Artists
This a story about artists, so it stands it reason that much of the metaphorical language would be directed toward aesthetic matters. And, indeed, Hawthorne allows his narrator one particularly lush and robust observation about artists whom the narrator defines as:
“lifted by the ideality of their pursuits a little way off the earth, and are therefore able to catch the evanescent fragrance that floats in the atmosphere of life above the heads of the ordinary crowd. Even if they seem endowed with little imagination individually, yet there is a property, a gift, a talisman, common to their class, entitling them to partake somewhat more bountifully than other people in the thin delights of moonshine and romance.”
Miriam’s Painting
The description of the beautiful woman painted on the canvas which Miriam holds back a secret before revealing it to Donatello is an example of the metaphor that has, over time, moved closer to skirting the line of political incorrectness:
“She was very youthful, and had what was usually thought to be a Jewish aspect; a complexion in which there was no roseate bloom, yet neither was it pale; dark eyes, into which you might look as deeply as your glance would go, and still be conscious of a depth that you had not sounded, though it lay open to the day…if she were really of Jewish blood, then this was Jewish hair.”
The verbal description paints a portrait of great beauty, so it can hardly be termed anti-Semitic. Still, the phrase “a Jewish aspect” just seems cringeworthy enough to be easily avoided. This is an example of how changing times can place upon a metaphorical image an aspect which was likely never intended.
Sculpture
Likewise, much figurative language is engaged with the centerpiece of aesthetics in the story: sculpture. And not all of it is necessarily to the positive:
“it is an awful thing, indeed, this endless endurance, this almost indestructibility, of a marble bust!”
A Certain Moment in a Certain Place
Hawthorne consistently proves himself a master of creating mood with figurative imagery. In some instance, his prose almost verges into the territory of sheer poetry:
“the broad valley twinkled with lights, that glimmered through its duskiness like the fireflies in the garden of a Florentine palace. A gleam of lightning from the rear of the tempest showed the circumference of hills and the great space between, as the last cannon-flash of a retreating army reddens across the field where it has fought.”
Character Description
Hawthorne, likewise, is also an artist himself when it comes to metaphorical language to delineate character; sometimes more than one character within a single sentence:
“Donatello’s heart was so fresh a fountain, that, had Miriam been more world-worn than she was, she might have found it exquisite to slake her thirst with the feelings that welled up and brimmed over from it.”
