Burnt Sienna—The Aquila Nera—A grand, noble, gentle
creature—The most beautiful woman in the world—Better
friends than ever—A shadow brooded—Boys are whole-souled
creatures—Franklin Pierce—Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon,
Donatello—The historian of the Netherlands—When New
England makes a man—The spell of Trevi—An accession of
mishaps—My father's mustache—Three steps of stone, the
fourth, death—Havre, Redcar, Bath, London, Liverpool.
Siena is distant from Florence, in a direct line, not more than fifty miles, but the railway turns the western flank of the mountains, and kept us full three hours on the trip. I had long been familiar with a paint in my color-box called Burnt Sienna, and was now much interested to learn that it was made of the yellow clay on which the city of Siena stands; and when I discovered for myself that this clay, having formed the bed of some antediluvian ocean, was full of fossil shells, I thought that Siena was a place where I would do well to spend one of my lifetimes. The odd, parti-colored architecture of the town did not so much appeal to me, and certainly the streets and squares were less attractive in themselves than either the Roman or the Florentine ones. The shells were personally ugly, but they were shells, and fossils into the bargain, and they sufficed for my happiness.
The Storys had a villa in Siena, and my father certainly had in the back part of his mind an idea of settling there, or elsewhere in Italy, now or later; but after ten days we were on our travels again. There were no ruins to be seen, that I remember, but many churches and frescoes and old oil-paintings, which I regarded with indifference. Mediaeval remains did not attract me like classic ones. It was here that Story drew the caricatures which I have already spoken of, and from the windows of the room, as the twilight fell, we could see the great comet, then in its apogee of brilliance. Where will the world be when it comes again? We had rooms at the Aquila Nera, looking out on the venerable, gray Palazzo Tolomei. The narrow streets were full of people; the steepness and irregularity of the thoroughfares of the city produced a feeling of energy and activity in the midst of the ancient historic peace. Siena is, I believe, built about the crater of an extinct volcano. The old brick wall of the city was still extant, running up hill and down, and confining the rusty heaps of houses within its belt. There were projecting balconies, crumbling with age, and irregular arcades, resembling tunnels hewn out of the solid rock. From the windows of our sitting-room in the hotel we commanded the piazza, in front of the Palazzo Tolomei, with a pillar in the midst of it, on which was a group of Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf, the tradition of the city being that it was founded during the epoch of the Roman kings. My mother made a sketch of this monument in her little sketch-book, and my father, according to a common custom of his, sat for an hour at the window one day and made a note of every person who passed through the little square, thus getting an idea of the character of the local population not otherwise obtainable. I can imagine that, were one born in Siena, one might conceive an ardent affection for it; but, in spite of its picturesqueness, it never touched my heart like Rome or Florence, or even London or Paris. I left it without regret, but with specimens of its fossils in my pockets.
It often happens with miracles that they occur in doubles or trebles, in order, I suppose, to suggest to us that they may be simply instances of an undiscovered law. Gaetano was a miracle, and he was followed by Constantino, who, though of an altogether different human type, was of no less sweet and shining a nature than the other. He was a grand, noble, gentle creature, and my mother soon dubbed him "The Emperor," though it may be doubted whether the original emperor of that name was as good a man as ours; he was certainly not nearly so good-looking. He was only the driver of our vettura from Siena to Rome, but there was a princely munificence in his treatment of us that made us feel his debtors in an indefinitely greater sum than that which technically discharged our obligations. He was massive, quiescent, oxlike, with great, slow-moving, black eyes. He had the air of extending to us the hospitalities of Italy, and our journey assumed the character of a royal progress. He was especially devoted to my small sister Rose, and often, going up the hills, he would have her beside him on foot, one of his great hands clasping hers, while with the other he wielded the long whip that encouraged the horses. His garments were of the humblest fashion, but he so wore them as to make them seem imperial robes. My mother caught an excellent likeness of him as he sat before her on the driver's seat. The second trip was as enjoyable as the first, though it was two or three days shorter. The route was west of our former one, passing through Radicofani, incrusted round its hill-top; and Bolsena, climbing backward from the poisonous shore of its beautiful lake; and Viterbo, ugly and beggar-ridden, though famous forever on account of the war for Galiana waged between Viterbo and Rome. In the front of an old church in the town I saw the carved side of her sarcophagus, incorporate with the wall. She was the most beautiful woman in the world in her day, and in the fight for the possession of her her townsmen overcame the Romans, but the latter were permitted, as a salve for their defeat, to have one final glimpse of Galiana as they marched homeward without her. From a window in a tower of one of the gates of the city, therefore, her heavenly face looked forth and shed a farewell gleam over the dusty, defeated ranks of Rome as they filed past, up-looking. The tale is as old as the incident itself, but I always love to recall it; there is in it something that touches the soul more inwardly than even the legend of Grecian Helen.
