Rome is the scene of The Marble Faun, the longest of Hawthorne’s romances, and in his opinion the best. The author professed to have seen, in the studio of an American sculptor, Kenyon, an unfinished portrait bust, certain traits of which led him to ask the history of the original. This face, of a beautiful youth, might have been mistaken for a not fortunate attempt to reproduce the roguish countenance of the Faun of Praxiteles. The resemblance was external merely; the beholder presently detected something inscrutable in the eyes, in the whole expression, as if powers of the soul hitherto dormant were awaking, and with the awakening had come anxiety, longing, grief, remorse, in short a knowledge of good through a sudden apprehension of evil.
It was the portrait of a young Count of Monte Beni (known as Donatello), whose family, an ancient one, was believed to have sprung from the union of one of those fabled woodland creatures, half animal, half god, and an earthly maiden. At long intervals the traits defining the origin of the race were accentuated in a member of the family. He was said to be ‘true Monte Beni.’ He lived on the border line between two worlds, fearless and happy, but also unthinking, a creature incapable of doing wrong because his life was free, natural, instinctive. Such was Donatello.
The idea of a creature who should unite the characteristics of the wild and the human fascinated Hawthorne. The charm is elusive, and must be elusive or it is no longer charming. Hawthorne warns us against letting the idea harden in our grasp or grow coarse from handling. For this reason (and not for the sake of petty mystification) Hawthorne will not disclose the one physical trait which would have completed Donatello’s resemblance to the Faun, the pointed, furry ears. The youth himself will jest with his friends on the subject, but no more; the thick brown curls are never brushed aside.
So in Donatello’s attachment to Miriam, the mysterious beauty of the story, there is something animal-like, at once pathetic and fierce. Love does not awaken the intellect, however; the youth remains a child until the wrathful moment when he holds the mad Capuchin, Miriam’s persecutor, over the edge of the precipice, and reads in the girl’s consenting eyes approval of the deed he is about to commit. At this point Donatello’s real life begins.
The crime is far-reaching in its consequences, blighting for weary months the happiness of the gentle Hilda, a terrified eye-witness; but is most sinister in its effect on Donatello, whose dumb agony and remorse Hawthorne has painted with a strong but subdued touch. Perhaps the most striking of the incidents at Monte Beni is that where the wretched Donatello tries to call the wild creatures of the wood to him as he had been used to do in the days of his innocence, and finds his power gone, only some loathsome reptile coming at his bidding.
Hilda is one of the triumphs of Hawthorne’s art. By what necromancy did he contrive to invest a character so ethereal with life and interest? For the type is by no means one that invariably attracts, and the mere symbolism of the shrine, the doves, together with an innocence which carries its own safeguard, might have been used unsuccessfully a thousand times before being wrought by Hawthorne’s subtile power into enduring form.
Kenyon is a proof of the instinct Hawthorne had for avoiding the realistic fact. One would fancy this a character which would take on realism of its own accord, a character which could be depended on to become human and bohemian, to smoke, swear, tell emphatic stories, and yet be gentle and high-minded withal, like Bret Harte’s angel-miners. But Kenyon is almost as shadowy as Hilda.
Miriam with her rich dark beauty (making her in contrast with Hilda as Night to Day) is the one strong human character, capable of infinite pity and infinite devotion, a woman to die for—if the need were, and such need is not uncommon in romances. The shadow of a nameless crime hangs over her, from which, though innocent, she cannot escape. She has warned Donatello of the fatality that attends her. She holds his love in esteem so light as to be almost contempt until the moment when he shows the force to grapple with her enemy; then love flames up in her own heart. For her Donatello stains his hands with blood, suffers agony indescribable, and then ‘comes back to his original self, with an inestimable treasure of improvement won from an experience of pain.’ And as Miriam contemplates him on the day before he gives himself up to justice, she asks whether the story of the fall of man has not been repeated in the romance of Monte Beni.
The deficiencies and excesses of The Marble Faun have been often pointed out. The superabundance of guide-book description which disturbed Sir Leslie Stephen was noted by Hawthorne as a defect and apologized for in the preface. It is astonishing how it fits into place when, after an interval of several years, one comes to re-read the story. The Marble Faun is a magical piece of work, its very enigmas, mysteries, and its inconclusiveness tending to heighten the effect. And it does not in the least detract from the enjoyment that one cannot follow the author to the extent of believing it his best work.