Art is progressive, and the present is always the “heir of all the ages” preceding; but it cannot be affirmed that it invariably makes the best use of its rich inheritance.
There are latter-day sculptors who excel in certain excellences that Story lacked; still, it would not be his loss, but our own, if we fail in a due recognition of that in his art which may appeal to the imagination; for, whatever the enthusiasms of other cults may be, there are qualities of beauty, strength, and profound significance in the art of Story that must insure their permanent recognition. Still, it remains true that Mr. Story owes his fame in an incalculable degree to the friendly pens of Hawthorne and others of his immediate circle,—Lowell, Motley, Charles Eliot Norton, Thackeray, Browning,—friends who, according to the latest standards of art criticism, were not unqualified nor absolute judges of art, but who were in sympathy with ideal expression and recognized this as embodied in the statues of Story.
Browning wrote to the London Times an article on Mr. Story’s work, in which he conjured up most of the superlative phrases of commendation that the limits of the English language allow to praise his work, none of whose marshalled force was too poor to do him reverence. The versatile gifts of Story’s personality drew around him friends whose influence was potent and, indeed, authoritative in their time.
Still, any analysis of these conditions brings the searcher back to the primary truth that without the gifts and grace to attract about him an eminent circle of choice spirits he could not have enjoyed this potent aid and inspiration; and thus, that
“Man is his own star,”
is an assertion that life, as well as poetry, justifies. In the full blaze of this fundamental truth, it is, not unfrequently, the mysterious spiritual tragedy of life that many an one as fine of fibre and with lofty ideals
“Leads a frustrate life and blind,
For the lack of favoring gales
Blowing blithe on other sails.”
Mr. Story was himself of too fine an order not to divine this truth. With what unrivalled power and pathos has he expressed it in his poem—one far too little known—the “Io Victis”:—
“I sing the song of the Conquered, who fell in the Battle of Life,—
The hymn of the wounded, the beaten, who died overwhelmed in the strife;
Not the jubilant song of the victors, for whom the resounding acclaim
Of nations was lifted in chorus, whose brows wore the chaplet of fame,
But the hymn of the low and the humble, the weary, the broken in heart,
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