CHAPTER VIOUR EQUESTRIAN STATUES
Ourforefathers’ first fond national desire in sculpture was for an equestrian statue of Washington, by Houdon; a wish never to be fulfilled. The Congressional impulse of 1783 was sobered on counting up the cost. It came to nothing until two generations had passed; and it came to very little even then. Today, our country is sometimes called the paradise of the equestrian statue. If any such paradise exists among us, it has been created since 1853, when Clark Mills, “never having seen General Jackson or an equestrian statue,” at last succeeded, after heart-breaking difficulties, in casting in bronze the firstequestrian statue ever made here. With what passionate dithyrambs Benvenuto Cellini would have told the world of such a feat, had it been his! How breathlessly he would have described the breaking of cranes and the bursting of furnaces and the six tragic failures in the body of the horse before the old cannon captured by Andrew Jackson were finally translated into the supposed immortality of the equestrian group in bronze! General Jackson and his horse are still balancing themselves at leisure in front of the White House; it is perhaps needless to report their aspect as a thing more strange than beautiful. No one thinks this work a triumph of art, but every serious student knows it as a much needed initial victory over the hard conditions of bronze casting. You may call the group bizarre and unsophisticated in effect, as well as wholly mechanistic by firstintention; but you cannot take from it the honor of being first in our long procession of equestrian statues, some of them forms of the very highest distinction. And you will not fail to observe the amazing improvement in style that has somehow taken place by the time our second equestrian appears; Brown’s Washington, though coming but three years after the Mills Jackson, remains among our fine examples in sculpture. Not so number three, the Mills Washington, belated and inadequate response to the Congressional resolve in 1783; least said, soonest mended. Better fortune came with number four, the Ball Washington, long the pride of Boston.
Today, our equestrian statues are the work of accomplished sculptors. Such commissions are not bestowed onweaklings or beginners, on irresponsibles or mere experimenters. In addition to genius, the highest equestrian art demands of the sculptor certain pedestrian virtues; such as foresight and perseverance and common sense and ability to cope with the unsuspected deviltries of men, beasts, and things. As said in another chapter, every sculptor who triumphs over his equestrian problem is heroic. This is true whether he works single-handed or in collaboration with some other sculptor, some one with a special gift for animal form. And it remains true, even though in our day, no sculptor can well hope or desire, like Houdon, to be “considered under the double aspect of Statuary and Founder.” Earnest men like Cellini and Houdon, Clark Mills and Brown have long since, by working on their knees in sweat and grime, paved the way for the modern organization of bronze founding to becarried on as a craft in purlieus outside the sculptor’s studio. Many tribulations are thereby removed from the sculptor, but enough have been added for his proper chastening. Those who know our American equestrian statues, those who have seen the pluck and energy with which their makers have achieved their goal, will certainly set down valor as one of the gifts belonging to the spirit of American sculpture.
Clark Mills, Brown, Ball, Ward, Saint-Gaudens, French, Potter, Partridge, Remington, Bush-Brown, Elwell, Proctor, Rhind, Lukeman, Bitter, Niehaus, Ruckstull, Bartlett, MacMonnies, Dallin, the two Borglums, Fraser, Aitken, Miss Hyatt, Mrs. Farnham, Roth, Packer, Shrady;—if without benefit of catalogue memory at once speaks all these names, nodoubt there are others also. And in what infinite variety of imagination and of rendering their works stand before us! 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. If that almost mythical third masterpiece, da Vinci’s Sforza, had been saved to round out a trinity of high accomplishment, how great would have been our debt to Italy! As it is, the void left is something every sculptor is free tofill, if his powers permit; there are still worlds to conquer.
