ARTIST AND PUBLIC

AND OTHERESSAYS ON ART SUBJECTS

BYKENYON COX

[Illustration: From a photograph by Braun, Clement & Co. Plate 1. --Millet. "The Goose Girl. "In the collection of Mme. Saulnier, Bordeaux. ]

ARTIST AND PUBLIC

AND OTHERESSAYS ON ART SUBJECTS

BYKENYON COX

_WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS_

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONSNEW YORK MCMXIV

_Copyright, 1914, by Charles Scribner's SonsPublished September, 1914_

TO

J. D. C. 

IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF UNFAILING KINDNESSTHIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED

PREFACE

In "The Classic Point of View, " published three years ago, I endeavoredto give a clear and definitive statement of the principles on which allmy criticism of art is based. The papers here gathered together, whetherearlier or later than that volume, may be considered as the moredetailed application of those principles to particular artists, to wholeschools and epochs, even, in one case, to the entire history of thearts. The essay on Raphael, for instance, is little else than anillustration of the chapter on "Design"; that on Millet illustrates thethree chapters on "The Subject in Art, " on "Design, " and on "Drawing";while "Two Ways of Painting" contrasts, in specific instances, theclassic with the modern point of view. 

But there is another thread connecting these essays, for all of themwill be found to have some bearing, more or less direct, upon thesubject of the title essay. "The Illusion of Progress" elaborates apoint more slightly touched upon in "Artist and Public"; the careers ofRaphael and Millet are capital instances of the happy productiveness ofan artist in sympathy with his public or of the difficulties, noblyconquered in this case, of an artist without public appreciation; thegreatest merit attributed to "The American School" is an abstentionfrom the extravagances of those who would make incomprehensibility atest of greatness. Finally, the work of Saint-Gaudens is a noble exampleof art fulfilling its social function in expressing and in elevating theideals of its time and country. 

This last essay stands, in some respects, upon a different footing fromthe others. It deals with the work and the character of a man I knew andloved, it was originally written almost immediately after his death, andit is therefore colored, to some extent, by personal emotion. I haverevised it, rearranged it, and added to it, and I trust that thiscoloring may be found to warm, without falsifying, the picture. 

The essay on "The Illusion of Progress" was first printed in "TheCentury, " that on Saint-Gaudens in "The Atlantic Monthly. " The othersoriginally appeared in "Scribner's Magazine. "

KENYON COX. 

Calder House, Croton-on-Hudson, June 6, 1914. 

CONTENTS

ESSAY PAGE

 I. ARTIST AND PUBLIC 1 II. JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET 44III. THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS 77 IV. RAPHAEL 99 V. TWO WAYS OF PAINTING 134 VI. THE AMERICAN SCHOOL 149VII. AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 169

ILLUSTRATIONS

MILLET: 1. "The Goose Girl, " _Saulnier Collection, Bordeaux_ _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE 2. "The Sower, " _Vanderbilt Collection, Metropolitan Museum, New York_ 46 3. "The Gleaners, " _The Louvre_ 50 4. "The Spaders" 54 5. "The Potato Planter, " _Shaw Collection_ 58 6. "The Grafter, " _William Rockefeller Collection_ 62 7. "The New-Born Calf, " _Art Institute, Chicago_ 66 8. "The First Steps, " 70 9. "The Shepherdess, " _Chauchard Collection, Louvre_ 7210. "Spring, " _The Louvre_ 74

RAPHAEL:11. "Poetry, " _The Vatican_ 11212. "The Judgment of Solomon, " _The Vatican_ 11413. The "Disputa, " _The Vatican_ 11614. "The School of Athens, " _The Vatican_ 11815. "Parnassus, " _The Vatican_ 12016. "Jurisprudence, " _The Vatican_ 12217. "The Mass of Bolsena, " _The Vatican_ 12418. "The Deliverance of Peter, " _The Vatican_ 12619. "The Sibyls, " _Santa Maria della Pace, Rome_ 12820. "Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami, " _Gardner Collection_ 130

JOHN S. SARGENT:21. "The Hermit, " _Metropolitan Museum, New York_ 136

TITIAN:22. "Saint Jerome in the Desert, " _Brera Gallery, Milan_ 142

SAINT-GAUDENS:23. "Plaquette Commemorating Cornish Masque" 18224. "Amor Caritas" 19625. "The Butler Children" 20626. "Sarah Redwood Lee" 20827. "Farragut, " _Madison Square, New York_ 21228. "Lincoln, " _Chicago, Ill. _ 21429. "Deacon Chapin, " _Springfield, Mass. _ 21630. "Adams Memorial, " _Washington, D. C. _ 21831. "Shaw Memorial, " _Boston, Mass. _ 22032. "Sherman, " _The Plaza, Central Park, New York_ 224

