The Marble Faun, Volume II.

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


But Rome, within the walls, at this dreaded season, enjoys its festal
days, and makes itself merry with characteristic and hereditary
pas-times, for which its broad piazzas afford abundant room. It leads
its own life with a freer spirit, now that the artists and foreign
visitors are scattered abroad. No bloom, perhaps, would be visible in
a cheek that should be unvisited, throughout the summer, by more
invigorating winds than any within fifty miles of the city; no bloom,
but yet, if the mind kept its healthy energy, a subdued and colorless
well-being. There was consequently little risk in Hilda's purpose to
pass the summer days in the galleries of Roman palaces, and her nights
in that aerial chamber, whither the heavy breath of the city and its
suburbs could not aspire. It would probably harm her no more than it
did the white doves, who sought the same high atmosphere at sunset, and,
when morning came, flew down into the narrow streets, about their daily
business, as Hilda likewise did.

With the Virgin's aid and blessing, which might be hoped for even by
a heretic, who so religiously lit the lamp before her shrine, the New
England girl would sleep securely in her old Roman tower, and go forth
on her pictorial pilgrimages without dread or peril. In view of such
a summer, Hilda had anticipated many months of lonely, but unalloyed
enjoyment. Not that she had a churlish disinclination to society, or
needed to be told that we taste one intellectual pleasure twice, and
with double the result, when we taste it with a friend. But, keeping a
maiden heart within her bosom, she rejoiced in the freedom that enabled
her still to choose her own sphere, and dwell in it, if she pleased,
without another inmate.

Her expectation, however, of a delightful summer was woefully
disappointed. Even had she formed no previous plan of remaining there,
it is improbable that Hilda would have gathered energy to stir from
Rome. A torpor, heretofore unknown to her vivacious though quiet
temperament, had possessed itself of the poor girl, like a half-dead
serpent knotting its cold, inextricable wreaths about her limbs. It
was that peculiar despair, that chill and heavy misery, which only
the innocent can experience, although it possesses many of the gloomy
characteristics that mark a sense of guilt. It was that heartsickness,
which, it is to be hoped, we may all of us have been pure enough to
feel, once in our lives, but the capacity for which is usually exhausted
early, and perhaps with a single agony. It was that dismal certainty of
the existence of evil in the world, which, though we may fancy ourselves
fully assured of the sad mystery long before, never becomes a portion of
our practical belief until it takes substance and reality from the sin
of some guide, whom we have deeply trusted and revered, or some friend
whom we have dearly loved.

When that knowledge comes, it is as if a cloud had suddenly gathered
over the morning light; so dark a cloud, that there seems to be
no longer any sunshine behind it or above it. The character of our
individual beloved one having invested itself with all the attributes
of right,--that one friend being to us the symbol and representative of
whatever is good and true,--when he falls, the effect is almost as if
the sky fell with him, bringing down in chaotic ruin the columns
that upheld our faith. We struggle forth again, no doubt, bruised and
bewildered. We stare wildly about us, and discover--or, it may be, we
never make the discovery--that it was not actually the sky that has
tumbled down, but merely a frail structure of our own rearing, which
never rose higher than the housetops, and has fallen because we founded
it on nothing. But the crash, and the affright and trouble, are as
overwhelming, for the time, as if the catastrophe involved the whole
moral world. Remembering these things, let them suggest one generous
motive for walking heedfully amid the defilement of earthly ways! Let us
reflect, that the highest path is pointed out by the pure Ideal of those
who look up to us, and who, if we tread less loftily, may never look so
high again.

Hilda's situation was made infinitely more wretched by the necessity of
Confining all her trouble within her own consciousness. To this innocent
girl, holding the knowledge of Miriam's crime within her tender and
delicate soul, the effect was almost the same as if she herself had
participated in the guilt. Indeed, partaking the human nature of
those who could perpetrate such deeds, she felt her own spotlessness
impugnent.

Had there been but a single friend,--or not a friend, since friends were
no longer to be confided in, after Miriam had betrayed her trust,--but,
had there been any calm, wise mind, any sympathizing intelligence; or,
if not these, any dull, half-listening ear into which she might have
flung the dreadful secret, as into an echoless cavern, what a relief
would have ensued! But this awful loneliness! It enveloped her
whithersoever she went. It was a shadow in the sunshine of festal days;
a mist between her eyes and the pictures at which she strove to look; a
chill dungeon, which kept her in its gray twilight and fed her with its
unwholesome air, fit only for a criminal to breathe and pine in! She
could not escape from it. In the effort to do so, straying farther into
the intricate passages of our nature, she stumbled, ever and again, over
this deadly idea of mortal guilt.

