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_ After Donatello had left the studio, Miriam herself came forth, and taking
her way through some of the intricacies of the city, entered what might be
called either a widening of a street, or a small piazza. The neighborhood
comprised a baker's oven, emitting the usual fragrance of sour bread; a
shoe shop; a linen-draper's shop; a pipe and cigar shop; a lottery office;
a station for French soldiers, with a sentinel pacing in front; and a
fruit-stand, at which a Roman matron was selling the dried kernels of
chestnuts, wretched little figs, and some bouquets of yesterday. A church,
of course, was near at hand, the facade of which ascended into lofty
pinnacles, whereon were perched two or three winged figures of stone,
either angelic or allegorical, blowing stone trumpets in close vicinity to
the upper windows of an old and shabby palace. This palace was
distinguished by a feature not very common in the architecture of Roman
edifices; that is to say, a mediaeval tower, square, massive, lofty, and
battlemented and machicolated at the summit.
At one of the angles of the battlements stood a shrine of the Virgin, such
as we see everywhere at the street corners of Rome, but seldom or never,
except in this solitary, instance, at a height above the ordinary level of
men's views and aspirations. Connected with this old tower and its lofty
shrine, there is a legend which we cannot here pause to tell; but for
centuries a lamp has been burning before the Virgin's image, at noon, at
midnight, and at all hours of the twenty-four, and must be kept burning
forever, as long as the tower shall stand; or else the tower itself, the
palace, and whatever estate belongs to it, shall pass from its hereditary
possessor, in accordance with an ancient vow, and become the property of
the Church.
As Miriam approached, she looked upward, and saw,--not, indeed, the flame
of the neverdying lamp, which was swallowed up in the broad sunlight that
brightened the shrine, but a flock of white doves, skimming, fluttering,
and wheeling about the topmost height of the tower, their silver wings
flashing in the pure transparency of the air. Several of them sat on the
ledge of the upper window, pushing one another off by their eager struggle
for this favorite station, and all tapping their beaks and flapping their
wings tumultuously against the panes; some had alighted in the street, far
below, but flew hastily upward, at the sound of the window being thrust
ajar, and opening in the middle, on rusty hinges, as Roman windows do.
A fair young girl, dressed in white, showed herself at the aperture for a
single instant, and threw forth as much as her two small hands could hold
of some kind of food, for the flock of eleemosynary doves. It seemed
greatly to the taste of the feathered people; for they tried to snatch
beakfuls of it from her grasp, caught it in the air, and rushed downward
after it upon the pavement.
"What a pretty scene this is," thought Miriam, with a kindly smile, "and
how like a dove she is herself, the fair, pure creature! The other doves
know her for a sister, I am sure."
Miriam passed beneath the deep portal of the palace, and turning to the
left, began to mount flight after flight of a staircase, which, for the
loftiness of its aspiration, was worthy to be Jacob's ladder, or, at all
events, the staircase of the Tower of Babel. The city bustle, which is
heard even in Rome, the rumble of wheels over the uncomfortable
paving-stones, the hard harsh cries reechoing in the high and narrow
streets, grew faint and died away; as the turmoil of the world will always
die, if we set our faces to climb heavenward. Higher, and higher still;
and now, glancing through the successive windows that threw in their
narrow light upon the stairs, her view stretched across the roofs of the
city, unimpeded even by the stateliest palaces. Only the domes of
churches ascend into this airy region, and hold up their golden crosses on
a level with her eye; except that, out of the very heart of Rome, the
column of Antoninus thrusts itself upward, with St. Paul upon its summit,
the sole human form that seems to have kept her company.
Finally, the staircase came to an end; save that, on one side of the
little entry where it terminated, a flight of a dozen steps gave access to
the roof of the tower and the legendary shrine. On the other side was a
door, at which Miriam knocked, but rather as a friendly announcement of
her presence than with any doubt of hospitable welcome; for, awaiting no
response, she lifted the latch and entered.