ARTIST AND PUBLIC

I

ARTIST AND PUBLIC

In the history of art, as in the history of politics and in the historyof economics, our modern epoch is marked off from all preceding epochsby one great event, the French Revolution. Fragonard, who survived thatRevolution to lose himself in a new and strange world, is the last atthe old masters; David, some sixteen years his junior, is the first ofthe moderns. Now if we look for the most fundamental distinction betweenour modern art and the art of past times, I believe we shall find it tobe this: the art of the past was produced for a public that wanted itand understood it, by artists who understood and sympathized with theirpublic; the art of our time has been, for the most part, produced for apublic that did not want it and misunderstood it, by artists whodisliked and despised the public for which they worked. When artist andpublic were united, art was homogeneous and continuous. Since thedivorce of artist and public art has been chaotic and convulsive. 

That this divorce between the artist and his public--this dislocation ofthe right and natural relations between them--has taken place iscertain. The causes of it are many and deep-lying in our moderncivilization, and I can point out only a few of the more obvious ones. 

The first of these is the emergence of a new public. The art of pastages had been distinctively an aristocratic art, created for kings andprinces, for the free citizens of slave-holding republics, for thespiritual and intellectual aristocracy of the church, or for a luxuriousand frivolous nobility. As the aim of the Revolution was thedestruction of aristocratic privilege, it is not surprising that arevolutionary like David should have felt it necessary to destroy thetraditions of an art created for the aristocracy. In his own art ofpainting he succeeded so thoroughly that the painters of the nextgeneration found themselves with no traditions at all. They had not onlyto work for a public of enriched bourgeois or proletarians who had nevercared for art, but they had to create over again the art with which theyendeavored to interest this public. How could they succeed? The riftbetween artist and public had begun, and it has been widening eversince. 

If the people had had little to do with the major arts of painting andsculpture, there had yet been, all through the Middle Ages and theRenaissance, a truly popular art--an art of furniture making, ofwood-carving, of forging, of pottery. Every craftsman was an artist inhis degree, and every artist was but a craftsman of a superior sort. Ourmachine-making, industrial civilization, intent upon material progressand the satisfaction of material wants, has destroyed this popular art;and at the same time that the artist lost his patronage from above helost his support from below. He has become a superior person, a sort ofdemi-gentleman, but he has no longer a splendid nobility to employ himor a world of artist artisans to surround him and understand him. 

And to the modern artist, so isolated, with no tradition behind him, nodirection from above and no support from below, the art of all times andall countries has become familiar through modern means of communicationand modern processes of reproduction. Having no compelling reason fordoing one thing rather than another, or for choosing one or another wayof doing things, he is shown a thousand things that he may do and athousand ways of doing them. Not clearly knowing his own mind he hearsthe clash and reverberation of a thousand other minds, and having nocertainties he must listen to countless theories. 

Mr. Vedder has spoken of a certain "home-made" character which heconsiders the greatest defect of his art, the character of an artbelonging to no distinctive school and having no definite relation tothe time and country in which it is produced. But it is not Mr. Vedder'sart alone that is home-made. It is precisely the characteristic note ofour modern art that all of it that is good for anything is home-made orself-made. Each artist has had to create his art as best he could out ofhis own temperament and his own experience--has sat in his corner like aspider, spinning his web from his own bowels. If the art so created wasessentially fine and noble the public has at last found it out, but onlyafter years of neglect have embittered the existence and partiallycrippled the powers of its creator. And so, to our modern imagination, the neglected and misunderstood genius has become the very type of thegreat artist, and we have allowed our belief in him to color and distortour vision of the history of art. We have come to look upon the greatartists of all times as an unhappy race struggling against theinappreciation of a stupid public, starving in garrets and waiting longfor tardy recognition. 

The very reverse of this is true. With the exception of Rembrandt, whohimself lived in a time of political revolution and of the emergence topower of a burgher class, you will scarce find an unappreciated geniusin the whole history of art until the beginning of the nineteenthcentury. The great masters of the Renaissance, from Giotto to Veronese, were men of their time, sharing and interpreting the ideals of thosearound them, and were recognized and patronized as such. Rembrandt'sgreatest contemporary, Rubens, was painter in ordinary to half thecourts of Europe, and Velazquez was the friend and companion of hisking. Watteau and Boucher and Fragonard painted for the frivolousnobility of the eighteenth century just what that nobility wanted, andeven the precursors of the Revolution, sober and honest Chardin, Greuzethe sentimental, had no difficulty in making themselves understood, until the revolutionist David became dictator to the art of Europe andswept them into the rubbish heap with the rest. 

