an ecstatic and febrile condition of mind in her, very wearing to a poetic temperament. Hawthorne heartily liked Browning himself, and always speaks well of him; but there must also have been an undercurrent of disagreement between him and so ardent an admirer of Louis Napoleon, and he recalls little or nothing of what Browning said to him. This continued till the last of June, when Robert and Elizabeth left Florence for cooler regions.
Meanwhile Hawthorne occupied himself seriously with seeing Florence and studying art, like a man who intends to get at the root of the matter. Florence afforded better advantages than Rome for the study of art, not only from the superiority of its collections, but because there the development of mediaeval art can be traced to its fountain-source. He had no textbooks to guide him,—at least he does not refer to any,—and his investigations were consequently of rather an irregular kind, but it was evidently the subject which interested him most deeply at this time. His Note-book is full of it, and also of discussions on sculpture with Hiram Powers, in which Hawthorne has frequently the best of the argument.
In fact Powers looked upon his art from much too literal a stand-point. He agreed with Hawthorne as to the fine expression of the face of Michel Angelo’s “Giuliano dé Medici,” {Footnote: As Hawthorne did not prepare his diary for publication, it would not be fair to hold him responsible for the many instances of bad Italian in the Note-book, which ought to have been edited by some one who knew the language.} but affirmed that it was owing to a trick of overshadowing the face by the projecting visor of Giuliano’s helmet. Hawthorne did not see why such a device did not come within the range of legitimate art, the truth of the matter being that Michel Angelo left the face unfinished; but the expression of the statue is not in its face, but in the inclination of the head, the position of the arms, the heavy droop of the armor, and in fact in the whole figure. Powers’ “Greek Slave,” on the contrary, though finely modelled and sufficiently modern in type, has no definite expression whatever.
Hawthorne found an exceptional interest in the “Venus dé Medici,” now supposed to have been the work of one of the sons of Praxiteles, and its wonderful symmetry gives it a radiance like that of the sun behind a summer cloud; but Powers cooled down his enthusiasm by objecting to the position of the ears, the vacancy of the face, the misrepresentation of the inner surface of the lips, and by condemning particularly the structure of the eyes, which he declared were such as no human being could see with. {Footnote: Italian Note-book, June 13, 1858.} Hawthorne was somewhat puzzled by these subtleties of criticism, which he did not know very well how to answer, but he still held fast to the opinion that he was fundamentally right, and retaliated by criticising Powers’ own statues in his diary.
The Greeks, in the best period of their favorite art, never attempted a literal reproduction of the human figure. Certain features, like the nostrils, were merely indicated; others, like the eyelashes, often so expressive in woman, were omitted altogether; hair and drapery were treated in a schematic manner. In order to give an expression to the eyes, various devices were resorted to. The eyelids of the bust of Pericles on the Acropolis had bevelled edges, and the eyeballs of the “Apollo Belvedere” are exceptionally convex, to produce the effect of looking to a distance, although the human eye when gazing afar off becomes slightly contracted. The head of the “Venus dé Medici” is finely shaped, but small, and her features are pretty, rather than beautiful; but her eyes are exceptional among all feminine statues for their tenderness of expression—swimming, as it were, with love; and it is the manner in which this effect is produced that Powers mistook for bad sculpture. Hiram Powers’ most exceptional proposition was to the effect that the busts of the Roman emperors were not characteristic portraits. Hawthorne strongly dissented from this; and he was in the right, for if the character of a man can be read from marble, it is from those old blocks. Hawthorne has some admirable remarks on this point.
Such was Hawthorne’s internal life during his first month at Florence. He was full of admiration for the cathedral, the equestrian statue of Cosmo dé Medici, the “David” of Michel Angelo, the Loggia dé Lanzi, Raphael’s portrait of Julius II., the “Fates” of Michel Angelo, and many others; yet he confesses that the Dutch, French, and English paintings gave him a more simple, natural pleasure,—probably because their subjects came closer to his own experience.
A strange figure of an old man, with “a Palmer-like beard,” continually crossed Hawthorne’s path, both in Rome and in Florence, where he dines with him at the Brownings’. His name is withheld, but Hawthorne informs us that he is an American editor, a poet; that he voted for Buchanan, and was rejoicing in the defeat of the Free-soilers,—“a man to whom the world lacks substance because he has not sufficiently cultivated his emotional nature;” and “his personal intercourse, though kindly, does not stir one’s blood in the least.” Yet Hawthorne finds him to be good-hearted, intelligent, and sensible. This can be no other than William Cullen Bryant. {Footnote: Italian Note-book, ii. 15.}
In the evening of June 27 the Hawthornes went to call on a Miss Blagden, who occupied a villa on Bellosguardo, and where they met the Brownings, and a Mr. Trollope, a brother of the novelist. It could not have been the Villa Manteüto, which Miss Blagden rented, for we hear of her at Bellosguardo again in August, when Hawthorne was living there himself; and after this we do not hear of the Brownings again.
