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.