"What a hermitage you have found for yourself, dear Hilda!" she,
exclaimed. "You breathe sweet air, above all the evil scents of Rome; and
even so, in your maiden elevation, you dwell above our vanities and
passions, our moral dust and mud, with the doves and the angels for your
nearest neighbors. I should not wonder if the Catholics were to make a
saint of you, like your namesake of old; especially as you have almost
avowed yourself of their religion, by undertaking to keep the lamp alight
before the Virgin's shrine."
"No, no, Miriam!" said Hilda, who had come joyfully forward to greet her
friend. "You must not call me a Catholic. A Christian girl--even a
daughter of the Puritans--may surely pay honor to the idea of divine
Womanhood, without giving up the faith of her forefathers. But how kind
you are to climb into my dove-cote!"
"It is no trifling proof of friendship, indeed," answered Miriam; "I
should think there were three hundred stairs at least."
"But it will do you good," continued Hilda. "A height of some fifty feet
above the roofs of Rome gives me all the advantages that I could get from
fifty miles of distance. The air so exhilarates my spirits, that
sometimes I feel half inclined to attempt a flight from the top of my
tower, in the faith that I should float upward."
"O, pray don't try it!" said Miriam, laughing; "If it should turn out
that you are less than an angel, you would find the stones of the Roman
pavement very hard; and if an angel, indeed, I am afraid you would never
come down among us again."
This young American girl was an example of the freedom of life which it is
possible for a female artist to enjoy at Rome. She dwelt in her tower, as
free to descend into the corrupted atmosphere of the city beneath, as one
of her companion doves to fly downward into the street;--all alone,
perfectly independent, under her own sole guardianship, unless watched
over by the Virgin, whose shrine she tended; doing what she liked without
a suspicion or a shadow upon the snowy whiteness of her fame. The customs
of artist life bestow such liberty upon the sex, which is elsewhere
restricted within so much narrower limits; and it is perhaps an indication
that, whenever we admit women to a wider scope of pursuits and professions,
we must also,remove the shackles of our present conventional rules, which
would then become an insufferable restraint on either maid or wife. The
system seems to work unexceptionably in Rome; and in many other cases, as
in Hilda's, purity of heart and life are allowed to assert themselves, and
to be their own proof and security, to a degree unknown in the society of
other cities.
Hilda, in her native land, had early shown what was pronounced by
connoisseurs a decided genius for the pictorial art. Even in her
schooldays--still not so very distant--she had produced sketches that were
seized upon by men of taste, and hoarded as among the choicest treasures
of their portfolios; scenes delicately imagined, lacking, perhaps, the
reality which comes only from a close acquaintance with life, but so
softly touched with feeling and fancy that you seemed to be looking at
humanity with angels' eyes. With years and experience she might be
expected to attain a darker and more forcible touch, which would impart to
her designs the relief they needed. Had Hilda remained in her own country,
it is not improbable that she might have produced original works worthy
to hang in that gallery of native art which, we hope, is destined to
extend its rich length through many future centuries. An orphan, however,
without near relatives, and possessed of a little property, she had found
it within her possibilities to come to Italy; that central clime, whither
the eyes and the heart of every artist turn, as if pictures could not be
made to glow in any other atmosphere, as if statues could not assume grace
and expression, save in that land of whitest marble.
Hilda's gentle courage had brought her safely over land and sea; her mild,
unflagging perseverance had made a place for her in the famous city, even
like a flower that finds a chink for itself, and a little earth to grow in,
on whatever ancient wall its slender roots may fasten. Here she dwelt,
in her tower, possessing a friend or two in Rome, but no home companion
except the flock of doves, whose cote was in a ruinous chamber contiguous
to her own. They soon became as familiar with the fair-haired Saxon girl
as if she were a born sister of their brood; and her customary white robe
bore such an analogy to their snowy plumage that the confraternity of
artists called Hilda the Dove, and recognized her aerial apartment as the
Dovecote. And while the other doves flew far and wide in quest of what
was good for them, Hilda likewise spread her wings, and sought such
ethereal and imaginative sustenance as God ordains for creatures of her
kind.
