The Marble Faun Volume 1 - Page 80/130

On the evening after Miriam's visit to Kenyon's studio, there was an

assemblage composed almost entirely of Anglo-Saxons, and chiefly of

American artists, with a sprinkling of their English brethren; and some

few of the tourists who still lingered in Rome, now that Holy Week was

past. Miriam, Hilda, and the sculptor were all three present, and with

them Donatello, whose life was so far turned from fits natural bent

that, like a pet spaniel, he followed his beloved mistress wherever he

could gain admittance.

The place of meeting was in the palatial, but somewhat faded and gloomy

apartment of an eminent member of the aesthetic body. It was no more

formal an occasion than one of those weekly receptions, common among

the foreign residents of Rome, at which pleasant people--or disagreeable

ones, as the case may be--encounter one another with little ceremony.

If anywise interested in art, a man must be difficult to please who

cannot find fit companionship among a crowd of persons, whose ideas and

pursuits all tend towards the general purpose of enlarging the world's

stock of beautiful productions.

One of the chief causes that make Rome the favorite residence of

artists--their ideal home which they sigh for in advance, and are so

loath to migrate from, after once breathing its enchanted air--is,

doubtless, that they there find themselves in force, and are numerous

enough to create a congenial atmosphere. In every other clime they are

isolated strangers; in this land of art, they are free citizens.

Not that, individually, or in the mass, there appears to be any large

stock of mutual affection among the brethren of the chisel and the

pencil. On the contrary, it will impress the shrewd observer that the

jealousies and petty animosities, which the poets of our day have flung

aside, still irritate and gnaw into the hearts of this kindred class of

imaginative men. It is not difficult to suggest reasons why this should

be the fact. The public, in whose good graces lie the sculptor's or the

painter's prospects of success, is infinitely smaller than the public to

which literary men make their appeal. It is composed of a very limited

body of wealthy patrons; and these, as the artist well knows, are but

blind judges in matters that require the utmost delicacy of perception.

Thus, success in art is apt to become partly an affair of intrigue; and

it is almost inevitable that even a gifted artist should look askance at

his gifted brother's fame, and be chary of the good word that might help

him to sell still another statue or picture. You seldom hear a painter

heap generous praise on anything in his special line of art; a sculptor

never has a favorable eye for any marble but his own.

Nevertheless, in spite of all these professional grudges, artists are

conscious of a social warmth from each other's presence and contiguity.

They shiver at the remembrance of their lonely studios in the

unsympathizing cities of their native land. For the sake of such

brotherhood as they can find, more than for any good that they get from

galleries, they linger year after year in Italy, while their originality

dies out of them, or is polished away as a barbarism.