What does it mean for an author to re-do a precursor's work? As Harold Bloom's famous influence theory explains, this question may be answered by considering the author's will to create original works while (inevitably) in a state of ambivalent feelings toward precursors—split between respect and the desire to overcome. Nevertheless, this still leaves considerable room for authors to come up with their own individual answer. Henry James considered Nathaniel Hawthorne the most recent pioneer in his vicinity, while his earlier precursors include ancient Greek and Roman sculptors and poets. Geoffrey Moore views Roderick Hudson, James’ “first attempt at a novel,” as his “re-doing of The Marble Faun,”1 which, like Roderick Hudson, is set in a Rome filled with ancient sculptures, with artists and their models as the protagonists. Similarly, Sanford E. Marovitz considers Roderick Hudson as “a companion piece to The Marble Faun”2 and in a similar vein Quentin G. Kraft suggests that Roderick Hudson “sets up the complex of problems which preoccupied James throughout his career and that it does so in such a way as to link his work with Hawthorne's before him.”3 In writing such a tribute to Hawthorne's last finished romance, James probably saw a parallel between his and Hawthorne's circumstances in Rome. As American sojourners in the European city, they were both familiar with ancient Greek and Roman artworks and supported other artists, including the American sculptor William Wetmore Story, whom Hawthorne befriended in Rome and whose biography James later wrote.4 For James in such similar circumstances to Hawthorne, the older author would certainly have been a precursor both to praise and to overcome in a Bloomian sense.5 However, simultaneously, the ancient and Renaissance sculptures present in Rome certainly stood as older artistic precursors for both the authors.In recent critical studies on Roderick Hudson, characters are often likened to artworks. For instance, along with the sculptures produced by the protagonist Roderick Hudson, the patronship of Rowland Mallet, the narrator, can be viewed as another creation of an artwork: Roderick as an aesthetically and socially acknowledged person. Páraic Finnerty sees “homosociality, homoeroticism, and aestheticism” in Roderick and Rowland's relationship, and notes that in producing Roderick as an American artist in Rome, “Rowland's objectification of Roderick's physical beauty becomes the dominant way in which his admirers represent their fascination with the sculptor.”6 Similarly, while examining “James's treatment of homosociality and aesthetics in Roderick Hudson,” Michèle Mendelssohn states that “James's aesthetic views are encapsulated in his interpretation of homosocial bonds and Catholicism.”7 Their views highlight an aesthetic element in the artist–patron relationship, and consequently, they too see the artist Roderick as an artwork produced by his patron. In this article, while I also view Roderick and his body as an artwork, my interest lies in the artist's creativity and his relationship with his precursors—“models” of the artist in an ultimate sense.For sculptors in Italy, one of whom James creates as his protagonist in Roderick Hudson, the works of ancient Greek and Roman artists were the models to imitate, even though most of their actual products are now lost. In Florence, from 1841 until 1843, American sculptor Hiram Powers completed The Greek Slave, one of the most highly evaluated works of the period by an American artist, based apparently on Greco-Roman sculptures of Aphrodite (Venus), the goddess of love, such as the Venus de’ Medici and the Aphrodite of Knidos.8 Artists like Powers aimed to imitate works from one of the earliest stages of Western civilization—just as many Renaissance artists did; as Miriam in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun says critically of her contemporary sculptors, “A person familiar with the Vatican, the Uffizi Gallery, the Naples Gallery, and the Louvre, will at once refer any modern production to its antique prototype.”9 Regardless of the availability of Greek and Roman works in such galleries, an imitator of ancient works cannot access original works that are now lost and can no longer be seen, as reflected in Roderick's obsession with the female images of Hellenism.10 In other words, to carve an artwork that rivals those of ancient Greece and Rome, the method must necessarily be other than imitating the remaining copies without access to the original. In this sense, James seeks in Roderick Hudson a way to create a supreme work of art not by imitating the existing works of Greece and Rome but by imitating the concept that they themselves have imitated, which has no visual or tangible body—that is, by bypassing the real world and getting to the conceptual origin of all physical objects, a strongly Platonic project and worldview. In doing so, James associates his protagonist with the aesthetics of the Burkean sublime, in which the beginning of the world and even God's supreme power of creation are evoked by considering God as the first and paramount artist. James concretizes this idea near the end of the novel by representing the protagonist's body as a sculpture. In what he calls the “Gloriani trilogy” (Roderick Hudson, The Ambassadors, and “The Velvet Glove”), David J. Alworth suggests that the “key sculptural relation is that of