Roderick Hudson — Chapter VIII
About a month later, Rowland addressed to his cousin Cecilia a letter of which the following is a portion:-- “So much for myself; yet I tell you but a tithe of my own story unless I let you know how matters stand with poor Hudson, for he gives me more to think about just now than anything else in the world.
I need a good deal of courage to begin this chapter.
You warned me, you know, and I made rather light of your warning.
I have had all kinds of hopes and fears, but hitherto, in writing to you, I have resolutely put the hopes foremost.
Now, however, my pride has forsaken me, and I should like hugely to give expression to a little comfortable despair.
I should like to say, ‘My dear wise woman, you were right and I was wrong; you were a shrewd observer and I was a meddlesome donkey!
’ When I think of a little talk we had about the ‘salubrity of genius,’ I feel my ears tingle.
If this is salubrity, give me raging disease!
I ‘m pestered to death; I go about with a chronic heartache; there are moments when I could shed salt tears.
There ‘s a pretty portrait of the most placid of men!
I wish I could make you understand; or rather, I wish you could make me!
I don’t understand a jot; it ‘s a hideous, mocking mystery; I give it up!
I don’t in the least give it up, you know; I ‘m incapable of giving it up.
I sit holding my head by the hour, racking my brain, wondering what under heaven is to be done.
You told me at Northampton that I took the thing too easily; you would tell me now, perhaps, that I take it too hard.
I do, altogether; but it can’t be helped.
Without flattering myself, I may say I ‘m sympathetic.
Many another man before this would have cast his perplexities to the winds and declared that Mr. Hudson must lie on his bed as he had made it.
Some men, perhaps, would even say that I am making a mighty ado about nothing; that I have only to give him rope, and he will tire himself out.
But he tugs at his rope altogether too hard for me to hold it comfortably.
I certainly never pretended the thing was anything else than an experiment; I promised nothing, I answered for nothing; I only said the case was hopeful, and that it would be a shame to neglect it.
I have done my best, and if the machine is running down I have a right to stand aside and let it scuttle.
Amen, amen!
No, I can write that, but I can’t feel it.
I can’t be just; I can only be generous.
I love the poor fellow and I can’t give him up.
As for understanding him, that ‘s another matter; nowadays I don’t believe even you would.
One’s wits are sadly pestered over here, I assure you, and I ‘m in the way of seeing more than one puzzling specimen of human nature.
Roderick and Miss Light, between them!...
Have n’t I already told you about Miss Light?
Last winter everything was perfection.
Roderick struck out bravely, did really great things, and proved himself, as I supposed, thoroughly solid.
He was strong, he was first-rate; I felt perfectly secure and sang private paeans of joy.
We had passed at a bound into the open sea, and left danger behind.
But in the summer I began to be puzzled, though I succeeded in not being alarmed.
When we came back to Rome, however, I saw that the tide had turned and that we were close upon the rocks.
It is, in fact, another case of Ulysses alongside of the Sirens; only Roderick refuses to be tied to the mast.
He is the most extraordinary being, the strangest mixture of qualities.
I don’t understand so much force going with so much weakness--such a brilliant gift being subject to such lapses.
The poor fellow is incomplete, and it is really not his own fault; Nature has given him the faculty out of hand and bidden him be hanged with it.
I never knew a man harder to advise or assist, if he is not in the mood for listening.
I suppose there is some key or other to his character, but I try in vain to find it; and yet I can’t believe that Providence is so cruel as to have turned the lock and thrown the key away.
He perplexes me, as I say, to death, and though he tires out my patience, he still fascinates me.
Sometimes I think he has n’t a grain of conscience, and sometimes I think that, in a way, he has an excess.
He takes things at once too easily and too hard; he is both too lax and too tense, too reckless and too ambitious, too cold and too passionate.
He has developed faster even than you prophesied, and for good and evil alike he takes up a formidable space.
There ‘s too much of him for me, at any rate.
Yes, he is hard; there is no mistake about that.
He ‘s inflexible, he ‘s brittle; and though he has plenty of spirit, plenty of soul, he has n’t what I call a heart.
He has something that Miss Garland took for one, and I ‘m pretty sure she ‘s a judge.
