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.
III
It is a very happy thing for our sculpture that the three men who have most definitely guided its destinies through the past forty years,—Ward, Saint-Gaudens, French,—are hailed as men of moral force. And it is a special cause for congratulation that Mr. French, the youngest-born of the three, still remains with us, still vigorous in achievement. One expects moral earnestness from Mr. French, a New Englander of gracious ancestry, born and bred in the very happiest circumstances of New England life, and growing up gaily in the light-and-shade of Concord philosophy. One expects it from Mr. Ward, with his open-air Ohio boyhood of mingled zests and rigors, and his later conscientious acceptance of the public duties laid upon any artist who happens also to be an organizer, a “man’s man.” And whether one expects it or not, one finds it in rich measure in Saint-Gaudens. This child of France, born in Ireland, carries within him all the days of his life the light of an American conscience. Without a compelling moral earnestness, he could never have brought to completion, in face of unimaginable difficulties, some of the masterpieces on which his fame rests.
Every artist knows of the fourteen years during which the Shaw monument remained in his studio, never long absent from his thought. Many are familiar with the repeated trials through which his vision of General Sherman and the Angel of Victory-Peace finally emerged triumphant. A man once told his dentist of Saint-Gaudens, of the Shaw monument, of the fourteen years. “Well,” said the dentist, twirling his little mahogany stand of bright tools, in complacent recollection of some of his own swifter victories, “he couldn’t have been a very smart artist, to take all that time.” No, indeed, Saint-Gaudens was not a very smart artist. The very smart artist, one concludes, can flourish for his day without a deep foundation of moral earnestness. Saint-Gaudens was simply the very great artist. With Mr. Ward and Mr. French, he made integrity and the artistic conscience the only natural choice for scores of young sculptors now influencing our lives. What these three leaders have thus contributed of moral beauty, of needed moral earnestness to our society, will never be measured. It is too far-reaching and too deep-seated. Most observers consider that a certain superficiality mars American life. Although we need not join those defeatists who believe that this defect in itself spells our ruin, we shall certainly admit that the defect exists. All honor, then, to the moral earnestness that today, largely because of these three leaders, is so much a part of the spirit of American sculpture.
The sculptor’s work means far more than staying in a studio and luring visions into clay or stone or bronze. His business isn’t altogether a wrestling with angels. There’s a certain amount of coping with committees; and his visions are often none the worse for the honest revisions that other men may suggest. The sculptor’s masterpiece must be able to resist the spiritual wear-and-tear of the marketplace of the world’s opinion. It is no masterpiece unless it can in the end do that. And if, as it stands, the work is a silent influence against superficiality and emptiness, something is gained for American life. Glad sculpture as well as grave sculpture can exert that influence.
IV
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS WARD
No one is as disdainful of the early Victorians as the late Victorians used to be. In the strength of the ’eighties and ’nineties our studios often resounded with mutterings against the feebleness of the ’fifties. Perhaps some envy of certain primitive successes was mingled with this righteous wrath. But after all, our Powerses and Rogerses were not in the least the mere early worms their successors once said they were. A juster perspective invites the reflection that American sculpture in its development needed the influence of the Greek Slave and her thousand daughters as it has needed that of the Rock Creek figure, of the Lincoln Memorial, and of the fire-new work beautifully presented by our youngest group of sculptors. Those marble shapes now dwelling vaguely somewhere in the dark corridors of relegation had once a thrilling part to play. They were our ideals, to be seen, prized and possessed in the name of art. So, the old songs of blame have long been out of date. But they did good service in the days when John Quincy Adams Ward, a natural leader of men, turned a heroic back on Europe as a place for the American artist to live in. Go there to study, but not to stay, was his word.
Vision, veracity, virility are the three V’s that stamped his life and work. Like his friend Howells, he was Ohio-born; both men had boyhood aspirations that carried them away from their Middle-Border pioneer activities into the more genial milieu to be found among our Eastern salt-water cities. Living from 1830 to 1910, and working sixty years in his art, Ward has rightly been called the Colossus that bestrides the two separate worlds of our former and latter periods in sculpture. Though he founded no school, his influence has been far-reaching. His Beecher statue, flanked by its two lyrical groups, his Garfield monument with its attendant epic groups of War and Peace, his noble equestrian figure of General Thomas are among a host of sterling works that prove him the “all round” sculptor. In his youth, he played a well-known and highly practical part in the making of Brown’s equestrian statue of Washington, one of the best-praised and worst-placed monuments in the city of New York. Since the praise is deserved, the placing discredits us far more than it does the heroic artists who carried the work to completion. All sculptors who succeed in their equestrian statues are heroic; even if they are not heroes when they begin such enterprises they achieve heroism before they finish them. And if that is true to-day, with our more highly organized methods both of the sculptor’s art and of the bronze-founder’s science, what must it have been in 1856, when Brown’s Washington, our second equestrian statue, first saw the light? In later life, Ward sometimes spoke in whimsical recollection of industrious apprentice days that he, a luckier type of Jonah, spent within the belly of the horse cast in bronze by French workmen assisting Brown.
Ward had in his nature and in his art the great elements of the precursor. He represents not only the pioneer in American sculpture, but in no small measure and sometimes in a singular way, the prophet. Witness the dog with scalloped mane in his admirable group of the Indian Hunter, a work that much impressed the youthful Saint-Gaudens, fresh from years of study among European masters and masterpieces. Here we have a fore-taste of that delightful treatment of animal form found in the bronzes of the young men from the American Academy in Rome. To be sure, Ward’s dog does not seem to spring forward full-armed in a beautifully conventionalized linear panoply of bone and muscle resurrected from some newly revealed Klazomenian sarcophagus; he is not quite so Cretanly curled as some of the appealing animal figures of to-day, but ’tis enough, ’t will serve. And the whole group, as seen happily placed in Central Park, reveals the naturalism in which Ward envelops his own peculiar kind of classicism. For a nobler instance of Ward’s forward-looking quality, choose the bronze Washington standing on the steps of the Sub-Treasury in New York, in the very heart of all our heart-breaking yet inspiring financial traffic. That statue is not merely a portrait of Washington, but a symbolic expression of early American greatness in leadership.