Chapter XIII: The Ideal Motive 209 (1)

INDEX 233

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE SHERMAN MONUMENT. BY AUGUSTUS
SAINT-GAUDENS _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE

GRIEF. BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 8
A Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington,
D. C.

THE LINCOLN STATUE. BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 9

RELIEF PORTRAIT OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 16

PAN. BY GEORGE GREY BARNARD 28

THE HEWER. BY GEORGE GREY BARNARD 29

TWO FRIENDS. BY GEORGE GREY BARNARD 34
A Memorial Monument.

THE GREELEY STATUE. BY JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
WARD 46

THE BEECHER STATUE. BY JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
WARD 47

DEATH AND THE SCULPTOR. BY DANIEL
CHESTER FRENCH 60
The Milmore Monument in Forest Hills Cemetery
near Boston.

DETAIL OF THE CLARK MONUMENT. BY
DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH 61
Forest Hills Cemetery.

ALMA MATER. BY DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH 68
Columbia University.

DIANA. BY FREDERICK MACMONNIES 76

BACCHANTE. BY FREDERICK MACMONNIES 77

MICHELANGELO. BY PAUL WEYLAND BARTLETT 92
Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.

MADONNA. BY HERBERT ADAMS 104
Tympanum for St. Bartholomew’s Church, New
York.

PORTRAIT-BUST. BY HERBERT ADAMS 105

BUST OF THE ARTIST’S WIFE. BY HERBERT ADAMS 110

THE DRILLER. BY CHARLES HENRY NIEHAUS 122 From the Drake Monument, Titusville, Pennsylvania.

THE HAHNEMANN STATUE. BY CHARLES HENRY
NIEHAUS 123
From the Hahnemann Memorial, Washington, D. C.

BUST OF DANIEL COTTIER. BY OLIN LEVI
WARNER 136

CUPID AND PSYCHE. BY OLIN LEVI WARNER 137

DIANA. BY OLIN LEVI WARNER 144

COWBOY MOUNTING. BY SOLON HANNIBAL
BORGLUM 152

LOST IN A BLIZZARD. (Marble.) BY SOLON HANNIBAL
BORGLUM 153

TAMED. BY SOLON HANNIBAL BORGLUM 160

PORTRAIT OF C. P. HUNTINGTON. BY VICTOR
DAVID BRENNER 168

RECUMBENT FIGURE. BY J. MASSEY RHIND 192
From the Tomb of Father Brown in the Church of
Saint Mary-the-Virgin, New York.

PUMA. BY A. PHIMISTER PROCTOR 193
From Prospect Park, Brooklyn.

CHARIOT RACE. BY F. G. R. ROTH 202

BUST OF A CHILD. BY BIRTLEY CANFIELD 214

THE STONE AGE. BY JOHN J. BOYLE 215

I

AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS

If we value the gift of imagination in an artist over that of technique it is not because we undervalue the latter. Without technique a work of art is not to be thought of; it is as essentially the visible expression of the inward grace as the human form is the casket of the human spirit. But the quality in man or woman of purest delight and most enduring significance is less the body and its acts than the thought that animates them. And is it not so with a work of art?

It is as an artist of superior imagination that we regard Saint-Gaudens; as one who can give to the facts of our knowledge a fresh form and significance, attracting us toward the idea contained within the actual, the idealisation of character or of sentiment. And such imagination in an artist must have a twofold working. It fills him with a fine idea and it discovers to his hand a fine manner of embodying it; it penetrates his technique.

To appreciate fully a sculptor’s worthiness in this respect one should realise the peculiar relation in which he is placed with regard to facts. While the painter has a wide range of resources for creating an illusion the sculptor is limited to a comparatively strict and naïve realism. Even if he introduces an ideal figure, such as that of an angel, he is compelled to give it the clear-cut contours, substance and actuality of a distinctly visible and tangible form. His only means of idealising are the abstract beauty of line and form, the character of expression in face and gesture and the general feeling of nobility and sweetness that he can impart to his work through the degree to which the thought that is in him inspires his hand. He may, indeed, attempt a more obvious trick of idealising, as when Greenough represented Washington in the rôle of Olympian Zeus by the device of baring the body and placing a mimic thunderbolt in the hand. But to modern taste, at any rate, such a procedure seems ridiculous. The truth is, that the highest form of imagination--indeed, the only tolerable one to the modern mind--is that which illumines the facts of our common knowledge and expression; in a word, which bases itself on facts.

But this demands of the sculptor a very high degree of creative imagination, in all probability a proportionately higher one than the painter’s; for if the latter is confronted, for example, with a subject of ill-made coat and trousers, he can by merging the costume in atmosphere and by toning it with the background so gloss over its inartistic appearance as to produce a handsome _ensemble_. But, compared with the sculptor’s problems, this is an evasion of the difficulty. To repeat, the sculptor is limited in his presentment to the actual facts. But, though it may seem to be a paradox, it is almost a truism in art, that the limitations of a medium are its most characteristic sources of power--at least, when knowingly and courageously admitted. And, I believe, it can scarcely be doubted that the quality in Saint-Gaudens’s imagination which has most conduced to his greatness as an artist is this: it is kindled by contemplation of the facts, and it finds in the facts its keenest and truest impulse.