But she judged on scanty evidence.
He has something that Christina Light, here, makes believe at times that she takes for one, but she is no judge at all!
I
think it is established that, in the long run, egotism makes a failure in conduct: is it also true that it makes a failure in the arts?...
Roderick’s standard is immensely high; I must do him that justice.
He will do nothing beneath it, and while he is waiting for inspiration, his imagination, his nerves, his senses must have something to amuse them.
This is a highly philosophical way of saying that he has taken to dissipation, and that he has just been spending a month at Naples--a city where ‘pleasure’ is actively cultivated--in very bad company.
Are they all like that, all the men of genius?
There are a great many artists here who hammer away at their trade with exemplary industry; in fact I am surprised at their success in reducing the matter to a steady, daily grind: but I really don’t think that one of them has his exquisite quality of talent.
It is in the matter of quantity that he has broken down.
The bottle won’t pour; he turns it upside down; it ‘s no use!
Sometimes he declares it ‘s empty--that he has done all he was made to do.
This I consider great nonsense; but I would nevertheless take him on his own terms if it was only I that was concerned.
But I keep thinking of those two praying, trusting neighbors of yours, and I feel wretchedly like a swindler.
If his working mood came but once in five years I would willingly wait for it and maintain him in leisure, if need be, in the intervals; but that would be a sorry account to present to them.
Five years of this sort of thing, moreover, would effectually settle the question.
I wish he were less of a genius and more of a charlatan!
He ‘s too confoundedly all of one piece; he won’t throw overboard a grain of the cargo to save the rest.
Fancy him thus with all his brilliant personal charm, his handsome head, his careless step, his look as of a nervous nineteenth-century Apollo, and you will understand that there is mighty little comfort in seeing him in a bad way.
He was tolerably foolish last summer at Baden Baden, but he got on his feet, and for a while he was steady.
Then he began to waver again, and at last toppled over.
Now, literally, he ‘s lying prone.
He came into my room last night, miserably tipsy.
I assure you, it did n’t amuse me.....
About Miss Light it ‘s a long story.
She is one of the great beauties of all time, and worth coming barefoot to Rome, like the pilgrims of old, to see.
Her complexion, her glance, her step, her dusky tresses, may have been seen before in a goddess, but never in a woman.
And you may take this for truth, because I ‘m not in love with her.
On the contrary!
Her education has been simply infernal.
She is corrupt, perverse, as proud as the queen of Sheba, and an appalling coquette; but she is generous, and with patience and skill you may enlist her imagination in a good cause as well as in a bad one.
The other day I tried to manipulate it a little.
Chance offered me an interview to which it was possible to give a serious turn, and I boldly broke ground and begged her to suffer my poor friend to go in peace.
After a good deal of finessing she consented, and the next day, with a single word, packed him off to Naples to drown his sorrow in debauchery.
I have come to the conclusion that she is more dangerous in her virtuous moods than in her vicious ones, and that she probably has a way of turning her back which is the most provoking thing in the world.
She ‘s an actress, she could n’t forego doing the thing dramatically, and it was the dramatic touch that made it fatal.
I wished her, of course, to let him down easily; but she desired to have the curtain drop on an attitude, and her attitudes deprive inflammable young artists of their reason.....
Roderick made an admirable bust of her at the beginning of the winter, and a dozen women came rushing to him to be done, mutatis mutandis, in the same style.
They were all great ladies and ready to take him by the hand, but he told them all their faces did n’t interest him, and sent them away vowing his destruction.
” At this point of his long effusion, Rowland had paused and put by his letter.
He kept it three days and then read it over.
He was disposed at first to destroy it, but he decided finally to keep it, in the hope that it might strike a spark of useful suggestion from the flint of Cecilia’s good sense.
We know he had a talent for taking advice.
And then it might be, he reflected, that his cousin’s answer would throw some light on Mary Garland’s present vision of things.
In his altered mood he added these few lines:-- “I unburdened myself the other day of this monstrous load of perplexity;
I think it did me good, and I let it stand.
I was in a melancholy muddle, and I was trying to work myself free.
You know I like discussion, in a quiet way, and there is no one with whom I can have it as quietly as with you, most sagacious of cousins!
