SNOWDROPS AND MAIDENLY DELIGHTS
It being still considerably earlier than the period at which artists
and tourists are accustomed to assemble in Rome, the sculptor and Hilda
found themselves comparatively alone there. The dense mass of native
Roman life, in the midst of which they were, served to press them near
one another. It was as if they had been thrown together on a desert
island. Or they seemed to have wandered, by some strange chance, out
of the common world, and encountered each other in a depopulated city,
where there were streets of lonely palaces, and unreckonable treasures
of beautiful and admirable things, of which they two became the sole
inheritors.
In such circumstances, Hilda’s gentle reserve must have been stronger
than her kindly disposition permitted, if the friendship between Kenyon
and herself had not grown as warm as a maiden’s friendship can ever be,
without absolutely and avowedly blooming into love. On the sculptor’s
side, the amaranthine flower was already in full blow. But it is very
beautiful, though the lover’s heart may grow chill at the perception, to
see how the snow will sometimes linger in a virgin’s breast, even after
the spring is well advanced. In such alpine soils, the summer will not
be anticipated; we seek vainly for passionate flowers, and blossoms
of fervid hue and spicy fragrance, finding only snowdrops and sunless
violets, when it is almost the full season for the crimson rose.
With so much tenderness as Hilda had in her nature, it was strange that
she so reluctantly admitted the idea of love; especially as, in
the sculptor, she found both congeniality and variety of taste, and
likenesses and differences of character; these being as essential as
those to any poignancy of mutual emotion.
So Hilda, as far as Kenyon could discern, still did not love him, though
she admitted him within the quiet circle of her affections as a dear
friend and trusty counsellor. If we knew what is best for us, or could
be content with what is reasonably good, the sculptor might well have
been satisfied, for a season, with this calm intimacy, which so sweetly
kept him a stranger in her heart, and a ceremonious guest; and yet
allowed him the free enjoyment of all but its deeper recesses. The
flowers that grow outside of those minor sanctities have a wild, hasty
charm, which it is well to prove; there may be sweeter ones within the
sacred precinct, but none that will die while you are handling them, and
bequeath you a delicious legacy, as these do, in the perception of their
evanescence and unreality.
And this may be the reason, after all, why Hilda, like so many other
maidens, lingered on the hither side of passion; her finer instinct and
keener sensibility made her enjoy those pale delights in a degree of
which men are incapable. She hesitated to grasp a richer happiness, as
possessing already such measure of it as her heart could hold, and of a
quality most agreeable to her virgin tastes.
Certainly, they both were very happy. Kenyon’s genius, unconsciously
wrought upon by Hilda’s influence, took a more delicate character than
heretofore. He modelled, among other things, a beautiful little statue
of maidenhood gathering a snowdrop. It was never put into marble,
however, because the sculptor soon recognized it as one of those fragile
creations which are true only to the moment that produces them, and
are wronged if we try to imprison their airy excellence in a permanent
material.
On her part, Hilda returned to her customary Occupations with a fresh
love for them, and yet with a deeper look into the heart of things; such
as those necessarily acquire who have passed from picture galleries into
dungeon gloom, and thence come back to the picture gallery again. It is
questionable whether she was ever so perfect a copyist thenceforth. She
could not yield herself up to the painter so unreservedly as in times
past; her character had developed a sturdier quality, which made her
less pliable to the influence of other minds. She saw into the picture
as profoundly as ever, and perhaps more so, but not with the devout
sympathy that had formerly given her entire possession of the old
master’s idea. She had known such a reality, that it taught her to
distinguish inevitably the large portion that is unreal, in every work
of art. Instructed by sorrow, she felt that there is something beyond
almost all which pictorial genius has produced; and she never forgot
those sad wanderings from gallery to gallery, and from church to church,
where she had vainly sought a type of the Virgin Mother, or the Saviour,
or saint, or martyr, which a soul in extreme need might recognize as the
adequate one.
How, indeed, should she have found such? How could holiness be revealed
to the artist of an age when the greatest of them put genius and
imagination in the place of spiritual insight, and when, from the pope
downward, all Christendom was corrupt?
Meanwhile, months wore away, and Rome received back that large portion
of its life-blood which runs in the veins of its foreign and temporary
population. English visitors established themselves in the hotels, and
in all the sunny suites of apartments, in the streets convenient to
the Piazza di Spagna; the English tongue was heard familiarly along the
Corso, and English children sported in the Pincian Gardens.