It is not until the beginning of what is known as the Romantic movement, under the Restoration, that the misunderstood painter of geniusdefinitely appears. Millet, Corot, Rousseau were trying, withmagnificent powers and perfect single-mindedness, to restore the art ofpainting which the Revolution had destroyed. They were men of the utmostnobility and simplicity of character, as far as possible from thegloomy, fantastic, vain, and egotistical person that we have come toaccept as the type of unappreciated genius; they were classically mindedand conservative, worshippers of the great art of the past; but theywere without a public and they suffered bitter discouragement and longneglect. Upon their experience is founded that legend of theunpopularity of all great artists which has grown to astonishingproportions. Accepting this legend, and believing that all great artistsare misunderstood, the artist has come to cherish a scorn of the publicfor which he works and to pretend a greater scorn than he feels. Hecannot believe himself great _unless_ he is misunderstood, and he hugshis unpopularity to himself as a sign of genius and arrives at thatsublime affectation which answers praise of his work with an exclamationof dismay: "Is it as bad as that?" He invents new excesses andeccentricities to insure misunderstanding, and proclaims the doctrinethat, as anything great must be incomprehensible, so anythingincomprehensible must be great. And the public has taken him, at leastpartly, at his word. He may or may not be great, but he is certainlyincomprehensible and probably a little mad. Until he succeeds the publiclooks upon the artist as a more or less harmless lunatic. When hesucceeds it is willing to exalt him into a kind of god and to worshiphis eccentricities as a part of his divinity. So we arrive at a beliefin the insanity of genius. What would Raphael have thought of such anotion, or that consummate man of the world, Titian? What would theserene and mighty Veronese have thought of it, or the cool, clear-seeingVelazquez? How his Excellency the Ambassador of his Most CatholicMajesty, glorious Peter Paul Rubens, would have laughed!

It is this lack of sympathy and understanding between the artist and hispublic--this fatal isolation of the artist--that is the cause of nearlyall the shortcomings of modern art; of the weakness of what is known asofficial or academic art no less than of the extravagance of the art ofopposition. The artist, being no longer a craftsman, working to order, but a kind of poet, expressing in loneliness his personal emotions, haslost his natural means of support. Governments, feeling a responsibilityfor the cultivation of art which was quite unnecessary in the days whenart was spontaneously produced in answer to a natural demand, havetried to put an artificial support in its place. That the artist mayshow his wares and make himself known, they have created exhibitions;that he may be encouraged they have instituted medals and prizes; thathe may not starve they have made government purchases. And thesewell-meant efforts have resulted in the creation of pictures which haveno other purpose than to hang in exhibitions, to win medals, and to bepurchased by the government and hung in those more permanent exhibitionswhich we call museums. For this purpose it is not necessary that apicture should have great beauty or great sincerity. It _is_ necessarythat it should be large in order to attract attention and sufficientlywell drawn and executed to seem to deserve recognition. And so wasevolved the salon picture, a thing created for no man's pleasure, noteven the artist's; a thing which is neither the decoration of a publicbuilding nor the possible ornament of a private house; a thing which, after it has served its temporary purpose, is rolled up and stored in aloft or placed in a gallery where its essential emptiness becomes moreand more evident as time goes on. Such government-encouraged art had atleast the merit of a well-sustained and fairly high level ofaccomplishment in the more obvious elements of painting. But asexhibitions became larger and larger and the competition engendered bythem grew fiercer, it became increasingly difficult to attract attentionby mere academic merit. So the painters began to search forsensationalism of subject, and the typical salon picture, no longerdecorously pompous, began to deal in blood and horror and sensuality. Itwas Regnault who began this sensation hunt, but it has been carried muchfurther since his day than he can have dreamed of, and the modern salonpicture is not only tiresome but detestable. 

The salon picture, in its merits and its faults, is peculiarly French, but the modern exhibition has sins to answer for in other countries thanFrance. In England it has been responsible for a great deal ofsentimentality and anecdotage which has served to attract the attentionof a public that could not be roused to interest in mere painting. Everywhere, even in this country, where exhibitions are relatively smalland ill-attended, it has caused a certain stridency and blatancy, akeying up to exhibition pitch, a neglect of finer qualities for the sakeof immediate effectiveness. 

