THE SPIRIT OF
                                AMERICAN
                               SCULPTURE

[Illustration: STUDY FOR HEAD OF NIKE-EIRENE

BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS]




                             THE SPIRIT OF
                                AMERICAN
                               SCULPTURE

                                   BY
                             ADELINE ADAMS

                              WRITTEN FOR
                         THE NATIONAL SCULPTURE
                                SOCIETY

                             [Illustration]

                                NEW YORK
                                MCMXXIII




                          COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
                     THE NATIONAL SCULPTURE SOCIETY




PREFACE


Any survey of the Spirit of American Sculpture must naturally take
into account the Body of American Sculptors. On the other hand,
the outline here offered does not attempt the preposterous task of
putting everyone in his place, and thereby producing an unmannerly and
unreliable Who’s Who in Sculpture. Many sculptors whose work is dear
to me are scarcely named in the following pages. Why? Because, very
frequently, the individual achievement has been too fine to be slurred
over and shunted off with the faint praise of mere listing, while at
the same time it cannot well be appreciated at deserved length, given
the limitations laid upon the present writer,--limitations temporal,
spatial, personal. Again, it often happens in art, as in nature and
in politics, that certain forces for good are better left unmentioned;
headlines would disturb their harmonious functioning.

The brief annals of our sculpture may be divided either according to
our wars, or according to our times of peace. The critic who chooses
the former way will point out that our Revolution called into being a
national consciousness which was strengthened by the War of 1812, and
which immediately thereafter sought expression in Federal or State
buildings, and in their adornment by the arts. Side by side with
national yearnings for art sprang up half-thwarted individual longings
either to produce art, or to enjoy art, or to possess art. Not until
the close of the Civil War, with its legacy of greater national unity
and advancing prosperity, did we find out that our education in art was
too meagre to let us express in any fitting way the emotions aroused
by that conflict and its costly sacrifices. In the marketplace, we were
naïve and unformed enough to accept with more or less satisfaction and
in infinite repetition the stone soldier of commercial origin. In the
home, we thoroughly enjoyed the anecdotes, patriotic or parochial,
told by our Rogers groups. But before the Spanish War was over, our
enlightenment as to the artistic value of these productions was
rather general. With respect to the Rogers groups, we passed to the
other extreme; in our headlong attempt to register culture, we forgot
that these works had performed a genuine service. Later, the wave of
romantic rococo noted in the “red-blooded” literature of the day had
its parallel in some of our noisier war monuments, creatures surging
from a limbo that was neither art nor commerce. Since the World War,
and even before the World War, there has been, through our museums and
other sources, an honest effort toward coöperation between art and
manufacture. An up-hill task but a necessary one, in any sound national
development! The day of the stone soldier is over, but whether we are
laying up for ourselves a store of future regret in other forms of
memorial sculpture remains to be seen.

Thus to mark off by our wars the various chapters of our sculptural
history and to develop each chapter in sequence would be in the grand
style; perhaps in a grander style than is suited to the dimensions of
this sketch. It has therefore seemed better to indicate certain natural
divisions of the subject by means of those enterprises of peace, our
expositions. The Centennial of 1876, by its cruel comparisons, stirred
our sculpture from the lethargy supposed to have overtaken it in the
studios of American expatriates in Rome and in Florence. Until 1876, we
had been dreaming, stumbling, aspiring; making false moves in plastic
art. A few early triumphs shine forth from the prevailing mediocrity;
but it must be owned that Cooper, Hawthorne, and Emerson, in the
world of letters, have no vigorous contemporaries in the world of
sculpture. During the ’eighties, however, a group of really strong and
characteristic pieces of American sculpture emerges by slow degrees.
Ward had already produced his noble equestrian statue of Thomas. He
now placed his bronze Washington in front of the Sub-Treasury in New
York, and his Pilgrim in Central Park. In 1881, Saint-Gaudens put out
his incomparable Farragut; his Puritan appeared two years after Ward’s
Pilgrim. Daniel Chester French, with notable work behind him, came
into his own with the exquisite group of Gallaudet and the little
deaf-mute; in the early ’nineties he showed his Milmore Memorial, (the
Angel of Death and the Sculptor) a work of extraordinary appeal to both
artists and laymen.

While these men were creating sculpture to be proud of, younger men
were conning with all their might the vigorous lessons proffered in the
French schools, or on French soil, by Falguière, Mercié, Dubois, Chapu,
Saint-Marceaux, Rodin,--a mighty host. At the Columbian Exposition,
our country had abundant good work to show in sculpture from the hands
of returning youth. Between 1876 and 1893 were packed most of the
essential lessons our sculpture has learned, either at home or abroad.
No subsequent exposition has disclosed so great an advance as that
noted in 1893. There has indeed been a further development of basic
principles, as well as a recent genial stylistic efflorescence in
manner, favored by many of our younger sculptors under the influence
of sincere post-graduate study of archaic models. And there have
naturally been occasional obscure ultra-modernistic experiments not
without service in the zigzag of progress; such works are neither
to be despised nor unduly exalted because they proclaim themselves
revolutionary. An advance as rapid as that made in sculpture during
the seventeen years between the Centennial and the Columbian is not
to be expected in the near future. Such an advance could occur only
as a strong reaction from a feebleness not now evident, or from a
retrogression not now casting its shadow. Many thoughtful painters have
pointed out that sculpture by its very essence is far less subject than
painting to the more unfortunate inroads of ultra-modernism.

We sometimes worry ourselves unnecessarily because our arts and
letters are not what is called “distinctively American.” But being
distinctively American is not in itself a merit. The distinctively
American voice, for example, has not yet been hailed as the
international model. Give our sculpture time for still further
expression, and it will become as distinctively American as need be.
A just and happy exchange of culture between peoples should not be
stigmatized as mere imitation. Oddly enough, the first timid flowering
of our American painting and sculpture took place among the Quaker
Philadelphians and even among the Puritan Bostonians. It did not follow
the footsteps of the earlier settlers of French or Spanish blood.
Culture has its curves and curious weavings forward and back. Already
in our ideals of art education a change has been noted. Many who
have studied this subject for a lifetime now believe, as they could
not with wisdom have believed a generation ago, that it is better
for the student to get his technical training in the schools of his
own country, and to learn the beauty of foreign art and the value
of foreign culture through eager vacation study abroad, rather than
through prolonged residence abroad. The vacation schools of music and
painting at Fontainebleau are watched with deep interest. Thus far,
their results speak well for this new point of view in art study.

The occasion for which this modest book was made is the opening of
the National Sculpture Society’s exhibition in the year 1923, under
the auspices and in the neighborhood of a distinguished group of
learned societies. Such an occasion invites rejoicing, rather than
lamentation. Hence in these loosely gathered chapters little is said
of commercialism, of mechanistic tendencies, of unhappy professional
rivalries, of mistaken ultra-modernism, or of other burdens or bugaboos
that hamper the spirit of American sculpture. I have tried to bear in
mind a saying of Kenyon Cox, an accomplished critic, yet honest at all
times beyond conventional expectation. Mr. Cox was asked whether in
his opinion as a critic, a certain article on a well-known painter, a
younger contemporary, was not too favorable in its judgments. Taking
time to consider, Mr. Cox answered, “No, to my mind, that critique is
not too favorable! It brings forward much of the best that is to be
found in one of our best painters, and it doesn’t harp on his defects.
As I take it, the thing was written for intelligent readers. They are
able to read between the lines. From what is said of the qualities,
they will know the defects.”




NOTE


In the preparation of the present work, the author has found herself,
through the natural insistence of her own and her husband’s feelings,
placed in a somewhat delicate position. It remains, therefore, for
those editing the volume to preface it with some expression of
admiration, however inadequate.

To sculptors, it is needless to point out the importance of the work of
Herbert Adams. It is therefore to the lay reader that some word must be
said of the man who hesitates to have recorded the admirable production
of a fruitful and influential career. The wisdom, restraint, and true
sense of the just and fitting, which for years have rendered all
relation with his calm and balanced intellect the delight of friends
and the aid of fellow workers, are mirrored in an art which so easily
reflects these qualities. To those connected with the preparation of
this exhibition it is a great pleasure to render serious tribute to
the man who among sculptors has brought such faithful homage to the
Art of Sculpture, and whose influence must be cherished as one of the
permanent forces for Truth in the Art of our land.

                                                      THE COMMITTEE.




CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE
        PREFACE                                                        v

        NOTE                                                          xv

  CHAPTER
     I  MRS. PATIENCE WRIGHT SPEAKS THE PROLOGUE                       3

    II  OUR BLITHE BEGINNING DAYS                                     29

   III  OF THREE LEADERS, AND OF MORAL EARNESTNESS IN ART             47

          JOHN QUINCY ADAMS WARD                                      57

          AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS                                      67

          DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH                                       76

    IV  OF EXPOSITIONS AND COLLABORATIONS                             87

     V  THE STATUE AND THE BUST AND THE IDEAL FIGURE                 101

    VI  OUR EQUESTRIAN STATUES                                       125

   VII  THE ART OF RELIEF, HIGH AND LOW                              145

  VIII  OF GARDEN SCULPTURE AND ORNAMENT                             159

    IX  OF SMALL BRONZES AND GREAT CRAFTS                            177

     X  THE NATIONAL SCULPTURE SOCIETY                               191

   XI  INFLUENCES, GOING AND COMING                                  213




ILLUSTRATIONS


                                                                  FACING
  STUDY FOR HEAD OF NIKE-EIRENE                                  _Title_
    By Augustus Saint-Gaudens
                                                                    PAGE
  STATUE OF WASHINGTON                                                 8
    By Jean Antoine Houdon

  BUST OF WASHINGTON AT MOUNT VERNON                                  26
    By Jean Antoine Houdon

  CLYTIE                                                              42
    By William H. Rinehart

  WHITE CAPTIVE                                                       44
    By Erastus D. Palmer

  STATUE OF WASHINGTON                                                62
    By John Quincy Adams Ward

  STATUE OF ADMIRAL FARRAGUT                                          68
    By Augustus Saint-Gaudens

  MEMORY                                                              78
    By Daniel Chester French

  STATUE OF MAJ.-GEN. MACOMB                                         108
    By Adolph A. Weinman

  PORTRAIT BUST OF J. Q. A. WARD                                     118
    By Charles H. Niehaus

  MARBLE PORTRAIT OF BABY                                            120
    By Paul Manship

  THE GOLDEN HOUR                                                    122
    By Rudolph Evans

  HORSE TAMERS                                                       136
    By F. W. MacMonnies

  EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF GENERAL SHERMAN                               142
    By Augustus Saint-Gaudens

  WELCH MONUMENT                                                     148
    By Herbert Adams

  VICTORY                                                            152
    By James Earl Fraser

  PLAQUETTE                                                          156
    By Augustus Saint-Gaudens

  BACCHANTE                                                          162
    By F. W. MacMonnies

  FOUNTAIN FIGURE                                                    164
    By Janet Scudder

  CENTAUR AND DRYAD                                                  180
    By Paul Manship

  VICTORY                                                            234
    By Augustus Saint-Gaudens




                             THE SPIRIT OF
                                AMERICAN
                               SCULPTURE




CHAPTER I

MRS. PATIENCE WRIGHT SPEAKS THE PROLOGUE


I

What a pity that Thackeray, surveying our pre-Revolutionary American
world in the interest of his Esmond and his Virginians, had not
chanced to espy the valiant figure of our first American sculptor,
Mrs. Patience Lovell Wright of New Jersey,--Quaker, wax-image-maker,
traveler, keen Republican observer of the moods of British royalty and
the movements of British troops! Had his mind’s eye but once seen her
in her eagerly-frequented rooms on Pall Mall, with the notables of the
town literally under her thumb, in wax, and over her shoulder, in the
flesh, we might have had from his pen a portrait worthy to live beside
that of Beatrix, or of Madam Esmond, or of the Fotheringay herself.
Similarly, if Lytton Strachey, building his Books and Characters,
had followed out a line or two of Horace Walpole’s concerning the
“artistess,” he might have given us a Mrs. Wright fully as engaging
as his Madame du Deffand, perhaps almost as “inexplicable, grand,
preposterous” as his Lady Hester. Such joys were not to be ours. Some
of the traits that Thackeray and Strachey might have dwelt on for
our delight have been well sketched by. Abigail Adams, incorruptible
eye-witness and letter-writer.

Mrs. Adams, though taken aback by the “hearty buss” with which the
sculptress greeted ladies and gentlemen alike, observed that “there
was an old clergyman sitting reading a paper in the middle of the room,
and though I went prepared to see strong representations of real life,
I was effectually deceived in this figure for ten minutes, and was
finally told that it was only wax.” And Elkanah Watson, meeting Mrs.
Wright in Paris, where she was living in her dual capacity as artist
and patriot, notes that “the wild flights of her powerful mind stamped
originality on all her acts and language.” He tells us that the British
king and queen often visited her in her London rooms, where they would
induce her to work on her heads regardless of their presence, and
where, at times, as if forgetting mundane deferences in the swirl of
her inspiration, she would address them offhand as George and Charlotte.

The intrepid if somewhat incongruous figure of this Quaker artist
abroad will serve very well as herald or prologue to the drama of
American sculpture. Nor can I think that either Mr. Greenough or Mr.
Powers, Mr. Ward or Mr. Saint-Gaudens, Mr. French or the very youngest
sculptor newly laureled by our American Academy in Rome would object
to that assignment of rôle. Surely in any play, it is allowed that
the herald may seem somewhat more fantastic and legendary than the
kings and counselors that come after. Mrs. Wright and her wax-works
are important to us, but not because anyone now accounts her the
“Promethean modeller” her enthusiastic contemporaries charged her with
being. She is important because her vogue reveals the artless taste
of her time, its awe in the presence of perfect imitations of nature.
Not that such awe is unknown to-day in the world of art. Indeed, our
herald brings vigorously upon the scene one of the major problems that
still perplex the American sculptor in his work. I mean the problem of
likenesses, those “strong representations of real life,” as Abigail
Adams would say.


II

A strong representation of real life was exactly what Thomas Jefferson
wanted for the State Capitol of Virginia when he induced the great
French sculptor Houdon to “leave the statues of Kings unfinished,”
and to cross the Atlantic to take casts, measurements, and artistic
cognizance of the person of George Washington, in order to create that
marble portrait statue still holding its own in the good top light
of the Rotunda at Richmond. To cross the Atlantic, what an adventure
for a home-keeping Frenchman in the eighteenth century! Yet in the
year 1785, there must have been uneasiness at home as well as abroad
for Monsieur Houdon, so soon to become _le citoyen_ Houdon. In the
midst of our early Republican simplicities, there had been talk of
an equestrian statue also. Justified in the hope of obtaining the
commission equestrian as well as the commission pedestrian, Houdon
accordingly spends a fortnight at Mount Vernon, taking casts, and
“forming the General’s bust in plaister.” Later, however, the project
of the equestrian statue is dropped, to Houdon’s natural regret.

[Illustration: STATUE OF WASHINGTON

BY JEAN ANTOINE HOUDON]

“We shall regulate the article of expense as œconomically as we can
with justice to the wishes of the world,” writes Jefferson to Governor
Harrison, concerning the standing statue. “We are agreed in one
circumstance, that the size shall be precisely that of life.” Jefferson
gives patriotic reasons for that decision as to size; he adds with
excellent artistic judgment, “We are sensible that the eye alone
considered will not be quite as well satisfied.” A generation later,
writing from Monticello in regard to the statue of Washington that the
legislature of North Carolina desires to order, he declares that this
work should be somewhat larger than life. A strict realism no longer
delights him. With true Jeffersonian divination of popular currents, he
leans now toward the pseudo-classic ideal already dominant in European
studios. As to the costume chosen, he finds that “every person of taste
in Europe would be for the Roman.... Our boots and regimentals have a
very puny effect.” In short, “Old Canova of Rome” is the artist North
Carolina should employ. It is pleasant to note that just as Houdon,
having “solemnly and feelingly protested against the inadequacy of the
price, evidently undertook the work from motives of reputation alone,”
so too Canova is “animated with ardent zeal to prove himself worthy of
so great a subject.” Thus happily are begun those steadfastly continued
artistic relations between the United States and the two European
countries in which art prospers as the light and livelihood of the
people.

Washington himself, when the Houdon portrait statue is projected, plays
an admirably discreet part in the art criticism of the moment. He
writes to Jefferson, on August 1, 1786:

“In answer to your obliging enquiries respecting the dress, attitude,
etc., which I would wish to have given to the statue in question, I
have only to observe that, not having sufficient knowledge in the art
of sculpture to oppose my judgment to the taste of Connoisseurs, I do
not desire to dictate in the matter.”

How unlike the home life of William Hohenzollern! And how often the
thoughtful sculptor of to-day has wished that Washington’s simple
dignity in admitting an insufficiency of “knowledge in the art of
sculpture” might be pondered and taken to heart by those of us who are
not qualified “to dictate in the matter”! In this our free country of
the self-elected critic, the temple of art is at all hours invaded
by those who cheerily announce that “they do not know much,” but who
nevertheless follow the example of William II rather than of our first
President.

All the Jefferson correspondence respecting these two statues of
Washington is of vital interest to the student of our art history. Our
young Republic, in its early strivings toward art, was fortunate in
having an adviser as well-advised as the master of Monticello. It was
Thomas Jefferson who guided inquiring state legislatures, now toward
Houdon, the powerful French realist, and again toward Canova, the
distinguished Italian idealist. Through Jefferson’s hands, our American
sculpture first received those rich streams of influence, realism and
idealism, both so necessary in any living national art. For realism and
idealism, however often misnamed or over-praised or discredited, each
after the other, will continue to shape the artist’s interpretation
of his vision of life. Today, when in our literature books as
fundamentally unlike as Maria Chapdelaine and Babbitt run their race
side by side as popular favorites, we cannot doubt the hold of either
classicism or naturalism on our lives and times. Gilbert Murray, in
his notes on the Hippolytus, writes that its matchless closing scene
“proves the ultimate falseness of the distinction between classical and
romantic. The highest poetry has the beauty of both.”


III

Returning to the Quaker lady who speaks our prologue, and conning
once more the tale of her works in all their brisk naïveté, the
sympathetic student will easily evoke the difficult conditions under
which sculpture first reared its head in our country. Sculpture,
though an art manifestly answering one of the earliest religious needs
of primitive man, (and indeed the very first of all the arts to fall
under the ban of the censor) is an art much hindered and abridged
during large pioneer movements. Thus the Mayflower, that greatly
accommodating vessel, may have brought over Elder Brewster’s chest or
some fair Priscilla’s spinning-wheel, but we may be sure that never a
statue came out of her hold. Neither architecture nor painting suffered
quite as much as sculpture in that historic sea-change of the early
seventeenth century. As the turtle carries his house on his back,
so the architect, in a sense, may carry his home in his pocket. The
drawings and inherited traditions of cabinet-makers, carpenters, and
architects supplied our colonists with excellent models for furniture,
for mansions, for churches, for state-houses. Such models were not
slavishly followed. They were adapted, often with great originality and
skill, sometimes with creative genius.

The colonists’ sense of form gratified itself in these directions,
since the time was not ripe for sculpture. Diligent in fostering both
foreign importations and local industry, the more prosperous of our
forefathers had good houses, good furniture, good silver, good clothes,
and even good paintings long before they had any good sculpture.
Statues, unlike chocolate-pots and meeting-houses, cannot, even when
all materials are given, be magically called into existence from a
sheaf of plans and specifications placed in the hands of competent
artisans. A considerable body of sculpture in permanent form implies a
background of orderly civilization, well developed on its industrial
side. The marble quarry and the bronze foundry do not spring up
over-night in mushroom growth. They are the foster-children of slow
time. We are called an inventive, craftsmanlike people, but it was
not until the year 1847 that the first casting of a bronze statue was
accomplished in our country. The statue was of the Boston astronomer,
Dr. Bowditch, and by the English sculptor, Ball Hughes. The original
bronze cast was not a wholly successful piece of work; it was long ago
replaced by a bronze from a French foundry. But those familiar with the
difficulties of the situation will recall Dr. Johnson’s observation
about the dog walking on his hind legs. “It is not done well, but you
are surprised to find it done at all.”


IV

However, we need not harp too long and too mournfully on the physical
impediments in our sculptural start. Enormous as these were, they were
less mighty than the spiritual obstacles set up by time and place.
First of all, it is to be remembered that the European world of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was moving on in a mild, manifest,
not necessarily permanent decline in creative power as shown through
the graphic arts. The waves of that decline reached even our own
stern coast. It is safe to say that had the American colonists’ hour
coincided with an hour of large renascence in art throughout Europe,
our forefathers, whether Cavalier or Roundhead, would earlier have
found room for art as a need and a natural expression of the freer life
they sought. As for the distinctively Puritan view, that view too often
(though perhaps not as often as we now think) denied and persecuted
beauty in the fierce Puritan concentration upon holiness. It is true
that art, in its blither and more genial guise, slips away from the
society of the sour-visaged. But it is also true that a great tragic
expression in art sometimes bursts uncontrollably from peoples or
persons with minds exacerbated by long fortitudes. We learn this from
the Belgian sculptor Meunier brooding over his brothers of the Black
Country, from the Serbian sculptor Mestrovic immortalizing in stone
his country’s stern legends, from the poet Dante treading his Inferno.
But the Florentine and the Serbian and the Belgian produced their art
under their native skies. They were not torn up by the roots to live in
a strange land.

