You see that I really had no luck this morning; for the Director, rising, said to me, "Ah, then, as you argue in this way, I will tell you that, if the petition is referred to me for information, you shall have nothing," and then reseated himself.
I made my bow, and went out. But when I was outside, and wished to put on my hat, I found it was completely crushed: without being aware of it, I had reduced it to this state. So much the better. You lose as far as your hat is concerned, but you gain in character; and I counsel all young men who find themselves in a similar situation to take the same course.
CAVALIERE RAMIREZ DI MONTALVO.
But for all this, I repeat, Cavaliere Ramirez di Montalvo was a good and excellent man; but everything irritated him which seemed to him in the least to run off the rails. In his view, a youth who had not come out of the wine-press of the Academy could have little good in him, and he looked upon him as being a schismatic or excommunicated person. The Academy was to him the baptism of an artist, and outside of it he saw neither health nor salvation. I fell under him, and he crushed me. Parce sepulto.
But he was soon obliged to go back on this academic puritanism. His friend Cavaliere Pietro Benvenuti spoke to him in praise of this germ which was budding forth outside the privileged garden; and he soon began to regret having treated me with a nonchalance more appropriate for a pasha than a Christian. I believe this—and more, I am sure of it; for having gone one day to invite him to come and see a statue which I was modelling, he received me with singular kindness. It was as if he had never seen me before, much less had spoken to me so severely only a few months before, when I urged him to look with favour on my petition for a studio. I was moved to invite him, not only because by nature I am not tenacious in my resentments, but because I knew that he desired to see me—perhaps because he regretted not having been able to further my request. In a word, I went to see him, and found him most kindly disposed, as I have said; and he accepted my invitation, and came to call upon me at my studio in San Simone, where I modelled my Abel.
I have said that Cavaliere Montalvo was rather deficient in his sentiment and taste for art, but he liked the contrary to be thought of him. He was not indeed entirely without a certain discernment, and he had enough to enable him to distinguish an absolutely bad thing from an absolutely good thing. He was, in a word, a connoisseur in a general way; but his dignity as Director of the Royal Galleries, and even more as President of the Academy of Fine Arts, required him to conscientiously believe himself a connoisseur with refined taste. What I was then ignorant of in this respect I now clearly know, but I had a suspicion of this from the manner in which he looked at my statue, and by his expressions of praise, which were interlarded with commonplaces which he had learned from the stale formulas of the Academy. And in order that I should not imagine that he had found everything as it should be in the statue, he wished to point out some defect, and what he discovered was this, that the left ear seemed a little too far back, by which the jaw was enlarged beyond what it should be.
AN AMATEUR CRITIC.
I have promised from the beginning to tell the truth, and I will tell it, with the help of God, even to the end. I must here confess that I acted like a hypocrite. Instead of answering, "It does not seem so to me, but I will measure it to assure myself," I told him that he was right, and I was much obliged to him; and more, when he favoured me with a second visit, I said to him as soon as he came in—
"Look at the ear."
"Have you compared it with the model?"