himself almost as much a literary man as he was a sculptor; he was the
friend and companion of literary men, and to the fact that art in the
middle years of the nineteenth century was far more a literary topic
than a matter of critical scrutiny, Mr. Story owed an incalculable
degree of his fame. He was an extremely interesting figure with his
social grace, his liberal culture, and his versatile gifts. His life was
centred in choice and refined associations. If not dowered with lofty
and immortal original genius, he had a singular combination of talent,
of fastidious taste, and of the intellectual appreciation that enabled
him to select interesting ideal subjects to portray in the plastic art.
These appealed to the special interest of his literary friends and were
widely discussed in the press and periodicals of the day. It is a
_bonmot_ of contemporary studio life that Hawthorne rather than Story
created the "Cleopatra," and one ingenious spirit suggests that as Mr.
Story put nothing of expression or significance into his statues, the
beholder could read into them anything he pleased; finding an empty
mould, so to speak, into which to pour whatever image or embodiment he
might conjure up from the infinite realm of imagination. One of the
latest of these contemporary critics declares that "Story declined
appreciably, year by year, falling away from his own standard; haunted
to the point of obsession by visions of mournful female figures,
generally seated, wrapped in gloom. It seems strange," this critic
continues, "that so active a mind should dream of nothing but brooding,
sinister souls, of bodies bowed in grief, or tense with rage. Never
once, apparently, did there come to him a vision of buoyancy and grace;
of a beauty that one could love; of good cheer and joy of very living;
always these unwholesome creatures born of that belated Byronic
romanticism."
This criticism, while it has as little appreciation of Mr. Story's
exquisite culture and of the taste and refinement of his art as the
general rush of the motor car and telephonic conversational life of the
first decade of the twentieth century has of the thoughtful, the poetic,
the leisurely atmosphere of Mr. Story's time, is yet not without a keen
flashlight of truth. Painting had its reactionary crisis from the
pre-Raphaelite ideals and the _intransigeants_ have had their own
conflicts in which they survived, or disappeared, according to the
degree of artistic vitality within. Sculpture and literature must also
meet the series of tests to which the onward progress of life persists
in subjecting them, and those who are submerged and perish can only
encourage the survivors as did the Greeks, as sung by Theocritus:--
"A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast,
Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant ship, when we were lost,
Weathered the gale."
"As we refine, our checks grow finer," said Emerson. As life becomes
more elaborate and ambitious, the critical tests increase. Contemporary
fame can be created for the artist by favorable contemporary comment;
but it rests with himself, after all; it rests in the abiding
significance of his work--or the lack of it--as to whether this fame is
perpetuated. That of Mr. Story does not hold within itself all the
qualities that insure the appreciation of the present day. It is, as the
critic of the hour expresses himself, "too literary,"--too largely a
question of classic titles which appealed to the mid-nineteenth-century
authors whose judgment of art the twentieth century finds particularly
amusing. Henry James has somewhere held up to ridicule the early Beacon
Hill Boston for its impassioned devotion to the "attenuated outlines" of
Flaxman's art. But the work of Story will survive all transient
variations of opinion, even of the present realistic age; for is not
true realism, after all, to be found in the eternal ideals of truth,
grace, dignity, refinement, significance, and beauty? These qualities
have a message to convey; and no one can study with sympathetic
appreciation any sculpture of William Wetmore Story without feeling that
the work has something to say; that it is not a mere reproduction of
some form, but is, rather, an idea impersonated, and therefore it has
life, it has significance. The criticism of the immediate hour is not
necessarily infallible because it is contemporary. What does William
Watson say?
"A deft musician does the breeze become
Whenever an AEolian harp it finds;
Hornpipe and hurdy-gurdy both are dumb
Unto the most musicianly of winds."
It is an irretrievable loss if, in the passion for the _vita nuova_, a
generation, or a century, shall substitute for the AEolian harp the mere
hornpipe and hurdy-gurdy of the hour. In another of his keenly critical
quatrains William Watson embodies this signal truth:--
"His rhymes the poet flings at all men's feet,
And whoso will may trample on his rhymes.
Should Time let die a song that's pure and sweet,
The singer's loss were more than matched by Time's."
Art is progressive, and the present is always the "heir of all the ages"
preceding; but it cannot be affirmed that it invariably makes the best
use of its rich inheritance.