There is an excellent old lady with whom I often chat, and who talks very much to the point.
But Madame Grandoni has disliked Roderick from the first, and if I were to take her advice I would wash my hands of him.
You will laugh at me for my long face, but you would do that in any circumstances.
I am half ashamed of my letter, for I have a faith in my friend that is deeper than my doubts.
He was here last evening, talking about the Naples Museum, the Aristides, the bronzes, the Pompeian frescoes, with such a beautiful intelligence that doubt of the ultimate future seemed blasphemy.
I walked back to his lodging with him, and he was as mild as midsummer moonlight.
He has the ineffable something that charms and convinces; my last word about him shall not be a harsh one.
” Shortly after sending his letter, going one day into his friend’s studio, he found Roderick suffering from the grave infliction of a visit from Mr. Leavenworth.
Roderick submitted with extreme ill grace to being bored, and he was now evidently in a state of high exasperation.
He had lately begun a representation of a lazzarone lounging in the sun; an image of serene, irresponsible, sensuous life.
The real lazzarone, he had admitted, was a vile fellow; but the ideal lazzarone--and his own had been subtly idealized--was a precursor of the millennium.
Mr. Leavenworth had apparently just transferred his unhurrying gaze to the figure.
“Something in the style of the Dying Gladiator?
” he sympathetically observed.
“Oh no,” said Roderick seriously, “he ‘s not dying, he ‘s only drunk!
” “Ah, but intoxication, you know,” Mr. Leavenworth rejoined, “is not a proper subject for sculpture.
Sculpture should not deal with transitory attitudes.
” “Lying dead drunk is not a transitory attitude!
Nothing is more permanent, more sculpturesque, more monumental!
” “An entertaining paradox,” said Mr. Leavenworth, “if we had time to exercise our wits upon it.
I remember at Florence an intoxicated figure by Michael Angelo which seemed to me a deplorable aberration of a great mind.
I myself touch liquor in no shape whatever.
I have traveled through Europe on cold water.
The most varied and attractive lists of wines are offered me, but I brush them aside.
No cork has ever been drawn at my command!
” “The movement of drawing a cork calls into play a very pretty set of muscles,” said Roderick.
“I think I will make a figure in that position.
” “A Bacchus, realistically treated!
My dear young friend, never trifle with your lofty mission.
Spotless marble should represent virtue, not vice!
” And Mr. Leavenworth placidly waved his hand, as if to exorcise the spirit of levity, while his glance journeyed with leisurely benignity to another object--a marble replica of the bust of Miss Light.
“An ideal head, I presume,” he went on; “a fanciful representation of one of the pagan goddesses--a Diana, a Flora, a naiad or dryad?
I often regret that our American artists should not boldly cast off that extinct nomenclature.
” “She is neither a naiad nor a dryad,” said Roderick, “and her name is as good as yours or mine.
” “You call her”--Mr. Leavenworth blandly inquired.
“Miss Light,” Rowland interposed, in charity.
“Ah, our great American beauty!
Not a pagan goddess--an American, Christian lady!
Yes, I have had the pleasure of conversing with Miss Light.
Her conversational powers are not remarkable, but her beauty is of a high order.
I observed her the other evening at a large party, where some of the proudest members of the European aristocracy were present--duchesses, princesses, countesses, and others distinguished by similar titles.
But for beauty, grace, and elegance my fair countrywoman left them all nowhere.
What women can compare with a truly refined American lady?
The duchesses the other night had no attractions for my eyes; they looked coarse and sensual!
It seemed to me that the tyranny of class distinctions must indeed be terrible when such countenances could inspire admiration.
You see more beautiful girls in an hour on Broadway than in the whole tour of Europe.
Miss Light, now, on Broadway, would excite no particular remark.
” “She has never been there!
” cried Roderick, triumphantly.
“I ‘m afraid she never will be there.
I suppose you have heard the news about her.
” “What news?
” Roderick had stood with his back turned, fiercely poking at his lazzarone; but at Mr. Leavenworth’s last words he faced quickly about.
“It ‘s the news of the hour, I believe.
Miss Light is admired by the highest people here.
They tacitly recognize her superiority.
She has had offers of marriage from various great lords.
