It is composed of a very limited body of wealthy patrons and these, as the artist well knows, are but blind judges in matters that require the utmost delicacy of perception. The public, in whose good graces lie the sculptor’s or the painter’s prospects of success, is infinitely smaller than the public to which literary men make their appeal. It is not difficult to suggest reasons why this should be the fact. On the contrary, it will impress the shrewd observer that the jealousies and petty animosities, which the poets of our day have flung aside, still irritate and gnaw into the hearts of this kindred class of imaginative men.
Not that, individually, or in the mass, there appears to be any large stock of mutual affection among the brethren of the chisel and the pencil. In every other clime they are isolated strangers in this land of art, they are free citizens. One of the chief causes that make Rome the favorite residence of artists-their ideal home which they sigh for in advance, and are so loath to migrate from, after once breathing its enchanted air-is, doubtless, that they there find themselves in force, and are numerous enough to create a congenial atmosphere. If anywise interested in art, a man must be difficult to please who cannot find fit companionship among a crowd of persons, whose ideas and pursuits all tend towards the general purpose of enlarging the world’s stock of beautiful productions. It was no more formal an occasion than one of those weekly receptions, common among the foreign residents of Rome, at which pleasant people-or disagreeable ones, as the case may be-encounter one another with little ceremony. The place of meeting was in the palatial, but somewhat faded and gloomy apartment of an eminent member of the aesthetic body. Miriam, Hilda, and the sculptor were all three present, and with them Donatello, whose life was so far turned from its natural bent that, like a pet spaniel, he followed his beloved mistress wherever he could gain admittance. On the evening after Miriam’s visit to Kenyon’s studio, there was an assemblage composed almost entirely of Anglo-Saxons, and chiefly of American artists, with a sprinkling of their English brethren and some few of the tourists who still lingered in Rome, now that Holy Week was past.
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