Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Hon. Whitelaw Reid, to send
for Dorchester House, London, three busts of distinguished
Americans,--those of Alexander Hamilton, Chief Justice Chase, and Hon.
James G. Blaine, which Mr. Reid, in visiting the Roman studios of Mr.
Simmons, had seen and greatly admired. The Ambassador observed that he
"would like a few Americans, as well as so many Roman Emperors," about
him.
These portrait busts all reveal an amazing force and mastery of work.
The fine sculptural effect of the Hamilton and the wonderful blending of
subtle delicacy of touch and vigor of treatment with which the nobility
of character is expressed, mark this bust as something exceptional in
portrait art. It has a matchless dignity and serene poise. The bust of
Chief Justice Chase is a faithful and speaking reproduction of the very
presence of its subject, instinct with vitality; and the fire and force
and brilliancy of the bust of Hon. James G. Blaine fairly sweeps the
visitor off his feet. The modelling is done with an apparent
instantaneousness of power that is the highest realization of creative
art. It is the magnetic Blaine, the impassioned and eloquent statesman,
that rises before the gazer.
Mr. Simmons has long been a commanding figure in plastic art. No
American sculptor abroad has, perhaps, received so many important public
commissions as have been given to him. He has created nearly a score of
memorial groups; he has modelled over one hundred portrait busts and
statues. His industry has kept step with his genius. The latest success
of Mr. Simmons in the line of monumental art is the statue (in bronze)
of Alexander Hamilton, which was unveiled at Paterson, N. J., in May of
1907. The splendidly poised figure, the dignity, the serene strength and
yet the intense energy of the expression and of the entire pose are a
revelation in the art of the portrait statue.
It is not, however, true that Mr. Simmons has ever resigned himself to
the necessity of producing portrait and memorial sculpture exclusively.
In the realm of the purely ideal Mr. Simmons finds his most felicitous
field for creative work. A bas-relief entitled "The Genius of Progress
Leading the Nations," with all its splendid fire and action, the _motif_
being that of the spirits Life and Light beating down and driving out
the spirits of darkness and evil; "The Angel of the Resurrection," with
its glad, triumphant assertion of the power of the immortal life; the
poetry and sacredness of maternity as typified in the "Mother of Moses;"
the statues of the "Galatea" and the "Medusa," and other ideal
creations, indicate "the vision and the faculty divine" of Mr. Simmons.
To a very great degree his art is that which the French describe as the
grand manner, and to this is added a spiritual quality, a power of
radiating the intellectual purpose, the profounder thought and the
aspiration of the subject represented.
[Illustration: "MOTHER OF MOSES"
Franklin Simmons
_Page 108_]
One of the most charming of these ideal works is a statue of "Penelope,"
represented seated in the chair, her rich robe falling in graceful
folds, and the little Greek fillet binding her hair. The face bears a
meditative expression, into which has entered a hint of pathos and
wistfulness in the dawning wonder as to whether, after all, Ulysses will
return. The classic beauty of the pose; the exquisite modelling of the
bust and arms and hands, every curve and contour so ideally lovely; the
distinction of the figure in its noble and refined patrician elegance,
are combined to render this work one that well deserves immortality in
art, and to rank as a masterpiece in modern sculpture.
[Illustration: "THE GENIUS OF PROGRESS LEADING THE NATIONS"
Franklin Simmons
_Page 107_]
Another of his ideal figures, "The Promised Land," is a work of great
spiritual exaltation and beauty. An Israelite woman has just arrived at
the point when before her vision gleams the "Promised Land"; the face
tells its own story of all she has passed through,--the trials, the
sadness, the obstacles to be overcome; but now she sees the fulfilment
of her hopes and dreams. It is a most interesting creation, and one in
which is portrayed the artist's spiritual insight and susceptibility to
poetic exaltation. To one visitor to Mr. Simmons's studio this statue
suggested the following lines:--
Fair on her sight it gleams,--the Promised Land!
The rose of dawn sifts through the azure air,
And all her weariness and toil and care
Vanish, as if from her some tender hand
Lifted the burden, and transformed the hour
To this undreamed-of sense of joy and power!
