Charles H. Caffin

“ In the swish of her tail and the droop and stiffening of the hind quarters, we are made to realise the force of the blizzard; while, is it the little mass of piled-up snow, or the whiteness of the marble, or the intensity of the sculptor’s imagination, that conveys to our own a sense of white, snowy desolation all around the two poor creatures? It is seldom in modern sculpture that one will find an expression of sentiment so unaffected and affecting. ”

“ I doubt if anywhere in modern art, except in that of Rodin, will you find busts of such vital power. They exhibit the same regard for the structural significance of the head; something more than the suggestion of form and bulk—a rich, strong, jubilant recognition of these facts as the ones of peculiar interest to the sculptor, offering him the opportunity of indulging his especial delight. They exhibit also, as do Rodin’s, the same delicately precise handling of details: like the obligato which a musician composes upon his basic theme, yet with a different range of motive. ”

“ While the painter has a wide range of resources for creating an illusion the sculptor is limited to a comparatively strict and naïve realism. Even if he introduces an ideal figure, such as that of an angel, he is compelled to give it the clear-cut contours, substance and actuality of a distinctly visible and tangible form. His only means of idealising are the abstract beauty of line and form, the character of expression in face and gesture and the general feeling of nobility and sweetness that he can impart to his work through the degree to which the thought that is in him inspires his hand. ”

“ Separated from the turmoil of human passion it touches the theme of humanity with a gracious tenderness that leans toward an elegant idealisation and to an attitude of feeling that is far less human than artistic. I would cite, as an illustration of what I am trying to express, the fact that Death has been symbolised by a woman of noble and inviting mien, whose arms might fold themselves around the young sculptor’s form as with a mother’s caress, while she pressed the poppies on his brow and wooed him to eternal sleep. ”

“ It is, indeed, too picturesque, one may feel—with too expanded a composition and too much play of movement, to satisfy its architectonic function of relieving by a vertical line the horizontal of the balustrade. But, however that may be, as the portrait of a great musician and an idealisation of his art, it is a statue full of suggestion—a work of imagination, elevated, tender, deep and true. ”

“ In American art there is scarcely any trace of the superesthetic; but more than a little of the superintellectual, a phase and product of our{231} infatuation for words, which binds the imagination with wrappings of borrowed thought and checks the free flight of original ideas. For the end of art is not to teach, but to make us feel; to refine and elevate the operation of the senses, helping us through visible, tangible and audible beauty to catch at something of the mysterious infinitude of beauty. Even as man’s intellect reaches ever wider and further until knowledge is merged in speculation ”

“ Within the little enclosure of solemn greenery a bench, marble and of Greek design, invites to sit; the world is all outside, and here before us, raised upon a slight pedestal, enough to lift it above the level, but not too high for close and intimate communion, is the Presence: a woman’s seated figure, wrapped about in coarse drapery that shrouds her head and falls in long, loose, heavy folds at her feet. ”

“ Yet the sculptor has invested the head with an air of dispassionate refinement which gives it a certain aloofness; scarcely more, however, than the self-possession, consciously unconscious, with which the American woman can carry her beauty. It is almost as if one of them had mounted the pedestal and, with a ready wit embracing the situation, were enacting the part of patroness to the university. Every student will love her and her influence will be altogether one of sweet nobility; but whether he will receive any inspiration in the direction of the highest art and scholarship is less sure. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And here before us—in the isolation of the figure, in the uncompromising sternness of the drapery, in the majestic agony of the face, the eyelids lowered in pain, the lips full and set in the effort of endurance and also in a protest as proud as it is despairing—there is expressed a universality of grief that sums up the sorrow of the modern world, as well as the eternal question of the why and to what end. ”

“ Victory moves ahead of his left stirrup, palm branch in hand, her drapery buoyed up with air; the horse’s tail streams behind; throughout the whole composition is a single impulse of irresistible advance. From every point of view the mass is compact with dignity, ornamental in line and bulk, alive with elevated and inspiring energy. At closer range one may discover the big simplicity and pregnant generalisation of the modelling, also the meaningfulness of the characterisation. The horse in build and gait is a serviceable beast, bred for courage and endurance ”

“ To repeat, the sculptor is limited in his presentment to the actual facts. But, though it may seem to be a paradox, it is almost a truism in art, that the limitations of a medium are its most characteristic sources of power—at least, when knowingly and courageously admitted. And, I believe, it can scarcely be doubted that the quality in Saint-Gaudens’s imagination which has most conduced to his greatness as an artist is this: it is kindled by contemplation of the facts, and it finds in the facts its keenest and truest impulse. ”