Moreover, it has been his good fortune to be confronted with large and impressive facts. The panorama of American civilization, and especially one episode of tremendous import--the Civil War--has spread itself behind his work; and the latter, as in the case of one of his own reliefs, has grown out of and in harmony with the background. Other sculptors, also, have had the same high incentive, but many have failed to respond to it. Saint-Gaudens has had the force of imagination which could not only grasp the magnitude of his opportunity but interpret its impressiveness.

The conditions in America have demanded that his work should be largely of a memorial character--monuments to those that are honoured in public or mourned in private, and in both directions his achievements have placed him in the foremost ranks of modern sculptors. This was demonstrated at the Paris Exposition of 1900, where he was represented among other works by the statue of General Sherman and the “Shaw Memorial.” A comparison of these, respectively with Dubois’s “Joan of Arc” and with Bartholomé’s “Monument to the Dead,” helped one to divine the special qualities of Saint-Gaudens’s style.

He himself had a Paris training. Son of a French father and an Irish mother, brought to this country when a child, he displayed early an aptitude for art, and in course of time went through the usual regimen of a student in Paris. Thus he came under the influence of the best academic traditions and of the modern naturalistic movement, and imbibed both to the degree that his own temperament and the conditions of his inspiration demanded.

So in the direction of tradition--that is to say, of more or less consecutive descent from an original classic type--we may compare his “General Sherman” with Dubois’s “Joan of Arc”; both equestrian statues, monumental in design, full of decorative dignity yet so different in character. The latter, noble in every particular, has a choice propriety of feeling that separates it by an ocean of motive from the freer spirit of the other. It is at once mannered, more consciously correct and studiously discreet and has an air of _hauteur_ and aloofness, as becomes its aristocratic descent in the direct line from Verrocchio’s “Colleoni.” The “Sherman,” however, is of only collateral descent, modified by a larger environment and a fresher inspiration. The typal form has yielded to the individual, abstract dignity to the force of character, the fundamental suggestion to that of vivid, immediate actuality.

In its naturalistic tendency and expression of profound emotion the “Monument to the Dead,” by Bartholomé, is at one with Saint-Gaudens’s work; but I found myself comparing it with the latter’s figure of “Grief” in the Rock Creek Cemetery, near Washington. Then its degree of naturalism is found to be less. It shows some influence of the classic tradition in the use of nude figures and in their elaborate disposition along the background of masonry; while the single figure by Saint-Gaudens is draped and presented with an unaffectedness of arrangement and with an intimacy of appeal that is at the same time more naturalistic and more poignant.

So may we not deduce from these comparisons one quality inherent in Saint-Gaudens: that of daring to be free from conventional restraint, or rather the daring to adapt, with a freedom only limited by his sense of artistic fitness, the academic traditions which his early life experienced? For the means by which he has wrought out his freedom are in no sense revolutionary. He does not, for example, go as far as Rodin in the latter’s disregard of symmetry in composition. His own have always a monumental character, studied for their effect in the mass, as seen from various points of view. Moreover, they are always extremely reserved: as far as possible removed from the floridness indulged in by many students of the academic traditions. A similar reserve controls his naturalistic tendencies. Evidently it is not naturalism of itself which attracts him; indeed, all his leaning is primarily toward the sculpturesque side of sculpture, as a self-contained mass, proportionately impressive, equable in outline, decorative and structural in _ensemble_. These principles of technique are at the service

By Augustus Saint-Gaudens

A Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D. C.]

By Augustus Saint-Gaudens]

of--perhaps it would be truer to say that they have been adapted to--an imagination, which reverences the character in man and can picture and suggest the individual in relation to the larger issues of his time; with a capacity of emotional expression that has the added poignancy of compression. It has been, indeed, continually reënforced by the grandeur of the themes that have confronted him, and the result upon his technique is a gravity of distinction which represents the finest kind of style. In that smaller kind of style which is limited to the actual technique of modelling it would be possible to mention sculptors who far excel Saint-Gaudens; but in those qualities of broader and deeper reference wherein brain and sensibility coöperate with hand for high creative and poetic ends I doubt if he has any superior among modern artists.

Let us trace the gift of idealising as it appears in several of his works, selected because they represent a descending scale from the purely ideal to the idealised fact. And first the statue of “Grief” in the Rock Creek Cemetery. I made the pilgrimage from Washington one sunny autumn afternoon with a companion. The gatekeeper directing us, we threaded our way along the labyrinth of paths, among the chaos of conflicting monuments, so many of which testify to impotence of taste. Finally a glance behind a hedge of cypress--we are indeed on holy ground! Within the little enclosure of solemn greenery a bench, marble and of Greek design, invites to sit; the world is all outside, and here before us, raised upon a slight pedestal, enough to lift it above the level, but not too high for close and intimate communion, is the Presence: a woman’s seated figure, wrapped about in coarse drapery that shrouds her head and falls in long, loose, heavy folds at her feet. We have heard the story: That a husband, robbed of his wife with shocking suddenness, called upon the sculptor to express in plastic shape the void in his life, enjoining him to ignore all symbols of hope and to give utterance only to the consuming hopelessness of loss. And here before us--in the isolation of the figure, in the uncompromising sternness of the drapery, in the majestic agony of the face, the eyelids lowered in pain, the lips full and set in the effort of endurance and also in a protest as proud as it is despairing--there is expressed a universality of grief that sums up the sorrow of the modern world, as well as the eternal question of the why and to what end. Under the spell of it a wife and husband sit on into the golden afternoon, chastened, purified, elevated, drawn closer to each other by the realisation of the mystery of grief, and with a renewed sense of the sanctity of happiness ere the shadow falls. Here indeed is an idealisation, complete and absolute; no helping out with wings and symbols, but the rendering of a simple, natural fact--a woman in grief; yet with such deep and embracing comprehension that the individual is magnified into a type. The emotional appeal is universal.

