Washington Allston's numerous works were collected
for a public exhibition which drew to Boston lovers of
art from many distant places. In the same year some
sculptures of Greenough and Crawford were added to
the attractions of the Boston Athenæum.
In Margaret's appreciation of these works, if we may believe Emerson, a certain fanciful interpretation of her own sometimes took the place of a just estimate of artistic values. Yet he found her opinion worthy of attention, as evincing her real love of beautiful things, and her great desire to understand the high significance of art. He makes some quotations from her notes on the Athenæum Gallery of sculpture in 1810.
Here she finds marble busts of Byron and Napoleon. The first, with all its beauty, appears to her “sultry, stern, all-craving, all-commanding," and expressive of something which accounts for what she calls “the grand failure of his scheme of existence." The head of Napoleon is, she says, not only stern but ruthless. “Yet this ruthlessness excites no aversion. The artist has caught its true character, and gives us here the Attila, the instrument of fate to serve a purpose not his own." She groups the poet and the warrior together as having, “the one in letters, the other in arms, represented more fully than any other the tendency of their time; [they] more than any other gave it a chance for reaction." Near these she finds a head of the poet Ennius, and busts also of Edward. Everett, Washington Allston, and Daniel Webster. Her comment upon this juxtaposition is interesting.
“Yet even near the Ennius and Napoleon our American men look worthy to be perpetuated in marble or bronze, if it were only for their, air of calm, unpretending sagacity."
