Part 12
In contrast with the mysticism and subtlety of imagination, more or less displayed in the work we have been considering, is that form of imagination which turns to earth and to the facts of things for its inspiration. How it has operated in the work of some of our sculptors has been noticed elsewhere, as well as the fact that the Indian subject has made frequent appeal to their imagination. A further example of the latter is “The Medicine Man,” by C. E. Dallin, which was a prominent feature on the grounds of the Paris Exposition. Mounted on a stringy pony, the man himself lean and gaunt, the group counted very little as a mass, yet compelled attention by the keenness of the characterisation. Amid the extreme modernness of the scene and its variety of impressions, the impassiveness of this figure, survival of an age so remote, was strangely moving; a proud, stern figure, conscious of its dignity, in pitiful, solemn protest against the inexorable march of destiny; the last echo of an unrecorded epic. No sculptor has succeeded better in combining with complete naturalism the poetry of the Indian subject. Gutzon Borglum in his statuettes has represented with realism and vigour its actualities, and H. A. MacNeil has reached inward into the thought of the Indian; but Dallin has given us the realism, spirit and some suggestion of the Indian environment, such as Brush did in his early paintings.
In Philadelphia, however, is an Indian group representing “The Stone Age,” which involves some further suggestion. A woman stands grasping a hatchet and clutching her infant to her breast, as she looks into the distance with wary, resolute courage, while a little child crouches up to her on one side, and on the other a bear’s cub lies dead. It is by John J. Boyle, one of his few ideal subjects, a work of powerful imagination. This sculptor has essayed decorative subjects, but with less success. His control of composition does not seem to extend beyond the treatment of a single figure or of a group in which one is predominant; and his strong point is the expression of character or sentiment. Thus his seated statue of Benjamin Franklin is one of the most interesting examples of portrait-sculpture in the country. It possesses a considerable share of monumental dignity and a very remarkable intimacy of feeling. The pose is informal, the expression of the head and body quite natural, yet the conception has no trace of obviousness, much less of commonplace. It is invested with just sufficient idealisation to preserve the impression of a statue; that it is not the counterfeit presentiment of a man, but a memorial of his qualities and what they imply to his admirers. And the qualities are expressed with admirable decision; the intellectual dignity of the head well sustained by the erect torso and the broad, firm carriage of the arms; the easy negligence of the costume according so well with the benevolence and genial humanity of the face. Indeed, in this portrait-statue Boyle reveals a penetrating and sympathetic insight and a choice of treatment that are the products of an active imagination; and when in a subject like the “Stone Age” his imagination can work as it lists, it reaches to that point where the particular becomes merged in the universal suggestion.
For in this group we pass from interest in the episode to a realisation of the rude grandeur of the primitive nature, the physical grandeur of untrammelled development and the natural instinct of the mother animal. I recall another group of his: a modern peasant woman with her baby folded in sleep upon her broad bosom and another child nestling at her feet. Here, too, the mother is vigorous and ample, but rounded and softened by more genial environment. Yet in the generousness of her form as in the strenuousness of the other’s, we feel the same suggestion of the earth-mother, the mother in closest affinity with nature. Only, as nature progresses from rigour to amenity, the primal instinct of preservation of her young has passed into the all-pervading tenderness of maternal solicitude. It is, in fact, the typical conception of motherhood, as compared with the merely individual representation that appears in each of these groups.
The conception, moreover, is coloured with modern thought, not a spiritualised abstraction, like Raphael’s, but enriched with the passion and fecundity of earth. Raphael may have sought his models among the girl-mothers of Trastevere or the Campagna; but his idea of motherhood he brought down from the region of artistic and intellectual speculation. On the other hand, the tendency of the modern artist is to set back his model in her actual environment and to discover her affinity thereto. Or, if his model be nature, he no longer attempts to spiritualise it by arrangement of lines and forms that accord with his abstract theories of beauty, or by investing it with atmosphere and sunlight, drawn from his own imagination. Nor is he satisfied with the objective nature-study of the Dutchmen of the sixteenth century; but, observing nature no less closely than they, he peers further into it in the search for a soul and heart within her that shall correspond to the heart and soul within himself.
The main current of the poetic imagination in modern art is to find the soul in the fact and it is a phase of the general tendency of modern thought. Our gaze is earthward; to the beauty, poetry and desirable goodness that are in nature and the natural life, and to the spiritual suggestion in the actual.