There are latter-day sculptors who excel in certain excellences that
Story lacked; still, it would not be his loss, but our own, if we fail
in a due recognition of that in his art which may appeal to the
imagination; for, whatever the enthusiasms of other cults may be, there
are qualities of beauty, strength, and profound significance in the art
of Story that must insure their permanent recognition. Still, it remains
true that Mr. Story owes his fame in an incalculable degree to the
friendly pens of Hawthorne and others of his immediate circle,--Lowell,
Motley, Charles Eliot Norton, Thackeray, Browning,--friends who,
according to the latest standards of art criticism, were not unqualified
nor absolute judges of art, but who were in sympathy with ideal
expression and recognized this as embodied in the statues of Story.
Browning wrote to the London _Times_ an article on Mr. Story's work, in
which he conjured up most of the superlative phrases of commendation
that the limits of the English language allow to praise his work, none
of whose marshalled force was too poor to do him reverence. The
versatile gifts of Story's personality drew around him friends whose
influence was potent and, indeed, authoritative in their time.
Still, any analysis of these conditions brings the searcher back to the
primary truth that without the gifts and grace to attract about him an
eminent circle of choice spirits he could not have enjoyed this potent
aid and inspiration; and thus, that
"Man is his own star,"
is an assertion that life, as well as poetry, justifies. In the full
blaze of this fundamental truth, it is, not unfrequently, the
mysterious spiritual tragedy of life that many an one as fine of fibre
and with lofty ideals
"Leads a frustrate life and blind,
For the lack of favoring gales
Blowing blithe on other sails."
Mr. Story was himself of too fine an order not to divine this truth.
With what unrivalled power and pathos has he expressed it in his
poem--one far too little known--the "Io Victis":--
"I sing the song of the Conquered, who fell in the Battle of
Life,--
The hymn of the wounded, the beaten, who died overwhelmed
in the strife;
Not the jubilant song of the victors, for whom the resounding
acclaim
Of nations was lifted in chorus, whose brows wore the chaplet
of fame,
But the hymn of the low and the humble, the weary, the
broken in heart,
* * * * *
Whose youth bore no flower on its branches, whose hopes
burned in ashes away,
From whose hands slipped the prize they had grasped at, who stood
at the dying of day
With the wreck of their life all around them...."
In this poem Mr. Story touched the highest note of his life,--as poet,
sculptor, painter, or writer of prose; in no other form of expression
has he equalled the sublimity of sentiment in these lines:--
"... I stand on the field of defeat,
In the shadow, with those who are fallen, and wounded, and
dying, and there
* * * * *
Hold the hand that is helpless, and whisper, 'They only the
victory win
Who have fought the good fight, and have vanquished the
demon that tempts us within;
Who have held to their faith unseduced by the prize that the
world holds on high;
Who have dared for a high cause to suffer, resist, fight,--if
need be, to die.'"
Such a poem must have its own immortality in lyric literature.
For a period of forty years the home of the Storys in Palazzo Barberini
was a noted centre of the most charming social life. Mr. Story's
literary work--in his contributions of essays and poems to the _Atlantic
Monthly_; in his published works, the "Roba di Roma," "Conversations in
a Studio," his collected "Poems," and others--gave him a not transitory
rank in literature which rivals, if it does not exceed, his rank in
art.
Meantime other artists were to take up their permanent abode in the
Seven-hilled City,--Elihu Vedder in 1866; Franklin Simmons two years
later; Waldo and Julian Story, the two sons of William Wetmore Story,
though claiming Rome as their home, are American by parentage and
ancestry; and Mr. Waldo Story succeeds his father in pursuing the art of
sculpture in the beautiful studios in the Via San Martino built by the
elder Story. In 1902 Charles Walter Stetson, with his gifted wife, known
to the contemporary literary world by her maiden name, Grace Ellery
Channing, set up their household gods and lighted their altar fires in
the city by the Tiber, ready, it may be, to exclaim with Ovid:--
"Four times happy is he, and times without number is happy,
Who the city of Rome uninterdicted enjoys."
[Illustration: "THE DANCE OF THE PLEIADES"
Elihu Vedder
_Page 92_]
If art is a corner of the universe seen through a temperament, the
temperament of Mr. Vedder must offer an enthralling study, for it seems
to be a lens whose power of refraction defies prophecy because it deals
with the incalculable forces. His art concerns itself little with the
aesthetic, but is chiefly the art of the intellect and the imagination.