By the middle of October we were back again in Rome, and though we were now in new lodgings, the feeling was that of getting home after travels. The weather was fine, and we revisited the familiar ruins and gardens, and renewed our acquaintance with our favorite statues and pictures with fresh enjoyment. Eddy Thompson and I found each other better friends than ever—we had written each other laborious but sincerely affectionate letters during our separation—and he and I, with one or more favored companions sometimes, perambulated Rome incessantly, and felt that the world had begun again. But by the 1st of November there came to pass an untoward change, and our rejoicing was changed to lamentation. First, my father himself had a touch of malaria, which clouded his view of all outward things; and then my sister Una, disregarding the law which provides that all persons must be in-doors in Rome by six o'clock in the evening, caught the veritable Roman fever, and during four months thereafter a shadow brooded over our snug little lodgings in the Piazza, Poli. "It is not a severe attack," my father wrote at the beginning, "yet it is attended by fits of exceeding discomfort, occasional comatoseness, and even delirium to the extent of making the poor child talk in rhythmic measure, like a tragic heroine—as if the fever lifted her feet off the earth; the fever being seldom dangerous, but is liable to recur on slight occasion hereafter." But, as it turned out, Una's attack was of the worst kind, and she sank and sank, till it seemed at last as if she must vanish from us altogether. Eddy and I held melancholy consultations together, for Eddy, besides being my special crony and confidant, had allowed himself to conceive a heroic and transcendental passion for my sister—one of the antique, Spenserian sort—and his concern for her condition was only less than mine. So we went about with solemn faces, comforting each other as best we might. I remember, when the crisis of the fever was reached, taking him into a room and closing the door, and there imparting to him the news that Una might not recover. We stared drearily into each other's faces, and felt that the world would never again be bright for us. Boys are whole-souled creatures; they feel one thing at a time, and feel it with their might.
However, Una safely passed her crisis, thanks mainly to the wonderful nursing of her mother, and by carnival-time was able to be out again and to get her share of sugar-plums and flowers. But my mother was exhausted by her ceaseless vigils in the sick-room, and my father, as I have before intimated, never recovered from the long-drawn fear; it sapped his energies at the root, and the continued infirmity of Una's health prevented what chance there might have been of his recuperation. Yet for the moment he could find fun and pleasure in the carnival, and he felt as never before the searching beauty of the Borghese, the Pincian, and the galleries. He was also comforted by the companionship of his friend Franklin Pierce, who, his Presidential term over, had come to Europe to get the scent of Washington out of his garments. There was a winning, irresistible magnetism in the presence of this man. Except my father, there was no man in whose company I liked to be so much as in his. I had little to say to him, and demanded nothing more than a silent recognition from him; but his voice, his look, his gestures, his gait, the spiritual sphere of him, were delightful to me; and I suspect that his rise to the highest office in our nation was due quite as much to this power or quality in him as to any intellectual or even executive ability that he may have possessed. He was a good, conscientious, patriotic, strong man, and gentle and tender as a woman. He had the old-fashioned ways, the courtesy, and the personal dignity which are not often seen nowadays. His physical frame was immensely powerful and athletic; but life used him hard, and he was far from considerate of himself, and he died at sixty-five, when he might, under more favorable conditions, have rounded out his century.
My father had written nothing, not even his journal, during the period of Una's illness; but he began to work again now, being moved thereto not only as a man whose nature is spontaneously impelled to express itself on the imaginative side, but also in order to recoup himself for some part of the loss of the ten thousand dollars which he had loaned to John O'Sullivan, which, it was now evident, could never be repaid. His first conception of the story of The Marble Faun had been as a novelette; but he now decided to expand it so as to contain a large amount of descriptive matter; and although the strict rules of artistic construction may have been somewhat relaxed in order to admit these passages, there is no doubt that the book gained thereby in value as a permanent addition to literature, the plot, powerful though it is, being of importance secondary to the creation of an atmosphere which should soften the outlines and remove the whole theme into a suitable remoteness from the domain of matter-of-fact. The Eternal City is, after all, as vital a portion of the story as are the adventures of Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, and Donatello. They could not have existed and played their parts in any other city of the world.
