THE FAUN
“Donatello,” playfully cried Miriam, “do not leave us in this perplexity!
Shake aside those brown curls, my friend, and let us see whether this
marvellous resemblance extends to the very tips of the ears. If so, we
shall like you all the better!”
“No, no, dearest signorina,” answered Donatello, laughing, but with
a certain earnestness. “I entreat you to take the tips of my ears for
granted.” As he spoke, the young Italian made a skip and jump, light
enough for a veritable faun; so as to place himself quite beyond the
reach of the fair hand that was outstretched, as if to settle the matter
by actual examination. “I shall be like a wolf of the Apennines,” he
continued, taking his stand on the other side of the Dying Gladiator,
“if you touch my ears ever so softly. None of my race could endure it.
It has always been a tender point with my forefathers and me.”
He spoke in Italian, with the Tuscan rusticity of accent, and an
unshaped sort of utterance, betokening that he must heretofore have been
chiefly conversant with rural people.
“Well, well,” said Miriam, “your tender point--your two tender points,
if you have them--shall be safe, so far as I am concerned. But how
strange this likeness is, after all! and how delightful, if it really
includes the pointed ears! O, it is impossible, of course,” she
continued, in English, “with a real and commonplace young man like
Donatello; but you see how this peculiarity defines the position of
the Faun; and, while putting him where he cannot exactly assert his
brotherhood, still disposes us kindly towards the kindred creature. He
is not supernatural, but just on the verge of nature, and yet within
it. What is the nameless charm of this idea, Hilda? You can feel it more
delicately than I.”
“It perplexes me,” said Hilda thoughtfully, and shrinking a little;
“neither do I quite like to think about it.”
“But, surely,” said Kenyon, “you agree with Miriam and me that there is
something very touching and impressive in this statue of the Faun. In
some long-past age, he must really have existed. Nature needed, and
still needs, this beautiful creature; standing betwixt man and animal,
sympathizing with each, comprehending the speech of either race, and
interpreting the whole existence of one to the other. What a pity that
he has forever vanished from the hard and dusty paths of life,--unless,”
added the sculptor, in a sportive whisper, “Donatello be actually he!”
“You cannot conceive how this fantasy takes hold of me,” responded
Miriam, between jest and earnest. “Imagine, now, a real being, similar
to this mythic Faun; how happy, how genial, how satisfactory would be
his life, enjoying the warm, sensuous, earthy side of nature; revelling
in the merriment of woods and streams; living as our four-footed kindred
do,--as mankind did in its innocent childhood; before sin, sorrow or
morality itself had ever been thought of! Ah! Kenyon, if Hilda and you
and I--if I, at least--had pointed ears! For I suppose the Faun had
no conscience, no remorse, no burden on the heart, no troublesome
recollections of any sort; no dark future either.”
“What a tragic tone was that last, Miriam!” said the sculptor;
and, looking into her face, he was startled to behold it pale and
tear-stained. “How suddenly this mood has come over you!”
“Let it go as it came,” said Miriam, “like a thunder-shower in this
Roman sky. All is sunshine again, you see!”
Donatello’s refractoriness as regarded his ears had evidently cost him
something, and he now came close to Miriam’s side, gazing at her with an
appealing air, as if to solicit forgiveness. His mute, helpless gesture
of entreaty had something pathetic in it, and yet might well enough
excite a laugh, so like it was to what you may see in the aspect of a
hound when he thinks himself in fault or disgrace. It was difficult to
make out the character of this young man. So full of animal life as
he was, so joyous in his deportment, so handsome, so physically
well-developed, he made no impression of incompleteness, of maimed or
stinted nature. And yet, in social intercourse, these familiar friends
of his habitually and instinctively allowed for him, as for a child or
some other lawless thing, exacting no strict obedience to conventional
rules, and hardly noticing his eccentricities enough to pardon them.
There was an indefinable characteristic about Donatello that set him
outside of rules.
He caught Miriam’s hand, kissed it, and gazed into her eyes without
saying a word. She smiled, and bestowed on him a little careless caress,
singularly like what one would give to a pet dog when he puts himself in
the way to receive it. Not that it was so decided a caress either, but
only the merest touch, somewhere between a pat and a tap of the finger;
it might be a mark of fondness, or perhaps a playful pretence of
punishment. At all events, it appeared to afford Donatello exquisite
pleasure; insomuch that he danced quite round the wooden railing that
fences in the Dying Gladiator.
“It is the very step of the Dancing Faun,” said Miriam, apart, to Hilda.
“What a child, or what a simpleton, he is! I continually find myself
treating Donatello as if he were the merest unfledged chicken; and yet
he can claim no such privileges in the right of his tender age, for he
is at least--how old should you think him, Hilda?”
“Twenty years, perhaps,” replied Hilda, glancing at Donatello; “but,
indeed, I cannot tell; hardly so old, on second thoughts, or possibly
older. He has nothing to do with time, but has a look of eternal youth
in his face.”
“All underwitted people have that look,” said Miriam scornfully.
“Donatello has certainly the gift of eternal youth, as Hilda suggests,”
observed Kenyon, laughing; “for, judging by the date of this statue,
which, I am more and more convinced, Praxiteles carved on purpose for
him, he must be at least twenty-five centuries old, and he still looks
as young as ever.”
“What age have you, Donatello?” asked Miriam.
“Signorina, I do not know,” he answered; “no great age, however; for I
have only lived since I met you.”
“Now, what old man of society could have turned a silly compliment more
smartly than that!” exclaimed Miriam. “Nature and art are just at one
sometimes. But what a happy ignorance is this of our friend Donatello!
Not to know his own age! It is equivalent to being immortal on earth. If
I could only forget mine!”