Under our modern conditions the exhibition has become a necessity, andit would be impossible for our artists to live or to attain a reputationwithout it. The giving of medals and prizes and the purchase of worksof art by the state may be of more doubtful utility, though such effortsat the encouragement of art probably do more good than harm. But thereis one form of government patronage that is almost wholly beneficial, and that the only form of it which we have in this country--the awardingof commissions for the decoration of public buildings. The painter ofmural decorations is in the old historical position, in sound andnatural relations to the public. He is doing something which is wantedand, if he continues to receive commissions, he may fairly assume thathe is doing it in a way that is satisfactory. With the decorative ormonumental sculptor he is almost alone among modern artists in beingrelieved of the necessity of producing something in the isolation of hisstudio and waiting to see if any one will care for it; of trying, against the grain, to produce something that he thinks may appeal tothe public because it does not appeal to himself; or of attempting tobamboozle the public into buying what neither he nor the public reallycares for. If he does his best he may feel that he is as fairly earninghis livelihood as his fellow workmen, the blacksmith and thestonecutter, and is as little dependent as they upon either charity orhumbug. The best that government has done for art in France is thecommissioning of the great decorative paintings of Baudry and Puvis. Inthis country, also, governments, national, State, or municipal, arepatronizing art in the best possible way, and in making buildingssplendid for the people are affording opportunity for the creation of atruly popular art. 

Without any artificial aid from the government the illustrator has awide popular support and works for the public in a normal way; and, therefore, illustration has been one of the healthiest and mostvigorous forms of modern art. The portrait-painter, too, is producingsomething he knows to be wanted, and, though his art has had to fightagainst the competition of the photograph and has been partiallyvulgarized by the struggle of the exhibitions, it has yet remained, uponthe whole, comprehensible and human; so that much of the soundest art ofthe past century has gone into portraiture. It is the painters ofpictures, landscape or genre, who have most suffered from themisunderstanding between artist and public. Without guidance some ofthem have hewed a path to deserved success. Others have wandered intostrange byways and no-thoroughfares. 

The nineteenth century is strewn with the wrecks of such misunderstoodand misunderstanding artists, but it was about the sixties when theirsearching for a way began to lead them in certain clearly markeddirections. There are three paths, in especial, which have been followedsince then by adventurous spirits: the paths of æstheticism, ofscientific naturalism, and of pure self-expression; the paths ofWhistler, of Monet, and of Cézanne. 

Whistler was an artist of refined and delicate talent with greatweaknesses both in temperament and training; being also a very cleverman and a brilliant controversialist, he proceeded to erect a theorywhich should prove his weaknesses to be so many virtues, and he nearlysucceeded in convincing the world of its validity. Finding therepresentation of nature very difficult, he decided that art should notconcern itself with representation but only with the creation of"arrangements" and "symphonies. " Having no interest in the subject ofpictures, he proclaimed that pictures should have no subjects and thatany interest in the subject is vulgar. As he was a cosmopolitan with nolocal ties, he maintained that art had never been national; and as hewas out of sympathy with his time, he taught that "art happens" and that"there never was an artistic period. " According to the Whistleriangospel, the artist not only has now no point of contact with the public, but he should not have and never has had any. He has never been a manamong other men, but has been a dreamer "who sat at home with the women"and made pretty patterns of line and color because they pleased him. Andthe only business of the public is to accept "in silence" what hechooses to give them. 

This kind of rootless art he practised. Some of the patterns he producedare delightful, but they are without imagination, without passion, without joy in the material and visible world--the dainty diversions ofa dilettante. One is glad that so gracefully slender an art shouldexist, but if it has seemed great art to us it is because our age is sopoor in anything better. To rank its creator with the abounding mastersof the past is an absurdity. 

In their efforts to escape from the dead-alive art of the salon picture, Monet and the Impressionists took an entirely different course. Thegallery painter's perfunctory treatment of subject bored them, and theyabandoned subject almost as entirely as Whistler had done. The sound iftame drawing and the mediocre painting of what they called official artrevolted them as it revolted Whistler; but while he nearly suppressedrepresentation they could see in art nothing but representation. Theywanted to make that representation truer, and they tried to work arevolution in art by the scientific analysis of light and theinvention of a new method of laying on paint. Instead of joining inWhistler's search for pure pattern they fixed their attention on factsalone, or rather on one aspect of the facts, and in their occupationwith light and the manner of representing it they abandoned form almostas completely as they had abandoned significance and beauty. 

So it happened that Monet could devote some twenty canvases to the studyof the effects of light, at different hours of the day, upon two strawstacks in his farmyard. It was admirable practice, no doubt, and neitherscientific analysis nor the study of technical methods is to bedespised; but the interest of the public, after all, is in what anartist does, not in how he learns to do it. The twenty canvases togetherformed a sort of demonstration of the possibilities of different kindsof lighting. Any one of them, taken singly, is but a portrait of twostraw stacks, and the world will not permanently or deeply care aboutthose straw stacks. The study of light is, in itself, no more anexercise of the artistic faculties than the study of anatomy or thestudy of perspective; and while Impressionism has put a keener edge uponsome of the tools of the artist, it has inevitably failed to produce aschool of art. 

