Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864; Novelists, American -- 19th century -- Biography
thoughts in reproductions. In his Boston days he use to visit such
collections of pictures as were accessible to him, and he knew sculpture
somewhat through casts. Such cultivation, however, was at best a very
limited and incomplete preparation, and did not preserve him from the
tourist's weariness of galleries. He had wished in London that the Elgin
marbles had all been reduced to lime. There was something pictorial in
his genius, but painting was slower to give up its secrets to him than
sculpture, which, being a more abstract art and simpler in intention, as
well as nearer to the living form, made the easier appeal to him. He did
not respond to Italian painting very perfectly at the best, and his
education hardly proceeded farther than an appreciation of the softer
and brighter works of Guido and Raphael, nor did he ever free himself
from the intellectual prepossessions of his mind. He did not become even
an amateur in art, and he probably knew it; he had begun too late to
enter that world; and he contented himself with a moral sympathy, an
apprehension of idea and feeling, rather than the seeing eye and
understanding heart by which one takes possession of the artistic world
as a free citizen there. It was not an important matter, however; his
comments on art have only a personal interest, lighting up his own
nature; but, within his limits, he enjoyed a new and great experience,
one that illumined and softened his mind, in his wanderings about the
galleries and churches and his sittings in artists' studios. The
contemporary and native world of Italy he attended to but very little,
noting its picturesque aspects somewhat, but taking the slightest
interest in its people; if he had felt a barrier between himself and the
English, here was a gulf of difference that it was hopeless to attempt
to pass over, and he left the Italians in the inaccessible foreignness
in which he found them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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