Poor sufferer for another's sin! Poor wellspring of a virgin's heart,
into which a murdered corpse had casually fallen, and whence it could
not be drawn forth again, but lay there, day after day, night after
night, tainting its sweet atmosphere with the scent of crime and ugly
death!

The strange sorrow that had befallen Hilda did not fail to impress
its mysterious seal upon her face, and to make itself perceptible to
sensitive observers in her manner and carriage. A young Italian artist,
who frequented the same galleries which Hilda haunted, grew deeply
interested in her expression. One day, while she stood before Leonardo
da Vinci's picture of Joanna of Aragon, but evidently without seeing
it,--for, though it had attracted her eyes, a fancied resemblance to
Miriam had immediately drawn away her thoughts,--this artist drew a
hasty sketch which he afterwards elaborated into a finished portrait. It
represented Hilda as gazing with sad and earnest horror at a bloodspot
which she seemed just then to have discovered on her white robe. The
picture attracted considerable notice. Copies of an engraving from
it may still be found in the print shops along the Corso. By many
connoisseurs, the idea of the face was supposed to have been suggested
by the portrait of Beatrice Cenci; and, in fact, there was a look
somewhat similar to poor Beatrice's forlorn gaze out of the dreary
isolation and remoteness, in which a terrible doom had involved a tender
soul. But the modern artist strenuously upheld the originality of his
own picture, as well as the stainless purity its subject, and chose
to call it--and was laughed at for his pains--"Innocence, dying of a
Blood-stain!"

"Your picture, Signore Panini, does you credit," remarked the picture
dealer, who had bought it of the young man for fifteen scudi, and
afterwards sold it for ten times the sum; "but it would be worth a
better price if you had given it a more intelligible title. Looking at
the face and expression of this fair signorina, we seem to comprehend
readily enough, that she is undergoing one or another of those troubles
of the heart to which young ladies are but too liable. But what is this
blood-stain? And what has innocence to do with it? Has she stabbed her
perfidious lover with a bodkin?"

"She! she commit a crime!" cried the young artist. "Can you look at the
innocent anguish in her face, and ask that question? No; but, as I
read the mystery, a man has been slain in her presence, and the blood,
spurting accidentally on her white robe, has made a stain which eats
into her life."

"Then, in the name of her patron saint," exclaimed the picture dealer,
"why don't she get the robe made white again at the expense of a few
baiocchi to her washerwoman? No, no, my dear Panini. The picture being
now my property, I shall call it 'The Signorina's Vengeance.' She
has stabbed her lover overnight, and is repenting it betimes the next
morning. So interpreted, the picture becomes an intelligible and very
natural representation of a not uncommon fact."

Thus coarsely does the world translate all finer griefs that meet its
eye. It is more a coarse world than an unkind one.

But Hilda sought nothing either from the world's delicacy or its pity,
and never dreamed of its misinterpretations. Her doves often flew in
through the windows of the tower, winged messengers, bringing her what
sympathy they could, and uttering soft, tender, and complaining sounds,
deep in their bosoms, which soothed the girl more than a distincter
utterance might. And sometimes Hilda moaned quietly among the doves,
teaching her voice to accord with theirs, and thus finding a temporary
relief from the burden of her incommunicable sorrow, as if a little
portion of it, at least, had been told to these innocent friends, and
been understood and pitied.

When she trimmed the lamp before the Virgin's shrine, Hilda gazed at
the sacred image, and, rude as was the workmanship, beheld, or fancied,
expressed with the quaint, powerful simplicity which sculptors sometimes
had five hundred years ago, a woman's tenderness responding to her
gaze. If she knelt, if she prayed, if her oppressed heart besought the
sympathy of divine womanhood afar in bliss, but not remote, because
forever humanized by the memory of mortal griefs, was Hilda to be
blamed? It was not a Catholic kneeling at an idolatrous shrine, but a
child lifting its tear-stained face to seek comfort from a mother.