After Impressionism, what? We have no name for it butPost-Impressionism. Such men as Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh recognizedthe sterility of Impressionism and of a narrow æstheticism, while theyshared the hatred of the æsthetes and the Impressionists for the currentart of the salons. No more than the æsthetes or the Impressionists werethey conscious of any social or universal ideals that demandedexpression. The æsthetes had a doctrine; the Impressionists had a methodand a technic. The Post-Impressionists had nothing, and were driven tothe attempt at pure self-expression--to the exaltation of the great godWhim. They had no training, they recognized no traditions, they spoke tono public. Each was to express, as he thought best, whatever he happenedto feel or to think, and to invent, as he went along, the language inwhich he should express it. I think some of these men had the elementsof genius in them and might have done good work; but their task was aheart-breaking and a hopeless one. An art cannot be improvised, and anartist must have some other guide than unregulated emotion. The paththey entered upon had been immemorially marked "no passing"; for many ofthem the end of it was suicide or the madhouse. 

But whatever the aberrations of these, the truePost-Impressionists--whatever the ugliness, the eccentricity, or themoral dinginess into which they were betrayed--I believe them to havebeen, in the main, honest if unbalanced and ill-regulated minds. Whatever their errors, they paid the price of them in poverty, inneglect, in death. With those who pretend to be their descendants to-daythe case is different; they are not paying for their eccentricity ortheir madness, they are making it pay. 

The enormous engine of modern publicity has been discovered by thesemen. They have learned to advertise, and they have found that morbidity, eccentricity, indecency, extremes of every kind and of any degree arecapital advertisement. If one cannot create a sound and living art, onecan at least make something odd enough to be talked about; if one cannotachieve enduring fame, one may make sure of a flaming notoriety. And, asa money-maker, present notoriety is worth more than future fame, for thespeculative dealer is at hand. His interest is in "quick returns" andhe has no wish to wait until you are famous--or dead--before he can sellanything you do. His process is to buy anything he thinks he can "boom, "to "boom" it as furiously as possible, and to sell it before the "boom"collapses. Then he will exploit something else, and there's the rub. Once you have entered this mad race for notoriety, there is no drawingout of it. The same sensation will not attract attention a second time;you must be novel at any cost. You must exaggerate your exaggerationsand out-Herod Herod, for others have learned how easy the game is toplay, and are at your heels. It is no longer a matter ofmisunderstanding and being misunderstood by the public; it is a matterof deliberately flouting and outraging the public--of assumingincomprehensibility and antagonism to popular feeling as signs ofgreatness. And so is founded what Frederic Harrison has called the"shock-your-grandmother school. "

It is with profound regret that one must name as one of the founders ofthis school an artist of real power, who has produced much admirablework--Auguste Rodin. At the age of thirty-seven he attained a sudden andresounding notoriety, and from that time he has been the most talked-ofartist in Europe. He was a consummate modeller, a magnificent workman, but he had always grave faults and striking mannerisms. These faults andmannerisms he has latterly pushed to greater and greater extremes whileneglecting his great gift, each work being more chaotic and fragmentaryin composition, more hideous in type, more affected and emptier inexecution, until he has produced marvels of mushiness and incoherencehitherto undreamed of and has set up as public monuments fantasticallymutilated figures with broken legs or heads knocked off. Now, in hisold age, he is producing shoals of drawings the most extraordinary ofwhich few are permitted to see. Some selected specimens of them hang ina long row in the Metropolitan Museum, and I assure you, upon my word asa lifelong student of drawing, they are quite as ugly and as silly asthey look. There is not a touch in them that has any truth to nature, not a line that has real beauty or expressiveness. They represent thehuman figure with the structure of a jellyfish and the movement of aDutch doll; the human face with an expression I prefer not tocharacterize. If they be not the symptoms of mental decay, they can benothing but the means of a gigantic mystification. 

With Henri Matisse we have not to deplore the deliquescence of a greattalent, for we have no reason to suppose he ever had any. It is truethat his admirers will assure you he could once draw and paint aseverybody does; what he could _not_ do was to paint enough better thaneverybody does to make his mark in the world; and he was a quiteundistinguished person until he found a way to produce some effect uponhis grandmother the public by shocking her into attention. His method isto choose the ugliest models to be found; to put them into the mostgrotesque and indecent postures imaginable; to draw them in the mannerof a savage, or a depraved child, or a worse manner if that be possible;to surround his figures with blue outlines half an inch wide; and topaint them in crude and staring colors, brutally laid on in flat masses. Then, when his grandmother begins to "sit up, " she is told with a graveface that this is a reaction from naturalism, a revival of abstract lineand color, a subjective art which is not the representation of naturebut the expression of the artist's soul. No wonder she gasps andstares!