Yes, the main impediment in early American art was spiritual rather
than material. When we see to-day in some lonely, half-forgotten
New England village a spacious, nobly-designed, admirably-built
meeting-house, capping the very crest of a high rock-ribbed hill
of exceeding difficulty, (the church at Acworth will serve as an
example) we uncover our heads before the efforts of our fathers to
erect a house of prayer. The spirit moved them. Nothing less would
have sufficed in what they did and suffered. The obstacles in their
path were many and great, but being material, were surmounted. In our
early strivings toward sculpture, the obstacles were both spiritual and
material, and generally speaking, the obstacles won the day. We had
no noteworthy early native sculpture, largely because we lacked the
passion to create it. That passion was not dead, but it lay dormant
during the long wintry season that preceded the spring of our national
consciousness.

In the mean time, men and women died, and had their humble carved
slate headstones; ships put out to sea, glorying in their robust
wooden figure-heads of American make. Benjamin West’s legendary
adventure with his cat’s-fur brushes and his Amerind colors and his
baby sister’s likeness no doubt had its sculptural counterpart in the
creative endeavor of many an unknown fire-side whittler. These obscure
dramas of artistic effort counted; though meagre and lowly, they were
not in vain; they made for craftsmanship, art’s helper. Referring to
more important matters, we do not forget William Rush’s full-length
statue of Washington, hewn from wood, or his soldierly self-portrait,
carved from a pine log; or the early efforts, in portraiture, of Dixey,
in New Jersey, of Augur in Connecticut; of John Frazee, that young
stone-cutter to whom we owe the first marble portrait bust chiseled
in the United States, as late as the year 1824. We remember also the
Browere life-masks, created by a secret process, and useful still as
historic data.

Interesting and emphatic as are the personalities of all these early
workers, that of William Rush is by far the most significant. In
literal truth, Patience Wright was merely our first _sculptress_,
whose work must bear the implications of frailty lent by that name.
But William Rush was our first _sculptor_. In his youth he was a
soldier of the Revolution, and in later life he was long a member of
the Council of Philadelphia; his career as artist and as citizen won
respect for the early art life of our country. Born in Philadelphia
in 1756, he was twenty-nine when Houdon sojourned in that town.
Having been apprenticed when very young, Rush was already well-known
as a carver of ships’ figure-heads, work in which he continued to be
successful throughout his long and busy life. His theory and practice
in wood-carving conformed to Michelangelo’s Gothic creed, somewhat
outworn among sculptors, but of late restored to respect. William Rush
earnestly believed that the carver should see his vision in the block,
and realize its image by hewing away the superfluous shell. He was
modern enough at times to stand by while directing a workman to chop
here and cut there and slice somewhere else, so that he himself could
save his own energy for keeping his vision clear. Of his Spirit of the
Schuylkill, originally in wood but since translated into bronze and
still standing over its basin in Fairmount Park, the chronicles of its
day declared that “no greater piece of art was to be found in all the
world.” The present age will hardly consider this draped figure the
equal, say, of the Maidens of the Erechtheum. Yet the work, with its
companion pieces, the Schuylkill in Chains and the Schuylkill Released,
has its own vigorous archaic classicism which modern students may well
ponder. Rush was one of the planners and founders of the Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts. After this was finally established in 1805, our
first American art organization, he was one of its directors until his
death. As a many-sided man of action and of counsel, of intelligence
and of culture, he sums up the best to be found in the varied
characters of our pioneer artists, personages worthy of our deepest
respect.

We shall be too quick despairers if we brood over the fact that most
of their works show Yankee ingenuity rather than Promethean fire. The
inventive spirit is part of our pioneer heritage; it reappears rather
often in our art history. Robert Fulton, as Mr. Isham reminds us in
his story of American painting, was a promising pupil in Benjamin
West’s London studio. “From there he went to Paris, where he remained
seven years, painting easel pictures, and also the first panorama seen
there, whose memory is still preserved in the name of the Passage des
Panoramas.” Morse is yet another classic example of American genius
serving both art and science. One of the later pupils of West, he had
not only painted vigorous and important pictures but had also played a
striking part in the founding of our National Academy of Design before
he finally “wreaked his genius” on his invention of the telegraph.
Hiram Powers, sculptor of the Greek Slave, in youth acquired merit
from the clock-work devices by which he enhanced the moving charms of
the wax figures he modeled for a museum in Cincinnati. Today, in our
journalistic canvassings of popular opinion as to contemporary American
greatness, we find that in the public mind, Edison’s name leads all
the rest. The prickly palm of greatness is awarded not to a teacher,
to a publicist, to a writer, to a political leader, or to an artist in
any guise whatever, but to an inventor. Inventive genius thus claims
our highest admiration; inventive genius may indeed be our highest
national characteristic. If so, it is worth while (and not in the
least “devastating”) to consider whether the same inventiveness that
animates the early art-forms of William Rush’s followers does not also
contribute something to the very sophisticated creations of our gifted
and fortunately well-trained young sculptors with the _dernier cri_
from Crete in their minds and at their finger-tips.

The story of American sculpture cannot be told under a parable of a
chain with equally strong links throughout. One thinks rather of a
slender thread, which may be fastened to a cord, which will draw up a
strong rope, which will in turn attach itself to a powerful cable. If
early Yankee ingenuity is that slender thread, let us thank God for it,
and hope for better things.


V

With the dawn of our national consciousness just after the dark hours
of the Revolution, a natural human love for the likeness, strengthened
by a generous surrender to hero-worship, is already arousing in us
a longing for an art that will express our patriotic emotions. If
achievement alone be considered, there is surely a great gulf fixed
between Patience Wright and Jean Antoine Houdon. But the same sincere
passion fires Quakeress and _citoyen_; their common aim is a strong
representation of real life, transfigured by the flame of the spirit
burning in the lamp of clay. It is recorded that an overpowering sense
of Washington’s greatness sometimes actually impeded those artists who
aspired to reveal him, body and soul, to posterity. Posterity then is
fortunate because our fathers received from Houdon’s genius not only
the Washington statue, but also seven noble portrait busts, those of
Franklin, Paul Jones, Washington, Lafayette, Jefferson, Fulton, and
Joel Barlow, to mention them in the order of their creation, from 1778
to 1803. These virile interpretations of character were not lost in the
ins and outs of our Atlantic coast-line. Even to this day, some one
or other of them often reappears in public view, to excite interest,
admiration, and controversy. But in the early nineteenth century, as
is shown by Jefferson’s counsel to the North Carolina legislature,
Conova, rather than Houdon, has become the name to conjure with. Even
in portraiture, realism has given way to pseudo-classicism, long before
Greenough arrives on the stage with his Washington as the Olympian
Zeus, a colossal half-draped marble figure designed for a shrine within
the Capitol.

[Illustration: BUST OF WASHINGTON, AT MOUNT VERNON

BY JEAN ANTOINE HOUDON]




CHAPTER II

OUR BLITHE BEGINNING DAYS


I

Alive and kicking; better than we now realize, the old phrase fits
our young American art of the early nineteenth century. In Boston,
Mr. Bulfinch is packing his triangles and T-squares for a journey
to Washington, where he is to remain twelve years as Latrobe’s
successor as architect of the Capitol. In New York, morning-star
young art-students are passionately performing their historic ritual
of fighting the janitor and founding new movements; even Colonel
Trumbull is defied; hence, in 1825, our National Academy of Design.
In Philadelphia, harmony presides over the Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts. But in Washington, what commotion! Restorations are to be
made after the fires of the British; there are new excavations, new
aspirations. There’s sculptor’s work here for many a year. Bronze doors
must be created, in the supposed manner of Ghiberti; pediments must be
populated; and what is a dome without its colossal figure of Freedom?
Greenough and Crawford and Randolph Rogers are the sculptors of the
hour. And always Hiram Powers, somewhat apart from the Washington
bustle.

Modern imagination fails to see those early craftsmen as they really
were. Because they are dead to us now, we fall into the error of
thinking that they always were dead, anyway; the stilly sort of
sculpture they often made sustains us in that illusion. But when we
look into their lives, and hear their sayings, we learn, almost with a
shock, that these men felt deeply, even while they expressed themselves
feebly in their art.

Living amidst heaped riches of opportunity, the art-student of to-day
can scarcely imagine the bleak poverty of artistic resource that
Greenough and Crawford and Powers left behind them when they sailed
away to Rome or to Florence. Nowadays, art-schools flourish here: casts
of good sculpture abound; photographs of masterpieces may be had at a
small price. Museums freely show examples of the arts of all nations,
and intelligently arrange these displays to serve the immediate needs
of students; in short, they do a great work so well that they have
already become a target for so-called criticism from self-styled
intellectuals exposing their wits in the columns of would-be radical
journals. Things were very different in Greenough’s time. There were
indeed a few collections of casts, probably with soiled noses; there
were portfolios of steel engravings, that sometimes bore false witness
against beauty.

Knowing the leanness of those early years, we can but wonder at the
large vision of our fathers in considering our capital city; and we can
but thank our lucky Stars and Stripes for the bond of sympathy between
our young Republic and France, a sympathy partly responsible for the
happy choice of General Washington’s aid, Major Pierre L’Enfant, as
our first city planner. The spirit of L’Enfant’s work has survived
the shocks of time and senates; that plan of the year 1792 (since
extended in accordance with the principles of design it embodied) is
still regarded as “at once the finest and most comprehensive plan ever
devised for a capital city.” Those lean years were not by any means the
day of small things; it is to this hour a blessing for sculpture and
for architecture that Washington and Jefferson and L’Enfant laid large
foundations for the seat of Government. A century ago, the continued
building and re-building of the Capitol expressed a profound national
feeling; the souls of our sculptors, as far as we had sculptors, were
thrilled with desire to add plastic beauty to its gates and gables.
At least one of those great dreams was destined to end as food for
journalistic jibes. Greenough’s colossal marble Washington as the
Olympian Zeus, a grandiose conception pored over for seven years in
Italy, proved to be too large and heavy for the indoor placing intended
for it, and it was doomed to be set up outside the Capitol for the
public to sharpen its wits upon. Unfavorably shown, it is unjustly
viewed. One recalls with pleasure Saint-Gaudens’s gentle judgments of
our pioneer sculptors and their handiwork. “Those men were greater
than we know,” he would say. He refused to join in any of our modern
merriment at the expense of the Olympian Zeus. _Esprit de corps_
compelled him to recognize in Greenough some large trace of the artist
as well as the craftsman.


II

Consider for a moment the attractive young Irish-American sculptor
Crawford standing rapt before his splendidly blank Senate pediment,
with his theme of the Past and Present of the Republic in his eye.
Those were our blithe beginning days when a sculptor might confront
his pediment with a heart unburdened by the remembrance of other
men’s failures in pediments, and with a mind undisciplined by any
previous knowledge of the needs of pediments. He did not dread those
bitter acuities of space at right and left, those angles which to
modern discrimination often seem so grossly overstuffed when filled,
so tragically vacant when left “to let.” He had never heard of the
“orchestration of shadows,” or of “musical repetitions,” or of “blonde
modeling,” or of “keeping the masses white,” or of “the creative
spiral,” or of “mastery through the golden diagonal.” He had never
been adjured, like the young student Saint-Gaudens, to “beware the
_boule de suif_”; on the other hand, he had never been advised, with
students coming after Saint-Gaudens, to seek richness of modeling by
means of “fatty ends.” Sculptural color he would probably have regarded
as having something to do with paint. He of course had his own patter,
blown abroad by the writers of a too prosaic poetry and a too poetic
prose. The real writers, too, used to lend a hand in presenting art to
the public. When the genius of Edward Everett sprang to the rescue of
Greenough’s Washington, and when Hawthorne sent out winged words about
little Miss Hosmer’s Zenobia, sculpture was receiving from scholarship
a needed sort of first aid.

To return to the Capitol pediment, Crawford’s intention and attitude
were quite uncomplicated. He had but to snatch the largest theme in
sight, and to do his best with shaping its figures one by one inside
his triangle of grandeur. The marvel is that he came so near to
success. The thing has a kind of distinction from the man’s singleness
of aim. Since then, scores of our sculptors from coast to coast have
solved the pediment problem with varying success. Many of them bring
a highly personal and interesting solution. Ward, Bartlett, French,
O’Connor, Bitter, Weinman, the Piccirillis,--these names but begin the
list. The world calls us a wasteful nation, a nation that unbuilds as
it builds. In the face of this, it is pleasant to know that only a few
months ago, Mr. Bartlett’s handsome Peace Protecting Genius has been
set up in the House pediment, to match Crawford’s Past and Present of
the Republic at the Senate wing. Nearly a century has elapsed since the
Capitol first busied itself with pedimental decorations. Our sculpture
has had time to learn in these years.


III

Greenough came first in our line of scholarly sculptors, that class
to which W. W. Story later lent great lustre. A Latin inscription
of five lines, beginning “Simulacrum istud” and ending “Horatius
Greenough faciebat” marks the huge Washington statue. Well, if I
rightly understand this sculptor, I like his “faciebat.” It seems
more conscientious and less cocksure than the “fecit” with which our
sculptors sometimes grace their signatures, and it is certainly not
so gruff as the laconic “sc.” Between its eight letters one reads the
coming and going of those seven diligent Italian years; and we shall
deceive ourselves if we count those years wholly lost for our American
art. If only Greenough could have enjoyed some of the surplusage of
admiration given to his contemporary Powers for his Greek Slave with
her well-smoothed body, her manacled Medicean hand, and the accurately
fringed mantle at her feet! Though expressly advertised as a nude
figure, she is dressed from top to toe in a most unfleshly hard-soft
technique which our time calls incompetent, but which 1847 styled “the
spiritualization of the marble.” The personality of the artist counted
very largely in those days; while Greenough was scholarly and Crawford
attractive, and while Randolph Rogers with his bronze doors and his
Nydia was what would now be called a good “go-getter,” Hiram Powers was
easily the main spellbinder of the early group.

With the exception of Rodin’s Balzac of fifty years later, no statue
of the nineteenth century has ever been so famous as the Greek Slave.
It is one of the paradoxes of art that this strangely ill-assorted
pair go down the corridors of that great age together, united solely
by the bond of greatest fame. It is worth while to examine the two,
placed side by side in the museum of our minds. Both are so well known
through prints and photographs that many persons who have never really
seen either one face to face, now fancy that they have studied both
at close range. Both are sculptural anecdotes; one is told with a
leisurely abundance of detail, the other with a swift dash for the
climax. The Vermonter’s statue is surely meant to be a conscientious
rendering “from the Nudo,” as our grandparents phrased it, but the
Frenchman, in his passion to translate into sculpture a force of
literature, has gone far beyond what was to him a daily commonplace,
the study of flesh. As for the mere apparel of the subject, one man
has scheduled it to the last stitch, while the other has piled it up
vehemently into a shapeless monolith from which emerges the triumphant
head. Each sculptor doubtless threw his whole soul into revealing the
spirit of the matter in hand. Which of the two has succeeded? If the
parallel becomes deadly here, Mr. Powers has brought it on himself by
his extraordinary fame in three countries. Everything conspired for
the celebrity of the Slave,--her creation in Italy, her fortunate
début in England, her travels to America, and, best of all, that body
of clergymen deputed to pass upon her moral status. One can but wonder
whether every last one of these took the matter seriously, or whether
some one of them winked at some other during the deliberations. The
sculptor made a modest number of copies of his masterpiece. But other
sculptors reproduced their marble visions by the baker’s dozen, by
the score. In fact, only yesterday a venerable eye-witness of those
times reported that a certain American sculptor disposed of no less
than two hundred marble copies of a life-sized ideal figure. Appalling
iteration! One asks where all the marble came from, and whither it all
went. And that sculptor apparently had no idea that in this business
of the two hundred copies he was showing himself two hundred times as
much salesman as artist. Fashions alter, in ethics as in art. To-day,
such a practitioner would hardly be _persona grata_ in the National
Sculpture Society.


IV

Meanwhile a young modern sculptor at my elbow very civilly inquires,
“But why the devil didn’t those old boys do their home stuff?” The
obvious answer would be, that if the home is where the heart is, then
in a very real sense they _did_ do their home stuff. They were not at
home among the Vermont mountains, or by the Great Lakes. They felt that
their birthright in art called them away from their first birthplace
to their second. Very soon, too, the all-absorbing topic of slavery
will be presented by our sculptors, in a different way and under a
more timely aspect. Long before Thomas Ball places his Emancipation
groups in Washington and in Boston, Ward has produced his Freedman,
and John Rogers the Slave Auction that in 1860 heralds his long series
of popular groups. Choosing subjects both classic and realistic, Miss
Hosmer, Miss Ream and other women sculptors have a considerable vogue.
From that earlier period remain beautiful classic works by Rinehart,
founder of the Rinehart scholarship which much later send abroad Hermon
MacNeil, one of the most distinguished of our modern sculptors, and now
President of our National Sculpture Society. Rinehart’s Clytie, coming
but a few years after the Greek Slave, shows a marked advance over
her more famous sister. And Erastus Palmer’s winning White Captive,
although not new in theme, has a great freshness, a delicate realism of
treatment. To quote from my article on the exhibition of contemporary
sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum, “No less interesting to the
student of sculpture is the kaleidoscopic juxtaposition of Palmer and
Manship, two artists of two different generations. Only the width of a
room parts the White Captive from the Girl with Gazelles, from which
we note that in aim these men are not so different as we once had
dreamed.... As to manner, much might be said besides these two obvious
truths; first, that the newest manner is often the oldest, or at least
the longest forgotten at the time of its resuscitation, it being a
thing which for some obscure human reason or other ‘men want dug up
again’; and next, that the best manner is that which scarcely shows as
a manner at all, but is taken for granted as accompaniment of something
more important, the matter and the spirit.” It would appear that the
young men of to-day are doing much the same thing as “those old boys”
my sculptor friend speaks of: they are seeking modern inspiration from
ancient models, but they are doing it with more knowledge, more grace,
more humor, more assurance, more style. Style? Perhaps the right word
is stylization.

[Illustration: CLYTIE

BY WILLIAM H. RINEHART]

[Illustration: WHITE CAPTIVE

BY ERASTUS D. PALMER]




CHAPTER III

OF THREE LEADERS, AND OF MORAL EARNESTNESS IN ART


I

Moral earnestness? I use both words gladly, and without apology. Why
should any one fear that two words so packed with meaning should breed
ennui?

A curious fact about our contemporary criticism of art and literature
is this: that a criticism which constantly declares itself to be
courageous in all ways, and which really has proved itself to be
courageous in many ways, often scurries away affrighted the moment it
grazes the word _moral_. But why? Does it fear the lash of epithets
such as Pharisee, Philistine, Victorian? The sting has long ago gone
out of those hard names.

Over and over again, the critic will aim some well-considered attack
upon a certain specified baseness that he perceives and abhors in
literature or in art; and then, before he finishes his good work, (and
you can see from his look that he believes it to be good work) he
suddenly decamps, with the observation, “But this is not in the least
a question of morals; it is a question of artistic taste.” Sometimes
his reader cannot help thinking, by contrast, of that quick word of the
old Greek dramatist, protesting against some of the lewd myths of his
religion,

    “Say not there be adulterers in heaven,
    Nor prisoner gods and jailers:--long ago
    My heart hath named it vile and shall not alter!”

If someone nowadays should speak like that, might it not clear the air?
I mean, some valued critic of our arts and letters. As it is, we of
today leave such work to the censor. And our democracy, avid for class
distinctions, accounts the censor considerably lower than the angels.
The censor, poor soul, might as well slink at once into the society of
the executioner, that most dejected, most rejected figure in history.
When the censor says, in his own way, “My heart hath named it vile,”
nobody pays much attention. But the world might look up if some urbane
and trusted critic would write with the moral earnestness of Euripides,
dodging nothing. Kenyon Cox used to do so.

What I am driving at is this: Without moral earnestness, (very probably
the French would call it seriousness) art cannot prosper in a strange
country, under unnative sky. There would be no foundation for laying
the cornerstones of art, let alone for building its high-erected
arches. It is a solemn thought, is it not, that American sculptors are
today placing their creations on soil that never before was moulded
into forms of vivid art such as the Old World knew in the dawn of human
culture? For with due regard to our ancient Aztec civilization from
Zuñi to Cuzco, our pre-historic New World has nothing to show in any
way comparable with those free forms sketched twenty thousand years
ago on the walls of the paleolithic caverns in Southwestern Europe,
in the very regions where the nineteenth century masters of sculpture
were born. To this day, American artists have all the responsibility
that comes with the beginnings and transplantings of culture. They are
ancestors.