Hawthorne’s remark on Browning’s poetry is one of the rare instances in which he criticises a contemporary author:
“I am rather surprised that Browning’s conversation should be so clear, and so much to the purpose at the moment, since his poetry can seldom proceed far, without running into the high grass of latent meanings and obscure allusions.”
It is precisely this which has prevented Browning from achieving the reputation that his genius deserves. We wish that Hawthorne could have favored us with as much literary criticism as he has given us of art criticism, and we almost lose patience with him for his repeated canonization of General Jackson—St. Hickory—united with a disparagement of Washington and Sumner; but although Hawthorne’s insight into human nature was wonderful in its way, it would seem to have been confined within narrow boundaries. At least he seems to have possessed little insight into grand characters and magnanimous natures. He wishes now that Raphael could have painted Jackson’s portrait. So, conversely, Shakespeare belittles Cæsar in order to suit the purpose of his play. Which of Shakespeare’s male characters can be measured beside George Washington? There is not one of them, unless Kent in “King Lear.” Strong, resolute natures, like Washington, Hamilton, Sumner, are not adapted to dramatic fiction, either in prose or in verse.
A Florentine summer is about equal to one in South Carolina, and now, when Switzerland can be reached by rail in twenty-four hours, no American or Englishman thinks of spending July and August there; but in Hawthorne’s time it was a long and expensive journey over the Pennine Alps; Hawthorne’s physique was as well attempered to heat as to cold; and he continued to frequent the picture-galleries and museums after all others had ceased to do so; although he complains in his diary that he had never known it so hot before, and that the flagstones in the street reflect the sun’s rays upon him like the open doors of a furnace.
At length, in an entry of July 27, he says:
“I seldom go out nowadays, having already seen Florence tolerably well, and the streets being very hot, and myself having been engaged in sketching out a romance, {Footnote: “The Marble Faun."} which whether it will ever come to anything is a point yet to be decided. At any rate, it leaves me little heart for journalizing, and describing new things; and six months of uninterrupted monotony would be more valuable to me just now, than the most brilliant succession of novelties.”
This is the second instance in which we hear of a romance based on the “Faun” of Praxiteles, and now at last he appears to be in earnest.
It may be suspected that his entertaining friend, Hiram Powers, was the chief obstacle to the progress of his new plot, and it is rather amusing to believe that it was through the agency of Mr. Powers, who cared for nothing so much as Hawthorne’s welfare, that this impediment was removed. Five days later, Hawthorne and his household gods, which were chiefly his wife and children, left the Casa del Bello for the Villa Manteüto where they remained in peaceful retirement until the first of October.
On the tower of the Villa he could enjoy whatever enlivening breezes came across to Florence from the mountains to the north and east. When thetramontanablew, he was comfortable enough. Thunder-storms also came frequently, with the roar of heaven’s artillery reverberating from peak to peak, and enveloping Bellosguardo in a dense vapor, like the smoke from Napoleon’s cannon; after which they would career down the valley of the Arno to Pisa, flashing and cannonading like a victorious army in pursuit of the enemy.
The beauty of the summer nights at Florence amply compensates for the sultriness of the days,—especially if they be moonlight nights,—and the bright starlight of the Mediterranean is little less beautiful. Travellers who only see Italy in winter, know not what they miss. Hawthorne noticed that the Italian sky had a softer blue than that of England and America, and that there was a peculiar luminous quality in the atmosphere, as well as a more decided difference between sunshine and shadow, than in countries north of the Alps. The atmosphere of Italy, Spain, and Greece is not like any American air that I am acquainted with. During the summer season, all Italians whose occupation will permit them, sleep at noon,—the laborers in the shadows of the walls,—and sit up late at night, enjoying the fine air and the pleasant conversation which it inspires. Hawthorne found the atmosphere of Tuscany favorable for literary work, even in August.
