Michelangelo's Shoulder
Michelangelo's Shoulder It dawned hot in Georgia. Don rubbed his head and blinked. He got out of bed and paused before a makeshift easel where a drawing, taped to a board, showed a woman sitting on a park bench. She was large, dressed in layers of multi-colored cotton. She reminded him of the Renoir woman in her plush living room, the dog sprawled at her feet, but she was smarter. The line across her eyebrows and tapering along her jaw was right. He'd left out a lot, but that didn't matter. If what was there was true enough, you knew the rest--like a Michelangelo shoulder emerging from stone. He went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face. After coffee and a piece of toast, he rolled the drawing and took it to the park where the woman fed pigeons every day. She wasn't there. She wasn't there the next day, either. The following day Don brought a loaf of bread, sat on her bench, and tossed white pellets into the air. Birds fought for each piece. He prepared the remaining bread and scattered it in one throw. "There you go--something for everybody.
and endows schools; his portrait is painted by a second-rate
Academician, and hangs, until disaster overtakes him, in the town-hall
of his adopted borough.
How much worse is he than the High-toby-cracks of old! They were as
brave as lions; he is a very louse for timidity. His conduct is meaner
than the conduct of the most ruffianly burglar that ever worked a
centre-bit. Of art he has not the remotest inkling: though his greed
is bounded by the Bank of England, he understands not the elegancies of
life; he cares not how he plumps his purse, so long as it be full; and
if he were capable of conceiving a grand effect, he would willingly
surrender it for a pocketed half-crown. This side the Channel, in brief,
romance and the picturesque are dead; and in France, the last refuge of
crime, there are already signs of decay. The Abbe Bruneau caught a whiff
of style and invention from the past. That other Abbe--Rosslot was his
name--shone forth a pure creator: he owed his prowess to the example of
none. But in Paris crime is too often passionel, and a crime passionel
is a crime with a purpose, which, like the novel with a purpose, is
conceived by a dullard, and carried out for the gratification of the
middle-class.
To whitewash the scoundrel is to put upon him the heaviest dishonour: a
dishonour comparable only to the monstrously illogical treatment of
the condemned. When once a hero has forfeited his right to comfort and
freedom, when he is deemed no longer fit to live upon earth, the Prison
Chaplain, encouraging him to a final act of hypocrisy, gives him a free
Michelangelo's Shoulder It dawned hot in Georgia. Don rubbed his head and blinked. He got out of bed and paused before a makeshift easel where a drawing, taped to a board, showed a woman sitting on a park bench. She was large, dressed in layers of multi-colored cotton. She reminded him of the Renoir woman in her plush living room, the dog sprawled at her feet, but she was smarter. The line across her eyebrows and tapering along her jaw was right. He'd left out a lot, but that didn't matter. If what was there was true enough, you knew the rest--like a Michelangelo shoulder emerging from stone. He went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face. After coffee and a piece of toast, he rolled the drawing and took it to the park where the woman fed pigeons every day. She wasn't there. She wasn't there the next day, either. The following day Don brought a loaf of bread, sat on her bench, and tossed white pellets into the air. Birds fought for each piece. He prepared the remaining bread and scattered it in one throw. "There you go--something for everybody.