Adeline Adams

“ In Italy, the tooth of time is not a bad sort of modeling-tool; it has carved a veil of illusion for triviality, and has given a new grace to things already beautiful. But in our northern latitudes, the tooth of time does not model; it ravages and corrodes, often with incredible swiftness, and due winter precautions must enshroud our garden sculpture. The question of material is ever with us. Bronze endures, but turns dark; marble is fair, but frail. In the dooryard of many an American artist, home-grown miracles have been wrought from cement. ”

“ A time came when Maurice Price, suddenly finding himself in a new environment, remembered that in ten years he had not once painted a landscape from nature. As he stood in the wide doorway of his friend’s country studio, and gazed with delight at the springtime beauty of the New Hampshire hills flung down at his feet, the fact that during a whole decade his painting had been done within doors and under glass struck him as an absurdity, even a reproach. Ah, well, those who go about calling ten years a whole decade must expect reproach, he reasoned. They bring it on themselves. ”

“ There’s sculptor’s work here for many a year. Bronze doors must be created, in the supposed manner of Ghiberti; pediments must be populated; and what is a dome without its colossal figure of Freedom? Greenough and Crawford and Randolph Rogers are the sculptors of the hour. And always Hiram Powers, somewhat apart from the Washington bustle.
Modern imagination fails to see those early craftsmen as they really were. Because they are dead to us now, we fall into the error of thinking that they always were dead, anyway; the stilly sort of sculpture they often made sustains us in that illusion. ”

“ Euripides was creator rather than critic. It may be that the moral earnestness we need must come to us in a thousand unseen ways through the reconciling hands of creation, rather than in one way through the tongue or pen of the critic.
I shall not say that this quality of moral earnestness is found everywhere in American sculpture. But I know that it is found in many places, and in nearly all the high places. Moral earnestness is the very foundation of the only sort of artistic conscience that amounts to much as a contribution toward the higher life in art. ”

“ Maurice could see that Saltonstall was trembling with emotion. In a flash, he remembered Amouretta. “Oh,” he cried out, in a shocked voice, “a landscape, a thousand times a landscape! Did you think I could have meant the other, the one on the back? Amouretta?”
Mr. Saltonstall looked relieved, triumphant, ashamed. “Yes, I did, at first! And why not, when it was just that ribald portrait, and nothing else, that Wrayne showed me there, in an exquisite frame, in his confounded Court of New Departures? I tell you, Maurice Price, I was wild when I saw it. ”

“ SPEAKING OF ANGELS I
The youth’s name was Apollos Rivers. We admired him, used him, and for a time, despised him, too. Why we admired and used, I can easily explain. Apollos was every inch his name—blond, athletic, superb; no model in New York posed as faithfully. Why we despised—well, the logic of that is more complicated. Our contempt was doubtless merely a habit, formed on sight unseen and strengthened by hearsay. Apollos, indeed! ”

“ It is enough to point out that a healthy, if high-strung, revolt against all this easy offhand grab-bag naturalistic symbolism will not only bring in its train the sculpture of serious protest; it will also pick up on its fringes plenty of those tongue-in-cheek specimens of so-called sculpture familiar in our century. From Rodin’s candle-lit and blanketed Balzac of the previous generation down to the latest Greenwich Village absurdity, in which human portraiture once more achieves its apotheosis on the surface of an egg, such revolt is visible. ”

“ There was nothing false about Amouretta. From her golden topknot to her pink toes, she was as good a girl, all in all, as ever hopped high-heeled from a painter’s studio to a picture-studio (two quite different arenas) , in the effort to make both ends meet, and then cross over. “It’s the cross-over that counts,” Amouretta used to say; “there’s where the joy in life appears.” The name Amouretta was a business concession to the picture industry and to the small vaudeville shows in which she worked when posing was slack. ”

“ If his portrait is in profile, as is not unlikely, he discovers that this profile is in itself a very telling thing, and that he can make it interesting or lively by softening a contour here, by hardening it there, by letting it alone somewhere else, by sinking or by raising parts of his background; before long he has discovered, as Egyptians and Italians and Frenchmen and Americans before him have discovered, a thousand devices of art, not algebra, that give his relief a look of life and truth. ”

“ Amouretta’s brilliant blush came and went so often during her story, and finally stayed so long, that it played the very deuce with Maurice’s entire morning; you know how difficult it is to paint emerald satin when the wearer is blushing; the green and the red come to blows. And Maurice, who had two daughters of his own, howbeit small, was really worried, until one afternoon at the Century, Mr. William Saltonstall, long of limb, lineage, and purse,—a man of undoubted probity, and a collector, too!—had touched him on the shoulder, and poured out the whole story of his love for Amouretta. ”