On the 4th of that month he looked out from his castle wall late at night and noticed the brilliancy of the stars,—also that the Great Dipper exactly overhung the valley of the Arno. At that same hour the astronomer Donati was sweeping the heavens with his telescope at the Florentine observatory, and it may have been ten days later that he discovered in the handle of the Dipper the great comet which will always bear his name,—the most magnificent comet of modern times, only excepting that of 1680, which could be seen at noonday. It first became visible to the naked eye during the last week of August, as a small star with a smaller tail, near the second star from the end of the handle of the Dipper; after which it grew apace until it extended nearly from the horizon to the zenith, with a tail millions of miles in length. This, however, did not take place until near the time of Hawthorne’s departure from Florence. In his case it proved sorrowfully enough a harbinger of calamity.
Hawthorne blocked out his sketch of “The Romance of Monte Beni” in a single month, and then returned to the churches and picture-galleries. He could not expect to revisit Italy in this life, and prudently concluded to make the most of it while the opportunity lasted. He notices the peculiar fatigue which sight-seeing causes in deep natures, and becomes unspeakably weary of it, yet returns to it again next day with an interest as fresh as before.
Neither did he lack for society. William Story came over to see him from Siena, where he was spending the summer, exactly as Hawthorne describes the visit of Kenyon to Donatello in his romance. Mr. and Mrs. Powers came frequently up the hill in the cool of the evening, and Miss Blagden also proved an excellent neighbor. Early in September the “spirits” appeared again in great force. Mrs. Hawthorne discovered a medium in her English governess; table-rappings and table-tippings were the order of the evening; and some rather surprising results were obtained through Miss Shepard’s fingers. {Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 31.} Powers related a still more surprising performance {Footnote: Italian Note-book.} that he had witnessed, which was conducted by D. D. Home, an American mountebank, who hoaxed more crowned heads, princes, princesses, and especially English duchesses than Cagliostro himself. Hawthorne felt the repugnance of the true artist to this uncanny business, and his thorough detestation of the subject commends itself to every sensible reader. He came to the conclusion that the supposed revelations of spirits were nothing more than the mental vagaries of persons in the same room, conveyed in some occult manner to the brain of the medium. The governess, Miss Shepard, agreed with him in this, but she could give no explanation as to the manner in which the response came to her. Twenty years of scientific investigations have added little or nothing to this diagnosis of Hawthorne’s, nor are we any nearer to an explanation of the simple fact; which is wonderful enough in its way. Hawthorne compares the revelations of mediums to dreams, but they are not exactly like them, for they are at the same time more rational and less original or spontaneous than dreams. In my dreams my old friends often come back to me and speak in their characteristic manner,—more characteristic perhaps than I could represent them when awake,—but the responses of mediums are either evasive or too highly generalized to be of any particular value. The story of Mary Runnel, or Rondel, which Julian Hawthorne narrates, is an excellent case in point. Hawthorne had probably heard of that flirtation of his grandfather some time in his youth, and the fact was unconsciously latent in his mind; but nothing that Mary divulged at Bellosguardo was of real interest to him or to the others concerned. The practice of spiritism, hypnotism, or Christian Science opens a wide door for superstition and imposture to walk in and seat themselves by our firesides.
About a year before this, Congress had given Hiram Powers a commission to model a colossal statue ofAmericafor the Capitol at Washington. This he had done, and the committee in charge accepted his design,—Hawthorne also writes admiringly of it,—but it was also necessary to receive the approval of the President, and this Buchanan with his peculiar obstinacy refused to give. Powers was left without compensation for a whole year of arduous labor, and Hawthorne for once was thoroughly indignant. He wrote in his diary:
“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.... 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 Greeneough’s Washington.”
Perhaps Powers’ “America” was a fortunate escape, and yet it does not seem right that any enlightened government should set such a pitfall for honest men to stumble into. There certainly ought to be some compensation in such cases. The experience of history hitherto has been that, whereas painting and literature have nourished under all forms of government, sculpture has only attained its highest excellence in republics like Athens, Rhodes, Florence, and Nuremberg; so that upon this line of argument there is good hope for America in the future.
Nearly one-third of the Italian Note-book is devoted to the criticisms or descriptions of paintings, statues, and architecture, for which we can be only too thankful as coming from such a bright, penetrating, and ingenious intelligence. It is much in their favor that Hawthorne had not previously undertaken a course of instruction in art; that he wrote for his own benefit, and not for publication; and that he was not biased by preconceived opinions. It cannot be doubted that he was sometimes influenced by the opinions of Story, Powers, and other artists with whom he came in contact; but this could have happened only in particular cases, and more especially in respect to modern works of art. When Hawthorne visited the galleries he usually went alone, or only accompanied by his wife.
