BOOKS.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.* Ix reading these volumes, we shall do well to remember a statement made by the editor in the preface to the English Note-Books. "Mr. Hawthorne," it was there said, "is entertaining, and not asserting opinions and ideas. He questions, doubts, and reflects with his pen, and, as it were, instructs himself. So that these Note-Books should be read not as definite conclusions of his mind, but often merely as passing impressions." Viewed in this light, the journal is full of interest. The reader does not take it up in order to gain the knowledge that may be gleaned from a hand- book, but to learn how the writer was affected by the sights which be saw and by the people whom he met. There are perhaps few writings of our time which are so remarkable as works of art,

or which form so curious a study as Hawthorne's. And the books are not such as we can read without thinking of the writer. The subtle thought, the grotesque fancy, the weird-like imagination of the Scarlet Letter and the House with the Seven Gables are associated throughout with the personality of Hawthorne. He is a fine

literary egotist, and stands, as it were, close by his own creations ; he is a shy, sensitive man, who can hold cheerier intercourse with these children of his fancy than with the men and women of the world. Hawthorne forbade in his will the publication of a bio- graphy, and considering the injudicious memoirs that have appeared so frequently of late years, we do not wonder at the re- striction. In some respects the deficiency is supplied by these Note- Books, in which the writer jotted down for private service his obser- vations upon places, people, and things. Hawthorne was more at ease in the "Old Home" than on the Continent. No writer has ever described English scenery more lovingly or felt more deeply the charm that springs out of old habits and associations. A Re-

publican in creed, he is a Conservative in sentiment, and while bonouring American institutions and loving his own country as he is bound to do, it is easy to see that if sometimes harsh in his judg- ment of Englishmen, England itself, with its delicious rural -scenery, and grey ruins, and noble cathedrals, and memories of far- -off centuries holds a large place in his heart. In France and Italy he appears less happy and finds less food for reflection. He detested mere sight-seeing, he was glad in many cases of an excuse for -escaping from picture-galleries and public buildings, and one sees at times a struggle in his mind, with which it is impossible not to

sympathize, between his sense of what was proper to be seen and his indifference to the sight. Mr. Helps observes somewhere that the traveller will often find an exquisite delight in what the guide- books pass by with indifference, and that he may gain more from the chance felicities of a journey than from seeing the objects for -which the journey was undertaken. This was certainly the case 'with Hawthorne, and no doubt the expression of what he felt

-while in Rome and Florence will appear strange and almost shock- ng to the conscientious and business-like traveller.

In the eyes of artists, too, Hawthorne will appear like an innocent novice or a daring iconoclast. He cannot see in high art what he ought to see, and he is bold enough to confess that the pictures of some of his countrymen give him more pleasure -than the great works of the old masters. Mr. C. G. Thompson is praised by the novelist in his Transformation, and in these

Notes he says, "I had rather look at his pictures than at any except the very finest of the old masters, and taking into con- sideration only the comparative pleasure to be derived, I would not except more than one or two of those ;" and of the American 'landscape painter George L. Brown he writes

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 pic- tures prescriptively and by tradition, after the qualities which first -won them their fame have vanished."

Again, in daring contempt of the judgment of art critics, he thought Murillo "the tenderest and truest of artists," and he would have been quite content that all pictures, save one perhaps in a thousand, should be put in garrets or painted over by newer artists, just as tolerable poets are shelved when their little day is done." Cimabue and Giotto he considered might be dismissed for ever without any detriment to the cause of good art, and their frescoes, "poor jaded relics," made his heart sink and his stomach sicken. Sculpture seemed to affect him more than plastic art, yet since in his opinion modern costume renders

* Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne. 2 vols. London: Strahan and Co. high sculpture impossible, he is content that the art should perish as one the world has done with. The sculptor Powers eschewed drapery in his statues, and expressed to Hawthorne great contempt for the coat and breeches in which he had been required to clothe his statue of Washington, upon which the writer observes :—" Did anybody ever see Washington nude ? It is inconceivable. He had no nakedness, but I imagine he was born with his clothes on, and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first ap- pearance in the world." In talking about English sculptors to Mrs. Jameson, Mr. Hawthorne did not dispute that lady's disput- able opinion that Gibson had produced works equal to the antique, "but still questioned whether the world needed Gibson, or was any the better for him."