II

Euripides was creator rather than critic. It may be that the moral
earnestness we need must come to us in a thousand unseen ways through
the reconciling hands of creation, rather than in one way through the
tongue or pen of the critic.

I shall not say that this quality of moral earnestness is found
everywhere in American sculpture. But I know that it is found in many
places, and in nearly all the high places. Moral earnestness is the
very foundation of the only sort of artistic conscience that amounts
to much as a contribution toward the higher life in art. It was a
strongly developed artistic conscience that often impelled Shrady, like
Saint-Gaudens before him, to break the letter of some lesser clause
of his contract, in order to keep faith with the spirit of the whole.
Consider the moral earnestness of George Grey Barnard, one of the
few modern masters of the imagination as it speaks in stone. You will
find that in Barnard this earnestness is part and parcel of the artist
he now is; just as it was once part and parcel of Barnard the young
student, devoting intense study to the exacting yet large processes of
the marble cutter; and by marble cutter I mean not the practitioner,
the doomed copyist, but the sort of marble cutter that might call
Michelangelo kinsman, and be at ease on the Acropolis with Pheidias and
his men. And even if, like myself, you cannot make Barnard’s bronze
presentment of Lincoln square with your own thrice dear and clear
image of this great man, this great symbol of American statesmanship,
you will grant that only a high integrity of purpose in the matter
could have kept the sculptor steadfast in the truth as he saw it. This
fundamental earnestness of Barnard’s adds a distinction to his most
casual or even whimsical words concerning art. When he talks to you
about “the cheekbones that make the pathos of a face,” a dozen examples
of what he means fill your memory.


III

It is a very happy thing for our sculpture that the three men who
have most definitely guided its destinies through the past forty
years,--Ward, Saint-Gaudens, French,--are hailed as men of moral
force. And it is a special cause for congratulation that Mr. French,
the youngest-born of the three, still remains with us, still vigorous
in achievement. One expects moral earnestness from Mr. French, a New
Englander of gracious ancestry, born and bred in the very happiest
circumstances of New England life, and growing up gaily in the
light-and-shade of Concord philosophy. One expects it from Mr. Ward,
with his open-air Ohio boyhood of mingled zests and rigors, and his
later conscientious acceptance of the public duties laid upon any
artist who happens also to be an organizer, a “man’s man.” And whether
one expects it or not, one finds it in rich measure in Saint-Gaudens.
This child of France, born in Ireland, carries within him all the days
of his life the light of an American conscience. Without a compelling
moral earnestness, he could never have brought to completion, in face
of unimaginable difficulties, some of the masterpieces on which his
fame rests.

Every artist knows of the fourteen years during which the Shaw
monument remained in his studio, never long absent from his thought.
Many are familiar with the repeated trials through which his vision
of General Sherman and the Angel of Victory-Peace finally emerged
triumphant. A man once told his dentist of Saint-Gaudens, of the Shaw
monument, of the fourteen years. “Well,” said the dentist, twirling
his little mahogany stand of bright tools, in complacent recollection
of some of his own swifter victories, “he couldn’t have been a very
smart artist, to take all that time.” No, indeed, Saint-Gaudens was
not a very smart artist. The very smart artist, one concludes, can
flourish for his day without a deep foundation of moral earnestness.
Saint-Gaudens was simply the very great artist. With Mr. Ward and Mr.
French, he made integrity and the artistic conscience the only natural
choice for scores of young sculptors now influencing our lives. What
these three leaders have thus contributed of moral beauty, of needed
moral earnestness to our society, will never be measured. It is too
far-reaching and too deep-seated. Most observers consider that a
certain superficiality mars American life. Although we need not join
those defeatists who believe that this defect in itself spells our
ruin, we shall certainly admit that the defect exists. All honor, then,
to the moral earnestness that today, largely because of these three
leaders, is so much a part of the spirit of American sculpture.

The sculptor’s work means far more than staying in a studio and luring
visions into clay or stone or bronze. His business isn’t altogether
a wrestling with angels. There’s a certain amount of coping with
committees; and his visions are often none the worse for the honest
revisions that other men may suggest. The sculptor’s masterpiece must
be able to resist the spiritual wear-and-tear of the marketplace of
the world’s opinion. It is no masterpiece unless it can in the end
do that. And if, as it stands, the work is a silent influence against
superficiality and emptiness, something is gained for American life.
Glad sculpture as well as grave sculpture can exert that influence.


IV

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS WARD

No one is as disdainful of the early Victorians as the late Victorians
used to be. In the strength of the ’eighties and ’nineties our studios
often resounded with mutterings against the feebleness of the ’fifties.
Perhaps some envy of certain primitive successes was mingled with this
righteous wrath. But after all, our Powerses and Rogerses were not in
the least the mere early worms their successors once said they were.
A juster perspective invites the reflection that American sculpture
in its development needed the influence of the Greek Slave and her
thousand daughters as it has needed that of the Rock Creek figure, of
the Lincoln Memorial, and of the fire-new work beautifully presented
by our youngest group of sculptors. Those marble shapes now dwelling
vaguely somewhere in the dark corridors of relegation had once a
thrilling part to play. They were our ideals, to be seen, prized and
possessed in the name of art. So, the old songs of blame have long been
out of date. But they did good service in the days when John Quincy
Adams Ward, a natural leader of men, turned a heroic back on Europe as
a place for the American artist to live in. Go there to study, but not
to stay, was his word.

Vision, veracity, virility are the three V’s that stamped his life
and work. Like his friend Howells, he was Ohio-born; both men had
boyhood aspirations that carried them away from their Middle-Border
pioneer activities into the more genial milieu to be found among our
Eastern salt-water cities. Living from 1830 to 1910, and working sixty
years in his art, Ward has rightly been called the Colossus that
bestrides the two separate worlds of our former and latter periods
in sculpture. Though he founded no school, his influence has been
far-reaching. His Beecher statue, flanked by its two lyrical groups,
his Garfield monument with its attendant epic groups of War and Peace,
his noble equestrian figure of General Thomas are among a host of
sterling works that prove him the “all round” sculptor. In his youth,
he played a well-known and highly practical part in the making of
Brown’s equestrian statue of Washington, one of the best-praised and
worst-placed monuments in the city of New York. Since the praise is
deserved, the placing discredits us far more than it does the heroic
artists who carried the work to completion. All sculptors who succeed
in their equestrian statues are heroic; even if they are not heroes
when they begin such enterprises they achieve heroism before they
finish them. And if that is true to-day, with our more highly organized
methods both of the sculptor’s art and of the bronze-founder’s science,
what must it have been in 1856, when Brown’s Washington, our second
equestrian statue, first saw the light? In later life, Ward sometimes
spoke in whimsical recollection of industrious apprentice days that he,
a luckier type of Jonah, spent within the belly of the horse cast in
bronze by French workmen assisting Brown.

Ward had in his nature and in his art the great elements of the
precursor. He represents not only the pioneer in American sculpture,
but in no small measure and sometimes in a singular way, the prophet.
Witness the dog with scalloped mane in his admirable group of the
Indian Hunter, a work that much impressed the youthful Saint-Gaudens,
fresh from years of study among European masters and masterpieces.
Here we have a fore-taste of that delightful treatment of animal form
found in the bronzes of the young men from the American Academy in
Rome. To be sure, Ward’s dog does not seem to spring forward full-armed
in a beautifully conventionalized linear panoply of bone and muscle
resurrected from some newly revealed Klazomenian sarcophagus; he is not
quite so Cretanly curled as some of the appealing animal figures of
to-day, but ’tis enough, ’t will serve. And the whole group, as seen
happily placed in Central Park, reveals the naturalism in which Ward
envelops his own peculiar kind of classicism. For a nobler instance of
Ward’s forward-looking quality, choose the bronze Washington standing
on the steps of the Sub-Treasury in New York, in the very heart of all
our heart-breaking yet inspiring financial traffic. That statue is not
merely a portrait of Washington, but a symbolic expression of early
American greatness in leadership.

[Illustration: STATUE OF WASHINGTON

BY JOHN QUINCY ADAMS WARD]

A comparison between the Ward Washington and the Houdon Washington
is permitted here; Houdon’s position as a commanding figure among
the sculptors of all time is too securely based on his incomparable
busts and on his Voltaire at the Comédie-Française to be in the least
disturbed by any of our observations. Remembering that Ward’s task was
naturally less difficult than Houdon’s, we shall do no injustice to
our earliest foreign master in sculpture when we remark that Ward’s
Washington, rather than Houdon’s, bears away the palm for the
larger monumental qualities of design. The great Frenchman’s work is
cumbered from the waist down with naturalistic emblems from field and
forum. Neither ploughshare nor fasces nor cane nor sword nor cloak
are omitted. Their insistence is of course redeemed in general by
Houdon’s general mastery, and in particular by his particular prowess
in rendering the head; it is Houdon’s glory that in some inexplicable
way his hand makes every face it touches come alive. Ward’s statue,
appearing almost a century later, owes something to Houdon; every
portrait statue of Washington, if worth much, will owe something to
Houdon. But what we would especially note is, that in this virile
presentment of Washington, Ward has chosen the better part of both
realism and classicism; The work has something of the serenity of
synthesis and elimination of detail that we love in the Parthenon
masterpieces, yet it has enough of modern individualism and modern
insistence upon expression and emotion to satisfy the longings of the
everyday American spectator.

Our reference to the super-symbolism in Houdon’s Washington (a
flaw partly explained, it may be, by the inexorable demands of our
forefathers as well as of practical marble-cutting) leads us to
the observation that to-day, taken by and large, French monumental
art suffers enormously from emblematic excrescences. What scales
of justice and of mermaids, what pinions of angels and eagles and
doves, what garlands and garters and gaiters, what palettes and
portfolios, what seines and scrolls and T-squares have been gathered
together in the French marketplaces as candidates for immortality!
And what complication of silhouette, what lack of massing in light
and shade, have resulted thereby! This paradox of the over-explained
wrongs the clear French mind, the intuitive French eye. How is it in
our own country? But I studiously avoid breathing any word here of
any lesson for our own sculptors. It is enough to point out that a
healthy, if high-strung, revolt against all this easy offhand grab-bag
naturalistic symbolism will not only bring in its train the sculpture
of serious protest; it will also pick up on its fringes plenty of
those tongue-in-cheek specimens of so-called sculpture familiar in our
century. From Rodin’s candle-lit and blanketed Balzac of the previous
generation down to the latest Greenwich Village absurdity, in which
human portraiture once more achieves its apotheosis on the surface of
an egg, such revolt is visible. It is of course a revolt against many
things besides an overdone symbolism; but the symbolism may well serve
as a symbol for the rest. All honor then to the austerity of Ward’s
Washington.

As Ward in his youth worked for an older man, so he himself in his
later years had the good fortune to meet the newer ideals in his
art through collaboration with younger sculptors. Mr. Bartlett’s
sympathetic assistance is apparent in the Stock Exchange pediment,
and in the equestrian statue of General Hancock, for Fairmount Park.
This last was the work that engaged Ward’s thought to the very day of
his death. But nowhere shall we study Ward better than in the statue
of Washington. Here we see this sculptor as he himself would wish to
be seen; a sculptor of mankind at its most heroic, for mankind at its
daily average. “Our work,” he often said, “must touch the ordinary
human heart.” His rugged, straightforward genius was not suited for
revealing the more exquisite aspects of beauty, the more whimsical
secrets of the soul. Never fear; later sculptors, both men and women,
will fully attend to those things. In the words of Ward’s historic
observation to the Farragut statue committee, “Give the younger man the
chance!”


V

AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS

Born eighteen years after Ward, and dying while Ward still had three
years of strenuous work before him, Augustus Saint-Gaudens lives in our
annals as the most illustrious figure in American art. Both the Old
World and the New see it so.

Brought to this country at the age of six months, the Dublin-born child
of a French father and an Irish mother, he soon became more American
than the Americans themselves. We see him first as the typical New York
sidewalk boy, learning not much in school, but far more from eager
contacts in the city boy’s world of home, parents, streets, policemen,
processions; the atmosphere of the Civil War stirs his young blood,
and will long afterward quicken his sculpture of our Civil War heroes.
At fourteen he is by day a cameo-cutter’s apprentice, by night a rapt
student of drawing at Cooper Institute. At nineteen, with a hundred
dollars and his father’s blessing, he sails abroad for his first three
years of foreign study and travel; in Paris and Rome he learns and
earns; he has a stout heart, a lean purse, and an undying passion for
his art. His return to New York with a few small commissions picked
up, as the custom then was, from American travellers sojourning in
Rome; his second stay abroad; his early struggles to obtain a footing;
his marriage and subsequent three years in Paris while creating the
Farragut; his ardent friendship with Stanford White, John La
Farge, and other strong personalities of the day;--surely all this
seems quite the usual story. But Saint-Gaudens had always his own
innermost unusualness that somehow placed him above his fellows; and
the victorious completion of the Farragut in 1881 was but the first of
a long line of signal triumphs. And even his almost forgotten triumphs
(for example, the great improvement in our coinage initiated by his
endeavor) are signal triumphs. There was no branch of his art in which
he did not excel; it was an art designed in general for the flowingness
of bronze rather than for reproduction within the confines of the
marble block.

[Illustration: STATUE OF ADMIRAL FARRAGUT

BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS]

Too often versatility connotes a superficiality of mind, an easily
satisfied outlook. Not so with Saint-Gaudens. He was if anything
over-critical of his work; for instance, he never forgot that the
snare of the picturesque was in his path, as it is in the path of every
sculptor trying to infuse a genial human warmth into the sculptural
order. His knowledge in the lesser art of cameo-cutting, a knowledge
which in some sculptors would have been swept aside as detrimental to a
spacious style, helped rather than hindered him in his advance toward
his ultimate mastery over relief of all kinds,--the coin, the intimate
portrait medallion, the heroic monumental relief. He may be truly said
to have invented that charming form of bas-relief likeness shown in the
portraits of the Schiff children, the Butler children, Bastien-Lepage,
Violet Sargent, and many others. Nothing quite like these works had
ever before been produced, either in the French medalists’ fertile
art of the nineteenth century or in that still richer period of the
Italian Renaissance medal, heralded by Pisano. And yet, since little
in the field of art is utterly original, we are reminded here of that
old saying about the power of the man meeting the power of the moment.
In beautiful angel-figures such as the Amor-Caritas in high relief,
Saint-Gaudens realized and expressed the spiritual meanings of other
artists of his time, both sculptors and painters; this we see when we
study French’s noble Angel of Death, and the Burne-Jones figures on
their golden stair.

Critics are divided, not as to the greatness of Saint-Gaudens, but as
to the work which best stores up within itself the true elements of
his greatness. Those who have seen tears start from the eyelids of
gray veterans standing before the Shaw Memorial will perhaps say the
Shaw, while those who perceive with delight all that the sculptor has
attained in the Sherman equestrian group, with its thrilling harmony
of spiritual and realistic presentation, will perhaps say the Sherman.
Londoners and Chicagoans will rest content in their great possession
of the standing Lincoln. Others again will find their truest vision of
this artist’s power in the enfolded mystery of the Rock Creek figure,
sometimes called Nirvana, but better named the Peace of God. And if
(as I think) this is indeed his consummate, his culminating work, how
strange that it is, in a sense, a somewhat unexpected, uncharacteristic
work! In its profound other-worldliness, it seems as withdrawn from
the Sherman and the Puritan and the Farragut as from those happy
portrait-reliefs of living beings in their loveliness or strength. How
often artists have mused on the beauty of the head of this figure!
Every trace of artistic knowingness is eliminated here; nothing so vain
and petty as any suggestion of accomplished technique intrudes. The
beholder’s attention is directed solely toward whatever inner meaning
he finds in those shadowed lineaments.

Saint-Gaudens had the power of attracting to his service young men and
women of true artistic ability. MacMonnies, Flanagan, Fraser, Weinman,
Martiny, Proctor, Hering, Miss Grimes, Miss Ward,--all of these have
won distinction in their own personal work in sculpture; some among
them are now past masters. But a higher power than that of winning
the enthusiastic loyalty of youth belonged to Saint-Gaudens. He had
also the gift of drawing from each worker something finer and more
precious than anything that this worker had ever before possessed. He
compelled his assistants to build better than they knew. It is part
of this sculptor’s glory that no one can ever mistake the subsequent
work of his “arrived” pupils, even the most famous of these, for the
work of Saint-Gaudens. In anonymous service to him, they best perfected
themselves as individual artists.

How I wish I might make myself clear when touching this vexed subject
of apprenticeship! The romantic part of the world dwelling far from
the realities of studio life loves to picture a pathetic situation of
gifted youth silently wasting its genius in saving the day for the
commonplace performances of a middle-aged employer. But this poetic
view squares with cinema ideals rather than with the facts. At a recent
exhibition of weird works by the immature young sculptor X, (such
shows at times add to the gayety of New York) I heard an ardent lady
worshipper of something she called “the new spirit of expressionism,”
denounce the greed and vanity of the middle-aged sculptor Y, basely
employing the bright unrecognized wings of X, to give fire and
movement to the pedestrian Y inventions. Ah, if that lady only knew
the truth about X and Y! But it was closing-time, and I made no
attempt to tell her the truth; it would have seemed rather gray and
commonplace compared with her own glamorous moving-picturization of
studio life. All her thought was of heroism and oppression, not of work
and wages. Yet I might at least have given her this one helpful fact;
that almost without exception, the successful sculptors of to-day look
back with gratitude toward the multitudinous activities of their young
apprenticeships; sometimes they even feel a secret amazement that their
former masters should have put up with them so long.


VI

DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH

Last summer, revisiting Concord after many years, I crossed “the rude
bridge that arched the flood,” and found Mr. French’s Minute Man,
embattled still, though embowered in quietness, and made safe from the
ruder motor traffic of the day. It seemed incredible that a youth of
twenty-three, with no models except the Apollo Belvidere and himself,
and with no instruction beyond that derived from a month in Ward’s
studio and from Dr. Rimmer’s anatomy lectures, could have produced a
statue so competent and so sculptural as this. Then I remembered that
in 1919 the most proudly acclaimed work of American art for the year
was Mr. French’s marble figure of Memory; and it was interesting to
note that the Minute Man, however immediately convincing in general
appeal, appeared in a sense as the work of an artist older than the
sculptor of the Memory. For the Minute Man has here and there a lean
gravity of modeling that we rightly or wrongly associate with passing
maturity, while the forms of the Memory are rich and commanding,
yet enveloped with that serenity for which we have no better word
than classic. And what is the true meaning of classic, except as it
describes that which is fresh and vivid to-day, yet has the underlying
force of permanence, the very tide of immortality flowing in its veins?
Many of our artists acquire the classic spirit, many have it thrust
upon them, some reject it utterly. But Mr. French is the classic
spirit personified among us; born so, not made so; and what he creates
is illumined by his understanding of the dignity of the human soul,
and by his belief that beauty and truth are acceptable to the human
mind. This gracious seated figure of Memory, gazing calmly into the
glass that reflects, not her own person but the shapes of the past,
is admirably composed from every point of view and within the natural
limits of the marble. A critic has written of it as “showing at its
best Mr. French’s idealism, and being at the same time a masterly study
of the nude, true to the nobler forms of nature, yet with a skillful
avoidance of what is commonly known as realism.” That phrase “true
to the nobler forms of nature” well describes this sculptor’s great
ideal figures. Mr. French is to-day the dean of American sculpture,
the honorary President of the National Sculpture Society; a presence
with all the gracious authority conferred by deanship, and with nothing
whatever of the dry ancientry at times associated with that honor.

There is something of the unexpected in the course of every great
artist. With Ward it is one thing, with Saint-Gaudens another. With
Daniel Chester French, born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1850, the
unexpected thing is that in his art education he seems somehow to
have skipped the slow Preamble and the voluminous Whereas, and to
have reached almost at a bound the precincts of the Resolved. Concord
has never lacked favorite sons, and young Daniel among the lions
of that town of his later boyhood felt only their appreciation and
encouragement. But with one year in Florence, spent largely under the
genial influence of Thomas Ball, sculptor of the first equestrian
monument placed in New England, his so-called study-period ends. A
pediment for the St. Louis Custom House awaits him in 1877; within
the next few years he executes similar architectural sculpture for
Philadelphia and Boston. In 1879 he models from life his beautiful
portrait bust of Emerson.