The only opportunities for the study of aesthetics or art criticism, fifty years ago, were to be found in German universities. Kugler’s handbook of painting was the chief authority in use, rather academic, but correct enough in a general way. Ruskin, a more eloquent and discriminating writer, had devoted himself chiefly to celebrating the merits of Turner and Tintoretto, but was never quite just to Florentine art. Mrs. Jameson followed closely after Kugler, and was the only one of these that Hawthorne appears to have consulted. Winckelmann’s history of Greek sculpture, which was not a history in the proper sense of the word, had been translated by Lodge, but Hawthorne does not mention it, and it would not have been much assistance to him if he had read it. Like Winckelmann and Lessing, however, he admired the “Laocoön,”—an admiration now somewhat out of fashion.
There can be no final authority in art, for the most experienced critics still continue to differ in their estimates of the same painting or statue. More than this, it is safe to affirm that any one writer who makes a statement concerning a certain work of art at a given time, would have made a somewhat different statement at another time. In fact, this not unfrequently happens in actual practice; for all that any of us can do is, to reproduce the impression made on us at the moment, and this depends as much on our own state of mind, and on our peculiarities, as on the peculiarities of the picture or statue that we criticise. It is the same in art itself. If Raphael had not painted the “Sistine Madonna” at the time he did, he would have produced a different work. It was the concentration of that particular occasion, and if any accident had happened to prevent it, that pious and beautiful vision would have been lost to the world.
It requires years of study and observation of the best masters to become a trustworthy art critic, and then everything depends of course upon the genius of the individual. It has happened more than once that a wealthy American, with a certain kind of enthusiasm for art, has prepared himself at a German university, has studied the science of connoisseurship, and has become associate member of a number of foreign societies, only to discover at length that he had no talent for the profession. Hawthorne enjoyed no such advantages, nor did he even think of becoming a connoisseur. His whole experience in the art of design might be included within twelve months, and his original basis was nothing better than his wife’s water-color painting and the mediocre pictures in the Boston Athenaeum; but he brought to his subject an eye that was trained to the closest observation of Nature and a mind experienced beyond all others {Footnote: At least at that time.} in the mysteries of human life. He begins tentatively, and as might be expected makes a number of errors, but quite as often he hits the nail, where others have missed it. He learns by his mistakes, and steadily improves in critical faculty. Hawthorne’s Italian Note-book is a unique record, in which the development of a highly organized mind has advanced from small beginnings to exceptional skill in a fresh department of activity.
Hawthorne brought with him to Italy the Yankee preference for newness and nicety, which our forefathers themselves derived from their residence in Holland, and there is no city in Europe where this sentiment could have troubled him so much as in Rome. He disliked the dingy picture-frames, the uncleanly canvases, the earth-stains and broken noses of the antique statues, the smoked-up walls of the Sistine Chapel, and the cracks in Raphael’s frescos. He condemns everything as rubbish which has not an external perfection; forgetting that, as in human nature, the most precious treasures are sometimes allied with an ungainly exterior. Yet in this he only echoes the impressions of thousands of others who have gone to the Vatican and returned disconsolate, because amid a perplexing multitude of objects they knew not where to look for consummate art. One can imagine if an experienced friend had accompanied Hawthorne to the Raphael stanza, and had pointed out the figures of the Pope, the cardinal, and the angelic boys in the “Mass at Bolsena,” he would have admired them without limitation. He quickly discovered Raphael’s “Transfiguration,” and considered it the greatest painting that the world contains.
The paintings in the princely collections in Rome are, with the exception of those in the Borghese gallery, far removed from princely. A large proportion of their best paintings had long since been sold to the royal collections of northern Europe, and had been replaced either by copies or by works of inferior masters. In the Barberini palace there are not more than three or four paintings such as might reasonably detain a traveller, and it is about the same in the Ludovisi gallery. There was not a grain of affectation in Hawthorne; he never pretended to admire what he did not like, nor did he strain himself into liking anything that his inner nature rebelled against.
Hawthorne’s taste in art was much in advance of his time. His quick appreciation of the colossal statues of Castor and Pollux on the Quirinal is the best proof of this. Ten years later it was the fashion in Rome to deride those statues, as a late work of the empire and greatly lacking in artistic style. Brunn, in his history of ancient sculpture, attributes them to the school of Lysippus, a contemporary of Alexander, which Brunn certainly would not have done if he had possessed a good eye for form. Vasari, on the contrary, a surer critic, considered them worthy to be placed beside Michel Angelo’s “David”; but it remained for Furtwängler to restore them to their true position as a work of the Periclean age, although copied by Italian sculptors. They must have been the product of a single mind, {Footnote: On the base of one isOpus Phidiae, and on that of the other,Opus Praxitelis.} either Phidias, Alcameres, or the elder Praxiteles—if there ever was such a person; and they have the finest figures of any statues in Rome (much finer than the dandified “Apollo Belvedere”) and also the most spirited action.
