The Marble Faun, Volume I.

N >> Nathaniel Hawthorne >> The Marble Faun, Volume I.


"I partly agree with you," said Miriam. "It is a mistaken idea, which
men generally entertain, that nature has made women especially prone to
throw their whole being into what is technically called love. We have,
to say the least, no more necessity for it than yourselves; only we have
nothing else to do with our hearts. When women have other objects
in life, they are not apt to fall in love. I can think of many women
distinguished in art, literature, and science,--and multitudes whose
hearts and minds find good employment in less ostentatious ways,--who
lead high, lonely lives, and are conscious of no sacrifice so far as
your sex is concerned."

"And Hilda will be one of these!" said Kenyon sadly; "the thought makes
me shiver for myself, and and for her, too."

"Well," said Miriam, smiling, "perhaps she may sprain the delicate wrist
which you have sculptured to such perfection. In that case you may hope.
These old masters to whom she has vowed herself, and whom her slender
hand and woman's heart serve so faithfully, are your only rivals."

The sculptor sighed as he put away the treasure of Hilda's marble hand
into the ivory coffer, and thought how slight was the possibility
that he should ever feel responsive to his own the tender clasp of the
original. He dared not even kiss the image that he himself had made: it
had assumed its share of Hilda's remote and shy divinity.

"And now," said Miriam, "show me the new statue which you asked me
hither to see."




CHAPTER XIV


CLEOPATRA


"My new statue!" said Kenyon, who had positively forgotten it in the
thought of Hilda; "here it is, under this veil." "Not a nude figure,
I hope," observed Miriam. "Every young sculptor seems to think that he
must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it
Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of
decent clothing. I am weary, even more than I am ashamed, of seeing such
things. Nowadays people are as good as born in their clothes, and
there is practically not a nude human being in existence. An artist,
therefore, as you must candidly confess, cannot sculpture nudity with a
pure heart, if only because he is compelled to steal guilty glimpses
at hired models. The marble inevitably loses its chastity under such
circumstances. An old Greek sculptor, no doubt, found his models in the
open sunshine, and among pure and princely maidens, and thus the nude
statues of antiquity are as modest as violets, and sufficiently draped
in their own beauty. But as for Mr. Gibson's colored Venuses (stained, I
believe, with tobacco juice), and all other nudities of to-day, I really
do not understand what they have to say to this generation, and would be
glad to see as many heaps of quicklime in their stead."

"You are severe upon the professors of my art," said Kenyon, half
smiling, half seriously; "not that you are wholly wrong, either. We are
bound to accept drapery of some kind, and make the best of it. But
what are we to do? Must we adopt the costume of to-day, and carve, for
example, a Venus in a hoop-petticoat?"

"That would be a boulder, indeed!" rejoined Miriam, laughing. "But
the difficulty goes to confirm me in my belief that, except for
portrait-busts, sculpture has no longer a right to claim any place among
living arts. It has wrought itself out, and come fairly to an end. There
is never a new group nowadays; never even so much as a new attitude.
Greenough (I take my examples among men of merit) imagined nothing new;
nor Crawford either, except in the tailoring line. There are not, as you
will own, more than half a dozen positively original statues or groups
in the world, and these few are of immemorial antiquity. A person
familiar with the Vatican, the Uffizzi Gallery, the Naples Gallery,
and the Louvre, will at once refer any modern production to its antique
prototype; which, moreover, had begun to get out of fashion, even in old
Roman days."

"Pray stop, Miriam," cried Kenyon, "or I shall fling away the chisel
forever!"

"Fairly own to me, then, my friend," rejoined Miriam, whose disturbed
mind found a certain relief in this declamation, "that you sculptors
are, of necessity, the greatest plagiarists in the world."

"I do not own it," said Kenyon, "yet cannot utterly contradict you, as
regards the actual state of the art. But as long as the Carrara quarries
still yield pure blocks, and while my own country has marble mountains,
probably as fine in quality, I shall steadfastly believe that future
sculptors will revive this noblest of the beautiful arts, and people the
world with new shapes of delicate grace and massive grandeur. Perhaps,"
he added, smiling, "mankind will consent to wear a more manageable
costume; or, at worst, we sculptors shall get the skill to make
broadcloth transparent, and render a majestic human character visible
through the coats and trousers of the present day."

"Be it so!" said Miriam; "you are past my counsel. Show me the veiled
figure, which, I am afraid, I have criticised beforehand. To make
amends, I am in the mood to praise it now."