It seemed, two or three years ago, that the limit of mystification hadbeen reached--that this comedy of errors could not be carried further;but human ingenuity is inexhaustible, and we now have whole schools, Cubists, Futurists, and the like, who joyously vie with each other inthe creation of incredible pictures and of irreconcilable andincomprehensible theories. The public is inclined to lump them alltogether and, so far as their work is concerned, the public is not farwrong; yet in theory Cubism and Futurism are diametrically opposed toeach other. It is not easy to get any clear conception of the doctrinesof these schools, but, so far as I am able to understand them--and Ihave taken some pains to do so--they are something like this:

Cubism is static; Futurism is kinetic. Cubism deals with bulk; Futurismdeals with motion. The Cubist, by a kind of extension of Mr. Berenson'sdoctrine of "tactile values, " assumes that the only character of objectswhich is of importance to the artist is their bulk and solidity--what hecalls their "volumes. " Now the form in which volume is most easilyapprehended is the cube; do we not measure by it and speak of the cubiccontents of anything? The inference is easy: reduce all objects to formswhich can be bounded by planes and defined by straight lines and angles;make their cubic contents measurable to the eye; transform drawing intoa burlesque of solid geometry; and you have, at once, attained to thehighest art. The Futurist, on the other hand, maintains that we knownothing but that things are in flux. Form, solidity, weight areillusions. Nothing exists but motion. Everything is changing everymoment, and if anything were still we ourselves are changing. It is, therefore, absurd to give fixed boundaries to anything or to admit ofany fixed relations in space. If you are trying to record yourimpression of a face it is certain that by the time you have done oneeye the other eye will no longer be where it was--it may be at the otherside of the room. You must cut nature into small bits and shuffle themabout wildly if you are to reproduce what we really see. 

Whatever its extravagance, Cubism remains a form of graphic art. Howeverpedantic and ridiculous its transformation of drawing, it yet recognizesthe existence of drawing. Therefore, to the Futurist, Cubism isreactionary. What difference does it make, he asks, whether you draw ahead round or square? Why draw a head at all? The Futurist denies thefundamental postulates of the art of painting. Painting has always, andby definition, represented upon a surface objects supposed to liebeyond it and to be seen through it. Futurism pretends to place thespectator inside the picture and to represent things around him orbehind him as well as those in front of him. Painting has always assumedthe single moment of vision, and, though it has sometimes placed morethan one picture on the same canvas, it has treated each picture as seenat a specific instant of time. Futurism attempts systematically tocombine the past and the future with the present, as if all the picturesin a cinematograph film were to be printed one over the other; to paintno instant but to represent the movement of time. It aims at nothingless than the abrogation of all recognized laws, the total destructionof all that has hitherto passed for art. 

Do you recall the story of the man who tried to count a litter of pigs, but gave it up because one little pig ran about so fast that he couldnot be counted? One finds oneself in somewhat the same predicament whenone tries to describe these "new movements" in art. The movement is sorapid and the men shift their ground so quickly that there is no tellingwhere to find them. You have no sooner arrived at some notion of thedifference between Cubism and Futurism than you find your Cubist doingthings that are both Cubist and Futurist, or neither Cubist norFuturist, according as you look at them. You find things made up ofgeometrical figures to give volume, yet with all the parts many timesrepeated to give motion. You find things that have neither bulk normotion but look like nothing so much as a box of Chinese tangramsscattered on a table. Finally, you have assemblages of lines that do notdraw anything, even cubes or triangles; and we are assured that thereis now a newest school of all, called Orphism, which, finding still somevestiges of intelligibility in any assemblage of lines, reduceseverything to shapeless blotches. Probably the first of Orphic pictureswas that produced by the quite authentic donkey who was induced to smeara canvas by lashing a tail duly dipped in paint. It was given a title asOrphic as the painting, was accepted by a jury anxious to find new formsof talent, and was hung in the _Salon d'Automne. _

In all this welter of preposterous theories there is but one thingconstant--one thing on which all these theorists are agreed. It is thatall this strange stuff is symbolic and shadows forth the impressions andemotions of the artist: represents not nature but his feeling aboutnature; is the expression of his mind or, as they prefer to call it, hissoul. It may be so. All art is symbolic; images are symbols; words aresymbols; all communication is by symbols. But if a symbol is to serveany purpose of communication between one mind and another it must be asymbol accepted and understood by both minds. If an artist is to choosehis symbols to suit himself, and to make them mean anything he chooses, who is to say what he means or whether he means anything? If a man wereto rise and recite, with a solemn voice, words like "Ajakan maradaktecor sosthendi, " would you know what he meant? If he wished you tobelieve that these symbols express the feeling of awe caused by thecontemplation of the starry heavens, he would have to tell you so _inyour own language_; and even then you would have only his word for it. He may have meant them to express that, but do they? The apologists ofthe new schools are continually telling us that we must give thenecessary time and thought to learn the language of these men before wecondemn them. Why should we? Why should not they learn the universallanguage of art? It is they who are trying to say something. When theyhave learned to speak that language and have convinced us that they havesomething to say in it which is worth listening to, then, and not tillthen, we may consent to such slight modification of it as may fit itmore closely to their thought. 

