Artist and Public Part 5

25), the "Schiff Children," the "Sarah Redwood Lee" (Pl. 26), to name but a few of his masterpieces of this kind, are in their perfection of s.p.a.cing, their grace of line, their exquisite and ethereal illusiveness of surface, comparable only to the loveliest works of the Florentine Renaissance; while the a.s.sured mastery of the most complicated problems of relief evinced in the "Shaw Memorial"--a mastery which shows, in the result, no trace of the strenuous and long-continued effort that it cost--is unsurpa.s.sed--I had almost said unequalled--in any work of any epoch.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.

Plate 25.--Saint-Gaudens. "The Butler Children."]

Ill.u.s.tration can give but a faint idea of the special beauties of this or that particular work in this long series. It can show no more than the composition and the draughtsmans.h.i.+p. The refinement of workmans.h.i.+p, the sensitiveness and subtlety of modelling, can be appreciated only before the works themselves. And this sensitiveness and delicacy of workmans.h.i.+p, this mastery of the problems of relief, with its reliance on illusion and its necessary abstention from realization, is applied to sculpture in the round, and becomes with Saint-Gaudens, as it did with the sculptors of the Florentine Renaissance, the means of escape from the matter of fact. The concrete art of sculpture becomes an art of mystery and of suggestion--an art having affinities with that of painting. Hollows are filled up, shadows are obliterated, lines are softened or accentuated, as the effect may require, details are eliminated or made prominent as they are less or more essential and significant, as they hinder or aid the expressiveness of the whole. It is by such methods that beauty is achieved, that the most unpromising material is subdued to the purposes of art, that even our hideous modern costume may be made to yield a decorative effect. Pure sculpture, as the ancients understood it, the art of form _per se_, demands the nude figure, or a costume which reveals it rather than hides it. The costume of to-day reveals as little of the figure as possible, and, unlike mediaeval armor, it has no beauty of its own. A painter may make it interesting by dwelling on color or tone or texture, or may so lose it in shadow that it ceases to count at all except as a s.p.a.ce of darkness.

A sculptor can do none of these things, and if he is to make it serve the ends of beauty he has need of all the resourcefulness and all the skill of the master of low relief. It was fortunate that the artist whose greatest task was to commemorate the heroes of the Civil War should have had the temperament and the training of such a master, and I know of no other sculptor than Saint-Gaudens who has so magnificently succeeded in the rendering of modern clothing--no other who could have made the uniform of Farragut or the frock coat of Lincoln as interesting as the armor of Colleone or the toga of Augustus.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.

Plate 26.--Saint-Gaudens. "Sarah Redwood Lee."]

But if the genius of Saint-Gaudens was primarily a decorative genius--if it was, even, in his earlier work, a trifle picturesque, so that, as he said himself, he had "to fight against picturesqueness," his work was never pictorial. He never indulged in perspective or composed his reliefs on more than one plane; never took such liberties with the traditions of sculpture as did Ghiberti, or painted pictures in bronze or marble as more than one modern has done. His very feeling for decoration kept him from pictorial realism, and his fight against picturesqueness was n.o.bly won. His design becomes ever cleaner and more cla.s.sic; by years of work and of experience he becomes stronger and stronger in the more purely sculptural qualities--attains a grasp of form and structure only second to his mastery of composition. He is always a consummate artist--in his finest works he is a great sculptor in the strictest sense of the word.

I have dwelt somewhat at length upon technical matters because technical power is the first necessity for an artist; because technical mastery is that for which he consciously endeavors; because the technical language of his art is the necessary vehicle of expression for his thoughts and emotions, and determines, even, the nature of the thoughts and emotions he shall express. But while the technical accomplishment of an artist is the most necessary part of his art, without which his imagination would be mute, it is not the highest or the most significant part of it.

I have tried to show that Saint-Gaudens was a highly accomplished artist, the equal of any of his contemporaries, the superior of most.

What made him something much more than this--something infinitely more important for us--was the vigor and loftiness of his imagination.

Without his imaginative power he would have been an artist of great distinction, of whom any country might be proud; with it he became a great creator, able to embody in enduring bronze the highest ideals and the deepest feelings of a nation and of a time.