But, as Kenyon was about to take the cloth off the clay model, she laid
her hand on his arm.

"Tell me first what is the subject," said she, "for I have sometimes
incurred great displeasure from members of your brotherhood by being
too obtuse to puzzle out the purport of their productions. It is so
difficult, you know, to compress and define a character or story,
and make it patent at a glance, within the narrow scope attainable
by sculpture! Indeed, I fancy it is still the ordinary habit with
sculptors, first to finish their group of statuary,--in such development
as the particular block of marble will allow,--and then to choose the
subject; as John of Bologna did with his Rape of the Sabines. Have you
followed that good example?"

"No; my statue is intended for Cleopatra," replied Kenyon, a little
disturbed by Miriam's raillery. "The special epoch of her history you
must make out for yourself."

He drew away the cloth that had served to keep the moisture of the clay
model from being exhaled. The sitting figure of a woman was seen. She
was draped from head to foot in a costume minutely and scrupulously
studied from that of ancient Egypt, as revealed by the strange sculpture
of that country, its coins, drawings, painted mummy-cases, and whatever
other tokens have been dug out of its pyramids, graves, and catacombs.
Even the stiff Egyptian head-dress was adhered to, but had been softened
into a rich feminine adornment, without losing a particle of its
truth. Difficulties that might well have seemed insurmountable had been
courageously encountered and made flexible to purposes of grace and
dignity; so that Cleopatra sat attired in a garb proper to her historic
and queenly state, as a daughter of the Ptolemies, and yet such as
the beautiful woman would have put on as best adapted to heighten the
magnificence of her charms, and kindle a tropic fire in the cold eyes of
Octavius.

A marvellous repose--that rare merit in statuary, except it be the
lumpish repose native to the block of stone--was diffused throughout the
figure. The spectator felt that Cleopatra had sunk down out of the fever
and turmoil of her life, and for one instant--as it were, between two
pulse throbs--had relinquished all activity, and was resting throughout
every vein and muscle. It was the repose of despair, indeed; for
Octavius had seen her, and remained insensible to her enchantments. But
still there was a great smouldering furnace deep down in the woman's
heart. The repose, no doubt, was as complete as if she were never to
stir hand or foot again; and yet, such was the creature's latent energy
and fierceness, she might spring upon you like a tigress, and stop the
very breath that you were now drawing midway in your throat.

The face was a miraculous success. The sculptor had not shunned to
give the full Nubian lips, and other characteristics of the Egyptian
physiognomy. His courage and integrity had been abundantly rewarded; for
Cleopatra's beauty shone out richer, warmer, more triumphantly beyond
comparison, than if, shrinking timidly from the truth, he had chosen
the tame Grecian type. The expression was of profound, gloomy, heavily
revolving thought; a glance into her past life and present emergencies,
while her spirit gathered itself up for some new struggle, or was
getting sternly reconciled to impending doom. In one view, there was a
certain softness and tenderness,--how breathed into the statue, among so
many strong and passionate elements, it is impossible to say. Catching
another glimpse, you beheld her as implacable as a stone and cruel as
fire.

In a word, all Cleopatra--fierce, voluptuous, passionate, tender,
wicked, terrible, and full of poisonous and rapturous enchantment--was
kneaded into what, only a week or two before, had been a lump of wet
clay from the Tiber. Soon, apotheosized in an indestructible material,
she would be one of the images that men keep forever, finding a heat in
them which does not cool down, throughout the centuries?

"What a woman is this!" exclaimed Miriam, after a long pause. "Tell me,
did she ever try, even while you were creating her, to overcome you with
her fury or her love? Were you not afraid to touch her, as she grew more
and more towards hot life beneath your hand? My dear friend, it is a
great work! How have you learned to do it?"

"It is the concretion of a good deal of thought, emotion, and toil of
brain and hand," said Kenyon, not without a perception that his work was
good; "but I know not how it came about at last. I kindled a great fire
within my mind, and threw in the material,--as Aaron threw the gold
of the Israelites into the furnace,--and in the midmost heat uprose
Cleopatra, as you see her."

"What I most marvel at," said Miriam, "is the womanhood that you have so
thoroughly mixed up with all those seemingly discordant elements. Where
did you get that secret? You never found it in your gentle Hilda, yet I
recognize its truth."

"No, surely, it was not in Hilda," said Kenyon. "Her womanhood is of the
ethereal type, and incompatible with any shadow of darkness or evil."