The native Romans, on the other hand, like the butterflies and
grasshoppers, resigned themselves to the short, sharp misery which
winter brings to a people whose arrangements are made almost exclusively
with a view to summer. Keeping no fire within-doors, except possibly a
spark or two in the kitchen, they crept out of their cheerless houses
into the narrow, sunless, sepulchral streets, bringing their firesides
along with them, in the shape of little earthen pots, vases, or pipkins,
full of lighted charcoal and warm ashes, over which they held their
tingling finger-ends. Even in this half-torpid wretchedness, they still
seemed to dread a pestilence in the sunshine, and kept on the shady side
of the piazzas, as scrupulously as in summer. Through the open doorways
w no need to shut them when the weather within was bleaker than
without--a glimpse into the interior of their dwellings showed the
uncarpeted brick floors, as dismal as the pavement of a tomb.
They drew their old cloaks about them, nevertheless, and threw the
corners over their shoulders, with the dignity of attitude and action
that have come down to these modern citizens, as their sole inheritance
from the togated nation. Somehow or other, they managed to keep up their
poor, frost-bitten hearts against the pitiless atmosphere with a quiet
and uncomplaining endurance that really seems the most respectable point
in the present Roman character. For in New England, or in Russia, or
scarcely in a hut of the Esquimaux, there is no such discomfort to be
borne as by Romans in wintry weather, when the orange-trees bear icy
fruit in the gardens; and when the rims of all the fountains are shaggy
with icicles, and the Fountain of Trevi skimmed almost across with a
glassy surface; and when there is a slide in the piazza of St. Peter’s,
and a fringe of brown, frozen foam along the eastern shore of the Tiber,
and sometimes a fall of great snowflakes into the dreary lanes and
alleys of the miserable city. Cold blasts, that bring death with them,
now blow upon the shivering invalids, who came hither in the hope of
breathing balmy airs.
Wherever we pass our summers, may all our inclement months, from
November to April, henceforth be spent in some country that recognizes
winter as an integral portion of its year!
Now, too, there was especial discomfort in the stately picture
galleries, where nobody, indeed,--not the princely or priestly founders,
nor any who have inherited their cheerless magnificence,--ever dreamed
of such an impossibility as fireside warmth, since those great palaces
were built. Hilda, therefore, finding her fingers so much benumbed that
the spiritual influence could not be transmitted to them, was persuaded
to leave her easel before a picture, on one of these wintry days, and
pay a visit to Kenyon’s studio. But neither was the studio anything
better than a dismal den, with its marble shapes shivering around the
walls, cold as the snow images which the sculptor used to model in his
boyhood, and sadly behold them weep themselves away at the first thaw.
Kenyon’s Roman artisans, all this while, had been at work on the
Cleopatra. The fierce Egyptian queen had now struggled almost out of the
imprisoning stone; or, rather, the workmen had found her within the mass
of marble, imprisoned there by magic, but still fervid to the touch
with fiery life, the fossil woman of an age that produced statelier,
stronger, and more passionate creatures than our own. You already felt
her compressed heat, and were aware of a tiger-like character even in
her repose. If Octavius should make his appearance, though the marble
still held her within its embrace, it was evident that she would tear
herself forth in a twinkling, either to spring enraged at his
throat, or, sinking into his arms, to make one more proof of her rich
blandishments, or, falling lowly at his feet, to try the efficacy of a
woman’s tears.
“I am ashamed to tell you how much I admire this statue,” said Hilda.
“No other sculptor could have done it.”
“This is very sweet for me to hear,” replied Kenyon; “and since your
reserve keeps you from saying more, I shall imagine you expressing
everything that an artist would wish to hear said about his work.”
“You will not easily go beyond my genuine opinion,” answered Hilda, with
a smile.
“Ah, your kind word makes me very happy,” said the sculptor, “and I
need it, just now, on behalf of my Cleopatra. That inevitable period has
come,--for I have found it inevitable, in regard to all my works,--when
I look at what I fancied to be a statue, lacking only breath to make it
live, and find it a mere lump of senseless stone, into which I have not
really succeeded in moulding the spiritual part of my idea. I should
like, now,--only it would be such shameful treatment for a discrowned
queen, and my own offspring too,--I should like to hit poor Cleopatra a
bitter blow on her Egyptian nose with this mallet.”