[Illustration: MEMORY

BY DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH]

Surely we cannot say that his art education was finished before these
things were attempted. It progressed with them, and with those other
creations, more idealistic in type, in which his imagination had fuller
play. When in 1888 he went to Paris to make the model for his marble
statue of General Cass of Michigan, he went as a master, yet as a
seeker; one well prepared to gain without groping all that was worth
while in the influence of the time and place. Five years later, at the
Columbian Exposition, his genius makes an extraordinary appeal to his
fellow-countrymen in two imposing works, the Republic and the consoling
Angel of Death. These of course differ widely in their inspiration
and in the emotion they arouse, but they are equally eloquent. The
Gallaudet group, placed in Washington in 1889, had already spoken its
message to the human heart. An inner radiance of the spirit shines from
that very solidly and beautifully composed group of the great teacher
and the little deaf-mute; nowhere else in sculpture have we found so
adequate and touching an expression of the fatherliness that should
animate those who teach, and of the trust of those who must needs
learn or be lost. Who would have guessed that sculpture could have
found out this way of saying Faith, Hope, and Charity? And beneath all
that captivates the general public, how much there is in the Angel,
the Republic, and the Gallaudet that remains of special interest to
artists, because of the individual mastery of a special problem! In
collaboration with Mr. Potter, the accomplished master of animal
sculpture, Mr. French has created some of our most notable equestrian
statues; the General Grant and the General Meade for Philadelphia, the
General Washington, presented to France by an association of American
women, the General Hooker for Boston. Other works of high import are
the majestic Alma Mater at Columbia University, the bronze doors in
delicately shadowed relief for the Boston Public Library, the colossal
seated bronze figure of Lincoln enshrined within the Lincoln Memorial
at Washington.

Once again let it be said, a man’s work shows his mind. What Mr.
French’s art has given to our country is something greatly needed here
to-day, that quality which for lack of a better name we call urbanity.
There ought to be a higher word for this gift, but Matthew Arnold had
to put up with the term, and so must I. The harried dweller in our
American _urbs_ is often far from urbane, more’s the pity. But the
urbanity we need now, in our arts, our letters, our life, is something
that goes deeper than courtesy; it is something that is allied to the
spirit of Amor-Caritas seen not only in the Saint-Gaudens angel of
that name, but also in Mr. French’s Alma Mater, and in his Angel of
Death. Even in the gesture of the Republic’s arms, and in the very
folds of her garments, there is a reminder of that large charitable
humanist urbanity all nations need when trying to know themselves and
each other. Mr. French is the humanist among our American sculptors.
But he is empathically not of that type of humanist darkly described
by Professor Kallen as living “beside life, not in it.” His position
among our sculptors is more than honorary; it is that of the generous
co-worker and helper, especially sympathetic toward youth and its
aspirations. What Mr. French does seems effortless, but beneath that
apparent ease is a profound knowledge of all the armature, both
mechanical and intellectual, that holds the sculptor’s art in true
poise and balance. Work from his hands may be the monumental or the
exquisite; it is imagined simply and naturally, as if this artist knew
no other way than the beautiful way. How deeply our democracy needs the
best he has to give!


VII

Our twentieth century admits that the latter years of the nineteenth
century were spacious years in our sculpture, and that there are as
yet no leaders who overtop these three. With these will always be
associated, in the minds of those who know things as they are, that
distinguished artist Olin Warner, whose death cut short a career
splendidly ready for its zenith. For some unknown reason, his work
has missed something of its due praise among us; time will perhaps
readjust this. The delightful caryatids of his fountain at Portland,
Oregon, are indeed greatly prized; his portrait statues are truly
sculptural in their ensemble, and fine in their characterization;
and with the passing of years, his spirited yet beautifully classic
portrait busts of Alden Weir, of Cottier, and of Maud Morgan gain
rather than lose in the esteem of the student.

A much later leader, also lost before winning the heights to which he
aspired, was Karl Bitter, that sensitive, swift-minded, deft-handed
sculptor whose ardent intellectual curiosity kept him still the seeker
for newer and more vital ways of sculptural expression. His tragic
death was not unlike Warner’s; Warner was thrown from his bicycle in
Central Park, Bitter was struck down by an automobile in front of the
Opera House. Both men were of those _êtres d’ élite_ that Art needs as
her interpreters. But what a contrast in their lives, their characters,
their sculptural interpretations! Warner was of the highest type of New
Englander of Puritan descent, a courageous worshipper of beauty, and
at his best in revealing beauty in classic guise; he has been called
the Pilgrim homesick for Hellas; Bitter was of the highest type of
the foreign-born, a Viennese eagerly assuming the duties of American
citizenship. A gallant figure, already before his coming among us he
was imbued with various Old World ideals in art, many of which he
afterward rejected as flamboyant, frivolous. No sculptor of our time
has made a swifter and steadier advance in sculptural power throughout
a busy and varied career. Warner and Bitter; the deep-minded and the
quick-minded; the spirit of American sculpture needed both these men,
and felt their loss.




CHAPTER IV

OF EXPOSITIONS AND COLLABORATIONS


I

An unpublished satiric drawing of the ’eighties shows a family of
American tourists in the Louvre. They contemplate the Melian Venus.
With one exception, they are dumb with awe. The exception is Aunt
Maria, the masterful old lady in the foreground. Aunt Maria has seen
men and cities, but she doesn’t know as there’s much that can beat
South Bend. So

    “Aunt Maria gazes with distrust
      Upon the goddess in her bloom perennial.
    ‘Talk about art,--you should have seen the bust,
    The butter bust we had at our Centennial.’”

The Sleeping Iolanthe in butter! In 1876, her name melted in the
American mouth. Though barred from the Fine Arts section, she was
believed by many to express the spirit of American art. Shamed by her
popularity, certain sensitive American artists did not quite recover a
jubilant tone until, long years afterward, a full-sized Melian Venus
in chocolate contributed to the gayety of the greatest of French
expositions. After that, the butter bust incident weighed less heavily
on thoughtful minds.

Just before our Centennial exposition, the scholarly John Fiske,
admitting that “the classical picture and the undraped statue” have “a
high place in our esteem,” ruefully adds that “it will probably be some
time before genuine art ceases to be an exotic among us, and becomes a
plant of unhindered native growth.” The Centennial showed us the truth
of just that. The Centennial was a glory, and a profound disturbance.
To our sculpture, this disturbance was its great gain. For the first
time, the American sculptor saw his work side by side with that of
Europeans. He was dismayed. He had had his doubts, his forebodings. He
now perceived for a certainty that in spite of half a century spent
in the pursuit of all the best that Italian pseudo-classicism could
offer, our apprentice days in sculpture, far from being well over,
were scarcely begun. Perhaps a fresh start was needed. At a time when
Munich, as well as Paris, was calling to the young painter, Paris,
rather than Rome or Florence, beckoned to the sculptor. New forces were
abroad in art, and American sculpture of the next generation profited
eagerly from the vigorous new French school.


II

The lesson taught by the Columbian exposition of 1893 was just as
important as that learned from the Centennial, though far less
sobering. A holiday spirit, not without dignity, spoke from those
pleasure-domes and lagoons and abounding sculptural forms of the White
City. The progress made by our art during seventeen years packed with
artistic adventure and endeavor was blown abroad in triumph. On the
whole, we were justified in our joy. As the Centennial by its dismaying
jolt had enlarged the outlook of our artists, so the Columbian, by
its varied harmonies, liberated the imagination of the public, of
the art-lover. To a marked extent, it created anew the art-lover,
a personage already made possible by the prosperity following the
conclusion of the Civil War. In the World’s Fair of 1893, the
apparently inexhaustible advantages of a sympathetic collaboration
between architect, painter, sculptor, and landscape architect were for
the first time sketched out large for the American vision. Our many
succeeding expositions have of course emphasized and amplified the
suggestions so gallantly given and so eagerly noted in 1893. Not that
our whole broad land is to-day the dwelling-place of beauty. Far from
it. Great reaches of time and great strivings of the spirit must match
our great stretches of space before art is everywhere at home here. And
collaboration at its best is jointly and severally a striving of the
spirit.

In 1825, when Charles Bulfinch, then architect of the Capitol, receives
an inquiry “respecting the ornaments wanted for the pediment of the
Capitol,” and writes in answer that “the object of advertising was
to obtain designs in various styles, from which to select one,” an
ardent collaboration between sculptor and architect was clearly not the
order of the day. The hard fate of Greenough’s Olympian Washington,
dragged in 1843 from inner shrine to outdoor platform, shows that in
almost twenty years conditions had not changed. For a long time after
that, a work of sculpture was seldom considered, during its creation,
with special reference to its destined surroundings. Artist and public
satisfied themselves with the bland half-truth that a good thing looks
well anywhere. There were of course vague gestures of collaboration
when the first statues were placed in Central Park; and in the good
fellowship existing between students of the different arts in the few
schools we had here as well as in the foreign schools there was a basis
for later harmonious co-operation. But the Saint-Gaudens Farragut,
unveiled in 1881, and showing in detail and ensemble the results of an
extraordinarily happy and sympathetic collaboration, roused the minds
of all artists. And twelve years afterward, the intelligent public was
fully ready to appreciate the happy collaborations it saw on every hand
at the Fair.


III

Expositions bring in their train certain evils. Is superficiality one
of these? In theory, sculptural work for exposition buildings and
approaches and vistas must often stress too much the gala-day aspect
of life; it must sound the hurrah at any cost; the note is gayety and
triumph; let no other chord intrude. So much for theory. As a matter
of fact, the making of red-letter-day sculpture injures only those
sculptors who are already too much enamoured of the “façade and froth”
side of human achievement. Nothing could be more serious in matter or
in manner than was Mr. French’s stately Republic, a dominant note of
the plan of the Columbian Exposition. And no work was more thoroughly
appreciated. Some of the very gayest of our exposition sculptures owe
their vitality to the very serious studies and the very solid mastery
of the artists who have produced them. There was wide-spread regret
because the MacMonnies Fountain, that thing of joy for the exposition
of 1893, could not sprinkle its dews permanently for our refreshment.
And in our later expositions, there have always been temporary works
achieved with bravura by the artist, enjoyed without reservation by
the public, and (often with a real sadness of farewell) consigned to
oblivion by the powers. The story of the Fair of 1893, the exemplar,
one might say, for subsequent celebrations, has been exceedingly well
told by Mr. Charles Moore, in his recently published Life of Daniel
Burnham. Nowhere else will one find so true and inspiring a picture of
our American architects, painters, sculptors, and landscape gardeners
working together in exalted collaboration. Those men set a great
standard and a great stride for artists of the present century. To
quote from Mr. Moore’s book a paragraph concerning the sculptors:

“Marshalled by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the sculptors for the first
time in America took their rightful place in co-operation with the
architects. And what a troop they were. There was Daniel French,
embodying the spirit of permanence and clear-sightedness in the
serene figure of the Republic that graciously presided over the Court
of Honor; and again, in conjunction with Edward Potter, manifesting
sustained ability in the quadriga surmounting the Peristyle; Frederick
MacMonnies, giving vent to the exuberance of America in the joyous
fountain that lent gayety to the great central motive of the Fair;
Olin Warner, whose early death lost to the country an artist on the
way to the heights; Paul Bartlett, then a promise which opportunity
has fulfilled; Edwin Kemeys, with his animal sculpture that came to
attract all the money Theodore Roosevelt could spare for art; and
Louis Saint-Gaudens, wanting only the intellectual element to put
him in the same class with his brother; and Karl Bitter, capable and
conscientious, whose accidental death brought grief to a host of
admirers; and Lorado Taft, who has put the ethereal, haunting spirit of
the Great Lakes into his Chicago fountain; Larkin Mead, sculptor of the
old school; Phimister Proctor, lover of American animals; besides Bela
Pratt, Rohl-Smith, Bush-Brown, Rideout, Boyle, Waagen, Bauer, Martiny,
Blenkenship, and the satisfactory Partridge.”

Later Fairs have but exemplified what was well suggested by the White
City. The Exposition at San Francisco, most recent of all, and taking
place in bright evanescence while Europe was already in the bitter
throes of the World War, brought forward, under the vigorous direction
of Mr. Calder, sculptor of the Pioneer Mother and of the Triumph of
Energy, much that was stimulating and fresh in our sculpture, even
though none of these American exhibits labelled themselves as Dynamic
Decompositions, and few attempted the earnest sort of modernism found
in French works such as Bernard’s Maiden with Water Jar. The fountain
in particular was delightfully renewed in Mr. Aitken’s Fountain of the
Earth, Mrs. Burroughs’s Fountain of Youth, Mr. Taft’s Fragment from
the Fountain of Time, Mrs. Whitney’s Fountain with Pristine Motives
from Aztec Civilization, Mr. Putnam’s Fountain with Mermaids, and Miss
Longman’s Fountain of Ceres. Individual pieces such as William Sergeant
Kendall’s half-length portrait of a peasant girl, carved in wood and
realistically colored, attracted attention for successful originality.


IV

By and large, our expositions have done three good things for
sculpture. They have managed to dislodge, even from the most
painstaking of workers, a fearless immediacy of expression in their
art. They have introduced to the public, in a large way on the terrace
and in an intimate way within the gallery, the most interesting
sculptors of the time. Above all, they have fostered and amazingly
developed the give-and-take of collaboration in the arts. This last is
their best gift to the spirit of American sculpture; it is the gift of
the broader mind.

Our American Academy in Rome, with its stirring legend, “Not merely
fellowships, but fellowship,” is the direct outcome of the World’s Fair
of 1893. Burnham, McKim, Mead, La Farge, Millet, Saint-Gaudens, and
other artists who by collaboration made that Fair a thing of beauty
resolved then and there that younger men should have such advantages
as these that they themselves had gained by working together. Through
their efforts, the project took shape. Though a National institution,
our American Academy in Rome is endowed and maintained by private
citizens. Its beneficiaries are young sculptors, painters, architects,
classical scholars, landscape architects, and musicians who have
already shown themselves signally fitted for their chosen work, and
who, for the sake of our country’s art, ought to have the benefit of
the three years of intensive and inter-related study in Rome. To-day,
our Academy in Rome is regarded as the most important modern influence
in American sculpture. “My reason for thinking it admirable,” writes
Saint-Gaudens, “is my belief that the strenuous competition required to
gain access to the Villa Medici, as well as the three years of study in
that wonderful spot, tend to a more earnest and thorough training than
could elsewhere be gained under the present conditions of life in our
times.”




CHAPTER V

THE STATUE AND THE BUST AND THE IDEAL FIGURE


I

As originally planned, the title of the following chapter was The
Statue and the Bust, and the Wart Well Lost. For I have often felt (and
who has not?) that the Cromwellian forthrighteousness in the matter of
that wart has been over-estimated. However, on second thought, it would
seem wiser to suggest the possibility of occasional ideal presentation
rather than to decry the virtues of exact realism in commemorative
portraiture. Hence the more dignified heading seen above. And how does
that old case of idealism _vs._ realism stand at present in the field
of the portrait statue? Before answering this question, let us consider
for a moment the modern sculptor’s preparation for his life-work.

Following hard upon the three leaders who remain central figures in
our hundred years of sculpture came the outriders of that large and
ever increasing group whose creative genius, fostered by the training
enthusiastically received in the French school, now stands four-square
among us. The men and women of this group are the present-day nucleus
of sculptural activity here. Most of them keep a firm footing in two
centuries; they still profit by the light of the later nineteenth
century French masters, and they themselves pass on their own clear new
light to twentieth century learners. When the names of Falguière and
Mercié, Dubois and Chapu, Saint-Marceaux and Frémiet and Rodin are
spoken, these men and women are thrilled, just as Heine’s Grenadier
was thrilled by an imagined footstep; and these men and women know why
Schumann’s song soars up into the Marseillaise. They know that their
French masters once gave them something priceless, yet left them free
to use the gift according to their own bent and will. The principles
taught in the atelier seemed to them necessary and suggestive, not
despotic.

To-day, both the New World and the Old are altered. Good art schools
are now found in most of our large cities; as far as mere technical
training is concerned, opportunities for art-study are at present
brighter here than in Europe. But nothing can ever replace the
inspiration given by the sight of European masterpieces of painting,
sculpture, and architecture on European soil. Therefore we no longer
say with Ward, “Go abroad to study, but not to stay.” We say instead,
“Remain at home for your study, but go abroad during vacation periods
for travel and for inspiration.” A generation ago, the eager young
student body of returning painters and sculptors would not have
believed that this change of base in an artist’s education could occur
within their lifetime.

Until rather lately, the youthful sculptor returning to America to
practise his profession would hope first of all to make a portrait
bust or two, eking out his income by teaching classes in modeling, or
by assisting some more experienced sculptor in developing important
commissions. Then if he were lucky, a fountain figure for some one’s
garden or a portrait statue for his native town would loom up on his
horizon, and he would be fairly started on his way to glory.


II

The portrait statue; imperishable bronze trousers; the frock-coat
immortalized. Art thou there, truepenny?

Most of those persons who are now confirmed haters of sculpture
probably became so through having in tender childhood looked too long
on the bronze portrait statue when it was dark, when it gave its color
all wrong to the countenance of some beloved hero. Even among sculptors
there are many who admit a secret distaste for the portrait statue,
except when it proceeds from the art of the rare absolute master.
Hearing the grumblings of sculptors as to the difficulties of this
form, one is tempted to ask with Mr. Caudle, “If painful, why so often
do it?” The answer is, “The portrait statue is what committees want,
and will pay for. The portrait statue is my children’s bread; the
ideal figure will not keep them in shoes.”

So then, the situation must be examined on all sides. And is there not
a certain high courage in that sculptor who takes his age as it is,
and, like Saint-Gaudens and Ward, manfully makes the truthful best out
of Peter Cooper’s whiskers, and Horace Greeley’s long-legged boots?
“But,” retorts the sculptor, “the whiskers we can endure and celebrate;
the boots are not too much to bear. These things are not decorative,
but they have character, they tell their times. It is the frock-coat
and the trousers that paralyze our imagination.”

Perhaps it will never be known how much the modern male costume,
convenient indeed, but uncomely,--tyrannously uniform in its
formlessness, and rejecting any individuality as an indecency,--has
contributed to the rather wide indifference of the public toward the
usual dark effigy of estimable manhood set up in the marketplace. Well,
no conflict, no drama! If there were no inherent difficulties in the
problem of the portrait statue, there would be no exultation for the
sculptor in his successful solution. True, our days lack beauty; man’s
apparel is not a sculptural delight. But unless the artist can do
something to mend matters, there is little use in mournfully reminding
the world that there was no Wragg by the Ilissus. It is interesting to
mark how our American sculptors have come out from their clash with the
commonplace, and whether they emerge as victors or vanquished.


III

Looking at the general assembly of portrait statues here, we see at
once that these works are freer and happier when their subjects, to
alter Washington’s historic words, permit “some little deviation in
_disfavor_ of modern costume.” Mr. Quinn, in his statue of Edwin Booth,
and Mr. Weinman, in his spirited Macomb, have profited sculpturally
by such permissions. Most of the bronze statues in the Rotunda of
the Library of Congress have an added chance at immortality because
personages like Solon in his _himation_ and the Droeshout Shakespeare
in his doublet and hose, Michelangelo with his angry leather apron
and Columbus with his sea-coat and world-map, and Joseph Henry in his
gown are freed from the tyranny of modern tailoring. They evade the
question; they have every opportunity to look as good as they are. But
the statue of a plain blunt modern man rarely looks as good as it is;
clothes bewray it; and so we shall find all our modern artists using
one subterfuge or another to relieve the bleak dulness of modern
manly dress seen at full length in the round.

[Illustration: STATUE OF MAJ. GEN. MACOMB

BY ADOLPH A. WEINMAN]

Saint-Gaudens seats his Peter Cooper king-like within a Renaissance
portico, and places a curule chair behind his standing Lincoln. Though
Lincoln is a greatly revered subject in American sculpture,--a subject
of exceedingly rugged force,--few sculptors are satisfied to present
Lincoln, plain in his usual garb; they give the hero a background,
or a cloak, or an exedra, or a top hat on a bench, so keenly do they
feel the lack of amplifying circumstances. Yet certainly Lincoln’s
bronze clothing offers more of interest than that of today’s captains
of destiny, soldiers excepted. And how distinctively American is the
note sounded in all our portrait statues of Lincoln! Saint-Gaudens,
French, MacNeil, Weinman, Barnard, Borglum, and O’Connor have made some
of the best of these. One sees that a good statue of Lincoln _must_
be “distinctively American”; let all “viewers with alarm” be comforted
by observing that Frenchification or Italianization slips away from a
Lincoln statue like water from a duck’s back.


