The New Englander Abroad

With an Account of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Infidelity to the Venus di Medici

EDMUND WILSON, Jr.

IT has become the order of the day to attack the cul ture and taste of the New England of the last century. Lowell is pat ronized: Longfellow greeted with gufl faws; even Emerson and Thoreau are c loubted. It would, therefore, seem need! essly cruel to deride them at this late : date, where they are almost universal ly discredited by the younger generati on. But I have just read a Puritan document so curious that I cannot resist the temptation to call attention to the (now celebrated) limitations of the I 'uritan character, The evidence is part icularly valuable, as it comes not from a second-rate poet but from one who, in even Henry James' opinion, prodi need works of art "as exquisite in quality as anything that had yet been re ceived (from Europe)".

In the January of 1 [858, at the end of fifty years of New England, the foremost American literaryarti: st of his generation came for the first time to the continent of Europe. More au thentically a lover of beauty for its own sake than perhaps any other American writer of his time, it might have been supposed that Nathaniel Hawthorne would find in the country of Gautier and de Guerin, where Flaubert only a year before had published Madame Bovary, an atmosphere more kindly to his genius than any he had yet known. In America he had been incessantly at work distilling glamour and romance from the barren towns of New England and their gloomy Puritan past. He had wrung the last drop of beauty from their gaunt and unpleasing souls. Might it not be supposed that Paris, with its grace and tradition and gaiety, with its air so much gentler to artists thdn the freezing winds of New England, would seem to Hawthorne like a dear home-coming after the exile of a lifetime?

He has told us how it seemed in his diary. "Truly," he writes, "I have no sympathies towards the French people; their eyes do not win me, nor do their glances melt and mingle with mine." On the street you meet "a great many people whom you perceive to be outside of your experience, and know them ugly to look at, and fancy them villainous." In short, he regards the French people with the profoundest suspicion. He accuses them of talking too fast and doubts their capacity for religious faith; he believes that their cooking is immoral. "All the dishes were very delicate," he writes of a dinner in Paris, "and a vast change from the simple English system, with its joints, shoulders, beefsteaks, and chops; but I doubt whether English cookery, for the very reason that it is so simple, is not better for man's moral and spiritual nature than French. In the former case, you know that you are gratifying your animal needs and propensities, and are duly ashamed of it; but, in dealing with these French delicacies, you delude yourself into the idea that you are cultivating your taste while satisfying your appetite."

To be sure, he makes a few concessions: he is willing to admit, for example, that the French "do grand and beautiful things in the architectural way"; and he is "even more struck by the skill and ingenuity of the French in arranging their sculptural remains (the statuary in the Louvre) than by the value of the sculptures themselves." And he is even, finally, half-seduced by the wicked lure of French cooking. "In my opinion," he concedes, "it would require less time to cultivate our gastronomic taste than taste of any other kind; and, on the whole, I am not sure that a man would not be wise to afford himself a little discipline in this line. . . . We had a soup to-day, in which twenty kinds of vegetables were represented, and manifested each its own aroma; a fillet of stewed beef, and a fowl, in some sort of delicate fricassee. We had a bottle of Chablis, and renewed ourselves, at the close of the banquet, with a plate of Chateaubriand ice. It was all very good, and we respected ourselves far more than if we had eaten a quantity of red roast beef; but I am not quite sure that we were right." But, on the whole, his opinion of France is a severe and contemptuous one; as he says, just before he leaves, "nothing really thrives here; man and vegetables have but an artificial growth. ... I am quite tired of Paris,"—after six days.

Dark Days in Italy

AND SO he leaves France for Italy, which he enjoys even less than France. He is as alien in Rome and Florence as if he were in Borneo or Haiti. The whole distressing story is told in the labourious entries of his journal during the year and a half of his stay. At first, he suffers acutely: the weather is cold and wet; the people unsympathetic. He observes the February carnival at Rome with a chill, unenlivened eye; he is shocked to find the Teatro Goldoni at Florence giving

a performance on Sunday.

But it is in the picture galleries and the churches that his Puritanism is seen at its starkest. He has at last come to the country where, he has heard, so much of the beauty of the world is stored and he is prepared to avail himself of the opportunity to absorb as much as possible of it. He sets out to 'do' Italian art with a sober and earnest thoroughness. He inspects all the objects of note with the most scrupulous attention. He counts the arches in the cathedrals and measures .the thickness of the pillars; he paces the length and breadth of the galleries and computes their total area. And then he fills pages and pages with statistics of this kind.

But the canvases and statues and frescoes themselves only weary him intolerably. In spite of his most determined effort to enjoy the things that he sees, he remains as blind as a broker or a linoleum manufacturer. He visits and revisits the churches till he is sick at the very thought of them; he plods through interminable galleries till he is ready to die of fatigue. He sighs, he curses, he groans; he wails and beats his breast. He is ready a dozen times to give up the whole hopeless battle and declare the fine arts a humbug. But, at the end of day or two's rest, he has usually rallied again and is willing to go grimly on,— though the colours of Titian and Giorgione fall like a great darkness on his heart.

