THE value of the imaginative quality in a work of sculpture must depend chiefly upon the degree to which it is governed and prompted by, impregnated with, the sculptural feeling. This is, of course, true of any other work of art: that it should be the offspring of a wedding of the thought with the medium; a union in which the medium is not compelled into alliance with the thought, or dallied with in a more or less honourable concubinage, but fitly mated in the liberty of mutual dependence. Yet it is so habitual with us to clothe our thoughts in words, actually to think in words, that the artist finds it difficult to shake himself free of the verbal subjection and to think in the language of his particular medium. Some evade the difficulty by not burdening themselves with thought; others succumb to it and force their medium and technique to a literal rendering of their ideas, whether shallow ones or deeper; while a few succeed in deriving motive from the medium, or in so moulding their thought to it, that both become indissolubly blended and mutually enforcing.
Thus in those signal examples of Michelangelo upon the Medici tombs, we may call them “Night” and “Day,” “Dawn” and “Twilight,” for convenience of reference, but it is because the conceptions embodied in them cannot be captured into the precision of words that they have so profound a significance. Consciousness grows upon us first of huge, bony structures and elastic muscles; of torso and limbs contorted; more developed than the normal; in attitudes impossible to it, or well nigh so. We derive from this consciousness an impression of struggle; but no emblem or visible cause for it is introduced; only it is borne in upon us by the forms themselves. With this clue to understanding we note the more than human strength, the superb sensuousness, the eternal fixity of these supple figures and, again, their distortion, and the struggle which they body forth is realised as one of spirit, a conflict of soul. But to have discovered this is not to have captured the conception. It still eludes all exact comprehension; vague, limitless, the lapping up upon our shore of sense of an ocean that stretches to immensity.
This is to cite the example of a genius, beside whom the wits of most other men seem petty; yet surely it contains the principle upon which all truly imaginative work must be based. It is thus that Rodin bases his; bodying forth in structure, modelling and expression of movement his imaginings, just so far as they are to be made palpable to sight, but with a residuum always of what the mind alone can conceive or approximate to.
In every work of art there should be present the imagination of the artist, arousing our own imagination, directing it and then leaving it to its own unhampered speculation. This quality is not to be confined to the so-called “ideal” subject, it must appear in every bust or statue to make it vital. For while it is given to but few men to have creative imagination, we have a right to expect in the artist that degree of imagination which can penetrate beyond the outer integument of his subject, and find inside the tailor-made or millinery outworks the man or woman, the revelation in the flesh, however infinitesimally fractional, whether divine or devilish, of infinity.
How many American sculptors have infused their work in portraiture with this vital quality has been reviewed elsewhere. But the number is not complete without mention, at least, of W. R. O’Donovan, Samuel Murray, Charles Calverly, Henry H. Kitson and his wife, Alice Ruggles Kitson, R. E. Brooks, A. A. Weinman and Birtley Canfield. The last named’s treatment of the child in portraiture is full of tender imagination.
And elsewhere I have treated of some of our sculptors whose decorative works have exhibited imagination; the sweet and gaysome kind of it that plays like sunlight upon water; or, if occasion demands it, the kind of deeper, serious import. But there is a kind of decorative sculpture for which we can have little patience: the nude or draped inanities that spread themselves over space, exploitations of brainless facility; or, again, the figure which would be meaningless except for the added symbols, and which we only recognise as a model, posturing with something borrowed or stolen from the Old World property-room.
Yet one of the shibboleths glibly passed around the studio is “ideal sculpture,” and it is largely applied to just such sculpture as this; to works which are barren of ideas, or in which the subject of the statue is declared only through some time-worn symbol. Not that the introduction of a symbol is of itself objectionable, though it is a fact that the works of finest imagination, as Saint-Gaudens’s “Grief,” to quote a modern example, are free of such aids to suggestion. But I am thinking of that vast majority of statues
BUST OF A CHILD