Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli Volume I Part 23

TO ----.

'_Fishkill, 25 Nov., 1844_.--You would have been happy as I have been in the company of the mountains. They are companions both bold and calm. They exhilarate and they satisfy. To live, too, on the bank of the great river so long, has been the realization of a dream. Though I have been reading and thinking, yet this has been my life.'

'After they were all in bed,' she writes from the "Manse," in Concord,

'I went out, and walked till near twelve. The moonlight filled my heart. These embowering elms stood in solemn black, the praying monastics of this holy night; full of grace, in every sense; their life so full, so hushed; not a leaf stirred.'

'You say that nature does not keep her promise; but, surely, she satisfies us now and then for the time. The drama is always in progress, but here and there she speaks out a sentence, full in its cadence, complete in its structure; it occupies, for the time, the sense and the thought. We have no care for promises. Will you say it is the superficialness of my life, that I have known hours with men and nature, that bore their proper fruit,--all present ate and were filled, and there were taken up of the fragments twelve baskets full? Is it because of the superficial mind, or the believing heart, that I can say this?'

'Only through emotion do we know thee, Nature! We lean upon thy breast, and feel its pulses vibrate to our own. That is knowledge, for that is love. Thought will never reach it.'

ART.

There are persons to whom a gallery is everywhere a home. In this country, the antique is known only by plaster casts, and by drawings.

The BOSTON ATHENaeUM,--on whose sunny roof and beautiful chambers may the benediction of centuries of students rest with mine!--added to its library, in 1823, a small, but excellent museum of the antique sculpture, in plaster;--the selection being dictated, it is said, by no less an adviser than Canova. The Apollo, the Laoc.o.o.n, the Venuses, Diana, the head of the Phidian Jove, Bacchus, Antinous, the Torso Hercules, the Discobolus, the Gladiator Borghese, the Apollino,--all these, and more, the sumptuous gift of Augustus Thorndike. It is much that one man should have power to confer on so many, who never saw him, a benefit so pure and enduring.

To these were soon added a heroic line of antique busts, and, at last, by Horatio Greenough, the Night and Day of Michel Angelo. Here was old Greece and old Italy brought bodily to New England, and a verification given to all our dreams and readings. It was easy to collect, from the drawing-rooms of the city, a respectable picture-gallery for a summer exhibition. This was also done, and a new pleasure was invented for the studious, and a new home for the solitary. The Brimmer donation, in 1838, added a costly series of engravings, chiefly of the French and Italian museums, and the drawings of Guercino, Salvator Rosa, and other masters. The separate chamber in which these collections were at first contained, made a favorite place of meeting for Margaret and a few of her friends, who were lovers of these works.

First led perhaps by Goethe, afterwards by the love she herself conceived for them, she read everything that related to Michel Angelo and Raphael. She read, pen in hand, Quatremere de Quincy's lives of those two painters, and I have her transcripts and commentary before me. She read Condivi, Vasari, Benvenuto Cellini, Duppa, Fuseli, and Von Waagen,--great and small. Every design of Michel, the four volumes of Raphael's designs, were in the rich portfolios of her most intimate friend. 'I have been very happy,' she writes, 'with four hundred and seventy designs of Raphael in my possession for a week.'

These fine entertainments were shared with many admirers, and, as I now remember them, certain months about the years 1839, 1840, seem colored with the genius of these Italians. Our walls were hung with prints of the Sistine frescoes; we were all petty collectors; and prints of Correggio and Guercino took the place, for the time, of epics and philosophy.

In the summer of 1839, Boston was still more rightfully adorned with the Allston Gallery; and the sculptures of our compatriots Greenough, and Crawford, and Powers, were brought hither. The following lines were addressed by Margaret to the Orpheus:--

'CRAWFORD'S ORPHEUS.

'Each Orpheus must to the abyss descend, For only thus the poet can be wise,-- Must make the sad Persephone his friend, And buried love to second life arise; Again his love must lose, through too much love, Must lose his life by living life too true; For what he sought below has pa.s.sed above, Already done is all that he would do; Must tune all being with his single lyre; Must melt all rocks free from their primal pain, Must search all nature with his one soul's fire; Must bind anew all forms in heavenly chain: If he already sees what he must do, Well may he shade his eyes from the far-shining view.'