"It seems to me that old sculpture affects the spirits even more dolefully than old painting; it strikes colder to the heart, and lies heavier upon it, being marble, than if it were merely canvas." ... "I wonder whether other people are more fortunate than myself, and can invariably find their way to the inner soul of a work of art. I doubt it." . . . "It was one of the days when my mind misgives me whether the pictorial art be not a humbug, and when the minute accuracy of a fly in a Dutch picture of fruit and flowers seems to me something more reliable than the master-touches of Raphaek" By dint of tremendous effort, he occasionally persuades himself that he has at last appreciated something; but it is invariably some moral quality, never line or colour or form,—of which he seems never to have heard. "We next saw the famous picture of the Virgin by Cimabue. ... As to its artistic merits, it seems to me that the babe Jesus has a certain air of state and d'.gnity; but I could see no charm whatever in the broad-faced Virgin and it would relieve my mind and rejoice my spirit if the picture were borne out of the church . . . and reverently burnt." Correspondingly, on the strength of a Magdalen, "splendid" but "very coarse and sensual", he accuses Titian of having been "a very good-for-nothing old man."

Continued on page 96

Continued from page 44

Mr. Brown and the Old Masters

AS a rule, he is merely bored and irritated; he is seldom aroused to hostility. But there is one feature of Continental art that fires him with a kind of indignation. There is one thing about which this mild and tolerant man of letters becomes positively fierce. He cannot understand why the Greek and Italian artists should have insisted on representing people nude. "I do not," he protests, "altogether see the necesity of ever sculpturing another nakedness. Man is no longer a naked animal; his clothes are as natural to him as his skin, and sculptors have no more right to undress him than to flay him." . . . "The best thing he (Mr. Powers, an American sculptor) said against the use of colour in marble was to the effect that the whiteness removed the object represented into a sort of spiritual region, and so gave chaste permission to those nudities which would otherwise suggest immodesty. I have myself felt the truth of this in a certain sense of shame as I looked at Gibson's tinted Venus." . . . His horror of the nude makes him suspicious of even Michael Angelo, whose Day and Night, he observes coldly, "fling their limbs abroad with adventurous freedom" and whose Last Judgment he characterizes as a "sprawl of nakedness."

It was only in the paintings and statues of his contemporaries—the American artists in Italy—that he found art he could readily understand and which did not shock his prejudice against the human body. Beside the work of Mr. Brown and Mr. Thompson, of Mr. Story and Mr. Powers (of the Greek Slave), the paintings of the Renaissance and the sculpture of Greece and Rome seemed to offer but a faded interest and to fall short in moral backbone.

Mr. Story, he says with gratification, "is certainly sensible of something deeper in his art than merely to make beautiful nudities and baptize them by classic names." . . . Mr. Thompson showed us ... a copy (by him) of a small Madonna by Raphael, wrought with a minute faithfulness which it makes one a better man to observe." ... "I do not think there is a better painter than Mr. Thompson living—among Americans at least; not one so earnest, faithful and religious in his worship of art. I had rather look at his pictures than at any except the very finest of the old masters, and taking into consideration only the comparative pleasure to be derived, I would not except more than one or two of those." . . . "I seemed to receive more pleasure from Mr. Brown's pictures than from any of the landscapes of the old masters; and the fact seems to strengthen me in the belief, that the most delicate if not the highest charm of a picture is evanescent, and that we continue to admire pictures prescriptively and by tradition, after the qualities that first won them their fame have vanished."

No better example could be found of Hawthorne's attitude toward the arts than the case of the Venus di Medici. This celebrated statue lies like a shadow across the whole of his summer at Florence. It worries him, torments him, subjects him to painful selfsearchings. He approaches it, in the first instance, coyly, full of fear lest it disappoint him; "I . . . was indeed almost afraid to see it; for I somewhat apprehended the extinction of another of those lights that shine along a man's pathway, and go out in a snuff the instant he comes within eyeshot of the fulfilment of his hopes. My European experience has extinguished many such. ... As I passed from one room to another, my breath rose and fell a little, with the half-hope, half-fear, that she might stand before me. Really, I did not know that I cared so much about Venus, or any possible woman of marble."

