^{Note 1 in page 254} Ch. i. The last major character, Donatello, is a nobleman who resembles no less than three works of art (the Faun itself, Kenyon's clay bust in Ch. xxx, and his marble one in Ch. xli) and oddly bears the name of an actual artist.

^{Note 2 in page 254} From Hawthorne's preface.

^{Note 3 in page 254} Most critics who deal with The Marble Faun account to some degree for the presence of art in it, but not in as thoroughgoing terms as seem to me necessary since art permeates every part of the book. The introduction of Norman Holmes Pearson's edition of Hawthorne's French and Italian notebooks, a 1941 Yale University doctoral dissertation to which I am often indebted here, contains the first adequate attempt known to me to deal with art in The Marble Faun. My explanation is different from Professor Pearson's, but not necessarily opposed to it; we deal with different levels of meaning in the book.

I should like to acknowledge my indebtedness also to Charles Feidelson, Jr., who read and extensively commented upon an early draft of this paper.

^{Note 4 in page 254} The Novels and Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Modern Library Giant ed., New York, 1937), ed. Norman Holmes Pearson, p. 653. Further page references, hereafter cited in the text, are to this edition.

^{Note 5 in page 255} As the above quotations suggest, three general criticisms are made of Italian art, all of them on the grounds that it does not finally tell moral truth. Aspirational paintings are usually not spiritual enough; neo-pagan nudes are irrelevant to present conditions; representations of sin, passion, life are sometimes inappropriately spiritualized. The first two criticisms can be generalized beyond the incapacities of the individual artist to the corrupt moral climate he lived in; the third criticism is perhaps no more than the result of a personal failure of insight, though possibly even inappropriate spiritualization insofar as it represents a kind of hypocrisy, a refusal to see the truth of life, can be traced to the corrupting falsity of a time and place. Typical animadversions are to be found on pages 670 and 696 (Guido's archangel); 672 (the Trevi fountain); 737 (Titian's Magdalen); 769 (Fra Angelico); 784 (several Raphaels). Much of a reader's impression that The Marble Faun tends to praise Italian art is due to the book's early favorable reactions to Rome's innocent “pagan” art and to the ancient monuments of sublimity which, though seen as products of a corrupt time, are seen under the aspect of history rather than that of aesthetics, and inspire reactions of awe instead of niggling evaluations of precise worth.

^{Note 6 in page 256} “Pagan” statues largely escape the book's disapproval, although it is clear from Hawthorne's journals that he was not uncritical of Greek and Roman art. They come off relatively so well because of the novel's Golden Age bias, which seems to combine the generic tendency of romance toward sentimentality regarding simpler times and places with the thematic use The Marble Faun makes of that tendency. In the journals ancient art is seen as the product of real eras, while the novel tends to see it in terms that more or less silently assume it to be not just pre-Catholic, but mythic, prehistoric, prelapsarian, prehuman, innocent. It is seen in this way necessarily: the fable of Donatello demands a posited Golden Age; Donatello in his faunlike state is therefore exempt from Christian moral judgments, and he is insistently linked with a statue which the book associates more with “paganism” than Praxiteles; since Christian morality forms the only really articulate basis Hawthorne had developed for aesthetic judgments, any characteristic criticism of pagan art would be subversive of Donatello's status. The few criticisms the book contains, such as Kenyon's fashionable sarcasm about the length of time it takes the Dying Gaul to die, are therefore more completely aesthetic in nature than usual; but those statues like the Laocoön or the child as Human Soul that precociously chanced to anticipate the validity of Christian terms receive their due moral-aesthetic homage.

^{Note 7 in page 256} Obviously priesthood in the analogy is used in a general, non-Catholic sense, since the book's ordinary remarks on the Catholic hierarchy are not honorific at all: priests are “pampered, sensual with red and bloated cheeks, and carnal eyes ...” etc.

^{Note 8 in page 257} These two categories are not opposites in the sense that the ideal and the actual would be. A crucial distinction between the ideal and the actual is that the former is experienced as non-temporal, the latter as temporal; but because both can be experienced as layers of existence, existential is here meant to include elements of both. In short, it'can include the ideal, but the ideal can not include it.

^{Note 9 in page 257} Donatello's position will be considered later. At this point suffice it to say that after his transformation from the condition of ideal innocence to the existential complexity of full humanity, his one comment on art occurs, and it is deprecatory of Fra Angelico's idealized spirituality, which for Donatello is now too transcendent of life to be truthful.

^{Note 10 in page 257} The above may seem too schematic a way of putting the aesthetic conflict, for Miriam and Kenyon in practise overlap in the kinds of art they produce, however much they may argue aesthetics with each other. Nevertheless the tendency is there in several ways, beginning in their playful competition and in their choice of media: Kenyon deals in marble, which has a sterner, higher, purer function than painting: “Flitting moments,” as he says (599), “ought not to be encrusted with the eternal repose of marble”; Miriam immediately counters with the argument that “in painting there is no similar objection to the representation of brief snatches of time; perhaps, because a story can be so much more fully told in picture” (hence her genre paintings of everyday life, and her story-pictures of sexual revenge). Both would agree that marble implies eternity, therefore ideality, while paint implies time, therefore actuality.

^{Note 11 in page 257} English notebook entry for 26 March 1856, quoted by Professor Pearson in the introduction to his edition of Hawthorne's French and Italian notebooks. See fn. 3.

^{Note 12 in page 257} See page lxxxv of the above-cited introduction.