CHAPTER XXXVII


THE EMPTINESS OF PICTURE GALLERIES


Hilda descended, day by day, from her dove-cote, and went to one or
another of the great old palaces,--the Pamfili Doria, the Corsini, the
Sciarra, the Borghese, the Colonna,--where the doorkeepers knew her
well, and offered her a kindly greeting. But they shook their heads and
sighed, on observing the languid step with which the poor girl toiled up
the grand marble staircases. There was no more of that cheery alacrity
with which she used to flit upward, as if her doves had lent her their
wings, nor of that glow of happy spirits which had been wont to set the
tarnished gilding of the picture frames and the shabby splendor of the
furniture all a-glimmer, as she hastened to her congenial and delightful
toil.

An old German artist, whom she often met in the galleries, once laid a
paternal hand on Hilda's head, and bade her go back to her own country.


"Go back soon," he said, with kindly freedom and directness, "or you
will go never more. And, if you go not, why, at least, do you spend the
whole summer-time in Rome? The air has been breathed too often, in so
many thousand years, and is not wholesome for a little foreign
flower like you, my child, a delicate wood-anemone from the western
forest-land."

"I have no task nor duty anywhere but here," replied Hilda. "The old
masters will not set me free!"

"Ah, those old masters!" cried the veteran artist, shaking his head.
"They are a tyrannous race! You will find them of too mighty a spirit to
be dealt with, for long together, by the slender hand, the fragile mind,
and the delicate heart, of a young girl. Remember that Raphael's genius
wore out that divinest painter before half his life was lived. Since you
feel his influence powerfully enough to reproduce his miracles so well,
it will assuredly consume you like a flame."

"That might have been my peril once," answered Hilda. "It is not so
now."

"Yes, fair maiden, you stand in that peril now!" insisted the kind old
man; and he added, smiling, yet in a melancholy vein, and with a
German grotesqueness of idea, "Some fine morning, I shall come to the
Pinacotheca of the Vatican, with my palette and my brushes, and shall
look for my little American artist that sees into the very heart of the
grand pictures! And what shall I behold? A heap of white ashes on the
marble floor, just in front of the divine Raphael's picture of the
Madonna da Foligno! Nothing more, upon my word! The fire, which the poor
child feels so fervently, will have gone into her innermost, and burnt
her quite up!"

"It would be a happy martyrdom!" said Hilda, faintly smiling. "But I
am far from being worthy of it. What troubles me much, among other
troubles, is quite the reverse of what you think. The old masters hold
me here, it is true, but they no longer warm me with their influence.
It is not flame consuming, but torpor chilling me, that helps to make me
wretched."

"Perchance, then," said the German, looking keenly at her, "Raphael has
a rival in your heart? He was your first love; but young maidens are not
always constant, and one flame is sometimes extinguished by another!"
Hilda shook her head, and turned away. She had spoken the truth,
however, in alleging that torpor, rather than fire, was what she had
to dread. In those gloomy days that had befallen her, it was a great
additional calamity that she felt conscious of the present dimness of an
insight which she once possessed in more than ordinary measure. She had
lost--and she trembled lest it should have departed forever--the faculty
of appreciating those great works of art, which heretofore had made so
large a portion of her happiness. It was no wonder.

A picture, however admirable the painter's art, and wonderful his power,
requires of the spectator a surrender of himself, in due proportion with
the miracle which has been wrought. Let the canvas glow as it may, you
must look with the eye of faith, or its highest excellence escapes you.
There is always the necessity of helping out the painter's art with your
own resources of sensibility and imagination. Not that these qualities
shall really add anything to what the master has effected; but they must
be put so entirely under his control, and work along with him to such
an extent, that, in a different mood, when you are cold and critical,
instead of sympathetic, you will be apt to fancy that the loftier merits
of the picture were of your own dreaming, not of his creating.

Like all revelations of the better life, the adequate perception of a
great work of art demands a gifted simplicity of vision. In this, and
in her self-surrender, and the depth and tenderness of her sympathy, had
lain Hilda's remarkable power as a copyist of the old masters. And now
that her capacity of emotion was choked up with a horrible experience,
it inevitably followed that she should seek in vain, among those friends
so venerated and beloved, for the marvels which they had heretofore
shown her. In spite of a reverence that lingered longer than her
recognition, their poor worshipper became almost an infidel, and
sometimes doubted whether the pictorial art be not altogether a
delusion.

