lves rowed out to Torcello, and Roderick lay back for a couple
of hours watching a brown-breasted gondolier making superb muscular
movements, in high relief, against the sky of the Adriatic, and at the
end jerked himself up with a violence that nearly swamped the gondola,
and declared that the only thing worth living for was to make a colossal
bronze and set it aloft in the light of a public square. In Rome his
first care was for the Vatican; he went there again and again. But the
old imperial and papal city altogether delighted him; only there he
really found what he had been looking for from the first--the complete
antipodes of Northampton. And indeed Rome is the natural home of those
spirits with which we just now claimed fellowship for Roderick--the
spirits with a deep relish for the artificial element in life and
the infinite superpositions of history. It is the immemorial city of
convention. The stagnant Roman air is charged with convention; it colors
the yellow light and deepens the chilly shadows. And in that still
recent day the most impressive convention in all history was visible to
men's eyes, in the Roman streets, erect in a gilded coach drawn by four
black horses. Roderick's first fortnight was a high aesthetic revel.
He declared that Rome made him feel and understand more things than
he could express: he was sure that life must have there, for all one's
senses, an incomparable fineness; that more interesting things must
happen to one than anywhere else. And he gave Rowland to understand that
he meant to live freely and largely, and be as interested as occasion
demanded. Rowland saw no reason to regard this as a menace of
dissipation, because, in the first place, there was in all dissipation,
refine it as one might, a grossness which would disqualify it for
Roderick's favor, and because, in the second, the young sculptor was
a man to regard all things in the light of his art, to hand over his
passions to his genius to be dealt with, and to find that he could live
largely enough without exceeding the circle of wholesome curiosity.
Rowland took immense satisfaction in his companion's deep impatience to
make something of all his impressions. Some of these indeed found their
way into a channel which did not lead to statues, but it was none the
less a safe one. He wrote frequent long letters to Miss Garland; when
Rowland went with him to post them he thought wistfully of the
fortune of the great loosely-written m