“Apollo! Jupiter! I’m carried aloft to your heavens and into your glory. The flower of life in my heart has blossomed for the first time.”
Yes, it blossomed, and then it bent, broke, and a nauseating vapor arose from it, blinding his eyes, numbing his thoughts, and extinguishing the fireworks of the senses. Everything turned black.
He was back in his room again, and there he sat on his bed, collecting his thoughts. “Shame on me!”—those words came out of his own mouth, from the depths of his heart. “Get out of my sight, be gone, you wretched man.” He heaved a deep, painful sigh.
“Go away! Get out of my sight!” Those words, the words of the living Psyche, resounded within and were spoken by his own lips.24 He buried his head in the pillow, and, with confused thoughts in his head, he fell asleep.
He awoke the following day at dawn with a start and tried to collect his thoughts again. What had happened? Had it all been a dream? Had he just dreamed about going to see her, about the trip to the tavern, and the evening spent with those two purple carnations from the campagna? No, it was all reality, a reality that he had not known up until now.
The bright morning star shone through the purple-tinted air. Its rays fell on him and onto the marble Psyche. He began to tremble when he looked at the image of immortality. His gaze seemed to taint the work. He threw a sheet over the statue, and then he touched it one more time to uncover the figure, but he was no longer able to look on his own work.
The artist sat alone all day long, quiet, gloomy, and absorbed in his thoughts. He did not hear a bit of what was going on outdoors. No one knew what was stirring in that human soul.
Days passed and weeks went by. The nights seemed endless. The twinkling star saw him rise from his bed one morning, pale and feverish. He walked over to the marble statue, pulled back the sheet covering it, and gazed one last time, with pain and longing, at his work. And then, staggering under its weight, he took the statue down into the garden, where there was a dried-up well that was now nothing more than a hole in the ground. He lowered Psyche down into it,25 threw dirt over her and then scattered dry sticks and nettles over the spot.
“Go away! Get out of my sight”—that’s all there was to the burial service.
The morning star witnessed everything in the rosy-red air, and its beams illuminated big tears on the deadly pale cheeks of the young man. Feverish and mortally ill, he was said to be on his deathbed.
Brother Ignatius came to see him often, as both friend and physician. He brought the consolations of religion to the ailing artist and told him about the peace and happiness that comes from the church, and he spoke of man’s sin and about grace and the peace found through God. His words were like warm sunshine landing on tilled soil that sends forth clouds of mist, fantastic thoughts, and images that were also reality. The ailing artist reviewed human life from these floating islands. It was nothing more than error and deception, for him as for everyone else. Art was nothing but a sorceress that fuels vanity and earthly desires. We betray ourselves, our friends, and God. The serpent within keeps telling us: “Taste and you shall become like God.”26
LORENZ FRØLICH
It seemed to him that for the first time he understood himself and had finally found the road to truth and to freedom. In church you could find God’s light and wisdom, and, in the monk’s cell, you could find the peace needed by the human tree to strike roots and grow through all eternity.
Brother Ignatius strengthened his resolve, and his mind was made up. A worldly creature was about to become a servant of the church. The young artist renounced the world and entered the monastery.
The brothers received him warmly, and it was a festive day when he took his vows. It seemed as if God was standing right there in the sunlight of the church, radiating his presence from the sacred images and the shining cross. When he was in his little cell that evening at sunset, he looked out from his window across old Rome with its desolate and its great, if dead, Coliseum and saw the city adorned in its springtime garb, with its acacias in bloom, its fresh evergreens, its abundance of roses, its glistening lemons and oranges, its waving palms. Then he felt moved and fulfilled as never before. The wide, open campagna stretched out as far as the bluish, snow-capped mountains, which seemed as if painted in the sky.27 Everything melted together, breathing peace and beauty, floating, dreaming—it was all a dream!
LORENZ FRØLICH
Yes, the world here was like a dream, and dreams can last for hours and can return for hours, but life in the monastery is a matter of years, many long years.
