"Oh, I don't say it, mind! I only say that she 's the most interesting creature in the world! The next time you mean to render me a service, pray give me notice beforehand!"It was perfectly characteristic of Roderick that, a fortnight later, he should have let his friend know that he depended upon him for society at Frascati, as freely as if no irritating topic had ever been discussed between them.
Rowland thought him generous, and he had at any rate a liberal faculty of forgetting that he had given you any reason to be displeased with him.
It was equally characteristic of Rowland that he complied with his friend's summons without a moment's hesitation.His cousin Cecilia had once told him that he was the dupe of his intense benevolence.She put the case with too little favor, or too much, as the reader chooses; it is certain, at least, that he had a constitutional tendency towards magnanimous interpretations.
Nothing happened, however, to suggest to him that he was deluded in thinking that Roderick's secondary impulses were wiser than his primary ones, and that the rounded total of his nature had a harmony perfectly attuned to the most amiable of its brilliant parts.Roderick's humor, for the time, was pitched in a minor key; he was lazy, listless, and melancholy, but he had never been more friendly and kindly and appealingly submissive.
Winter had begun, by the calendar, but the weather was divinely mild, and the two young men took long slow strolls on the hills and lounged away the mornings in the villas.The villas at Frascati are delicious places, and replete with romantic suggestiveness.Roderick, as he had said, was meditating, and if a masterpiece was to come of his meditations, Rowland was perfectly willing to bear him company and coax along the process.
But Roderick let him know from the first that he was in a miserably sterile mood, and, cudgel his brains as he would, could think of nothing that would serve for the statue he was to make for Mr.Leavenworth.
"It is worse out here than in Rome," he said, "for here I am face to face with the dead blank of my mind!
There I could n't think of anything either, but there I found things to make me forget that I needed to."This was as frank an allusion to Christina Light as could have been expected under the circumstances; it seemed, indeed, to Rowland surprisingly frank, and a pregnant example of his companion's often strangely irresponsible way of looking at harmful facts.
Roderick was silent sometimes for hours, with a puzzled look on his face and a constant fold between his even eyebrows; at other times he talked unceasingly, with a slow, idle, half-nonsensical drawl.
Rowland was half a dozen times on the point of asking him what was the matter with him; he was afraid he was going to be ill.
Roderick had taken a great fancy to the Villa Mondragone, and used to declaim fantastic compliments to it as they strolled in the winter sunshine on the great terrace which looks toward Tivoli and the iridescent Sabine mountains.
He carried his volume of Ariosto in his pocket, and took it out every now and then and spouted half a dozen stanzas to his companion.He was, as a general thing, very little of a reader; but at intervals he would take a fancy to one of the classics and peruse it for a month in disjointed scraps.
He had picked up Italian without study, and had a wonderfully sympathetic accent, though in reading aloud he ruined the sense of half the lines he rolled off so sonorously.
Rowland, who pronounced badly but understood everything, once said to him that Ariosto was not the poet for a man of his craft; a sculptor should make a companion of Dante.
So he lent him the Inferno, which he had brought with him, and advised him to look into it.Roderick took it with some eagerness; perhaps it would brighten his wits.
He returned it the next day with disgust; he had found it intolerably depressing.
"A sculptor should model as Dante writes--you 're right there," he said.
"But when his genius is in eclipse, Dante is a dreadfully smoky lamp.
By what perversity of fate," he went on, "has it come about that I am a sculptor at all? A sculptor is such a confoundedly special genius;there are so few subjects he can treat, so few things in life that bear upon his work, so few moods in which he himself is inclined to it."(It may be noted that Rowland had heard him a dozen times affirm the flat reverse of all this.) "If I had only been a painter--a little quiet, docile, matter-of-fact painter, like our friend Singleton--I should only have to open my Ariosto here to find a subject, to find color and attitudes, stuffs and composition; I should only have to look up from the page at that mouldy old fountain against the blue sky, at that cypress alley wandering away like a procession of priests in couples, at the crags and hollows of the Sabine hills, to find myself grasping my brush.
Best of all would be to be Ariosto himself, or one of his brotherhood.
Then everything in nature would give you a hint, and every form of beauty be part of your stock.You would n't have to look at things only to say,--with tears of rage half the time,--'Oh, yes, it 's wonderfully pretty, but what the deuce can I do with it?'
But a sculptor, now! That 's a pretty trade for a fellow who has got his living to make and yet is so damnably constituted that he can't work to order, and considers that, aesthetically, clock ornaments don't pay!
You can't model the serge-coated cypresses, nor those mouldering old Tritons and all the sunny sadness of that dried-up fountain; you can't put the light into marble--the lovely, caressing, consenting Italian light that you get so much of for nothing.Say that a dozen times in his life a man has a complete sculpturesque vision--a vision in which the imagination recognizes a subject and the subject kindles the imagination.