“ Mounted on a stringy pony, the man himself lean and gaunt, the group counted very little as a mass, yet compelled attention by the keenness of the characterisation. Amid the extreme modernness of the scene and its variety of impressions, the impassiveness of this figure, survival of an age so remote, was strangely moving; a proud, stern figure, conscious of its dignity, in pitiful, solemn protest against the inexorable march of destiny; the last echo of an unrecorded epic. No sculptor has succeeded better in combining with complete naturalism the poetry of the Indian subject. ”

“ To most of us, if we can recall our youth, the impressions that counted most came gradually, finding us often unprepared for them, and through circumstances or our own levity of soul unable to receive due profit at the time. But to the young Barnard, with a seriousness beyond his years, peering into the mystery of life, feeling after expression in form, the revelation of Michelangelo’s genius must have been like sudden light to a blind man, who, hitherto, had had but vague imaginings of light and form. ”

“ Instead of demanding such prosaic record, how much better it would be to call upon the sculptor to create out of his imagination some subject that may represent or symbolise the greatness of the hero and appeal to the imagination of succeeding generations, meanwhile gladdening all who pass and repass it daily with its essential beauties. Have you not seen a trousered, frock-coated statue against the pedestal of which are a row of seats and sitters with their back to the man that is to be remembered? ”

“ Witness this marble balustrade, divided into compartments by a series of plain posts, between which are suspended festoons of fruit and flowers, with baby forms astride them. Each in a vein of playful fancy personifies some occupation, art or science, and the emblems typifying them are introduced as accents of surprise in the composition. The whole is alive with graceful animation and yet preserves a rhythmical dignity, a variety in uniformity, like the play of notes in succeeding bars of music. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Working fitfully and with painful hindrances from insufficient facility in the handling of his medium, Theodore Bauer has produced some works full of imagination. Nature gave him the gifts of music and of dreaming; and, nursing these, he slipped on into middle life, without ceasing to be a child. The grit of manhood, the practicality of the world and the need of responding to it in kind, are outside his comprehension. He lives within himself in a world of his own: a world of rosy lights and purple shadows ”

“ He began to have an inkling of the majesty of form in the round, as something not to be translated into the flat, but to be felt in the bulk; a realisation of the wonder of palpable structure, when it has become the plastic expression of noble thought. It was several years later, and much discipline had to be undergone, before the impressions of this lonely communing were to become part of his conscious equipment as a sculptor. ”

“ We, however, in the superiority of our modern education, run our eye over a painting or piece of sculpture to discover what there is in either that is convertible into words, and overlook the qualities which affect the senses abstractly, which are indeed the bones and marrow and very physiognomy of the work of art, its distinguishing characteristics and capacity to move us. And this powerlessness to enter into a work of art from the artist’s point of view deprives us of all independence and initiative of appreciation. ”

“ THE DECORATIVE MOTIVE IN all ages sculpture has been intimately allied with architecture, somewhat as the blossom with the tree, reaching often its noblest expression as an efflorescence of decoration upon the surface of a building or as separate forms within it; springing up in statue, tomb or pulpit like bursts of flowery growth in the forest. ”

“ Without technique a work of art is not to be thought of; it is as essentially the visible expression of the inward grace as the human form is the casket of the human spirit. But the quality in man or woman of purest delight and most enduring significance is less the body and its acts than the thought that animates them. ”

“ When a gap has been made by some bell-wether in the hedge of stubborn intolerance{152} which public opinion had set round the art of a Rodin, we take our turn in the long row of sheep that follow each other’s tails through the gap and fancy that we are discoverers and appreciators of genius. Small wonder, then, if one of our own prophets, merely a young sculptor of America, should still be waiting for honour in his own country. ”

“ And this piano seems open to the charge of cumbersomeness, which again offends the instinct of the musician, who would feel in the instrument a suggestion of yielding to the vibrations of the music—a feeling so prominent in the delicate simplicity of the violin and to be desired in the form of all instruments. Yet one welcomes in this piano the inventiveness of fancy displayed, and the skill and individuality of the craftsmanship, delighted to find an American sculptor applying his art to the intimacies of domestic design. ”

“ Nature in a marvellous way adapts the colour and forms of the blossoms to the character and structure of the tree and shapes of the woodland flowers; for example, the foxglove spiring up amid the tree trunks to the character of its environment. In the spirit of this example the sculptor fashions his designs in conformity with that of the architecture, whether it be for decoration of the building’s surface or for a separate contributing feature.
Such coöperation with the architect demands at once fertility of imagination and considerable self-restraint ”

“ The action is such as no model could maintain in its vivacity for more than a moment; the artist has seized it in all its flow and suppleness of movement and held it in his imagination to the finish. It is a statue which we can almost accept as an example of the predominance of technique over the facts of the living model, except for a certain look-at-me-ishness which seems to result from the artist’s consciousness that his problem was a daring exhibition of skill. ”