A strangely moving story of some such high ambition is told in the career of Henry Merwin Shrady, who died last year, at the very time when his colossal equestrian monument to General Grant was unveiled in Washington. Shrady’s swift uncharted course, like that of a few artists, variations from the type, conformed in no way to the routine deemed necessary for most men in his profession. A graduate from Columbia, he had successfully engaged in business for some years before he began to model animals. He became a sculptor overnight. His immediate success in the art of sculpture is but partly explained by referring to his cultivated intellect, and by saying that as the son of a noted surgeonhe easily assimilated the truths of anatomy. Nor does his success need explanation as much as recognition. His success is his artist’s secret, perhaps never to be revealed, perhaps always to remain among the imponderable things the soul will not disclose to science. Surely he crowded into his brief career all the rapt effort of the youthful student, and all the more composed but no less strenuous endeavor of the assured artist. From first to last, his offerings are good. But the grandiose conception of his final work, the Grant monument, an epic crowded and massed with equestrian and leonine figures passionately portrayed in a kind of exalted realism, called for continued heroic years of labor. Those years were at times harassed by misunderstandings with the changing officials whose presumably difficult duty it was to supervise the work in the public interest. Indeed,Shrady’s equestrian concept was in this instance a thing too grandiose to be accepted, on sight unseen, by pedestrian minds. Though his art triumphed at last, and all his promises were performed, his life ended as the veil was lifted from its crowning work.
I often think that the equestrian statue has a larger and more immediate power of communication than other sculptural forms. This is not merely because of its weight and volume and general air of expensiveness. Those things belong in ever so many climes to ever so many huge prosaic monuments seen with the profoundest indifference of the human soul. But the man (or the Maid) on horseback is readily enough taken to heart as a person with tidings, say as someone bringing the good news from Ghent,or some other definite place. He or she at once becomes a figure in adrama, that old word that meanssomething doing; an atmosphere of romance is at once created for the passer-by to share in, if he likes.
Perhaps the equestrian hero is Mr. Lukeman’s Circuit Rider, a preacher of the Word, going very reverently and wisely about his Father’s business, or else, this being a great year for bronze circuit riding, he is Mr. Proctor’s studious Circuit Rider, to be set up on the Capitol grounds at Salem, Oregon. Perhaps he is Mr. Bartlett’s Lafayette, coming from a court of distinction, with a message of high national import, so that all the glory of just that must be diplomatically suggested in a large way in his own person, while his horse must show a proud lip, and seem to be of the kind men give kingdoms for. Perhaps he is Ward’s General Thomas, sitting histhoroughbred, the first thoroughbred revealed in true mettle in our sculpture; the General surveys a momentous battlefield, “holding his own,” as Garfield amazedly saw, “with utter defeat on each side of him, and such wild disorder in his rear,” and so winning the name he bore the rest of his life, the Rock of Chickamauga. Or perhaps again the hero is a heroine,—the Maid of Orleans as Miss Hyatt has portrayed her, uplifted by her visions and riding on to glory.
In any event, it is quite clear that the equestrian statue is a storied thing. And this is very hard on the solemn critic, who, thirsting for pure abstractions, declares in his mistaken way that art mustnottell a story, and who for the moment highbrowbeats everybody into saying message or meaning or content instead of story. Meanwhile, so far apart are the ways of criticism and creation, the maker ofequestrian statues continues to spin his romances and epics in bronze. The fact that his fine theme appeals to the people not only gladdens him; it puts him under a still more pressing obligation to show what an artist can do with such a theme, how greatly he can enhance and exalt it. He understands well enough that it is easier to begin such enterprises with gusto than to finish them with glory. Most of our masters of the equestrian form were lovers and knowers of the horse before they were his sculptors; and that, though not imperative for genius, is valuable.
Aside from good workmanship, our American equestrians show an individuality of conception, now stately, now familiarly historic, now soberly truthful, and almost always interesting. No one but MacMonnies has just the MacMonniesGaelic, Gallic gallantry of attack, everywhere sustained by the MacMonnies absolute mastery of sculptural resource; no one but Bartlett can impart quite that cosmopolitan touch of suavity and courtliness which tempers the eagerness of his young Lafayette; no one but Bitter ever worked up such a shout and hurrah over rearing stallions for expositions, and yet was able, a little later, to give New York a work of such studied seriousness as his equestrian of General Sigel; and no one but Edward Potter has ever told in sculpture, during a lifetime of acquaintance with thunder-clothed necks, so much of the honest truth about horses. That clear atmosphere of practical Christianity which envelops those two Circuit Riders does not in the least resemble the religious ecstasy breathing from Miss Hyatt’s Jeanne d’Arc. Different again is the exalted devotion thatspeaks in every line of Saint-Gaudens’s Shaw, from the slant of the rifles, like falling rain, up to the brooding visage of the young commander and the presence that guides him and his men. Looking at the mere composition here, one thinks often of the Surrender at Breda; but the oblique lines of our Army rifles are surely far more tragic than the upright Breda lances. Each of these last-named sculptors has had a certain theme and a certain emotion to present, and each has marshalled his resources in his own characteristic way.