Hawthorne went to the Villa Ludovisi to see the much-vaunted bas-relief of Antinous, which fifty years ago was considered one of the art treasures of the city; but a more refined taste has since discovered that in spite of the rare technical skill, its hard glassy finish gives it a cold and conventional effect. Hawthorne returned from it disappointed, and wrote in his diary:
“This Antinous is said to be the finest relic of antiquity next to the Apollo and the Laocoön; but I could not feel it to be so, partly, I suppose, because the features of Antinous do not seem to me beautiful in themselves; and that heavy, downward look is repeated till I am more weary of it than of anything else in sculpture.”
The Greek artist of Adrian’s time attempted to give the face a pensive expression, but only succeeded in this heavy downward look.
Hawthorne felt the same disappointment after his first visit to the sculpture-gallery of the Vatican. “I must confess,” he wrote, “taking such transient glimpses as I did, I was more impressed with the extent of the Vatican, and the beautiful order in which it is kept and its great sunny, open courts, with fountains, grass, and shrubs ... than with the statuary.” The Vatican collection has great archaeological value, but, with the exception of the “Laocoön,” the “Meleager,” the “Apollo,” and a few others, little or no artistic value. The vast majority of the statues there are either late Roman works or cheap Roman copies of second-rate Hellenic statues. Some of them are positively bad and others are archaic, and Hawthorne was fully justified in his disatisfaction with them. He noticed, however, a decided difference between the original “Apollo” and the casts of it with which he was familiar. On a subsequent visit he fails to observe the numerous faults in Canova’s “Perseus,” and afterwards writes this original statement concerning the “Laocoön”:
“I felt the Laocoön very powerfully, though very quietly; an immortal agony with a strange calmness diffused through it, so that it resembles the vast age of the sea, calm on account of its immensity; as the tumult of Niagara, which does not seem to be tumult, because it keeps pouring on forever and ever.”
Professor E. A. Gardner and the more fastidious school of critics have recently decided that the action of the “Laocoön” is too violent to be contained within the proper boundaries of sculpture; but Hawthorne controverts this view in a single sentence. The action is violent, it is true, but theimpressionwhich the statue makes on him is not a violent one; for the greatness of the art sublimates the motive. It is a tragedy in marble, and Pliny, who had seen the works of Phidias and Praxiteles, placed Agesander’s “Laocoön” above them all. This, however, is a Roman view. What Hawthorne wrote in his diary should not always be taken literally. When he declares that he would like to have every artist that perpetrates an allegory put to death, he merely expresses the puzzling effects which such compositions frequently exercise on the weary-minded traveller; and when he wishes that all the frescos on Italian walls could be obliterated, he only repeats a sentiment of similar strain. Perhaps we should class in the same category Hawthorne’s remark concerning the Elgin marbles in the British Museum, that “it would be well if they were converted into paving-stones.” There are no grander monuments of ancient art than those battered and headless statues from the pediment of the Parthenon (the figures of the so-called “Three Fates” surpass the “Venus of Melos”), and archaeologists are still in dispute as to what they may have represented; but the significance of the subject before him was always the point in which Hawthorne was interested. Julian Hawthorne says of his father, in regard to a similar instance:
“Of technicalities,—difficulties overcome, harmony of lines, and so forth,—he had no explicit knowledge; they produced their effect upon him of course, but without his recognizing the manner of it. All that concerned him was the sentiment which the artist had meant to express; the means and method were comparatively unimportant.” {Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 193.}
The technicalities of art differ with every clime and every generation. They belong chiefly to the connoisseur, and have their value, but the less a critic thinks of them in making a general estimate of a painting or statue, the more likely he is to render an impartial judgment. Hawthorne’s analysis of Praxiteles’s “Faun,” in his “Romance of Monte Beni,” being a subject in which he was particularly interested, is almost without a rival in the literature of its kind; and this is the more remarkable since the copy of the “Faun” in the museum of the Capitol is not one of the best, at least it is inferior to the one in the Glyptothek at Munich. It seems as if Hawthorne had penetrated to the first conception of it in the mind of Praxiteles.