replication.” These are relations “that stop nowhere,” constructing “vast associational networks of culture,”11 which, in my view, expand unto both the Biblical myth and the ancient world. James is ever conscious of the presence of both Hawthorne and the ultimate precursor. I would argue that his imagination goes back in time from Hawthorne to an envisioned origin of Western civilization in ancient Greek and Rome as well as to the Biblical account of the creation, overlapping his protagonist again with the Renaissance artists.12In James’ first novel, Roderick Hudson's attempt to achieve artistic supremacy corresponds with what the young author felt about his own creativity and even his later decision to choose the Old World as his inspiration for creativity and creation. As Leon Edel notes, “In Roderick Hudson, [James] drew upon a view of life and art which seemed to have greatly enlarged itself in recent months, so that he felt . . . a sense of living and feeling—and doing—that would carry him forward in all his future creations.”13 This is true in the light of his creative methods; Ruth Bernard Yeazell notes that “from the eponymous hero of Roderick Hudson . . . to the adulterers whose thoughts we can no longer access in the second volume of The Golden Bowl (1904), the lifelikeness of that fiction depends as much on the opacity of other persons as it does on a perceiving consciousness whose limitations resemble our own.” Yeazell even suggests that “James's novels are filled with persons whose inwardness can only be deduced, like that of painted portraits, from outward signs.”14 Perhaps portraits and their inner meanings can only be deduced from “outward signs”; but as James declares in “The Art of Fiction” (1884), compared with portraits, “the sculpture is another affair!”15 This difference is summed up in Roderick Hudson by the fact that sculptors imitate ancient works. Here sculptures are the evocation of not only the ancient world but the Platonic idea, the roots of every physical form. In this sense, the surface of a well-made sculpture can provide an immediate access to its meaning: the idea. Naturally, immediacy cannot be acquired because we can only reach the content of the novel mediated by a “perceiving consciousness.” In Roderick Hudson, James depicts an antithetical way of accessing the essence of art: one that allows the essence to be reached directly through the aesthetic sublime as opposed to, but also by being mediated by the narrator's—and our own—perception. And this perception, as James is fairly conscious, is constituted by artistic history and the succession of imitators from the ancient world to contemporaries. In Roderick Hudson, James interpenetrates Roderick's creative methods through the broader issues of ideas and objects. On the one hand, Roderick's insatiable quest to enlarge his artistic potential leads him to learn from the rich environment Rome provides for artists, but on the other it is also a quest for the enlargement of his inner self. In the conversation between Roderick and Rowland Mallet below, Rowland, the narrator, compares youth and age and characterizes the youthful spirit in terms of a continual expansion of its scope by introducing new things to itself one after another, as objects to a room: “The curious thing is that the more the mind takes in, the more it has space for, and that all one's ideas are like the Irish people at home who live in the different corners of a room and take boarders.”“I fancy it's our peculiar good luck that we don't see the limits of our minds,” said Rowland. “We're young compared with what we may one day be. That belongs to youth; it's perhaps the best part of it. They say that old people do find themselves at last face to face with a solid blank wall and stand thumping against it in vain. It resounds, it seems to have something beyond it, but it won't move. That's only a reason for living with open doors as long as we can.”“Open doors?” Roderick sounded. “Yes, let us close no doors that open upon Rome. For this, for the mind, must be the most breatheable air in the world—it gives a new sense to the old Pax Romana.”16To expand his artistic potential while in Rome, Roderick does not intend to merely enjoy his new environment as an artist but rather to open the door of his mind and welcome new ideas. In this sense, Christina's statement that Roderick “doesn't like perfection” (380) well describes his character—he is or wishes to be someone who incessantly expands his spiritual realm.For Roderick, this intention to enlarge his mind serves as a generative approach to sculpture more than any other technique or study of his predecessors because in the book Roderick's best works are always those without concrete models. In the first part of the novel, Rowland observes Roderick's sculpture “Thirst” and is surprised because it was made “without aid or encouragement, without models or examples” (19). To the degree that Roderick has a model, it is the very concept of “thirst.” To apply the room metaphor above to this sculpture, Roderick contemplates the idea of “thirst” in the room of his inner self and renders it as a sculpture. In this Platonic scheme, artists can conceive concepts without physical form in their own metaphysical place and—as James connects the room metaphor with the context of youth—the intangible storeroom can be expanded as long as the artist is young. If