I was extremely happy to learn this circumstance, and to know that they all had been left sighing.
She has not been dazzled by their titles and their gilded coronets.
She has judged them simply as men, and found them wanting.
One of them, however, a young Neapolitan prince, I believe, has after a long probation succeeded in making himself acceptable.
Miss Light has at last said yes, and the engagement has just been announced.
I am not generally a retailer of gossip of this description, but the fact was alluded to an hour ago by a lady with whom I was conversing, and here, in Europe, these conversational trifles usurp the lion’s share of one’s attention.
I therefore retained the circumstance.
Yes, I regret that Miss Light should marry one of these used-up foreigners.
Americans should stand by each other.
If she wanted a brilliant match we could have fixed it for her.
If she wanted a fine fellow--a fine, sharp, enterprising modern man--I would have undertaken to find him for her without going out of the city of New York.
And if she wanted a big fortune, I would have found her twenty that she would have had hard work to spend: money down--not tied up in fever-stricken lands and worm-eaten villas!
What is the name of the young man?
Prince Castaway, or some such thing!
” It was well for Mr. Leavenworth that he was a voluminous and imperturbable talker; for the current of his eloquence floated him past the short, sharp, startled cry with which Roderick greeted his “conversational trifle.
” The young man stood looking at him with parted lips and an excited eye.
“The position of woman,” Mr. Leavenworth placidly resumed, “is certainly a very degraded one in these countries.
I doubt whether a European princess can command the respect which in our country is exhibited toward the obscurest females.
The civilization of a country should be measured by the deference shown to the weaker sex.
Judged by that standard, where are they, over here?
” Though Mr. Leavenworth had not observed Roderick’s emotion, it was not lost upon Rowland, who was making certain uncomfortable reflections upon it.
He saw that it had instantly become one with the acute irritation produced by the poor gentleman’s oppressive personality, and that an explosion of some sort was imminent.
Mr. Leavenworth, with calm unconsciousness, proceeded to fire the mine.
“And now for our Culture!
” he said in the same sonorous tones, demanding with a gesture the unveiling of the figure, which stood somewhat apart, muffled in a great sheet.
Roderick stood looking at him for a moment with concentrated rancor, and then strode to the statue and twitched off the cover.
Mr. Leavenworth settled himself into his chair with an air of flattered proprietorship, and scanned the unfinished image.
“I can conscientiously express myself as gratified with the general conception,” he said.
“The figure has considerable majesty, and the countenance wears a fine, open expression.
The forehead, however, strikes me as not sufficiently intellectual.
In a statue of Culture, you know, that should be the great point.
The eye should instinctively seek the forehead.
Could n’t you heighten it up a little?
” Roderick, for all answer, tossed the sheet back over the statue.
“Oblige me, sir,” he said, “oblige me!
Never mention that thing again.
” “Never mention it?
Why my dear sir”-- “Never mention it.
It ‘s an abomination!
” “An abomination!
My Culture!
” “Yours indeed!
” cried Roderick.
“It ‘s none of mine.
I disown it.
” “Disown it, if you please,” said Mr. Leavenworth sternly, “but finish it first!
” “I ‘d rather smash it!
” cried Roderick.
“This is folly, sir.
You must keep your engagements.
” “I made no engagement.
A sculptor is n’t a tailor.
Did you ever hear of inspiration?
Mine is dead!
And it ‘s no laughing matter.
You yourself killed it.
” “I--I--killed your inspiration?
” cried Mr. Leavenworth, with the accent of righteous wrath.
“You ‘re a very ungrateful boy!
If ever I encouraged and cheered and sustained any one, I ‘m sure I have done so to you.
” “I appreciate your good intentions, and I don’t wish to be uncivil.
But your encouragement is--superfluous.
I can’t work for you!
” “I call this ill-humor, young man!
” said Mr. Leavenworth, as if he had found the damning word.
“Oh, I ‘m in an infernal humor!
” Roderick answered.
“Pray, sir, is it my infelicitous allusion to Miss Light’s marriage?
” “It ‘s your infelicitous everything!
I don’t say that to offend you;
I beg your pardon if it does.
I say it by way of making our rupture complete, irretrievable!
