I
Alive and kicking; better than we now realize, the old phrase fits our young American art of the early nineteenth century. In Boston, Mr. Bulfinch is packing his triangles and T-squares for a journey to Washington, where he is to remain twelve years as Latrobe’s successor as architect of the Capitol. In New York, morning-star young art-students are passionately performing their historic ritual of fighting the janitor and founding new movements; even Colonel Trumbull is defied; hence, in 1825, our National Academy of Design. In Philadelphia, harmony presides over the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. But in Washington, what commotion! Restorations are to be made after the fires of the British; there are new excavations, new aspirations. There’s sculptor’s work here for many a year. Bronze doors must be created, in the supposed manner of Ghiberti; pediments must be populated; and what is a dome without its colossal figure of Freedom? Greenough and Crawford and Randolph Rogers are the sculptors of the hour. And always Hiram Powers, somewhat apart from the Washington bustle.
Modern imagination fails to see those early craftsmen as they really were. Because they are dead to us now, we fall into the error of thinking that they always were dead, anyway; the stilly sort of sculpture they often made sustains us in that illusion. But when we look into their lives, and hear their sayings, we learn, almost with a shock, that these men felt deeply, even while they expressed themselves feebly in their art.
Living amidst heaped riches of opportunity, the art-student of to-day can scarcely imagine the bleak poverty of artistic resource that Greenough and Crawford and Powers left behind them when they sailed away to Rome or to Florence. Nowadays, art-schools flourish here: casts of good sculpture abound; photographs of masterpieces may be had at a small price. Museums freely show examples of the arts of all nations, and intelligently arrange these displays to serve the immediate needs of students; in short, they do a great work so well that they have already become a target for so-called criticism from self-styled intellectuals exposing their wits in the columns of would-be radical journals. Things were very different in Greenough’s time. There were indeed a few collections of casts, probably with soiled noses; there were portfolios of steel engravings, that sometimes bore false witness against beauty.
Knowing the leanness of those early years, we can but wonder at the large vision of our fathers in considering our capital city; and we can but thank our lucky Stars and Stripes for the bond of sympathy between our young Republic and France, a sympathy partly responsible for the happy choice of General Washington’s aid, Major Pierre L’Enfant, as our first city planner. The spirit of L’Enfant’s work has survived the shocks of time and senates; that plan of the year 1792 (since extended in accordance with the principles of design it embodied) is still regarded as “at once the finest and most comprehensive plan ever devised for a capital city.” Those lean years were not by any means the day of small things; it is to this hour a blessing for sculpture and for architecture that Washington and Jefferson and L’Enfant laid large foundations for the seat of Government. A century ago, the continued building and re-building of the Capitol expressed a profound national feeling; the souls of our sculptors, as far as we had sculptors, were thrilled with desire to add plastic beauty to its gates and gables. At least one of those great dreams was destined to end as food for journalistic jibes. Greenough’s colossal marble Washington as the Olympian Zeus, a grandiose conception pored over for seven years in Italy, proved to be too large and heavy for the indoor placing intended for it, and it was doomed to be set up outside the Capitol for the public to sharpen its wits upon. Unfavorably shown, it is unjustly viewed. One recalls with pleasure Saint-Gaudens’s gentle judgments of our pioneer sculptors and their handiwork. “Those men were greater than we know,” he would say. He refused to join in any of our modern merriment at the expense of the Olympian Zeus. Esprit de corps compelled him to recognize in Greenough some large trace of the artist as well as the craftsman.