IV

The major heroes of sculpture may well receive the tribute of shrine
or exedra or canopy, but what of the more numerous lesser heroes? In
avoiding a commonplace rendering, the imaginative sculptor has other
avenues of escape beside those offered by the architect, sometimes
gloomily called by unbelievers in collaboration the sculptor’s evil
genius. A first aid is the impressionist manner, used by O’Connor in
his Worcester Soldier, and in his masterly statue of General Lawton at
Indianapolis. In these works the modeling is fluid, the planes vibrate
in light; we feel the happy absence of a sample-card arrangement of
buttons; no one could for a moment say, Here are two more triumphs
of bronze tailoring. Already in some of our new War memorials, our
sculptors are making use, but not always the best use, of broad
simplifications of mass and surface. They are showing us young heroes
of the Argonne not cap-a-pie in their uniforms, (no one asks that)
but with torn tunics, if any, and with riven flesh. Rodin and the
grand old Bourgeois de Calais are indirectly responsible for some of
these compositions. But will these bronze pictures of human agony long
satisfy the human heart? Have such memorials the permanence of spirit
we implore, or are they big bronze studies that are really almost as
far from the heroic greatness of the Bourgeois de Calais as from the
unpretending littleness of a Rogers group, say the Wounded Scout in
the Swamp?

The answer depends entirely upon the artist. We have no right to
dictate his manner, but we demand that beneath the manner there shall
be sound construction as well as feeling: we ask also a knowledge of
ensemble, of silhouette. The impressionist style is a fine instrument
in the right hands. But in the hands of mediocrity, this style of
sculptural language performs the third and most regrettable function
of all language, that of concealing the lack of thought. The result is
what Mr. Grafly might well call “union-suit sculpture.” Between the
Devil of a prosaic literalness of rendering, and the deep sea of a
sloppy and would-be poetical impressionism, the genius of the sculptor
is our only salvation. Impressionism ill-handled will not save from
the commonplace either a group or a figure. While the problem of the
portrait statue remains as difficult as it now is, one is glad to see
that of late committees are turning toward other ways of perpetuating
the memory of greatness. Here in New York, the Pulitzer Memorial in
the Plaza has taken the form of a fountain, surmounted by a figure of
Abundance, the last work from the hands of Karl Bitter; and the Straus
Memorial is a fountain, in which the chief motive is a reclining figure
of Contemplation, at the head of a large pool. Other cities also have
their successful memorial avoidances of the “iron photograph,” as
the darkened bronze effigy has been called. A distinguished example
is Daniel French’s Du Pont fountain in Washington, made to replace
a portrait statue. Mrs. Whitney’s Titanic Memorial, a memorial for
many rather than for one, is admirable in its sincere originality of
inspiration.

At least one thing could be done which is now left undone by most of
the City Fathers in our land. Under the direction of Municipal Art
Commissions, bronze statues could be cleaned; not polished until they
are a glittering congeries of high lights, an effect heartily detested
by sculptors, but cleaned reasonably, with a decent regard for the
opinions of those who made them. Is it not a singular superstition
that a statue once placed should never be touched by the hand of
cleanliness, but should suffer in silence whatever indignities the
soot and the birds and the climate heap upon it? Again, in a country
in which gold is said to be no rare possession, this metal, properly
toned, could often without prohibitive expense be used to dignify our
statues, and prevent dark oxidization. And this would be done, if we of
today cared as much about art as we do, let us say, about advertising.
Future civilization will probably have a place for a new profession,
that of the well-trained custodian of statues. The first attempts in
this work will not in the nature of things be as destructive as were
the labors of the old-time picture-restorer, so-called, a personage
long reviled for his ignorant or dishonest acts, but now becoming
extinct. And what a boon it would be if this statue-custodian of
the future, with a body of intelligent criticism behind him, could
be depended upon for judicious removals as well as for faithful
guardianship! This liberating thought is brought to the attention of
all Municipal Art Commissions.


V

Among appealing portraits in the Louvre is Ghirlandaio’s Priest and
Boy. Whatever might be hideous in its realism is at once atoned for
by something singularly lovely. The priest has the ugliest nose
in the world; Cyrano is a Hermes to him; but the child looks up
to him in intimate childlike trust. The most unflinching realism
and the tenderest idealism meet in that portrait. And our American
portraits in sculpture, taken one by one, run that gamut. From the
day of William Rush’s rude self-portrait down to the present hour of
an occasional polychrome marble bust of exquisite workmanship, our
sculpture has advanced in the art of the portrait bust. The creator
of the Greek Slave was happier, whether he knew it or not, in rugged
masculine portrait heads such as his Jackson and his Calhoun, than in
his famed ideal figures; those male likenesses have a living quality
that is lacking in his series of idealized busts of classic heroines
such as Proserpine and Psyche, all much the same in feature, and all
appropriately corseted in a kind of marble corolla, springing up from
a leafy marble base. The ending of a bust, that is to say its base or
support, is always a question with the sculptor, unless, like Houdon,
he chooses one type of base for all, or unless, as Rodin in his marble
portraits of women, he counts upon the richly associative charm of the
unachieved.

Since the time of Verocchio’s bust of a woman with flowers in her
hands, many sculptors, for the sake of added interest, a more vivid
characterization, or a more striking composition, have attempted to
show the hands as well as the face of the person portrayed. In this
difficult undertaking, no modern sculptor has succeeded better than
Mr. Niehaus, well-known for his imposing monuments. His portrait bust
of John Quincy Adams Ward is not only a work of distinguished realism,
worthy of the artist it represents; it is also a perfect solution of
an almost insolvable problem in arrangement.

[Illustration: PORTRAIT BUST OF J. Q. A. WARD

BY CHARLES H. NIEHAUS]

Among the greatest virile portraits of our age are those of the “all
around” American sculptor, Charles Grafly; for style and workmanship
and seizing of character any half-dozen of his busts would proudly hold
their own if placed beside Rodin’s male portraits in the Metropolitan
Museum. Furthermore, they have the old-fashioned advantage of looking
like the persons they represent, an advantage not always attained in
the Rodin portrayals. Perhaps a fairer tribute to Mr. Grafly’s power
would be to say that his busts need not fear comparison with the
Saint-Gaudens Sherman, that most spirited portrait of a war-chief.
One of our memorable sculptured portraits is Mrs. Burroughs’s bust
of John La Farge, modeled at about the period of Mr. Lockwood’s
painted portrait. Both artists have attained truth. Mr. Lockwood’s
broadly enveloping technique shows La Farge as the cosmopolitan,
the artist who is also the gracious citizen of the world; Mrs.
Burroughs’s point of view emphasizes La Farge the individualist, the
thinker habitually pursuing his own spiritual adventures in many
realms, oriental and occidental. The painting tells wherein La Farge
resembles his fellow-men, while the sculpture with equal force brings
out his valuable points of difference. Twenty years ago, Jonathan
Scott Hartley’s sturdy renderings of masculine character delighted
his colleagues; and even today, his bust of John Gilbert as Sir Peter
Teazle loses nothing of its rich whimsical earnestness when considered
beside modern work of the highest order, such as Robert Aitken’s
portrait of Augustus Thomas, or one of Fraser’s presentments of our
great American citizens.

Naturally remote in intent and result from these virile modelings are
the lovingly rendered portraits of women and children familiar in our
sculpture. A well-known example is Manship’s realistically carved
marble image of his baby daughter placed within a captivating shrine
of blue and gold. Portraits in the round, carried out in a polychrome
ensemble of beautifully cut marble combined with other materials, such
as wood, gold, and semi-precious stones, offer a fascinating field for
the American sculptor willing to devote to such experiments the time
and thought they demand. The pure white marble bust looks ill at ease
in the warm precincts of the modern home; it is a thing of the past. We
can but wonder that our elders bore it so long, even when it was in a
measure suppressed by placing it looking streetward, between the parted
lace curtains.

[Illustration: MARBLE PORTRAIT OF BABY

BY PAUL MANSHIP]

For the male portrait, modern taste generally prefers bronze to
marble; and just as the dead whiteness of marble may be relieved by
color, so the severe darkness of bronze in statue or bust may be
altered by the use of a harmonious patina. Many of our sculptors have
given long and patient study to this subject of “patine”; others again
trust all to the bronze founder. But sculpture still has much to learn
from chemistry; and there are still a few artists who keep enough of
the weaker side of craftsmanship to believe in the advisability of
secret processes. Is it not true that art is the last field where such
secrecies should exist? Do we not look upon art as the liberator of
great things, not as the locker-up of little things like craftsmen’s
receipts? For receipts that are not exposed to the air get mouldy with
hugger-mugger and abracadabra; this is as true today as in good Cennino
Cennini’s time of “mordant with garlic,” and “tempera with the yolk of
the egg of a city hen.”


VI

A survey of the spirit of American sculpture should include, as a
cause for joy, a glimpse at the single ideal figures in which many
of our modern sculptors express themselves, more or less untrammeled
by the demands of the world. The subjects for such figures are
rarely new, yet they must be treated with perennial freshness. Take
Diana: Saint-Gaudens, Warner, MacMonnies, Miss Scudder, McCartan and
I know not how many others have done Diana in her phases, and each
new portrayal should prove a new joy. Take Maidenhood: Rudolph Evans
has chosen this ancient theme for his Golden Hour, one of the most
delightful pieces in all American sculpture; Barnard has rendered it
in marble; Sherry Fry’s classic bronze Maidenhood, in the guise
of Hygeia, and Mrs. Burroughs’s On the Threshold are sculptural
expressions of the same subject. Take the Ephebos: John Donoghue’s
Young Sophocles, dated 1885, a masterpiece coming just half way, in
point of time, between the arrival of the Greek Slave in America and
the unveiling of MacMonnies’s Civic Virtue, is a gloriously conceived
figure of youth in the abstract, rather than a full-length likeness of
the Greek poet leading the chorus after Salamis. Surely in sculptural
mastery, Donoghue is much nearer to MacMonnies than to Powers. Picking
our way past the Slave and her kin, and coming at last upon a classic
like this Young Sophocles, we may safely abandon the prefix _pseudo_.
What a relief! It is as if one could at last leave off over-shoes, and
walk abroad dry-shod, in fair weather. This example from the ’eighties
points out once more the progress made between the Fairs of 1876 and
1893. Does it also, in its old-school seriousness of consecration
to art, and in its reverence for “the nobler forms of nature” shame
a little the easy slapdash of the battalions of sketchy figures now
clamoring for space in print and in the galleries? Probably not. Other
times, other ideals. “She certainly saved herself trouble,” was the
comment of a sculptor, looking at a modernist figure whose drapery was
made by strings.

[Illustration: THE GOLDEN HOUR

BY RUDOLPH EVANS]




CHAPTER VI

OUR EQUESTRIAN STATUES


Our forefathers’ first fond national desire in sculpture was for
an equestrian statue of Washington, by Houdon; a wish never to be
fulfilled. The Congressional impulse of 1783 was sobered on counting
up the cost. It came to nothing until two generations had passed; and
it came to very little even then. Today, our country is sometimes
called the paradise of the equestrian statue. If any such paradise
exists among us, it has been created since 1853, when Clark Mills,
“never having seen General Jackson or an equestrian statue,” at last
succeeded, after heart-breaking difficulties, in casting in bronze
the first equestrian statue ever made here. With what passionate
dithyrambs Benvenuto Cellini would have told the world of such a feat,
had it been his! How breathlessly he would have described the breaking
of cranes and the bursting of furnaces and the six tragic failures in
the body of the horse before the old cannon captured by Andrew Jackson
were finally translated into the supposed immortality of the equestrian
group in bronze! General Jackson and his horse are still balancing
themselves at leisure in front of the White House; it is perhaps
needless to report their aspect as a thing more strange than beautiful.
No one thinks this work a triumph of art, but every serious student
knows it as a much needed initial victory over the hard conditions of
bronze casting. You may call the group bizarre and unsophisticated in
effect, as well as wholly mechanistic by first intention; but you
cannot take from it the honor of being first in our long procession of
equestrian statues, some of them forms of the very highest distinction.
And you will not fail to observe the amazing improvement in style that
has somehow taken place by the time our second equestrian appears;
Brown’s Washington, though coming but three years after the Mills
Jackson, remains among our fine examples in sculpture. Not so number
three, the Mills Washington, belated and inadequate response to the
Congressional resolve in 1783; least said, soonest mended. Better
fortune came with number four, the Ball Washington, long the pride of
Boston.


II

Today, our equestrian statues are the work of accomplished sculptors.
Such commissions are not bestowed on weaklings or beginners, on
irresponsibles or mere experimenters. In addition to genius, the
highest equestrian art demands of the sculptor certain pedestrian
virtues; such as foresight and perseverance and common sense and
ability to cope with the unsuspected deviltries of men, beasts, and
things. As said in another chapter, every sculptor who triumphs over
his equestrian problem is heroic. This is true whether he works
single-handed or in collaboration with some other sculptor, some one
with a special gift for animal form. And it remains true, even though
in our day, no sculptor can well hope or desire, like Houdon, to be
“considered under the double aspect of Statuary and Founder.” Earnest
men like Cellini and Houdon, Clark Mills and Brown have long since,
by working on their knees in sweat and grime, paved the way for the
modern organization of bronze founding to be carried on as a craft in
purlieus outside the sculptor’s studio. Many tribulations are thereby
removed from the sculptor, but enough have been added for his proper
chastening. Those who know our American equestrian statues, those who
have seen the pluck and energy with which their makers have achieved
their goal, will certainly set down valor as one of the gifts belonging
to the spirit of American sculpture.


III

Clark Mills, Brown, Ball, Ward, Saint-Gaudens, French, Potter,
Partridge, Remington, Bush-Brown, Elwell, Proctor, Rhind, Lukeman,
Bitter, Niehaus, Ruckstull, Bartlett, MacMonnies, Dallin, the two
Borglums, Fraser, Aitken, Miss Hyatt, Mrs. Farnham, Roth, Packer,
Shrady;--if without benefit of catalogue memory at once speaks all
these names, no doubt there are others also. And in what infinite
variety of imagination and of rendering their works stand before
us! The whole procession of mounted heroes produces no sense of
monotony. Originality, that quality overprized when prized at all as
an end in itself, appears in sufficient measure. Yet, beginning with
Saint-Gaudens, most of these well-trained artists would undoubtedly
admit their debt of gratitude to Barye and Frémiet and Dubois, the
French masters, and beyond these, to Donatello and to Verocchio and
Leopardi, through whom the Renaissance gave to the world those two
vivid masterpieces, the Gattamelata and the Colleoni. If that almost
mythical third masterpiece, da Vinci’s Sforza, had been saved to round
out a trinity of high accomplishment, how great would have been our
debt to Italy! As it is, the void left is something every sculptor is
free to fill, if his powers permit; there are still worlds to conquer.


IV

A strangely moving story of some such high ambition is told in the
career of Henry Merwin Shrady, who died last year, at the very time
when his colossal equestrian monument to General Grant was unveiled
in Washington. Shrady’s swift uncharted course, like that of a few
artists, variations from the type, conformed in no way to the routine
deemed necessary for most men in his profession. A graduate from
Columbia, he had successfully engaged in business for some years
before he began to model animals. He became a sculptor overnight. His
immediate success in the art of sculpture is but partly explained by
referring to his cultivated intellect, and by saying that as the son
of a noted surgeon he easily assimilated the truths of anatomy. Nor
does his success need explanation as much as recognition. His success
is his artist’s secret, perhaps never to be revealed, perhaps always
to remain among the imponderable things the soul will not disclose to
science. Surely he crowded into his brief career all the rapt effort of
the youthful student, and all the more composed but no less strenuous
endeavor of the assured artist. From first to last, his offerings
are good. But the grandiose conception of his final work, the Grant
monument, an epic crowded and massed with equestrian and leonine
figures passionately portrayed in a kind of exalted realism, called for
continued heroic years of labor. Those years were at times harassed
by misunderstandings with the changing officials whose presumably
difficult duty it was to supervise the work in the public interest.
Indeed, Shrady’s equestrian concept was in this instance a thing too
grandiose to be accepted, on sight unseen, by pedestrian minds. Though
his art triumphed at last, and all his promises were performed, his
life ended as the veil was lifted from its crowning work.


V

I often think that the equestrian statue has a larger and more
immediate power of communication than other sculptural forms. This
is not merely because of its weight and volume and general air of
expensiveness. Those things belong in ever so many climes to ever so
many huge prosaic monuments seen with the profoundest indifference
of the human soul. But the man (or the Maid) on horseback is readily
enough taken to heart as a person with tidings, say as someone bringing
the good news from Ghent, or some other definite place. He or she at
once becomes a figure in a _drama_, that old word that means _something
doing_; an atmosphere of romance is at once created for the passer-by
to share in, if he likes.

Perhaps the equestrian hero is Mr. Lukeman’s Circuit Rider, a preacher
of the Word, going very reverently and wisely about his Father’s
business, or else, this being a great year for bronze circuit riding,
he is Mr. Proctor’s studious Circuit Rider, to be set up on the Capitol
grounds at Salem, Oregon. Perhaps he is Mr. Bartlett’s Lafayette,
coming from a court of distinction, with a message of high national
import, so that all the glory of just that must be diplomatically
suggested in a large way in his own person, while his horse must show
a proud lip, and seem to be of the kind men give kingdoms for. Perhaps
he is Ward’s General Thomas, sitting his thoroughbred, the first
thoroughbred revealed in true mettle in our sculpture; the General
surveys a momentous battlefield, “holding his own,” as Garfield
amazedly saw, “with utter defeat on each side of him, and such wild
disorder in his rear,” and so winning the name he bore the rest of
his life, the Rock of Chickamauga. Or perhaps again the hero is a
heroine,--the Maid of Orleans as Miss Hyatt has portrayed her, uplifted
by her visions and riding on to glory.

In any event, it is quite clear that the equestrian statue is a storied
thing. And this is very hard on the solemn critic, who, thirsting for
pure abstractions, declares in his mistaken way that art must _not_
tell a story, and who for the moment highbrowbeats everybody into
saying message or meaning or content instead of story. Meanwhile,
so far apart are the ways of criticism and creation, the maker of
equestrian statues continues to spin his romances and epics in bronze.
The fact that his fine theme appeals to the people not only gladdens
him; it puts him under a still more pressing obligation to show what
an artist can do with such a theme, how greatly he can enhance and
exalt it. He understands well enough that it is easier to begin such
enterprises with gusto than to finish them with glory. Most of our
masters of the equestrian form were lovers and knowers of the horse
before they were his sculptors; and that, though not imperative for
genius, is valuable.


VI

Aside from good workmanship, our American equestrians show an
individuality of conception, now stately, now familiarly historic, now
soberly truthful, and almost always interesting. No one but MacMonnies
has just the MacMonnies Gaelic, Gallic gallantry of attack,
everywhere sustained by the MacMonnies absolute mastery of sculptural
resource; no one but Bartlett can impart quite that cosmopolitan touch
of suavity and courtliness which tempers the eagerness of his young
Lafayette; no one but Bitter ever worked up such a shout and hurrah
over rearing stallions for expositions, and yet was able, a little
later, to give New York a work of such studied seriousness as his
equestrian of General Sigel; and no one but Edward Potter has ever told
in sculpture, during a lifetime of acquaintance with thunder-clothed
necks, so much of the honest truth about horses. That clear atmosphere
of practical Christianity which envelops those two Circuit Riders does
not in the least resemble the religious ecstasy breathing from Miss
Hyatt’s Jeanne d’Arc. Different again is the exalted devotion that
speaks in every line of Saint-Gaudens’s Shaw, from the slant of the
rifles, like falling rain, up to the brooding visage of the young
commander and the presence that guides him and his men. Looking at the
mere composition here, one thinks often of the Surrender at Breda; but
the oblique lines of our Army rifles are surely far more tragic than
the upright Breda lances. Each of these last-named sculptors has had a
certain theme and a certain emotion to present, and each has marshalled
his resources in his own characteristic way.

[Illustration: HORSE TAMERS

BY F. W. MACMONNIES]

Again, the tragedy that will always be latent for the Southerner in
the Saint-Gaudens Sherman, with its dominating figure of the warrior
seasoned to his great task, yet a task to be tempered by the advancing
spirit of Nike-Eirene, is not in the least like the kind of tragedy
that enfolds Fraser’s End of the Trail. Here the pupil does not follow
the master in subject, or in treatment, or in those mere motions of
the sculptor’s tool, too often transmitted unchanged from teacher to
learner. Mr. Fraser’s moving parable of a losing people is told in his
own way, and in the grand style of sculpture, just as the parables of
the Evangelists are told in each Evangelist’s way, and in the grand
style of language, as English-speaking readers are privileged to know
it. Long before assisting Saint-Gaudens in the Sherman equestrian, Mr.
Fraser, from his boyhood in Montana, knew the horse of the untamed
West. His group is sculpture from his own experience. And Solon
Borglum’s way with his far-Western themes is not at all like Mr.
Fraser’s way. Solon Borglum, least academic of all those sculptors who
still feel reverence for anatomical truths, envelops his men and beasts
in a kind of fateful weather that stirs the human heart to sympathy
with them in their struggles, whether happy or unhappy; he veils his
subjects in the hope of making them more clear to you. Different again
is Mr. Dallin’s version of that great historic theme, the mounted
Indian. This sculptor’s genius, seen at its best in the commanding
Appeal to the Great Spirit, placed in front of the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts, interprets the ritual of a passing race. The position of
this austere group at the approach to an austere building appropriately
suggests to the spectator the pathos of contrast between two cultures,
the lower and the higher, the vanishing and the enduring. Does not that
Indian mutely remind us of great treasure which is ours, but in which
he may not share?