Margaret's love of art, like that of most cultivated persons in this country, was not at all technical, but truly a sympathy with the artist, in the protest which his work p.r.o.nounced on the deformity of our daily manners; her co-perception with him of the eloquence of form; her aspiration with him to a fairer life. As soon as her conversation ran into the mysteries of manipulation and artistic effect, it was less trustworthy. I remember that in the first times when I chanced to see pictures with her, I listened reverently to her opinions, and endeavored to see what she saw. But, on several occasions, finding myself unable to reach it, I came to suspect my guide, and to believe, at last, that her taste in works of art, though honest, was not on universal, but on idiosyncratic, grounds. As it has proved one of the most difficult problems of the practical astronomer to obtain an achromatic telescope, so an achromatic eye, one of the most needed, is also one of the rarest instruments of criticism.

She was very susceptible to pleasurable stimulus, took delight in details of form, color, and sound. Her fancy and imagination were easily stimulated to genial activity, and she erroneously thanked the artist for the pleasing emotions and thoughts that rose in her mind.

So that, though capable of it, she did not always bring that highest tribunal to a work of art, namely, the calm presence of greatness, which only greatness in the object can satisfy. Yet the opinion was often well worth hearing on its own account, though it might be wide of the mark as criticism. Sometimes, too, she certainly brought to beautiful objects a fresh and appreciating love; and her written notes, especially on sculpture, I found always original and interesting. Here are some notes on the Athenaeum Gallery of Sculpture, in August, 1840, which she sent me in ma.n.u.script:--

'Here are many objects worth study. There is Thorwaldsen's Byron. This is the truly beautiful, the ideal Byron. This head is quite free from the got-up, caricatured air of disdain, which disfigures most likenesses of him, as it did himself in real life; yet sultry, stern, all-craving, all-commanding.

Even the heavy style of the hair, too closely curled for grace, is favorable to the expression of concentrated life.

While looking at this head, you learn to account for the grand failure in the scheme of his existence. The line of the cheek and chin are here, as usual, of unrivalled beauty.

'The bust of Napoleon is here also, and will naturally be named, in connection with that of Byron, since the one in letters, the other in arms, represented more fully than any other the tendency of their time; more than any other gave it a chance for reaction. There was another point of resemblance in the external being of the two, perfectly corresponding with that of the internal, a sense of which peculiarity drew on Byron some ridicule. I mean that it was the intention of nature, that neither should ever grow fat, but remain a Ca.s.sius in the commonwealth. And both these heads are taken while they were at an early age, and so thin as to be still beautiful. This head of Napoleon is of a stern beauty. A head must be of a style either very stern or very chaste, to make a deep impression on the beholder; there must be a great force of will and withholding of resources, giving a sense of depth below depth, which we call sternness; or else there must be that purity, flowing as from an inexhaustible fountain through every lineament, which drives far off or converts all baser natures. Napoleon's head is of the first description; it is stern, and not only so, but ruthless. Yet this ruthlessness excites no aversion; the artist has caught its true character, and given us here the Attila, the instrument of fate to serve a purpose not his own. While looking on it, came full to mind the well-known lines,--

'"Speak gently of his crimes: Who knows, Scourge of G.o.d, but in His eyes, those crimes Were virtues?"

His brows are tense and damp with the dews of thought. In that head you see the great future, careless of the black and white stones; and even when you turn to the voluptuous beauty of the mouth, the impression remains so strong, that Russia's snows, and mountains of the slain, seem the tragedy that must naturally follow the appearance of such an actor. You turn from him, feeling that he is a product not of the day, but of the ages, and that the ages must judge him.

'Near him is a head of Ennius, very intellectual; self-centred and self-fed; but wrung and gnawed by unceasing thoughts.

'Yet, even near the Ennius and Napoleon, our American men look worthy to be perpetuated in marble or bronze, if it were only for their air of calm, unpretending sagacity. If the young American were to walk up an avenue lined with such effigies, he might not feel called to such greatness as the strong Roman wrinkles tell of, but he must feel that he could not live an idle life, and should nerve himself to lift an Atlas weight without repining or shrinking.

'The busts of Everett and Allston, though admirable as every-day likenesses, deserved a genius of a different order from Clevenger. Clevenger gives the man as he is at the moment, but does not show the possibilities of his existence.

Even thus seen, the head of Mr. Everett brings back all the age of Pericles, so refined and cla.s.sic is its beauty. The two busts of Mr. Webster, by Clevenger and Powers, are the difference between prose,--healthy and energetic prose, indeed, but still prose,--and poetry. Clevenger's is such as we see Mr. Webster on any public occasion, when his genius is not called forth. No child could fail to recognize it in a moment. Powers' is not so good as a likeness, but has the higher merit of being an ideal of the orator and statesman at a great moment. It is quite an American Jupiter in its eagle calmness of conscious power.