All manner of symbols and analogies; the laws of the universe that
prevail beyond the stars; the celestial figures; the undreamed
significance in prophecy or in destiny; omens, signs, and wonders; the
world forces, advancing stealthily in the shadows of a dusky twilight;
the Fates, under brilliant skies, gathering in the stars; oracles and
supernatural coincidences that lurk in undreamed-of days; the Pleiades
dancing in a light that never was on sea or land; unknown Shapes that
meet outside space and time and question each other's identity; the dead
that come forth from their graves and glide, silent and spectral,
through a crowd, unseen by any one; the prayer of the celestial powers
poured forth in the utter solitude of the vast desert,--it is these that
are the realm of Vedder's art, and what has the normal world of portrait
and landscape to do with such art as this? Can it only be relegated to a
class, an order, of its own, and considered as being--Vedderesque? It
seems to stand alone and unparalleled. In his work lies the
transfiguration of all mystery. Vedder never paints nature, in the
sense of landscapes, and yet one often feels that he has the key to the
very creation of nature; that he has supped with gods and surprised the
secrets of the stars. Do the winds whisper to him?--
"The Muse can knit
What is past, what is done,
With the web that's just begun."
How can he find the design to phrase his thought--this painter of ideas?
"Can blaze be done in cochineal,
Or noon in mazarin?"
Whatever the Roman environment may have done for Allston, Page, and
Story, there is no question but that to Vedder it has been as his soul's
native air. For him the sirens sing again on the coast; the sorceress
works her spell; the Cumaean Sibyl again flies, wraithlike, over the
plain, clasping her rejected leaves of destiny which Tarquin in his
blindness has refused to buy. The Rome that lies buried under the ages
rises for Vedder. His art cannot be catalogued under any known division
of portrait, landscape, marine, or genre, but it is simply--the art of
Vedder. It stands alone and absolutely unrivalled. The pictorial
creations of Vedder are as wholly without precedent or comparison as if
they were the sole pictorial treasures of the world. The visitor may
care for them, or not care, according to his own ability to comprehend
and to recognize the inscrutable genius there manifested; but in either
case he will find nowhere else, in either ancient or contemporary art,
any parallel to these works.
One could well fancy that to any interrogation of his conceptions the
artist might reply:--
"I am seeker of the stone,
Living gem of Solomon.
But what is land, or what is wave,
To me, who only jewels crave?
* * * * *
I'm all-knowing, yet unknowing;
Stand not, pause not in my going."
In the rich, weird realm of Omar Khayyam's Persian poem, the Rubaiyat,
Mr. Vedder found the opportunity of his life for translating its thought
into strange, mystic symbolism. Never were artist and poet so blended
in one as in Vedder's wonderful illustrations for this poem. It has
nothing in common with what we ordinarily call an illustrated work. It
is a great treasure of art for all the ages. It is a very fount of
inspiration for painter and poet. An exquisite sonnet suggested by "The
Angel of the Darker Cup" is the following by Louise Chandler Moulton:--
"She bends her lovely head to taste thy draught,
O thou stern Angel of the Darker Cup!
With thee to-night in the dim shades to sup,
Where all they be who from that cup have quaffed.
She had been glad in her own loveliness, and laughed
At Life's strong enemies who lie in wait;
Had kept with golden youth her queenly state,
All unafraid of Sorrow's threat'ning shaft.
"Then human Grief found out her human heart,
And she was fain to go where pain is dumb;
So Thou wert welcome, Angel dread to see,
And she fares onward with thee, willingly,
To dwell where no man loves, no lovers part,--
Thus Grief that is, makes welcome Death to come."
The sonnet, the stanza, and the pictorial interpretation all form one
beautiful trio in poetic and graphic art.
Writing of Mr. Vedder, Mr. W. C. Brownell speaks of the personal force
in a picture and says that with Vedder this personal force is
imagination,--"the imagination of a man whose natural expression is
pictorial, but who is a man as well as a painter; who has lived as well
as painted, who has speculated, pondered, and felt much.... It is this,"
he continues, "that places Vedder in the front rank of the imaginative
painters of the day." Of Mr. Vedder's painting called "The Enemy Sowing
Tares," Mr. Brownell writes:--
"... Here you note a dozen phases of significance. The theme is
unconventional; the man has become the archenemy; the night is
weird and awe-inspiring; the tares represent the foe of the
church--money; they are sown at the foot of the cross--the symbol
of the church.... Mr. Vedder has not passed his life in Rome for
nothing. His attitude is in harmony with the spirit of the Sistine
and the Stanze."
One of the interesting and mystical works of Vedder is "The Soul between
Doubt and Faith,"--three heads, that of the Soul hooded and draped,
looking before her with eyes that seem to discern things not seen by
mortals; the sinister face of Doubt at the left, the serene, inspiring
countenance of Faith at the right. It is a magical picture to have
before one with its profoundly significant message. The works of Mr.
