I
was not accustomed to being patronized; my mother herself had never
given me a command. Besides, I was out of temper to think that my
quietly observant father had stood in admiration before that picture
of the liberating of St. Peter, of which I wearied, liking it so
cordially that he had uttered his conclusive, deeply sympathetic
"Yes," when my mother gave voice to her praise; whereas I had not had
the grace to glow, but voted all the pictures bores in a lump. Mr.
Thompson, below the average size, and harmlessly handsome, always wore
the prevailing gleam of a smile that showed chiefly at the eyes,
offset by a nimbus of gray and black hair.
I wondered, even at seven years of age, how sculptors in the flesh
could come and carve original conceptions among the unspeakably
successful attempts of those who were already thinnest dust, yet whose
names have so much personality in them that a sovereign presence fills
the place where they are spoken,--sculptors whose statues step as it
were unexpectedly (themselves surprised) into sight, with none of the
avoirdupois of later stone-work; that heaviness which, in some of the
finest of these modern figures, causes them to pause involuntarily, as
if snowed upon. The high degree of smoothness of the old statues, as
well as their mellowed whiteness, may give life; added to that
wonderful deep cutting in all crevices and detail of nature, such as
gives, in literature, the life to Balzac's endlessly studied facts of
situation.
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