Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/77

 Norton 489 passages that are concerned with Dante's relation to Rome; studying the interchange of eclogues between Dante and Gio- vanni del Virgilio; and citing passages from the Inferno as probably the literary originals of some of the sculptures on one of the piers of the cathedral at Orvieto. Of the building of this cathedral he gives a detailed account which anticipates in many ways the method and content of his later Historical Studies of Church Building in the Middle Ages. Norton's judgment of painting and architecture at this time suffers severely from the despotism of Ruskin, the Ruskin of Modern Painters, whom Norton had first met in 1855. Like Ruskin, he can find little to praise after 1500; and even the fifteenth century comes in for some rather severe reflections. Nothing is worth while but Gothic, and the merits of Gothic consist in its being like nature and at the same time (Norton did not trouble to explain how) an expression of the deepest and highest religious aspirations of man. Norton even imitates some of Ruskin's stylistic mannerisms, though occasionally he finds a sturdier model in Gibbon. A certain banal moralism, when he speaks of retribution in the affairs of nations, is rather in the vein of Carlyle; while on the other hand the following passage, dated "Rome, 20th January, 1857," shows a remark- able coincidence with several passages in The Marble Faun^: There is many a wall in Rome made of old materials strikingly joined together, — bits of ancient bricks stamped with a con- sular date, pieces of the shaft of some marble column, fragments of serpentine, or even of giallo antico, that once made part of the polished pavement of a palace, — now all combined in one strange harmony by Nature, who seems to love these walls and to reclaim them to herself by tinting their various blocks with every hue of weather stain, and hanging over them her loveliest draperies of wall flower and mosses." Norton continued his work on Dante with a translation of the Vita Nuova, first published in 1859. From September, 1865, to May, 1867, he and Lowell, and occasionally George W. Greene, James T. Fields, William Dean Howells, and others, used to gather on Wednesday evenings at Longfellow's house to offer their suggestions and criticisms upon Longfellow's trans- ' Hawthorne arrived in Rome 20 January, 1858, began The Marble Faun there in the winter of 1859, and finished it in England in March, i860.