I shall never forget the impression made on me by a memorial exhibition, held in 1897, of a considerable number of his busts and medallions and of the “Psyche.” It may sound a little incongruous, but they suggested the impression that a highly bred, finely trained race-horse makes upon the imagination; an intensity of force and suppleness, nothing superfluous, everything expressive of its function, the whole an embodiment of keen vitality, of power and grace. There was a similarly high-bred feeling in these heads, the sign-manual of an unusually keen perception of facts and of a most refined sensibility in the rendering of them. I doubt if anywhere in modern art, except in that of Rodin, will you find busts of such vital power. They exhibit the same regard for the structural significance of the head; something more than the suggestion of form and bulk—a rich, strong, jubilant recognition of these facts as the ones of peculiar interest to the sculptor, offering him the opportunity of indulging his especial delight. They exhibit also, as do Rodin’s, the same delicately precise handling of details: like the obligato which a musician composes upon his basic theme, yet with a different range of motive. Warner’s work does not reveal the psychological analysis of Rodin’s; the penetrating, almost troublous intensity of his bust of Dalou, for example. He is scarcely less keen or subtle in his analysis than the French master, but studies the ripple of flesh above the muscles, the tremor or fold of an eyelid, the curves of nose or mouth, the disposition of the hair, with a pure delight in their expressional force or grace. He views the head as a type rather than as an individuality, and seeks to extract from it the essence of its character. It is in this respect, among others, that he shows himself to be imbued with the kind of spirit that animated the Greeks. As compared with Rodin, whose vision grasps the complexities of modern emotion and the underlying sadness of an age that has come late in time and whose energy is enclosed in a frail web of nerves, Warner is a child-man, with a man’s reserve and poise, and a child’s unsophisticated eagerness of eye and its pure delight in beauty and the joy of living.
And this strain of the Greek temperament in sculpture is a very different thing from the motive of the so-called “classic” school. The latter drew its primary inspiration from Roman sculpture, in a search for something supposedly heroic, that would fit the genius of the new republicanism which had arisen out of the chaos of the Revolution. It was at first grandiloquent, but, growing senile, fell to babbling of the abstract beauty of line and form, always without direct reference to nature and gradually with the increased formalism that grew from the perpetuation of certain arbitrary rules and precedents. Such “classic” statues, when they are the work of a master, have their beauty, but it is inert, without the thrill of life; when the work of a mere practitioner, they are unspeakably jejune and paltry. Both kinds are alike in their divorce from nature-study, from the inspiration which it gives to an intimate appreciation of line and form. They will not show the fluidity of line, the delicate surprises of curve, the infinite subtleties of modelling that invite caress, the texture and quality of flesh, nor the mingling of firm and supple in the form, the pliant movement adjusted to the action of the figure—in a word, the stir of life within the material. Warner gives us this sensation and with so choice an instinct for the exact point at which the naturalism should melt into plastic immobility, with a love so keen and unalloyed for the manifestations of nature and in a spirit so seriously jocund, that we recognise, as I have said, his affinity with the old Greek ideal.
We may trace it also in his feeling for the monumental rather than for the picturesque; for those qualities in sculpture which belong to it preëminently, as opposed to those which it derives by analogy from painting. It appears in the alto-relievo, “Cupid and Psyche,” most conspicuously, because the subject might have been treated differently. The modern sculptor, working from the background to the front plane by repeated superlayers of clay, can introduce a variety of subtly differentiated planes, and may become absorbed in this composition of light and shade, producing an effect which we can describe as full of colour and which is exceedingly beautiful. The artist of old time, however, graving the marble, wood or metal, started with the form of the figures under his hand, absorbed himself in them and regarded the open spaces of his composition, when he reached them, simply as a background. Instead of a quasi-pictorial subtlety of light and shade he strove for a purely sculptural tangibility of modelled form. It is this insistence upon form which is so conspicuous in the “Psyche”; in the contrast between the child’s podgy softness and the maiden’s long, lithe, firm figure.
This principle, applied to decoration, is most successfully represented in the artist’s last completed work, the bronze doors of the Library of Congress. In the lunette-shaped spaces above the doors the figures are in very high relief, and the background is modelled with forms of mountains and clouds, producing an effect of great richness, while upon each valve of the door is a single figure in low relief; the flesh parts having an emphasis of roundness, the draperies being flattened, yet amply indicating the dignity of the form beneath. The left-hand figure with the lyre (how I wish that it were possible to reproduce it here!) is supremely beautiful in its poise between life and art, in its exquisite rhythm of lines and in the alternate ebb and flow of the planes of surface.
But it was in his rendering of the nude that Warner exhibited the loveliest qualities of his art. He viewed it, as one views a flower, with single vision for its exquisite abstract beauty. Flower-like and fragrant, the “Psyche,” the “Dancing Nymph” and “Diana,” have the quivering sensibility of contour that one finds in the free growth of nature; united, however, to a firmness of texture and strength of structure and to a conscious play of movement, responding to the play of spirit, which in their perfect alliance are only to be found in the human form. The spirit which animates these figures is, of course, the sculptor’s, and it reveals itself most choicely in the serenity of the “Diana,” in the suspense between absolute repose and projected movement. For the figure seems about to rise; the carriage of the head and body alike suggest the activity inherent in the languor. One may believe that in the precision of beauty displayed in this statue, in the complete adjustment, that is to say, of every one of its qualities of beauty to the supreme idea of discovering that imaginary line upon which life merges into art, the mobile into the immobile, Warner reached most nearly his ideal. For in his busts and heroic statues, as in the fountains and decorative subjects, he was more or less constrained to a point of view. But in his nudes, and particularly in this one, the product of his maturity, he could work in the full liberty of his imagination. And the latter is found to be the ideal expression of those qualities of character which I have already attributed to him: intellectual stability, moral balance and spiritual serenity.
The singularly choice discretion which governed Warner’s appreciation of form is shown equally in his Portland fountain: a circular bowl with broad, flat brim, supported upon a rectangular pedestal and balanced by two caryatides. The design is almost severely simple, yet tempered with a grace of fitness in every detail, so chaste and noble as to produce an impression of perfect repose. It has, indeed, just that suggestion of being firmly rooted, of strong growth upward and of natural spread at the top, which exactly befits its architectural character, while in the contour and details it is as delicate as a lily.
We have traced this feeling for the monumental side of sculpture in Warner’s reliefs, where it is revealed in the thoroughly plastic treatment of form, so that it quivers on the edge between immobility and life; in his fountain, that presents a conspicuous immobility quickened with animation, and in his busts, wherein the form
DIANA