University of Virginia Library

16. CHAPTER XVI.
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
nearer to 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 inner 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 bequeathe 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 lifeblood 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 door-ways — 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
togaed nation. Somehow or other, they managed to keep
up their poor, frostbitten 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 snow-flakes 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 poems,
and I am afraid that this final despair, and sense of shortcoming,

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 threefold
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.