“O, Mr. Hart,” I cried, “do make this nose for me!”
Whereupon he made it, giving me many valuable suggestions, meanwhile, as to the effect produced by judicious shading. Still, I was discouraged. It was borne in upon me that this was not my branch of art.
“Posing.”
“Mr. Hart,” I said, “I think I would like to make noses your way.”
“Would you? Then you shall. Come to my studio to-morrow, and you shall have some clay and a board, and try what you can do.”
So the next day I insisted upon availing myself of this invitation. Mr. Hart was then elaborating his machine for taking portraits in marble, in his studio in the upper part of the city. He had always several busts on hand, excellent likenesses. His workmen would be employed in cutting out the marble, while he molded his original thought out of the plastic clay. There has always been a fascination to me in statuary. Mr. Ruskin tells us that form appealed to the old Greeks more forcibly than color. That was in the youth of the race; possibly, the first stage of art-development is an appreciation of form; in my case, I have not passed into the maturer stage yet. The rounded proportions, curves, and reality of a statue appeal to me as no painting ever did.
Nevertheless, I made no greater progress in molding than in sketching. I made my hands very sticky; I used up several pounds of clay; then I relinquished my hopes of becoming a sculptor. I found it more to my taste to follow Mr. Hart around the rooms, to chatter with the workmen, to ask innumerable questions about the “Invention.”
It has been suggested that it was to this Invention of Mr. Hart’s that Mrs. Browning referred when she wrote of—
“Just a shadow on a wall,”