For the first time in her life, Hilda now grew acquainted with that
icy demon of weariness, who haunts great picture galleries. He is
a plausible Mephistopheles, and possesses the magic that is the
destruction of all other magic. He annihilates color, warmth, and, more
especially, sentiment and passion, at a touch. If he spare anything, it
will be some such matter as an earthen pipkin, or a bunch of herrings by
Teniers; a brass kettle, in which you can see your rice, by Gerard Douw;
a furred robe, or the silken texture of a mantle, or a straw hat, by Van
Mieris; or a long-stalked wineglass, transparent and full of shifting
reflection, or a bit of bread and cheese, or an over-ripe peach with
a fly upon it, truer than reality itself, by the school of Dutch
conjurers. These men, and a few Flemings, whispers the wicked demon,
were the only painters. The mighty Italian masters, as you deem them,
were not human, nor addressed their work to human sympathies, but to
a false intellectual taste, which they themselves were the first to
create. Well might they call their doings "art," for they substituted
art instead of nature. Their fashion is past, and ought, indeed, to have
died and been buried along with them.

Then there is such a terrible lack of variety in their subjects. The
churchmen, their great patrons, suggested most of their themes, and
a dead mythology the rest. A quarter part, probably, of any large
collection of pictures consists of Virgins and infant Christs, repeated
over and over again in pretty much an identical spirit, and generally
with no more mixture of the Divine than just enough to spoil them as
representations of maternity and childhood, with which everybody's heart
might have something to do. Half of the other pictures are Magdalens,
Flights into Egypt, Crucifixions, Depositions from the Cross, Pietas,
Noli-me-tangeres, or the Sacrifice of Abraham, or martyrdoms of saints,
originally painted as altar-pieces, or for the shrines of chapels, and
woefully lacking the accompaniments which the artist haft in view.

The remainder of the gallery comprises mythological subjects, such as
nude Venuses, Ledas, Graces, and, in short, a general apotheosis of
nudity, once fresh and rosy perhaps, but yellow and dingy in our day,
and retaining only a traditionary charm. These impure pictures are from
the same illustrious and impious hands that adventured to call before
us the august forms of Apostles and Saints, the Blessed Mother of the
Redeemer, and her Son, at his death, and in his glory, and even the
awfulness of Him, to whom the martyrs, dead a thousand years ago, have
not yet dared to raise their eyes. They seem to take up one task or the
other w the disrobed woman whom they call Venus, or the type of highest
and tenderest womanhood in the mother of their Saviour with equal
readiness, but to achieve the former with far more satisfactory success.
If an artist sometimes produced a picture of the Virgin, possessing
warmth enough to excite devotional feelings, it was probably the object
of his earthly love to whom he thus paid the stupendous and fearful
homage of setting up her portrait to be worshipped, not figuratively as
a mortal, but by religious souls in their earnest aspirations towards
Divinity. And who can trust the religious sentiment of Raphael, or
receive any of his Virgins as heaven-descended likenesses, after seeing,
for example, the Fornarina of the Barberini Palace, and feeling how
sensual the artist must have been to paint such a brazen trollop of his
own accord, and lovingly? Would the Blessed Mary reveal herself to his
spiritual vision, and favor him with sittings alternately with that type
of glowing earthliness, the Fornarina?

But no sooner have we given expression to this irreverent criticism,
than a throng of spiritual faces look reproachfully upon us. We see
cherubs by Raphael, whose baby innocence could only have been nursed
in paradise; angels by Raphael as innocent as they, but whose serene
intelligence embraces both earthly and celestial things; madonnas by
Raphael, on whose lips he has impressed a holy and delicate reserve,
implying sanctity on earth, and into whose soft eyes he has thrown a
light which he never could have imagined except by raising his own
eyes with a pure aspiration heavenward. We remember, too, that divinest
countenance in the Transfiguration, and withdraw all that we have said.

Poor Hilda, however, in her gloomiest moments, was never guilty of the
high treason suggested in the above remarks against her beloved and
honored Raphael. She had a faculty (which, fortunately for themselves,
pure women often have) of ignoring all moral blotches in a character
that won her admiration. She purified the objects; of her regard by the
mere act of turning such spotless eyes upon them.