Gloriani, an artist who befriends Roderick in Rome, is correct in suggesting that the artistic capability of Roderick, whose talent adheres specifically to this scheme, will decline as he gets older, “Thirst,” one of his earliest works created before he moved from America, will presumably be better than what he will make in Rome. In that case, the excellence of Roderick's best sculpture lies in the fact that the work was modeled solely on the concept, not a physical shape.In Rome, Roderick produced more works solely from concepts, such as sculptures of Adam and Eve. The biblical account of the origin of humankind states that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”17 This is to say that Adam and Eve do not have any model except for God, Who is always outside the realm of human recognition. Thus an artist cannot use God as a visual model, although to create a sculpture of Adam and Eve automatically implies a repetition of God's creation of humans. Roderick's act of producing sculptures of original human beings is therefore another attempt at creating works without physical models. Even though Roderick does employ a female model for the sculpture of Eve, James indicates that the woman's body does not sufficiently serve as a model: “Roderick lost his temper time and again with his models, who offered but a gross degenerate image of his splendid ideal; but his ideal . . . became gradually such a fixed, vivid presence that he had only to shut his eyes to behold an image far more to his purpose than the poor girl who stood posturing at forty sous an hour” (104). When Roderick closes his eyes, the woman is deprived of her role as a model, a visual prototype for a sculpture. The statue of Eve created by ignoring the visual model and instead imitating the “image” behind his eyelids along with the statue of Adam ironically becomes one of his masterpieces like the sculpture “Thirst.”For an artist like Roderick, who creates his best works solely from concepts, it is natural to wish to create a sculpture after Christina Light, a beautiful woman whom Roderick meets one day at his studio and considers an incarnation of the concept of beauty. When Roderick and Rowland see Christina for the first time, Rowland sees her simply as “beautiful,” but Roderick expresses a different and more complicated view: “Beautiful? She's beauty's self—she's a revelation. I don't believe she's living—she's a phantasm, a vapor, an illusion!” (95). Here Roderick expresses his first impression of Christina with vocabulary that obviously evokes pure spiritual existence, without a physical body—that is, James presents Christina as a paradoxical being encompassing two antithetical elements: the earthly body and the heavenly idea. In his Symposium, Plato writes about “the ways of love,” that “the proper way to go about this business . . . is for someone to start as a young man by focusing on physical beauty” until he realizes that “any form of beauty is much the same as any other” and finally perceives beauty “in itself and by itself, constant and eternal.”18 Roderick's creative method of modeling ideas is based on this scheme, generally known as Plato's ladder of love,19 a quest from physical to metaphysical. However, Roderick does not anticipate Cristina's immediacy, incarnating this concept of beauty in her body. Therefore, Roderick's method of ignoring the physical bodies before his eyes, and instead using the concept in his head as a model, faces a challenge, for while Christina is to him the supreme model and beauty incarnate, she is simultaneously a living, worldly existence on earth; thus Roderick must inevitably face both sides of her. For Roderick, this reality then creates confusion between being an artist who seeks to model heavenly concepts and a man who consorts together with an earthly woman, manifested in his simultaneous attempts to carve Christina's image and pursue her as a romantic interest. This duality is especially challenging as his artistic approach was supposedly meant to capture the concept behind his eyelids, not the human body in front of him.Because Roderick's artistic method aims to welcome new concepts and expand his inner self, his artistic self must seek a way to usher Christina's beauty into his spiritual room. Nevertheless, because Christina is a living woman and he cannot simply close his eyes and imagine her, he needs physical contact with her. Roderick's subsequent sculpture of Christina's bust and his romance with her constitute his response to this situation: the realization of a person both conceptual and physical. In this sense, his attempt to marry Christina is a radical way of embracing both of her sides: welcoming her into his living space through marriage also means obtaining her—the concept of beauty—in his spiritual realm. Therefore, his pursuit of Christina's love must be considered both a romantic and an artistic act.Although Roderick yearns to possess both halves of Christina, his efforts toward this goal bring about a paradox. If Christina Light is a living incarnation of beauty, why reproduce her as a work of art that will simply be inferior to the original? James clarifies this problem by drawing a contrast between Roderick and Sam Singleton, a landscape painter sojourning in Rome. Every time Christina visits painters’ studios (due to her love of art) she is “fatal to the pictures” (155) because as a product