I
Sometimes we talk as if the present state of things were a sort of terminus; as if by many roads we had at last reached Rome. Would it not be wiser to look upon the Olympian Washington and the Adams Memorial and the lately-discussed Civic Virtue as so many figures marking stations of a journey by no means finished? We have had competent leaders in the immediate past of our sculpture; is there anything in our American way of life and our American view of art that will prevent our having competent leaders in the future? We are too close to that question to answer it, beyond saying that we are full of hope. And art is one of those matters concerning which despair is criminal. Certainly the chaos resulting from the World War is not as yet sufficiently transformed for the wisest to know from what Ark, high and dry on what Ararat, will issue the new hopes of all mankind. We can only cry out with Galsworthy, not yet are there enough lovers of beauty among us.
Our introductory chapter noted with some emphasis the fact that through Jefferson’s hands the realism of France and the idealism of Italy came to the aid of our new-born plastic art. Houdon happened to be a greater sculptor than Canova; it was our good fortune that we had Houdon at all. And Jefferson drew the curtain for a steadily unfolding act in the drama. Since his day, France and Italy have always been our chief allies in our sculpture. Because of this, and because of the Roman origin of most of the British culture our early settlers brought with them, bred in the bone, it follows that the main current of American sculpture, in thought, in feeling, and even in workmanship, has been fed from the boundless streams of Mediterranean civilization. Now and again, a Celtic influence, a German influence, a Scandinavian influence has made itself felt, for better or for worse.
Each new influence as it comes we shall prize for what it is, after the gloss or shock of novelty is worn off. Each may have an importance we can but guess at. Saint-Gaudens was deeply conscious that he had received his legacy of artistic sensitiveness quite as much from his Irish mother as from his French father, born in Southern France not far from those sculptured mountains on which many a French poet and artist opened infant eyes. Perhaps Celtic glamor was all that made his vision of man somewhat different from that of many of his comrades at the petite école,—just different enough to give his later work a chance at immortality, while the images they shaped had to go back dumb to the clay-pit again. It is a great gift, the Celtic eye, though making small boast of seeing things steadily and seeing them whole; ah, nothing so prosaic as that! Celtic melancholy and Celtic mirth raise up a kind of shimmering rainbow-dust through which an image is seen in glorious parts; and Celtic exasperation loves stir more than steadiness. But the plodders need the seers; and ever since the time of Crawford and his Past and Present of the Republic, our sculpture has been graced and enlivened by many a Mac and O; never more so than to-day. The Wren epitaph fits them even during their lifetime:—Circumspice.
So in our country as in Britain, the Scottish and the Irish and the Welsh strains in the blood key up the English-speaking peoples in their arts of vision and expression. Yet when all such things are said, (and much more might be said, with unmannerly talk of “creeping Saxons” and the like) the fact remains that the future art of the United States is even less easy to foreknow than that of the British Isles; and this because of what we call our “melting-pot” population, with all its benefits and drawbacks, its clamorous and conflicting ideals in art and in morality. The great American alembic is still seething. Newer forces than any that have come from Britain and France and Italy are now stirring here. What of these? Mr. Sloane, in his address on the sculptor Ward, reminded us of the slow evolution of sculpture, of the long journey between the Memnon and the Hermes, of the swifter travel between Greek art and our own, and of our recent return, not only to the classic, but to the oriental. That inquiring look toward the Orient, a corner of the earth always revered in occidental art, was never so general as at present. Some time ago, the studies of our sculptors at the American Academy at Rome led them to the eastern borders of that richly intricate rim of the Mediterranean basin; a rim from which we are still plucking jewels of hitherto unimagined splendor, such as those of Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb. But before pressing still farther eastward, let us glance a moment at the familiar influences of recent formative years.