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FRAN K KE RMODE
past and also the future. In his last completed novel he undertook a
more explicit encounter with the past at its imperial centre, the Rome
of
The Marble Faun,
far from what he calls the "broad and simple
daylight" of modern New England. Since Hawthorne cannot have his
Holgravian way, and every half-century destroy by fire a town's ac–
cumulation of guilt and filth, he sees the eternal city as the sibylline
recipient of a "grievous boon of immortality." Coexistent with this
immemorial and perpetually present past is the present of Kenyon's
own new world: "In that fortunate land, each generation has only its
own sins and sorrows to bear. Here, it seems as if all the weary and
dreary Past were piled upon the back of the Present" (XXXIII). Yet
Rome is also the centre of "that central clime, whither the eyes and the
heart of every artist turn" (VI). Pt:rhaps they ought not to; Hilda, by
growing so perfect a copyist of the old, abandons the gift with which
she might have enriched her own new world.
What is remarkable is Hawthorne's double vision of Rome. It is
the
urbs aeterna,
centre of perpetual empire, besides which all other
places are provincial (XXIV). It is the monument of a past when Italy
was "yet guiltless of Rome" (XXVI), stretching back to the date of the
faun and dryad, and, in art, to the obelisk in the Piazza del Popolo,
oldest of things, even in Rome (XII). It is the classic Rome, closer to us
than those Gothic centuries between, which "look further off than the
Augustan age" (XVIII).
It
is the Rome of St. Peter's seen in its entirety,
" the world's cathedral" (XII). But it is also the Rome that "lies, a long–
decaying corpse," among centuries of filth and squalor, amid " the
grime and corruption which paganism had left there, and a perverted
Christianity had made more noisome " (XLV); the Rome of malaria,
foul air; the Rome in which even the Carnival, though partaking of
the city's perpetuity, is mean and degenerate. At the end of his career
Hawthorne rediscovers the Rome that is timeless yet exists in the as–
pect of time.
Hilda's ambiguous relation with the art, and with the religio_n, of
Rome, is that of the new to the old empire, the one more spiritual but
also, even in being less evil, less connected to humanity and to art. On
the one hand there is the corruption of Donatello's nature, which is
also the birth of his soul, and the creative decadence of Miriam; on the
other the priggishness of Kenyon, the new-world chastity of Hilda.
There is the provinciality of America, its obvious past never more than
a generation or two back, with no use for marble, and a taste for vulgar