of nature she appears more beautiful than the art fashioned by human hands. Conscious of this fact, she says to Roderick, “you see we're necessarily enemies” (168), meaning that her mere existence could be a threat to human art. Nevertheless, Roderick decides to reproduce her in sculpture, while Singleton eschews the attempt and instead focuses on painting landscapes, making it difficult for Christina to be his artistic object. However, Singleton does at one point regard Roderick, who confronts this threat to art, as a “complete” (91) artist and a fit “subject for a painter” (191). He is open to painting a person from a model, but considering that Christina is “fatal to the picture” James suggests that Singleton's attitude toward her is an evasive one. In contrast, James presents Roderick's confrontation with Christina, the perfect work of art by nature, surpassing any artificial artworks, as a brave one that leads inevitably to his death in the Alps.James portrays Christina not only with a dual nature as both artwork and human being, he represents her as a petrified person as though her flesh were made of marble. Thus he suggests the superiority of ancient Greek and Roman art over more modern art. When Roderick first proposes to Christina that he sculpt her bust, he is “looking at her as he would have done at the Medicean Venus” (157). This line reminds the reader of his earlier statement, “The Greeks never made anything ugly, and I'm a Hellenist” (115). Considering this statement at face value suggests that Christina Light is a fully realized masterpiece that the young Roderick seeks to recreate following his Greek and Roman antecedents.Christina as sculpture is elsewhere manifested through Greek myth. As she notes as she talks with Mary Garland, “She looks magnificent when she glares—like a Medusa crowned not with snakes but with a tremor of doves’ wings” (381). By figuring Mary as a mythical creature who glares at Christina with a gaze that turns people to stone, James suggests that she is a type of petrified woman. In his Metamorphosis, in parallel with the Medusa legend, Ovid introduces the episode of Pygmalion in which “an ivory statue, a work of most marvelous art” acquires life (the opposite of Medusa, who transforms people into stone).20 Moreover, as I noted earlier, Roderick compares Christina with the Medicean Venus (or Venus de’ Medici, a representation of the goddess of love), which indicates that she is both an artwork and a human. If James associates Christina with the concept of beauty and figures her as a supreme work of art, the association with Venus represents a recreation of the Greco–Roman art as the origin of Western sculpture: that is, the point from which we cannot go back any further and thus the point closest to the concept itself—standing in the same relation as Adam and Eve to human beings.This mixture of the physical and the conceptual is well-expressed by the confusion of Christina's mother. Mrs. Light claims that she “deserve[s] some of the credit of the creation” (248) of her daughter. In fact, she was once in search of a good trade partner to sell her and had her daughter's value examined by a human buyer, bidding her to “put off her veil and let down her hair, show her teeth, her shoulders, her arms, all sort of things” (252). Even now, her mother's plot to snag Prince Casamassima as Christina's husband appears to be driven by a money motive. As Mendelssohn states, “Christina Light is the product of her mother's efforts and a work of art saleable on the marriage market,”21 or as Finnerty puts it, “Christina has been raised to be a public figure and uses celebrity culture and the marketplace to her advantage.”22 Nevertheless, Mrs. Light admits that Christina Light is “a priceless treasure” (251) beyond monetary calculation—what Roderick considers a supreme artwork. Even if Mrs. Light gave birth to Christina and thus is the origin of her presence, James suggests that Christina's origin as an artwork (not as a human) can be traced back to the origin of sculptural art: Greece and Rome. Therefore, Roderick, a self-proclaimed Hellenist, is obsessed with Christina's presence as an artwork.Like the history of Venus’ image and its representations mentioned above, the willingness to return to the origins confronts the question of whether the model is really the original. If one attempts to carve the image of a goddess in the first place, one has to somehow see her appearance or do it by her guidance, as Plato in his Epigrams writes about Praxiteles, who carved the original version of the Aphrodite of Knidos: “When Cypris [Aphrodite] saw Cypris at Cnidus [Aphrodite of Knidos], ‘Alas!’ said she; ‘where did Praxiteles see me naked?’”23 The fact that Praxiteles’ own Aphrodite of Knidos is lost and only copies by later Roman sculptors remain implies that, presuming that only Praxiteles saw Aphrodite naked, there is even more distance between later sculptors and the original goddess. The Venus de’ Medici, a modest representation of Aphrodite or Venus pudica is also an imitation of an older and now-lost original sculpture, and thus it does not completely retain the direct connection or presumably the original appearance of the goddess. Further, one of the arms of the Venus de’ Medici was restored by Italian sculptor Ercole Ferrata, so it has even lost its own original shape.24 In this sense, if a sculptor wishes to