If these gentlemen really believe that their capriciously chosen symbolsare fit vehicles for communication with others, why do they fall back onthat old, old symbol, the written word? Why do they introduce, in thevery midst of a design in which everything else is dislocated, a name ora word in clear Roman letters? Or why do they give their pictures titlesand, lest you should neglect to look in the catalogue, print the titlequite carefully and legibly in the corner of the picture itself? Theyknow that they must set you to hunting for their announced subject oryou would not look twice at their puzzles. 

Now, there is only one word for this denial of all law, thisinsurrection against all custom and tradition, this assertion ofindividual license without discipline and without restraint; and thatword is "anarchy. " And, as we know, theoretic anarchy, though it may notalways lead to actual violence, is a doctrine of destruction. It is soin art, and these artistic anarchists are found proclaiming that thepublic will never understand or accept their art while anything remainsof the art of the past, and demanding that therefore the art of the pastshall be destroyed. It is actual, physical destruction of pictures andstatues that they call for, and in Italy, that great treasury of theworld's art, has been raised the sinister cry: "Burn the museums!" Theyhave not yet taken to the torch, but if they were sincere they would doit; for their doctrine calls for nothing less than the reduction ofmankind to a state of primitive savagery that it may begin again at thebeginning. 

Fortunately, they are not sincere. There may be among them those whohonestly believe in that exaltation of the individual and that revoltagainst all law which is the danger of our age. But, for the most part, if they have broken from the fold and "like sheep have gone astray, "they have shown a very sheep-like disposition to follow the bell-wether. They are fond of quoting a saying of Gauguin's that "one must be eithera revolutionist or a plagiary"; but can any one tell theserevolutionists apart? Can any one distinguish among them such definiteand logically developed personalities as mark even schoolmen and"plagiarists" like Meissonier and Gérôme? If any one of these men stoodalone, one might believe his eccentricities to be the mark of an extremeindividuality; one cannot believe it when one finds the sameeccentricities in twenty of them. 

No, it is not for the sake of unhampered personal development that youngartists are joining these new schools; it is because they are offered ashort cut to a kind of success. As there are no more laws and no morestandards, there is nothing to learn. The merest student is at once setupon a level with the most experienced of his instructors, and boys andgirls in their teens are hailed as masters. Art is at last made easy, and there are no longer any pupils, for all have become teachers. Toborrow Doctor Johnson's phrase, "many men, many women, and manychildren" could produce art after this fashion; and they do. 

So right are the practitioners of this puerile art in their proclaimedbelief that the public will never accept it while anything else exists, that one might be willing to treat it with the silent contempt itdeserves were it not for the efforts of certain critics and writers forthe press to convince us that it ought to be accepted. Some of these menseem to be intimidated by the blunders of the past. Knowing thatcontemporary criticism has damned almost every true artist of thenineteenth century, they are determined not to be caught napping; andthey join in shouts of applause as each new harlequin steps upon thestage. They forget that it is as dangerous to praise ignorantly as toblame unjustly, and that the railer at genius, though he may seem moremalevolent, will scarce appear so ridiculous to posterity as the dupe ofthe mountebank. Others of them are, no doubt, honest victims of thatillusion of progress to which we are all more or less subject--to thatingrained belief that all evolution is upward and that the latest thingmust necessarily be the best. They forget that the same process whichhas relieved man of his tail has deprived the snake of his legs and thekiwi of his wings. They forget that art has never been and cannot becontinuously progressive; that it is only the sciences connected withart that are capable of progress; and that the "Henriade" is not agreater poem than the "Divine Comedy" because Voltaire has learned thefalsity of the Ptolemaic astronomy. Finally, these writers, like otherpeople, desire to seem knowing and clever; and if you appear to admirevastly what no one else understands you pass for a clever man. 

I have looked through a good deal of the writings of these "up-to-date"critics in the effort to find something like an intelligible argumentor a definite statement of belief. I have found nothing but thecontinually repeated assumption that these new movements, in all theirvarieties, are "living" and "vital. " I can find no grounds stated forthis assumption and can suppose only that what is changing with greatrapidity is conceived to be alive; yet I know nothing more productive ofrapid changes than putrefaction. 