We know not whether the result of her Italian studies, so far as it could
yet be seen, will be accepted as a good or desirable one. Certain it is,
that since her arrival in the pictorial land, Hilda seemed to have
entirely lost the impulse of original design, which brought her thither.
No doubt the girl's early dreams had been of sending forms and hues of
beauty into the visible world out of her own mind; of compelling scenes of
poetry and history to live before men's eyes, through conceptions and by
methods individual to herself. But more and more, as she grew familiar
with the miracles of art that enrich so many galleries in Rome, Hilda had
ceased to consider herself as an original artist. No, wonder that this
change should have befallen her. She was endowed with a deep and
sensitive faculty of appreciation; she had the gift of discerning and
worshipping excellence in a most unusual measure. No other person, it is
probable, recognized so adequately, and enjoyed with such deep delight,
the pictorial wonders that were here displayed. She saw no, not saw, but
felt through and through a picture; she bestowed upon it all the warmth
and richness of a woman's sympathy; not by any intellectual effort, but by
this strength of heart, and this guiding light of sympathy, she went
straight to the central point, in which the master had conceived his work.
Thus she viewed it, as it were, with his own eyes, and hence her
comprehension of any picture that interested her was perfect.
This power and depth of appreciation depended partly upon Hilda's physical
organization, which was at once healthful and exquisitely delicate; and,
connected with this advantage, she had a command of hand, a nicety and
force of touch, which is an endowment separate from pictorial genius,
though indispensable to its exercise.
It has probably happened in many other instances, as it did in Hilda's
case, that she ceased to aim at original achievement in consequence of the
very gifts which so exquisitely fitted her to profit by familiarity with
the works of the mighty old masters. Reverencing these wonderful men so
deeply, she was too grateful for all they bestowed upon her, too loyal,
too humble, in their awful presence, to think of enrolling herself in
their society. Beholding the miracles of beauty which they had achieved,
the world seemed already rich enough in original designs, and nothing more
was so desirable as to diffuse those self-same beauties more widely among
mankind. All the youthful hopes and ambitions, the fanciful ideas which
she had brought from home, of great pictures to be conceived in her
feminine mind, were flung aside, and, so far as those most intimate with
her could discern, relinquished without a sigh. All that she would
henceforth attempt and that most reverently, not to say religiously was to
catch and reflect some of the glory which had been shed upon canvas from
the immortal pencils of old.
So Hilda became a copyist: in the Pinacotheca of the Vatican, in the
galleries of the Pam-fili-Doria palace, the Borghese, the Corsini, the
Sciarra, her easel was set up before many a famous picture by Guido,
Domenichino, Raphael, and the devout painters of earlier schools than
these. Other artists and visitors from foreign lands beheld the slender,
girlish figure in front of some world-known work, absorbed, unconscious of
everything around her, seeming to live only in what she sought to do.
They smiled, no doubt, at the audacity which led her to dream of copying
those mighty achievements. But, if they paused to look over her shoulder,
and had sensibility enough to understand what was before their eyes, they
soon felt inclined to believe that the spirits of the old masters were
hovering over Hilda, and guiding her delicate white hand. In truth, from
whatever realm of bliss and many colored beauty those spirits might
descend, it would have been no unworthy errand to help so gentle and pure
a worshipper of their genius in giving the last divine touch to her
repetitions of their works.
Her copies were indeed marvellous. Accuracy was not the phrase for them;
a Chinese copy is accurate. Hilda's had that evanescent and ethereal
life--that flitting fragrance, as it were, of the originals--which it is
as difficult to catch and retain as it would be for a sculptor to get the
very movement and varying color of a living man into his marble bust.
Only by watching the efforts of the most skilful copyists--men who spend a
lifetime, as some of them do, in multiplying copies of a single
picture--and observing how invariably they leave out just the indefinable
charm that involves the last, inestimable value, can we understand the
difficulties of the task which they undertake.
