I
Alive and kicking; better than we now realize, the old phrase fits our young American art of the early nineteenth century. In Boston, Mr. Bulfinch is packing his triangles and T-squares for a journey to Washington, where he is to remain twelve years as Latrobe’s successor as architect of the Capitol. In New York, morning-star young art-students are passionately performing their historic ritual of fighting the janitor and founding new movements; even Colonel Trumbull is defied; hence, in 1825, our National Academy of Design. In Philadelphia, harmony presides over the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. But in Washington, what commotion! Restorations are to be made after the fires of the British; there are new excavations, new aspirations. There’s sculptor’s work here for many a year. Bronze doors must be created, in the supposed manner of Ghiberti; pediments must be populated; and what is a dome without its colossal figure of Freedom? Greenough and Crawford and Randolph Rogers are the sculptors of the hour. And always Hiram Powers, somewhat apart from the Washington bustle.
Modern imagination fails to see those early craftsmen as they really were. Because they are dead to us now, we fall into the error of thinking that they always were dead, anyway; the stilly sort of sculpture they often made sustains us in that illusion. But when we look into their lives, and hear their sayings, we learn, almost with a shock, that these men felt deeply, even while they expressed themselves feebly in their art.
Living amidst heaped riches of opportunity, the art-student of to-day can scarcely imagine the bleak poverty of artistic resource that Greenough and Crawford and Powers left behind them when they sailed away to Rome or to Florence. Nowadays, art-schools flourish here: casts of good sculpture abound; photographs of masterpieces may be had at a small price. Museums freely show examples of the arts of all nations, and intelligently arrange these displays to serve the immediate needs of students; in short, they do a great work so well that they have already become a target for so-called criticism from self-styled intellectuals exposing their wits in the columns of would-be radical journals. Things were very different in Greenough’s time. There were indeed a few collections of casts, probably with soiled noses; there were portfolios of steel engravings, that sometimes bore false witness against beauty.
Knowing the leanness of those early years, we can but wonder at the large vision of our fathers in considering our capital city; and we can but thank our lucky Stars and Stripes for the bond of sympathy between our young Republic and France, a sympathy partly responsible for the happy choice of General Washington’s aid, Major Pierre L’Enfant, as our first city planner. The spirit of L’Enfant’s work has survived the shocks of time and senates; that plan of the year 1792 (since extended in accordance with the principles of design it embodied) is still regarded as “at once the finest and most comprehensive plan ever devised for a capital city.” Those lean years were not by any means the day of small things; it is to this hour a blessing for sculpture and for architecture that Washington and Jefferson and L’Enfant laid large foundations for the seat of Government. A century ago, the continued building and re-building of the Capitol expressed a profound national feeling; the souls of our sculptors, as far as we had sculptors, were thrilled with desire to add plastic beauty to its gates and gables. At least one of those great dreams was destined to end as food for journalistic jibes. Greenough’s colossal marble Washington as the Olympian Zeus, a grandiose conception pored over for seven years in Italy, proved to be too large and heavy for the indoor placing intended for it, and it was doomed to be set up outside the Capitol for the public to sharpen its wits upon. Unfavorably shown, it is unjustly viewed. One recalls with pleasure Saint-Gaudens’s gentle judgments of our pioneer sculptors and their handiwork. “Those men were greater than we know,” he would say. He refused to join in any of our modern merriment at the expense of the Olympian Zeus. Esprit de corps compelled him to recognize in Greenough some large trace of the artist as well as the craftsman.
II
Consider for a moment the attractive young Irish-American sculptor Crawford standing rapt before his splendidly blank Senate pediment, with his theme of the Past and Present of the Republic in his eye. Those were our blithe beginning days when a sculptor might confront his pediment with a heart unburdened by the remembrance of other men’s failures in pediments, and with a mind undisciplined by any previous knowledge of the needs of pediments. He did not dread those bitter acuities of space at right and left, those angles which to modern discrimination often seem so grossly overstuffed when filled, so tragically vacant when left “to let.” He had never heard of the “orchestration of shadows,” or of “musical repetitions,” or of “blonde modeling,” or of “keeping the masses white,” or of “the creative spiral,” or of “mastery through the golden diagonal.” He had never been adjured, like the young student Saint-Gaudens, to “beware the boule de suif”; on the other hand, he had never been advised, with students coming after Saint-Gaudens, to seek richness of modeling by means of “fatty ends.” Sculptural color he would probably have regarded as having something to do with paint. He of course had his own patter, blown abroad by the writers of a too prosaic poetry and a too poetic prose. The real writers, too, used to lend a hand in presenting art to the public. When the genius of Edward Everett sprang to the rescue of Greenough’s Washington, and when Hawthorne sent out winged words about little Miss Hosmer’s Zenobia, sculpture was receiving from scholarship a needed sort of first aid.
To return to the Capitol pediment, Crawford’s intention and attitude were quite uncomplicated. He had but to snatch the largest theme in sight, and to do his best with shaping its figures one by one inside his triangle of grandeur. The marvel is that he came so near to success. The thing has a kind of distinction from the man’s singleness of aim. Since then, scores of our sculptors from coast to coast have solved the pediment problem with varying success. Many of them bring a highly personal and interesting solution. Ward, Bartlett, French, O’Connor, Bitter, Weinman, the Piccirillis,—these names but begin the list. The world calls us a wasteful nation, a nation that unbuilds as it builds. In the face of this, it is pleasant to know that only a few months ago, Mr. Bartlett’s handsome Peace Protecting Genius has been set up in the House pediment, to match Crawford’s Past and Present of the Republic at the Senate wing. Nearly a century has elapsed since the Capitol first busied itself with pedimental decorations. Our sculpture has had time to learn in these years.
III
Greenough came first in our line of scholarly sculptors, that class to which W. W. Story later lent great lustre. A Latin inscription of five lines, beginning “Simulacrum istud” and ending “Horatius Greenough faciebat” marks the huge Washington statue. Well, if I rightly understand this sculptor, I like his “faciebat.” It seems more conscientious and less cocksure than the “fecit” with which our sculptors sometimes grace their signatures, and it is certainly not so gruff as the laconic “sc.” Between its eight letters one reads the coming and going of those seven diligent Italian years; and we shall deceive ourselves if we count those years wholly lost for our American art. If only Greenough could have enjoyed some of the surplusage of admiration given to his contemporary Powers for his Greek Slave with her well-smoothed body, her manacled Medicean hand, and the accurately fringed mantle at her feet! Though expressly advertised as a nude figure, she is dressed from top to toe in a most unfleshly hard-soft technique which our time calls incompetent, but which 1847 styled “the spiritualization of the marble.” The personality of the artist counted very largely in those days; while Greenough was scholarly and Crawford attractive, and while Randolph Rogers with his bronze doors and his Nydia was what would now be called a good “go-getter,” Hiram Powers was easily the main spellbinder of the early group.