There was something especially confident and masterly in the artist's negligence of all such small picturesque accessories as might serve to label his figure to a vulgar apprehension.
If it represented the father of the human race and the primal embodiment of human sensation, it did so in virtue of its look of balanced physical perfection, and deeply, eagerly sentient vitality.Rowland, in fraternal zeal, traveled up to Carrara and selected at the quarries the most magnificent block of marble he could find, and when it came down to Rome, the two young men had a "celebration." They drove out to Albano, breakfasted boisterously (in their respective measure) at the inn, and lounged away the day in the sun on the top of Monte Cavo.
Roderick's head was full of ideas for other works, which he described with infinite spirit and eloquence, as vividly as if they were ranged on their pedestals before him.
He had an indefatigable fancy; things he saw in the streets, in the country, things he heard and read, effects he saw just missed or half-expressed in the works of others, acted upon his mind as a kind of challenge, and he was terribly restless until, in some form or other, he had taken up the glove and set his lance in rest.
The Adam was put into marble, and all the world came to see it.
Of the criticisms passed upon it this history undertakes to offer no record;over many of them the two young men had a daily laugh for a month, and certain of the formulas of the connoisseurs, restrictive or indulgent, furnished Roderick with a permanent supply of humorous catch-words.
But people enough spoke flattering good-sense to make Roderick feel as if he were already half famous.The statue passed formally into Rowland's possession, and was paid for as if an illustrious name had been chiseled on the pedestal.Poor Roderick owed every franc of the money.
It was not for this, however, but because he was so gloriously in the mood, that, denying himself all breathing-time, on the same day he had given the last touch to the Adam, he began to shape the rough contour of an Eve.This went forward with equal rapidity and success.
Roderick lost his temper, time and again, with his models, who offered but a gross, degenerate image of his splendid ideal; but his ideal, as he assured Rowland, became gradually such a fixed, vivid presence, that he had only to shut his eyes to behold a creature far more to his purpose than the poor girl who stood posturing at forty sous an hour.
The Eve was finished in a month, and the feat was extraordinary, as well as the statue, which represented an admirably beautiful woman.
When the spring began to muffle the rugged old city with its clambering festoons, it seemed to him that he had done a handsome winter's work and had fairly earned a holiday.He took a liberal one, and lounged away the lovely Roman May, doing nothing.He looked very contented; with himself, perhaps, at times, a trifle too obviously.
But who could have said without good reason? He was "flushed with triumph;" this classic phrase portrayed him, to Rowland's sense.
He would lose himself in long reveries, and emerge from them with a quickened smile and a heightened color.Rowland grudged him none of his smiles, and took an extreme satisfaction in his two statues.
He had the Adam and the Eve transported to his own apartment, and one warm evening in May he gave a little dinner in honor of the artist.
It was small, but Rowland had meant it should be very agreeably composed.
He thought over his friends and chose four.They were all persons with whom he lived in a certain intimacy.
One of them was an American sculptor of French extraction, or remotely, perhaps, of Italian, for he rejoiced in the somewhat fervid name of Gloriani.He was a man of forty, he had been living for years in Paris and in Rome, and he now drove a very pretty trade in sculpture of the ornamental and fantastic sort.
In his youth he had had money; but he had spent it recklessly, much of it scandalously, and at twenty-six had found himself obliged to make capital of his talent.This was quite inimitable, and fifteen years of indefatigable exercise had brought it to perfection.
Rowland admitted its power, though it gave him very little pleasure;what he relished in the man was the extraordinary vivacity and frankness, not to call it the impudence, of his ideas.
He had a definite, practical scheme of art, and he knew at least what he meant.In this sense he was solid and complete.
There were so many of the aesthetic fraternity who were floundering in unknown seas, without a notion of which way their noses were turned, that Gloriani, conscious and compact, unlimitedly intelligent and consummately clever, dogmatic only as to his own duties, and at once gracefully deferential and profoundly indifferent to those of others, had for Rowland a certain intellectual refreshment quite independent of the character of his works.
These were considered by most people to belong to a very corrupt, and by many to a positively indecent school.Others thought them tremendously knowing, and paid enormous prices for them; and indeed, to be able to point to one of Gloriani's figures in a shady corner of your library was tolerable proof that you were not a fool.