In this statue the sculptor could give free rein to his imagination. Observe how in the “Shaw Memorial” he meets the problem of an actual fact of history; the youthful leader riding forth to war with his marching regiment of Negroes. What a boundless zest he displays for the realism of the scene! He portrays the humble soldiers with varying characteristics of pathetic devotion, and from the halting uniformity of their movement, even from the uncouthness of their ill-fitting uniforms, from such details as the water-bottles and rifles, secures an impressiveness of decorative composition, distinguished by virile contrasts and repetitions of line and by vigorous handsomeness of light and shade. Mingled with our enjoyment of these qualities is the emotion aroused by the intent and steadfast onward movement of the troops, whose doglike trustfulness is contrasted with the serene elevation of their white leader.

Behind this group looms up the tremendous issues of the war; they were present to the imagination of the sculptor and he has suggested them to ours. Hence the work is big with fatefulness, with a reference reaching beyond the fate of the personages represented to the fate of a nation trembling in the balance. Ah! it is a great gift, this power to touch upon the fundamental, the essentially and genetically vital aspect of a matter, and by means so simple and of common knowledge. As he worked upon the memorial it would seem as if Saint-Gaudens distrusted somewhat his possession of this faculty, for to increase the idealisation he has introduced a figure of Victory floating above the head of the leader. It was not necessary and is scarcely in accord with the rest of the composition, introducing into the energy and concentration of the whole a somewhat quavering note. Yet, to judge by my own experience, the sense of jar yields to indifference; one loses consciousness of this figure in the grandeur and elevation of the whole. But, if this is the experience also of others, it tends to prove how unnecessary was its introduction; and, further, one is inclined to resent it as partaking of the obviousness which would occur to a smaller sculptor.

A similar attempt to reënforce the ideal suggestion contained in the realistic parts of the group with the direct introduction of a symbolic figure reappears in the equestrian statue of General Sherman. But the figure in this case is more intrinsically a part of the general design in perfect harmony of character and feeling, and the group as it stands, while almost the latest, is probably the most completely grand example of Saint-Gaudens’s art. Sherman leans a little forward in the saddle with a handling of the reins that keeps in control the impetuosity of his big-boned, powerful charger, an action of the hands very characteristic of an accomplished horseman. His head is bare and his military cloak floats from his back in ample folds. Victory moves ahead of his left stirrup, palm branch in hand, her drapery buoyed up with air; the horse’s tail streams behind; throughout the whole composition is a single impulse of irresistible advance. From every point of view the mass is compact with dignity, ornamental in line and bulk, alive with elevated and inspiring energy. At closer range one may discover the big simplicity and pregnant generalisation of the modelling, also the meaningfulness of the characterisation. The horse in build and gait is a serviceable beast, bred for courage and endurance; the rider, a man of iron purpose, indomitable in face and carriage; while the woman’s figure in the grand spirit of the flowing lines and in the lofty sadness of her mien touches a chord of triumph and pathos, of the glory and the tragedy of victory.

I compared this statue with Dubois’s “Joan of Arc,” and found it so much less mannered, so far more vital in the immediateness of its import; or, shall we state it in this way: less consciously a work of art, more spontaneously the expression of an overpowering sentiment. This, if I am not mistaken, contains the gist of Saint-Gaudens’s art. While traditional in its origin, it is a living art, rooted in the realities of its environment, modified in its growth--that is to say, in its technique--by the necessity of responding to its conditions.

But how does Saint-Gaudens fare when he confines himself to a factual representation of his subject? Let his statue of Lincoln at Chicago testify. No grace of line or grandeur of mass; only a chair behind the standing figure to eke out the stringiness of the legs and in a measure to build up the composition. Nor could the sculptor snatch an easy triumph through any heroic rendering of the figure, spare and elongated, in clothes uncompromisingly ordinary. But the man as he was, and just because he chanced to be the man he was, was great, and in the fearless acceptance of this fact the sculptor has seized his opportunity. The statue is planted firmly on the right foot--not every statue really stands upon its feet--the right arm held behind the back--these are the characteristic gestures of stability, tenacity and reflection; while the advance of the left leg and the grip of the left hand upon the lapel of the coat bespeak the man of action. With such completeness are these complex qualities suggested and then crowned with the solemn dignity of the declined head, so aloof in impenetrable meditation, that the homely figure has a grandeur and a power of appeal which are irresistible. True, our imagination, reënforced by knowledge, goes out to reach the artist half-way, thereby lessening the space he has to travel in his idealisation of facts. Behind this isolated figure looms up the scene in which he played so great a part. It was precisely because this scene was present to the sculptor’s imagination, and he knew it would be to ours, that he set himself to the most realistic rendering of his subject and thereby triumphed.