In selecting local habitations for the creatures of his imagination, he strolled into the Via Portoghese, and there found the "Virgin's Shrine," which, with minor modifications, was to become the home of Hilda. I quote from his journal the description of the actual place as he saw it. "The tower in the Via Portoghese," he says, "has battlements and machicolations, and the upper half of it is covered with gray, ancient-looking stucco. On the summit, at one corner, is the shrine of the Virgin, rising quite above the battlements, and with its lamp before it. Beneath the machicolations is a window, probably belonging to the upper chamber; and there seems to be a level space on the top of the tower. Close at hand is the facade of a church, the highest pinnacle of which appears to be at about the same level as the battlements of the tower, and there are two or more stone figures (either angels or allegorical) ornamenting the top of the facade, and, I think, blowing trumpets. These personages are the nearest neighbors of any person inhabiting the upper story of the tower, and the sound of their angelic trumpets must needs be very loud in that close vicinity: The lower story of the palace extends out and round the lower part of the tower, and is surrounded by a stone balustrade. The entrance from the street is through a long, arched doorway and passage, giving admittance into a small, enclosed court; and deep within the passage there is a very broad staircase, which branches off, apparently, on one side, and leads to the height of the tower. At the base of the tower, and along the front of the palace, the street widens, so as to form something like a small piazza, in which there are two or three bakers' shops, one or two shoe-shops, a lottery-office, and, at one corner, the stand of a woman who sells, I think, vegetables; a little further, a stand of oranges. Not so many doors from the palace entrance there is a station of French soldiers and a sentinel on duty. The palace, judging from the broad staircase, the balustraded platform, the tower itself, and other tokens, may have been a grand one centuries ago; but the locality is now a poor one, and the edifice itself seems to have fallen to unaristocratic occupants. A man was cleaning a carriage in the enclosed court-yard, but I rather conceive it was a cab for hire, and not the equipage of a dweller in the palace."
John Lothrop Motley, the historian of the Netherlands, had come to Rome this winter and brought his family with him. I believe my father had met Motley in America; at all events, we saw a good deal of him now. He was an exceedingly handsome man, not only on account of the beauty of physical features which marked him, but in the sensitiveness and vividness of expression which constantly illuminated them. He was at this time about five-and-forty years of age, and lacked a couple of inches of six feet in height. His hair, a dark, chestnut brown, had the hyacinthine wave through it, and was slightly streaked with gray; his beard, which was full and rather short, was likewise wavy; he was quietly and harmoniously dressed, but the artistic temperament declared itself in a touch of color in his cravat. His voice was melodious and finely modulated; his bearing gravely cheerful and very courteous. No type of man finer than Motley's has existed in modern times; all the elements of the best and purest society were illustrated in him. He had the depth of the scholar, the breadth and self-poise of the man of the world, the genial warmth of the human fellow-creature, and, over all, the harmonizing, individualizing charm of the artist. When New England gathers her resources to make a man she achieves a result hardly to be surpassed.
The Storys were also in Rome during these last months of our stay, and Miss Mitchell, I think, still lingered in her little lodgings in the Via Bocca di Leone. Miss Cushman likewise reappeared for a time, with all her former greatness and fascination, and many other friends, new and old, made that spring season memorable. As the moment for our departure drew near, the magical allurement of Rome laid upon us a grasp more than ever potent; it was impossible to realize that we were leaving it forever. On the last evening we walked in the moonlight to the fountain of Trevi, near our lodgings, and drank of the water—a ceremony which, according to tradition, insures the return of the drinker. It was the 25th of May, forty-four years ago. None of us has gone back since then, and, of the five who drank, three have passed to the country whence no traveller returns. For my own part, as a patriotic American nearly thirteen years old, I had no wish ever again to see Rome, and declared myself glad to turn my back upon it, not that I had any fault to find with it—I had always had a good time there—but my imagination was full of my native land, with which nothing else could be comparable. I did not learn of the fabled spell of Trevi until afterwards; then I scoffed at and defied it, and possibly Rome may have decided that it could do without me.
The railway to Civita Vecchia had just been completed, and we passed swiftly over the route which had been so full of dangers and discomforts eighteen months before. Embarking on the steamer for Marseilles, we kept on thence to Avignon, where we spent about a week. This venerable town had few attractions for me; I did not much care for the fourteenth-century popes, nor for the eighteenth-century silks, nor even for Petrarch and Laura; and the architecture of the palace, after I had tried to sketch it, ceased to exhilarate me. My father was in no mood for sight-seeing, either, but he went through it all conscientiously. My mother, of course, enjoyed herself, but she met with an accident. While sketching some figures of saints and monsters that adorned the arch of the northern portal of the palace, she made an incautious movement and sprained her ankle. The pain was excessive for the moment, but it soon passed off, so as to enable her to limp back to our hotel. But the next day the pain was worse; my father had a headache, a rare affliction with him; I had caught a bad cold from swimming in the arrowy Rhone, and Una and Miss Shepard were both in a state of exhaustion from sight-seeing; and in this condition the journey to Geneva had to be made. We had intended to remain there but a day, but we stayed longer, breathing the pure air from the Alps, and feeling better as we breathed. I stood on a bridge and looked down at that wonderful azure water rushing into the lovely lake; I looked up and beheld those glorious mountains soaring into the sky, and I forgot Rome and Florence, and almost America, in my joy. Everything that life needs for life seemed present there.
