Part 2

of--perhaps it would be truer to say that they have been adapted to--an imagination, which reverences the character in man and can picture and suggest the individual in relation to the larger issues of his time; with a capacity of emotional expression that has the added poignancy of compression. It has been, indeed, continually reënforced by the grandeur of the themes that have confronted him, and the result upon his technique is a gravity of distinction which represents the finest kind of style. In that smaller kind of style which is limited to the actual technique of modelling it would be possible to mention sculptors who far excel Saint-Gaudens; but in those qualities of broader and deeper reference wherein brain and sensibility coöperate with hand for high creative and poetic ends I doubt if he has any superior among modern artists.

Let us trace the gift of idealising as it appears in several of his works, selected because they represent a descending scale from the purely ideal to the idealised fact. And first the statue of “Grief” in the Rock Creek Cemetery. I made the pilgrimage from Washington one sunny autumn afternoon with a companion. The gatekeeper directing us, we threaded our way along the labyrinth of paths, among the chaos of conflicting monuments, so many of which testify to impotence of taste. Finally a glance behind a hedge of cypress--we are indeed on holy ground! Within the little enclosure of solemn greenery a bench, marble and of Greek design, invites to sit; the world is all outside, and here before us, raised upon a slight pedestal, enough to lift it above the level, but not too high for close and intimate communion, is the Presence: a woman’s seated figure, wrapped about in coarse drapery that shrouds her head and falls in long, loose, heavy folds at her feet. We have heard the story: That a husband, robbed of his wife with shocking suddenness, called upon the sculptor to express in plastic shape the void in his life, enjoining him to ignore all symbols of hope and to give utterance only to the consuming hopelessness of loss. And here before us--in the isolation of the figure, in the uncompromising sternness of the drapery, in the majestic agony of the face, the eyelids lowered in pain, the lips full and set in the effort of endurance and also in a protest as proud as it is despairing--there is expressed a universality of grief that sums up the sorrow of the modern world, as well as the eternal question of the why and to what end. Under the spell of it a wife and husband sit on into the golden afternoon, chastened, purified, elevated, drawn closer to each other by the realisation of the mystery of grief, and with a renewed sense of the sanctity of happiness ere the shadow falls. Here indeed is an idealisation, complete and absolute; no helping out with wings and symbols, but the rendering of a simple, natural fact--a woman in grief; yet with such deep and embracing comprehension that the individual is magnified into a type. The emotional appeal is universal.

In this statue the sculptor could give free rein to his imagination. Observe how in the “Shaw Memorial” he meets the problem of an actual fact of history; the youthful leader riding forth to war with his marching regiment of Negroes. What a boundless zest he displays for the realism of the scene! He portrays the humble soldiers with varying characteristics of pathetic devotion, and from the halting uniformity of their movement, even from the uncouthness of their ill-fitting uniforms, from such details as the water-bottles and rifles, secures an impressiveness of decorative composition, distinguished by virile contrasts and repetitions of line and by vigorous handsomeness of light and shade. Mingled with our enjoyment of these qualities is the emotion aroused by the intent and steadfast onward movement of the troops, whose doglike trustfulness is contrasted with the serene elevation of their white leader.

Behind this group looms up the tremendous issues of the war; they were present to the imagination of the sculptor and he has suggested them to ours. Hence the work is big with fatefulness, with a reference reaching beyond the fate of the personages represented to the fate of a nation trembling in the balance. Ah! it is a great gift, this power to touch upon the fundamental, the essentially and genetically vital aspect of a matter, and by means so simple and of common knowledge. As he worked upon the memorial it would seem as if Saint-Gaudens distrusted somewhat his possession of this faculty, for to increase the idealisation he has introduced a figure of Victory floating above the head of the leader. It was not necessary and is scarcely in accord with the rest of the composition, introducing into the energy and concentration of the whole a somewhat quavering note. Yet, to judge by my own experience, the sense of jar yields to indifference; one loses consciousness of this figure in the grandeur and elevation of the whole. But, if this is the experience also of others, it tends to prove how unnecessary was its introduction; and, further, one is inclined to resent it as partaking of the obviousness which would occur to a smaller sculptor.