But once more, turn to his statue of Peter Cooper. There is no background here of heroism, or any environment of a nation roused to highest sacrifice; only the background of a building, ugly in itself, though we know it to be the habitation of a great educational movement. Homely also is the general appearance of the founder and benefactor, yet the figure in its loose, slovenly costume, seated in a chair, presents in its solid mass a suggestion of fundamental force; the left hand grasps a walking-cane with a gesture of fine decision, and the head, with its long hair and fringe of beard, by sheer force of genial, manly directness, so earnest and unsophisticated, compels us to realize this man to be more than ordinary. He is the prophet of a cause, the leader of a peaceful revolution. In a word, if one has the mind and sympathy to note it, this old and yet alert man, of ungarnished simplicity and indomitable confidence, is an embodiment of the same sure uplifting of the people to which he contributed so largely.

I have chosen these examples to illustrate Saint-Gaudens’s ability to idealise his subject, to reach through the fact to the soul within the fact. But his sensibility to impressions is not only moved by the larger aspects of life; it is also exquisitely sweet and subtle. Study his numerous low-relief portraits--for example, the children of Prescott Hall Butler, those of Jacob H. Schiff, and the single portraits of Miss Violet Sargent and of Robert Louis Stevenson. In all these and in many others his sensibility is exhibited, not only in the sympathetic comprehension of character, but also in the extraordinary _finesse_ of the execution.

By Augustus Saint-Gaudens]

The figures are not merely set against the background; they grow out of it, forming with it an enclosed parterre of beautiful design, of delicately differing planes of elevation, of subtle tones of gray in between the extremes of light and dark. The effect is not unlike that revealed at early morning when the landscape is flattened in appearance by the mist, and, as the latter is loosened and dispersed by the sun, the patterned forms take on infinitesimal degrees of definition and mysteriousness behind the intervening veils of lighted vapour. Through such a simile one may, perhaps, suggest the essential quality of loveliness in these low reliefs.

Yet they are qualities shared to-day by several sculptors in France, sufficient to reveal an artist of rare sensibility, but not to measure the grander characteristics of Saint-Gaudens’s art. In the conditions of American civilization he has come within a range and depth of inspiration denied to modern Frenchmen, and it is in the degree to which he has responded to those opportunities that his preëminence consists. His position is unique, for no other sculptor of our time has so attuned the traditions of his art to the key of the modern spirit for the expression of grand conceptions.

II

GEORGE GREY BARNARD

While Saint-Gaudens, an American of European descent and training, has caught the outspoken voice of our national life, George Grey Barnard, of American parentage and practically self-taught, expresses its underlying force. To the former came a congenial opportunity in the demand for memorial sculpture. He turned it to great account through his gift of penetrating to the central fact of the subject and of illuminating it with a generous imagination. Instead of facts, however, it is rather with ideas that Barnard’s imagination has been concerned. They preceded his study of sculpture, and he sought the latter as an expression for them, influenced in his self-instruction by the work of Michelangelo.

He is from the West, that huge quarry out of which a new order of ideas is being gradually dug and shaped. The echoes of the clang of tool upon inchoate material, of sharp wits and keen purpose carving anew at the problems of existence, reach us from time to time in this more conventional East. We may smile at the crudeness of some of the results achieved, but cannot disregard the import of the endeavour. The force which animates it is the craving for larger, fuller liberty than mankind has yet attained; a titanic force, often brutal in its material manifestation, but with inherent mightiness of spirit. It is this spirit which has enveloped Barnard’s imagination since his childhood, and forms, as it were, the basis of his art. Its keynote is humanity, the elemental relationship of man to man and of men to the universe; a liberty of life and art, that would shake off the trammels devised for narrower theories and conditions and adjust itself to the perspective of a wider horizon. A boyhood nourished on literature and nature-studies sowed the seed from which these matured ideals were to spring.

He was born at Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, in 1863, the son of a Presbyterian minister; but his early years up to the age of twelve were spent in Chicago, after which the family moved to Iowa. When only nine years old he began to learn something of shells and minerals from a retired sea captain; later he studied birds and animals, taught himself to draw them and by fifteen was an expert taxidermist with as many as 1,200 specimens in his collection. Then for nearly two years he earned his living as an engraver and worker in gold and silver ornaments, learning meanwhile to model, until, having saved a little sum of money, he returned to Chicago, determined to become a sculptor. He was now seventeen and had not yet seen a statue.

There is a hint in this of the instinct that draws would-be artists toward sculpture rather than painting. It is an instinct for form, a passion for its tangible bodiliness, a prepossession so strong that it seems to transpose the senses of touch and sight; giving to the flat and round-topped thumb of the sculptor’s strong, square hand a sense equivalent to sight, keen and sensitive as is the touch of the blind, and giving to his eye a touch-consciousness. He feels with his eye and sees with his thumb. It is by the touch that in childhood we all assure ourselves of the reality of things, and it is the stimulation of the tactile imagination, as Mr. Bernard Berenson calls it, which is one of the chief sources of pleasure in the illusion of a picture. But touch to the sculptor is not an illusion. While a painter only imagines the form of an arm through his sense of sight, the sculptor actually gets his sensation through his hands, as he feels it growing in form and character, substance and subtlety of surface under his manipulation. With him the physical delight is added to the mental. I imagine, indeed, that the degree to which he expresses this twofold delight is largely the measure of his ability as a sculptor.

