American Masters of Sculpture. Charles H. Caffin
Institute and the École des Beaux Arts perpetuate a standard, characterised by technical perfection and elegance of style, while the tendency to academic narrowness is offset by the influence of independent sculptors; for there is not a thought-wave in modern art that does not emanate from or finally reach Paris. It is the world’s clearing-house of artistic currency.
The attractions of a city so rich in artistic resources, so generous to artists, have allured many to extend their sojourn there beyond the years of studentship, and Paris has been in these days, only in a still greater degree, what Florence and Rome were half a century ago—a resort for self-expatriated Americans. But, with a few exceptions, the sculptors have escaped this tendency; not so much perhaps from inclination as from circumstances. For commissions have been plentiful in America, and the need of being on the spot in order to secure them drew the sculptors home—on the whole to the betterment of their art. For it is the same with Paris, a university of the arts, as with Harvard, Yale or any other university of letters and science. The atmosphere is most congenial to the quick development of student years; but, for the further, more gradual development that grows out of the stuff which a man has in him, not to be compared to the rough-and-tumble contact with the larger world.
For there are some elements of technique which can be imparted; others, however, are of personal growth. It is a distinction largely of manners and feeling. Manners can be imparted and acquired; feeling, at best, mainly guided. Its finer manifestations are the outcome of self-development. Thus in the matter of modelling, in which the Parisian student usually excels, the hand can be trained to express with exquisite precision and delicacy the surface of flesh and fabric, the form and texture of each; and the feeling for the esthetic charm of these things can be aroused and refined. So, too, can that larger feeling for the construction of the form and the organic relation of its parts, up to the point at least of securing accuracy and truth to nature. But the still larger feeling, which finds in the structure and organic arrangement an expression of emotion and manifests itself most amply in composition, cannot be taught. To certain general principles the student may be directed, just as any school of manners may lay down rules of conduct, which will be admirable in securing propriety and decorum. So far can feeling be instilled and regulated; but the freer, deeper, really significant feeling has its origin in character, in the moral and mental ego of the individual, to be further deepened and broadened by the experiences of life. In sculpture this significant feeling manifests itself appropriately in the large field of the general design; in the weight, stability and harmonious unity of the mass, which make the composition monumental; and in the manifestation of character and sentiment, sustained through every part of the whole, which renders the composition expressional. For convenience one separates the disposition of the form from the expression, but really they are one and the same act, the sculptor composing his plastic material as the musician does his chords and harmonies, to give expression to the character or sentiment that supplies the theme of his work.
Now, given this natural gift, the reënforcement of it must come from the theme itself, from the degree to which it has laid hold of and possessed the sculptor’s imagination. And it is for this reason that, when he is executing American themes, the true environment for him is America. It ought to give him direct incentive, and, even if it does not, should at least save him from being enticed into a more specious attitude of mind. For I think one may note traces of this speciousness in the sculpture of Americans working in Paris; a parti pris for the smaller elegancies of design as opposed to the salient and the large.
On the other hand, the working upon American themes in the American environment can draw nothing out of the artist that is not in him; and this higher mastery over form and composition, being a gift of the gods, is necessarily rare. Perhaps only in a few American sculptors, as only rarely in other countries, will you discover it; while skill in modelling, elegance of design and a generally sensitive taste will be found more diffused through American sculpture than through that of any other country except France. The reason, unquestionably, is the peculiar aptitude of the American to impressions and his study in the best of modern schools.
PUBLISHERS’ NOTE
Thanks are due to the Sculptors, to the Century Company and to Charles Scribner’s Sons, whose assistance has made possible the inclusion of the illustrations in this edition.
I
AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS
IF we value the gift of imagination in an artist over that of technique it is not because we undervalue the latter. 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. And is it not so with a work of art?
It is as an artist of superior imagination that we regard Saint-Gaudens; as one who can give to the facts of our knowledge a fresh form and significance, attracting us toward the idea contained within the actual, the idealisation of character or of sentiment. And such imagination in an artist must have a twofold working. It fills him with a fine idea and it discovers to his hand a fine manner of embodying it; it penetrates his technique.
To appreciate fully a sculptor’s worthiness in this respect one should realise the peculiar relation in which he is placed with regard to facts. 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. He may, indeed, attempt a more obvious trick of idealising, as when Greenough represented Washington in the rôle of Olympian Zeus by the device of baring the body and placing a mimic thunderbolt in the hand. But to modern taste, at any rate, such a procedure seems ridiculous. The truth is, that the highest form of imagination—indeed, the only tolerable one to the modern mind—is that which illumines the facts of our common knowledge and expression; in a word, which bases itself on facts.
But this demands of the sculptor a very high degree of creative imagination, in all probability a proportionately higher one than the painter’s; for if the latter is confronted, for example, with a subject of ill-made coat and trousers, he can by merging the costume in atmosphere and by toning it with the background so gloss over its inartistic appearance as to produce a handsome ensemble. But, compared with the sculptor’s problems, this is an evasion of the difficulty. 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.
Moreover, it has been his good fortune to be confronted with large and impressive facts. The panorama of American civilization, and especially one episode of tremendous import—the Civil War—has spread itself behind his work; and the latter, as in the case of one of his own reliefs, has grown out of and in harmony with the background. Other sculptors, also, have had the same high incentive, but many have failed to respond to it. Saint-Gaudens has had the force of imagination which could not only grasp the magnitude of his opportunity but interpret its impressiveness.
The conditions in America have demanded that his work should be largely of a memorial character—monuments to those that are honoured in