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_ 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!" _
Read next: VOLUME I: CHAPTER III - SUBTERRANEAN REMINISCENCES
Read previous: VOLUME I: CHAPTER I - MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO
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