Barnard thus early had experienced it; but, we should notice, so far only through an experience of minute work. Yet his communing with himself and with nature along the shores of the great lake and of the Father of Waters was only waiting to discover its effects in a larger field of sensations.

This awakening did not come to him at once in Chicago. There was then no Art Institute with its array of sculpture casts; no flourishing school with its accompanying enthusiasms. Yet, possibly that was well for the slow, silent development of this youth, a dreamer of dreams, already a student of philosophy and occultism, fervently religious, with a religion that felt after the mysteries of life and included such dawning notions as he had of art.

He chanced upon a teacher whose stock in trade consisted of four casts of the antique statues in reduced size, which he drew in every possible position, until he had completely mastered the representation of an object on the flat. This, it will be observed, was a temporary suspension of his study of solid form, being indeed, a transposition from actual depth and distance to the _illusion_ of a third dimension; and the intense application in this direction, with the fascination of it, affected his work for some time. I think a comparison of “The Boy” with one of his later works will show this. The early work displays more feeling for light and shade than for form, and is, in fact, rather a study of planes of varying value than of bulk. While this may appear a somewhat fine-drawn distinction, it does involve an important principle, because it affects the way in which the subject has been considered, the conception, indeed, which inspired the work. In his later work Barnard is not oblivious to the charm of subtle modelling, but the larger motive is present in his mind, that of the constructional, organic character of the mass, and it becomes the distinctive direction in which his genius expresses itself.

He grew to consciousness of this large aspect of sculpture through the influence of Michelangelo. Hearing that there were some casts of the master’s work stored away in a room under lock and key he sought admission. It was at first denied; students by acts of vandalism had abused their privileges; the exhibition had been closed to them, and no exception could be made in his case. “But I must see them,” was his simple answer. “Michelangelo lived and worked for me as much as Jesus did; his works belong to me--I must see them.” In presence of such a fervour of conviction the director yielded, and Barnard was allowed to come and go as he pleased.

If one could really know the boy’s emotions, what a revelation it would be! To most of us, if we can recall our youth, the impressions that counted most came gradually, finding us often unprepared for them, and through circumstances or our own levity of soul unable to receive due profit at the time. But to the young Barnard, with a seriousness beyond his years, peering into the mystery of life, feeling after expression in form, the revelation of Michelangelo’s genius must have been like sudden light to a blind man, who, hitherto, had had but vague imaginings of light and form. There, in the quiet afternoons, until daylight faded into twilight, alone with these sublime beings, the boy would sit and sit. Tired on one occasion, he sat himself in the lap of the “Moses”--for he was small and boyish-looking despite his seventeen years--and resting his curly head against the statue’s beard fell fast asleep, his young, eager spirit, wrapped around and absorbed by the influence of the mighty dead. Do you not perceive in this little story another proof of the boy’s physical joy in form, so that after drawing from it sustenance to his spirit he nestled into contact with the feel of it, as a baby, surfeited with nourishment, lies close to the mother’s breast?

And it was with a good deal of a baby’s unconsciousness, I suspect, that Barnard sucked in nourishment from the experiences of this time. He was not as yet deliberately studying these statues, was still ignorant of the technical problems which they offered; but, himself a dreamer of dreams, he lost himself in the magnitude of the conception, and little by little grew to realise how dreams may shape themselves into form. He began to have an inkling of the majesty of form in the round, as something not to be translated into the flat, but to be felt in the bulk; a realisation of the wonder of palpable structure, when it has become the plastic expression of noble thought. It was several years later, and much discipline had to be undergone, before the impressions of this lonely communing were to become part of his conscious equipment as a sculptor.

But I wonder whether the scarcity of artists, as compared with the great number of skilful practitioners of painting and sculpture, is not due, in part at any rate, to the fact that few students enjoy a period of subconscious reception of impressions. In place of it they are surrounded by the clatter of the classroom, share in the smart little theories of their fellow-students and for the influence of the great masters substitute adulation for some teacher who professes to know a short cut to success. Most modern education, indeed, is a bustling after results, that allows no space for the slow, steady, silent growth, such as prepares the sapling to take its place among the giants of the forests. Yet in our study of the lives of all true artists we shall find that the period of communing, either with nature or with the masterpieces of art, has intervened. Happy for the student to whom it comes early!

At the end of his eighteenth year he received a commission for the portrait bust of a child, and discovered for himself the manner of executing it in marble. With the sum received, he went to Paris, studying for a time under the academician, Cavelier, and then establishing himself in a humble studio. Twelve years he lived in Paris, enduring the extreme of privations, until the patronage of an American, Mr. Alfred Corning Clark, relieved the pressure of want; and the acceptance of seven of his works at the Champ de Mars in 1894 and his election as an associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts crowned his struggles with artistic recognition. During

By George Grey Barnard]

By George Grey Barnard]

the intervening years he had shunned the influence of modern Paris, drawing nutriment in the museums from Phidias and Michelangelo, from the divine repose of the one and from the other’s conflict of soul, conscious of great strivings within himself that craved utterance.