"You are right," rejoined Miriam; "there are women of that ethereal
type, as you term it, and Hilda is one of them. She would die of her
first wrong-doing,--supposing for a moment that she could be capable of
doing wrong. Of sorrow, slender as she seems, Hilda might bear a great
burden; of sin, not a feather's weight. Methinks now, were it my doom, I
could bear either, or both at once; but my conscience is still as white
as Hilda's. Do you question it?"

"Heaven forbid, Miriam!" exclaimed the sculptor.

He was startled at the strange turn which she had so suddenly given to
the conversation. Her voice, too,--so much emotion was stifled rather
than expressed in it, sounded unnatural.

"O, my friend," cried she, with sudden passion, "will you be my friend
indeed? I am lonely, lonely, lonely! There is a secret in my heart that
burns me,--that tortures me! Sometimes I fear to go mad of it; sometimes
I hope to die of it; but neither of the two happens. Ah, if I could but
whisper it to only one human soul! And you--you see far into womanhood;
you receive it widely into your large view. Perhaps--perhaps, but Heaven
only knows, you might understand me! O, let me speak!"

"Miriam, dear friend," replied the sculptor, "if I can help you, speak
freely, as to a brother."

"Help me? No!" said Miriam.

Kenyon's response had been perfectly frank and kind; and yet the
subtlety of Miriam's emotion detected a certain reserve and alarm in his
warmly expressed readiness to hear her story. In his secret soul, to
say the truth, the sculptor doubted whether it were well for this
poor, suffering girl to speak what she so yearned to say, or for him
to listen. If there were any active duty of friendship to be performed,
then, indeed, he would joyfully have come forward to do his best. But if
it were only a pent-up heart that sought an outlet? in that case it was
by no means so certain that a confession would do good. The more her
secret struggled and fought to be told, the more certain would it be to
change all former relations that had subsisted between herself and the
friend to whom she might reveal it. Unless he could give her all the
sympathy, and just the kind of sympathy that the occasion required,
Miriam would hate him by and by, and herself still more, if he let her
speak.

This was what Kenyon said to himself; but his reluctance, after all, and
whether he were conscious of it or no, resulted from a suspicion that
had crept into his heart and lay there in a dark corner. Obscure as it
was, when Miriam looked into his eyes, she detected it at once.

"Ah, I shall hate you!" cried she, echoing the thought which he had
not spoken; she was half choked with the gush of passion that was thus
turned back upon her. "You are as cold and pitiless as your own marble."

"No; but full of sympathy, God knows!" replied he.

In truth, his suspicions, however warranted by the mystery in which
Miriam was enveloped, had vanished in the earnestness of his kindly and
sorrowful emotion. He was now ready to receive her trust.

"Keep your sympathy, then, for sorrows that admit of such solace," said
she, making a strong effort to compose herself. "As for my griefs, I
know how to manage them. It was all a mistake: you can do nothing for
me, unless you petrify me into a marble companion for your Cleopatra
there; and I am not of her sisterhood, I do assure you. Forget this
foolish scene, my friend, and never let me see a reference to it in your
eyes when they meet mine hereafter."

"Since you desire it, all shall be forgotten," answered the sculptor,
pressing her hand as she departed; "or, if ever I can serve you, let my
readiness to do so be remembered. Meanwhile, dear Miriam, let us meet in
the same clear, friendly light as heretofore."

"You are less sincere than I thought you," said Miriam, "if you try to
make me think that there will be no change."

As he attended her through the antechamber, she pointed to the statue of
the pearl-diver.

"My secret is not a pearl," said she; "yet a man might drown himself in
plunging after it."

After Kenyon had closed the door, she went wearily down the staircase,
but paused midway, as if debating with herself whether to return.

"The mischief was done," thought she; "and I might as well have had the
solace that ought to come with it. I have lost,--by staggering a little
way beyond the mark, in the blindness of my distress, I have lost, as
we shall hereafter find, the genuine friendship of this clear-minded,
honorable, true-hearted young man, and all for nothing. What if I should
go back this moment and compel him to listen?"

She ascended two or three of the stairs, but again paused, murmured to
herself, and shook her head.

"No, no, no," she thought; "and I wonder how I ever came to dream of
it. Unless I had his heart for my own,--and that is Hilda's, nor would I
steal it from her,--it should never be the treasure Place of my secret.
It is no precious pearl, as I just now told him; but my dark-red
carbuncle--red as blood--is too rich a gem to put into a stranger's
casket."

