Corrupt things they certainly were; in the line of sculpture they were quite the latest fruit of time.It was the artist's opinion that there is no essential difference between beauty and ugliness;that they overlap and intermingle in a quite inextricable manner;that there is no saying where one begins and the other ends;that hideousness grimaces at you suddenly from out of the very bosom of loveliness, and beauty blooms before your eyes in the lap of vileness;that it is a waste of wit to nurse metaphysical distinctions, and a sadly meagre entertainment to caress imaginary lines;that the thing to aim at is the expressive, and the way to reach it is by ingenuity; that for this purpose everything may serve, and that a consummate work is a sort of hotch-potch of the pure and the impure, the graceful and the grotesque.Its prime duty is to amuse, to puzzle, to fascinate, to savor of a complex imagination.
Gloriani's statues were florid and meretricious; they looked like magnified goldsmith's work.They were extremely elegant, but they had no charm for Rowland.He never bought one, but Gloriani was such an honest fellow, and withal was so deluged with orders, that this made no difference in their friendship.
The artist might have passed for a Frenchman.He was a great talker, and a very picturesque one; he was almost bald; he had a small, bright eye, a broken nose, and a moustache with waxed ends.
When sometimes he received you at his lodging, he introduced you to a lady with a plain face whom he called Madame Gloriani--which she was not.
Rowland's second guest was also an artist, but of a very different type.
His friends called him Sam Singleton; he was an American, and he had been in Rome a couple of years.He painted small landscapes, chiefly in water-colors: Rowland had seen one of them in a shop window, had liked it extremely, and, ascertaining his address, had gone to see him and found him established in a very humble studio near the Piazza Barberini, where, apparently, fame and fortune had not yet found him out.Rowland took a fancy to him and bought several of his pictures; Singleton made few speeches, but was grateful.
Rowland heard afterwards that when he first came to Rome he painted worthless daubs and gave no promise of talent.Improvement had come, however, hand in hand with patient industry, and his talent, though of a slender and delicate order, was now incontestable.
It was as yet but scantily recognized, and he had hard work to live.
Rowland hung his little water-colors on the parlor wall, and found that, as he lived with them, he grew very fond of them.Singleton was a diminutive, dwarfish personage; he looked like a precocious child.
He had a high, protuberant forehead, a transparent brown eye, a perpetual smile, an extraordinary expression of modesty and patience.
He listened much more willingly than he talked, with a little fixed, grateful grin; he blushed when he spoke, and always offered his ideas in a sidelong fashion, as if the presumption were against them.
His modesty set them off, and they were eminently to the point.
He was so perfect an example of the little noiseless, laborious artist whom chance, in the person of a moneyed patron, has never taken by the hand, that Rowland would have liked to befriend him by stealth.Singleton had expressed a fervent admiration for Roderick's productions, but had not yet met the young master.
Roderick was lounging against the chimney-piece when he came in, and Rowland presently introduced him.The little water-colorist stood with folded hands, blushing, smiling, and looking up at him as if Roderick were himself a statue on a pedestal.Singleton began to murmur something about his pleasure, his admiration; the desire to make his compliment smoothly gave him a kind of grotesque formalism.
Roderick looked down at him surprised, and suddenly burst into a laugh.
Singleton paused a moment and then, with an intenser smile, went on:
"Well, sir, your statues are beautiful, all the same!"Rowland's two other guests were ladies, and one of them, Miss Blanchard, belonged also to the artistic fraternity.
She was an American, she was young, she was pretty, and she had made her way to Rome alone and unaided.
She lived alone, or with no other duenna than a bushy-browed old serving-woman, though indeed she had a friendly neighbor in the person of a certain Madame Grandoni, who in various social emergencies lent her a protecting wing, and had come with her to Rowland's dinner.Miss Blanchard had a little money, but she was not above selling her pictures.
These represented generally a bunch of dew-sprinkled roses, with the dew-drops very highly finished, or else a wayside shrine, and a peasant woman, with her back turned, kneeling before it.
She did backs very well, but she was a little weak in faces.
Flowers, however, were her speciality, and though her touch was a little old-fashioned and finical, she painted them with remarkable skill.Her pictures were chiefly bought by the English.
Rowland had made her acquaintance early in the winter, and as she kept a saddle horse and rode a great deal, he had asked permission to be her cavalier.In this way they had become almost intimate.
Miss Blanchard's name was Augusta; she was slender, pale, and elegant looking; she had a very pretty head and brilliant auburn hair, which she braided with classical simplicity.
She talked in a sweet, soft voice, used language at times a trifle superfine, and made literary allusions.These had often a patriotic strain, and Rowland had more than once been irritated by her quotations from Mrs.Sigourney in the cork-woods of Monte Mario, and from Mr.Willis among the ruins of Veii.
Rowland was of a dozen different minds about her, and was half surprised, at times, to find himself treating it as a matter of serious moment whether he liked her or not.