It is a penetrating and sympathetic imagination that gave him his unerring grasp of character, that enabled him to seize upon the significant elements of a personality, to divine the att.i.tude and the gesture that should reveal it, to eliminate the unessential, to present to us the man. This is the imagination of the portrait-painter, and Saint-Gaudens has shown it again and again, in many of his reliefs and memorial tablets, above all in his portrait statues. He showed it conclusively in so early a work as the "Farragut" (Pl. 27), a work that remains one of the modern masterpieces of portrait statuary. The man stands there forever, feet apart, upon his swaying deck, his gla.s.s in one strong hand, cool, courageous, ready, full of determination but absolutely without bl.u.s.ter or braggadocio, a sailor, a gentleman, and a hero. He showed it again, and with ampler maturity, in that august figure of "Lincoln" (Pl. 28), grandly dignified, austerely simple, sorrowfully human, risen from the chair of state that marks his office, but about to speak as a man to men, his bent head and worn face filled with a sense of power, but even more with the sadness of responsibility--filled, above all, with a yearning, tender pa.s.sion of sympathy and love. In imaginative presentation of character, in n.o.bility of feeling and breadth of treatment, no less than in perfection of workmans.h.i.+p, these are among the world's few worthy monuments to its great men.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.

Plate 27.--Saint-Gaudens. "Farragut."]

And they are monuments to Americans by an American. Saint-Gaudens had lived through the time of the Civil War, had felt, as a boy, the stir of its great happenings in his blood, and its epic emotions had become a part of his consciousness, deep-seated at the roots of his nature. The feelings of the American people were his feelings, and his representations of these and of other heroes of that great struggle are among the most national as they are among the most vital things that our country has produced in art.

But if Saint-Gaudens's imagination was thus capable of raising the portrait to the dignity of the type, it was no less capable of endowing the imagined type with all the individuality of the portrait. In the "Deacon Chapin" (Pl. 29), of Springfield, we have a purely ideal production, the finest embodiment of New England Puritanism in our art, for no portrait of the real Chapin existed. This swift-striding, stern-looking old man, who clasps his Bible as Moses clasped the tables of the law and grips his peaceful walking-stick as though it were a sword, is a Puritan of the Puritans; but he is an individual also--a rough-hewn piece of humanity with plenty of the old Adam about him--an individual so clearly seen and so vigorously characterized that one can hardly believe the statue an invention or realize that no such old Puritan deacon ever existed in the flesh. Something of this imaginative quality there is in almost everything Saint-Gaudens touched, even in his purely decorative figures. His angels and caryatides are not cla.s.sical G.o.ddesses but modern women, lovely, but with a personal and particular loveliness, not insisted upon but delicately suggested. And it is not the personality of the model who chanced to pose for them but an invented personality, the expression of the n.o.bility, the sweetness, and the pure-mindedness of their creator. And in such a figure as that of the "Adams Memorial" (Pl. 30), in Rock Creek Cemetery in Was.h.i.+ngton, his imaginative power reaches to a degree of impressiveness almost unequalled in modern art. One knows of nothing since the tombs of the Medici that fills one with the same hushed awe as this shrouded, hooded, deeply brooding figure, rigid with contemplation, still with an eternal stillness, her soul rapt from her body on some distant quest. Is she Nirvana? Is she The Peace of G.o.d? She has been given many names--her maker would give her none. Her meaning is mystery; she is the everlasting enigma.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.

Plate 28.--Saint-Gaudens. "Lincoln."]

Not the greatest artist could twice sound so deep a note as this. The figure remains unique in the work of the sculptor as it is unique in the art of the century. Yet, perhaps, Saint-Gaudens's greatest works are two in which all the varied elements of his genius find simultaneous expression; into which his mastery of composition, his breadth and solidity of structure, his technical skill, his insight into character, and his power of imagination enter in nearly equal measure: the "Shaw Memorial" and the great equestrian group of the "Sherman Monument."

The "Shaw Memorial" (Pl. 31) is a relief, but a relief of many planes.

The marching troops are in three files, one behind the other, the varying distances from the spectator marked by differences of the degree of projection. Nearer than all of them is the equestrian figure of Shaw himself, the horse and rider modelled nearly but not quite in the round.

