My father and Powers took a strong fancy to each other, and met and talked a great deal. As I just said now, spiritualism was a fad at that time, and Powers was pregnant with marvels which he had either seen or heard of, and which he was always ready to attempt to explain on philosophical grounds. My father would listen to it all, and both believe it and not believe it. He felt, I suppose, that Powers was telling the truth, but he was not persuaded that all the truth was in Powers's possession, or in any one else's. Powers also had a great deal to say concerning the exoteric and esoteric truths of sculpture; his racy individuality marked it all. He would not admit that there was any limit to what might be done with marble; and when my father asked him one day whether he could model a blush on a woman's cheek, he said, stoutly, that the thing was possible. My father, as his manner was with people, went with the sculptor as far as he chose to carry him, accepting all his opinions and judgments, and becoming Powers, so far as he might, for the time being, in order the better to get to the root of his position. And then, afterwards, he would return to his own self, and quietly examine Powers's assertions and theories in the dry light. My father was two men, one sympathetic and intuitional, the other critical and logical; together they formed a combination which could not be thrown off its feet.
We had already met the Brownings in London; but at this period they belonged in Italy more than anywhere else, and Florence formed the best setting for the authors both of Aurora Leigh and of Sordello. They lived in a villa called Casa Guidi, and with them was their son, a boy younger than myself, whom they called Pennini, though his real name was something much less fastidious. Penni, I believe, used to be an assistant of Raphael early in the sixteenth century, and Pennini may have been nicknamed after him. His mother, who was an extravagant woman on the emotional and spiritual plane, made the poor little boy wear his hair curled in long ringlets down his back, and clad him in a fancy costume of black velvet, with knickerbockers and black silk stockings; he was homely of face, and looked “soft,” as normal boys would say. But his parents were determined to make an ideal dream-child of him, and, of course, he had to submit. I had the contempt for him which a philistine boy feels for a creature whom he knows he can lick with one hand tied behind his back, and I had nothing whatever to say to him. But Pennini was not such a mollycoddle and ass as he looked, and when he grew up he gave evidence enough of having a mind and a way of his own. My mother took him at his mother's valuation, and both she and my father have expressed admiration of the whole Browning tribe in their published journals. Mrs. Browning seemed to me a sort of miniature monstrosity; there was no body to her, only a mass of dark curls and queer, dark eyes, and an enormous mouth with thick lips; no portrait of her has dared to show the half of it. Her hand was like a bird's claw. Browning was a lusty, active, energetic person, dashing and plunging this way and that with wonderful impetus and suddenness; he was never still a moment, and he talked with extraordinary velocity and zeal. There was a mass of wild hair on his head, and he wore bushy whiskers. He appeared very different twenty years later, when I met him in London, after his wife's death; he was quiet and sedate, with close-cut silvery hair and pointed beard, and the rather stout, well-dressed figure of a British gentleman of the sober middle class. It is difficult to harmonize either of these outsides with the poet within — that remarkable imagination, intellect, and analytical faculty which have made him one of the men of the century. There was a genial charm in Browning, emphasized, in this earlier time, with a bewildering vivacity and an affluence of courtesy. In his mature phase he was still courteous and agreeable when he chose to be so, but was also occasionally supercilious and repellent, and assiduously cultivated smart society. I once asked him, in 1879, why he made his poetry so often obscure, and he replied, frankly, that he did so because he couldn't help it; the inability to put his thoughts in clear phrases had always been a grief to him. This statement was, to me, unexpected, and it has a certain importance.