She went down the stairs, and found her shadow waiting for her in the
street.




CHAPTER XV


AN AESTHETIC COMPANY


On the evening after Miriam's visit to Kenyon's studio, there was an
assemblage composed almost entirely of Anglo-Saxons, and chiefly of
American artists, with a sprinkling of their English brethren; and some
few of the tourists who still lingered in Rome, now that Holy Week was
past. Miriam, Hilda, and the sculptor were all three present, and with
them Donatello, whose life was so far turned from fits natural bent
that, like a pet spaniel, he followed his beloved mistress wherever he
could gain admittance.

The place of meeting was in the palatial, but somewhat faded and gloomy
apartment of an eminent member of the aesthetic body. It was no more
formal an occasion than one of those weekly receptions, common among
the foreign residents of Rome, at which pleasant people--or disagreeable
ones, as the case may be--encounter one another with little ceremony.

If anywise interested in art, a man must be difficult to please who
cannot find fit companionship among a crowd of persons, whose ideas and
pursuits all tend towards the general purpose of enlarging the world's
stock of beautiful productions.

One of the chief causes that make Rome the favorite residence of
artists--their ideal home which they sigh for in advance, and are so
loath to migrate from, after once breathing its enchanted air--is,
doubtless, that they there find themselves in force, and are numerous
enough to create a congenial atmosphere. In every other clime they are
isolated strangers; in this land of art, they are free citizens.

Not that, individually, or in the mass, there appears to be any large
stock of mutual affection among the brethren of the chisel and the
pencil. On the contrary, it will impress the shrewd observer that the
jealousies and petty animosities, which the poets of our day have flung
aside, still irritate and gnaw into the hearts of this kindred class of
imaginative men. It is not difficult to suggest reasons why this should
be the fact. The public, in whose good graces lie the sculptor's or the
painter's prospects of success, is infinitely smaller than the public to
which literary men make their appeal. It is composed of a very limited
body of wealthy patrons; and these, as the artist well knows, are but
blind judges in matters that require the utmost delicacy of perception.
Thus, success in art is apt to become partly an affair of intrigue; and
it is almost inevitable that even a gifted artist should look askance at
his gifted brother's fame, and be chary of the good word that might help
him to sell still another statue or picture. You seldom hear a painter
heap generous praise on anything in his special line of art; a sculptor
never has a favorable eye for any marble but his own.

Nevertheless, in spite of all these professional grudges, artists are
conscious of a social warmth from each other's presence and contiguity.
They shiver at the remembrance of their lonely studios in the
unsympathizing cities of their native land. For the sake of such
brotherhood as they can find, more than for any good that they get from
galleries, they linger year after year in Italy, while their originality
dies out of them, or is polished away as a barbarism.

The company this evening included several men and women whom the world
has heard of, and many others, beyond all question, whom it ought to
know. It would be a pleasure to introduce them upon our humble pages,
name by name, and had we confidence enough in our own taste--to crown
each well-deserving brow according to its deserts. The opportunity
is tempting, but not easily manageable, and far too perilous, both in
respect to those individuals whom we might bring forward, and the far
greater number that must needs be left in the shade. Ink, moreover, is
apt to have a corrosive quality, and might chance to raise a blister,
instead of any more agreeable titillation, on skins so sensitive as
those of artists. We must therefore forego the delight of illuminating
this chapter with personal allusions to men whose renown glows richly on
canvas, or gleams in the white moonlight of marble.

Otherwise we might point to an artist who has studied Nature with
such tender love that she takes him to her intimacy, enabling him to
reproduce her in landscapes that seem the reality of a better earth,
and yet are but the truth of the very scenes around us, observed by the
painter's insight and interpreted for us by his skill. By his magic,
the moon throws her light far out of the picture, and the crimson of
the summer night absolutely glimmers on the beholder's face. Or we might
indicate a poet-painter, whose song has the vividness of picture, and
whose canvas is peopled with angels, fairies, and water sprites, done to
the ethereal life, because he saw them face to face in his poetic mood.
Or we might bow before an artist, who has wrought too sincerely, too
religiously, with too earnest a feeling, and too delicate a touch, for
the world at once to recognize how much toil and thought are compressed
into the stately brow of Prospero, and Miranda's maiden loveliness; or
from what a depth within this painter's heart the Angel is leading forth
St. Peter.