It was not Hilda's general practice to attempt reproducing the whole of a
great picture, but to select some high, noble, and delicate portion of it,
in which the spirit and essence of the picture culminated: the Virgin's
celestial sorrow, for example, or a hovering angel, imbued with immortal
light, or a saint with the glow of heaven in his dying face,--and these
would be rendered with her whole soul. If a picture had darkened into an
indistinct shadow through time and neglect, or had been injured by
cleaning, or retouched by some profane hand, she seemed to possess the
faculty of seeing it in its pristine glory. The copy would come from her
hands with what the beholder felt must be the light which the old master
had left upon the original in bestowing his final and most ethereal touch.
In some instances even (at least, so those believed who best appreciated
Hilda's power and sensibility) she had been enabled to execute what the
great master had conceived in his imagination, but had not so perfectly
succeeded in putting upon canvas; a result surely not impossible when such
depth of sympathy as she possessed was assisted by the delicate skill and
accuracy of her slender hand. In such cases the girl was but a finer
instrument, a more exquisitely effective piece of mechanism,.by the help
of which the spirit of some great departed painter now first achieved his
ideal, centuries after his own earthly hand, that other tool, had turned
to dust.
Not to describe her as too much a wonder, however, Hilda, or the Dove, as
her well-wishers half laughingly delighted to call her, had been
pronounced by good judges incomparably the best copyist in Rome. After
minute examination of her works, the most skilful artists declared that
she had been led to her results by following precisely the same process
step by step through which the original painter had trodden to the
development of his idea. Other copyists--if such they are worthy to be
called--attempt only a superficial imitation. Copies of the old masters
in this sense are produced by thousands; there are artists, as we have
said, who spend their lives in painting the works, or perhaps one single
work, of one illustrious painter over and over again: thus they convert
themselves into Guido machines, or Raphaelic machines. Their performances,
it is true, are often wonderfully deceptive to a careless eye; but
working entirely from the outside, and seeking only to reproduce the
surface, these men are sure to leave out that indefinable nothing, that
inestimable something, that constitutes the life and soul through which
the picture gets its immortality. Hilda was no such machine as this; she
wrought religiously, and therefore wrought a miracle.
It strikes us that there is something far higher and nobler in all this,
in her thus sacrificing herself to the devout recognition of the highest
excellence in art, than there would have been in cultivating her not
inconsiderable share of talent for the production of works from her own
ideas. She might have set up for herself, and won no ignoble name; she
might have helped to fill the already crowded and cumbered world with
pictures, not destitute of merit, but falling short, if by ever so little,
of the best that has been done; she might thus have gratified some tastes
that were incapable of appreciating Raphael. But this could be done only
by lowering the standard of art to the comprehension of the spectator.
She chose the better and loftier and more unselfish part, laying her
individual hopes, her fame, her prospects of enduring remembrance, at the
feet of those great departed ones whom she so loved and venerated; and
therefore the world was the richer for this feeble girl.
Since the beauty and glory of a great picture are confined within itself,
she won out that glory by patient faith and self-devotion, and multiplied
it for mankind. From the dark, chill corner of a gallery,--from some
curtained chapel in a church, where the light came seldom and aslant,
--from the prince's carefully guarded cabinet, where not one eye in
thousands was permitted to behold it, she brought the wondrous picture
into daylight, and gave all its magic splendor for the enjoyment of the
world. Hilda's faculty of genuine admiration is one of the rarest to be
found in human nature; and let us try to recompense her in kind by
admiring her generous self-surrender, and her brave, humble magnanimity in
choosing to be the handmaid of those old magicians, instead of a minor
enchantress within a circle of her own.
The handmaid of Raphael, whom she loved with a virgin's love! Would it
have been worth Hilda's while to relinquish this office for the sake of
giving the world a picture or two which it would call original; pretty
fancies of snow and moonlight; the counterpart in picture of so many
feminine achievements in literature! _
Read next: VOLUME I: CHAPTER VII - BEATRICE
Read previous: VOLUME I: CHAPTER V - MIRIAM'S STUDIO
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