University of Virginia Library

12. CHAPTER XII.
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 door-keepers 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 now 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 face, 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 altarpieces,
or for the shrines of chapels, and wofully lacking
the accompaniments which the artist had 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 — 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?

And as for these galleries of Roman palaces, they were
to Hilda — though she still trod them with the forlorn
hope of getting back her sympathies — they were drearier
than the whitewashed walls of a prison corridor. If
a magnificent palace were founded, as was generally the
case, on hardened guilt and a stony conscience — if the
prince or cardinal who stole the marble of his vast mansion
from the Coliseum, or some Roman temple, had perpetrated
still deadlier crimes, as probably he did — there
could be no fitter punishment for his ghost than to wander
perpetually through these long suites of rooms, over the
cold marble or mosaic of the floors, growing chiller at
every eternal footstep. Fancy the progenitor of the
Dorias thus haunting those heavy halls where his posterity
reside! Nor would it assuage his monotonous
misery, but increase it manifold, to be compelled to scrutinize
those masterpieces of art, which he collected with
so much cost and care, and gazing at them unintelligently,
still leave a further portion of his vital warmth at every
one.

Such, or of a similar kind, is the torment of those who
seek to enjoy pictures in an uncongenial mood. Every
haunter of picture-galleries, we should imagine, must have
experienced it, in greater or less degree; Hilda never till
now, but now most bitterly.

And now, for the first time in her lengthened absence,

comprising so many years of her young life, she began to
be acquainted with the exile's pain. Her pictorial imagination
brought up vivid scenes of her native village,
with its great, old elm-trees; and the neat, comfortable
houses, scattered along the wide, grassy margin of its
street, and the white meeting-house, and her mother's
very door, and the stream of gold-brown water, which her
taste for color had kept flowing, all this while, through her
remembrance. Oh, dreary streets, palaces, churches, and
imperial sepulchres of hot and dusty Rome, with the
muddy Tiber eddying through the midst, instead of the
gold-brown rivulet! How she pined under this crumbly
magnificence, as if it were piled all upon her human
heart! How she yearned for that native homeliness,
those familiar sights, those faces which she had known
always, those days that never brought any strange event;
that life of sober week-days, and a solemn sabbath at the
close! The peculiar fragrance of a flower-bed, which
Hilda used to cultivate, came freshly to her memory,
across the windy sea, and through the long years since
the flowers had withered. Her heart grew faint at the
hundred reminiscences that were awakened by that remembered
smell of dead blossoms; it was like opening a
drawer, where many things were laid away, and every
one of them scented with lavender and dried rose-leaves.

We ought not to betray Hilda's secret; but it is the
truth, that being so sad, and so utterly alone, and in such
great need of sympathy, her thoughts sometimes recurred
to the sculptor. Had she met him now, her heart, indeed,
might not have been won, but her confidence would have

flown to him like a bird to its nest. One summer afternoon,
especially, Hilda leaned upon the battlements of
her tower, and looked over Rome towards the distant
mountains, whither Kenyon had told her that he was
going.

“Oh, that he were here,” she sighed; “I perish under
this terrible secret; and he might help me to endure it.
Oh, that he were here!”

That very afternoon, as the reader may remember,
Kenyon felt Hilda's hand pulling at the silken cord that
was connected with his heartstrings, as he stood looking
towards Rome from the battlements of Monte Beni.