Thus it would be easy to go on, perpetrating a score of little
epigrammatical allusions, like the above, all kindly meant, but none
of them quite hitting the mark, and often striking where they were not
aimed. It may be allowable to say, however, that American art is much
better represented at Rome in the pictorial than in the sculpturesque
department. Yet the men of marble appear to have more weight with the
public than the men of canvas; perhaps on account of the greater density
and solid substance of the material in which they work, and the sort
of physical advantage which their labors thus acquire over the illusive
unreality of color. To be a sculptor seems a distinction in itself;
whereas a painter is nothing, unless individually eminent.

One sculptor there was, an Englishman, endowed with a beautiful fancy,
and possessing at his fingers' ends the capability of doing beautiful
things. He was a quiet, simple, elderly personage, with eyes brown and
bright, under a slightly impending brow, and a Grecian profile, such as
he might have cut with his own chisel. He had spent his life, for forty
years, in making Venuses, Cupids, Bacchuses, and a vast deal of other
marble progeny of dreamwork, or rather frostwork: it was all a vapory
exhalation out of the Grecian mythology, crystallizing on the dull
window-panes of to-day. Gifted with a more delicate power than any other
man alive, he had foregone to be a Christian reality, and perverted
himself into a Pagan idealist, whose business or efficacy, in our
present world, it would be exceedingly difficult to define. And, loving
and reverencing the pure material in which he wrought, as surely this
admirable sculptor did, he had nevertheless robbed the marble of its
chastity, by giving it an artificial warmth of hue. Thus it became a sin
and shame to look at his nude goddesses. They had revealed themselves
to his imagination, no doubt, with all their deity about them; but,
bedaubed with buff color, they stood forth to the eyes of the profane in
the guise of naked women. But, whatever criticism may be ventured on
his style, it was good to meet a man so modest and yet imbued with such
thorough and simple conviction of his own right principles and practice,
and so quietly satisfied that his kind of antique achievement was all
that sculpture could effect for modern life.


This eminent person's weight and authority among his artistic brethren
were very evident; for beginning unobtrusively to utter himself on
a topic of art, he was soon the centre of a little crowd of younger
sculptors. They drank in his wisdom, as if it would serve all the
purposes of original inspiration; he, meanwhile, discoursing with
gentle calmness, as if there could possibly be no other side, and often
ratifying, as it were, his own conclusions by a mildly emphatic "Yes."

The veteran Sculptor's unsought audience was composed mostly of our own
countrymen. It is fair to say, that they were a body of very dexterous
and capable artists, each of whom had probably given the delighted
public a nude statue, or had won credit for even higher skill by the
nice carving of buttonholes, shoe-ties, coat-seams, shirt-bosoms, and
other such graceful peculiarities of modern costume. Smart, practical
men they doubtless were, and some of them far more than this, but still
not precisely what an uninitiated person looks for in a sculptor. A
sculptor, indeed, to meet the demands which our preconceptions make upon
him, should be even more indispensably a poet than those who deal in
measured verse and rhyme. His material, or instrument, which serves
him in the stead of shifting and transitory language, is a pure, white,
undecaying substance. It insures immortality to whatever is wrought in
it, and therefore makes it a religious obligation to commit no idea
to its mighty guardianship, save such as may repay the marble for
its faithful care, its incorruptible fidelity, by warming it with an
ethereal life. Under this aspect, marble assumes a sacred character; and
no man should dare to touch it unless he feels within himself a certain
consecration and a priesthood, the only evidence of which, for the
public eye, will be the high treatment of heroic subjects, or the
delicate evolution of spiritual, through material beauty.

No ideas such as the foregoing--no misgivings suggested by them
probably, troubled the self-complacency of most of these clever
sculptors. Marble, in their view, had no such sanctity as we impute
to it. It was merely a sort of white limestone from Carrara, cut into
convenient blocks, and worth, in that state, about two or three dollars
per pound; and it was susceptible of being wrought into certain shapes
(by their own mechanical ingenuity, or that of artisans in their
employment) which would enable them to sell it again at a much higher
figure. Such men, on the strength of some small knack in handling clay,
which might have been fitly employed in making wax-work, are bold to
call themselves sculptors. How terrible should be the thought that the
nude woman whom the modern artist patches together, bit by bit, from a
dozen heterogeneous models, meaning nothing by her, shall last as long
as the Venus of the Capitol!--that his group of--no matter what, since
it has no moral or intellectual existence will not physically crumble
any sooner than the immortal agony of the Laocoon!