II
Euripides was creator rather than critic. It may be that the moral earnestness we need must come to us in a thousand unseen ways through the reconciling hands of creation, rather than in one way through the tongue or pen of the critic.
I shall not say that this quality of moral earnestness is found everywhere in American sculpture. But I know that it is found in many places, and in nearly all the high places. Moral earnestness is the very foundation of the only sort of artistic conscience that amounts to much as a contribution toward the higher life in art. It was a strongly developed artistic conscience that often impelled Shrady, like Saint-Gaudens before him, to break the letter of some lesser clause of his contract, in order to keep faith with the spirit of the whole. Consider the moral earnestness of George Grey Barnard, one of the few modern masters of the imagination as it speaks in stone. You will find that in Barnard this earnestness is part and parcel of the artist he now is; just as it was once part and parcel of Barnard the young student, devoting intense study to the exacting yet large processes of the marble cutter; and by marble cutter I mean not the practitioner, the doomed copyist, but the sort of marble cutter that might call Michelangelo kinsman, and be at ease on the Acropolis with Pheidias and his men. And even if, like myself, you cannot make Barnard’s bronze presentment of Lincoln square with your own thrice dear and clear image of this great man, this great symbol of American statesmanship, you will grant that only a high integrity of purpose in the matter could have kept the sculptor steadfast in the truth as he saw it. This fundamental earnestness of Barnard’s adds a distinction to his most casual or even whimsical words concerning art. When he talks to you about “the cheekbones that make the pathos of a face,” a dozen examples of what he means fill your memory.