The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 67, May, 1863: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 67, May, 1863: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
This excellent man appears to have sunk into himself in a sitting
posture, with a thin leg crossed over his knee, a book in one hand, and
a finger of the other under his chin, I believe, or applied to the side
of his nose, or to some equally familiar purpose; while his exceedingly
homely and wrinkled face, held a little on one side, twinkles at you
with the shrewdest complacency, as if he were looking right into your
eyes, and twigged something there which you had half a mind to conceal
from him. He keeps this look so pertinaciously that you feel it to be
insufferably impertinent, and bethink yourself what common ground there
may be between yourself and a stone image, enabling you to resent it. I
have no doubt that the statue is as like Mr. Wilberforce as one pea to
another, and you might fancy, that, at come ordinary moment, when he
least expected it, and before he had time to smooth away his knowing
complication of wrinkles, he had seen the Gorgon's head, and
whitened into marble,--not only his personal self, but his coat and
small-clothes, down to a button and the minutest crease of the cloth.
The ludicrous result marks the impropriety of bestowing the agelong
duration of marble upon small, characteristic individualities, such as
might come within the province of waxen imagery. The sculptor should
give permanence to the figure of a great man in his mood of broad and
grand composure, which would obliterate all mean peculiarities; for, if
the original were unaccustomed to such a mood, or if his features were
incapable of assuming the guise, it seems questionable whether he could
really have been entitled to a marble immortality. In point of fact,
however, the English face and form are seldom statuesque, however
illustrious the individual.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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