THE SCARLET LETTER & A SCARLET STIGMA (Illustrated). Nathaniel Hawthorne
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official details, England afforded him that combination in bounteous measure.
On the publication of "The Marble Faun," the author's friend, John Lothrop Motley, with whom he had talked, of the contemplated romance, in Rome, wrote to him from Walton-on-Thames (March 29, 1860):—
"Everything that you have ever written, I believe, I have read many times, and I am particularly vain of having admired 'Sights from a Steeple,' when I first read it in the Boston 'Token,' several hundred years ago, when we were both younger than we are now; of having detected and cherished, at a later day, an old Apple-Dealer, whom I believe you have unhandsomely thrust out of your presence now that you are grown so great. But the 'Romance of Monte Beni' has the additional charm for me, that it is the first book of yours that I have read since I had the privilege of making your personal acquaintance. My memory goes back at once to those walks (alas, not too frequent) we used to take along the Tiber, or in the Campagna ... and it is delightful to get hold of the book now, and know that it is impossible for you any longer, after waving your wand as you occasionally did then, indicating where the treasure was hidden, to sink it again beyond plummet's sound.
"I admire the book exceedingly.... It is one which, for the first reading at least, I didn't like to hear aloud.... If I were composing an article for a review, of course I should feel obliged to show cause for my admiration; but I am only obeying an impulse. Permit me to say, however, that your style seems, if possible, more perfect than ever.... Believe me, I don't say to you half what I say behind your back; and I have said a dozen times that nobody can write English but you. With regard to the story, which has been somewhat criticized, I can only say that to me it is quite satisfactory. I like those shadowy, weird, fantastic, Hawthornesque shapes flitting through the golden gloom, which is the atmosphere of the book. I like the misty way in which the story is indicated rather than revealed; the outlines are quite definite enough from the beginning to the end, to those who have imagination enough to follow you in your airy flights.... The way in which the two victims dance through the Carnival on the last day is very striking. It is like a Greek tragedy in its effect, without being in the least Greek."
In this last sentence Mr. Motley struck out an apt distinction; for it is perhaps the foremost characteristic of Hawthorne as a writer that his fictions possessed a plastic repose, a perfection of form, which made them akin to classic models, at the same time that the spirit was throughout eminently that belonging to the mystic, capricious, irregular fantasy of the North.
Hawthorne thus made answer from Bath (April 1, 1860):—
My dear Motley,—You are certainly that Gentle Reader for whom all my books were exclusively written. Nobody else (my wife excepted, who speaks so near me that I cannot tell her voice from my own) has ever said exactly what I love to hear. It is most satisfactory to be hit upon the raw, to be shot straight through the heart. It is not the quantity of your praise that I care so much about (though I gather it all up carefully, lavish as you are of it), but the kind, for you take the book precisely as I meant it; and if your note had come a few days sooner, I believe I would have printed it in a postscript which I have added to the second edition, because it explains better than I found possible to do the way in which my romance ought to be taken.... Now don't suppose that I fancy the book to be a tenth part as good as you say it is. You work out my imperfect efforts, and half make the book with your warm imagination, and see what I myself saw but could only hint at. Well, the romance is a success, even if it never finds another reader.
We spent the winter in Leamington, whither we had come from the sea-coast in October. I am sorry to say that it was another winter of sorrow and anxiety.... I have engaged our passages for June 16th.... Mrs. Hawthorne and the children will probably remain in Bath till the eve of our departure; but I intend to pay one more visit of a week or two to London, and shall certainly come and see you. I wonder at your lack of recognition of my social propensities. I take so much delight in my friends, that a little intercourse goes a great way, and illuminates my life before and after....
Your friend,
Nathaniel Hawthorne.
One may well linger here, for an instant, over the calm, confident, but deeply vibrating happiness from which those words sprang, concerning his wife, "who speaks so near me that I cannot tell her voice from my own;" and one may profitably lay away, for instruction, the closing lines,—"I take so much delight in my friends, that a little intercourse goes a great way." The allusion to "another winter of sorrow and anxiety" carries us back to the previous winter, passed in Rome, during which Hawthorne's elder daughter underwent a prolonged attack of Roman fever. Illness again developed itself in his family while they were staying at Leamington.
In February of 1860 he wrote to Mr. Fields, who was then in Italy:—
"I thank you most heartily for your kind wishes in favor of the forthcoming work ['The Marble Faun'], and sincerely join my own prayers to yours in its behalf, without much confidence of a good result. My own opinion is, that I am not really a popular writer, and that what popularity I have gained is chiefly accidental, and owing to other causes than my own kind or degree of merit. Possibly I may (or may not) deserve something better than popularity; but looking at all my productions, and especially this latter one, with a cold or critical eye, I can see that they do not make their appeal to the popular mind. It is odd enough, moreover, that my own individual taste is for quite another class of works than those which I myself am able to write. If I were to meet with such books as mine by another writer, I don't believe I should be able to get through them." At another time he had written of Anthony Trollope's novels: "They precisely suit my taste; solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting that they were made a show of."
Before leaving England for the last time, Hawthorne went up alone to London, and spent a week or two among his friends there, staying with Motley, and meeting Lord Dufferin, the Honorable Mrs. Norton, Leigh Hunt, Barry Cornwall, and many other agreeable and noted persons. "You would be stricken dumb," he wrote to his wife, who remained at Bath, "to see how quietly I accept a whole string of invitations, and, what is more, perform my engagements without a murmur.... The stir of this London life, somehow or other, has done me a wonderful deal of good, and I feel better than for months past. This is strange, for if I had my choice, I should leave undone almost all the things I do." In the midst of these social occupations he gave sittings to a young German-American sculptor named Kuntze, who modelled a profile portrait of him in bas-relief. A farewell dinner was given him at Barry Cornwall's; and in June, 1860, he sailed for America, from which he had been absent seven years.
There was not yet any serious sign of a failure in his health; but the illness in his family, lasting through two winters, had worn severely upon him; his spirits had begun to droop. "I would gladly journalize some of my proceedings, and describe things and people; but I find the same coldness and stiffness in my pen as always since our return to England:" thus he had written in his Note-Book, while making that final London visit. In Italy, however, he had already shown symptoms of fatigue, saying to Mr. Fields: "I have had so many interruptions from things to see and things to suffer, that the story ['The Marble Faun'] has developed itself in a very imperfect way.... I could finish it in the time that I am to remain here, but my brain is tired of it just now." The voyage put fresh vigor into him, apparently. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Professor Stowe were on board, with their daughters, and Mr. Fields, who was also a passenger, has said: "Hawthorne's love for the sea amounted to a passionate worship, and while I (the worst sailor probably on this planet) was longing, spite of the good company on board, to reach land as soon as possible, Hawthorne was constantly saying in his quiet, earnest way, 'I should like to sail on and on forever, and never touch the shore again.'" His inherited susceptibility to the fascination of the sea no doubt intensified his enjoyment, and he is reported to have talked in a strain of delightful humor while on shipboard.
For nearly a year after his return to The Wayside, there is an uneventful gap in his history, concerning which we have very few details. He set about improving his house, and added to it a wing at the back, which, having three stories, rose above the rest of the building, and thus supplied him with a study in the top room, which had the effect of a tower.