The Sistine Chapel, like the Italian scenery, only unfolds its beauties on a bright day, and Hawthorne happened to go there when the sky was full of drifting clouds, a time when it is difficult to see any object as it really is. It may have been on this account that he entirely mistook the action of the Saviour in Michel Angelo’s “Last Judgment.” Christ has raised his arm above his head in order to display the mark where he was nailed to the cross, and Hawthorne presumed this, as many others have done, to be an angry threatening gesture of condemnation, which would not accord with his merciful spirit. He appreciated the symmetrical figure of Adam, and the majestic forms of the prophets and sibyls encircling the ceiling, and if he had seen the face of the Saviour in a fair light, he might have recognized that such divine calmness of expression could not coexist with a vindictive motive. This, however, can be seen to better advantage in a Braun photograph than in the painting itself.
Hawthorne goes to the Church of San Pietro in Vincolo to see Michel Angelo’s “Moses,” but he does not moralize before it, like a certain Concord artist, on “the weakness of exaggeration;” nor does he consider, like Ruskin, that its conventional horns are a serious detriment. On the contrary he finds it “grand and sublime, with a beard flowing down like a cataract; a truly majestic figure, but not so benign as it were desirable that such strength should hold.” An Englishman present remarked that the “Moses” had very fine features,—“a compliment,” says Hawthorne, “for which the colossal Hebrew ought to have made the Englishman a bow.”
{Footnote: Italian Note-book, p. 164.}
Perhaps the Englishman really meant that the face had a noble expression. The somewhat satyr-like features of the “Moses” would seem to have been unconsciously adopted, together with the horns, from a statue of the god Pan, which thus serves as an intermediate link between the “Moses” and the “Faun” of Praxiteles; but he who cannot appreciate Michel Angelo’s “Moses” in spite of this, knows nothing of the Alpine heights of human nature.
Of all the paintings that Hawthorne saw in Rome none impressed him so deeply as Guido’s portrait of Beatrice Cenci, and none more justly. If the “Laocoön” is the type of an old Greek tragedy, a strong man strangled in the coils of Fate, the portrait of Beatrice represents the tragedy of mediaeval Italy, a beautiful woman crushed by the downfall of a splendid civilization. The fate of Joan of Arc or of Madame Roland was merciful compared to that of poor Beatrice. Religion is no consolation to her, for it is the Pope himself who signs her death-warrant. She is massacred to gratify the avarice of the Holy See. Yet in this last evening of her tragical life, she does find strength and consolation in her dignity as a woman. Never was art consecrated to a higher purpose; Guido rose above himself; and, as Hawthorne says, it seems as if mortal man could not have wrought such an effect. It has always been the most popular painting in Rome, but Hawthorne was the first to celebrate its unique superiority in writing, and his discourse upon it in various places leaves little for those that follow.
It may have been long since discovered that Hawthorne’s single weakness was a weakness for his friends; certainly an amiable weakness, but nevertheless that is the proper name for it. When Phocion was Archon of Athens, he said that a chief magistrate should know no friends; and the same should be true of an authoritative writer. Hawthorne has not gone so far in this direction as many others have who had less reason to speak with authority than he; but he has indicated his partiality for Franklin Pierce plainly enough, and his over-praise of Hiram Powers and William Story, as well as his under-praise of Crawford, will go down to future generations as something of an injustice to those three artists.
{Illustration: GUIDO RENI’S PORTRAIT OF BEATRICE CENCI, PAINTED WHILE SHE WAS IN PRISON, WHICH SUGGESTED TO HAWTHORNE THE PLOT OF “THE MARBLE FAUN"}
It is not necessary to repeat here what Hawthorne wrote concerning Powers’ Webster. The statue stands in front of the State House at Boston, and serves as a good likeness of the famous orator, but more than that one cannot say for it. The face has no definable expression, and those who have looked for a central motive in the figure will be pleased to learn what it is by reading Hawthorne’s description of it, as he saw it in Powers’ studio at Florence. A sculptor of the present day can find no better study for his art than the attitudes and changes of countenance in an eloquent speaker; but which of them can be said to have taken advantage of this? Story made an attempt in his statue of Everett, but even his most indulgent friends did not consider it a success. His “George Peabody,” opposite the Bank of England, could not perhaps have been altogether different from what it is.
What chiefly interested Story in his profession seems to have been the modelling of unhappy women in various attitudes of reflection. He made a number of these, of which his “Cleopatra” is the only one known to fame, and in the expression of her face he has certainly achieved a high degree of excellence. Neither has Hawthorne valued it too highly,—the expression of worldly splendor incarnated in a beautiful woman on the tragical verge of an abyss. If she only were beautiful! Here the limitations of the statue commence. Hawthorne says, “The sculptor had not shunned to give the full, Nubian lips and other characteristics of the Egyptian physiognomy.”