“ One stage rejects all foreign culture; the other embraces anything foreign, provided that it is abundantly subversive of domestic ideals and labors and attainments. Both stages are hostile to truth and to progress, and to the only freedom there is, freedom of the spirit. The first type wilfully stunts growth; the second invites destruction of growth already accomplished by costly effort. Surely American sculpture, which has borrowed eagerly abroad and developed soundly at home, should not fall into either of these degenerate modes of thinking. ”

“ Gerald slouched a little, after the custom of his generation; this made him seem more blasé than he really was. Steven Grant was straight as a pine tree; this gave him a challenging look that people liked. The ties of blood and their pursuits bound the two together in a harmony that would scarcely have borne out the theories of Shaw, Samuel Butler, and other dispraisers of the Family.
That night, they were like a pair of girls in their wish to live the dinner over again, with the added joy of uncensored comment. “We’ll get our golden halters off,” said Uncle Steve, “and browse at our ease.” ”

“ Through Jefferson’s hands, our American sculpture first received those rich streams of influence, realism and idealism, both so necessary in any living national art. For realism and idealism, however often misnamed or over-praised or discredited, each after the other, will continue to shape the artist’s interpretation of his vision of life. Today, when in our literature books as fundamentally unlike as Maria Chapdelaine and Babbitt run their race side by side as popular favorites, we cannot doubt the hold of either classicism or naturalism on our lives and times. ”

“ However, what is poetry for, unless to quicken and rechristen all worlds into strangeness and beauty? Let Royal keep his Amaryllis a while longer, I beg!
Is there any good and comfortable thing that the heart of youth will not flee from, in its longing for the untrodden way? The boy Royal was a fugitive from the eggs-and-bacon type of breakfast. He was in search of some ambrosial, sit-by-the-brookside food more precious and sustaining to his spirit, so he dreamed, than any of the comestibles, fine or gross, involving his parents in worrisome monthly bills at the grocer’s. ”

“ Saint-Gaudens seats his Peter Cooper king-like within a Renaissance portico, and places a curule chair behind his standing Lincoln. Though Lincoln is a greatly revered subject in American sculpture,—a subject of exceedingly rugged force,—few sculptors are satisfied to present Lincoln, plain in his usual garb; they give the hero a background, or a cloak, or an exedra, or a top hat on a bench, so keenly do they feel the lack of amplifying circumstances. Yet certainly Lincoln’s bronze clothing offers more of interest than that of today’s captains of destiny, soldiers excepted. ”

“ I really needed both Apollos and Phineas, using each lad part of the day. Rough on me, rather; and I suppose fellows in shops and offices would open their eyes if they [145] saw a mere artist—next door to a do-nothing, you know—beginning work every morning at five and quitting at summer sundown; yes, and perhaps stealing back for more study by twilight. For it’s twilight that wipes out all the pettiness that the day reveals; it’s twilight that knows all and tells only the good, in sculpture. ”

“ To use the human frame as a heroic modeling-tool, or templet, struck me at that time as a delightfully unique idea in sculpture;171 today, with so many artists keen for the queer, it would doubtless seem a mere commonplace; one might even be glad that the human templet was not used upside down, in the pursuit of novelty. But to speak justly, our garden sculpture has not succumbed to the idea that queerness is higher than beauty, and a shock to the spectator a richer artistic achievement than his delight. Garden art in our country is no longer in its infancy, and not yet in its decadence. ”

“ Raymond’s flight of genius was over, and the result appalled him.
Indeed, it was rather remarkable, that transformation; and very curious is the power of a bit of clay, in willing fingers! That beautifully modelled countenance no longer suggested Madam Randolph of Highcourt; it had become the face of some Light-Horse Harry, some devil-may-care D’Arcy of the Guards. If that portrait had been scarce feminine enough before, what was it now, with those singular additions bristling from lips and chin? A warrior, no less. ”

“ The arch, as we shall doubtless see within the next generation, has its own place in our time; collaboration between sculptor and architect has never been better understood than at present. To reject an arch because it obstructs traffic, because it is out of scale, because it does not fit its surroundings, because it is needlessly magnificent, because it does not express the emotion it pretends to express,—all this is very wise, and important when true. ”