All his early works were so completely in response to an impulse from within, that they seem to me to reveal themselves as confessions of his soul, as manifestations not only of his artistic but of his spiritual development.

The earliest was “The Boy”: a nude figure seated, asleep, with arched back and with head drooping on the breast; a supple form, with that mingling of firmness and languor which a child presents in sound, healthy sleep; a composition, very fresh in conception and beautiful in its rhythmical compactness; expressive, moreover, in every part, of the character of profound slumber. This single theme of feeling flows through the whole figure in measured bars of melodious movement. I like to think of it as an artist’s expression, not of a boy, but of boyhood; his own boyhood, in its unalloyed purity and freshness, which even in his manhood is “not dead but sleepeth”; abiding with him in its beautiful quiescence, perpetual testimony to the living on of the child in the artist’s soul.

Then may we not see in “Pan” an embodiment of his experiences of passionate youth? Truly it is also the reincarnation of the spirit of the old golden legend of the world, before it was burdened with seriousness, still irresponsible and sportive; when the woods and streams were haunted by creatures close akin to the animals, but gifted also with something of man’s higher opportunities: lazy, sensuous and luxuriously content. But this is only to refer back to a mythological type the perennial characteristics of the birth of passion in a youth. It seems to me quite one with the philosophic bent of Barnard’s mind that he should have comprehended both intentions in his “Pan.” It is as if he had analysed himself and then exorcised his vagrant desires by imprisoning them in bronze. As an artist he takes his opportunity in the recumbent figure of enforcing the sensuous charm of the long, sinuous limbs, and once more indulges in the luxuriousness of firm, soft fleshiness; this time, however, with muscles not relaxed in sleep but unstrung in the sweet lassitude of lazy ease. Then what a subtle insinuation of contempt for the type as he conceives it! He sets one long asinine ear acock, and lets the other droop ridiculously, while in the slanting eye there is a leer of mischievous, foolish wantonness. I do not forget that this is later work, executed after Barnard’s return to America; yet his point of view is so subjective that he can scarcely fail sooner or later to express the struggles of his own soul.

But apart from these psychological considerations the statue is one of extraordinary artistic interest; the composition highly original and to a grand degree sculpturesque. It has, that is to say, qualities peculiar to sculpture; the impressiveness of bulk, of form in the round, with vigorous appeal to our tactile sense in its bossy elevations and deep hollows, and with that aptitude for changing effects of light and shadow, bold in parts, in others mysteriously subtle. Moreover, it is remarkable in its expression of character in pose and gesture; for subtle expressiveness could scarcely be carried further in the line of this conception and it is continuous throughout the figure and harmoniously complete. These, moreover, are the traits conspicuous in all Barnard’s work.

We shall find them in the group “I Feel Two Natures Struggling Within Me,” which, perhaps, more than any other of his works breaks away from the usual canons of composition. I can remember that when I first saw it the abruptness of the composition startled me unpleasantly; but this feeling has worn off and I recognize an inherent reasonableness in the arrangement, a harmony of fitness in the conception. It illustrates, in fact, the liberty of the western spirit, which dares to free itself from formula; it is not to be taken as a subversion of old principles, but as a justification of the right of freedom of will, where the originality of thought demands some freer method of expression. For, as a matter of fact, the salient feature of this group is the expression of character; and by the time that you fall under the spell of its intention, you are reconciled to the abruptness of the composition. It may interest those who are distrustful of “literary” expression in a work of art to know that the metaphysical title of this group was an afterthought. It had its inception in the chance grouping, afterward slightly modified, of two models, and the idea was to reproduce the character of pose and gesture. Then the standing figure suggested the notion of a conqueror; not one of the theatrical sort with action of defiance, but one who through defeat has reached an ultimate victory; and so by degrees the group began to partake of the fulness of the sculptor’s own thinkings and conclusions, until it finished by presenting in generalized form the conflict of the two natures of man.

The evolution of this group very fairly illustrates the balance of impulses in Barnard’s work. He is by natural instinct a sculptor; one whose imaginings inevitably shape themselves in form. On the other hand he is a thinker of thoughts and a dreamer of dreams that press for utterance, and he finds the utterance in plastic expression; but there is no confusion in his own mind between the mode of expression and the thought expressed. He recognizes both the possibilities and the limitations of his art, and in the working out of his thought confines himself to those aspects of it which lend themselves to plastic interpretation. At the same time his nature is so earnest and intense that it would seem impossible and horrible to him not to use his art to some serious end. But, be sure, it is less the bigness of his purpose than his power as a sculptor, or, shall we say, the happy adjustment of the two, that gives ultimate importance to his work.

