4, Hill Side, Cotham Hill, Bristol,
_Nov. 12th_, 1901.
Mr. Slater spoke as follows:--The importance of the moment bids me
hasten with all seriousness to support the special retribution of
plausible justice, amounting to adulation, which has been lavished
on the labours of the distinguished English sculptor. Had it been
necessary I should have travelled a greater distance to have paid with
my testimony homage to the words of this evening's lecturer. It is not
saying more than the truth will allow me, or admitting more than my
own poignant feelings may to such expression give justification,
when I confirm with my lips the belief that I have for much time
dispassionately held that Alfred Stevens, with Turner, were the first
artists that England produced from the middle of the eighteenth to
that of the nineteenth centuries; and that, compared with the great
oracles of the past, he reasonably approaches Michael Angelo, who he
unquestionably touches and sometimes surpasses. To state my views,
having received elementary drawing instructions from a friend of
Stevens, I think that there is evidence, in carefully examining
the figures upon the Wellington Monument and the Dorchester House
chimney-piece a finer knowledge of line in Stevens's work. Michael
Angelo's Medici figures, and indeed, his other famous works, are not
so unequivocably good; the effigies superimposing the sarcophagi are,
for brief instance, "pillowy," though they may be more anatomic. The
suavity of nature's hypo-refined grace is not traceable in their easy
posture. The fact is, that they pose for something; generally their
own animal idiosyncrasy, if not respectable vanity. Stevens's figures,
on the contrary, always for their own decency, which throws into the
core, the heart of the monument such an expression of beauty, giving
rise to the word innate, quenching the sense of frivolity, which
unrestrained, disordered state of things oozes out somewhere, or is at
any rate felt "in the air" in Michael Angelo's works. Stevens's head
was wonderfully poised on his own "torso" to know and feel this with
such thrilling, vital, consistent certainty. You catch awhile his
lovely idea in the strong fragrant symmetry permeating his work. The
iron soul of the man implants his lines of strength far inside
the actual bounds of the visible crust, and the mind of the idea,
naturally expanding is caught at the salient "processes" in curves
and features, betokening nothing--that touches--but grace. I should
mention that there is one fact which describes minutely my veneration
for Stevens's work at its best, perhaps the fullest; whereby I mean
that inspection of his intellectual labour has always restored to me
the time so wisely occupied in regarding it, proving that there is
goodness, virtue, essence in it, past all fellowship with ephemeral
things. There is a true, not a laconic, logical, and prophetic
inference in it that is apropriately styled, "time"; the finest
embodiment of musical equipoise; felt to a "tick"; no faltering,
barbaric, or false quantities, but a sustained and equable, uniform
tone of chromatic measure, meted out as by a mind imbued by but
sacrificing the scale of colour to its own actual, achieved end. One
misses the heated passion of Watts's best pictures, which flow through
the ordered channel of recognisable expression and make one adore
them as poetry. But there, of a truth, invidious comparison ends,
and reticence shall ever guard the space that intervenes betwixt the
grounds sacred to the exposition of the embodiment of these master
lights.
_MUSIC._
_From the_ BATH CHRONICLE, _January 30th,_ 1902.