VII

Whether our equestrian statues, as the groups last spoken of, reveal
a side of American life destined to pass from our view, or whether,
on the other hand, they are of the historic portrait order, as are our
most of the Old World equestrians, it is clear that the personal vision
prevails. The note of romance is present; perhaps we scarcely realize
how much the so-called dumb beast contributes to that. Mr. Proctor’s
mastery of animal form, whether in equine or other shape, is certain,
plain, delightful. Leaving our horses for a moment, where shall we find
a “Tyger” as terrible and as “burning bright” as the Proctor Golden
Tiger for Princeton, a creature none the less awe-inspiring though seen
in sphinx-like repose? Decidedly, the man has the gift for animals; I
shall never forget how under Mr. Proctor’s playful influence, one of
the dullest and mangiest kittens I ever saw suddenly leaped up into a
miracle of feline grace.

[Illustration: EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF GENERAL SHERMAN

BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS]

A genius for animals is found rather often among us, as befits a people
whose fathers so lately subdued the forest-born; it is a gift as richly
special and as deeply innate as the gift, let us say, for religious
sculpture, or for any other lofty form. Through this gift, Miss Hyatt
and Miss Gardin, Mr. Harvey, Mr. Roth, Mr. Potter, Mr. Laessle, Mr.
Sanford, Mr. Rumsey and many others have shown us beautiful or terrible
or humorous things. The presence of the horse, the _cheval_, easily
gives the authentic accent of _chivalry_ to the equestrian portrait
statue, as contrasted with its pedestrian relative; while in a work
imagined in the manner of the Saint-Gaudens Sherman, the beast,
the man, and the embodied spirit unite in an epical ensemble that
appeals to the thoughtful mind. One thinks of that similar trinity
of Earth, Man, and Heaven, said to animate in humbler guise every
flower arrangement poetically shaped by Japanese fingers. An artistic
impulse so widely felt, though not yet commonly revealed, holds out
its promise for future creations in art. At present, the fact that
Reinhold Begas in Germany and Augustus Saint-Gaudens in America have
lately used this motive in equestrian art is perhaps unduly prohibitive
for other sculptors. True, neither artist knew what the other was
doing; Saint-Gaudens was somewhat taken aback on learning of the Begas
design.




CHAPTER VII

THE ART OF RELIEF, HIGH AND LOW


I

How summarize an art that shows us sculptured form, not in the faithful
four-square roundness of fact, but in a subtly chosen and poetic
projection of fact? For the manifestations of the spirit of relief are
legion. A relief of a certain figure may have scarcely the thickness of
a flower petal, or again it may have an even greater salience than life
itself. All depends upon its purpose. When I am told that Mr. Aitken
and Mr. MacNeil are making some studies, in relief, I do not know
whether Mr. Aitken is at work on another large equestrian subject like
that of his George Rogers Clark monument, or whether he is devising
one of his little medallic Pegasi such as his Watrous medal; and I do
not know whether Mr. MacNeil is to give us a new coin, such as his
quarter-dollar of a recent series, or a new memorial as imposing as his
military monument at Albany with its serried stone warriors in relief.
Surely it is a Protean art that can produce the Brenner cent, the
Weinman dime, the Fraser Victory medal; that can make the Saint-Gaudens
portrait of Stevenson a suitable adornment for the church of St. Giles
in Edinburgh; that can decorate the façade of St. Bartholomew’s in
New York with bronze portals crowded with figures of the apostles and
crowned with marble tympana of the saints; that may even serve the
dynamic purpose of Rude’s great Chant du Départ on the Paris arch and
the static majesty of Calder’s Washington and MacNeil’s Washington
paired on the New York arch.

When we remember all the little coins and medals in the world, and
all the architectural ornament, structural or otherwise, on the
buildings of the world, and all the religious reliefs of Bible story
such as those that Mino and the Della Robbias have left us, and all
the patriotic and allegoric tales hoisted aloft into pediments and
springing up on arches, it is clear that relief sculptures vastly
outnumber the other sort. How often sculptors must have hailed relief
as an escape from rendering facts in the round, to be seen all around!
For commemorative portraiture in the public square, the future will
probably make a wider use of high relief (or even of low relief,
properly framed) to take the place of the portrait statue, often the
result of a purely automatic choice. And the purely automatic choice is
not a choice at all; it is a habit.


II

I am told on high authority that there are many persons who think
that a bas-relief in sculpture is a form resulting from an exactly
proportioned flattening of the same subject in the round. It is also
dismaying to find that there are those who would invent a machine
whereby on some principle of proportionate recession from the eye a
bas-relief could be produced from a form in full-blown dimensions. Is
not the art of sculpture already sufficiently mechanized? And surely
a good look at a fine relief should dispel mechanistic illusions. For
in relief, if nowhere else, live sculpture laughs at the despotism
of mathematics. Even the tyro in relief portraiture soon finds that
he cannot give the human ear the projection from background that
a proportional representation would demand; he sees that to do
this would exalt that whimsical volute beyond its merits, and divert
attention from other and perhaps more delightful, more characteristic
features of a face. If his portrait is in profile, as is not unlikely,
he discovers that this profile is in itself a very telling thing, and
that he can make it interesting or lively by softening a contour here,
by hardening it there, by letting it alone somewhere else, by sinking
or by raising parts of his background; before long he has discovered,
as Egyptians and Italians and Frenchmen and Americans before him have
discovered, a thousand devices of art, not algebra, that give his
relief a look of life and truth. In short, his work will never seem so
false and so far from sympathetic as when its chief quality is that it
is topographically true in its proportionate flattening. Of course I
feel ashamed to say such things baldly, when so many of our American
bas-reliefs have said them poetically. My excuse is that my words may
drive some unbeliever to look at the works. For, as the Metropolitan
Museum’s curator of prints lately said in an address, “Art in this
country doesn’t need to be talked about; it needs to be _seen_.”

[Illustration: WELCH MONUMENT

BY HERBERT ADAMS]


III

Someone promptly asks what are the rules of relief. But are rules of
much use here? Rules of relief are seldom mentioned by the sculptor;
never until after they have been patently transgressed. He has of
course his standards; he allows to his reliefs some of the privileges
of painting, such as perspective and distance, but he does not presume
too far with these borrowings, lest his work lose its sculptural
style. A relief is largely a matter of innate artistic feeling, as
well as of trained taste. And quite as much as a work in the round,
it tells the personality of its maker. A Saint-Gaudens relief, whether
the monumental bronze Shaw, or the marble portrait, slightly under
life-size, of Mrs. Stanford White, or the little reduction, “about as
large as the hand of a child of twelve years,” made from the bas-relief
of the baby Homer, reveals the artist’s temperament, shows his
principles and prejudices in art.

Many of this master’s pupils have made memorable reliefs in various
styles from medallic to monumental. The medals and portrait-reliefs of
Martiny, Flanagan, Fraser, and Weinman are well-known. Less familiar
to the general public because kept in private collections are the
admirable bronze or marble portrait-reliefs by Frances Grimes. After
the mechanical roughing-out of the pointing-machine is over, Miss
Grimes herself finishes all her marbles, whether created in the round
or in relief. She does this oftener in her studio than in the Sunday
picture papers; and because her designs for marble are from their first
rude beginnings in the clay imagined with a full realization of their
final possibilities in marble, they naturally have an integrity not
always attained in the work of sculptors unfamiliar with the chisel.


IV

Most artists would probably agree with Saint-Gaudens that “the great
coins are the Greek, ... just as the great medals are those of the
fifteenth century by Pisanello and Sperandio.”

[Illustration: VICTORY MEDAL

BY JAMES EARL FRASER]

But he who designs the modern American coin, however enthusiastic he
may be in his admiration of the Greek high relief masterpieces of
monetary beauty, must take serious and constant thought of the
curiously un-Greek conditions confronting him. His coin must work
harder than the Greek coin; it must “stack” properly; it must be
struck in numbers undreamed of in Hellas. Our difficult modern ideal
calls alike for quantity and for quality. Comparatively limited as
was the circulation of our recent Victory medal, four million copies
were considered necessary. One of the good precedents introduced by
Roosevelt, in consultation with Saint-Gaudens, was that of entrusting
the designing of our coins to our most talented sculptors; the
resulting improvement in our coinage, on the æsthetic side, has
been one of our twentieth-century triumphs. And the “great medals”
Saint-Gaudens loved are still influencing the medallic art of the
Western world.

The candor and warm simplicity of Pisanello and Sperandio were
perhaps lost sight of during those years while the earlier French
master-medalists of the nineteenth century, David d’Angers, Oudiné,
and Ponscarme, were paving the difficult way for a later and more
sympathetic flowering of the medallic art in the hands of Roty,
Chaplain, and Charpentier. But the delightful quality of the
Renaissance medal was never more deeply appreciated in France than at
the time when a goodly number of our American sculptors were studying
there, and shared in that appreciation; and now that the modern
reducing-machine allows the artist fully to develop his design for
a medal in a fairly large size before bringing it within the final
small circumference, it is certainly well for him to bear in mind the
admirable results obtained by the less sophisticated quattrocento
methods. Never before has the medalist had at hand as many excellent
mechanical aids as at present. Never before has he faced a greater
need of remembering the value of clarity in his vision, of simplicity
and sincerity in his touch.

Some of our purists maintain that every medal should be modeled from
first to last in its ultimate size, however trying and meticulous
this task may be. But does not such strictness denote a rather rabid
hostility to mechanical contrivances? There are medals whose intricate
yet logical design could hardly be carried out by the human hand, no
matter how skilful, within the narrow limits thus prescribed. Of this
type is the plaquette designed by Saint-Gaudens as a token of gratitude
to all who took part in the Masque of the Golden Bowl, offered to him
on a famous anniversary.

“Within its harmonious oblong are shown the columns and the blazing
altar and the Greek seat that figured in the scene, framed by the
proscenium arch of great New England pines, and by the stage-curtains
crowned with masks invented by the joyous fancy of Maxfield Parrish;
below is the triumphal chariot; and, as a symbol of the love that
prompted the pageant, there stands by the altar the winged figure of
Amor, who has borrowed the lyre of Apollo. The names of the seventy
figurants are beautifully inscribed, making a decoration for certain
spaces in the background; this feature, naturally prized by those
who received the medal, was made possible by modeling the original
on a large scale. Here is no hodge-podge of unrelated symbols,
but a beautiful and lovingly considered arrangement of deeply
significant things. We associate with it the same sculptor’s Columbus
medal-obverse, and many reductions, in plaquette form, from his
portrait reliefs. While delighting in the conceptions of antiquity and
of the Renaissance, Saint-Gaudens, more than any other master of his
day, made a faithful study of all the conditions of the modern portrait
relief.”

[Illustration: PLAQUETTE

BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS]

The fact that this sculptor not only prized the bas-relief form, but
also achieved a beautiful originality in it has of course turned many
Americans to the same path of expression. It is one of the delightful
ways in which modeling can take an occasional half-holiday from the
facts of form.




CHAPTER VIII

OF GARDEN SCULPTURE AND ORNAMENT[A]


I

Visitors were standing by the fountain in the garden of a sculptor;
and some one was asking him what in his opinion was the most beautiful
material to model in. The questioner probably had in mind clay, wax,
stone, metal and other solid substances; but the sculptor answered
quickly: “Water. There is nothing in the whole world so marvelous to
manipulate as water.” A gleam of creative rapture lit his face. “Shall
I show you my ‘Veil of Mist?’ or would you rather see my ‘Jeweled
Elm-Tree?’”

    [A] This chapter is largely a reprint, permitted through the
        courtesy of the _American Magazine of Art_.

There are few sculptors who have not been fascinated at one time or
another by the designing of fountains, with their primary interest
of sculpture and their secondary mystery and magic of water; whether
of still water, with its mirrored pictures of blue sky, dark trees,
many-colored flowers and sun-flecked walls; or of gently dropping
water, suggestive of leisure and repose; or of leaping, flashing,
dancing water, hypnotic even without copper or silver balls tossed
up and down; or of water brought from afar in grandiose cascades or
canals, as in the garden art of the Villa d’Este, the Villa Lante,
Versailles, and Saint Cloud; or even of water turned at great cost
to wondrous baroque inventions for drenching the unwary bystander,
as in the Villa Aldobrandini. Fortunately, at the present hour, the
practical joke in fountains is out of date; and there is a growing use
of fountains as memorials, either stately or intimate, either in public
squares or in private gardens.

Setting aside the innumerable pots, urns, sarcophagi and other
“containers” for trees, shrubs and flowering plants, the larger part
of our garden sculpture centres about water and its works. Besides the
more or less imposing figure fountain, with its bronze boys, dolphins,
fauns, nymphs, Nereids, Tritons, turtles and other hardy perennials of
the aquatic imagination, there are tanks, reservoirs, bathing pools,
all no less practical if touched with some suggestion of the sculptor’s
art; there is the basin of the well-known _pozzo_ type, flowering
out into _putti_, corpulent or lean, bending under their swags of
foliage and fruit; there is the little wall-fountain, borrowed from
the lavabo of Renaissance churches, and dear to the careful gardener,
replenishing from it the green-painted, fine-snouted watering-pot kept
sacred to his tiny seedlings. Then there is the water-spout, ready with
its witty word of grotesque, and the rainwater pipe-head, in which
English lead-work of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries displayed
a vigorous and interesting art. There is even the bird-bath, that
modern invention of the nature-lover, since today, though we profit
by many of the garden ideas of the Renaissance, we do not imitate
those Siennese gallants who tied blinded thrushes to the dwarf ilex
and cypress, to decoy winged creatures for convenient garden shooting.
The twentieth-century bird-bath lures birds to life rather than to
death, as is shown in a decorative bronze by Annette Saint-Gaudens,
who has represented upon it characters in Percy MacKaye’s bird-masque,
Sanctuary. The masquing spirit is afoot these days with new
opportunities for sculpture; the outdoor stage, now no very uncommon
feature in private gardens and groves, shows a retaining wall and other
boundaries ready for suitable sculptural accent by means of statues,
Hermæ, vases, mascarons or garlands.

[Illustration: BACCHANTE

BY F. W. MACMONNIES]

As not every day is fit for verse, so not every artist is gifted with
the happy hand for designing garden forms. It is a temperamental
matter; generally the note should be that of joy, or at least of
serenity. Mr. MacMonnies’s Bacchante and his Boy with Heron long ago
set the perfect pace of gayety for American gardens. And today, what
gladder creature this side of Arcady can you find than the MacMonnies
Duck Baby? Unless it is Edith Barretto Parsons’s laughing Child with
Turtle, or else one of Miss Scudder’s engaging imps of Frogland. Some
of our most accomplished sculptors have delighted us with their
garden art. How exquisite is the graciousness of John Gregory’s
kneeling Philomela, a statue lately designed for the bird-garden of
Mrs. Payne Whitney! No figure in recent years has seemed more original
and alluring than this “blithe spirit” considering the wonder of her
pinions.

[Illustration: FOUNTAIN FIGURE

BY JANET SCUDDER]

The garden sculptor should have above all a true dramatic instinct
for the rôle his work is to play in the garden ensemble--a fine
relation-sense which will by no means clip the wings of his design.
You can not make pleasure-sculpture out of accurate letter-of-the-law
nature-copying alone. In a fountain figure, for example, with its
silhouette seen under varying conditions, today drenched with sun and
tomorrow dripping with water, all according to wind and weather, surely
the artist has much to consider aside from inch-by-inch anatomical
modeling. Sculptors know this, but sometimes forget it, when once
launched out on the simple joy of “copying a _morceau_.”

Here we touch a great difficulty in our art education. In spite of all
the chattered tomfoolishness of the hour, the fact remains that for
most artists, the school training is the beginning of wisdom. It is not
a goal, but a starting-point; it gives firm ground for future creative
flights. Yet no house can be well built of foundation-stuff alone. The
school provides a foundation, and something of a ground-floor besides,
but the artist himself must build his own upper stories. He must create
his own personal syntheses in art, with the help of the repeated
analyses practised by him in school. And now comes his perilous moment;
to survive, he needs time and opportunity. The most advanced type of
artistic training, that offered by our American Academy in Rome, does
not begin and end with Houdon’s “_Copiez toujours_,” but allows for
contemplation, for self-communion, for the personal synthesis, and for
the exchange of thought between sculptor, painter and architect, so
that each may understand the other’s aims. American art today needs all
the mellowing and broadening influences that both the contemplative
and the communicative spirit can bestow. Mr. Manship’s figures and
groups, with their rich inventions of rainbow-winged fancy, are here
to prove that the Academy is not an ogre, whose chief delight is to
crush personal genius. But human frailty does not easily part with its
incurably romantic ideas of a fabulous monster; the public demands a
scape-goat; it would rather than not believe in the Evil Eye; and the
mood of the moment, with the injudicious, is to charge all untoward
influences in art to some Gryphon of an Academy, of which little is
known, and everything suspected.


II

Meanwhile, Mr. Manship from Rome and Mr. McCartan in New York have
both proved in their work that they not only know how to model the
nude and compose a statue, but, what is far more rare, that they can
“handle ornament.” Now ornament is often regarded as beneath the notice
of the new-fledged sculptor, while as a matter of sad fact, it is
more likely to be quite beyond his powers; and this is partly because
he lacks invention, and partly because he is without knowledge of
the rhythms of design; not hearing the music, his mind cannot march.
Garden sculpture as well as severe monumental form calls constantly for
the light touch or the strong arm of ornament. Noting our American
lack in this direction, the Society of Beaux Arts Architects, in
coöperation with the National Sculpture Society, has been at pains
to install in New York ateliers in which the ornament-modeler, as
distinct from the sculptor, may seriously study his art. And when an
artist like Mr. McCartan designs and models the exquisite ornament
seen upon his Barnett Prize Fountain, a new hope is breathed into the
efforts of those who would improve our American standards in artistic
craftsmanship, and break down the stupid barrier between artist and
artisan. Somewhere in the unknown lies a vast continent of design-forms
not yet touched by any Columbus--a wealth of fauna and flora not of the
Acropolis or the Roman Forum or the Gothic cathedral, but akin to Greek
and Gothic in beauty and power; and the world is waiting for these new
good things.


III

Given our garden fountain, with or without its ornament, what more
natural than a coign of vantage from which to enjoy it? The exedra, as
introduced to us long ago by McKim, White and other architects, has
been eagerly adopted by garden lovers. A beloved spot at Aspet, the
Saint-Gaudens estate, holds in the far distance a blue sky, a blue
mountain and a lordly crest of purple pines; in the middle distance is
a magic stretch of simple grass, while near at hand, and flanked by a
rosy tracery of oleander blossoms, a golden god Pan pipes to the seven
golden fishes spouting water into a green-veined white marble basin,
rectangular in form. Facing this, and shaded by pines, hemlocks and
silver birches, is a great white exedra, planned not on the usual curve
but on the three sides of an oblong, and showing in relief, on the end
of each wing, an ivy-crowned faun, by Louis Saint-Gaudens. Two giant
terra-cotta vases, made in this country from Italian originals, stand
at the entrance to the pergola that garlands the “old studio”; in an
upper garden, a bronze Narcissus leads the eye toward the house, with
its white balustrade accented by gracious heads of the Seasons.

Some years ago, I saw in the garden of a sculptor an exedra with
outlines pleasing to the eye, and comfortable to the anatomy. The
material was concrete, that first aid to the garden-mad and their
domestic sculpture. Inquiry brought out the fact that the contour had
been established by the sculptor’s actual sitting down, _in propria
persona_, in a roughly shaped mass of fresh concrete. To use the human
frame as a heroic modeling-tool, or templet, struck me at that time as
a delightfully unique idea in sculpture; today, with so many artists
keen for the queer, it would doubtless seem a mere commonplace; one
might even be glad that the human templet was not used upside down,
in the pursuit of novelty. But to speak justly, our garden sculpture
has not succumbed to the idea that queerness is higher than beauty,
and a shock to the spectator a richer artistic achievement than his
delight. Garden art in our country is no longer in its infancy, and not
yet in its decadence. Accepting the broad principles of Italian garden
design, (such as the treatment of the garden as a place to live in, the
harmonizing of the house with the garden, and the adaptation of both to
climate and landscape) it does not today admit the baroque puerilities
of the hydraulic practical joke, or the grotto of mechanical toys and
monsters. Fortunately, much of our landscape gardening is in the hands
of true artists, who employ the best resources of other days, and the
genius of modern sculptors.

