SPEAKING OF ANGELS
I
The youth’s name was Apollos Rivers. We admired him, used him, and for a time, despised him, too. Why we admired and used, I can easily explain. Apollos was every inch his name—blond, athletic, superb; no model in New York posed as faithfully. Why we despised—well, the logic of that is more complicated. Our contempt was doubtless merely a habit, formed on sight unseen and strengthened by hearsay. Apollos, indeed! How absurd a name for the oldest Rivers boy, seeking work in studios! In vain he had politely explained to us that his late father, a bookish Montreal goldsmith, had so greatly admired the senior Paul Revere of colonial history (the Paul Revere whose Huguenot name had originally been Apollos Rivoire) that he himself, British subject though he was, had bestowed the name Apollos on his own firstborn. Later Rivers arrivals, less magnificent in physique, had to content themselves with names less proud—Tom, Chuck, Nipper, and plain Ellen.
Perhaps we would have accepted that explanation, if somebody (that eternally busy somebody) had not seen young Apollos at an Academy reception, his ears tinted rose-pink, with cheeks to match, and his vigorous young eyelashes weighted with whatever it is the chorus ladies use to veil and enhance their already too potent come-hither-of-the-eye. After this, do you wonder that we jumped at the conclusion that Apollos was merely a name the youth had wished on himself, a nom de pose, as it were? And why did he polish his nails? Unnatural in a boy of eighteen! Anyhow, we wouldn’t have done it, at that age. And I fear that with some of us, even his honest Canadian accent was against him. Take the word been, for instance. Those whose grandfathers had always said ben, and whose mothers had said bin, were repelled when the Montreal lad called it bean.
But the posing of Apollos (one can’t forget that!) was absolutely the best I had ever met anywhere. He first came to me when I was doing that big California thing; you know, the one they call Three Angels, two of the angels being winged marble youths in flat relief, kneeling, and the third a retributive sort of shrouded female figure in bronze, standing, of course, and dominating the other two. Get me? Oh, yes, in the round, she was. I had no trouble in finding her type, no trouble at all. Powerful women abound, these days. But the youths were a more difficult matter. Of course I didn’t want them to look Athenian, as if I’d just dislodged them from the Parthenon frieze, and given them a pair of wings apiece; but then, on the other hand, I didn’t care to have them suggest that I’d merely picked them up on the beach at Coney Island, the Sunday before. Angels mustn’t bear too personal a stamp, you know. To my thinking, no artist has ever surpassed Saint-Gaudens in creating the impersonal, other-worldly type. But he always used a lot of wonder-drapery for his angelic hosts; I had merely wings.
I had tried a good many youths from thirteen to thirty, before I finally decided to take with me to my summer studio, for a period of ten weeks, Apollos Rivers and Phineas Stickney. Remembering those tinted ears, I had some doubt about Apollos and his staying powers through a country summer, far from all but the most elementary sort of movies and like attractions; but I had a hope that the influence of Phineas Stickney, coupled with my own persuasions, would keep the boy on the side of the angels.
In fact, the angels were all that counted with me, that summer. The commission was an important one, and the contract ironclad. If within three years I couldn’t produce the Three Angels, “complete in place and in the final materials as hereinbefore specified,” my name, on the Golden Coast, would be mud instead of Jefferson. And the three years had by now dwindled to one year only! Time pressed. I’d been diligent and fore-handed enough, Heaven knows. If anything, I am diligent to a fault. The retributive woman was all done in bronze; but those two youths weren’t yet ready for the plaster, let alone the “final materials as hereinbefore specified.”
My work in the country studio was cut out for me. I had had an assistant there for some weeks, setting up the full-size work from a half-size study; but when I saw the thing sketched out in the large, I was not at all satisfied with my original idea of those figures. I wanted to make certain very drastic changes; I really needed both Apollos and Phineas, using each lad part of the day. Rough on me, rather; and I suppose fellows in shops and offices would open their eyes if they saw a mere artist—next door to a do-nothing, you know—beginning work every morning at five and quitting at summer sundown; yes, and perhaps stealing back for more study by twilight. For it’s twilight that wipes out all the pettiness that the day reveals; it’s twilight that knows all and tells only the good, in sculpture. If it were not for the healing touch of twilight on our work, how many of us sculptors would have abandoned the art, long ago! Well, I’ve often marvelled at the amount of work I put through that summer. Of course it makes a difference when a man’s work is such that he can make a lark out of it, as well as a living. Still, don’t run away with the idea that any art is pure ecstasy every minute. Nothing is.