A sense of weariness pervades these volumes which we do not find in the English Note-Books. Of Paris he writes :—" Nothing really thrives here ; man and vegetables have but an artificial life, like flowers stuck in a little mould, but never taking root. I ant quite tired of Paris, and long for home more than ever." And of Rome, of which, however, he gained another impression on a second visit :—" I shall never be able to express how I dislike the place, and how wretched I have been in it." Of Florence he writes with appreciation and enjoyment, yet he adds :—" I am not loath to go away, impatient rather ; for taking no root, I soon weary of any soil in which I may be temporarily deposited. The same im- patience I sometimes feel or conceive of as regards this earthly life." At Sienna, walking by the hedges, "I could have fancied," he says, "that the olive-trunks were those of apple trees, and that I were in one or other of the two lands that I love better than Italy." And again, he observes, in a significant passage, and writing of the same city :— "It is a fine old town and really, if I could take root any- where, I know not but it could as well be here as in another place. It would only be a kind of despair, however, that would over make me dream of finding a home in Italy ; a sense that I had lost my country through absence or incongruity, and that earth is not an abiding-place. I wonder that the Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no owners ; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart everything falls away except one's native State, neither can you seize hold of that unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering. Yet unquestionably we do stand by our national flag as stoutly as any people in the world, and I myself have felt the heart throb at sight of it as sensibly as other men. I think the singularity of our form of govern- ment contributes to give us a kind of patriotism, by separating us from other nations more entirely. If other nations had similar institutions— if England especially were a democracy—we should as readily make ourselves at home in another country as now in a new State."

These Note-Books, like, if we remember rightly, the former volumes, are almost wholly destitute of any references to literature. At Florence, Hawthorne met Mr. Thomas Adolphus Trollope, of whom he writes as "a sensible, cultivated man, and, I suspect, an author ; at least there is a literary man of repute of his name, though I have never read his works." There, too, he visited the Brownings, and was rather surprised to find Mr. Browning's conversation "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.' Of Mrs. Browning's poetry no opinion is uttered, but he describes her as "a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all," and adds, "There is not such another figure in the world ; her black ringlets cluster down into her neck, and make her face look the whiter by their sable profusion." A pleasant picture, too, is drawn of Miss Bremer, "a most amiable little woman, worthy to be the maiden aunt of the whole human race," who lodged at that time in a small chamber of an old building situated a little way from the brow of the Tarpeian rock :— "There is not a better-bred woman, and yet one does not think whether she has any breeding or no. Her little bit of a round table was already spread for us with her blue earthenware tea-cups ; and after she had got through an interview with the Swedish Minister and dis- missed him with a hearty pressure of his hand between both her own, she gave us our tea and some bread and a mouthful of cake. . . . There is no better heart than hers and not many sounder heads ; and a little touch of sentiment comes delightfully in, mixed up with a quick and delicate humour and the most perfect simplicity. There is also a very pleasant atmosphere of maidenhood about her. We are sensible of a freshness and odour of the morning still in this little withered rose; its recompense for never having been gathered and worn, but only diffusing fragrance on its stem."

If Hawthorne rarely alludes to other authors or ventures a criticism on their works, he is equally reticent with regard to his own posi- tion as a man of letters. All the more interesting therefore, because unlooked for, is the following passage, in which, after describing the well of Arezzo, made famous by Boccaccio, he adds :

"As I lingered round it, I thought of my own town pump in old Salem, and wondered whether my townspeople would ever point it out to strangers, and whether the stranger would gaze at it with any degree of such interest as I felt in Boccaccio's well. Oh! certainly not ; but yet I made that humble town pump the most celebrated structure in the good town. A thousand and a thousand people had pumped there, merely to water oxen or fill their tea-kettles ; but when once I grasped the handle, a rill gashed forth that meandered as far as England—as far as India—besides tasting pleasantly in every town and village of our own country. I like to think of this, so long after I did it, and so far from home, and not without hopes of some kindly local remembrance on this score."

There is something in fame, after all, and the desire to live in the hearts and minds of his fellows is felt by almost every man who has the power to do aught worthy of remembrance. Hawthorne would have shrunk with extreme sensitiveness from any public demonstration designed to do him honour, but he enjoyed in quiet the thought of leaving behind him a name that should not perish in the dust. There are few imaginative writers of our age who have a better chance of being thus honoured, not indeed by the popular voice, but by those who are best able to judge of literary excellence.