^{Note 13 in page 258} The Artist in this book begins to resemble the earlier magician-scientist figures. Perhaps the evil overtones of the magician-scientist have diminished in Kenyon to the level of the merely nasty, because the real Europe, although fancifully conceived of for fictional presentation, would not remain as thoroughly under Hawthorne's control as the earlier backgrounds would: America, or Europe before he had been there (in Rappaccini's Daughter, for example). Perhaps Italy kept invading his imagination, which would place him as writer in a position analogous to that of his magician-scientists, at odds with his material and struggling to form it. Perhaps he began to feel more sympathy with the position; as a position it might even have begun to seem more necessary, however far from humanly desirable it remained.

^{Note 14 in page 259} On the one hand, Miriam would like to revenge herself on the Model, but gets no help from the men she knows, which may be why her paintings so often seem to picture a revenge on all mankind. This revenge seems basically sexual: she is not physically attracted to Kenyon, and she makes fun of the inadequate, importunate Donatello, to whom she is attracted, but who in his faunlike state is not Man enough for her; in short, she has a kind of sexual grievance against the race of men for not being able to provide her with a suitably fulfilling partner. On the other hand, her quieter sketches simply reflect her quieter dreams of blissful domesticity.

^{Note 15 in page 259} Her prim speech about nude statues (p. 660) may seem inappropriate to what is here held to be her allegorical status, and doubtless most readers find it at odds at least with her character. Kenyon or Hilda might better have spoken it. Its argument is not at all inappropriate, however: though the speech is motivated by prudery, what it actually says is that nude statues are no longer true to existence, however valid they once were, because people in the present world “are as good as born in their clothes.”

^{Note 16 in page 261} Her inspiration is sometimes direct and specific, she inspires both Kenyon's model of her hand, and the spotted-dress painting an Italian artist secretly does of her, only to have it widely misinterpreted when it achieves popularity.

^{Note 17 in page 262} That he bears the name of an actual artist may be deliberate. On the evidence to be found in the French and Italian notebooks, Hawthorne thought highly of the sculptor Donatello, whose statues he felt were original and unspoiled, products of the time “before sculpture began to be congealed by the influence of Greek art.” The name Donatello may possibly be designed to link the character's initially simple personality in the moral allegory with the art context of the book by recalling a sculptor whom Hawthorne thought (odd as this must seem to modern taste) naïve. Such a link, if that is what it is, seems weak; though perhaps it becomes strengthened when Donatello uncovers a statue for Kenyon (to be considered later).

^{Note 18 in page 262} Hilda's abstractness has been discussed. As for Donatello, Henry James, for example, found him “rather vague and impalpable,” a figure who “falls short ... of being a creation” because, unlike Hawthorne's usual typological figures, little dramatically effective attention is paid him as a character.

^{Note 19 in page 262} Miriam's dual participation has been indicated. Kenyon's relation, as the archetypal artist, to the fall of man is, like Hilda's, primarily that of a spectator. However, as priest-Artist and basically out of his sense of aesthetic unity he actively—that is, dramatically—helps to bring Miriam and Donatello together, even (speaking in pontifical tones, under the aesthetically blessing hand of the statue of Pope Julius in Perugia) marrying them, and thus he affects the course of the moral allegory as Hilda does not.

^{Note 20 in page 262} Thus, for example, while Miriam gains her status of Woman-in-general by the very vitality of her rendering—by, in effect, being vividly visualizable—Donatello becomes a kind of generalized Man because his tenuous personality is hard to visualize at all.

^{Note 21 in page 263} Donatello's prototype is of course Adam, but an Adam significantly de-Christianized and de-Judaized into pagan legend. This has the effect of both universalizing the moral allegory beyond the Bible into ‘prehistoric’ myth and suggesting some sort of essential, ideal equivalence between the Bible and myth as they both meet on the ground of the timeless.

^{Note 22 in page 263} In The American Adam R. W. B. Lewis suggests that the action of The Marble Faun “has to do with the discovery of time as a metaphor of the experience of evil.” The action is immediately present in this passage from museum to world.

^{Note 23 in page 263} Formally, Kenyon is away at Monte Beni because, as the more ‘human’ of the two partners in the aesthetic allegory, he is observing at close range the human consequences of the fall of man as well as actively shaping those consequences (‘marrying’ Miriam and Donatello) and transforming them into art (his bust of Donatello).

^{Note 24 in page 264} It is the site of Beatrice's crime, and therefore the site of an artistic type of Miriam's first act of ambiguous filial impiety (an act which seems to figure the theological paradox of original predestination and free will, since it was an act of will which made all but inevitable, given Miriam's character, her part in the later, less ambiguous re-enactment of Adam's fall). As the site of the aesthetic type of an act embodying deep theological mystery, perhaps the Palazzo Cenci becomes on the aesthetic plane emblematic of the Church, and therefore the place where the Church can capture Hilda on her own grounds, something It was not able to do in the Vatican.

^{Note 25 in page 265} Here, Donatello's name may have had some private significance for Hawthorne, because it was Donatello who had partially uncovered for Kenyon to see the statue that Kenyon associates with Hilda (and the spirit of art), and Hawthorne thought the sculptor Donatello one of the few really good Italian masters, a man whose art combined the “rough and ugly” forms derived from existence with meaning transcending existence, and hence a likely candidate to deliver the Muse back to her archetypal protector.

^{Note 26 in page 265} Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), p. 90.