Much of what taints humans comes from within—that much was confirmed for the artist. What flames burned in him at times! Why did the evil that he wanted so much to defy refuse to go away? He chastised his body, but the evil was coming from within. A small part of his mind wrapped itself as lithely as a snake around him and crawled with his conscience under the mantle of universal love and comforted him with these words: “The saints pray for us, the Madonna prays for us, and Jesus himself gave his blood for us.” Was it childlike innocence or the flippancy of youth that partook of grace and felt elevated by it, elevated over many others now that he had rejected the vanity of the world? After all, he was a son of the church.
One day, after many years had passed, he met Angelo, who recognized him at once.
“My boy!” Angelo cried out. “It’s you! Are you happy now? You sinned against God by throwing away the gifts that he gave you. You forfeited your mission in this world. Have you ever read the parable about the talents?28 The wise man who told that story spoke the truth. What have you earned and what have you found? Don’t you think that you are living a dream, a religion that is simply in your head, the way it is for others? What if everything were just a dream, a fantasy, and beautiful thoughts!”
“Get thee behind me, Satan,” the monk shouted and walked away from Angelo.
“The devil exists, and he is made of flesh and blood! I saw him today,” the monk muttered. “Once I gave him my little finger, and he grabbed my whole hand! But no,” he sighed, “the evil is in me and in him too, but it doesn’t weigh him down. He walks around free as a bird and lives comfortably while I struggle to find comfort in the consolations of religion. If only it were a consolation! If only everything here were just beautiful thoughts, like the world that I left behind—illusions, like the beauty of the rose-colored evening clouds, like the drifting blues of the distant mountains. Up close they look quite different. Eternity29: you are like the vast, boundless, silent seas that beckon and call and fill us with hopes. But as soon as we wade in, we start to sink, vanish, and die. We cease to exist. Deception! Go Away! Fall down!”
Without shedding any tears and completely absorbed in his thoughts, he sat down at his place of prayer, bowed down, but before whom? Before the stone cross in the wall? No, it was sheer habit that led him to assume this position.
The deeper he looked into himself, the blacker the darkness seemed. “Nothing within, nothing without! My entire life squandered.” And these thoughts grew like a snowball that became larger as it rolled along until finally it crushed him—wiping him out.
“I can’t confide in anyone or tell anyone about the worm that is gnawing away at my insides! My secret is my prisoner, and if I let him escape, I’m his.”
And the divine power within him suffered and struggled.
“God, my heavenly God,” he called out in his anguish. “Have pity on me! Give me faith! I left my mission unfulfilled. I squandered the talent you gave me. I lacked the strength, for it was not given to me. Immortality, the Psyche in my breast—go away, down with you! It must be buried like that Psyche which was the finest ray of hope in my life. She will never rise from her grave.”
The star in the rosy-red skies was shining, the very star that will some day fade and disappear even as the soul lives and shines. Its trembling beam landed on the white wall, but it wrote nothing at all about God’s glory, about his blessings, about his love, about all those thing
s that resound in the hearts of those who have faith.
“The Psyche within me will never die! To live in consciousness? Can the unfathomable happen? Yes, yes, my being is unfathomable, and you, oh Lord, are unfathomable! Your entire creation is a wondrous work of power, glory, and love!”
His eyes were glowing, and then they dimmed. The sound of the church bells was the last thing he heard before he died. His body was lowered into soil that had come from Jerusalem and that had been mixed with dust from the corpses of pious souls.
Many years later his bones were disinterred, as had also happened with monks who had died before him. His skeleton was clothed in a brown monk’s robe and a rosary was put in his hand. It was placed in the ranks with others in the cloisters of the monastery. And while the sun was shining outdoors, incense was burned indoors and the mass was read.