” Rowland had stood by in silence, but he now interfered.
“Listen to me,” he said, laying his hand on Roderick’s arm.
“You are standing on the edge of a gulf.
If you suffer anything that has passed to interrupt your work on that figure, you take your plunge.
It ‘s no matter that you don’t like it; you will do the wisest thing you ever did if you make that effort of will necessary for finishing it.
Destroy the statue then, if you like, but make the effort.
I speak the truth!
” Roderick looked at him with eyes that still inexorableness made almost tender.
“You too!
” he simply said.
Rowland felt that he might as well attempt to squeeze water from a polished crystal as hope to move him.
He turned away and walked into the adjoining room with a sense of sickening helplessness.
In a few moments he came back and found that Mr. Leavenworth had departed--presumably in a manner somewhat portentous.
Roderick was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.
Rowland made one more attempt.
“You decline to think of what I urge?
” “Absolutely.
” “There’s one more point--that you shouldn’t, for a month, go to Mrs. Light’s. ” “I go there this evening.
” “That too is an utter folly.
” “There are such things as necessary follies.
” “You are not reflecting; you are speaking in passion.
” “Why then do you make me speak?
” Rowland meditated a moment.
“Is it also necessary that you should lose the best friend you have?
” Roderick looked up.
“That ‘s for you to settle!
” His best friend clapped on his hat and strode away; in a moment the door closed behind him.
Rowland walked hard for nearly a couple of hours.
He passed up the Corso, out of the Porta del Popolo and into the Villa Borghese, of which he made a complete circuit.
The keenness of his irritation subsided, but it left him with an intolerable weight upon his heart.
When dusk had fallen, he found himself near the lodging of his friend Madame Grandoni.
He frequently paid her a visit during the hour which preceded dinner, and he now ascended her unillumined staircase and rang at her relaxed bell-rope with an especial desire for diversion.
He was told that, for the moment, she was occupied, but that if he would come in and wait, she would presently be with him.
He had not sat musing in the firelight for ten minutes when he heard the jingle of the door-bell and then a rustling and murmuring in the hall.
The door of the little saloon opened, but before the visitor appeared he had recognized her voice.
Christina Light swept forward, preceded by her poodle, and almost filling the narrow parlor with the train of her dress.
She was colored here and there by the flicking firelight.
“They told me you were here,” she said simply, as she took a seat.
“And yet you came in?
It is very brave,” said Rowland.
“You are the brave one, when one thinks of it!
Where is the padrona?
” “Occupied for the moment.
But she is coming.
” “How soon?
” “I have already waited ten minutes; I expect her from moment to moment.
” “Meanwhile we are alone?
” And she glanced into the dusky corners of the room.
“Unless Stenterello counts,” said Rowland.
“Oh, he knows my secrets--unfortunate brute!
” She sat silent awhile, looking into the firelight.
Then at last, glancing at Rowland, “Come!
say something pleasant!
” she exclaimed.
“I have been very happy to hear of your engagement.
” “No, I don’t mean that.
I have heard that so often, only since breakfast, that it has lost all sense.
I mean some of those unexpected, charming things that you said to me a month ago at Saint Cecilia’s. ” “I offended you, then,” said Rowland.
“I was afraid I had.
” “Ah, it occurred to you?
Why have n’t I seen you since?
” “Really, I don’t know.
” And he began to hesitate for an explanation.
“I have called, but you have never been at home.
” “You were careful to choose the wrong times.
You have a way with a poor girl!
You sit down and inform her that she is a person with whom a respectable young man cannot associate without contamination; your friend is a very nice fellow, you are very careful of his morals, you wish him to know none but nice people, and you beg me therefore to desist.
You request me to take these suggestions to heart and to act upon them as promptly as possible.
They are not particularly flattering to my vanity.
Vanity, however, is a sin, and I listen submissively, with an immense desire to be just.
If I have many faults I know it, in a general way, and I try on the whole to do my best.
‘Voyons,’ I say to myself, ‘it is n’t particularly charming to hear one’s self made out such a low person, but it is worth thinking over; there ‘s probably a good deal of truth in it, and at any rate we must be as good a girl as we can.
That ‘s the great point!