“That is a blow which all statues seem doomed to receive, sooner or
later, though seldom from the hand that sculptured them,” said Hilda,
laughing. “But you must not let yourself be too much disheartened by
the decay of your faith in what you produce. I have heard a poet express
similar distaste for his own most exquisite poem, and I am afraid that
this final despair, and sense of short-coming, must always be the reward
and punishment of those who try to grapple with a great or beautiful
idea. It only proves that you have been able to imagine things too high
for mortal faculties to execute. The idea leaves you an imperfect image
of itself, which you at first mistake for the ethereal reality, but soon
find that the latter has escaped out of your closest embrace.”
“And the only consolation is,” remarked Kenyon, “that the blurred and
imperfect image may still make a very respectable appearance in the eyes
of those who have not seen the original.”
“More than that,” rejoined Hilda; “for there is a class of spectators
whose sympathy will help them to see the perfect through a mist of
imperfection. Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures
or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or
artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.”
“You, Hilda, are yourself the only critic in whom I have much faith,”
said Kenyon. “Had you condemned Cleopatra, nothing should have saved
her.”
“You invest me with such an awful responsibility,” she replied, “that I
shall not dare to say a single word about your other works.”
“At least,” said the sculptor, “tell me whether you recognize this
bust?”
He pointed to a bust of Donatello. It was not the one which Kenyon had
begun to model at Monte Beni, but a reminiscence of the Count’s face,
wrought under the influence of all the sculptor’s knowledge of his
history, and of his personal and hereditary character. It stood on a
wooden pedestal, not nearly finished, but with fine white dust and small
chips of marble scattered about it, and itself incrusted all round with
the white, shapeless substance of the block. In the midst appeared
the features, lacking sharpness, and very much resembling a fossil
countenance,--but we have already used this simile, in reference to
Cleopatra, with the accumulations of long-past ages clinging to it.
And yet, strange to say, the face had an expression, and a more
recognizable one than Kenyon had succeeded in putting into the
clay model at Monte Beni. The reader is probably acquainted with
Thorwaldsen’s three-fold analogy,--the clay model, the Life; the plaster
cast, the Death; and the sculptured marble, the Resurrection,--and
it seemed to be made good by the spirit that was kindling up these
imperfect features, like a lambent flame.
“I was not quite sure, at first glance, that I knew the face,” observed
Hilda; “the likeness surely is not a striking one. There is a good
deal of external resemblance, still, to the features of the Faun of
Praxiteles, between whom and Donatello, you know, we once insisted that
there was a perfect twin-brotherhood. But the expression is now so very
different!”
“What do you take it to be?” asked the sculptor.
“I hardly know how to define it,” she answered. “But it has an effect
as if I could see this countenance gradually brightening while I look
at it. It gives the impression of a growing intellectual power and
moral sense. Donatello’s face used to evince little more than a genial,
pleasurable sort of vivacity, and capability of enjoyment. But here, a
soul is being breathed into him; it is the Faun, but advancing towards a
state of higher development.”
“Hilda, do you see all this?” exclaimed Kenyon, in considerable
surprise. “I may have had such an idea in my mind, but was quite unaware
that I had succeeded in conveying it into the marble.”
“Forgive me,” said Hilda, “but I question whether this striking effect
has been brought about by any skill or purpose on the sculptor’s part.
Is it not, perhaps, the chance result of the bust being just so far
shaped out, in the marble, as the process of moral growth had advanced
in the original? A few more strokes of the chisel might change the whole
expression, and so spoil it for what it is now worth.”
“I believe you are right,” answered Kenyon, thoughtfully examining his
work; “and, strangely enough, it was the very expression that I tried
unsuccessfully to produce in the clay model. Well; not another chip
shall be struck from the marble.”
And, accordingly, Donatello’s bust (like that rude, rough mass of the
head of Brutus, by Michael Angelo, at Florence) has ever since remained
in an unfinished state. Most spectators mistake it for an unsuccessful
attempt towards copying the features of the Faun of Praxiteles. One
observer in a thousand is conscious of something more, and lingers long
over this mysterious face, departing from it reluctantly, and with many
a glance thrown backward. What perplexes him is the riddle that he sees
propounded there; the riddle of the soul’s growth, taking its first
impulse amid remorse and pain, and struggling through the incrustations
of the senses. It was the contemplation of this imperfect portrait of
Donatello that originally interested us in his history, and impelled us
to elicit from Kenyon what he knew of his friend’s adventures.