[20] Compare, for instance, the slender figure of the [Apoxyomenos].


After this description the writer goes on to analyze the nature of the Faun. "The being here represented," he says, "is endowed with no principle of virtue, and would be incapable of comprehending such; but he would be true and honest by dint of his simplicity. We should expect from him no sacrifice or effort for an abstract cause; there is not an atom of martyr's stuff in all that softened marble; but he has a capacity for strong and warm attachment, and might act devotedly through its impulse, and even die for it at need. It is possible, too, that the Faun might be educated through the medium of his emotions, so that the coarser animal portion of his nature might eventually be thrown into the background, though never utterly expelled."

The original statue, of which the marble of the Capitol is a copy, was the work of the sculptor Praxiteles. As Hawthorne says: "Only a sculptor of the finest imagination, the most delicate taste, the sweetest feeling, and the rarest artistic skill—in a word, a sculptor and a poet too—could have ... succeeded in imprisoning the sportive and frisky thing in marble." We are presently to see again in the head of Hermes that Praxiteles was indeed a remarkable sculptor. The Faun, however, is the more difficult subject of the two, for it was puzzling to think what expression would be proper to a being partly human, but without a soul.

It is said that Praxiteles himself considered the Faun one of his two best works. It had been impossible for his friends to get an expression of opinion from him in regard to his statues, until one day a trick was devised to betray him. He was told that his studio was on fire, when he exclaimed that his labor was all lost if the Faun and the Eros were destroyed.

The Faun originally stood in the street of the Tripods at Athens, but what has now become of it we do not know. The statue in our illustration is one of the most celebrated copies. Many travellers make a special pilgrimage to see it, and seeing it recall the words of Hawthorne, describing the spell it casts upon the spectator. "All the pleasantness of sylvan life, all the genial and happy characteristics of creatures that dwell in woods and fields, will seem to be mingled and kneaded into one substance, along with the kindred qualities in the human soul. Trees, grass, flowers, woodland streamlets, cattle, deer, and unsophisticated man—the essence of all these was compressed long ago, and still exists, within that discolored marble surface of the Faun of Praxiteles."

IX