'A marble copy of the beautiful Diana, not so spirited as the Athenaeum cast. S. C---- thought the difference was one of size. This work may be seen at a glance; yet does not tire one after survey. It has the freshness of the woods, and of morning dew. I admire those long lithe limbs, and that column of a throat. The Diana is a woman's ideal of beauty; its elegance, its spirit, its graceful, peremptory air, are what we like in our own s.e.x: the Venus is for men. The sleeping Cleopatra cannot be looked at enough; always her sleep seems sweeter and more graceful, always more wonderful the drapery.

A little Psyche, by a pupil of Bartolini, pleases us much thus far. The forlorn sweetness with which she sits there, crouched down like a bruised b.u.t.terfly, and the languid tenacity of her mood, are very touching. The Mercury and Ganymede with the Eagle, by Thorwaldsen, are still as fine as on first acquaintance. Thorwaldsen seems the grandest and simplest of modern sculptors. There is a breadth in his thought, a freedom in his design, we do not see elsewhere.

'A spaniel, by Gott, shows great talent, and knowledge of the animal. The head is admirable; it is so full of playfulness and of doggish knowingness.'

I am tempted, by my recollection of the pleasure it gave her, to insert here a little poem, addressed to Margaret by one of her friends, on the beautiful imaginative picture in the gallery of 1840, called "The Dream."

"A youth, with gentle brow and tender cheek, Dreams in a place so silent, that no bird, No rustle of the leaves his slumbers break; Only soft tinkling from the stream is heard, As in bright little waves it comes to greet The beauteous One, and play upon his feet.

"On a low bank, beneath the thick shade thrown, Soft gleams over his brown hair are flitting, His golden plumes, bending, all lovely shone; It seemed an angel's home where he was sitting, Erect, beside, a silver lily grew, And over all the shadow its sweet beauty threw.

"Dreams he of life? O, then a n.o.ble maid Toward him floats, with eyes of starry light, In richest robes all radiantly arrayed, To be his ladye and his dear delight.

Ah no! the distance shows a winding stream; No lovely ladye moves, no starry eyes do gleam.

"Cold is the air, and cold the mountains blue; The banks are brown, and men are lying there, Meagre and old; O, what have they to do With joyous visions of a youth so fair?

He must not ever sleep as they are sleeping, Onward through life he must be ever sweeping.

"Let the pale glimmering distance pa.s.s away; Why in the twilight art thou slumbering there?

Wake, and come forth into triumphant day; Thy life and deeds must all be great and fair.

Canst thou not from the lily learn true glory, Pure, lofty, lowly?--such should be thy story.

"But no! thou lovest the deep-eyed Past, And thy heart clings to sweet remembrances; In dim cathedral aisles thou'lt linger last, And fill thy mind with flitting fantasies.

But know, dear One, the world is rich to-day, And the unceasing G.o.d gives glory forth alway."

I have said she was never weary of studying Michel Angelo and Raphael; and here are some ma.n.u.script "notes," which she sent me one day, containing a clear expression of her feeling toward each of these masters, after she had become tolerably familiar with their designs, as far as prints could carry her:--

'On seeing such works as these of Michel Angelo, we feel the need of a genius scarcely inferior to his own, which should invent some word, or some music, adequate to express our feelings, and relieve us from the t.i.tanic oppression.

'"Greatness," "majesty," "strength,"--to these words we had before thought we attached their proper meaning. But now we repent that they ever pa.s.sed our lips. Created anew by the genius of this man, we would create language anew, and give him a word of response worthy his sublime profession of faith.

Could we not at least have reserved "G.o.dlike" for him?

For never till now did we appreciate the primeval vigor of creation, the instant swiftness with which thought can pa.s.s to deed; never till now appreciate the pa.s.sage, "Let there be light, and there was light," which, be grateful, Michel! was clothed in human word before thee.

'One feels so repelled and humbled, on turning from Raphael to his contemporary, that I could have hated him as a Gentile Choragus might hate the prophet Samuel. Raphael took us to his very bosom, as if we had been fit for disciples,--

'"Parting with smiles the hair upon the brow, And telling me none ever was preferred"

'This man waves his serpent wand over me, and beauty's self seems no better than a golden calf!

'I could not bear M. De Quincy for intimating that the archangel Michel could be jealous; yet I can easily see that he might have given cause, by undervaluing his divine contemporary. Raphael was so sensuous, so lovely and loving.