Here he follows the sculptor himself, and it is remarkable that a college graduate like William Story should have made so transparent a mistake. Cleopatra was not an Egyptian at all. The Ptolemies were Greeks, and it is simply impossible to believe that they would have allied themselves with a subject and alien race. This kind of small pedantry has often led artists astray, and was peculiarly virulent during the middle of the past century. The whole figure of Story’s “Cleopatra” suffers from it. Hawthorne says again, “She was draped from head to foot in a costume minutely and scrupulously studied from that of ancient Egypt.” In fact, the body and limbs of the statue are so closely shrouded as to deprive the work of that sense of freedom of action and royal abandon which greets us in Shakespeare’s and Plutarch’s “Cleopatra.” Story might have taken a lesson from Titian’s matchless “Cleopatra” in the Cassel gallery, or from Marc Antonio’s small woodcut of Raphael’s “Cleopatra.”
Perhaps it is not too much to say of Crawford that he was the finest plastic genius of the Anglo-Saxon race. His technique may not have been equal to Flaxman’s or St. Gaudens’, but his designs have more of grandeur than the former, and he is more original than the latter. There are faults of modelling in his “Orpheus,” and its attitude resembles that of the eldest son of Niobe in the Florentine gallery,—although the Niobe youth looks upward and Orpheus is peering into darkness,—its features are rather too pretty; but the statue has exactly what Powers’ “Greek Slave” lacks, a definite motive,—that of an earnest seeker,—which pervades it from head to foot; and it is no imaginary pathos that we feel in its presence. There is, at least, no imitation of the antique in Crawford’s “Beethoven,” for its conception, the listening to internal harmonies, would never have occurred to a Greek or a Roman. Even Hawthorne admits Crawford’s skill in the treatment of drapery; and this is very important, for it is in his drapery quite as much as in the nude that we recognize the superiority of Michel Angelo to Raphael; and the folds of Beethoven’s mantle are as rhythmical as his own harmonies. The features lack something of firmness, but it is altogether a statue in the grand manner.
Hawthorne is rather too exacting in his requirements of modern sculptors. Warrington Wood, who commenced life as a marble-worker, always employed Italian workmen to carve his statues, although he was perfectly able to do it himself, and always put on the finishing touches,—as I presume they all do. Bronze statues are finished with a file, and of course do not require any knowledge of the chisel.
In regard to the imitation of antique attitudes, there has certainly been too much of it, as Hawthorne supposes; but the Greeks themselves were given to this form of plagiarism, and even Praxiteles sometimes adopted the motives of his predecessors; but Hawthorne praises Powers, Story, and Harriet Hosmer above their merits.
The whole brotherhood of artists and their critical friends might rise up against me, if I were to support Hawthorne’s condemnation of modern Venuses, and “the guilty glimpses stolen at hired models.” They are not necessarily guilty glimpses. To an experienced artist the customary study from a naked figure, male or female, is little more than what a low-necked dress at a party would be to many others. Yet the instinct of the age shrinks from this exposure. We can make pretty good Venuses, but we cannot look at them through the same mental and moral atmosphere as the contemporaries of Scopas, or even with the same eyes that Michel Angelo saw them. We feel the difference between a modern Venus and an ancient one. There is a statue in the Vatican of a Roman emperor, of which every one says that it ought to wear clothes; and the reason is because the face has such a modern look. A raving Bacchante may be a good acquisition to an art museum, but it is out of place in a public library. A female statue requires more or less drapery to set off the outlines of the figure and to give it dignity. We feel this even in the finest Greek work—like the “Venus of Cnidos.”
In this matter Hawthorne certainly exposes his Puritanic education, and he also places too high a value on the carving of button-holes and shoestrings by Italian workmen. Such things are the fag-ends of statuary.
His judgment, however, is clear and convincing in regard to the tinted Eves and Venuses of Gibson. Whatever may have been the ancient practice in this respect, Gibson’s experiment proved a failure. Nobody likes those statues; and no other sculptor has since followed Gibson’s example. The tinting of statues by the Greeks did not commence until the time of Aristotle, and does not seem to have been very general. Their object evidently was, not so much to imitate flesh as to tone down the crystalline glare of the new marble. Pausanias speaks of a statue in Arcadia, the drapery of which was painted with vermilion, “so as to look very gay.” This was of course the consequence of a late and degraded taste. That traces of paint should have been discovered on Greek temples is no evidence that the marble was painted when they were first built.