The whole scale of relief was altered in the course of the work, after it had once been nearly completed, and the mastery of the infinitely complicated problem of relief in many degrees is supreme. But all the more because the scheme was so full and so varied, the artist has carefully avoided the pictorial in his treatment. There is no perspective, the figures being all on the same scale, and there is no background, no setting of houses or landscape. Everywhere, between and above the figures, is the flat surface which is the immemorial tradition of sculpture in relief; and the fact that it _is_ a surface, representing nothing, is made more clear by the inscription written upon it--an inscription placed there, consciously or unconsciously, that it might have that very effect. The composition is magnificent, whether for its intrinsic beauty of arrangement--its balancing of lines and s.p.a.ces--or for its perfect expressiveness. The rhythmic step of marching men is perfectly rendered, and the guns fill the middle of the panel in an admirable pattern, without confusion or monotony. The heads are superb in characterization, strikingly varied and individual, yet each a strongly marked racial type, unmistakably African in all its forms.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Plate 29.--Saint-Gaudens. "Deacon Chapin."]

These are merits, and merits of a very high order, enough of themselves to place the work in the front rank of modern sculpture, but they are, after all, its minor merits. What makes it the great thing it is is the imaginative power displayed in it--the depth of emotion expressed, and expressed with perfect simplicity and directness and an entire absence of parade. The negro troops are marching steadily, soberly, with high seriousness of purpose, and their white leader rides beside them, drawn sword in hand, but with no military swagger, courageous, yet with a hint of melancholy, ready not only to lay down his life but to face, if need be, an ignominious death for the cause he believes to be just. And above them, laden with poppy and with laurels, floats the Death Angel pointing out the way.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright, Curtis & Cameron.

Plate 30.--Saint-Gaudens. "Adams Memorial."]

It is a work which artists may study again and again with growing admiration and increasing profit, yet it is one that has found its way straight to the popular heart. It is not always--it is not often--that the artists and the public are thus at one. When they are it is safe to a.s.sume that the work they equally admire is truly great--that it belongs to the highest order of n.o.ble works of art.

The Sherman group (Pl. 32), though it has been more criticised than the "Shaw Memorial," seems to me, if possible, an even finer work. The main objection to it has been that it is not sufficiently "monumental," and, indeed, it has not the ma.s.siveness nor the repose of such a work as Donatello's "Gattamelata," the greatest of all equestrian statues. It could not well have these qualities in the same degree, its motive being what it is, but they are, perhaps, not ill exchanged for the character and the nationalism so marked in horse and rider and for the irresistible onward rush of movement never more adequately expressed. In all other respects the group seems to me almost beyond criticism. The composition--composition, now, in the round and to be considered from many points of view--builds up superbly; the flow of line in wing and limb and drapery is perfect; the purely sculptural problems of anatomical rendering, equine and human, are thoroughly resolved; the modelling, as such, is almost as fine as the design.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright, De. W.C. Ward.

Plate 31.--Saint-Gaudens. "Shaw Memorial."]

To the boyish Saint-Gaudens Sherman had seemed the typical American hero. To the matured artist he had sat for an admirable bust. The sculptor had thus an unusual knowledge of his subject, a perfect sympathy with his theme; and he has produced a work of epic sweep and significance. Tall and erect, the general sits his horse, his military cloak bellying out behind him, his trousers strapped down over his shoes, his hat in his right hand, dropping at arm's length behind his knee, his bare head like that of an old eagle, looking straight forward.

The horse is as long and thin as his rider, with a tremendous stride; and his big head, closely reined in, twitches viciously at the bridle.

Before the horse and rider, upon the ground, yet as if new-lighted there from an aerial existence, half walks, half flies, a splendid winged figure, one arm outstretched, the other brandis.h.i.+ng the palm--Victory leading them on. She has a certain fierce wildness of aspect, but her rapt gaze and half-open mouth indicate the seer of visions--peace is ahead, and an end of war. On the bosom of her gown is broidered the eagle of the United States, for she is an American Victory, as this is an American man on an American horse; and the broken pine bough beneath the horse's feet localizes the victorious march--it is the march through Georgia to the sea.