Hilda's despondency, nevertheless, while it dulled her perceptions in
one respect, had deepened them in another; she saw beauty less vividly,
but felt truth, or the lack of it, more profoundly. She began to suspect
that some, at least, of her venerated painters, had left an inevitable
hollowness in their works, because, in the most renowned of them, they
essayed to express to the world what they had not in their own souls.
They deified their light and Wandering affections, and were continually
playing off the tremendous jest, alluded to above, of offering the
features of some venal beauty to be enshrined in the holiest places. A
deficiency of earnestness and absolute truth is generally discoverable
in Italian pictures, after the art had become consummate. When you
demand what is deepest, these painters have not wherewithal to respond.
They substituted a keen intellectual perception, and a marvellous knack
of external arrangement, instead of the live sympathy and sentiment
which should have been their inspiration. And hence it happens, that
shallow and worldly men are among the best critics of their works; a
taste for pictorial art is often no more than a polish upon the hard
enamel of an artificial character. Hilda had lavished her whole heart
upon it, and found (just as if she had lavished it upon a human idol)
that the greater part was thrown away.

For some of the earlier painters, however, she still retained much
of her former reverence. Fra Angelico, she felt, must have breathed a
humble aspiration between every two touches of his brush, in order to
have made the finished picture such a visible prayer as we behold it, in
the guise of a prim angel, or a saint without the human nature. Through
all these dusky centuries, his works may still help a struggling heart
to pray. Perugino was evidently a devout man; and the Virgin, therefore,
revealed herself to him in loftier and sweeter faces of celestial
womanhood, and yet with a kind of homeliness in their human mould, than
even the genius of Raphael could imagine. Sodoma, beyond a question,
both prayed and wept, while painting his fresco, at Siena, of Christ
bound to a pillar.

In her present need and hunger for a spiritual revelation, Hilda felt a
vast and weary longing to see this last-mentioned picture once again. It
is inexpressibly touching. So weary is the Saviour and utterly worn out
with agony, that his lips have fallen apart from mere exhaustion; his
eyes seem to be set; he tries to lean his head against the pillar, but
is kept from sinking down upon the ground only by the cords that
bind him. One of the most striking effects produced is the sense of
loneliness. You behold Christ deserted both in heaven and earth; that
despair is in him which wrung forth the saddest utterance man ever made,
"Why hast Thou forsaken me?" Even in this extremity, however, he is
still divine. The great and reverent painter has not suffered the Son of
God to be merely an object of pity, though depicting him in a state so
profoundly pitiful. He is rescued from it, we know not how,--by nothing
less than miracle,--by a celestial majesty and beauty, and some quality
of which these are the outward garniture. He is as much, and as visibly,
our Redeemer, there bound, there fainting, and bleeding from the
scourge, with the cross in view, as if he sat on his throne of glory in
the heavens! Sodoma, in this matchless picture, has done more towards
reconciling the incongruity of Divine Omnipotence and outraged,
suffering Humanity, combined in one person, than the theologians ever
did.

This hallowed work of genius shows what pictorial art, devoutly
exercised, might effect in behalf of religious truth; involving, as it
does, deeper mysteries of revelation, and bringing them closer to man's
heart, and making him tenderer to be impressed by them, than the most
eloquent words of preacher or prophet.

It is not of pictures like the above that galleries, in Rome or
elsewhere, are made up, but of productions immeasurably below them,
and requiring to be appreciated by a very different frame of mind. Few
amateurs are endowed with a tender susceptibility to the sentiment of
a picture; they are not won from an evil life, nor anywise morally
improved by it. The love of art, therefore, differs widely in its
influence from the love of nature; whereas, if art had not strayed away
from its legitimate paths and aims, it ought to soften and sweeten
the lives of its worshippers, in even a more exquisite degree than the
contemplation of natural objects. But, of its own potency, it has no
such effect; and it fails, likewise, in that other test of its moral
value which poor Hilda was now involuntarily trying upon it. It cannot
comfort the heart in affliction; it grows dim when the shadow is upon
us.

So the melancholy girl wandered through those long galleries, and over
the mosaic pavements of vast, solitary saloons, wondering what had
become of the splendor that used to beam upon her from the walls. She
grew sadly critical, and condemned almost everything that she was wont
to admire. Heretofore, her sympathy went deeply into a picture, yet
seemed to leave a depth which it was inadequate to sound; now, on the
contrary, her perceptive faculty penetrated the canvas like a steel
probe, and found but a crust of paint over an emptiness. Not that she
gave up all art as worthless; only it had lost its consecration. One
picture in ten thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of
mankind, from generation to generation, until the colors fade and
blacken out of sight, or the canvas rot entirely away. For the rest, let
them be piled in garrets, just as the tolerable poets are shelved, when
their little day is over. Is a painter more sacred than a poet?