After a few weeks in Casa Bella, opposite Powers's house, Florence grew so hot that we were glad of an opportunity to rent the Villa Montauto, up on the hill of Bellosguardo, less than a mile beyond the city gate. The villa, with two stories and an attic, must have been nearly two hundred feet long, and was two or three rooms deep; at the hither end rose a tower evidently much older than the house attached to it. Near the foot of the tower grew an ancient tree, on a projecting branch of which we soon had a swing suspended, and all of us children did some very tall swinging. There was a little girl of ten belonging to the estate, named Teresa, an amiable, brown-haired, homely little personage. We admitted her to our intimacy, and swung her in the swing till she screamed for mercy. The road from Florence, after passing our big iron gate on the east, continued on westward, beneath the tower and the parapet of the grounds; beyond extended the wide valley of the Arno, with mountains hemming it in, and to the left of the mountains, every evening, Donati's comet shone, with a golden sweep of tail subtending twenty degrees along the horizon. The peasant folk regarded it with foreboding; and I remember seeing in the book-shops of Rome, before we left, pamphlets in both Italian and English, with such titles as “Will the great comet, now rapidly approaching, strike the earth?” It did not strike the earth, but it afforded us a magnificent spectacle during our stay in Montauto, and the next year it was followed by war between Austria and France and the evacuation of Venice.
The elevation of Bellosguardo sloped from the villa north and east, and this declivity was occupied by a podere of some dozen acres, on which grew grape-vines, olive and fig trees. Every morning, about ten o'clock, the peasants on the estate would come in loaded with grapes, which they piled up on a large table in the reception-hall on the ground floor. We ate them by handfuls, but were never able to finish them. Between times we would go out among the fruit trees and devour fresh figs, luscious with purple pulp. I had three or four rooms to myself at the western extremity of the house; they were always cool on the hottest days. There I was wont to retire to pursue my literary labors; I was still writing works on conchology. My sister Una had rooms on the ground floor, adjoining the chapel. They were haunted by the ghost of a nun, and several times the candle which she took in there at night was moved by invisible hands from its place and set down elsewhere. Ghostly voices called to us, and various unaccountable noises were heard now and then, both within and without the house; but we children did not mind them, not having been bred in the fear of spirits. Indeed, at the instance of Mrs. Browning, who was often with us, we held spirit seances, Miss Shepard being the medium, though she mildly protested. Long communications were written down, but the sceptics were not converted, nor were the believers discouraged. “I discern in the alleged communications from my wife's mother,” wrote my father, “much of her own beautiful fancy and many of her preconceived ideas, although thinner and weaker than at first hand. They are the echoes of her own voice, returning out of the lovely chambers of her heart, and mistaken by her for the tones of her mother.”
Almost every day some of us made an incursion into Florence. The town itself seemed to me more agreeable than Rome; but the Boboli Gardens could not rival the Borghese, and the Pitti and Uffizi galleries were not so captivating as the Vatican and the Capitol. However, the Cascine and the Lung' Arno were delightful, and the Arno, shallow and placid, flowing through the midst of the city, was a fairer object than the muddy and turbulent Tiber. Men and boys bathed along the banks in the afternoons and evenings; and the Ponte Vecchio, crowded with grotesque little houses, was a favorite promenade of mine. There was also a large marketplace, where the peasant women sold the produce of their farms. My insatiable appetite for such things prompted me often to go thither and eat everything I had money to buy. One day I consumed so many fresh tomatoes that I had a giddiness in the back of my head, and ate no more tomatoes for some years. But the place I best liked was the great open square of the Palazzo Vecchio, with the statues of David and of Perseus under the Loggia dei Lanzi, a retreat from sun and
rain; and the Duomo and Giotto's Campanile, hard by. The pavements of Florence, smooth as the surface of stone canals, were most soothing and comfortable after the relentless, sharp cobble-stones of Rome; the low houses that bordered them seemed to slumber in the hot, still sunshine. What a sunshine was that! Not fierce and feverish, as in the tropics, but soft and intense and white. Who would not live in Florence if he could? I think my father would have settled there but for his children, to whom he wished to give an American education. The thought was often in his mind; and he perhaps cherished some hope of returning thither later in life, and letting old age steal gently upon him and his wife in the delicious city. But the Celestial City was nearer to him than he suspected.