Among the oldest inhabitants of gardens are the Hermæ, or boundary
gods, once used, it is said, to define limits of land, but now freed
from that dull task, to be set up (singly, or in pairs, or in rows)
wherever found desirable, as to accent a terrace, or to flank a flight
of steps. The variety of type is infinite; male and female, these
terminal deities are the chorus in the grand opera of garden sculpture,
the only rule laid upon them being that they must play the foursquare
post below the waist, and look pleasant above. Marble is their best
dress, but they may with good effect wear terra-cotta in the paler
tones; a material well adapted also for the legion of great decorative
pots, round or square, that “help so” in gardens either intimate or
imposing. Many garden owners collect “antiques,” delightful enough
even though some of them, like women and music, are perhaps better
left undated. Renaissance sarcophagi are put to the cheerful uses of
pink geraniums; capitals and fonts and well-heads bubble over with all
sorts of blooming things. In the sun-dial, little regarded by the Latin
temperament, but dear as the lawn itself to the Britannic imagination,
the American sculptor has a subject that cannot be accused of alien
origin. Associated chiefly with English landscape art, it nevertheless
may “mark only happy hours” in more formal surroundings. Harriet
Frishmuth and Brenda Putnam are our most lately laureled dialists; both
have been successful in adapting the well-modeled human figure to this
form of garden sculpture.

Alas, that in every human effort shown out-of-doors, the climate has
always the last word! Good old Horace, grumbling impressively about the
hard winters of Tibur, would find his sandaled toes shrewdly nipped in
a Cornish garden on the Ides of December, with Mercury’s winged heel
quite capable of hitting well below the zero mark. In Italy, the tooth
of time is not a bad sort of modeling-tool; it has carved a veil of
illusion for triviality, and has given a new grace to things already
beautiful. But in our northern latitudes, the tooth of time does not
model; it ravages and corrodes, often with incredible swiftness,
and due winter precautions must enshroud our garden sculpture. The
question of material is ever with us. Bronze endures, but turns dark;
marble is fair, but frail. In the dooryard of many an American artist,
home-grown miracles have been wrought from cement. I recall charming
tennis benches, with ornamented ends; a wall-fountain with reliefs of
satyrs; some great vases enriched with the owner’s coat-of-arms, and
cast in a three-piece mold; and numerous basins, posts, balustrades
and steps. But trowel-sculpture has its limitations, and the question
of durability has not yet been fully answered by the years. Perhaps,
at some future day, science will co-operate with art, and produce
for the garden sculptor a material as easily modeled as terra-cotta,
as exquisite as marble, as impressive as granite, and as durable as
bronze. Until then, we must manage as best we can with the materials
the ancients had, though under climatic conditions more favorable than
ours; and we may at least note with thankfulness that in garden art as
in all things annihilation has its uses.




CHAPTER IX

OF SMALL BRONZES AND GREAT CRAFTS


I

Akin to the faculty for creating garden sculpture is the gift for
designing those “small bronzes” in which American connoisseurs are
now taking a happy interest. The general public also is being made
familiar with the best of these pieces; a result reached through the
initiative of the National Sculpture Society and the enthusiasm of
our American Federation of Arts in sending out traveling exhibitions
of small bronzes to various cities. The small bronze may be either a
potentially perfect reduction from some full-sized masterpiece, as in
the well-known Saint-Gaudens reliefs reduced from larger originals;
or it may on the other hand be designed from the start in the ultimate
size. Both types are excellent. American sculpture today counts scores
of artists with a sure and delightful touch for the latter type.
Some of our women sculptors have created little masterpieces in this
intimate and friendly form.

Bessie Potter Vonnoh is an acknowledged leader here; one might say
that she is the originator of an American genre, in which small size
does not for a moment imply either a trifling imagination or a petty
rendering. I well remember Mr. Howells’s enthusiasm for Bessie Potter’s
figurines when they were first shown at a New York exhibition. Their
authentic American note captivated him. “These,” he declared, “are
_real_ creations in sculpture.” The same may be said of Miss Eberle’s
vivid groups and figures from street and fireside and doorstep; they
have the charm and integrity of folk-lore tales told in a plastic
medium. Animal form, as in the days of Barye and Frémiet, easily
disports itself in this field. Miss Hyatt, Mr. Roth, Mr. Laessle and
others press all the imaginable joys of La Fontaine’s fables within
the contours of their bronze goats and bears, tigers, turkeys, and
elephants. Like the fables themselves, these bronzes are classics, as
in the stricter sense, the delightful groups of Manship and Jennewein
are classics.

Generally speaking, we do not like a look of toil and endeavor in our
small bronzes; we want something spontaneous, whether graceful or
humorous. Well and good. Yet here again is a real danger; anyone who
has had the sobering privilege, year by year, of reviewing the rank
and file of little plastic works presented for exhibition knows very
well that many of these pieces utterly lack the solid qualities of
construction, workmanship and an understanding of nature’s detail.


II

One of the brighter possibilities of the small bronze designed in its
ultimate size is that it may well be cast by the _cire perdue_ process.
That name is not altogether a happy one, because in truth less of the
sculptor’s personal touch is “lost” by this method than by the sand
process of bronze casting. By the lost wax method, it’s the sculptor’s
own fault if there’s anything wrong with the wax figure as it leaves
his hands. A mold made of a composition suitable for enduring the
subsequent impact of molten metal is then built up directly on the wax
figure, which has of course its insoluble core. This stout mold or
shell, closely enveloping every knob and crevice of its wax kernel,
is subjected to heat; the wax is thus melted out; and, if all is
well, an absolutely perfect space is left behind it, between core and
shell, ready to receive the red-hot bronze. The _cire perdue_ process
theoretically avoids all unseemly seams, all ill-joined joints. At its
best, it approaches perfection; and such work is as well done in our
country as anywhere on earth.

[Illustration: CENTAUR AND DRYAD

BY PAUL MANSHIP]

The small bronze has then its two separate manifestations. It may
present itself either as a reduction from some much larger work worthy
of wide recognition and ownership, or as a spontaneous first-hand
offering of a sculptural thought well-suited for expression within
modest confines. In either shape, its cost is not prohibitive for many
of our private citizens as well as for our museums. The cause of art
and the delights of possession are advanced side by side.


III

Whether we look at a little book-end bear in bronze, or at a heroic
equestrian statue in bronze and stone, or at a colossal monument in
granite or marble, the importance of fine craftsmanship is evident. The
artist is the last person in the world who can afford to underrate the
craftsman.

Not long ago in reading an essay on literary criticism, I was
confronted with this impressive query: What has the navel done for
modern life? Of course modern literature in its desire to be impressive
asks many curious questions of the reader, but this one about the
navel seemed unduly wide of the mark. I was disturbed until I suddenly
perceived that the printer had used an _a_ for an _o_; the luckless
author had meant to ask about the novel, not the navel. But the artist
in words suffers less often at the hands of his helping craftsman than
does the artist in paint or clay. The sculptor in particular runs grave
risks. Even the forces of nature conspire against him; the fair-faced
marble hypocritically hides her blemishes until weeks of carving lay
them bare. Even chemistry betrays him; the bronze that should be
perfect everywhere has perhaps a spongy place or a “tin spot” or a
treacherous seam just where it does the greatest possible damage to his
statue.

One of the advantages of the ancient apprentice system was that the
beginner in art could learn all the tricks, and not only the tricks but
the very serious difficulties of the various trades that help to bring
the artist’s work to completion. Our American sculpture, which after
all began timidly enough as a kind of craftsmanship, has at certain
periods of its immaturity forgotten the importance and dignity of the
crafts on which it depends for a fair presentation. Bronze casting
has indeed advanced greatly through the fact that modern sculpture has
become largely an expression in clay, to be made permanent in bronze;
sculptors have demanded good casting, and they have obtained it. In
general, the sculptors of the world are no longer masters who release
from stone, either hard or soft, the image circumscribed within. To
reach their results, they do not as a rule start from the assumption of
Michelangelo, as Symonds translates it:

    The best of artists hath no thought to show
    Which the rough stone in its superfluous shell
    Doth not include:

They look on their work as a building-up in clay, rather than as a
cutting-down in stone. Well, why not? If the word _plastic_ keeps
its old meaning of something _shaped_, and _glyptic_ its meaning of
something _carved_, surely the sculptor may without reproach choose his
approach; always provided that this approach is the one best suited to
the matter in hand.

But even here, changes are already visible. On both sides of the
Atlantic a few sculptors are harking back to the fine old Gothic
tradition which animated Michelangelo, that spirit who was at once a
late fruit of the Gothic and a great flowering of the Renaissance.
Perhaps we owe to Rodin this modern return from plastic to glyptic? At
any rate, the movement is but lightly sketched, except as seen in some
of the enormous monuments of Middle Europe, and in particular in the
powerful works of the Serbian Mestrovic, as well as in those of recent
insurgent followers of Rodin. An odd fact is, that some of these last,
in seeking the titanic, have attained the Teutonic, especially when
their theory of deformation has betrayed them. And, of course, any new
style, vital or not, will breed new errors.

Criticism has had of late a tendency to scold sculptors for not seeing
things as Michelangelo did, or as the artist of “Le Beau Sourire
de Reims” did. It is perhaps surprising that the eloquent mediæval
craftsmanship suitable for Caen stone or limestone, and beautiful in
its place, has not attracted a larger interest and a wider experiment
among us. However, Miss Hoffman has just completed an important and
unusual War Memorial in Caen stone. Mr. MacMonnies’s great Washington
monument at Princeton is of limestone, most thoughtfully carved,
and not at all in the impetuous new manner; it may prove to be a
forerunner of other ambitious enterprises in this material. But ours
is an unkind climate. The sculptured forms of Italy and France have
not had to endure the extreme changes of heat and cold well-known
here. We have interesting varieties of marble and granite, and have
made but a beginning in the exploration of their possibilities as
adapted to our weather. A very beautiful tradition in marble-cutting
has been built up in our country by the Piccirilli family, six brothers
among whom are distinguished sculptors and distinguished craftsmen.
Their output, which includes both their own original works and their
faithful renderings in stone of the works of other sculptors, is known
throughout the country, and has inspired good craftsmanship.

Thus in the major crafts of bronze casting and of marble-cutting,
American sculpture is fairly fortunate today. In the one, we have come
a long way from that first attempt in 1847; in the other, we have
craftsmen who for large work to be seen at a distance can sufficiently
well translate into stone the sculptor’s finished models. We have
also for our salvation a few sculptors, who, like Chester Beach, are
peculiarly gifted in wresting from the marble, and with their own
hands, their own visions. But Mr. Beach is different again from most
of his contemporaries, in that he is successful in his command over
_all_ the final materials in which a sculptor’s work may be presented,
whether terra-cotta, stone, or bronze. With a modern and highly
interesting vision of beauty, and with an absolute understanding of
the principles of sculpture, this artist respects both the _art_ and
the _craft_ of sculpture. Sometimes it would seem that the finer the
artist, the finer his appreciation of craftsmanship.

Of course if one were to judge by the pictures in the Sunday
supplements, all sculptors carve their marbles themselves; they seem
to do little else. That is not true, alas. Certainly a busy sculptor
may well save himself for other matters besides roughing-out a block
of marble. But a serious sculptor will generally wish to give the
finishing strokes, few or many, a matter of weeks or of months, to
any marble work that leaves his hands. In modern stone-cutting, the
pneumatic tool is indeed a miracle-worker; and for that very reason,
it bears constant watching from the sculptor whose work it translates.
Mr. John Kirchmayer, an artist in the field of wood-carving, has
described in a recent article the mischief wrought for this art by too
great a dependence on the machine, a dependence that atrophies the
native genius of the craftsman. His counsel is the same that all arts
and crafts must follow: Use the machine but do not abuse it. When the
cheapening of production means the debasing of the product, it is time
for art and the machine to part company.




CHAPTER X

THE NATIONAL SCULPTURE SOCIETY


Other gifts besides those commonly acknowledged as the artist’s
peculiar possession are needful if the advancement of art and the
status of the artist are to be fitly assured. These other gifts
belonged to the painter Morse when in defending the interests of
art-study he played his important part in founding our National Academy
of Design in 1825. They belonged to the artists who, in espousing
the cause of the young Saint-Gaudens half a century later, broke
away from the Academy to form the Society of American Artists. They
belonged also to those later spirits who, perceiving the weakness of
that disunion, managed somehow to gather the Society back into the
bosom of the Academy, to the chastening of both factions. And they
belong in good measure to Mr. F. W. Ruckstull, an American sculptor
of widely recognized ability, who in 1893, with the help of Mr.
Charles de Kay and others, was foremost in assembling the body since
known as the National Sculpture Society. Mr. Ruckstull and the other
charter members had no personal tocsin of revolt to sound; they simply
saw, as intelligent artists and citizens, that their art and their
country needed such an organization, “to spread the knowledge of good
sculpture.”

To begin with, sculpture is not easy to exhibit. Far more than
any living painter has ever acknowledged, it suffers acutely from
unfriendly lighting. The old proverb that good sculpture looks well
anywhere ought to be amended to add, it looks its best only in its
chosen light and space. Sculpture’s appetite for space, at times
modest, is at times illimitable. The Academy, always hard-pressed
for space in its annual exhibitions, cannot afford to give up large
well-lit areas for sculptures of heroic size. The Architectural League
is hospitable toward sculpture, but, the aims of this body being many
and diverse, it certainly cannot favor the sculptors above all other
comers. Once in a while, if not oftener, our sculpture should be
shown under the happiest conditions. Again, sculpture, even more than
painting, has active contacts with the worlds of government, whether
municipal, state or federal; it should be able to present itself
with the authority naturally vested in an honored group of experts.
And sculptors, quite as much as painters and architects, must stand
together lest personal interest wrong the general good, and lest
individuals fall into misunderstandings either among themselves,
or with the public, to whose intelligent opinion they, like other
citizens, must commonly submit.

The Society, founded in 1893, and incorporated in 1896, has had
from the first an extraordinarily vivifying influence in matters
of sculpture. It has labored for the public good, in harmony with
various private committees, with Municipal Art Commissions, and with
the Federal Commission of Fine Arts. Its first president, John Quincy
Adams Ward, believed enthusiastically in its work and destiny. His
first annual report emphasizes the fact that its “reputation will be
established by its deeds, not by empty promises.” In the Society’s
second year, Ward was called upon, in association with Warner and
Saint-Gaudens, to give counsel as to the sculptural decorations for the
Library of Congress, the architecture of this building being at that
time in the hands of Edward P. Casey. Mr. Casey showed a fine zeal in
getting the best possible sculpture for the Library; besides the usual
structural ornament, his scheme called for fountains, three pairs of
bronze doors, and for a circle of twelve imposing bronze statues by
almost as many sculptors. The results were in general very happy, and
at once established a high standard. And this is important, because
the fine public building enhanced by sculpture is of service in the
progress of art, as we see from the Brooklyn Museum, the New York
Public Library, the Cleveland Court House.

Among the “deeds” foreshadowed by Mr. Ward were certain memorable
exhibitions of sculpture, enterprises of genuine value to the
community. These exhibitions were wisely and enthusiastically arranged
in collaboration with landscape architects and florists; beautiful
works fitly shown proved a surprise and a joy to both public and
connoisseurs. The public was reminded that sculpture is a living
art, with roots and branches; that it is not dedicated entirely to
pediments, portrait statues, and other monumental grandeurs; and
that sculptured forms may charm the eye of the home-maker and the
garden-lover, in intimate possession.

In 1899 Charles R. Lamb, a charter member, born with a vision of the
City Beautiful and working always toward the realization of that great
dream, conceived the thought of the Dewey Arch as a dignified free-will
offering from our sculptors,--an offering that would take a central
and beautiful part in New York’s public tribute to the hero of Manila.
That idea somehow captured the fancy of Mr. Lamb’s fellow-artists.
Immediately and unreservedly, they gave themselves to the sculptural
decorations of this arch and its approaches; Mr. Ward, full of years
and honors, set the pace by his vigorous design for the crowning group
of Naval Victory. It was rightly said that the names of those sculptors
who dedicated themselves to this Arch constituted a roll of honor.
The result of their labors was impressive beyond expectation. The
Dewey Arch, though a temporary structure, lives in our remembrance;
it is vivid in our annals as an example of whole-hearted artistic
co-operation; it gave a precedent for our later historic transformation
of Fifth Avenue into the Avenue of the Allies, an enterprise to which
our sculptors once more devoted their gifts. These rousing masculine
gestures of civic pride have a value. At the very least, they keep the
world from falling into the belief that Fifth Avenue is no more than a
bright shop where beautifully painted flower-face girls choose endless
bubbles of adornment, only to speed away self-regarding yet unsatisfied
on their tiptoe silvery shoes.

It is true that of late there has been grumbling as to the choice
of any arch as a monumental form fitted to express the tribute of
our citizens to patriotism. This disapproval is sometimes warranted,
sometimes merely superficial. The arch, as we shall doubtless
see within the next generation, has its own place in our time;
collaboration between sculptor and architect has never been better
understood than at present. To reject an arch because it obstructs
traffic, because it is out of scale, because it does not fit its
surroundings, because it is needlessly magnificent, because it does not
express the emotion it pretends to express,--all this is very wise,
and important when true. But is it not stupid to reject the arch just
because the Romans liked it? However, discussion as to the value of
the arch in our coming War memorials is beside the mark in looking back
on the Dewey Arch as a fine example of artistic co-operation.

A valuable activity has been the sending out of small sculptures on
tour throughout the country. Commenting on the universal public need
of something with increased beauty to replace the story-telling Rogers
groups of other days, a president of the Society wrote in 1913: “The
time was ripe when some four years ago the National Sculpture Society
carefully selected and sent out as a traveling exhibition nearly two
hundred small bronzes which made a circuit of the museums in some
eight or ten of the important cities. The responsive interest was as
immediate as it was unexpected, and thousands of people gave expression
to their pleasure in seeing what had hardly been known to exist.
In Chicago alone, over thirty thousand persons visited this first
exhibition.... This year, under similar auspices, and the management of
the Pittsburgh Art Society, another collection of entirely different
bronzes is passing from one museum to another, and meeting the same
warm reception from the public.”

Established in New York, the Society has proved by work of this kind
that it is truly National in its aims. Earnest inquiries and knotty
problems are sent to it from all quarters of the United States. At
one time it will be asked to “prepare the program for the competition
for the $100,000 American Baseball Monument.” Again, it will be found
considering the question, “What will it cost to produce 30,000 medals
within three weeks?” Only a great moral earnestness joined to a
knowledge of art and some acumen in judging human nature can properly
answer some of the queries submitted.

The Society’s professional membership includes nearly all persons
in the United States who practise the art of sculpture with dignity
and merit; it is safe to say that any renowned sculptor remaining
aloof from the organization is an individualist, doubtless with a
congenital distaste for organized effort. The Society’s lay membership
is an unusually large and distinguished group, made up in the main
of disinterested lovers of art. In addition to the proverbial reward
of virtue, the lay members receive from time to time some tangible
souvenir, such as a small bronze designed by a sculptor member, or a
monograph. These tokens occur often enough to attest good will, but not
so often as to lose the charm of the unexpected.

The list of professional members reveals a surprisingly large number
of names of women. It will be remembered that Mr. Ward, that figure
of virility personified, cordially invited women sculptors to become
members of the Society, and to join in the deliberations of the
council-table. Chesterton, in his story of Victorian literature, has
emphasized the importance of women writers in the development of the
English novel. In our country, the importance of women engaged in
sculpture as a gainful occupation has steadily increased during the
past half-century. “Enter the race,” said Mr. Ward, “asking no odds!”
Commissions for statues were once given to women, it must be confessed,
out of what Dr. Johnson might call “Pure ignorance, Madam.” How
otherwise can we explain the spectacle of our chivalrous Congressmen
entrusting to a girl of fifteen the making of a statue of Lincoln? It
is indeed said that “all the great sculptors of the period submitted
models, but that the committee, after careful study, decided that the
model of the little Ream girl surpassed all others.” The child surely
had genius; she had the further advantage of quiet half-hours of study
of Lincoln from life.

But to-day,--well, it isn’t supposed to be done! Thanks to the
National Sculpture Society, such competitions are at present generally
conducted with even-handed justice. Nowadays, women who receive really
important sculptural commissions are expected to deserve them out of
the fullness of experience. In 1911, I was unwise enough to write,
apropos of the monumental equestrian statue, that this field was for
man’s working, and that it would not in the near future offer any very
large _place aux dames_. But it chanced that the fifth centenary of
Jeanne d’Arc fell due soon after, and Miss Hyatt, paying no attention
to my grotesque observation, began work on her equestrian statue of the
Maid. Rarely has any such statue been studied with as fine a vision
of the relative claims of art and archæology. In 1915, Miss Hyatt’s
work was unveiled on Riverside Drive. It is one of the best-loved
monuments in the city of New York; and from the day of its unveiling,
I have forsworn prophecy. Otherwise, I might be tempted to add that
at present, given the tradition of apprenticeship still keeping its
last stronghold in some of the studios, and given the ease with which
assistance may be obtained for the ruder manual labor, there is no
reason why women may not be trained to solve with success the usual
sculptural problems. “Because they are conscientious, and because they
have imagination,” were the reasons given by a sculptor who employed
women assistants.