imitate the original concept represented by a Greek goddess like Aphrodite, they must trace back existing images—and the means to do so are undermined on the grounds that the original sculptures that could have been modeled after the god concept are now lost.Such attempts of the sculptors, which meet a dead end—in that their works cannot, in an ultimate sense, be original because of the lack of knowledge of the origin itself—also evoke the biblical explanation of human origins. Before Roderick Hudson, James’ precursor Hawthorne consciously associated sculptural art and the human origin in the book of Genesis. In “The New Adam and Eve” (1843), after the extinction of contemporary humanity, a new-born Adam and Eve explore a deserted city, a conceit through which Hawthorne criticizes the society and culture as “merely the interpolation of the perverted mind and heart of man,” through the fresh eyes of new humans, without any knowledge of the old ones. After observing several things left by the vanished humans, Adam and Eve find a “statue of a child in a corner of the room, so exquisitely idealized, that it is almost worthy to be the prophetic likeness of their first-born,” thus similar in appearance to Adam and Eve themselves. Hawthorne notes that “Sculpture, in its highest excellence, is more genuine than painting, and might seem to be evolved from a natural germ, by the same law as a leaf or flower.” At the end of the story, the new Adam and Eve find another marble statue of a child in a cemetery, and Adam says, “Let us sleep, as this lovely little figure is sleeping,”25 suggesting their sleep after death. Thus through this story, Hawthorne associates the original humans whether natural or idealized beings with the achievement of art. In Hawthorne, James writes about his observations from Hawthorne's Italian notebooks, particularly about his attitude toward sculpture: “The plastic sense was not strong in Hawthorne; there can be no better proof of it than his curious aversion to the representation of the nude in sculpture.” In fact, in “The New Adam and Eve,” Adam and Eve visit a clothing store and find something to wear. James further notes that Hawthorne “apparently quite failed to see that nudity is not an incident, or accident, of sculpture, but its very essence and principle; and his jealousy of undressed images strikes the reader as a strange, vague, long-dormant heritage of his straight-laced Puritan ancestry,” which in his view constitutes Hawthorne's “very limitations.”26 It thus appears likely that James had in mind this tale in which the new humans again avoid nudity. If so, Hawthorne's aversion to Adam and Eve's nakedness constitutes the “long dormant heritage of his straight-laced Puritan heritage,” for naturally the nudity is equated with sin.27After Christina is betrothed to the Prince, Roderick abandons Rome for the Alps to assuage his anger and disappointment. The Alps have traditionally been regarded a symbol of sublimity or infinity and they thus attract Roderick. Moreover, in the view of Edmund Burke, the Alps evoke God's creation, the origin of the world.28 Roderick's creativity fails to prosper in the Alps, however, and his death epitomizes James’ view on art. To understand the significance of his death, consider the aesthetic history of the Alps. Marjorie Hope Nicholson notes that people began to climb the Alps in the sixteenth century. For climbers like John Dennis, the experience was “an enlargement of spirit Beauty had never produced” and “the ‘extravagancies’ of Nature,” whose magnificence prompted Dennis to write about the concepts of the sublime and the beautiful. Nicholson further notes that for Joseph Addison, who likewise climbed the Alps and wrote about the experience, the sublimity of the Alps lay in their “vastness.” For William Wordsworth and his contemporaries, the mountains were a “‘more beyond’ to which imagination persistently aspires” and belonged to “the eternity and infinity that are the unattainable goals of the imagination.”29 James adds another element associated with the Alps: the sublime with its attendant meanings of fear and danger. Roderick's retreat to the mountains corresponds to what Burke says about the sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).30 In the Alps, Roderick disintegrates both as an artist and a man because he has lost the prospect of marrying and modeling Christina. Worse yet, Rowland informs Roderick that he loves Mary Garland, Roderick's fiancée in the U.S. After this conversation, Roderick escapes to the mountains. Before he leaves, in reply to Rowland's question “Where are you going?” Roderick says: “Oh, I don't care! To walk, to look about, to ‘communicate with nature.’ You've given me an idea, and I nowadays have so few that I'm taking this one with me” (512). Although he does not specify this new idea, James implies that it amounts to a sublime emotion. When Rowland and Singleton search for Roderick the next morning after the storm, they find his rain-washed body, in effect a new work of art in the form of a petrified man so unscarred and fragile that Rowland refuses to touch it: He had fallen from a great height, but he was singularly little disfigured. The rain had spent its torrents upon him, and his clothes and hair were as wet as if the billows of the ocean had flung him upon the strand. An attempt to move him would attest some fatal fracture, some horrible physical dishonor, but what Rowland saw on first looking at him was only a noble expression of life. The eyes were the eyes of death, but in a short time, when he had closed them, the whole face seemed to revive. The rain had washed away all blood; it was as if violence, having wrought her ravage, had stolen away in shame. Roderick's face might have shamed her; it was indescribably, and all so innocently, fair. (523–24)As Mendelssohn observes, Roderick's body is indeed “objectified even in death.”31James’ treatment of Roderick's body corresponds to Alfred Tennyson's method in his poem “A Dream of Fair Women”: At length I saw a lady within call, Stiller than chiselled marble, standing there;A daughter of the gods, divinely tall, And most divinely fair.Her loveliness with shame and with surprise Froze my swift speech: she turning on my faceThe star-like sorrows of immortal eyes, Spoke slowly in her place.“I had great beauty: ask thou not my name: No one can be more wise than destiny.Many drew swords and died. Where'er I came I brought calamity.”32Here the god-like woman is described as something sculptural. Although she is “stiller than chisell'd marble,” the comparison between the woman and the white stone invokes the Greco-Roman sculptures of their gods, who directly represent the original concepts. By comparing Roderick's corpse to a marble sculpture, James presents the body as something both human and artistic. However, while Tennyson's women represent fairness or beauty, Roderick's body evokes the sublime. Roderick's frozen, marble-like body reenacts what classical artists, like the sculptors who carved the Aphrodite of Knidos and the Venus de’ Medici, achieved and what modern sculptors like Powers endeavored to realize by imitating the ancient works.Roderick's experience of the sublime through danger and death also works as an immediate method of reaching original ideas. If the sublime is what associates one's sensibility and emotions with God's act of creation, as Burke stresses in his Philosophical Enquiry, the will to the sublime simultaneously constitutes the will to the original, which evokes God's transcendent powers of creation. That is, the sublime represents what is inevitably conceptual, without physical body: the idea, where all reality in the Platonic sense originates. Therefore, for an artist like Roderick, the will to imitate pure ideas and thus to model the sublime works as a method to skip any mediate things and directly reach the idea(l). The sublime in Roderick Hudson is similar to the conception of music in Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation: “Music is an unmediated objectivation and copy of the entire will, just as the world itself is, just as in fact the Ideas themselves are, whose multiplied appearance continues the world of particular things. . . . [Music] is a copy of the will itself, whose objecthood the Ideas are as well.”33In presenting Roderick's body as a supreme work of art, James admits that it is beyond description. In their inability to duplicate Roderick's supreme creation, sculptors and authors, including James, face a common predicament. This is a notion James inherited from Hawthorne: in the first chapter of The Marble Faun, Hawthorne writes the following about Praxiteles’ Faun: Only a sculptor of the finest imagination, the most delicate taste, the sweetest feeling, and the rarest artistic skill—in a word, a sculptor and a poet too—could have first dreamed of a Faun in this guise, and then have succeeded in imprisoning the sporting and frisky thing in the marble. . . . The idea grows coarse as we handle it and hardens in our grasp. But, if the spectator broods long over the statue, he will be conscious of its spell; all the pleasantness of the sylvan life, all the genial and happy characteristics of creatures that dwell in woods and fields, will seem to be mingled and kneaded into one substance, along with the kindred qualities in the human soul. Trees, grass, flowers, woodland streamlets, cattle, deer, and unsophisticated man. The essence of all these was compressed long ago, and still exists, within that discolored marble surface of the Faun of Praxiteles.34Although both James and Hawthorne agree that a sculpture or a poem can represent the idea, James is more conscious of the distance an artist needs to reach the underlying idea, in that his protagonist produced only a momentary imitation of it at the expense of his life. In Roderick Hudson, through Roderick's ambition to create a supreme sculpture, James early in his career faced the same difficulties as his protagonist. Although he presumed to emulate his literary model Hawthorne, he was also conscious of their shared precursors: the artists of classical Greece and Rome, the artworks of the Renaissance in Rome and Florence. James also evoked another primary source of Western culture: the Bible. In his novel James understood that carving the sculptures of the original pair parallels the attempt to trace artistic history back to Greece and Rome. Roderick achieved a supreme creativity at the cost of his life; here one can see James’ strong will to surpass that of all his predecessors. James implies that the ideas of objects and forms constitutes the most powerful creation. In the end, both James and Roderick pursue the seemingly unreachable shadow slowly dissolving in time much as Achilles pursued the tortoise.