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A creature of antique healthfulness had vanished from the earth; and, in his stead, there was only one other morbid and remorseful man, among millions that were cast in the same indistinguishable mould. The accident of thus meeting Donatello the glad Faun of his imagination and memory, now transformed into a gloomy penitent contributed to deepen the cloud that had fallen over Kenyon's spirits.
Events followed fast in those eventful days. On the thirteenth of April Ann Penhallow sat in the spring sunshine on the porch, while Leila read aloud to her with entranced attention "The Marble Faun." The advent of an early spring in the uplands was to be seen in the ruddy colour of the maples. Bees were busy among the young flowers. There was noiseless peace in the moveless infant foliage.
Anthony had met a centaur and a faun, a little man with horns growing from his forehead, who were possibly devils, and at all events, at a later period, the "Lives of the Saints" represent evil spirits in the form of animals as not infrequent. Lycanthropy, however, or the transformation of witches into wolves, presented more difficulty.
In "Monte Beni," as he preferred to call "The Marble Faun," my father speaks of Rome with mingled contempt for its discomforts and delighted heartiness for its outshining fascinations. "The desolation of her ruin" does not prevent her from being "more intimately our home than even the spot where we were born."
This picture in the Dresden Gallery is a scene from the mythical story of a goddess who fell in love with the youthful son of a faun and a naiad. Thus she excited the jealous fury of the cyclops, Polythemus, who is seen in the picture herding his flock of sheep upon the high cliff at the right.
In this hour of acute reaction the cool justice of the Englishman judged the passionate impulse of the Sicilian, even marvelled at it, and the heart of the dancing Faun cried: "What am I what am I really?" and did not find the answer. "Signorino?" "Yes, Gaspare." "When we get to that rock we shall see the house." "I know."
The lad for he was only a lad, being but sixteen years of age was not sorry at their departure, and had flung himself back with a deep sigh of relief on the soft cushions of his embroidered couch, lying there, wild-eyed and open-mouthed, like a brown woodland Faun, or some young animal of the forest newly snared by the hunters.
This race of fauns was the most delightful of all that antiquity imagined. It seems to me that a story, with all sorts of fun and pathos in it, might be contrived on the idea of their species having become intermingled with the human race; a family with the faun blood in them, having prolonged itself from the classic era till our own days.
I likewise took particular note of the Faun of Praxiteles, because the idea keeps recurring to me of writing a little romance about it, and for that reason I shall endeavor to set down a somewhat minutely itemized detail of the statue and its surroundings. . . .
The grape design at the base of the little statue, and the snake supporting the candleholder, both are symbols of the sileni. In one of the largest and most elegant houses in Pompeii, on the floor of the atrium, or principal room of the house, men found in the ashes this bronze statue of a dancing faun. Doesn't he look as if he loved to dance, snapping his fingers to keep time?
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