Washington himself, when the Houdon portrait statue is projected, plays an admirably discreet part in the art criticism of the moment. He writes to Jefferson, on August 1, 1786:
“In answer to your obliging enquiries respecting the dress, attitude, etc., which I would wish to have given to the statue in question, I have only to observe that, not having sufficient knowledge in the art of sculpture to oppose my judgment to the taste of Connoisseurs, I do not desire to dictate in the matter.”
How unlike the home life of William Hohenzollern! And how often the thoughtful sculptor of to-day has wished that Washington’s simple dignity in admitting an insufficiency of “knowledge in the art of sculpture” might be pondered and taken to heart by those of us who are not qualified “to dictate in the matter”! In this our free country of the self-elected critic, the temple of art is at all hours invaded by those who cheerily announce that “they do not know much,” but who nevertheless follow the example of William II rather than of our first President.
All the Jefferson correspondence respecting these two statues of Washington is of vital interest to the student of our art history. Our young Republic, in its early strivings toward art, was fortunate in having an adviser as well-advised as the master of Monticello. It was Thomas Jefferson who guided inquiring state legislatures, now toward Houdon, the powerful French realist, and again toward Canova, the distinguished Italian idealist. Through Jefferson’s hands, our American sculpture first received those rich streams of influence, realism and idealism, both so necessary in any living national art. For realism and idealism, however often misnamed or over-praised or discredited, each after the other, will continue to shape the artist’s interpretation of his vision of life. Today, when in our literature books as fundamentally unlike as Maria Chapdelaine and Babbitt run their race side by side as popular favorites, we cannot doubt the hold of either classicism or naturalism on our lives and times. Gilbert Murray, in his notes on the Hippolytus, writes that its matchless closing scene “proves the ultimate falseness of the distinction between classical and romantic. The highest poetry has the beauty of both.”
III
Returning to the Quaker lady who speaks our prologue, and conning once more the tale of her works in all their brisk naïveté, the sympathetic student will easily evoke the difficult conditions under which sculpture first reared its head in our country. Sculpture, though an art manifestly answering one of the earliest religious needs of primitive man, (and indeed the very first of all the arts to fall under the ban of the censor) is an art much hindered and abridged during large pioneer movements. Thus the Mayflower, that greatly accommodating vessel, may have brought over Elder Brewster’s chest or some fair Priscilla’s spinning-wheel, but we may be sure that never a statue came out of her hold. Neither architecture nor painting suffered quite as much as sculpture in that historic sea-change of the early seventeenth century. As the turtle carries his house on his back, so the architect, in a sense, may carry his home in his pocket. The drawings and inherited traditions of cabinet-makers, carpenters, and architects supplied our colonists with excellent models for furniture, for mansions, for churches, for state-houses. Such models were not slavishly followed. They were adapted, often with great originality and skill, sometimes with creative genius.
The colonists’ sense of form gratified itself in these directions, since the time was not ripe for sculpture. Diligent in fostering both foreign importations and local industry, the more prosperous of our forefathers had good houses, good furniture, good silver, good clothes, and even good paintings long before they had any good sculpture. Statues, unlike chocolate-pots and meeting-houses, cannot, even when all materials are given, be magically called into existence from a sheaf of plans and specifications placed in the hands of competent artisans. A considerable body of sculpture in permanent form implies a background of orderly civilization, well developed on its industrial side. The marble quarry and the bronze foundry do not spring up over-night in mushroom growth. They are the foster-children of slow time. We are called an inventive, craftsmanlike people, but it was not until the year 1847 that the first casting of a bronze statue was accomplished in our country. The statue was of the Boston astronomer, Dr. Bowditch, and by the English sculptor, Ball Hughes. The original bronze cast was not a wholly successful piece of work; it was long ago replaced by a bronze from a French foundry. But those familiar with the difficulties of the situation will recall Dr. Johnson’s observation about the dog walking on his hind legs. “It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
IV
However, we need not harp too long and too mournfully on the physical impediments in our sculptural start. Enormous as these were, they were less mighty than the spiritual obstacles set up by time and place. First of all, it is to be remembered that the European world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was moving on in a mild, manifest, not necessarily permanent decline in creative power as shown through the graphic arts. The waves of that decline reached even our own stern coast. It is safe to say that had the American colonists’ hour coincided with an hour of large renascence in art throughout Europe, our forefathers, whether Cavalier or Roundhead, would earlier have found room for art as a need and a natural expression of the freer life they sought. As for the distinctively Puritan view, that view too often (though perhaps not as often as we now think) denied and persecuted beauty in the fierce Puritan concentration upon holiness. It is true that art, in its blither and more genial guise, slips away from the society of the sour-visaged. But it is also true that a great tragic expression in art sometimes bursts uncontrollably from peoples or persons with minds exacerbated by long fortitudes. We learn this from the Belgian sculptor Meunier brooding over his brothers of the Black Country, from the Serbian sculptor Mestrovic immortalizing in stone his country’s stern legends, from the poet Dante treading his Inferno. But the Florentine and the Serbian and the Belgian produced their art under their native skies. They were not torn up by the roots to live in a strange land.
Yes, the main impediment in early American art was spiritual rather than material. When we see to-day in some lonely, half-forgotten New England village a spacious, nobly-designed, admirably-built meeting-house, capping the very crest of a high rock-ribbed hill of exceeding difficulty, (the church at Acworth will serve as an example) we uncover our heads before the efforts of our fathers to erect a house of prayer. The spirit moved them. Nothing less would have sufficed in what they did and suffered. The obstacles in their path were many and great, but being material, were surmounted. In our early strivings toward sculpture, the obstacles were both spiritual and material, and generally speaking, the obstacles won the day. We had no noteworthy early native sculpture, largely because we lacked the passion to create it. That passion was not dead, but it lay dormant during the long wintry season that preceded the spring of our national consciousness.