In further proof of this let me refer to two more of his statues, one of which had its origin in chance, the other in deliberation: The former is “Maidenhood” which was primarily suggested by the pose of a model, spontaneously assumed. It had character and was evidently characteristic of this individual type of girlhood. He studied the figure, first in its _ensemble_ and then in the correlation of its parts, and as he worked the floodgates of sentiment were gradually lifted, until there poured into the work his pent-up feeling and convictions concerning female beauty, his personal ones as a man and the abstract devotion that he felt for it as an artist. The result is a statue, lovely as a piece of technique, lovely also in its inspired interpretation of beauty of form and soul; a figure that has the allurement of individual personality, as well as that higher quality of abstract loveliness which belongs to an ideal conception, rendered with exquisite reverence and a spirit of purest poetry.

The other statue, “The Hewer,” was begun with the deliberate purpose of embodying in a series of figures the gradual evolution of mankind and, I fancy also, of the human soul toward higher possibilities. There is nothing unusual in the theme, but much in the way in which Barnard has comprehended and expressed it. He has felt it in its elemental significance and set it forth with monumental simplicity. The background of his imagination, and he makes it part of ours, is the nebulous immensity out of which primitive man emerges toward the light. The step is won by putting forth of strength; but tentatively, gropingly, with only partial consciousness of strength; there is an exertion of power, but a

By George Grey Barnard

A Memorial Monument]

reserve far greater of unexpended power. In correspondence with the controlled bigness of this conception is the generalized method of the actual modelling, so that the eye is not deflected to this or that part, but compelled to embrace the figure as a whole. It is in this respect that Barnard’s work differs from that of Rodin, to which at a first glance we might feel disposed to liken it, in consequence of the expression of character in both and the freedom from conventional restraint. But each has his separate method of attack; for while Rodin reaches his _ensemble_ through an elaboration of the parts, Barnard is possessed first and foremost of the conception in its entirety and keeps the parts subordinate. The one entices you to follow the play of subtle expression that winds through the figure, while the other arrests your eye to its structural significance as a unity.

In a brief summary of this sculptor’s art the thing to be noted is that it is distinguished as much by breadth of conception as by expression of character, and always with an instinctive regard for the simplest form of plastic interpretation. It is this which separates him from the hypersensitive tendencies of the old world and proves him to be a prophet of the new. His vision is less penetrating than embracing; his methods more constructive than analytical; his emotions ample, sane. His genius indeed has not grown with the sinuous convolutions of a sapling that enforces its existence in a thicket, but like one that stands alone in virgin soil with spaciousness around it.

III

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS WARD

Born in Urbana, Ohio, in 1830, Ward is still an active force among American sculptors. His career connects the past with the present, spanning the long interval like a bridge: one pier, embedded in the old condition of things when American sculptors first began to make America the scene and inspiration of their art, its arch mounting above the indifference to, and ignorance of, things artistic which prevailed before the influence of European art began to be felt here, and its other pier firmly incorporated into the new order. And there is additional fitness in the simile, for Ward’s career has presented the logical reasonableness of an architectural structure; built up of character, stout as granite, shaped by experience and tempered by local necessities; a structure modified by practical as well as by esthetic considerations, which has been invaluable in its day and embodies some features of permanent worth among others that time has superseded. For the architect of his own life cannot proceed like the builder of a material bridge--establish simultaneously his hither and nether pier, and then by ingenious underpinning support the weight of the arch until he reaches the keystone, which finally locks all into a compact whole. He can but start with good, firm basis of intention, hew the stones as faithfully as he knows and set them in cement of honest endeavour, lifting his arch by personal force, while the force of gravity, acting outside himself, gradually determines the direction of its curve. He will be shrewder than most if he guesses when he has reached the keystone--generally will only discern it after long years by looking back; and when he gains the farther bank of the stream and once more has the firm ground beneath his feet, if he turns round to view the work he will be conscious of parts which disturb the symmetry of the whole: here a bit of inferior craftsmanship which his later knowledge detects, there some result of untoward circumstances. He is happy if his life presents a constancy of purpose and has been of service to his fellows.

Such happiness may fairly be enjoyed by Ward. His share in establishing the National Sculpture Society, of which he has been president since its foundation, would alone entitle him to the permanent consideration of his colleagues, while to the sum total of American sculpture he has made some very notable contributions. That his work includes examples which fall short in artistic conception and in technical skill, is undeniable. They are the result partly of the circumstances of his development and partly of his own determined, straightforward character; a combination of meager artistic experiences at the start and of a predisposition to the objective point of view.

One imagines that he has always been powerfully attracted to the facts of things: the facts of American life and the facts of the subjects which he has portrayed in his art. If there was any fiber of transcendentalism in his mind--and few of us are altogether without some vision of what is beyond the bounds of actual experience--it took the form of speculating upon the future of American civilisation, which facts have subsequently indorsed, or, if it entered into his feeling toward his subject, made him realise something of the spirit embedded in the fact, as in his early statue representing the Negro breaking loose his fetters. But the various theories concerning art which study in Paris might have taught him, and which in a measure are the shibboleth of people whose faith in facts has dwindled, and, unless reallied to actual facts, are but “vacant chaff well meant for grain,” he had no means of learning in his youth, and throughout his manhood, I suspect, has had little patience with. Still at the bottom of all theories is the principle that it is not in the subject but in the manner of presenting it that a work of art is proclaimed; that technique and motive should be indissolubly wedded--to their mutual perfection if each is choice, and, if either is inferior, to a mutual loss. This was not recognised in America in Ward’s youth, nor until much later; and none of his work, it is probably true to say, reveals that particular kind of craftsmanlike facility which distinguishes the work of the sculptor who has been trained abroad, and by the side of this more accomplished modelling Ward’s statues often appear crude. But if they lack the stylistic quality, the best of them have a force which more than compensates. It results from a strong feeling for design, the general accumulative effect of the whole composition, which itself results from a strong antecedent feeling for form. The latter seems to characterise all self-taught students, whether sculptors or painters; and, although, as their experience broadens, there may be increased subtlety of expression, the primary characteristic of their work will continue to be a very strong sense and enjoyment of the structural facts of the figure or landscape, and most frequently in their simplest and directest manifestations. And in the case of sculpture this is an especially valuable gift of vision, since the most sculptural quality in sculpture is unquestionably that of form: its solidity, stability and natural grace or dignity of movement. It is precisely in these particulars that some of our foreign-taught sculptors, while easily excelling Ward in refinements of detail, fall short of him.

