It took a long while for artists to understand that the Greek face was
the ideal face merely to Greek sculptors. During the baser ages of the
sculpturesque art, (how far towards our own day the epicycle inclusive
of those ages extended it would be invidious for us to say,) sculpture
consisted of the nearest imitation of Greek models which was possible of
attainment by _talents_, with an occasional intercalated _genius_,
hampered by prevailing modes. That the Greek face was _beautiful_, none
could doubt. That in the sovereign points of _intellect_ it was the
absolute beau-ideal is open to great doubt. Apart from all such
questions, the fact of subservience exists. Even Benjamin Robert Haydon,
the man who thought himself called to be the æsthetic saviour of the
age, knew no other, no better way of making himself master of solid form
than by lying down in the cold with a candle before the Elgin marbles.
Let not this be mistaken as a slur upon one of the most devoted men in
history,--a man who surely lived, and who, aside from the pangs of
poverty, probably died, for the regeneration of Art. We only mean to
select an instance preëminent over all that can be mentioned, to show
that until a very late date even the most learned men in the Art-world
had not cut loose from the fascination of old models, considered not as
suggestive, but as dominant. There is nothing in the sculptors of
Haydon's period to prove that their view differed essentially from that
of the most self-devoted theorist among painters.
We hold that it has been left for America to complete the æsthetic, as
well as the social and political emancipation of the world. The fact
that pre-Raphaelism began in England (we refer to the _new_ saints
standing on their toe-nails, not the _old_ ones) proves nothing
respecting the origination of Art's highest liberty. In the first place,
the man who was selected by the Elisha to be the Elijah of the school
would under no circumstances have chosen a fiery chariot to go up in,
but would have taken the Lord Mayor's coach, (if he could have got it
without paying,) and, like a true Englishman, been preceded by heralds,
and after-run by lackeys. The idea of Turner _en martyre_ is to a calm
spectator simply amusing. If "a neglected disciple of Truth" had met him
out a-sketching, and asked him for help, or a peep, he would have shut
up his book with a slap, and said, like the celebrated laird, "_Puir
bodie! fin' a penny for yer ain sel'_." In the second place, this Elijah
never dropped his mantle on the _soi-disant_ Elisha. Search over the
whole range of walls where (with their color somewhat the worse for
time) Turner's pictures are preserved, and if any critic but Ruskin's
self can find the qualities which unite Turner with modern
pre-Raphaelism, we will buy the view of Köln and make it a present to
him. In the third place, apart from all ancestry or indorsement, we
regard modern pre-Raphaelism, as a school full of vital mistakes. It
refuses to acknowledge this preëminent, eternal fact of Art, _that the
entire truth of Nature cannot be copied_: in other words and larger,
that the artist must select between the major and the minor facts of the
outer world; that, before he executes, he must pronounce whether he will
embody the essential effect, that which steals on the soul and possesses
it without painful analysis, or the separate details which belong to the
geometrician and destroy the effect,--still further, whether he will
make us feel what Nature says, or examine below her voice into the
vibration of the _chordæ vocales_.
We have not touched on pre-Raphaelism with the idea of attacking it,
still less of defending it, and not at all of discussing it. Our view
has been simply to excuse the assertion that with America has begun,
must necessarily begin and belong, the enfranchisement of Art from
subservience to a type,--the opening of its doors into the open air of
æsthetic catholicity.
Years ago, the writer in several places presented to the consideration
of American Art-lovers the plaster bust of "The Old Trapper," as one of
the foremost things which up to that period had been done by any man for
such enfranchisement as that referred to above. Palmer, the noble master
and teacher of the sculptor who created this bust, had done many things
entirely outside of the old ring-fence, had made himself famous by them;
but this, on some accounts, seemed to us the chief, because the most
audacious of all. What did it represent? Simply an old, worn,
peril-tried, battle-scarred man, who had fought grislies and
Indians,--walked leagues with his canoe on his back,--camped under
snow-peaks,--dined on his rifle's market,--had nothing but his heroic
pluck, patience, and American individuality, to fascinate people,--and
now, under a rough fur cap of his own making, showed a face without a
line that was Greek in it, and said to Launt Thompson, "Make me, if you
dare!"
