The Collected Gothic Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated Edition). Nathaniel Hawthorne
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ground where the story is laid; but the work itself was written at Redcar, and in the communication last quoted from he had said: "I find this Italian atmosphere not favorable to the close toil of composition, although it is a very good air to dream in. I must breathe the fogs of old England, or the east-winds of Massachusetts, in order to put me into working-trim." Conditions other than physical were most probably responsible, in part, for this state of things. Strong as Hawthorne's nature was on the side of the real, the ideal force within him was so much more puissant, that when circumstances were all propitious—as they were in Italy—it obtained too commanding a sway over him. His dreams, in such case, would be apt to overcome him, to exist simply for their own sake instead of being subordinated to his will; and, in fine, to expend their witchery upon the air, instead of being imprisoned in the enduring form of a book. Being compounded in such singular wise of opposing qualities: the customary, prudential, common sensible ones, and the wise and visionary ones—the outward reticence, and (if we may say so) the inward eloquence—of which we now have a clearer view; being so compounded, he positively needed something stern and adverse in his surroundings, it should seem, both as a satisfaction to the sturdier part of him, and as a healthful check which, by exciting reaction, would stimulate his imaginative mood. He must have precisely the right proportion between these counter influences, or else creation could not proceed. In the Salem Custom House and at the Liverpool consulate there had been too much of the hard commonplace: instead of serving as a convenient foil to the more expansive and lightsome tendencies of his genius, it had weighed them down. But in Italy there was too much freedom, not enough framework of the severe, the roughly real and unpicturesque. Hawthorne's intellectual and poetic nature presents a spectacle somewhat like that of a granite rock upon which delicate vines flourish at their best; but he was himself both rock and vine. The delicate, aspiring tendrils and the rich leafage of the plant, however, required a particular combination of soil and climate, in order to grow well. When he was not hemmed in by the round of 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