Long ago I expressed my conviction that the "Sherman Monument" is third in rank of the great equestrian statues of the world. To-day I am not sure that that conviction remains unaltered. Donatello's "Gattamelata"

is unapproached and unapproachable in its quiet dignity; Verrocchio's "Colleone" is unsurpa.s.sed in picturesque attractiveness. Both are consecrated by the admiration of centuries. To-day I am not sure that this work of an American sculptor is not, in its own way, equal to either of them.

There are those who are troubled by the introduction of the symbolical figures in such works as the "Shaw Memorial" and the Sherman statue; and, indeed, it was a bold enterprise to place them where they are, mingling thus in the same work the real and the ideal, the actual and the allegorical. But the boldness seems to me abundantly justified by success. In either case the entire work is pitched to the key of these figures; the treatment of the whole is so elevated by style and so infused with imagination that there is no shock of unlikeness or difficulty of transition. And these figures are not merely necessary to the composition, an essential part of its beauty--they are even more essential to the expression of the artist's thought. Without that hovering Angel of Death, the negro troops upon the "Shaw Memorial" might be going anywhere, to battle or to review. We should have a pa.s.sing regiment, nothing more. Without the striding Victory before him, the impetuous movement of Sherman's horse would have no especial significance. And these figures are no mere conventional allegories; they are true creations. To their creator the unseen was as real as the seen--nay, it was more so. That Shaw was riding to his death at the command of duty was, the only thing that made Shaw memorable. That Sherman was marching to a victory the fruits of which should be peace was the essential thing about Sherman. Death and Duty--Victory and Peace--in each case the compound ideal found its expression in a figure entirely original and astonis.h.i.+ngly living: a _person_ as truly as Shaw or Sherman themselves. He could not have left them out. It were better to give up the work entirely than to do it otherwise than as he saw it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.

Plate 32.--Saint-Gaudens. "Sherman."]

I have described and discussed but a few of the many works of this great artist, choosing those which seem to me the most significant and the most important, and in doing so I have keenly felt the inadequacy of words to express the qualities of an art which exists by forms.

Fortunately, the works themselves are, for the most part, readily accessible. In the originals, in casts, or in photographs, they may be studied by every one. Nothing is more difficult than to estimate justly the greatness of an object that is too near to us--it is only as it recedes into the distance that the mountain visibly overtops its neighboring hills. It is difficult to understand that this man so lately familiar to us, moving among us as one of ourselves, is of the company of the immortals. Yet I believe, as we make this study of his works, as we yield ourselves to the graciousness of his charm or are exalted by the sweep of his imagination, we shall come to feel an a.s.sured conviction that Augustus Saint-Gaudens was not merely the most accomplished artist of America, not merely one of the foremost sculptors of his time--we shall feel that he is one of those great, creative minds, transcending time and place, not of America or of to-day, but of the world and forever.

Where, among such minds, he will take his rank we need not ask. It is enough that he is among them. Such an artist is a.s.suredly a benefactor of his country, and it is eminently fitting that his gift to us should be acknowledged by such tribute as we can pay him. By his works in other lands and by his world-wide fame he sheds a glory upon the name of America, helping to convince the world that here also are those who occupy themselves with the things of the spirit, that here also are other capabilities than those of industrial energy and material success.

In his many minor works he has endowed us with an inexhaustible heritage of beauty--beauty which is "about the best thing G.o.d invents." He is the educator of our taste and of more than our taste--of our sentiment and our emotions. In his great monuments he has not only given us fitting presentments of our national heroes; he has expressed, and in expressing elevated, our loftiest ideals; he has expressed, and in expressing deepened, our profoundest feelings. He has become the voice of all that is best in the American people, and his works are incentives to patriotism and lessons in devotion to duty.

But the great and true artist is more than a benefactor of his country, he is a benefactor of the human race. The body of Saint-Gaudens is ashes, but his mind, his spirit, his character have taken on enduring forms and are become a part of the inheritance of mankind. And if, in the lapse of ages, his very name should be forgotten--as are the names of many great artists who have gone before him--yet his work will remain; and while any fragment of it is decipherable the world will be the richer in that he lived.