Henry James - Henry James - The Complete Novels (The Greatest Novelists of All Time – Book 10)

Our friend Gloriani came, among others, to congratulate Roderick on his model and what he had made of her. “Devilish pretty, through and through!” he said as he looked at the bust. “Capital handling of the neck and throat; lovely work on the nose. You’re a detestably lucky fellow, my boy! But you ought not to have squandered such material on a simple bust; you should have made a great imaginative figure. If I could only have got hold of her, I would have put her into a statue in spite of herself. What a pity she is not a ragged Trasteverine, whom we might have for a franc an hour! I have been carrying about in my head for years a delicious design for a fantastic figure, but it has always stayed there for want of a tolerable model. I have seen intimations of the type, but Miss Light is the perfection of it. As soon as I saw her I said to myself, ‘By Jove, there’s my statue in the flesh!’”

“What is your subject?” asked Roderick.

“Don’t take it ill,” said Gloriani. “You know I ’m the very deuce for observation. She would make a magnificent Herodias!”

If Roderick had taken it ill (which was unlikely, for we know he thought Gloriani an ass, and expected little of his wisdom), he might have been soothed by the candid incense of Sam Singleton, who came and sat for an hour in a sort of mental prostration before both bust and artist. But Roderick’s attitude before his patient little devotee was one of undisguised though friendly amusement; and, indeed, judged from a strictly plastic point of view, the poor fellow’s diminutive stature, his enormous mouth, his pimples and his yellow hair were sufficiently ridiculous. “Nay, don’t envy our friend,” Rowland said to Singleton afterwards, on his expressing, with a little groan of depreciation of his own paltry performances, his sense of the brilliancy of Roderick’s talent. “You sail nearer the shore, but you sail in smoother waters. Be contented with what you are and paint me another picture.”

“Oh, I don’t envy Hudson anything he possesses,” Singleton said, “because to take anything away would spoil his beautiful completeness. ‘Complete,’ that’s what he is; while we little clevernesses are like half-ripened plums, only good eating on the side that has had a glimpse of the sun. Nature has made him so, and fortune confesses to it! He is the handsomest fellow in Rome, he has the most genius, and, as a matter of course, the most beautiful girl in the world comes and offers to be his model. If that is not completeness, where shall we find it?”

One morning, going into Roderick’s studio, Rowland found the young sculptor entertaining Miss Blanchard — if this is not too flattering a description of his gracefully passive tolerance of her presence. He had never liked her and never climbed into her sky-studio to observe her wonderful manipulation of petals. He had once quoted Tennyson against her:—

“And is there any moral shut Within the bosom of the rose?”

“In all Miss Blanchard’s roses you may be sure there is a moral,” he had said. “You can see it sticking out its head, and, if you go to smell the flower, it scratches your nose.” But on this occasion she had come with a propitiatory gift — introducing her friend Mr. Leavenworth. Mr. Leavenworth was a tall, expansive, bland gentleman, with a carefully brushed whisker and a spacious, fair, well-favored face, which seemed, somehow, to have more room in it than was occupied by a smile of superior benevolence, so that (with his smooth, white forehead) it bore a certain resemblance to a large parlor with a very florid carpet, but no pictures on the walls. He held his head high, talked sonorously, and told Roderick, within five minutes, that he was a widower, traveling to distract his mind, and that he had lately retired from the proprietorship of large mines of borax in Pennsylvania. Roderick supposed at first that, in his character of depressed widower, he had come to order a tombstone; but observing then the extreme blandness of his address to Miss Blanchard, he credited him with a judicious prevision that by the time the tombstone was completed, a monument of his inconsolability might have become an anachronism. But Mr. Leavenworth was disposed to order something.

“You will find me eager to patronize our indigenous talent,” he said. “I am putting up a little shanty in my native town, and I propose to make a rather nice thing of it. It has been the will of Heaven to plunge me into mourning; but art has consolations! In a tasteful home, surrounded by the memorials of my wanderings, I hope to take more cheerful views. I ordered in Paris the complete appurtenances of a dining-room. Do you think you could do something for my library? It is to be filled with well-selected authors, and I think a pure white image in this style,”— pointing to one of Roderick’s statues — “standing out against the morocco and gilt, would have a noble effect. The subject I have already fixed upon. I desire an allegorical representation of Culture. Do you think, now,” asked Mr. Leavenworth, encouragingly, “you could rise to the conception?”

“A most interesting subject for a truly serious mind,” remarked Miss Blanchard.

Roderick looked at her a moment, and then —“The simplest thing I could do,” he said, “would be to make a full-length portrait of Miss Blanchard. I could give her a scroll in her hand, and that would do for the allegory.”

Miss Blanchard colored; the compliment might be ironical; and there was ever afterwards a reflection of her uncertainty in her opinion of Roderick’s genius. Mr. Leavenworth responded that with all deference to Miss Blanchard’s beauty, he desired something colder, more monumental, more impersonal. “If I were to be the happy possessor of a likeness of Miss Blanchard,” he added, “I should prefer to have it in no factitious disguise!”

Roderick consented to entertain the proposal, and while they were discussing it, Rowland had a little talk with the fair artist. “Who is your friend?” he asked.

“A very worthy man. The architect of his own fortune — which is magnificent. One of nature’s gentlemen!”

This was a trifle sententious, and Rowland turned to the bust of Miss Light. Like every one else in Rome, by this time, Miss Blanchard had an opinion on the young girl’s beauty, and, in her own fashion, she expressed it epigrammatically. “She looks half like a Madonna and half like a ballerina,” she said.

Mr. Leavenworth and Roderick came to an understanding, and the young sculptor good-naturedly promised to do his best to rise to his patron’s conception. “His conception be hanged!” Roderick exclaimed, after he had departed. “His conception is sitting on a globe with a pen in her ear and a photographic album in her hand. I shall have to conceive, myself. For the money, I ought to be able to!”

Mrs. Light, meanwhile, had fairly established herself in Roman society. “Heaven knows how!” Madame Grandoni said to Rowland, who had mentioned to her several evidences of the lady’s prosperity. “In such a case there is nothing like audacity. A month ago she knew no one but her washerwoman, and now I am told that the cards of Roman princesses are to be seen on her table. She is evidently determined to play a great part, and she has the wit to perceive that, to make remunerative acquaintances, you must seem yourself to be worth knowing. You must have striking rooms and a confusing variety of dresses, and give good dinners, and so forth. She is spending a lot of money, and you’ll see that in two or three weeks she will take upon herself to open the season by giving a magnificent ball. Of course it is Christina’s beauty that floats her. People go to see her because they are curious.”

“And they go again because they are charmed,” said Rowland. “Miss Christina is a very remarkable young lady.”