Vedder will grow more priceless as the years pass by. They are pictures
for the ages.
In Mr. Ezekiel, another American artist whose almost lifelong home has
been in Rome, is a sculptor whose touch and technique have won
recognition. In a recumbent figure of Christ is seen one of the best
examples of his art. It is pervaded by the classic influences in which
he has lived. The studios of Mr. Ezekiel, in the ruins of the old Baths
of Caracalla, are very picturesque and his salon, with its music, its
wealth of books including many rare and beautiful copies, and its old
pictures and bric-a-brac, is one of the fascinating interiors of the
Eternal City.
The visitor who is privileged to see the Story studios in the Via San
Martino finds Mr. Waldo Story occupying these spacious rooms where the
flash of a fountain in the court, a view of the garden, green-walled by
vines, with flowers and shrubs and broken statues, make the place
alluring to dreamer and poet. In these rooms may be seen many of the
elder Story's finest statues in cast or marble, the "Libyan Sibyl,"
"Nemesis," "Sappho," the "Christ," "Into the Silent Land," and others,
with many portrait busts, among which are those of Browning, Shelley,
Keats, Theodore Parker, Mrs. Browning, Marchesa Peruzzi de Medici (Edith
Story), John Lothrop Motley, one of Story's nearer friends, and Lord
Houghton.
In the work of Mr. Waldo Story one admirable portrait bust is of Cecil
Rhodes. A decorative work, a fountain for the Rothschild country estate
in England, is charmingly designed as a Galatea (in bronze), standing in
a marble shell that is drawn by Nereids and attended by Cupids. The
happy blending of marble and bronze gives to this work a pleasing
variety of color. Another decorative design is that of "Nymphs Drinking
at the Fountain of Love." These studios are among the most interesting
in Rome.
It was in 1868 that Franklin Simmons, then a young artist from Maine,
turned to Rome as his artistic Mecca. Since then the Eternal City has
always been his home, but his frequent and prolonged sojourns in America
have kept him closely in touch with its national life. Mr. Simmons is
the idealist who translates his vision into the actuality of the hour
and who also exalts this actuality of the hour to the universality of
the vision. In the creation of portrait busts and of the statues and
monumental memorials of great men he infuses into them the indefinable
quality of extended relation which relegates his work to the realm of
the universal and, therefore, to the immortality of art, rather than
restricting it to the temporal locality. Louis Gorse observes that it is
not the absence of faults that constitutes a masterpiece, but that it is
flame, it is life, it is emotion, it is sincerity. Under the touch of
Mr. Simmons the personal accent speaks; to his creative power flame and
life respond, and to no sculptor is the truth so admirably stated by M.
Gorse more applicable.
Mr. Simmons has been singularly fortunate in a wide American
recognition, having received a liberal share of the more important
commissions for great public works of sculpture. The splendid statue,
_al fresco_, of the poet Longfellow for his native city, Portland, was
appropriately the work of Mr. Simmons as a native of the same state; the
portrait statues of General Grant, Gov. William King, Roger Williams,
and Francis H. Pierrepont, all in Statuary Hall in the Capitol in
Washington; the portrait busts of Grant, Sheridan, Porter, Hooker,
Thomas, and other heroes of the Civil War; the colossal group of the
Naval Monument at the head of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington,--are
all among the works of Mr. Simmons.
Like all artists who, like the poet, are born and not made, Mr. Simmons
gave evidence of his artistic bent in his early childhood. After
graduating from Bates College he modelled a bust of its president, and a
little later, going to Washington (in the winter of 1865-66), many of
the noted men of the time gave him sittings, and in a series of portrait
busts his genius impressed itself by its dignity of conception and an
unusual power of sympathetic interpretation. He modelled the bust of
Grant while he was the General's guest in camp, taking advantage of
whatever spare minutes General Grant could give for sittings in the
midst of his pressing responsibilities; and it is perhaps due to this
unusually intimate intercourse with the great hero, and the _rapport_,
not difficult of establishment, between two men whose natures were akin
in a certain noble sincerity and lofty devotion to the purest ideals,
that Mr. Simmons owes the power with which he has absolutely interpreted
the essential characteristics of General Grant in that immortal portrait
statue in the Capitol.