Many years went by, and the bones of the skeletons had crumbled. The skulls had been gathered together to make a wall around the church. There they all were—his among them—in the burning sunlight. There were many there, and no one knew their names. Nobody knew his name either. But look! Something was moving in the sockets of his skull, and it was alive! What could it be? A spotted lizard was darting around in the hollow skull, leaping in and out of the empty eye sockets.30 The lizard was now the only form of life in that skull that had once entertained bold thoughts, bright dreams, and a love of art and splendor—it had shed hot tears and aspired to immortality. The lizard jumped and then disappeared. The skull crumbled, and dust returned to dust.31
Centuries later the bright morning star could be found continuing to shine, large and radiant, as it had for thousands of years. The skies were aglow in hues of red, fresh as roses, red as blood.
A monastery now occupied the site of the temple that had been on that narrow street and had lain in ruins. A grave was being dug in the convent’s garden. A young nun had died and was to be buried at dawn. The spade hit a stone, and a dazzling ray of whiteness gleamed through the dirt. The perfect form of a shoulder made from marble emerged from the ground. The spade was guided with greater care, and the head of a woman was uncovered, and then suddenly butterfly wings appeared.32 The gravediggers lifted the marvelous figure of Psyche—chiseled from white marble and resplendent in the rose-red hues of the dawn—from the grave where the nun was to be buried. “How beautiful, how perfect she is! A work of art by one of the great masters!” people were saying. Who could that master have been? No one knew, no one had known him but the bright, shining star that had sent its beams down for thousands of years. It was familiar with the course of his life on earth, his sufferings and weaknesses, and also knew that he was a man, nothing more! But he was gone now, scattered abroad as dust is destined to be. But Psyche, the fruit of his most noble labors and the glorious work that revealed the spark of the divine in him, remained, and she would never die. She had transcended fame and fortune, and her glory would remain here on earth. She would be seen, appreciated, admired, and idealized.
The bright morning star in the rose-tinted air sent its sparkling beams down on Psyche and on the lips and eyes of her admirers, who were smiling with delight as they beheld the soul carved from a block of marble.
Everything that is of the earth will crumble and be forgotten. Only the star in the vast firmament will remember. What is heavenly will shine through the ages, and when that too has passed, Psyche will live on.33
LORENZ FRØLICH
1. Psyche. In Apuleius’s story “Cupid and Psyche” from the second century A.D., Psyche, whose name is the Greek word for “soul,” disobeys her husband Cupid and lights a lamp in order to see him. When Cupid flees, Psyche pursues him, undertaking a series of tasks, which, although not successfully completed, lead to a reunion with the beloved and bestow on Psyche immortality. The deep irony of the artist’s quest in Andersen’s story becomes apparent with the realization that, in the ancient story, Psyche acquires immortality through her marriage to a figure who embodies Eros. The two give birth to a child named Pleasure. The soul is represented in many cultures as a butterfly (symbol of metamorphosis) that leaves the body at the moment of death.
2. Its beams tremble on the white wall. The star is identified as the story’s first narrator and makes an attempt to write the story down with its rays as pen. But that act of writing remains in the realm of “as if,” and the star ends up telling the first part of the story. Although the morning star seems to witness much of what happens, the narrator occasionally has access to events that are not seen by the star (“the bright star did not report it”). The artist in the story may be haunted by anxieties about usurping God’s power to create life, but the narrator remains supremely untroubled by any possible rivalry between him and the star, who witnesses the events and tries unsuccessfully to write them down. The two seem to work in partnership, with the star as the oral teller of the tale, and the narrator as scribe, a figure who engages in the very same activity as the artist by trying to create the semblance of reality through his art.
3. a young artist. Ironically, the artist, who is intent on making a name for himself, is never given a name in the story. Unlike Raphael and Leonardo, who inspire him, he remains unknown. He may have been modeled in part on the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, who moved to Rome in 1797 and did not return to Copenhagen until 1838. While visiting Thorvaldsen in Rome, Andersen mentioned that the sculptor’s statue of Pontius Pilate was dressed more like an Egyptian than a Roman. Thorvaldsen destroyed the figure and Andersen was scolded for having forced the artist “to destroy an immortal work” (Travels, 234–35).