What we then admired in "The Old Trapper" we now admire in Miss Hosmer's
"Zenobia."
* * * * *
There now stands on exhibition in this country one of the finest
examples of the spirit which animates our best American artists in their
selection of ideals, and their execution of them on the catholic
principle.
Miss Hosmer has not thought it necessary to color her statue, because
she knew that the utmost capability of sculpture is the expression of
form,--that, had she colored it, she would have brought it into
competition with a Nature entirely beyond her in mere details, and made
it a doll instead of a statue. Neither has she made it a travel-stained
woman with a carpet-bag, because in history all mean details melt away,
and we see its actors at great distances like the Athené, and because
our whole idea of Zenobia is this:--
_A Queen led in Chains._
Neither has she made her Zenobia a Greek woman, because she was a
Palmyrene. What she has made her is this:--
_Our idea of Zenobia won from Romance and History._
This Zenobia is a queen. She is proud as she was when she sat in
pillared state, under gorgeous canopies, with a hundred slaves at her
beck, and a devoted people within reach of her couriers. She does not
tremble or swerve, though she has her head down. That head is bowed only
because she is a woman, and she will not give the look of love to the
man who has forced her after him. Her lip has no weakness in it. She is
a _lady_, and knows that there is something higher than joy or pain.
Miss Hosmer has evidently believed nothing of the legends to the effect
that she did swerve afterward, else she could not have put that noble
soul in her heroine's mouth. Or did she believe the swerving, she must
have felt that Aurelian had the right, after all pain and wrong, to come
and claim the queen,--to say,--
"I did all this wrong _for_ you, and you were worth it."
The face (perhaps, with the present necessities of a catholicized Art,
its most important excellence) is not a Greek face, but a much farther
Oriental.
The bas-reliefs of Layard's Nineveh are not more characteristic,
national, faithful to the probable facts in that best aspect of facts
with which Art has to do.
As for the figure, none of those who from Roman studios have hitherto
sent us their work have ever given a juster idea of their advancement in
the understanding of the human anatomy. The bones of the right
metatarsus show as they would under the flesh of a queenly foot. The
right foot is the one flexed in Zenobia's walking, and that foot has
never been used to support the weight of burdens; it has gone bare
without being soiled. The shoulders perfectly carry the head, and no
anatomist could suggest a place where they might be bent or erected in
truer relative proportion to either of the feet. The dejection of the
right arm is a wonderful compromise between the valor of a queen who has
fought her last and best, and the grief of a woman who has no further
resource left to her womanliness.
Both arms, in their anatomy, in their truthfulness to the queenly
circumstances, may equally delight and challenge criticism. The chains
which the queen carries are smaller than we suspect a _Roman_ conqueror
put even upon a woman and a queen; but let that pass,--for they do not
hurt the harmony of the idea, and are simply a matter of detail, which
womanly sympathy might well have erred in since chivalric days, though
their adherence to actual truth would not have blemished the idea. At
all events, Zenobia holds them like a queen, so as not to hurt her. She
_will_ remember her glory.
The drapery of the statue is a subordinate matter; but that has been
attended to as true artists attend to even the least things which wait
on a great idea. The tassels of the robe have been chiselled by Miss
Hosmer's marble-cutter with a care which shows that the last as well as
the first part of the work went on under her womanly supervision. Every
fold of the robe, which must have been copied from the cast, falls and
swings before our eyes as the position demands. Grace and truth lie in
the least wrinkle of a garment which needs no after-cast of the
anatomist's cloak of charity to hide a sin.
In many respects, we regard Miss Hosmer's "Zenobia" as one of the very
highest honors paid by American Art to our earliest assertions of its
dominant destiny.