The figures are not merely set against the background; they grow out of it, forming with it an enclosed parterre of beautiful design, of delicately differing planes of elevation, of subtle tones of gray in between the extremes of light and dark. The effect is not unlike that revealed at early morning when the landscape is flattened in appearance by the mist, and, as the latter is loosened and dispersed by the sun, the patterned forms take on infinitesimal degrees of definition and mysteriousness behind the intervening veils of lighted vapour. Through such a simile one may, perhaps, suggest the essential quality of loveliness in these low reliefs.
Yet they are qualities shared to-day by several sculptors in France, sufficient to reveal an artist of rare sensibility, but not to measure the grander characteristics of Saint-Gaudens’s art. In the conditions of American civilization he has come within a range and depth of inspiration denied to modern Frenchmen, and it is in the degree to which he has responded to those opportunities that his preëminence consists. His position is unique, for no other sculptor of our time has so attuned the traditions of his art to the key of the modern spirit for the expression of grand conceptions.
II
GEORGE GREY BARNARD
WHILE Saint-Gaudens, an American of European descent and training, has caught the outspoken voice of our national life, George Grey Barnard, of American parentage and practically self-taught, expresses its underlying force. To the former came a congenial opportunity in the demand for memorial sculpture. He turned it to great account through his gift of penetrating to the central fact of the subject and of illuminating it with a generous imagination. Instead of facts, however, it is rather with ideas that Barnard’s imagination has been concerned. They preceded his study of sculpture, and he sought the latter as an expression for them, influenced in his self-instruction by the work of Michelangelo.
He is from the West, that huge quarry out of which a new order of ideas is being gradually dug and shaped. The echoes of the clang of tool upon inchoate material, of sharp wits and keen purpose carving anew at the problems of existence, reach us from time to time in this more conventional East. We may smile at the crudeness of some of the results achieved, but cannot disregard the import of the endeavour. The force which animates it is the craving for larger, fuller liberty than mankind has yet attained; a titanic force, often brutal in its material manifestation, but with inherent mightiness of spirit. It is this spirit which has enveloped Barnard’s imagination since his childhood, and forms, as it were, the basis of his art. Its keynote is humanity, the elemental relationship of man to man and of men to the universe; a liberty of life and art, that would shake off the trammels devised for narrower theories and conditions and adjust itself to the perspective of a wider horizon. A boyhood nourished on literature and nature-studies sowed the seed from which these matured ideals were to spring.
He was born at Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, in 1863, the son of a Presbyterian minister; but his early years up to the age of twelve were spent in Chicago, after which the family moved to Iowa. When only nine years old he began to learn something of shells and minerals from a retired sea captain; later he studied birds and animals, taught himself to draw them and by fifteen was an expert taxidermist with as many as 1,200 specimens in his collection. Then for nearly two years he earned his living as an engraver and worker in gold and silver ornaments, learning meanwhile to model, until, having saved a little sum of money, he returned to Chicago, determined to become a sculptor. He was now seventeen and had not yet seen a statue.
There is a hint in this of the instinct that draws would-be artists toward sculpture rather than painting. It is an instinct for form, a passion for its tangible bodiliness, a prepossession so strong that it seems to transpose the senses of touch and sight; giving to the flat and round-topped thumb of the sculptor’s strong, square hand a sense equivalent to sight, keen and sensitive as is the touch of the blind, and giving to his eye a touch-consciousness. He feels with his eye and sees with his thumb. It is by the touch that in childhood we all assure ourselves of the reality of things, and it is the stimulation of the tactile imagination, as Mr. Bernard Berenson calls it, which is one of the chief sources of pleasure in the illusion of a picture. But touch to the sculptor is not an illusion. While a painter only imagines the form of an arm through his sense of sight, the sculptor actually gets his sensation through his hands, as he feels it growing in form and character, substance and subtlety of surface under his manipulation. With him the physical delight is added to the mental. I imagine, indeed, that the degree to which he expresses this twofold delight is largely the measure of his ability as a sculptor.