Bringing Sculpture to Life
Roderick is a sculptor. Rowland Mallet is the man who discovers his talent and becomes his patron. This meeting of art and commerce commences upon Mallet’s first glimpse of a sculpture Roderick titles “Thirst.” Imagery is essential to making a work of fine visual art come to life on the printed page:
“The statuette, in bronze, something less than two feet high, represented a naked youth drinking from a gourd. The attitude was perfectly simple. The lad was squarely planted on his feet, with his legs a little apart; his back was slightly hollowed, his head thrown back, and both hands raised to support the rustic cup. There was a loosened fillet of wild flowers about his head, and his eyes, under their drooped lids, looked straight into the cup.”
The Alps
Much of the action of the novel takes place in the Swiss Alps. In fact, that majestically beautiful location is the ironic setting for tragedy. Before then, however, the author expends his description talents upon bringing topography to life upon the page without coming across like at travel brochure:
“…the two young men took a long stroll together. They followed the winding footway that led toward Como, close to the lake-side, past the gates of villas and the walls of vineyards, through little hamlets propped on a dozen arches, and bathing their feet and their pendant tatters in the gray-green ripple; past frescoed walls and crumbling campaniles and grassy village piazzas, and the mouth of soft ravines that wound upward, through belts of swinging vine and vaporous olive and splendid chestnut, to high ledges where white chapels gleamed amid the paler boskage, and bare cliff-surfaces, with their sun-cracked lips, drank in the azure light.”
Characterization
Quick delineation of character becomes necessary when much of the narrative is viewed through the keen perspective a sculptor capable of seeing at once what most can never taken in entirely at all. The eye of the author commingles with the eye of his creation throughout the text to make short order of robust physical descriptions:
“One was a woman of middle age, with a rather grand air and a great many furbelows…She had such an expansive majesty of mien that Rowland supposed she must have some proprietary right in the villa and was not just then in a hospitable mood. Beside her walked a little elderly man, tightly buttoned in a shabby black coat, but with a flower in his lappet, and a pair of soiled light gloves. He was a grotesque-looking personage, and might have passed for a gentleman of the old school, reduced by adversity to playing cicerone to foreigners of distinction. He had a little black eye which glittered like a diamond and rolled about like a ball of quicksilver, and a white moustache, cut short and stiff, like a worn-out brush. He was smiling with extreme urbanity, and talking in a low, mellifluous voice to the lady, who evidently was not listening to him.”
The Paradox of Being Missing
A storm precedes the last time anyone sees Roderick alive. The imagery used to portray the concern and trepidation about why it is taking him so long to return is a commentary upon the dual possibilities of being alive and dead at the same time as it is constructed upon paradox and opposites:
"The day was magnificent; the sun was everywhere; the storm had lashed the lower slopes into a deeper flush of autumnal color, and the snow-peaks reared themselves against the near horizon in glaring blocks and dazzling spires…The silence everywhere was horrible; it seemed to mock at his impatience and to be a conscious symbol of calamity… the sun, as I have said, was everywhere…and showed him nothing but the stony Alpine void—nothing so human even as death…He was aroused at last by the sound of a stone dislodged nearby, which rattled down the mountain…he beheld a figure cautiously descending—a figure which was not Roderick. It was Singleton, who had seen him and began to beckon to him.”