HORSE TAMERSBY F. W. MACMONNIES
HORSE TAMERSBY F. W. MACMONNIES
HORSE TAMERS
BY F. W. MACMONNIES
Again, the tragedy that will always be latent for the Southerner in the Saint-Gaudens Sherman, with its dominating figure of the warrior seasoned to his great task, yet a task to be tempered by the advancing spirit of Nike-Eirene, is not in the least like the kind of tragedy that enfolds Fraser’s End of the Trail. Here the pupil does not follow the master in subject, or intreatment, or in those mere motions of the sculptor’s tool, too often transmitted unchanged from teacher to learner. Mr. Fraser’s moving parable of a losing people is told in his own way, and in the grand style of sculpture, just as the parables of the Evangelists are told in each Evangelist’s way, and in the grand style of language, as English-speaking readers are privileged to know it. Long before assisting Saint-Gaudens in the Sherman equestrian, Mr. Fraser, from his boyhood in Montana, knew the horse of the untamed West. His group is sculpture from his own experience. And Solon Borglum’s way with his far-Western themes is not at all like Mr. Fraser’s way. Solon Borglum, least academic of all those sculptors who still feel reverence for anatomical truths, envelops his men and beasts in a kind of fateful weather that stirs the human heart to sympathy with themin their struggles, whether happy or unhappy; he veils his subjects in the hope of making them more clear to you. Different again is Mr. Dallin’s version of that great historic theme, the mounted Indian. This sculptor’s genius, seen at its best in the commanding Appeal to the Great Spirit, placed in front of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, interprets the ritual of a passing race. The position of this austere group at the approach to an austere building appropriately suggests to the spectator the pathos of contrast between two cultures, the lower and the higher, the vanishing and the enduring. Does not that Indian mutely remind us of great treasure which is ours, but in which he may not share?
Whether our equestrian statues, as the groups last spoken of, reveal aside of American life destined to pass from our view, or whether, on the other hand, they are of the historic portrait order, as are our most of the Old World equestrians, it is clear that the personal vision prevails. The note of romance is present; perhaps we scarcely realize how much the so-called dumb beast contributes to that. Mr. Proctor’s mastery of animal form, whether in equine or other shape, is certain, plain, delightful. Leaving our horses for a moment, where shall we find a “Tyger” as terrible and as “burning bright” as the Proctor Golden Tiger for Princeton, a creature none the less awe-inspiring though seen in sphinx-like repose? Decidedly, the man has the gift for animals; I shall never forget how under Mr. Proctor’s playful influence, one of the dullest and mangiest kittens I ever saw suddenly leaped up into a miracle of feline grace.
EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF GENERAL SHERMANBY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS
EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF GENERAL SHERMANBY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS
EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF GENERAL SHERMAN
BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS
A genius for animals is found rather often among us, as befits a people whose fathers so lately subdued the forest-born; it is a gift as richly special and as deeply innate as the gift, let us say, for religious sculpture, or for any other lofty form. Through this gift, Miss Hyatt and Miss Gardin, Mr. Harvey, Mr. Roth, Mr. Potter, Mr. Laessle, Mr. Sanford, Mr. Rumsey and many others have shown us beautiful or terrible or humorous things. The presence of the horse, thecheval, easily gives the authentic accent ofchivalryto the equestrian portrait statue, as contrasted with its pedestrian relative; while in a work imagined in the manner of the Saint-Gaudens Sherman, the beast, the man, and the embodied spirit unite in an epical ensemble that appeals to the thoughtful mind. One thinks of that similar trinity of Earth, Man, and Heaven, said to animate in humbler guise everyflower arrangement poetically shaped by Japanese fingers. An artistic impulse so widely felt, though not yet commonly revealed, holds out its promise for future creations in art. At present, the fact that Reinhold Begas in Germany and Augustus Saint-Gaudens in America have lately used this motive in equestrian art is perhaps unduly prohibitive for other sculptors. True, neither artist knew what the other was doing; Saint-Gaudens was somewhat taken aback on learning of the Begas design.