There was a magical old man in Florence named Kirkup, an Englishman, though he had dwelt abroad so many years that he seemed more Florentine than the Florentines themselves. He had known, in his youth, Byron, Shelley, Hunt, and Edward Trelawney. After that famous group was disparted, Kirkup, having an income sufficient for his needs, came to Florence and settled there. He took to antiquarianism, which is a sort of philtre, driving its votaries mildly insane, and filling them with emotions which, on the whole, are probably more often happy than grievous. But Kirkup, in the course of his researches into the past, came upon the books of the necromancers, and bought and studied them, and began to practise their spells and conjurations; and by-and-by, being a great admirer and student of Dante, that poet manifested himself to him in his lonely vigils and told him many unknown facts about his career on earth, and incidentally revealed to him the whereabouts of the now-familiar fresco of Dante on the wall of the Bargello Chapel, where it had been hidden for ages beneath a coat of whitewash. In these occult researches, Kirkup, of course, had need of a medium, and he found among the Florentine peasants a young girl, radiantly beautiful, who possessed an extraordinary susceptibility to spiritual influences. Through her means he conversed with the renowned dead men of the past times. But one day Regina (such was the girl's name), much to the old man's surprise, gave birth to a child. She herself died, in Kirkup's house, soon after, and on her death-bed she swore a solemn oath on the crucifix that the baby's father was none other than Kirkup himself. The poor old gentleman had grown so accustomed to believing in miracles that he made little ado about accepting this one also; he received the child as his daughter, and made provision for her in his will. No one had the heart or thought it worth while to enlighten him as to certain facts which might have altered his attitude; but it was well known that Regina had a lover, a handsome young Italian peasant, much more capable of begetting children than of taking care of them afterwards.
These interesting circumstances I did not learn until long after Florence had receded into the distance in my memory. But one afternoon, with my father and mother, I entered the door of a queer old house close to the Ponte Vecchio; I was told that it had formerly been a palace of the Knights Templars. We ascended a very darksome flight of stairs, and a door was opened by a strange little man. He may have been, at that time, some seventy years my senior, but he was little above my height; he had long, soft, white hair and a flowing white beard; his features bore a resemblance to those of Bulwer Lytton, only Bulwer never lived to anything like Mr. Kirkup's age. Old as he was, our host was very brisk and polite, and did the honors of his suite of large rooms with much grace and fantastic hospitality. Dancing about him, and making friends freely with us all meanwhile, was the little girl, Imogen by name, who was accredited as the octogenarian's offspring. She was some four or five years of age, but intellectually precocious, though a complete child, too. Mr. Kirkup said that she, like her beautiful mother, was a powerful medium, and that he often used to communicate through her with her mother, who would seem to have kept her secret even after death. The house was stuffed full of curiosities, but was very dirty and cobwebby; the pictures and the books looked much in need of a caretaker. The little child frolicked and flitted about the dusky apartments, or seated herself like a butterfly on the great tomes of magic that were piled in corners. Nothing could be stronger or stranger than the contrast between her and this environment. My father wrote it all down in his journal, and it evidently impressed his imagination; and she and Kirkup himself — mutatis mutandis — appear in Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, and again, in a somewhat different form, in The Dolliver Romance. There was even a Persian kitten, too, to bear little Imogen company. But no fiction could surpass the singularity of this withered old magician living with the pale, tiny sprite of a child of mysterious birth in the ghost-haunted rooms of the ancient palace.