“It is too soon to wish that,” observed the sculptor; “you are scarcely
older than Donatello looks.”
“I shall be content, then,” rejoined Miriam, “if I could only forget
one day of all my life.” Then she seemed to repent of this allusion, and
hastily added, “A woman’s days are so tedious that it is a boon to leave
even one of them out of the account.”
The foregoing conversation had been carried on in a mood in which all
imaginative people, whether artists or poets, love to indulge. In this
frame of mind, they sometimes find their profoundest truths side by side
with the idlest jest, and utter one or the other, apparently without
distinguishing which is the most valuable, or assigning any considerable
value to either. The resemblance between the marble Faun and their
living companion had made a deep, half-serious, half-mirthful impression
on these three friends, and had taken them into a certain airy region,
lifting up, as it is so pleasant to feel them lifted, their heavy
earthly feet from the actual soil of life. The world had been set
afloat, as it were, for a moment, and relieved them, for just so long,
of all customary responsibility for what they thought and said.
It might be under this influence--or, perhaps, because sculptors always
abuse one another’s works--that Kenyon threw in a criticism upon the
Dying Gladiator.
“I used to admire this statue exceedingly,” he remarked, “but, latterly,
I find myself getting weary and annoyed that the man should be such a
length of time leaning on his arm in the very act of death. If he is so
terribly hurt, why does he not sink down and die without further ado?
Flitting moments, imminent emergencies, imperceptible intervals between
two breaths, ought not to be incrusted with the eternal repose of
marble; in any sculptural subject, there should be a moral standstill,
since there must of necessity be a physical one. Otherwise, it is
like flinging a block of marble up into the air, and, by some trick of
enchantment, causing it to stick there. You feel that it ought to come
down, and are dissatisfied that it does not obey the natural law.”
“I see,” said Miriam mischievously, “you think that sculpture should
be a sort of fossilizing process. But, in truth, your frozen art has
nothing like the scope and freedom of Hilda’s and mine. 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, and buttressed about with circumstances that give it an epoch.
For instance, a painter never would have sent down yonder Faun out of
his far antiquity, lonely and desolate, with no companion to keep his
simple heart warm.”
“Ah, the Faun!” cried Hilda, with a little gesture of impatience; “I
have been looking at him too long; and now, instead of a beautiful
statue, immortally young, I see only a corroded and discolored stone.
This change is very apt to occur in statues.”
“And a similar one in pictures, surely,” retorted the sculptor. “It is
the spectator’s mood that transfigures the Transfiguration itself.
I defy any painter to move and elevate me without my own consent and
assistance.”
“Then you are deficient of a sense,” said Miriam.
The party now strayed onward from hall to hall of that rich gallery,
pausing here and there, to look at the multitude of noble and lovely
shapes, which have been dug up out of the deep grave in which old Rome
lies buried. And still, the realization of the antique Faun, in the
person of Donatello, gave a more vivid character to all these marble
ghosts. Why should not each statue grow warm with life! Antinous might
lift his brow, and tell us why he is forever sad. The Lycian Apollo
might strike his lyre; and, at the first vibration, that other Faun in
red marble, who keeps up a motionless dance, should frisk gayly forth,
leading yonder Satyrs, with shaggy goat-shanks, to clatter their little
hoofs upon the floor, and all join hands with Donatello! Bacchus, too,
a rosy flush diffusing itself over his time-stained surface, could
come down from his pedestal, and offer a cluster of purple grapes to
Donatello’s lips; because the god recognizes him as the woodland elf
who so often shared his revels. And here, in this sarcophagus, the
exquisitely carved figures might assume life, and chase one another
round its verge with that wild merriment which is so strangely
represented on those old burial coffers: though still with some subtile
allusion to death, carefully veiled, but forever peeping forth amid
emblems of mirth and riot.
As the four friends descended the stairs, however, their play of fancy
subsided into a much more sombre mood; a result apt to follow upon such
exhilaration as that which had so recently taken possession of them.
“Do you know,” said Miriam confidentially to Hilda, “I doubt the reality
of this likeness of Donatello to the Faun, which we have been talking so
much about? To say the truth, it never struck me so forcibly as it did
Kenyon and yourself, though I gave in to whatever you were pleased to
fancy, for the sake of a moment’s mirth and wonder.” “I was certainly
in earnest, and you seemed equally so,” replied Hilda, glancing back
at Donatello, as if to reassure herself of the resemblance. “But faces
change so much, from hour to hour, that the same set of features has
often no keeping with itself; to an eye, at least, which looks at
expression more than outline. How sad and sombre he has grown all of a
sudden!” “Angry too, methinks! nay, it is anger much more than sadness,”
said Miriam. “I have seen Donatello in this mood once or twice before.
If you consider him well, you will observe an odd mixture of
the bulldog, or some other equally fierce brute, in our friend’s
composition; a trait of savageness hardly to be expected in such a
gentle creature as he usually is. Donatello is a very strange young man.
I wish he would not haunt my footsteps so continually.”
“You have bewitched the poor lad,” said the sculptor, laughing. “You
have a faculty of bewitching people, and it is providing you with a
singular train of followers. I see another of them behind yonder pillar;
and it is his presence that has aroused Donatello’s wrath.”
They had now emerged from the gateway of the palace; and partly
concealed by one of the pillars of the portico stood a figure such as
may often be encountered in the streets and piazzas of Rome, and nowhere
else. He looked as if he might just have stepped out of a picture, and,
in truth, was likely enough to find his way into a dozen pictures; being
no other than one of those living models, dark, bushy bearded, wild
of aspect and attire, whom artists convert into saints or assassins,
according as their pictorial purposes demand.
“Miriam,” whispered Hilda, a little startled, “it is your model!”