“ No man not a relative should be able to say he had done that for her; and I’m thinking it would be a long day before either her father or her brother, in their good-natured shiftlessness, could provide the outfit she had in mind! But there was no June wedding at Saint Barnaby’s, after all; for Amouretta caught a fatal chill one raw night at the Revelries, while posing as Innocence, insufficiently clad in white paint and a scrap of georgette, in one of those pure-white sculpture groups which occasionally reappear in refined vaudeville. ”

“ But trowel-sculpture has its limitations, and the question of durability has not yet been fully answered by the years. Perhaps, at some future day, science will co-operate with art, and produce for the garden sculptor a material as easily modeled as terra-cotta, as exquisite as marble, as impressive as granite, and as durable as bronze. Until then, we must manage as best we can with the materials the ancients had, though under climatic conditions more favorable than ours; and we may at least note with thankfulness that in garden art as in all things annihilation has its uses. ”

“ One would have said that half the American Camouflage trooped in; little Robert, so strangely saved that black night at Beaumetz-les-Cambrai; young Harry, born at the foot of Ascutney—smiling Harry the sculptor, beside whom he himself had stood unharmed, in the field by Reims, when a shell came, striking Harry to nothingness; and Anthony’s nephew too, that portrait-painter whom the papers had called brilliant-futured—debonair Charlie Anthony whom he himself, merely Captain Price, under orders, had unknowingly despatched to his doom. ”

“ And how often the thoughtful sculptor of to-day has wished that Washington’s simple dignity in admitting an insufficiency of “knowledge in the art of sculpture” might be pondered and taken to heart by those of us who are not qualified “to dictate in the matter”! In this our free country of the self-elected critic, the temple of art is at all hours invaded by those who cheerily announce that “they do not know much,” but who nevertheless follow the example of William II rather than of our first President. ”

“ The dinner, that masterpiece, had faded from the foreground.
“I never told you,” said Gerald, abruptly, “how I longed to make a death-mask of father, when he died there in London, away from you all. I wanted to preserve—and to show to you yourself, Stevedear!—the look of peace that came upon him. As a sculptor, I knew how, of course. Every kid studying sculpture has made casts—from life, anyway. ”

“ It is the little artist who proclaims himself different from other men, and so not subject to their laws; the great artist strives to bring his personality and his work into harmony with the best that he knows of human effort. Magnanimous men and women unconsciously reveal their longing that their work may live after them for the happiness of mankind. Ward on his death-bed, finally assured that all is well with the great equestrian that had engaged his last thoughts, whispers to his wife, “Now I can go in peace.” ”

“ Too late! Mr. William Saltonstall had just entered the gallery. The ruler of the Court of New Departures had hard work to pull himself together, and recapture his pleasant alertness. It must be done, however; Mr. Saltonstall was too good a client to lose. Hal sprang to his feet, kicked the carnation under the throne, and with it cast aside for the moment his problem of the true and the false in art, as if it were an entangling garment that would burden him in a race.... ”

“ And whether one expects it or not, one finds it in rich measure in Saint-Gaudens. This child of France, born in Ireland, carries within him all the days of his life the light of an American conscience. Without a compelling moral earnestness, he could never have brought to completion, in face of unimaginable difficulties, some of the masterpieces on which his fame rests.
Every artist knows of the fourteen years during which the Shaw monument remained in his studio, never long absent from his thought. ”

“ I became two persons, as every artist at times must. Each was sharply awake. One of these two was modelling for dear life on that portrait, smiting the thing now here, now there; unhasting, unresting; gathering up rich handfuls of all the released individuality of greatness that I now saw radiating from a transfigured Senatorial countenance, and compressing that individuality into clay for [85] the plaster-moulder’s sacrifice and the bronze-founder’s furnace. The other man in me was listening amiably to a Bullwinkle speech of self-revelation. ”

“ The whole procession of mounted heroes produces no sense of monotony. Originality, that quality overprized when prized at all as an end in itself, appears in sufficient measure. Yet, beginning with Saint-Gaudens, most of these well-trained artists would undoubtedly admit their debt of gratitude to Barye and Frémiet and Dubois, the French masters, and beyond these, to Donatello and to Verocchio and Leopardi, through whom the Renaissance gave to the world those two vivid masterpieces, the Gattamelata and the Colleoni. ”

“ But Anita’s face with its majestic calm held me there; that, and the example of Janvier’s fortitude. And, well, life must be lived! There might be something I could do for Janvier, or Giuseppe, for that matter, on their return. Once again I went to the alcove, this time carrying a lighted candle, to be doubly sure of a dreadful thing. The tiny bronze face with closed eyes implored only peace—a shadow praying to return to its rest among shadows. ”