It seemed as if the world of the occult were making a determined attack upon us during this Florentine sojourn; whichever way we turned we came in contact with something mysterious. In one of my father's unpublished diaries he writes, in reference to the stories with which he was being regaled by Powers, the Brownings, and others, that he was reminded “of an incident that took place at the old manse, in the first summer of our marriage. One night, about eleven o'clock, before either my wife or I had fallen asleep (we had been talking together just before), she suddenly asked me why I had touched her shoulder? The next instant she had a sense that the touch was not mine, but that of some third presence in the chamber. She clung to me in great affright, but I got out of bed and searched the chamber and adjacent entry, and, finding nothing, concluded that the touch was a fancied one. My wife, however, has never varied in her belief that the incident was supernatural and connected with the apparition of old Dr. Harris, who used to show himself to me daily in the reading-room of the Boston Athenaeum. I am still incredulous both as to the doctor's identity and as to the reality of the mysterious touch. That same summer of our honeymoon, too, George Hillard and his wife were sitting with us in our parlor, when a rustling as of a silken robe passed from corner to corner of the room, right among my wife and the two guests, and was heard, I think, by all three. Mrs. Hillard, I remember, was greatly startled. As for myself, I was reclining on the sofa at a little distance, and neither heard the rustle nor believed it.”
Nevertheless, such things affect one in a degree. Here is a straw to show which way the wind of doctrine was blowing with my father: We were in Siena immediately after the date of our Florentine residence, and he and I, leaving the rest of the family at our hotel, sallied forth in quest of adventures. “We went to the cathedral,” he writes, “and while standing near the entrance, or about midway in the nave, we saw a female figure approaching through the dimness and distance, far away in the region of the high altar; as it drew nearer its air reminded me of Una, whom we had left at home. Finally, it came close to us, and proved to be Una herself; she had come, immediately after we left the hotel, with Miss Shepard, and was looking for objects to sketch. It is an empty thing to write down, but the surprise made the incident stand out very vividly.” Una was to pass near the gates of the next world a little while later, and doubtless my father often during that dark period pictured her to himself as a spirit. To make an end of this subject, I will quote here my father's account of a story told him by Mrs. Story when we were living in Rome for the second time. The incident of the woman's face at the carriage window reappears in The Marble Faun. “She told it,” he says, “on the authority of Mrs. Gaskell, to whom the personages were known. A lady, recently married, was observed to be in a melancholy frame of mind, and fell into a bad state of health. She told her husband that she was haunted with the constant vision of a certain face, which affected her with an indescribable horror, and was the cause of her melancholy and illness. The physician prescribed travel, and they went first to Paris, where the lady's spirits grew somewhat better, and the vision haunted her less constantly. They purposed going to Italy, and before their departure from Paris a letter of introduction was given them by a friend, directed to a person in Rome. On their arrival in Rome the letter was delivered; the person called, and in his face the lady recognized the precise reality of her vision. By-the-bye, I think the lady saw this face in the streets of Rome before t
he introduction took place. The end of the story is that the husband was almost immediately recalled to England by an urgent summons; the wife disappeared that very night, and was recognized driving out of Rome, in a carriage, in tears, and accompanied by the visionary unknown. It is a very foolish story, but told as truth. Mrs. Story also said that in an Etruscan tomb, on the Barberini estate, the form and impression, in dust, of a female figure were discovered. Not even a bone of her was left; but where her neck had been there lay a magnificent necklace, all of gold and of the richest workmanship. The necklace, just as it was found (except, I suppose, for a little furbishing), is now worn by the Princess Barberini as her richest adornment. Mrs. Story herself had on a bracelet composed, I think, of seven ancient Etruscan scorabei in carnelian, every one of which has been taken from a separate tomb, and on one side of each was engraved the signet of the person to whom it had belonged and who had carried it to the grave with him. This bracelet would make a good connecting link for a series of Etruscan tales, the more fantastic the better!”
On the first day of October, 1859, we left Florence by railway for Siena on our way back to Rome. There had been no drawbacks to our enjoyment of the city and of our villa and of the people we had met. We departed with regret; had we stayed on there, instead, and not again attempted the fatal air of the Seven Hills, our after chronicles might have been very different. But we walk over precipices with our eyes open, or pass safely along their verge in the dark, and only the Power who made us knows why. Providence takes very long views.
Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) Page 657