We got into a little steamer and made the trip up the lake, the mountains all about us. Up to this time I had imagined that the acclivities in the north of England and in Scotland were mountains. We sat on deck, in the stern of the steamer, my father gazing out and up from beneath the rim of his soft felt hat, with his dark cloak over his shoulders. He looked revived and vigorous again. Shortly before we left Rome he had ceased to shave his upper lip, for what reason I know not; I think it was simply indisposition to take that trouble any longer. My mother had at first gently protested; she did not want his upper lip and mouth to be hidden. But as the brown mustache, thick and soldier-like, appeared, she became reconciled, and he wore it to the end of his life. "Field-Marshal Hawthorne" James T. Fields used to call him after we got home. Owing to the preponderance of expression of the upper part of his head, the addition did not change his look as much as might have been expected; we soon got used to it, and, inasmuch as all his photographs were taken after the mustache was established, the world does not know him otherwise.
The view became more and more enchanting as we penetrated farther into the depths of the embrace of the mountains, and at last, at its most ravishing point, the lake ceased, and the lonely little pile of dingy white masonry, which is Chillon, appeared. Few works of man have a more romantic interest than this castle; but, seen from the lake, its environment was too much for it. Had it plunged downward into the smooth waters and vanished, its absence would not have been marked in that stupendous landscape. But it improved greatly upon closer acquaintance; and when we stood in its vaults, and saw the pillar to which the prisoner was chained, and the hole in the floor, with its three steps of stone, and the fourth of death, we felt that Chillon was not unequal to its reputation.
After leaving Chillon and Geneva our faces were turned homeward, and we hastened our steps. My father wrote to England to engage our passage for the first of August. We were now at midsummer. We returned to Paris, and after a few days there proceeded to Havre, in order to see Ada Shepard safe on board her steamer for home; her Wanderjahre was over, and she was now to be married to Henry Clay Badger. We were sorry to say good-bye to her; she had been a faithful and valuable element in our household, and she had become a dear friend and comrade. She stood waving her handkerchief to us as her steamer slipped away down the harbor. She, too, was sorry for the parting. She once had said to me: "I think your father is the wisest man I ever knew; he does not seem ever to say much, but what he does say is always the truest and best thing that could be said."
From Havre we crossed the Channel to Southampton, and were soon in London. Boston and Concord were only six weeks distant. Such, at any rate, had been the original design. But after we reached London the subject of the English copyright of The Marble Faun came up for discussion. Henry Bright introduced Mr. Smith, of the firm of Smith, Elder & Company, who made such proposals for the English publication of the book as were not to be disregarded; but, in order to make them available, it was necessary that the manuscript should be completed in England. Nothing but the short sketch of it was as yet in existence; it could not be written in much less than a year; either the English offer must be rejected, or we must stay out that year in her Majesty's dominions. My father decided, not altogether unwillingly, perhaps, to stay. He had written in his journal a few weeks before: "Bennoch and Henry Bright are the only two men in England to whom I shall be much grieved to say farewell; but to the island itself I cannot bear to say that word as a finality. I shall dreamily hope to come back again at some indefinite time, rather foolishly, perhaps, for it will tend to take the substance out of my life in my own land. But this, I suspect, is apt to be the penalty of those who stay abroad and stay too long."