It may be suspected that Hawthorne was one of the very few who have seen the “Venus dé Medici” and recognized the true significance of the statue. The vast majority of visitors to the Uffizi only see in it the type of a perfectly symmetrical woman bashfully posing for her likeness in marble, but Hawthorne’s perception in it went much beyond that, and the fact that he attempts no explanation of its motive is in accordance with the present theory. He also noticed that statues had sometimes exercised a potent spell over him, and at others a very slight influence.
Froude says that a man’s modesty is the best part of him. Notice that, ye strugglers for preferment, and how beautifully modest Hawthorne is, when he writes in his Florentine diary:
“In a year’s time, with the advantage of access to this magnificent gallery, I think I might come to have some little knowledge of pictures. At present I still know nothing; but am glad to find myself capable, at least, of loving one picture better than another. 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.”
Hawthorne belongs to the same class of amateur critics as Shelley and Goethe, who, even if their opinions cannot always be accepted as final, illuminate the subject with the radiance of genius and have an equal value with the most experienced connoisseurs.
The return of the Hawthornes to Rome through Tuscany was even more interesting than their journey to Florence in the spring, and they enjoyed the inestimable advantage of avetturinowho would seem to have been the Sir Philip Sidney of his profession, a compendium of human excellences. There are such men, though rarely met with, and we may trust Hawthorne’s word that Constantino Bacci was one of them; not only a skilful driver, but a generous provider, honest, courteous, kindly, and agreeable. They went first to Siena, where they were entertained for a week or more by the versatile Mr. Story, and where Hawthorne wrote an eloquent description of the cathedral; then over the mountain pass where Radicofani nestles among the iron-browed crags above the clouds; past the malarious Lake of Bolsena, scene of the miracle which Raphael has commemorated in the Vatican; through Viterbo andSette Vene; and finally, on October 16, into Rome, through the Porta’ del Popolo, designed by Michel Angelo in his massive style,—Donati’s comet flaming before them every night. Thompson, the portrait painter, had already secured a furnished house, No. 68 Piazza Poli, for the Hawthornes, to which they went immediately.
Since the death of Julius Cæsar, comets have always been looked upon as the forerunners of pestilence and war, but wars are sometimes blessings, and Donati’s discovery proved a harbinger of good to Italy,—but to the Hawthornes, a prediction of evil. Continually in Hawthorne’s Italian journal we meet with references to the Roman malaria, as if it were a subject that occupied his thoughts, and nowhere is this more common than during the return-journey from Florence. Did it occur to him that the lightning might strike in his own house? No sensible American now would take his children to Rome unless for a very brief visit; and yet William Story brought up his family there with excellent success, so far as health was concerned.
We can believe that Hawthorne took every possible precaution, so far as he knew, but in spite of that on November 1 his eldest daughter was seized with Roman fever, and for six weeks thereafter lay trembling between life and death, so that it seemed as if a feather might turn the balance.
She does not appear to have been imprudent. Her father believed that the “old hag” breathed upon her while she was with her mother, who was sketching in the Palace of the Cæsars; but the Palatine Hill is on high ground, with a foundation of solid masonry, and was guarded by French soldiers, and it would have been difficult to find a more cleanly spot in the city. A German count, who lived in a villa on the Cælian Hill, close by, considered his residence one of the most healthful in Rome. Miss Una had a passionate attachment for the capital of the ancient world; and it seems as if the evil spirit of the place had seized upon her, as the Ice Maiden is supposed to entrap chamois hunters in the Alps.
One of the evils attendant on sickness in a foreign country is, the uncertainty in regard to a doctor, and this naturally leads to a distrust and suspicion of the one that is employed. Even so shrewd a man as Bismarck fell into the hands of a charlatan at St. Petersburg and suffered severely in consequence. Hawthorne either had a similar experience, or, what came to the same thing, believed that he did. He considered himself obliged to change doctors for his daughter, and this added to his care and anxiety. During the next four months he wrote not a word in his journal (or elsewhere, so far as we know), and he visibly aged before his wife’s eyes. He went to walk on occasion with Story or Thompson, but it was merely for the preservation of his own health. His thoughts were always in his daughter’s chamber, and this was so strongly marked upon his face that any one could read it. Toward the Ides of March, Miss Una was sufficiently improved to take a short look at the carnival, but it was two months later before she was in a condition to travel, and neither she nor her father ever wholly recovered from the effects of this sad experience.