Washington is, indeed, the place to especially study the earlier work of
Franklin Simmons. An important one is the Logan memorial,--an equestrian
statue which is considered the finest work in sculpture in the capital,
and which is the only statue in the United States in which both the
group and the pedestal are of bronze. The visitor in Washington who
should be ignorant of the relative rank of the great men commemorated by
the equestrian memorial monuments of the city might be justified in
believing that General Logan was the most important man of his time, if
he judged from the relative greatness of his statue. When Congress
decided upon this group, Mr. Simmons was requested to prepare a model.
This proving eminently acceptable, Mr. Simmons found himself, quite to
his own surprise, fairly launched on this arduous work, involving years
of intense concentration and labor. For this monumental work was to be
not merely that of the brave and gallant military leader,--a single idea
embodied, as in those of Generals Scott, Sheridan, Thomas, and
others,--but it was to be a permanent interpretation of the
soldier-statesman, mounted on his battle-horse; it was to be, in the
comprehensive grasp of Mr. Simmons, the vital representation of the
complex life and individuality of General Logan and, even more, it must
reflect and suggest the complex spirit of his age. In this martial
figure was thus embodied a manifold and mysterious relation, as one of
the potent leaders and directive powers in an age of tumultuous
activities; an age of strife and carnage, whose goal was peace; of
adverse conditions and reactions, whose manifest outcome was yet
prosperity and national greatness and splendid moral triumph. All these
must be suggested in the atmosphere, so to speak, of the artist's work;
and no sculptor who was not also an American--not merely by ancestry and
activity, but one in mind and heart only; one who was an intense
patriot and identified with national ideas--could ever have produced
such a work as that of the Logan monument. So unrivalled does it stand,
unique among all the equestrian art of this country, that it enchants
the art student and lover with its indefinable spell. When this colossal
work was cast in bronze, in Rome, the event was considered important.
The king and the Royal family visited the studio of Mr. Simmons to see
the great group, and so powerfully did its excellence appeal to King
Umberto that he knighted Mr. Simmons, making him Cavaliere of the Crown
of Italy. Nor was Mr. Simmons the prophet who was not without honor save
in his own country, for his _alma mater_ gave him the degree of M.A. in
1867; Colby College honored him with the Master's degree in 1885, and in
1888 Bowdoin bestowed upon this eminent Maine artist the same degree. In
1892 Mr. Simmons married the Baroness von Jeinsen, a brilliant and
beautiful woman who, though a lady of foreign title, was an American by
birth. An accomplished musician, a critical lover of art, and the most
delightful of hostesses and friends, Mrs. Simmons drew around her a
remarkable circle of charming people and made their home in the Palazzo
Tamagno a notable centre of social life. No woman in the American colony
of the Seven-hilled City was ever more beloved; and it was frequently
noted by guests at her weekly receptions that Mrs. Simmons was as
solicitous for the enjoyment of the most unknown stranger as for those
of rank and title who frequented her house. Her grace and loveliness
were fully equalled by her graciousness and that charm of personality
peculiarly her own. Her death in Rome, on Christmas of 1905, left a
vacant place, indeed, in many a home which had been gladdened by her
radiant presence. One of the most beautiful works of Mr. Simmons is a
portrait of his wife in bas-relief, representing her standing just at
the opening of parted curtains, as if she were about to step behind and
vanish. It is a very poetic conception. A bust of Mrs. Simmons, also, in
his studio, is fairly a speaking likeness of this beautiful and
distinguished woman. It is over her grave in the Protestant cemetery
that Mr. Simmons has placed one of his noblest ideal statues, "The Angel
of the Resurrection,"--a memorial monument that is one of the art
features of Rome to the visitor in the Eternal City.
[Illustration: "GRIEF AND HISTORY," DETAIL FROM NAVAL MONUMENT,
WASHINGTON
Franklin Simmons
_Page 105_]
The brilliant and impressive Naval Monument, or Monument of Peace, as it
is known in Washington, placed at the foot of Capitol Hill on
Pennsylvania Avenue, is eloquent with the power of heroic suggestion
that Mr. Simmons has imparted to it. The work breathes that exaltation
of final triumph that follows temporary defeat. Those who died that the
nation might live, are seen in the perpetual illumination of
immortality. Not only has Mr. Simmons here perpetuated the suffering,
the sacrifices of the Civil War, but that sublime and eternal truth of
victory after defeat, of peace and serene exaltation after conflict, and
the triumph of life after death, are all immortally embodied in this
group crowned with those impressive and haunting figures, "Grief" and
"History," which are considered as among the most classically beautiful
and significant in the range of modern sculpture.