4. Many things have changed there since that time. The notion of metamorphosis is introduced right away in a story that sets up oppositions between permanence and change, death and immortality, the fleeting and the durable. It is no accident that the events take place in Rome, a site known as “the eternal city” even as it stands in ruins. The city had been Andersen’s travel destination on more than one occasion. Teeming with life, with lights, sounds, and scents, Rome is also seen as a place of decay and bears everywhere the signs of destruction. Ruins can be particularly attractive because they show nature reclaiming culture even as they display the remnants of that culture.
5. Raphael. In a diary entry of 1833, Andersen describes seeing Raphael’s representation of Psyche: “Went to the Palazzo Farazina, where Raphael and his pupils had painted the story of Psyche in a fresco on the ceiling.” Raphael died in 1520, and Michaelangelo lived until 1564. “The Psyche” is therefore set in sixteenth-century Renaissance Italy. In 1833, Andersen visited Raphael’s villa and drew a sketch of it. He was impressed by the violets growing in the garden and sent a pressed violet from the garden to a friend.
6. Art was supported, revered, and rewarded. The high status of art and the deference paid to it by the Pope stand in apparent contrast to modern times. The nostalgic view of a golden age in which art and religion were in harmony rather than in competition reflects Romantic views that originated in Germany and England and migrated to Scandinavian countries.
7. here she had come to life and was walking around. Like photographs, shadows, and mirrors, paintings have been seen as producing doubles that both capture the soul and can take on a life of their own. The animated portrait has a venerable history, reaching back to folktales from China, India, and Persia that depict subjects stepping out of their framed representations. Andersen, like Poe, Hawthorne, Wilde, and other nineteenth-century writers, draws on the theme to illuminate the complex relationship between an artist and his work and to reflect on the power of artists, who ceaselessly violate the biblical taboo against making images and who fashion lifelike figures that rival God’s creation. (“Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness of any thing that is in Heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth,” Exodus 20:4–5.)
8. This Psyche had to come to life in marble. Among the many mythological references embedded in the tale, the story of Py
gmalion is the most pertinent. Ovid’s Metamorphoses contains one story about a sculptor who has no interest in the women of Cyprus and, inspired by an image of Aphrodite, carves a woman out of ivory. He falls in love with the statue, and Aphrodite, taking pity on him, brings the statue to life. Andersen’s artist, like Pygmalion, creates a statue from an already-existing work of art—an image of an image—even if he claims to be creating the image of the Roman maiden.
9. soiling its purity. In Andersen’s work, the sublime can coexist with the impure, polluted, or grotesque, often undermining the transcendent values attributed to a person or thing. Gutters, garbage heaps, and refuse serve as reminders of mortality, decay, and transience.
10. but it also crushed him! Much as the artist appears to be enamored of the young Roman girl, he feels mortified when he realizes that he cannot duplicate the enchanting smile of the living woman.
11. “divine altar wine that consecrates life.” This allusion to the yeast used to make bread and also to altar wine is one of many references to bread and wine, and wine’s sustaining influence. Unlike Raphael, who appreciated the value of both bread and wine, the artist makes a distinction between the two. The symbolic power of the sacrament figures importantly in a story about art’s power to represent the soul.
12. as graceful and perfect as God’s own image of the maiden. The artist’s creation is repeatedly set in opposition to God’s creation of man. Adam was made from what has variously been translated as dust, earth, and clay, and God breathed life into him. The artist too begins with clay, then translates his clay image into the refined purity of marble. The sacred breath may never enter his creation, but the statue endures long after God’s own image in the maiden is gone.
13. “the equal of nobles!” The aspirations of the artist go beyond sculpture. His success, he believes, will lead to social mobility as well as to fame, a connection that was not trivial in Andersen’s mind.