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Does it not frighten you a little, like the apparition of a lovely woman that livid of old, and has long lain in the grave?" "Ah, Miriam! I cannot respond to you," said the sculptor, with irrepressible impatience. "Imagination and the love of art have both died out of me." "Miriam," interposed Donatello with gentle gravity, "why should we keep our friend in suspense? We know what anxiety he feels.
Of course there could be no real doubt that it was Miriam, his artist friend, with whom and Hilda he had spent so many pleasant and familiar hours, and whom he had last seen at Perugia, bending with Donatello beneath the bronze pope's benediction.
The central idea of the story, the necessity of sin to convert such a creature as Donatello into a moral being, is also not happily illustrated in the leading event.
This was the ultimate peculiarity, the final touch, distinguishing between the sylvan creature and the beautiful companion at his side. Setting apart only this, Miriam resembled a Nymph, as much as Donatello did a Faun. There were flitting moments, indeed, when she played the sylvan character as perfectly as he.
Her crime consisted merely in a look, the expression of her eyes, and the whole world is free to her; but her heart is imprisoned in the same cell with Donatello. There is not a more powerful ethical effect in Dante or Sophocles. This, we may suppose, is intended for a hit at New England Puritanism; and from the French stand-point, it is not unfair.
Donatello prepared this niche for him at the end of his life it was almost his last work; and Verrocchio, after many years of labour, had thought to place here really his masterpiece, in the church that, more than any other, belonged to the people of the city, that middle class, as we might say, from which he sprang.
On his own part, therefore, and leaving Donatello out of the case, he would have judged it well to go.
The rich man brought his merchandise, the poor his industry: the one was sure of finding workmen, the other was sure of finding work. Art also was by no means behindhand: Dante, Giotto, Brunelleschi, and Donatello were dead, but Ariosto, Raphael, Bramante, and Michael Angelo were now living.
As I gazed at it, and read the gothic letters in which it was set forth that this monument was erected in adoration of this woman, how well I remembered the day when we had crouched together over those stones in the crypt at Certosa, to admire the chiselling of Donatello which had inspired this.
Miriam, in like manner, had doubtless conveyed some of the intimate results of her heart knowledge into her own portrait, and perhaps wished to try whether they would be perceptible to so simple and natural an observer as Donatello. "Does the expression please you?" she asked. "Yes," said Donatello hesitatingly; "if it would only smile so like the sunshine as you sometimes do.
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