A similar attempt to reënforce the ideal suggestion contained in the realistic parts of the group with the direct introduction of a symbolic figure reappears in the equestrian statue of General Sherman. But the figure in this case is more intrinsically a part of the general design in perfect harmony of character and feeling, and the group as it stands, while almost the latest, is probably the most completely grand example of Saint-Gaudens’s art. Sherman leans a little forward in the saddle with a handling of the reins that keeps in control the impetuosity of his big-boned, powerful charger, an action of the hands very characteristic of an accomplished horseman. His head is bare and his military cloak floats from his back in ample folds. Victory moves ahead of his left stirrup, palm branch in hand, her drapery buoyed up with air; the horse’s tail streams behind; throughout the whole composition is a single impulse of irresistible advance. From every point of view the mass is compact with dignity, ornamental in line and bulk, alive with elevated and inspiring energy. At closer range one may discover the big simplicity and pregnant generalisation of the modelling, also the meaningfulness of the characterisation. The horse in build and gait is a serviceable beast, bred for courage and endurance; the rider, a man of iron purpose, indomitable in face and carriage; while the woman’s figure in the grand spirit of the flowing lines and in the lofty sadness of her mien touches a chord of triumph and pathos, of the glory and the tragedy of victory.

I compared this statue with Dubois’s “Joan of Arc,” and found it so much less mannered, so far more vital in the immediateness of its import; or, shall we state it in this way: less consciously a work of art, more spontaneously the expression of an overpowering sentiment. This, if I am not mistaken, contains the gist of Saint-Gaudens’s art. While traditional in its origin, it is a living art, rooted in the realities of its environment, modified in its growth--that is to say, in its technique--by the necessity of responding to its conditions.

But how does Saint-Gaudens fare when he confines himself to a factual representation of his subject? Let his statue of Lincoln at Chicago testify. No grace of line or grandeur of mass; only a chair behind the standing figure to eke out the stringiness of the legs and in a measure to build up the composition. Nor could the sculptor snatch an easy triumph through any heroic rendering of the figure, spare and elongated, in clothes uncompromisingly ordinary. But the man as he was, and just because he chanced to be the man he was, was great, and in the fearless acceptance of this fact the sculptor has seized his opportunity. The statue is planted firmly on the right foot--not every statue really stands upon its feet--the right arm held behind the back--these are the characteristic gestures of stability, tenacity and reflection; while the advance of the left leg and the grip of the left hand upon the lapel of the coat bespeak the man of action. With such completeness are these complex qualities suggested and then crowned with the solemn dignity of the declined head, so aloof in impenetrable meditation, that the homely figure has a grandeur and a power of appeal which are irresistible. True, our imagination, reënforced by knowledge, goes out to reach the artist half-way, thereby lessening the space he has to travel in his idealisation of facts. Behind this isolated figure looms up the scene in which he played so great a part. It was precisely because this scene was present to the sculptor’s imagination, and he knew it would be to ours, that he set himself to the most realistic rendering of his subject and thereby triumphed.

But once more, turn to his statue of Peter Cooper. There is no background here of heroism, or any environment of a nation roused to highest sacrifice; only the background of a building, ugly in itself, though we know it to be the habitation of a great educational movement. Homely also is the general appearance of the founder and benefactor, yet the figure in its loose, slovenly costume, seated in a chair, presents in its solid mass a suggestion of fundamental force; the left hand grasps a walking-cane with a gesture of fine decision, and the head, with its long hair and fringe of beard, by sheer force of genial, manly directness, so earnest and unsophisticated, compels us to realize this man to be more than ordinary. He is the prophet of a cause, the leader of a peaceful revolution. In a word, if one has the mind and sympathy to note it, this old and yet alert man, of ungarnished simplicity and indomitable confidence, is an embodiment of the same sure uplifting of the people to which he contributed so largely.

I have chosen these examples to illustrate Saint-Gaudens’s ability to idealise his subject, to reach through the fact to the soul within the fact. But his sensibility to impressions is not only moved by the larger aspects of life; it is also exquisitely sweet and subtle. Study his numerous low-relief portraits--for example, the children of Prescott Hall Butler, those of Jacob H. Schiff, and the single portraits of Miss Violet Sargent and of Robert Louis Stevenson. In all these and in many others his sensibility is exhibited, not only in the sympathetic comprehension of character, but also in the extraordinary _finesse_ of the execution.

The figures are not merely set against the background; they grow out of it, forming with it an enclosed parterre of beautiful design, of delicately differing planes of elevation, of subtle tones of gray in between the extremes of light and dark. The effect is not unlike that revealed at early morning when the landscape is flattened in appearance by the mist, and, as the latter is loosened and dispersed by the sun, the patterned forms take on infinitesimal degrees of definition and mysteriousness behind the intervening veils of lighted vapour. Through such a simile one may, perhaps, suggest the essential quality of loveliness in these low reliefs.