The rapture and the ecstasy divine
Are deep realities that only wait
Their hour to dawn, nor ever rise too late
To draw the soul to its immortal shrine.
O Sculptor! thy great gift has shaped this clay,
To image the profoundest truth, and stand
As witness of the spirit power that may
Achieve the vision of the Promised Land!
[Illustration: "VALLEY FORGE"
Franklin Simmons
_Page 110_]
In a statuette in bronze called "Valley Forge," Mr. Simmons has fairly
incarnated the entire spirit of the Revolutionary period in that
mysterious way recognized only in its result; all that unparalleled
epoch of tragic intensity and sublime triumph lives again in this work.
The fidelity to a lofty ideal which essentially characterizes Mr.
Simmons is as unswerving as that of Merlin, who followed "The Gleam."
"Great the Master
And sweet the Magic
When over the valley
In early summers,
Over the mountain,
On human faces,
And all around me
Moving to melody,
Floated the Gleam."
This American sculptor who, in his early youth, sought the artistic
atmosphere of Rome as the environment most stimulating to his dawning
power, who accepted with unfailing courage the incidental privations of
art life in a foreign land more renowned for beauty than for comfort,
who
"... never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,"
has expressed his message in many purely ideal works,--the message that
the true artist must always give to the world and that leads humanity to
the crowning truth of life, that of the ceaseless progress of the soul
in its immortality.
For the brief and significant assertion of the apostle condenses the
most profound truth of life when he says:--
"To be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is
life and peace."
In these words are imaged the supreme purpose of all the experiences of
the life on earth; and to the artist whose works bear this lofty message
of the triumph of spirituality, his reward shall appear, not in the
praise of men, but in the effect on character that his efforts have
aided to exalt; in the train of nobler influences that his work shall
perpetually inspire and create.
Mr. Simmons has always found Rome potent in fascination. One may not
want to go to St. Peter's every day, but one knows it is there, and
there is some inexplicable satisfaction in being where it is possible to
easily enter this impressive interior. One may not go near the Forum
for a month, or even a season, but the knowledge that one may find it
and the wonderful Palatine Hill any hour of any day is a perpetual
delight. The Vatican galleries, with their great masterpieces; the
Sistine Chapel, the stately, splendid impressiveness of San Giovanni
Laterano; the wanderings in Villa Borghese, and the picturesque climbing
of the Spanish steps, even all the inconveniences and deprivations,
become a part of the story of Rome which the artist absorbs and loves.
The studios of Mr. Simmons in the Via San Nicolo da Tolentino are a
centre of artistic resort, and his personal life is one of distinction
amid the picturesque beauty and enchantment of the Eternal City.
For many years (until the death of Mrs. Simmons in 1905) the sculptor
and his wife had their home in the beautiful Palazzo Tamagno in the Via
Agostino Depretis, where one of those spacious apartments of twenty to
thirty rooms, only to be found in a Roman palace, was made by them a
brilliant centre of social life. Mrs. Simmons was herself a musical
artist, with impassioned devotion to music; and her rare personal charm
and distinction of presence drew around her a most interesting
circle. Her receptions were for many years a noted feature of Roman
society. The social life in Rome is very brilliant, interesting, and
fascinating. The sight-seeing is a kind of attendant atmosphere,--the
perpetual environment offering, but not intruding itself. People come to
Rome for reasons quite disconnected with the Golden House of Nero or the
latest archaeological discoveries in the Forum. The present, rather than
the past, calls to them, and the present, too, is resplendent and
alluring.
Of the foreign painters in Rome, Charles Walter Stetson, whose work
recalls the glory of the old Italian masters, is especially
distinguished for his genius as a colorist. No visitor in Rome can
afford to miss the studio of one of the most imaginative of modern
artists. A wonderful picture still in process is a genre work with
several figures, called "Music." An idyllic scene of a festa amid the
ilex trees--with the Italian sky and the golden sunshine pervading a
luminous atmosphere, while the joyous abandon of the dancers appeals to
all who love Italy--is one of the many beautiful pictorial scenes of Mr.
