Sometimes we talk as if the present state of things were a sort of terminus; as if by many roads we had at last reached Rome. Would it not be wiser to look upon the Olympian Washington and the Adams Memorial and the lately-discussed Civic Virtue as so many figures marking stations of a journey by no means finished? We have had competent leaders in the immediate past of our sculpture; is there anything in our American way of life and our American view of art that will prevent our having competent leaders in the future? We are too close to that question to answer it, beyond saying that we are full of hope. And art is one of those matters concerning which despair is criminal. Certainly the chaos resulting from the World War is not as yet sufficiently transformed for the wisest to know from what Ark, high and dry on what Ararat, will issue the new hopes of all mankind. We can only cry out with Galsworthy, not yet are there enough lovers of beauty among us.
Our introductory chapter noted with some emphasis the fact that through Jefferson’s hands the realism of France and the idealism of Italy came to the aid of our new-born plastic art. Houdon happened to be a greater sculptor than Canova; it was our good fortune that we had Houdon at all. And Jefferson drew the curtain for a steadily unfolding act in the drama. Since his day, France and Italy have always been our chief allies in our sculpture. Because of this, and because of the Roman origin of most of the British culture our early settlers brought with them, bred in the bone, it follows that the main current of American sculpture, in thought, in feeling, and even in workmanship, has been fed from the boundless streams of Mediterranean civilization. Now and again, a Celtic influence, a German influence, a Scandinavian influence has made itself felt, for better or for worse.
Each new influence as it comes we shall prize for what it is, after the gloss or shock of novelty is worn off. Each may have an importance we can but guess at. Saint-Gaudens was deeply conscious that he had received his legacy of artistic sensitiveness quite as much from his Irish mother as from his French father, born in Southern France not far from those sculptured mountains on which many a French poet and artist opened infant eyes. Perhaps Celtic glamor was all that made his vision of man somewhat different from that of many of his comrades at the petite école,—just different enough to give his later work a chance at immortality, while the images they shaped had to go back dumb to the clay-pit again. It is a great gift, the Celtic eye, though making small boast of seeing things steadily and seeing them whole; ah, nothing so prosaic as that! Celtic melancholy and Celtic mirth raise up a kind of shimmering rainbow-dust through which an image is seen in glorious parts; and Celtic exasperation loves stir more than steadiness. But the plodders need the seers; and ever since the time of Crawford and his Past and Present of the Republic, our sculpture has been graced and enlivened by many a Mac and O; never more so than to-day. The Wren epitaph fits them even during their lifetime:—Circumspice.
So in our country as in Britain, the Scottish and the Irish and the Welsh strains in the blood key up the English-speaking peoples in their arts of vision and expression. Yet when all such things are said, (and much more might be said, with unmannerly talk of “creeping Saxons” and the like) the fact remains that the future art of the United States is even less easy to foreknow than that of the British Isles; and this because of what we call our “melting-pot” population, with all its benefits and drawbacks, its clamorous and conflicting ideals in art and in morality. The great American alembic is still seething. Newer forces than any that have come from Britain and France and Italy are now stirring here. What of these? Mr. Sloane, in his address on the sculptor Ward, reminded us of the slow evolution of sculpture, of the long journey between the Memnon and the Hermes, of the swifter travel between Greek art and our own, and of our recent return, not only to the classic, but to the oriental. That inquiring look toward the Orient, a corner of the earth always revered in occidental art, was never so general as at present. Some time ago, the studies of our sculptors at the American Academy at Rome led them to the eastern borders of that richly intricate rim of the Mediterranean basin; a rim from which we are still plucking jewels of hitherto unimagined splendor, such as those of Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb. But before pressing still farther eastward, let us glance a moment at the familiar influences of recent formative years.
II
We differentiate too rudely if we say offhand that American sculpture has learned its art from France, its craft from Italy. The truth cannot be told so simply as that. For instance, the Piccirillis, American artists and craftsmen of Italian ancestry, are but a few out of many talented American sculptors of Italian birth. Again, we went to France for lessons in casting bronze, as well as in making our weekly “bonhomme” at the école. Yet for the whole Western world of sculpture during the past forty years, the strongest general influence has been that of the French school, and the strongest single influence that of a Frenchman aloof from the school, Auguste Rodin. No thinking sensitive person who uses clay to shape his visions and earn his living has failed to feel Rodin’s influence; it is already so deeply imbedded in consciousness that many of those who most imitate this master are least aware of so doing. It would be a mistake to suppose, because the shouting is over, that this powerful influence has wholly waned.
