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]