Stetson which enchant the eye and haunt the imagination. Another
picture is called "Beggars,"--a name that illy suggests its splendor.
There is the facade of a church to which a long flight of steps leads
up, a procession of cardinals and friars in their rich robes, while at
one side the groups of beggars shrink into the darkness. It is an
impressive commentary upon life.
For a long period, through the early and middle years of the nineteenth
century, Rome held her place as the world centre of modern artistic
activity. Great works of poetic and ideal sculpture elevated the general
public taste to a high degree of appreciation. The standards were not
ingeniously adjusted to mere spectacular methods whose sole appeal was
to the crude fancy of possible patrons. Art held her absolute and
inviolate ideals, and the spirit of her votaries might well have been
interpreted in Mrs. Browning's words:--
"I, who love my art,
Would never wish it lower to suit my stature."
The tone of public appreciation is raised to a high quality only when
the artist refuses to sell his soul for a mess of pottage. He may, to
be sure, need the pottage, but the price is too great. Rather will he
find his attitude expressed in these wonderful lines:--
"I can live
At least my soul's life without alms from men.
And if it be in heaven instead of earth,
Let heaven look to it--I am not afraid."
All art that has within itself true vitality must ever be the leader and
the creator of the popular taste; only when it falls into decadence does
it become the servile follower.
It is a serious question as to the degree in which the art of to-day
keeps faith with the eternal ideals. The great expositions of the past
quarter of a century, while they have contributed immeasurably to the
popularization of art and to the familiarization of the public with the
work of individual painters and sculptors, have yet, in many ways, been
a demoralizing influence in their insidious temptation to produce
pictures or plastic art calculated to arrest immediate attention, thus
putting a premium on the spectacular, the sensational, on that which
makes the most immediate and direct appeal to the senses. The work
becomes fairly a personal document wrought with perhaps an almost
amazing finesse, but utterly failing in power to inspire joyous
sensibility to beauty or to impart to the gazer that glow of radiant
energy which lofty art invariably communicates to all who respond to its
infinite exaltation.
All great art is inspired by religious ideals. Painting and sculpture
give to these a presence. Under their creative power are these ideals
manifested. To embody them in living form becomes the absolute
responsibility of the artist. In Greece all the fortunate conditions to
produce great art were curiously combined and pre-eminently supported by
the conjunction of events and by the prevailing sentiment of the time.
The artist drew his inspiration from the most exalted conception of life
embodied in gods rather than in men. Art, too, was an affair of the
state. It was the supreme interest and held national importance. The
temple was erected to form an inclosure for the statue, rather than that
the statue was created as an adornment for the temple. The greatest
gifts were consecrated to the service of art, and under these
stimulating influences it is little wonder that artistic creation
achieved that vital potency which has thrilled all succeeding
centuries and has communicated to them something of the divine air of
that remote period. With the Renaissance in Italy art culminated in the
immortal work of Raphael and Michael Angelo. In the Sistine Chapel,
where that sublime grouping of prophets and sibyls speaks of the very
miracle of art in their impassioned fire and glow; where the figures,
the pose, the draperies are so grandly noble and infused with dignity
and presence,--the very atmosphere is vocal with the language of the
spirit and the expressions of religious reverence. These marvellous
shapes of grandeur and sublime intimations carry the soul into a
conscious communion with the divine. In these stupendous works Michael
Angelo has given to all the ages the message of the highest exaltation
of art. In the technique, in the marvellous dignity of the sentiment, in
the depth of the feeling involved, in the grace and power of the
composition, these works embody the artistic possibilities of painting.
Are such works as those of Canova and Thorwaldsen no longer created?
Can it be that art is no longer of national importance? In our own
country vast appropriations are made for internal improvements of all
kinds, while art that kindles and re-enforces life is almost ignored.
