England village, Hawthorne would never have admitted a touch which
has no conceivable bearing upon the situation. There is almost a
superabundance of minute local colour in his American Romances, as, for
example, in the 'House of the Seven Gables;' but still, every touch,
however minute, is steeped in the sentiment and contributes to the
general effect. In Rome the smell of a loaf is sacred to his
imagination, and intrudes itself upon its own merits, and, so far as we
can discover, without reference to the central purpose. If a baker's
shop impresses him unduly because it is Roman, the influence of ancient
ruins and glorious works of art is of course still more distracting. The
mysterious Donatello, and the strange psychological problem which he is
destined to illustrate, are put aside for an interval, whilst we are
called upon to listen to descriptions and meditations, always graceful,
and often of great beauty in themselves, but yet, in a strict sense,
irrelevant. Hawthorne's want of familiarity with the scenery is of
course responsible for part of this failing. Had he been a native Roman,
he would not have been so preoccupied with the wonders of Rome. But it
seems that for a romance bearing upon a spiritual problem, the scenery,
however tempting, is not really so serviceable as the less prepossessing
surroundings of America. The objects have too great an intrinsic
interest. A counter-attraction distorts the symmetry of the system. In
the shadow of the Coliseum and St. Peter's you cannot pay much attention
to the troubles of a young lady whose existence is painfully ephemeral.
Those mighty objects will not be relegated to the background, and
condescend to act as mere scenery. They are, in fact, too romantic for a
romance. The fountain of Trevi, with all its allegorical marbles, may be
a very picturesque object to describe, but for Hawthorne's purposes it
is really not equal to the town-pump at Salem; and Hilda's poetical
tower, with the perpetual light before the Virgin's image, and the doves
floating up to her from the street, and the column of Antoninus looking
at her from the heart of the city, somehow appeals less to our
sympathies than the quaint garret in the House of the Seven Gables, from
which Phoebe Pyncheon watched the singular idiosyncrasies of the
superannuated breed of fowls in the garden. The garret and the pump are
designed in strict subordination to the human figures: the tower and the
fountain have a d