Yet they are qualities shared to-day by several sculptors in France, sufficient to reveal an artist of rare sensibility, but not to measure the grander characteristics of Saint-Gaudens’s art. In the conditions of American civilization he has come within a range and depth of inspiration denied to modern Frenchmen, and it is in the degree to which he has responded to those opportunities that his preëminence consists. His position is unique, for no other sculptor of our time has so attuned the traditions of his art to the key of the modern spirit for the expression of grand conceptions.

II

GEORGE GREY BARNARD

While Saint-Gaudens, an American of European descent and training, has caught the outspoken voice of our national life, George Grey Barnard, of American parentage and practically self-taught, expresses its underlying force. To the former came a congenial opportunity in the demand for memorial sculpture. He turned it to great account through his gift of penetrating to the central fact of the subject and of illuminating it with a generous imagination. Instead of facts, however, it is rather with ideas that Barnard’s imagination has been concerned. They preceded his study of sculpture, and he sought the latter as an expression for them, influenced in his self-instruction by the work of Michelangelo.

He is from the West, that huge quarry out of which a new order of ideas is being gradually dug and shaped. The echoes of the clang of tool upon inchoate material, of sharp wits and keen purpose carving anew at the problems of existence, reach us from time to time in this more conventional East. We may smile at the crudeness of some of the results achieved, but cannot disregard the import of the endeavour. The force which animates it is the craving for larger, fuller liberty than mankind has yet attained; a titanic force, often brutal in its material manifestation, but with inherent mightiness of spirit. It is this spirit which has enveloped Barnard’s imagination since his childhood, and forms, as it were, the basis of his art. Its keynote is humanity, the elemental relationship of man to man and of men to the universe; a liberty of life and art, that would shake off the trammels devised for narrower theories and conditions and adjust itself to the perspective of a wider horizon. A boyhood nourished on literature and nature-studies sowed the seed from which these matured ideals were to spring.

He was born at Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, in 1863, the son of a Presbyterian minister; but his early years up to the age of twelve were spent in Chicago, after which the family moved to Iowa. When only nine years old he began to learn something of shells and minerals from a retired sea captain; later he studied birds and animals, taught himself to draw them and by fifteen was an expert taxidermist with as many as 1,200 specimens in his collection. Then for nearly two years he earned his living as an engraver and worker in gold and silver ornaments, learning meanwhile to model, until, having saved a little sum of money, he returned to Chicago, determined to become a sculptor. He was now seventeen and had not yet seen a statue.

There is a hint in this of the instinct that draws would-be artists toward sculpture rather than painting. It is an instinct for form, a passion for its tangible bodiliness, a prepossession so strong that it seems to transpose the senses of touch and sight; giving to the flat and round-topped thumb of the sculptor’s strong, square hand a sense equivalent to sight, keen and sensitive as is the touch of the blind, and giving to his eye a touch-consciousness. He feels with his eye and sees with his thumb. It is by the touch that in childhood we all assure ourselves of the reality of things, and it is the stimulation of the tactile imagination, as Mr. Bernard Berenson calls it, which is one of the chief sources of pleasure in the illusion of a picture. But touch to the sculptor is not an illusion. While a painter only imagines the form of an arm through his sense of sight, the sculptor actually gets his sensation through his hands, as he feels it growing in form and character, substance and subtlety of surface under his manipulation. With him the physical delight is added to the mental. I imagine, indeed, that the degree to which he expresses this twofold delight is largely the measure of his ability as a sculptor.

Barnard thus early had experienced it; but, we should notice, so far only through an experience of minute work. Yet his communing with himself and with nature along the shores of the great lake and of the Father of Waters was only waiting to discover its effects in a larger field of sensations.

This awakening did not come to him at once in Chicago. There was then no Art Institute with its array of sculpture casts; no flourishing school with its accompanying enthusiasms. Yet, possibly that was well for the slow, silent development of this youth, a dreamer of dreams, already a student of philosophy and occultism, fervently religious, with a religion that felt after the mysteries of life and included such dawning notions as he had of art.

He chanced upon a teacher whose stock in trade consisted of four casts of the antique statues in reduced size, which he drew in every possible position, until he had completely mastered the representation of an object on the flat. This, it will be observed, was a temporary suspension of his study of solid form, being indeed, a transposition from actual depth and distance to the _illusion_ of a third dimension; and the intense application in this direction, with the fascination of it, affected his work for some time. I think a comparison of “The Boy” with one of his later works will show this. The early work displays more feeling for light and shade than for form, and is, in fact, rather a study of planes of varying value than of bulk. While this may appear a somewhat fine-drawn distinction, it does involve an important principle, because it affects the way in which the subject has been considered, the conception, indeed, which inspired the work. In his later work Barnard is not oblivious to the charm of subtle modelling, but the larger motive is present in his mind, that of the constructional, organic character of the mass, and it becomes the distinctive direction in which his genius expresses itself.