Our government--the government of the richest country in the
world--appropriated $200,000 for a memorial monument to General Grant to
be placed in Washington, while Italy--whose resources are so slender in
comparison--appropriates seven million dollars--thirty-five times the
amount--for her great monument to Victor Emmanuel which is now being
erected in Rome to stand near the Capitol and the Palace of the
Quirinale. Great art has always been closely associated with great
devotion to religious ideals. The artist was the servant of the Lord,
and it was his supreme purpose to embody the aspirations of the age and
render his works a full and complete symbol of those true realities of
life which have their being in the spiritual universe rather than in the
changing temporal world of the outer universe. The so-called realism of
the day is based on a false interpretation. "The things that are seen
are temporal, while the things that are not seen are eternal." True
realism is in spiritual qualities, not in physical attributes. True
realism is found in such works as Canova's sublime group, where the
figures of Religion and of Death forever impress all who stand before
this magnificent monument; it is found in Thorwaldsen's "Christ;" in
Franklin Simmons's "Angel of the Resurrection,"--in such works as those
that have a language for the soul, rather than in a "Saturnalia."
Again, another fatal rock on which art must inevitably make shipwreck is
the theory that it is good to perpetuate ugliness, in either painting or
in sculpture. The permanent reality of life is beauty. So far as any
person or object departs from this enduring reality, so far it is the
result of distortion and deformity, and these, being the temporary, the
accidental, the deficient, should not be perpetuated in ideal creation.
It is an Apollo who embodies the permanent ideal of manhood--not a
cripple or a hunchback. Still further: art should not only refuse to
embody the defective, which is a mere negative; it should not only give
form to the utmost perfection it beholds in nature or in humanity, but
beyond this the responsibility is upon the artist to penetrate into
loftier realms, to catch the vision not revealed to mortals. The artist
is, by virtue of his high calling, a co-worker with God. An English wit
has declared that life copies art rather than that art copies life. In
this he expresses a truth rather than a merely clever epigram. It is the
artist's business to lead, not to follow. Only as he leads does he
fulfil his divinely appointed destiny. "I maintain that life is not a
form of energy," writes Sir Oliver Lodge; "that it is not included in
our present physical categories; that its explanation is still to be
sought. And it appears to me to belong to a separate order of existence,
which interacts with this material frame of things, and while here
exerts guidance and control on the energy which already here exists; for
although they alter the quantity of energy no whit, and though they
merely utilize available energy like any other machine, live things are
able to direct inorganic terrestrial energy along new and special paths,
so as to achieve results without which such living agency could not have
occurred." Does it for an instant seem that a great scientist's
theoretical speculations of the laws of the universe and of organic life
have no connection with the province of art? On the contrary. Truly does
Balzac exclaim: "Is not God the whole of science, the all of love,
the source of poetry?" The artist is he who enters into the divine
realm; who discerns the divine creations as the true ideals of humanity,
and who interprets to the world the sublime significance of the divine
thought. Shall such an artist degrade his power by portraying
ugliness--the mere defects of negations and distortions? Shall he
degrade life by calling these the realities?
[Illustration: "LA PIETA," ST. PETER'S, ROME
Michael Angelo
_Page 117_]
The painter or sculptor who holds that it is as truly art to represent
distortion and repulsiveness as it is to represent beauty is as false to
his high calling as would be the poet who should insist that doggerel
and mere commonplace truisms expressed in rhyme are poetry. Compare, for
example, two statues, Cecioni's "_La Madre_," in which a woman's utter
lack of personal attraction is so complete as to make her fairly
repulsive to the gazer, and the "Mother of Moses," by Franklin Simmons,
in which the mystic beauty, the very ideal of maternity, is embodied.
Which of these statues is calculated to uplift and to exalt all who come
near? This marvellously beautiful creation of Mr. Simmons shows a woman
of exquisite delicacy and loveliness sitting, slightly bending forward,
holding her baby to her breast. The modelling of the draped figure with
the bare arms and neck revealing the tender curves, the yielding
delicacy of the flesh and that inscrutable light upon the beautiful
countenance, whose expression suggests that she is looking far into the
future of the infant whom she holds in her arms, are a wonderful
portrayal of the mystery and the sacredness of motherhood. The one
statue degrades maternity; the other ennobles and exalts. The one
embodies a pernicious and a false ideal; the other embodies the ideal
that must appeal to all that is noble and divine in human life, and it
thus ministers to moral progress by its contribution to the elevation of
the social tone. For indeed, life follows art. It is art that exerts
this powerful influence upon life which it may lead to loftier heights
or drag down to the moral abyss. The artist is not merely the portrayer
of existing types; he is the inspirer of those ideal types which human
life should recognize as its pattern, its model to be followed and
ultimately achieved. The world needs ideal and poetic art to minister to
the attainment of the true social life and to the full and complete
expression of man himself.