As a boy he had been devoted to fashioning with his fingers, and, at the age of nineteen, entered the studio of Henry Kirke Brown. The latter, after practising as a sculptor at Albany, had spent some five years in Europe, chiefly in Italy; but, feeling strongly that an American should occupy himself with American subjects, and to that end should work in his own country, resisted the tendency among sculptors of that day to join the American colony in Rome or Florence. He therefore returned and engaged upon the equestrian statue of Washington, now in Union Square, New York. Ward assisted him in the work and gained thereby a fine experience of what makes for nobility in design. He must have profited also by companionship with a man of such large and generous mind. But his stay in the studio was short, and for the rest he has been the architect of his own career.

A fragment remains of his student work, a study for a high-relief in which an Indian is represented breaking and burning his arrows--an episode of the voyage of Hendrik Hudson. One cannot help noticing the _naïveté_ of the composition, the simple intention of representing the action just as it might have happened; the apparent unconsciousness that any academic considerations were involved. It, no doubt, represents the attitude of his mind at that time, and to a very considerable extent prefigures the lines along which his development was to proceed. Thus a year or two later, while he was working in Washington and executing busts of many leading men of the time, and the whole country began to seethe with passion over the slave question, Ward’s contribution to it is “The Freedman.” It shows simply a Negro, in an entirely natural pose, who has put forth his strength and is looking very quietly at the broken fetters. The whole gist of the matter is thus embodied in a most terse and direct fashion, without rodomontade or sentimentality, but solely as an objective fact into which there is no intrusion of the sculptor’s personal feeling. But of his personal point of view toward his art there is abundant testimony. This figure, which was never reproduced larger than statuette size, but in that form had a wide popularity, proves how keen and true was Ward’s instinct for the sculpturesque qualities of sculpture and for the limit to which it is safe to go in the interpretation of sentiment. The latter is simply enforced by the action of the figure.

In order that he might have opportunities of studying form in the freedom of movement, he visited the western frontier and lived for a while among the Indians. A statue of this period is “The Indian Hunter,” which now stands in bronze in Central Park, New York. Again it is a strikingly vivid realisation of actual facts; of the racial characteristics of both the man and his dog, and of their respective kinds of movement: the man’s, stealthy and powerfully controlled; the dog’s, more keen and alert and needing to be checked. Again, too, one feels, I think, the absence of any preconceived theories of technique, so that the group has something of a primitive, almost barbarous feeling; which, however, seems strangely appropriate to the subject.

Yet it is easy to understand that for a young sculptor, so resolutely facing natural facts and untrained in academic teaching of what is right and what is wrong, a table of doctrines which may easily lead to dry formalism, but which yet holds many directions and warnings of value, there will be shoals ahead. The actual may readily drift into the commonplace; and that some of Ward’s portrait-statues should be of small account was to be expected from the circumstances of his self-wrought development and peculiar personal point of view. They were the stepping-stones by which he gradually rose to higher things. For the thing to be noticed is that he eventually reached the power that is exhibited in such works as the “Greeley,” “Washington,” “Lafayette,” “General Thomas,” and in that masterpiece, the “Beecher” statue, by following with undeviating persistence the promptings of his youth; only that with matured experience came a clearer discrimination of the salient facts, and a deeper understanding of what they truly signified. In a word, he reached beyond the fact to its significance.

It may be mainly the significance of clothes, as in that remarkable statue of “Lafayette” at Burlington, Vermont, in which he represents the hero of two revolutions as a middle-aged dandy. I cannot say whether he saw behind Lafayette’s support of liberty, as Carlyle did, but at any rate the figure has simply the easy dignity of a well-bred man, whose _embonpoint_ has modified but

By John Quincy Adams Ward]

By John Quincy Adams Ward]

not effaced his debonair demeanour and whose clothes set gracefully to his person. Yet the person is unmistakably enforced. The man is not lost in the millinery, as one may have noticed in some costume statues; and it is in this respect that Ward has shown his true appreciation of the significance of clothes. They not only envelop the figure as naturally as a skin, and with no hindrance to the imagining of the body inside them, but they adapt themselves completely to the character of the man as shown in the pose of the body and expression of the head. They have been reduced, in fact, to an abstraction corresponding to the sculptor’s conception of the man.