We have spoken of the uses of collaboration. But there are souls that would perish rather than collaborate. Some of these belong in the ranks of genius, others are distinctly due elsewhere. Of the former class was Rodin, never willing or able to subject himself to any architectural tradition. Even while writing of Rodin’s consistent refusal of collaboration, I hear the ironic voice of M. Anatole France, a veteran in one art speaking of a veteran in another: “Et surtout, avouons-le, il collabore trop avec la catastrophe.” And he adds, with that sparkle of malice veterans allow themselves but not others to use when speaking of veterans, “Il abuse du droit de casser ce qui, dans une œuvre, est mal venu.” According to M. France, Rodin collaborates, and even too much; not with architecture, as a more conventional soul might, but with architecture’s logical opposite, catastrophe. It is more fruitful to dwell on the gifts of genius than on its limitations; yet the limitations also must be noted, whenever blind worship confuses defects with qualities. It was a limitation (and so the Société des Gens de Lettres found it) that Rodin could not bring himself to any architectural conception of his Balzac:—Balzac, more architecturally minded than even the English novelist Hardy; Balzac, who will not let you once look at Père Goriot until you have a clear understanding of the plan and elevation of the sordid pension where the poor man lives; Balzac, who jealously hides Eugénie Grandet from you until you have mastered every arch and cornice of the gloomy mansion that shelters her; Balzac, who insists that you must know period and style and galleries and window-glass of la maison Claes before you can peer at Madame Claes. Balzac built his novels that way because to his mind man’s architecture is part of his life, his fate, his rôle in the Comédie Humaine. So what Rodin did lacked basic fitness. In that portrait statue, the Rodin of it was more precious to him than the Balzac of it; he could make no compromise.
Now an advancing civilization will make its honorable compromises; and it seems to me that Saint-Gaudens’s way of letting the significant winds and waves play about the architectural pedestal or deck that Farragut bestrides is more civilized than Rodin’s far simpler way of letting the magnificent head of his Balzac emerge from monstrous shapelessness to splendor. The Balzac looks splendidly begun, the Farragut splendidly brought to completion. There is indeed a charm in things greatly begun. Such things suggest the untamed glory of the human spirit, and give skyey space for the beholder’s imagination to dip its wings in. The poorest of us in looking at them can at least conjecture, if not create. And a very present refuge for the sculptor is that lump of marble which says nothing but suggests much in Rodin’s portraits of women, and in many of his ideal groups with certain surfaces of soft flesh exquisitely carved in their emergence from the hard stone. Those melodious modulations of light and shade in flesh are Rodin’s secret; here his genius is forever happy. That woman’s marble back, for instance; one thinks that if one should touch it, the skin would yield and pale and redden again. Rodin himself, in his talk of his own work and of the classic masterpieces he loved, constantly uses the word “esprit” rather than “chair,” and from his point of view there is no inconsistency in that. Gratefully we acknowledge that this master has showed the wonders of both flesh and spirit. It was well for American sculpture to applaud both triumphs. What next?
Next, there were certain mannerisms better left unlearned by our students; for example, that use of large extremities, a choice announcing a healthy abhorrence of prettiness. We have seen in our land many a Bertha Broadfoot and many a Helen of the Large Hand created by those who had not Rodin’s excuse for this avoidance of conventional proportion; they were not revealing the scarce-finished new beings of Paradise, or the muscular striding bulk of a John the Baptist in the wilderness. There is yet another mannerism filched by admiring disciples; perhaps it is something less superficial than a mannerism. We need not take M. France too seriously when he says of M. Rodin, “Il me sémble ignorer la science des ensembles.” It is a saying fitter to live in the flow of talk than to be embalmed in print; yet it draws blood, too, with its prickly edge of truth. Rodin’s ensembles are his own, not those of sane tradition; his imitators’ ensembles are often pitifully less good than those of either Rodin or the school. That is serious! At the present moment, many American War monuments are in the making; too many, perhaps, are casting away collaboration and tradition. Their creators seem unaware that they are under an influence; they think they are showing originality, preaching the gospel of simplicity, and in a really messianic way, calling architecture to repentance.
But, nowhere is the architectural conception of work more necessary than in a new country. Without that conception, these United States would be besprinkled with productions richer in the one virtue of individuality than in the many virtues of order, unity, harmony, an underlying sense of natural evolution and continuity. Our civilization is not yet jaded, and does not yet need prickings toward variety. For American sculpture, the lesson of Rodin’s genius, as distinct from the lesson of the school, is that of the titanic conception and the exquisite morceau, but not that of harmonious collaboration. Meanwhile, it is cheering to see that the singular doctrine of deformation distilled in France by vigorous modern followers of Rodin is at present neglected here; when we turn modernist, as sometimes happens, we choose the path of abstractions, seeking perhaps Epstein’s “form that is not the form of anything,” rather than form amplifying itself into ugliness, in defiance of classic balance and measure. In fact, a recent piece of the new poetry, written about a recent piece of the new sculpture tells us that