THE COLONIAL VS. THE NATIONAL
the complex problem of "escaping" to Europe---and one had to deal
also with the uneasy conscience that followed on the heels of that alter–
native. The ease with which Copley's art had managed to
be
both
American and European without embarrassment, and to achieve real
stature in terms of a culture not yet hopelessly fragmentary, gave place
to the nervous high spirits of Washington Allston viewing the galleries
of Europe for the first time, filching romantic fragments from a thou–
sand ancient paintings with the voracious appetite of a starved Amer–
ican. Allston's pictures are not only charming-they are beautifully
painted; and it is impossible to view them without sharing in the exhil–
aration with which he delightedly utilized parts of Titian, Raphael,
Poussin, Prud'hon, Crome, Gainsborough, Bonnington, Michelangelo,
Claude, Lorenzo Lotto, Hogarth, Rubens and probably dozens of others.
But the pleasure at last becomes a little boring and one prefers to re–
member how Copley had complained from France on first viewing the
works of Raphael, Corregio, Titian, and Guido, that he hoped the Paris
pictures did not represent the best works of those artists from whom he
had anticipated so much in America. And if one compares the feeling
and knowledge with which Copley assimilated the influence of Raphael
in
The Ascension
with the exuberant virtuosity with which Allston could
paint in
anybody's
manner the difference between, not so much two men
as two societies, becomes apparent.
It is difficult not to think of Allston
in
terms of
Roderick Hudson.
James' novel is the most valid and deepest comment ever written on the
dilemma confronting the contemporaries of Allston. The following dia–
logue between Roderick and his patron, Rowland Mallett,
as
they talk
beneath "the long-stemmed pines of the Villa Ludovisi" mentions every
significant element in Allston's own charm and failure as a painter: the
eagerness of response, the quickness of assimilation with its superficial
sophistication, the engaging innocence, and finally that sense of guilt,
that moral nervousness which was to prove an incurable disease in
American art:
"It came over me just now that it's exactly three months to a day
since I left Northampton. I can't believe anything so ridiculous."
"It certainly seems more."
"It seems ten years. What an exquisite ass I was
so
short a time
ago!"
"Do you feel," Rowland asked all amusedly, "so tremendously wise
now?"
"Wise with the wi6dom of the ages and the taste of a thousand
fountains. Don't I look so? Surely I haven't the same face. Haven't I
different eyes, a different skin, different legs and arms?"
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