Since that time I have talked far and wide. I hope I have given some pleasure and entertainment to the good people who have listened. I hope also that I have created in the minds of my hearers a background that will help the art of taxidermy and its practitioners in the future. More especially I hope that I have contributed something to the study of natural history and that I have stimulated a decent attitude toward wild life.
CHAPTER X A TAXIDERMIST AS A SCULPTOR
After I had got over my first youthful enthusiasm about taxidermy and had seen how it was practiced, I recognized that, as it then was, it was not an art—that it was in fact little better than a trade. I had moments when I felt like abandoning the whole thing. I used to study sculpture, particularly animal sculpture, in relation to taxidermy. I remember that when I was twenty-eight years old I came to New York and spent hours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the itch in my hands and brain to become a sculptor. But one thing restrained me. I had enough common sense to know that while I might become a sculptor and even a fairly successful one I could never contribute to that art what I could contribute to taxidermy. I believed then that I could start taxidermy on the road from a trade to an art. So I turned away from sculpture. Nevertheless, the idea of being a sculptor kept running in my mind. And whenever it did, it depressed me. Finally, I gave up going near the Art Museum altogether.
But the discipline that I inflicted on myself I could not inflict on other people. I had to make little clay groups as studies and models for the animal groups that I was mounting. Many people who saw these clay models would suggest that I have them cast in bronze. If I had not still had the fever of sculpturing in my blood, these remarks would not have stuck in my mind, but as it was they did. So this idea became familiar to me.
However, it was a good many years after it first became a regular inhabitant of my mind that I put it in practice, for along with it had grown up the notion that I should not merely turn models into bronzes but that I would wait until I had a real contribution. Real contributions did not seem abundant and so year after year went by with no bronzes made.
Then in 1912 a situation arose which I thought forced sculpture upon me. I had a dream of a great African Hall of forty groups of animals with all the ingenuity, all the technique, and all the art the country could boast of. By that time I had come to feel that taxidermy could be a great art. I felt that a beautifully modelled animal required at least as much knowledge, taste, skill, and technique as a bronze or stone animal. But I knew that this conception was not common. A taxidermist couldn't talk art. Especially he couldn't talk art convincingly to the kind of men who supported great museum ventures. It was a recognized thing to support art. Taxidermy had no such tradition. The only way out of the dilemma that I could see was to prove that whether or not taxidermy was an art at least a taxidermist could be an artist.
It was my desire to make an appeal to those men who support art financially that stimulated my first work in bronze. I felt that we might expect the aid of these men in such undertakings as the African Hall if I could once get them to see the artistic possibilities of taxidermy. The American Museum of Natural History already had friends who were interested in art, but it had not occurred to them that the Museum's animal groups had any relation to sculpture because these groups had not been presented in the accepted materials of sculpture such as stone and bronze. Through the medium of bronze I hoped to lead them to see in the taxidermist's productions something worthy of their support as patrons of art.
So I set to work to do a bronze that would prove that a taxidermist could be an artist. Years before I had heard the story of an elephant bull wounded by hunters, whose two comrades had ranged themselves one on either side and helped him to escape. I have told the story in detail elsewhere. It always appealed to me as showing a spirit in the elephant that I should like to record. I set to work on The Wounded Comrade. It was a part of the story of the elephant, a theme that always aroused enthusiasm in me. And I felt it was a labour of love for African Hall. It was pleasant work. It went well. The thing seemed to take shape naturally. It was soon finished. Then came its test.