But when he finally does encounter her, he decides that he likes her very much. "I felt a kind of tenderness for her; an affection, not as if she were one woman, but all womanhood in one. Her modest attitude, which, before I saw her, I had not liked, deeming that it might be an artificial shame, is partly what unmakes her as the heathen goddess, and softens her into woman. . . . Her face is so beautiful and intellectual that it is not dazzled out of sight by her form. Methinks this was a triumph for the sculptor to achieve." Encouraged by his appreciation, he presently visits her again and this time attains a degree of enthusiasm which he has not before found possible. "I wonder", he exclaims, "how any sculptor has had the impertinence to aim at any other presentation of female beauty. I mean no disrespect to 'Gibson or Powers, or a hundred other men who people the world with nudities, all of which are abortions' compared with her; but I think the world would be all the richer if their Venuses, their Greek Slaves, their Eves, were burnt into quicklime, leaving us only this statue as our image of the beautiful. ... I mean to leave off speaking of the Venus hereafter, in utter despair of saying what I wish; especially as the contemplation of the statue will refine and elevate my taste, and make it continually more difficult to express my sense of its excellence, as the perception of it grows upon me. If at any time 1 become less sensible of it, it will be my deterioration, not any defect in the statue."

The Broken Vow

A GALLANT vow—but alas! he is all too soon to break it. Two days afterwards he calls on Mr. Powers, a robustious, self-confident fellow, who demonstrates to him that the Venus, di Medici is anatomically impossible: the ear is "too low on the head"; the eye is like "a half-worn buttonhole"; the mouth is "altogether wrong". Mr. Powers points out that two of his own busts, a Proserpine and a Psyche, are really incomparably better; and poor Hawthorne, sadly bewildered, is finally forced to admit that "there is no sort of comparison to be made between the beauty, intelligence, feeling, and accuracy of representation in these two faces and in that of the Venus di Medici. A light—the light of a soul proper to each individual character— seems to shine from the interior of the marble, and beam forth from the features, chiefly from the eyes."

Continued on page 98

Continued, from page 96

This worries Hawthorne a little, but the next time he visits the Venus he finds her face "noble and beautiful", "whatever rules may be transgressed." But, fifteen days afterwards, when he goes to see her again, a terrible transformation has occurred: he can no longer appreciate her! "I was sensible of the same weary lack of appreciation that used to chill me through in my earlier visits to picture-galleries; the same doubt, moreover, whether we do not bamboozle ourselves in a greater part of the admiration which we learn to bestow."

In spite of all his professions of devotion, he doubts whether he has ever really liked her! And his infidelity seems to torment him, like Hester Prynne's scarlet letter. He returns again and again and, once, half believes he has found her, but it is vain: her beauty has vanished; the figure seems to him now "little more than any other piece of yellowish white marble." And, when he is finally on the point of leaving Florence, he throws his "farewell glance at the Venus di Medici . . . with a strange insensibility." "When the material embodiment", he laments, "presents itself outermost, and we perceive them only by the grosser sense, missing their ethereal spirit, there is nothing so heavily burdensome as masterpieces of painting and sculpture."

Paul in Athens

TTAVE I made him seem a comic figure? He was really a pathetic one. For all his dryness and frigidity, he was really won by Italy a little; for all his bewilderment among the galleries, he regrets that there are no galleries at home. "I shall ... go to see pictures and statues occasionally," he writes, rather touchingly, "and so assuage and mollify myself a little after that uncongenial life of the consulate, and before going back to my own hard and dusty New England." . . . "It needs the native air to give life a reality; a truth which I do not fail to take home regretfully to myself, though without feeling much inclination to go back to the realities of my own."

He was hungry for all that Europe could give him; but he found he could not eat at its feast. He thought New England arid and unlovely, but it had spoiled him for beauty and abundance. He who had figured as an aesthete at home found himself a Puritan in Europe. For, in Europe, he differed but little from the typical American of his generation—differed only, perhaps, in honestly confessing that he did not. like what he saw and in realizing that "there is something false and affected in our highest taste for art."

He could only wander through museums, uncomfortable, cold and unmoved, looking patiently for messages and moralities in the glories of Italian art; he could only turn his dogged journal into a kind of conscientious Baedeker, more wearisome than the original, because it was even more detailed. Like Paul, on his mission to Athens, crying out against the Greek "idols", he could not forget that the Venus di Medici was a "heathen goddess". The perfect forms of the ancient world could not melt the grim restraint of his mind; the richest colours of the Renaissance could not stir his sober heart to joy. The revelation of beauty does not thrill him; the past does not come alive for him. He who should have walked in Florence and Paris at his ease, an artist among artists, comes stiffly, a hostile stranger, bristling with suspicions and doubts.

To Paris, down the Rhone, to Florence, to Rome, to Geneva—among names, so long on the lips of men, which must once have made him dream —he brings the eyes of Salem and Concord, clear and sober and blind. He can never exult in life. Only once does enthusiasm betray him. "It was like sailing through the sky," he says, "to be borne along on such water as that of Lake Leman—the bluest, brightest, and profoundest element, the most radiant eye that the dull earth ever opened to see heaven withal." But, "I am writing nonsense," he checks himself. "It is because no sense within my mind will answer the purpose."

Not a bad image, nonetheless; in fact, perhaps the best in the book; he might almost have made a lyric of it. That is why it seems to him "nonsense".