IV
A strangely moving story of some such high ambition is told in the career of Henry Merwin Shrady, who died last year, at the very time when his colossal equestrian monument to General Grant was unveiled in Washington. Shrady’s swift uncharted course, like that of a few artists, variations from the type, conformed in no way to the routine deemed necessary for most men in his profession. A graduate from Columbia, he had successfully engaged in business for some years before he began to model animals. He became a sculptor overnight. His immediate success in the art of sculpture is but partly explained by referring to his cultivated intellect, and by saying that as the son of a noted surgeon he easily assimilated the truths of anatomy. Nor does his success need explanation as much as recognition. His success is his artist’s secret, perhaps never to be revealed, perhaps always to remain among the imponderable things the soul will not disclose to science. Surely he crowded into his brief career all the rapt effort of the youthful student, and all the more composed but no less strenuous endeavor of the assured artist. From first to last, his offerings are good. But the grandiose conception of his final work, the Grant monument, an epic crowded and massed with equestrian and leonine figures passionately portrayed in a kind of exalted realism, called for continued heroic years of labor. Those years were at times harassed by misunderstandings with the changing officials whose presumably difficult duty it was to supervise the work in the public interest. Indeed, Shrady’s equestrian concept was in this instance a thing too grandiose to be accepted, on sight unseen, by pedestrian minds. Though his art triumphed at last, and all his promises were performed, his life ended as the veil was lifted from its crowning work.
V
I often think that the equestrian statue has a larger and more immediate power of communication than other sculptural forms. This is not merely because of its weight and volume and general air of expensiveness. Those things belong in ever so many climes to ever so many huge prosaic monuments seen with the profoundest indifference of the human soul. But the man (or the Maid) on horseback is readily enough taken to heart as a person with tidings, say as someone bringing the good news from Ghent, or some other definite place. He or she at once becomes a figure in a drama, that old word that means something doing; an atmosphere of romance is at once created for the passer-by to share in, if he likes.
Perhaps the equestrian hero is Mr. Lukeman’s Circuit Rider, a preacher of the Word, going very reverently and wisely about his Father’s business, or else, this being a great year for bronze circuit riding, he is Mr. Proctor’s studious Circuit Rider, to be set up on the Capitol grounds at Salem, Oregon. Perhaps he is Mr. Bartlett’s Lafayette, coming from a court of distinction, with a message of high national import, so that all the glory of just that must be diplomatically suggested in a large way in his own person, while his horse must show a proud lip, and seem to be of the kind men give kingdoms for. Perhaps he is Ward’s General Thomas, sitting his thoroughbred, the first thoroughbred revealed in true mettle in our sculpture; the General surveys a momentous battlefield, “holding his own,” as Garfield amazedly saw, “with utter defeat on each side of him, and such wild disorder in his rear,” and so winning the name he bore the rest of his life, the Rock of Chickamauga. Or perhaps again the hero is a heroine,—the Maid of Orleans as Miss Hyatt has portrayed her, uplifted by her visions and riding on to glory.
In any event, it is quite clear that the equestrian statue is a storied thing. And this is very hard on the solemn critic, who, thirsting for pure abstractions, declares in his mistaken way that art must not tell a story, and who for the moment highbrowbeats everybody into saying message or meaning or content instead of story. Meanwhile, so far apart are the ways of criticism and creation, the maker of equestrian statues continues to spin his romances and epics in bronze. The fact that his fine theme appeals to the people not only gladdens him; it puts him under a still more pressing obligation to show what an artist can do with such a theme, how greatly he can enhance and exalt it. He understands well enough that it is easier to begin such enterprises with gusto than to finish them with glory. Most of our masters of the equestrian form were lovers and knowers of the horse before they were his sculptors; and that, though not imperative for genius, is valuable.
VI
Aside from good workmanship, our American equestrians show an individuality of conception, now stately, now familiarly historic, now soberly truthful, and almost always interesting. No one but MacMonnies has just the MacMonnies Gaelic, Gallic gallantry of attack, everywhere sustained by the MacMonnies absolute mastery of sculptural resource; no one but Bartlett can impart quite that cosmopolitan touch of suavity and courtliness which tempers the eagerness of his young Lafayette; no one but Bitter ever worked up such a shout and hurrah over rearing stallions for expositions, and yet was able, a little later, to give New York a work of such studied seriousness as his equestrian of General Sigel; and no one but Edward Potter has ever told in sculpture, during a lifetime of acquaintance with thunder-clothed necks, so much of the honest truth about horses. That clear atmosphere of practical Christianity which envelops those two Circuit Riders does not in the least resemble the religious ecstasy breathing from Miss Hyatt’s Jeanne d’Arc. Different again is the exalted devotion that speaks in every line of Saint-Gaudens’s Shaw, from the slant of the rifles, like falling rain, up to the brooding visage of the young commander and the presence that guides him and his men. Looking at the mere composition here, one thinks often of the Surrender at Breda; but the oblique lines of our Army rifles are surely far more tragic than the upright Breda lances. Each of these last-named sculptors has had a certain theme and a certain emotion to present, and each has marshalled his resources in his own characteristic way.
HORSE TAMERS