He grew to consciousness of this large aspect of sculpture through the influence of Michelangelo. Hearing that there were some casts of the master’s work stored away in a room under lock and key he sought admission. It was at first denied; students by acts of vandalism had abused their privileges; the exhibition had been closed to them, and no exception could be made in his case. “But I must see them,” was his simple answer. “Michelangelo lived and worked for me as much as Jesus did; his works belong to me--I must see them.” In presence of such a fervour of conviction the director yielded, and Barnard was allowed to come and go as he pleased.

If one could really know the boy’s emotions, what a revelation it would be! To most of us, if we can recall our youth, the impressions that counted most came gradually, finding us often unprepared for them, and through circumstances or our own levity of soul unable to receive due profit at the time. But to the young Barnard, with a seriousness beyond his years, peering into the mystery of life, feeling after expression in form, the revelation of Michelangelo’s genius must have been like sudden light to a blind man, who, hitherto, had had but vague imaginings of light and form. There, in the quiet afternoons, until daylight faded into twilight, alone with these sublime beings, the boy would sit and sit. Tired on one occasion, he sat himself in the lap of the “Moses”--for he was small and boyish-looking despite his seventeen years--and resting his curly head against the statue’s beard fell fast asleep, his young, eager spirit, wrapped around and absorbed by the influence of the mighty dead. Do you not perceive in this little story another proof of the boy’s physical joy in form, so that after drawing from it sustenance to his spirit he nestled into contact with the feel of it, as a baby, surfeited with nourishment, lies close to the mother’s breast?

And it was with a good deal of a baby’s unconsciousness, I suspect, that Barnard sucked in nourishment from the experiences of this time. He was not as yet deliberately studying these statues, was still ignorant of the technical problems which they offered; but, himself a dreamer of dreams, he lost himself in the magnitude of the conception, and little by little grew to realise how dreams may shape themselves into form. He began to have an inkling of the majesty of form in the round, as something not to be translated into the flat, but to be felt in the bulk; a realisation of the wonder of palpable structure, when it has become the plastic expression of noble thought. It was several years later, and much discipline had to be undergone, before the impressions of this lonely communing were to become part of his conscious equipment as a sculptor.

But I wonder whether the scarcity of artists, as compared with the great number of skilful practitioners of painting and sculpture, is not due, in part at any rate, to the fact that few students enjoy a period of subconscious reception of impressions. In place of it they are surrounded by the clatter of the classroom, share in the smart little theories of their fellow-students and for the influence of the great masters substitute adulation for some teacher who professes to know a short cut to success. Most modern education, indeed, is a bustling after results, that allows no space for the slow, steady, silent growth, such as prepares the sapling to take its place among the giants of the forests. Yet in our study of the lives of all true artists we shall find that the period of communing, either with nature or with the masterpieces of art, has intervened. Happy for the student to whom it comes early!

At the end of his eighteenth year he received a commission for the portrait bust of a child, and discovered for himself the manner of executing it in marble. With the sum received, he went to Paris, studying for a time under the academician, Cavelier, and then establishing himself in a humble studio. Twelve years he lived in Paris, enduring the extreme of privations, until the patronage of an American, Mr. Alfred Corning Clark, relieved the pressure of want; and the acceptance of seven of his works at the Champ de Mars in 1894 and his election as an associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts crowned his struggles with artistic recognition. During

the intervening years he had shunned the influence of modern Paris, drawing nutriment in the museums from Phidias and Michelangelo, from the divine repose of the one and from the other’s conflict of soul, conscious of great strivings within himself that craved utterance.

All his early works were so completely in response to an impulse from within, that they seem to me to reveal themselves as confessions of his soul, as manifestations not only of his artistic but of his spiritual development.

The earliest was “The Boy”: a nude figure seated, asleep, with arched back and with head drooping on the breast; a supple form, with that mingling of firmness and languor which a child presents in sound, healthy sleep; a composition, very fresh in conception and beautiful in its rhythmical compactness; expressive, moreover, in every part, of the character of profound slumber. This single theme of feeling flows through the whole figure in measured bars of melodious movement. I like to think of it as an artist’s expression, not of a boy, but of boyhood; his own boyhood, in its unalloyed purity and freshness, which even in his manhood is “not dead but sleepeth”; abiding with him in its beautiful quiescence, perpetual testimony to the living on of the child in the artist’s soul.