It is interesting to know that Miss Eberle worked out the composition for the White Slave four years ago; but the actual work of modelling was done in the four weeks’ interval between the time she was invited to send some of her work to last winter’s International Art Exhibition and its opening. Until then, she had felt that the time had perhaps not come when such a group would be received except as an unwelcome effort toward sensationalism. It is the first of several such interpretative subjects which she has in mind, and which, if worked out in an equally sincere spirit, should be big in social significance.
But after all is said, Miss Eberle consistently holds with the many who believe that the first function of art is not didactic. Much of her work besides that shown here is conceived in a spirit of sheer joy in beauty of form and line, and one may go far to find a more exquisitely modelled figure than that of the utterly submissive, despairful child-victim of the white slaver. To use her own words:
“It is the beauty that is in the world today that appeals to me—not what may have existed centuries ago in Greece. Though I love that, too, I will not shut my eyes to the present and continue to echo the past. No matter how ugly the present might be, I would rather live in it. After all, ugliness, as well as beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,—and the present isn’t ugly at all, but full of a wonderful interest, as a few of us are beginning to find out. We are trying to find new bottles for new wine—Greek vases are about worn out.”
THE BATH HOUR
And so we may, as she asks, leave her work to make its own eloquent plea for what Emerson calls “the eternal picture that nature paints in the street, with moving men and children, beggars and fine ladies, ... capped and based by heaven, earth and sea.”
“MY LITTLE SISTER”
HARRIET BURTON LAIDLAW
[Mrs. Laidlaw is chairman of Manhattan Borough of the Woman Suffrage Party. Her special interest in the subject of this review is due, among other things, to her friendship with Rose Livingston, the rescue worker in Chinatown whose unique experience gives her understanding sympathy with unfortunate girls, and who has suffered persecution, unchecked by the police, on account of her revelations in regard to the white slave trade.—Ed.]
In My Little Sister[[10]] Elizabeth Robins has let us hear a great cry out of the depths—an actual human cry.