But my father could not write in London, and, casting about for a fitting spot, he finally fixed upon the remote hamlet of Redcar, far up on the bleak coast of Redcar, in Yorkshire. It was not far from Whitby, where we had been two or three years before. The gray German Ocean tumbled in there upon the desolate sands, and the contrast of the scene with those which we had been of late familiar with made the latter, no doubt, start forward intensely in the romancer's imagination. So there he wrote and wrote; and he walked far along the sands, with his boy dogging his steps and stopping for shells and crabs; and at a certain point of the beach, where the waves ran over a bar and formed a lake a few feet in depth, he would seat himself on a tussock of sand-grass, and I would undress and run into the cold water and continue my swimming-lessons, which had been begun in Stockbridge Bowl, continued in Lake Leman, and were now brought to a satisfactory conclusion. Both my feet were finally off the bottom, and I felt the wonderful sensation of the first cousin to flying. While I floundered there my father looked off towards the gray horizon, and saw the visions of Hilda, Miriam, Kenyon, and Donatello which the world of readers was presently to behold through his eyes. As we walked home in the twilight, the dull-red glow of the sunset would throw the outlines of the town into dark shadows, and shed a faint light on the surf roaming in from the east. I found, in my old album, the black silhouette of the scene which I made one day. The arms of an old mill are flung appealingly upward, the highest object of the landscape, above the irregular sky-line of the clustering houses. There is also, on the next page, a water-color drawing of a sailor in a blue jersey and a sou'wester, standing, with his hands in his pockets, on the beach beside one of the boats of the region—a slender, clipper-built craft, painted yellow below and black above, good for oars or sail. Her bow rests on a shaft connecting two wheels, for convenience of running her down into the water. There was a dozen or more of these boats always ready on the beach in front of our lodgings. These lodgings were just back of the esplanade, which, during our sojourn, was treated to a coat of tar from end to end—a delightful entertainment for us children—and I have loved the smell of tar ever since. There is little else that I remember about Redcar, except that, in the winter, there was skating on a part of the beach; but it was "salt ice," and not to be compared with the skating I was to enjoy a year or two later in Concord, which I shall describe if ever I come to that epoch in my narrative.
From Redcar, with the romance more than half done, we went south to our old Leamington, which seemed half like home; and there the loveliness of an English spring at its best came to greet us, and there the book was finished, and sent to the printer. We spent a month or two at Bath, and found it very pleasant; my father rested from his labors, except the proof-reading; and I was instructed in the use of the broadsword by an old Peninsular officer, Major Johnstone, who had fought at Waterloo, and had the bearing of such majors as Thackeray puts into Vanity Fair. I once asked him whether he had ever killed a man; it was on the day when he first allowed me to use a real broadsword in our lesson. "Well," replied the major, hesitatingly, "I was riding in a charge, and there came a fellow at me, with his sword up, and made a swing for my head. I dodged, and his blade just grazed me; but I let him have it, downright, at the same moment, and I caught him where the neck joins the shoulder, and he went down, and I went on, and what became of him I don't know; I hope nothing serious!" The major sighed and looked serious himself. "And was this the sword?" I demanded, balancing the heavy weapon in my hand. "No—no—it wasn't that one," said the major, hastily. "I've never used the other since! Now, then, sir, if you please, on guard!"
We went to London, and there were our old friends Bright and Bennoch, and the Motleys appeared from Italy, and a book called (by the publishers) Transformation came out in three volumes, being the latest romance by the author of The Scarlet Letter. The title was not bestowed with my father's consent. He had, at the publishers' request, sent them a list of several titles, beginning with The Marble Faun, and among others on the list was "The Faun's Transformation." The publishers took the "Transformation," and left out "The Faun." My father laughed, but let it go. The book was to come out under its proper title in America, and he was indifferent as to what they called it in England.
The end of our tarrying in the Old World was now at hand. Seven years had we lived there, and we were eager and yet loath to go. My father's friends gathered about him, men who had hardly so much as heard his name a little while ago, but who now loved him as a brother. For a few days Mrs. Blodgett's hospitable face glowed upon us once more, and pale Miss Williams, and trig little Miss Maria, and many of the old captains whom we had known. It was the middle of June, and the sun shone even in Liverpool. Our red-funnelled steamer lay at her moorings in the yellow Mersey, with her steam up. It was not The Niagara, but on her bridge stood our handsome little Captain Leitch, with his black whiskers, smiling at us in friendly greeting. How much had passed since we had seen him last! How much were we changed! What experiences lay behind us! What memories would abide with us always! My father leaned on the rail and looked across the river at the dingy, brick building, near the wharves, where he had spent four wearisome but pregnant years. The big, black steamer, with her little, puffing tug, slipped her moorings, and slid slowly down the stream. After a few miles the hue of the water became less turbid, the engines worked more rapidly and regularly. Liverpool was now a smoky mass off our starboard quarter. It sank and dwindled, till the smoke alone was left; the blue channel spread around us; we were at sea, and home lay yonder, across three thousand miles of tumbling waves. But my father still leaned on the rail, and looked backward towards the old home that he loved and would never see again. It was the hour for good-bye; there would come another hour for the other home and for welcome.
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