The National Sculpture Society’s ideals, to be valuable and enduring,
must concern themselves with the ethical as well as the artistic side
of various questions brought before the body. On the ethical side, it
has, not without inherent difficulties, established its Code governing
Competitions, the Code itself being governed by the Society’s avowed
principle of fostering art with integrity. Year by year, the good
work of this Code is shown by the larger clarity of purpose and of
statement, and the larger conscientiousness in endeavor now expected
alike from committees, competitors, and juries of award.

Some of the thoughtful idealists of the Society have long wished that
it could undertake as part of its work an enterprise that might prove
of untold value in the arts. “If instead of wrangling so long and so
devotedly over our Code,” said one of these idealists, “we could have
given the time to establishing a workshop for scientific experiments
with our various materials, what immense practical good might have
been accomplished! But it would take money, more money than our Society
has ever had at its disposal.”

The field for such experiment is boundless. Science properly applied
could help the sculptor at every step.

Think what it would mean to the sculptor if he had a _plastic_ material
which by the magic of chemistry could be at once converted into an
_imperishable_ material, exactly as it leaves his hands; or if the
metallurgist would find him an alloy of metals which would take on,
or even hold, a beautiful _patine_ when exposed to our atmosphere; or
if the chemist could explain some of the strange antics and prevent
the misbehavior of that go-between, common plaster, which plays such a
vital part in a sculptor’s work from the clay model to the final marble
or bronze. Plaster is indispensable, in spite of its shortcomings;
could not this lifeless, chalky stuff be transformed into a substance
both durable and interesting? And marble, that sovereign among
materials, is there no way by which its fine white crystals could be
made to take on other tones than those nature has given? The questions
are legion. With the amazing advance of practical chemistry within the
last few years, many of them might be definitely settled by scientific
experiment. It is to be hoped that in the near future the National
Sculpture Society will acquire its needed research workshop, and put
out publications of the results obtained, so that science may assist
art as generously as in an allegory of mural decoration.

We have spoken of idealists. No member of the Society has proved
himself a more practical idealist than Mr. Lorado Taft, long an
enthusiastic teacher of the modeling classes at the Chicago Art
Institute, and to-day a force for art not only in the Middle West, but
throughout the country. Mr. Taft is the sculptor of the Black Hawk
monument, the grandiose fountain of Time, and other works well-known
indeed, but not because he himself in his thousands of lectures and in
his two important books on sculpture has ever taken the opportunity
to advertise his own talent. The fact is ironic, even grotesque; by
voice and pen Mr. Taft has for years disclosed the merits of all
sculpture save his own. Lesser artists than himself have been genially
interpreted in his vivid and conscientious expositions. His public
service for sculpture, a service now widely welcomed, was begun in
the Middle West, a part of our country which because of its early
settlement by Americans, Germans, and Scandinavians of enlightened
stock, was early interested in artistic endeavor, and which today has
some of our strongest art schools and museums. Nowhere else could his
work have been begun so usefully. As sculptor, traveler, lecturer,
writer, Mr. Taft gives himself with unfailing zest to that first avowed
object of the Society, “to spread the knowledge of good sculpture.”

During the World War, and throughout the subsequent period of striving
to wrest world betterment out of world bewilderment, the Society has
remained active in its chosen work. The Spring of 1918 saw the opening
by the Metropolitan Museum of a permanent exhibition of contemporary
American sculpture; and to quote from a Bulletin of that time, Mr.
French, the honorary president of the Society, “to whose gallant
initiative and untiring endeavor the success of the undertaking is
largely due, is as truly an American patriot as if he were a very young
man with a very new rifle, now gazing eagerly toward the coast of
France.” Robert Aitken and Sherry Fry, sculptors already distinguished
in their profession before serving abroad with our Army, have doubtless
through their military experience gained something of value to them
as artists and as citizens. By the death of Harry Thrasher, killed
near Rheims, the Society has lost one of its promising members; one
who, having richly profited by his advanced studies at the American
Academy in Rome, seemed at the outbreak of the War to stand on the
threshold of high achievement in art. Those who knew him well have said
that in his work as a sculptor, varied though this was, his genius
was seen at its best in spacious and heroic conceptions, and that had
he been spared, the heroic would have been as fully expressed in his
art as it has been expressed in his life and its final sacrifice. The
recent untimely death of Solon Borglum, an artist in whom a winning
personality was joined to integrity of purpose and originality of
outlook, was doubtless hastened by hardships met during his devoted
service in France. Such men well illustrate the hope of the National
Sculpture Society as to the quality of its membership; as sculptors and
as citizens, they gave themselves to their art and to their country.

In the stimulating opportunity for exhibition offered to American
sculptors through the courtesy of the group of learned Societies housed
in stately fashion in upper Broadway, the National Sculpture Society
desires once more to show, in a creditable manner and to a discerning
public, the beauty and serviceableness of the art its members practise.
Broadway at 156th Street is unlike any other Broadway in the world.
The air is finer and clearer there than elsewhere, yet not too fine
and good for human nature’s daily breathing. Very hospitable are the
terraces and galleries of the Hispanic Society, the Numismatic Society,
the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Geographical
Society, the Heye Foundation. The National Sculpture Society counts
on a dignified setting such as it has never before enjoyed, together
with a sympathetic collaboration such as it has always appreciated, to
achieve a worthy revelation of sculptured form.




CHAPTER XI

INFLUENCES, GOING AND COMING

“_Quid quisque vitet, nunquam homini satis cautum est in horas._”


I

Sometimes we talk as if the present state of things were a sort of
terminus; as if by many roads we had at last reached Rome. Would it not
be wiser to look upon the Olympian Washington and the Adams Memorial
and the lately-discussed Civic Virtue as so many figures marking
stations of a journey by no means finished? We have had competent
leaders in the immediate past of our sculpture; is there anything
in our American way of life and our American view of art that will
prevent our having competent leaders in the future? We are too close
to that question to answer it, beyond saying that we are full of
hope. And art is one of those matters concerning which despair is
criminal. Certainly the chaos resulting from the World War is not as
yet sufficiently transformed for the wisest to know from what Ark, high
and dry on what Ararat, will issue the new hopes of all mankind. We can
only cry out with Galsworthy, not yet are there enough lovers of beauty
among us.

Our introductory chapter noted with some emphasis the fact that through
Jefferson’s hands the realism of France and the idealism of Italy came
to the aid of our new-born plastic art. Houdon happened to be a greater
sculptor than Canova; it was our good fortune that we had Houdon at
all. And Jefferson drew the curtain for a steadily unfolding act in
the drama. Since his day, France and Italy have always been our chief
allies in our sculpture. Because of this, and because of the Roman
origin of most of the British culture our early settlers brought with
them, bred in the bone, it follows that the main current of American
sculpture, in thought, in feeling, and even in workmanship, has been
fed from the boundless streams of Mediterranean civilization. Now and
again, a Celtic influence, a German influence, a Scandinavian influence
has made itself felt, for better or for worse.

Each new influence as it comes we shall prize for what it is, after
the gloss or shock of novelty is worn off. Each may have an importance
we can but guess at. Saint-Gaudens was deeply conscious that he had
received his legacy of artistic sensitiveness quite as much from his
Irish mother as from his French father, born in Southern France not far
from those sculptured mountains on which many a French poet and artist
opened infant eyes. Perhaps Celtic glamor was all that made his vision
of man somewhat different from that of many of his comrades at the
_petite école_,--just different enough to give his later work a chance
at immortality, while the images they shaped had to go back dumb to the
clay-pit again. It is a great gift, the Celtic eye, though making small
boast of seeing things steadily and seeing them whole; ah, nothing so
prosaic as that! Celtic melancholy and Celtic mirth raise up a kind
of shimmering rainbow-dust through which an image is seen in glorious
parts; and Celtic exasperation loves stir more than steadiness. But the
plodders need the seers; and ever since the time of Crawford and his
Past and Present of the Republic, our sculpture has been graced and
enlivened by many a Mac and O; never more so than to-day. The Wren
epitaph fits them even during their lifetime:--_Circumspice._

So in our country as in Britain, the Scottish and the Irish and the
Welsh strains in the blood key up the English-speaking peoples in their
arts of vision and expression. Yet when all such things are said, (and
much more might be said, with unmannerly talk of “creeping Saxons” and
the like) the fact remains that the future art of the United States is
even less easy to foreknow than that of the British Isles; and this
because of what we call our “melting-pot” population, with all its
benefits and drawbacks, its clamorous and conflicting ideals in art
and in morality. The great American alembic is still seething. Newer
forces than any that have come from Britain and France and Italy are
now stirring here. What of these? Mr. Sloane, in his address on the
sculptor Ward, reminded us of the slow evolution of sculpture, of
the long journey between the Memnon and the Hermes, of the swifter
travel between Greek art and our own, and of our recent return, not
only to the classic, but to the oriental. That inquiring look toward
the Orient, a corner of the earth always revered in occidental art,
was never so general as at present. Some time ago, the studies of our
sculptors at the American Academy at Rome led them to the eastern
borders of that richly intricate rim of the Mediterranean basin; a
rim from which we are still plucking jewels of hitherto unimagined
splendor, such as those of Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb. But before pressing
still farther eastward, let us glance a moment at the familiar
influences of recent formative years.


II

We differentiate too rudely if we say offhand that American sculpture
has learned its _art_ from France, its _craft_ from Italy. The truth
cannot be told so simply as that. For instance, the Piccirillis,
American artists and craftsmen of Italian ancestry, are but a few out
of many talented American sculptors of Italian birth. Again, we went
to France for lessons in casting bronze, as well as in making our
weekly “bonhomme” at the _école_. Yet for the whole Western world of
sculpture during the past forty years, the strongest general influence
has been that of the French school, and the strongest single influence
that of a Frenchman aloof from the school, Auguste Rodin. No thinking
sensitive person who uses clay to shape his visions and earn his living
has failed to feel Rodin’s influence; it is already so deeply imbedded
in consciousness that many of those who most imitate this master are
least aware of so doing. It would be a mistake to suppose, because the
shouting is over, that this powerful influence has wholly waned.

We have spoken of the uses of collaboration. But there are souls that
would perish rather than collaborate. Some of these belong in the
ranks of genius, others are distinctly due elsewhere. Of the former
class was Rodin, never willing or able to subject himself to any
architectural tradition. Even while writing of Rodin’s consistent
refusal of collaboration, I hear the ironic voice of M. Anatole France,
a veteran in one art speaking of a veteran in another: “_Et surtout,
avouons-le, il collabore trop avec la catastrophe_.” And he adds, with
that sparkle of malice veterans allow themselves but not others to use
when speaking of veterans, “_Il abuse du droit de casser ce qui, dans
une œuvre, est mal venu_.” According to M. France, Rodin collaborates,
and even too much; not with architecture, as a more conventional soul
might, but with architecture’s logical opposite, catastrophe. It is
more fruitful to dwell on the gifts of genius than on its limitations;
yet the limitations also must be noted, whenever blind worship confuses
defects with qualities. It was a limitation (and so the _Société des
Gens de Lettres_ found it) that Rodin could not bring himself to any
architectural conception of his Balzac:--Balzac, more architecturally
minded than even the English novelist Hardy; Balzac, who will not let
you once look at Père Goriot until you have a clear understanding of
the plan and elevation of the sordid _pension_ where the poor man
lives; Balzac, who jealously hides Eugénie Grandet from you until
you have mastered every arch and cornice of the gloomy mansion that
shelters her; Balzac, who insists that you must know period and style
and galleries and window-glass of _la maison Claes_ before you can
peer at Madame Claes. Balzac built his novels that way because to his
mind man’s architecture is part of his life, his fate, his rôle in
the Comédie Humaine. So what Rodin did lacked basic fitness. In that
portrait statue, the Rodin of it was more precious to him than the
Balzac of it; he could make no compromise.

Now an advancing civilization will make its honorable compromises; and
it seems to me that Saint-Gaudens’s way of letting the significant
winds and waves play about the architectural pedestal or deck that
Farragut bestrides is more civilized than Rodin’s far simpler way
of letting the magnificent head of his Balzac emerge from monstrous
shapelessness to splendor. The Balzac looks splendidly begun, the
Farragut splendidly brought to completion. There is indeed a charm in
things greatly begun. Such things suggest the untamed glory of the
human spirit, and give skyey space for the beholder’s imagination to
dip its wings in. The poorest of us in looking at them can at least
conjecture, if not create. And a very present refuge for the sculptor
is that lump of marble which says nothing but suggests much in Rodin’s
portraits of women, and in many of his ideal groups with certain
surfaces of soft flesh exquisitely carved in their emergence from the
hard stone. Those melodious modulations of light and shade in flesh
are Rodin’s secret; here his genius is forever happy. That woman’s
marble back, for instance; one thinks that if one should touch it, the
skin would yield and pale and redden again. Rodin himself, in his talk
of his own work and of the classic masterpieces he loved, constantly
uses the word “esprit” rather than “chair,” and from his point of view
there is no inconsistency in that. Gratefully we acknowledge that this
master has showed the wonders of both flesh and spirit. It was well for
American sculpture to applaud both triumphs. What next?

Next, there were certain mannerisms better left unlearned by our
students; for example, that use of large extremities, a choice
announcing a healthy abhorrence of prettiness. We have seen in our
land many a Bertha Broadfoot and many a Helen of the Large Hand
created by those who had not Rodin’s excuse for this avoidance of
conventional proportion; they were not revealing the scarce-finished
new beings of Paradise, or the muscular striding bulk of a John the
Baptist in the wilderness. There is yet another mannerism filched by
admiring disciples; perhaps it is something less superficial than a
mannerism. We need not take M. France too seriously when he says of
M. Rodin, “_Il me sémble ignorer la science des ensembles_.” It is
a saying fitter to live in the flow of talk than to be embalmed in
print; yet it draws blood, too, with its prickly edge of truth. Rodin’s
ensembles are his own, not those of sane tradition; his imitators’
ensembles are often pitifully less good than those of either Rodin
or the school. That is serious! At the present moment, many American
War monuments are in the making; too many, perhaps, are casting away
collaboration and tradition. Their creators seem unaware that they are
under an influence; they think they are showing originality, preaching
the gospel of simplicity, and in a really messianic way, calling
architecture to repentance.

But, nowhere is the architectural conception of work more necessary
than in a new country. Without that conception, these United States
would be besprinkled with productions richer in the one virtue of
individuality than in the many virtues of order, unity, harmony, an
underlying sense of natural evolution and continuity. Our civilization
is not yet jaded, and does not yet need prickings toward variety.
For American sculpture, the lesson of Rodin’s genius, as distinct
from the lesson of the school, is that of the titanic conception and
the exquisite _morceau_, but not that of harmonious collaboration.
Meanwhile, it is cheering to see that the singular doctrine of
deformation distilled in France by vigorous modern followers of Rodin
is at present neglected here; when we turn modernist, as sometimes
happens, we choose the path of abstractions, seeking perhaps Epstein’s
“form that is not the form of anything,” rather than form amplifying
itself into ugliness, in defiance of classic balance and measure. In
fact, a recent piece of the new poetry, written about a recent piece of
the new sculpture tells us that

   “the immaculate
    conception
    of the inaudible bird
    occurs
    in gorgeous reticence.”

Gorgeous reticence is perhaps preferable to gorgeous loquacity.


III

For a long time, and without conspicuous success, Mr. Howells tried
to show his friends the beauty of Russian realism. Apparently much of
the American appreciation that did not go out to Turgenev was being
saved for Chekhov, and for those later realists whose writings chime
with the discords and disillusions of the “expressionism” now making
itself felt in various arts. Both here and in England, the Russian
influence is visible in literature. But sculpture is slower than
literature to accept the exotic; sculpture’s magisterial weight and
bulk, and its supposed permanence, help to make it more self-contained
and less mercurial in its reactions. And indeed all the Russian
influence our sculpture has hitherto met has been of the Gallic
variety; Troubetskoy’s brilliant _pleinairiste_ modeling is as French
as Marie Bashkirtseff’s painting. Meanwhile, Russian peasant drama is
having its brightly colored successes here, in our richest of American
cities, especially among those of our intelligentsia who can afford the
price of admission, or who as critics make their living by appraising
novelties in art. Since American criticism is often created by youth
and for youth, its various impregnable positions shift with a rapidity
that has a certain advantage for a listening public; no one who is
guided by a youthful Mentor needs to remain long in any one error. But
Heaven forbid that youth, and most of all opinion-shaping youth, should
abandon a generosity of outlook toward foreign products of the mind!

To speak seriously, it will be interesting to know just how the
increasing Slavic element in our population will influence our
country’s arts in general, and our self-contained art of sculpture
in particular. When a teacher of art remarks, in some dubiety, “So
many of our students have names that end in ‘sky’,” the only gallant
retort is, “It is our business to be sure that they make no worse end
than that.” Not the least of art’s problems here in America is that
universal American problem of the unassimilated alien. Optimists and
pessimists can unite in one opinion; that our latest immigrants, no
less than those of the Mayflower, have certain native qualities that
need alteration for the benefit of the human race. The Puritan has
altered for the better. Later comers must do likewise. Some of these
have a far harder task than the Puritans, with less ability to perform
it; but they have infinitely more help.

Mr. John Corbin, in one of his penetrating studies of dramatic art,
has pointed out “two stages of American provincialism.” One stage
rejects all foreign culture; the other embraces anything foreign,
provided that it is abundantly subversive of domestic ideals and labors
and attainments. Both stages are hostile to truth and to progress,
and to the only freedom there is, freedom of the spirit. The first
type wilfully stunts growth; the second invites destruction of growth
already accomplished by costly effort. Surely American sculpture, which
has borrowed eagerly abroad and developed soundly at home, should not
fall into either of these degenerate modes of thinking.

“_Quid quisque vitet_,” says Horace, with his canny Roman
philosophy,--“What hourly to avoid is known by none.” What hourly
to accept is our modern question. Since a man’s foes may be of his
own household, what if our own home-grown materialism were after
all the worst enemy of our art? It will do little good to fly
feverish alien contacts if at the same time things of the spirit are
allowed to languish at our own ancestral firesides. Sometimes the
firesides themselves seem less frequent, as ancestors diminish in the
world’s esteem. True, our tawdry and vehement self-advertising has
its magnificent dreams, and our childlike faith in the dollar its
occasional glorious hour of justification; we cannot help seeing that
some of our transatlantic co-workers in art and letters come among us
remembering those things. And it is a healing principle of civilization
that we shall borrow our light from one land, and divide our loaf
with another; even though loaves are wasted thereby. Every lover of
our country will wish its culture to remain at once hospitable and
self-respecting; both characteristics may dwell harmoniously together.

In spite of superficial indications such as those offered by the names
in a city telephone directory, the core and nucleus of general culture
in the United States remains English-speaking; more, it remains true
to ideals of human conduct and human responsibility that have been
fruitfully developed and cherished by the English-speaking peoples.
Whatever lightly-accepted beliefs there may be in regard to this
matter, I am persuaded that the broad basis of American culture is and
will be our Puritanism. Not the narrow, mote-seeking Puritanism of past
story, but an enlightened, liberating Puritanism, with perceptions
and pardons for others, and with questionings as to its own supposed
superiorities; a Puritanism that has gained in grace and goodness
through native development and happy alien contacts. How often we have
mumbled an ancient shibboleth to the effect that art and morality
have nothing in common! On the contrary, they have the one supreme
aspiration of human beings in common; the benefit of the race. It is
the little artist who proclaims himself different from other men, and
so not subject to their laws; the great artist strives to bring his
personality and his work into harmony with the best that he knows of
human effort. Magnanimous men and women unconsciously reveal their
longing that their work may live after them for the happiness of
mankind. Ward on his death-bed, finally assured that all is well with
the great equestrian that had engaged his last thoughts, whispers to
his wife, “Now I can go in peace.” Saint-Gaudens in the later pages of
his Memoirs writes of the knowledge of the beautiful: “I know it is
a question whether such a knowledge increases the general happiness
and morality of a community. I firmly believe it does, as I believe
that any effort to do a thing as well as it can be done, regardless of
mercenary motives, tends to the elevation of the human mind.”

[Illustration: VICTORY

BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS]

[Illustration: THE GILLISS PRESS]




Transcriber’s Notes


Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.

Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs
and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support
hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to
the corresponding illustrations.

Text uses “today” and “to-day” with equal frequency; both forms
retained here.

Page 3: Transcriber removed duplicate book title.