The Marble Faun Volume 1 - Page 8/130

"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."