MEMORY
BY DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH
Surely we cannot say that his art education was finished before these things were attempted. It progressed with them, and with those other creations, more idealistic in type, in which his imagination had fuller play. When in 1888 he went to Paris to make the model for his marble statue of General Cass of Michigan, he went as a master, yet as a seeker; one well prepared to gain without groping all that was worth while in the influence of the time and place. Five years later, at the Columbian Exposition, his genius makes an extraordinary appeal to his fellow-countrymen in two imposing works, the Republic and the consoling Angel of Death. These of course differ widely in their inspiration and in the emotion they arouse, but they are equally eloquent. The Gallaudet group, placed in Washington in 1889, had already spoken its message to the human heart. An inner radiance of the spirit shines from that very solidly and beautifully composed group of the great teacher and the little deaf-mute; nowhere else in sculpture have we found so adequate and touching an expression of the fatherliness that should animate those who teach, and of the trust of those who must needs learn or be lost. Who would have guessed that sculpture could have found out this way of saying Faith, Hope, and Charity? And beneath all that captivates the general public, how much there is in the Angel, the Republic, and the Gallaudet that remains of special interest to artists, because of the individual mastery of a special problem! In collaboration with Mr. Potter, the accomplished master of animal sculpture, Mr. French has created some of our most notable equestrian statues; the General Grant and the General Meade for Philadelphia, the General Washington, presented to France by an association of American women, the General Hooker for Boston. Other works of high import are the majestic Alma Mater at Columbia University, the bronze doors in delicately shadowed relief for the Boston Public Library, the colossal seated bronze figure of Lincoln enshrined within the Lincoln Memorial at Washington.
Once again let it be said, a man’s work shows his mind. What Mr. French’s art has given to our country is something greatly needed here to-day, that quality which for lack of a better name we call urbanity. There ought to be a higher word for this gift, but Matthew Arnold had to put up with the term, and so must I. The harried dweller in our American urbs is often far from urbane, more’s the pity. But the urbanity we need now, in our arts, our letters, our life, is something that goes deeper than courtesy; it is something that is allied to the spirit of Amor-Caritas seen not only in the Saint-Gaudens angel of that name, but also in Mr. French’s Alma Mater, and in his Angel of Death. Even in the gesture of the Republic’s arms, and in the very folds of her garments, there is a reminder of that large charitable humanist urbanity all nations need when trying to know themselves and each other. Mr. French is the humanist among our American sculptors. But he is empathically not of that type of humanist darkly described by Professor Kallen as living “beside life, not in it.” His position among our sculptors is more than honorary; it is that of the generous co-worker and helper, especially sympathetic toward youth and its aspirations. What Mr. French does seems effortless, but beneath that apparent ease is a profound knowledge of all the armature, both mechanical and intellectual, that holds the sculptor’s art in true poise and balance. Work from his hands may be the monumental or the exquisite; it is imagined simply and naturally, as if this artist knew no other way than the beautiful way. How deeply our democracy needs the best he has to give!
VII
Our twentieth century admits that the latter years of the nineteenth century were spacious years in our sculpture, and that there are as yet no leaders who overtop these three. With these will always be associated, in the minds of those who know things as they are, that distinguished artist Olin Warner, whose death cut short a career splendidly ready for its zenith. For some unknown reason, his work has missed something of its due praise among us; time will perhaps readjust this. The delightful caryatids of his fountain at Portland, Oregon, are indeed greatly prized; his portrait statues are truly sculptural in their ensemble, and fine in their characterization; and with the passing of years, his spirited yet beautifully classic portrait busts of Alden Weir, of Cottier, and of Maud Morgan gain rather than lose in the esteem of the student.
A much later leader, also lost before winning the heights to which he aspired, was Karl Bitter, that sensitive, swift-minded, deft-handed sculptor whose ardent intellectual curiosity kept him still the seeker for newer and more vital ways of sculptural expression. His tragic death was not unlike Warner’s; Warner was thrown from his bicycle in Central Park, Bitter was struck down by an automobile in front of the Opera House. Both men were of those êtres d’ élite that Art needs as her interpreters. But what a contrast in their lives, their characters, their sculptural interpretations! Warner was of the highest type of New Englander of Puritan descent, a courageous worshipper of beauty, and at his best in revealing beauty in classic guise; he has been called the Pilgrim homesick for Hellas; Bitter was of the highest type of the foreign-born, a Viennese eagerly assuming the duties of American citizenship. A gallant figure, already before his coming among us he was imbued with various Old World ideals in art, many of which he afterward rejected as flamboyant, frivolous. No sculptor of our time has made a swifter and steadier advance in sculptural power throughout a busy and varied career. Warner and Bitter; the deep-minded and the quick-minded; the spirit of American sculpture needed both these men, and felt their loss.
CHAPTER IV
OF EXPOSITIONS AND COLLABORATIONS
I
An unpublished satiric drawing of the ’eighties shows a family of American tourists in the Louvre. They contemplate the Melian Venus. With one exception, they are dumb with awe. The exception is Aunt Maria, the masterful old lady in the foreground. Aunt Maria has seen men and cities, but she doesn’t know as there’s much that can beat South Bend. So