There are minor currents, too, little streams of rebellion that flow contrary to the general direction. The superesthetic and the superintellectual, equally are protests against the trend toward naturalism. The one responds to what there is in us of world-weariness, of a jaded epicureanism that needs the subtlest stimulants to its imagination; the other would emphasise the quality by which, it assumes, we are differentiated from, and superior to, the natural world. Disregarding the Universal Intellect which regulates the law of natural growth and of natural habits, it would force the little unit of intellect into premature development, into lifelong estrangement from the wholesomeness of nature. For facts it would substitute names; words, words and continually words, until they take the place of knowledge, of ideas and of all religious, moral and esthetic consciousness.
In American art there is scarcely any trace of the superesthetic; but more than a little of the superintellectual, a phase and product of our infatuation for words, which binds the imagination with wrappings of borrowed thought and checks the free flight of original ideas. For the end of art is not to teach, but to make us feel; to refine and elevate the operation of the senses, helping us through visible, tangible and audible beauty to catch at something of the mysterious infinitude of beauty. Even as man’s intellect reaches ever wider and further until knowledge is merged in speculation; so by the promptings of the senses we reach from appreciation of material things to that detachment of feeling which exists in the ideal.
INDEX
Adams, Herbert, 99-115, 184, 193
Ball, Thomas, vi, 56
Barnard, George Grey, 21-36
Barnhorn, Clement J., 193, et seq.
Bartholomé, Albert, 6, 7
Bartlett, Paul W., 89-95, 184
Barye, Antoine Louis, 158
Bauer, Theodore, 223, et seq.
Bissell, George E., 184
Bitter, Karl, 204, 205
Borglum, Gutzon, 153, 154, 226
Borglum, Solon Hannibal, 149-162
Boston Public Library, 81, 83
Boyle, John J., 184, 227, et seq.
Brenner, Victor David, 165-171
Brooks, Richard E., 214
Brown, Henry Kirke, vi, 43, 203
Bush-Brown, H. K., 202, 203
Calverly, Charles, 213
Canfield, Birtley, 214
Canova, v, 56
Carpeaux, Jean Baptiste, 134
Casey, Edward Pearce, 188
Cavelier, Jules Pierre, 28
Centennial Exhibition, v, viii, 136
Chicago World’s Fair, 61, 65, 75, 84, 197, 203, 222, 224
Coloring Sculpture, 102, et seq.
Crawford, Thomas, vi
Dallin, Cyrus E., 184, 226
Donoghue, John, 222
Dubois, Paul, 6, 7, 15
Elwell, F. Edwin, 219, et seq.
Falguière, Jean Alexandre Joseph, 75, 100, 134
Flanagan, John, 185
Frémiet, Emmanuel, 90, 157
French, Daniel Chester, 55-70, 193
Grafly, Charles, 217, et seq., 222
Greenough, Horatio, 4
Harvey, Eli, 202
Jouffroy, François, 134
Kemeys, Edward, 197
Kitson, Alice Ruggles, 213
Kitson, Henry H., 213
Konti, Isidore, 205, et seq.
Library of Congress, 74, 83, 90, 113, 128, 142, 176, et seq., 223
Linder, Henry, 195
Macmonnies, Frederick, 73-85
MacNeil, H. A., 226
Martiny, Philip, 177, et seq., 179, 191, 205
McKim, Charles F., 65, 66, 189
Mercié, Marius Jean Antonin, 100, 134
Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts, New York, 81, 89, 169
Michelangelo, 21, 26, 27, 102, 212
Murray, Samuel, 213
National Sculpture Society, 40
Niehaus, Charles Henry, 119-128, 184
O’Donovan, W. R., 213
Pan-American Exposition, 149, 203, 207, 217
Paris Exposition of 1900, 6, 77, 149
Perry, R. Hinton, 185, et seq.
Potter, Edward C., 66, 184, 197
Powers, Hiram, vi
Pratt, Bela L., 181, et seq.
Proctor, A. Phimister, 197, 198, 199
Rebisso, Louis T., 155, 157
Rhind, J. Massey, 191, et seq.
Rinehart, William Henry, vi
Rodin, Auguste, 8, 35, 102, 139, 158, 213
Roth, Frederick G. R., 199, et seq.
Roty, Louis Oscar, 168
Ruckstuhl, F. Wellington, 184
Rude, François, 134
Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 3, 17, 21, 49, 74, 75, 157, 193, 214
Schwarzott, M. M., 196
Sullivan, Louis H., 190
Taft, Lorado, 178
Ward, John Quincy Adams, 39-52, 167
Warner, Olin Levi, 109, 131-146
Weinert, Albert, 179
Weinman, Adolph A., 214
End of Project Gutenberg's American Masters of Sculpture, by Charles H. Caffin