Do not the visions of Fra Angelico and Botticelli still inspire the
artist of to-day with the absolute realization of all the deep
significance of the past?
"Is there never a retroscope mirror,
In the realms and corners of space,
That can give us a glimpse of the battle,
And the soldiers face to face?"
Religion and art are inseparably united. In its true significance
religion takes precedence of all else in that its influence is felt in
every department and in every direction and expression of man's
activity. It is the inexhaustible fountain of that lofty energy which
communicates itself to every channel that carries inspiration to life
and to art. Religion is the influence that redeems the mere shallow,
surface presentation,--the petty trick to capture popularity, and holds
art true to its real purpose. The glory of the mediaeval art of Italy
owed its greatness to religion. Cimabue and Giotto were directly
inspired by that spring of a diviner life given to Italy and later to
the world of that "sweet saint," Francis of Assisi. In an age of cruelty
and terror he brought the new message that man is dear to God; that the
soul is ceaselessly joyful; that man, created in the divine image, is a
part of the divine life, and that only when he lives in this response
and recognition does he truly live at all. In this restatement of the
truth that Jesus came to proclaim, St. Francis opened the way for a
revival of art, and opened the gates of that infinite and divine energy
which has immortally recorded itself for all ages in the "Divina
Comedia" of Dante. The irresistible wave of power which resulted from
that liberating of thought, feeling, and emotion by the work of St.
Francis expressed itself in the sublimest poem of all the ages, and in
that glorious triumph of art that is still the treasure and the source
of artistic inspiration.
It is only when the world is lifted out of the limitations of the
material by a period of great art that humanity is brought into close
and inspiring relation with the living Christ.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
_Men and women make the world,
As head and heart make human life._
MRS. BROWNING.
* * * * *
_Alas, our memories may retrace
Each circumstance of time and place;
Season and scene come back again,
And outward things unchanged remain;
The rest we cannot reinstate,
Ourselves we cannot re-create,
Nor set our souls to the same key
Of the remembered harmony._
LONGFELLOW.
_And as, after the lapse of a thousand years, you stand upon that
hallowed spot, the yellow Tiber flowing sluggishly beneath you, the
ruins of the Eternal City all around you speaking of fallen
greatness, the mighty Basilica of St. Peter rising before you like
some modern tower of Babel that would monopolize the road to
heaven, the eye rests upon the figure of the Archangel sheathing
his glittering sword upon the summit of the Castle of St. Angelo,
and the heart asks, Why should that be a legend? Why should that be
a projection of a morbid and devout imagination? Why should it not
have been the clairvoyance of supernatural ecstasy opening the
world of spirits? It was no unreality when the angel of God, with
his sword drawn in his hand, withstood the prophet Balaam. It was
no morbid imagination when the angel of God smote with the edge of
the sword the first-born of the land of Egypt. It was no imposture
when the shining hosts of the army of the Almighty smote the
Assyrians. It was no deception when Gabriel, the King's messenger
from the court of heaven, was sent to comfort Daniel by the river
Hiddekel; or when he announced to the maiden, whom all generations
have called blessed, that she was to be the mother of the Divine
Redeemer.... The written Word from first to last is full of the
holy angels. It begins with angels, it ends with angels._
THE VENERABLE ARCHDEACON WILBERFORCE,
Westminster Abbey.
II
SOCIAL LIFE IN THE ETERNAL CITY
And others came,--Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions and Veiled Destinies!
SHELLEY.
In what ethereal dances!
By what eternal streams!
POE.