Do not be deceived. This is not vital art, it is decadent and corrupt. True art has always been the expression by the artist of the ideals ofhis time and of the world in which he lived--ideals which were his ownbecause he was a part of that world. A living and healthy art never hasexisted and never can exist except through the mutual understanding andco-operation of the artist and his public. Art is made for man and has asocial function to perform. We have a right to demand that it shall beboth human and humane; that it shall show some sympathy in the artistwith our thoughts and our feelings; that it shall interpret our idealsto us in that universal language which has grown up in the course ofages. We have a right to reject with pity or with scorn the stammeringsof incompetence, the babble of lunacy, or the vaporing of imposture. Butmutual understanding implies a duty on the part of the public as well ason the part of the artist, and we must give as well as take. We must beat the pains to learn something of the language of art in which we bidthe artist speak. If we would have beauty from him we must sympathizewith his aspiration for beauty. Above all, if we would have himinterpret for us our ideals we must have ideals worthy of suchinterpretation. Without this co-operation on our part we may have abetter art than we deserve, for noble artists will be born, and theywill give us an art noble in its essence however mutilated and shorn ofits effectiveness by our neglect. It is only by being worthy of it thatwe can hope to have an art we may be proud of--an art lofty in itsinspiration, consummate in its achievement, disciplined in its strength. 

II

JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET

Jean François Millet, who lived hard and died poor, is now perhaps themost famous artist of the nineteenth century. His slightest work isfought for by dealers and collectors, and his more important pictures, if they chance to change hands, bring colossal and almost incredibleprices. And of all modern reputations his, so far as we can see, seemsmost likely to be enduring. If any painter of the immediate past isdefinitively numbered with the great masters, it is he. Yet the popularadmiration for his art is based on a I misapprehension almost asprofound as that of those contemporaries who decried and opposed him. They thought him violent, rude, ill-educated, a "man of the woods, " arevolutionist, almost a communist. We are apt to think of him as agentle sentimentalist, a soul full of compassion for the hard lot of thepoor, a man whose art achieves greatness by sheer feeling rather than byknowledge and intellect. In spite of his own letters, in spite of thetestimony of many who knew him well, in spite of more than one piece ofilluminating criticism, these two misconceptions endure; and, for themany, Millet is still either the painter of "The Man with the Hoe, " apowerful but somewhat exceptional work, or the painter of "L'Angelus, "precisely the least characteristic picture he ever produced. There is alegendary Millet, in many ways a very different man from the real one, and, while the facts of his life are well known and undisputed, theinterpretation of them is colored by preconceptions and strained to makethem fit the legend. 

Altogether too much, for instance, has been made of the fact thatMillet was born a peasant. He was so, but so were half the artists andpoets who come up to Paris and fill the schools and the cafés of thestudent quarters. To any one who has known these young _rapins_, andwondered at the grave and distinguished members of the Institute intowhich many of them have afterward developed, it is evident that thisstudious youth--who read Virgil in the original and Homer andShakespeare and Goethe in translations--probably had a much morecultivated mind and a much sounder education than most of his fellowstudents under Delaroche. Seven years after this Norman farmer's soncame to Paris, with a pension of 600 francs voted by the town council ofCherbourg, the son of a Breton sabot-maker followed him there with aprecisely similar pension voted by the town council of Roche-sur-Yon;and the pupil of Langlois had had at least equal opportunities withthe pupil of Sartoris. Both cases were entirely typical of Frenchmethods of encouraging the fine arts, and the peasant origin of Milletis precisely as significant as the peasant origin of Baudry. 

[Illustration: Plate 2. --Millet. "The Sower. "In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vanderbilt collection. ]

Baudry persevered in the course marked out for him and, after failingthree times, received the _Prix de Rome_ and became the pensioner of thestate. Millet took umbrage at Delaroche's explanation that his supportwas already pledged to another candidate for the prize, and left the_atelier_ of that master after little more than a year's work. But thathe had already acquired most of what was to be learned there is shown, if by nothing else, by the master's promise to push him for the prizethe year following. This was in 1838, and for a year or two longerMillet worked in the life classes of Suisse and Boudin without a master. His pension was first cut down and then withdrawn altogether, and hewas thrown upon his own resources. His struggles and his poverty duringthe next few years were those of many a young artist, aggravated, in hiscase, by two imprudent marriages. But during all the time that he waspainting portraits in Cherbourg or little nudes in Paris he was steadilygaining reputation and making friends. If we had not the picturesthemselves to show us how able and how well-trained a workman he was, the story told us by Wyatt Eaton, in "Modern French Masters, " wouldconvince us. It was in the last year of Millet's life that he told theyoung American how, in his early days, a dealer would come to him for apicture and, "having nothing painted, he would offer the dealer a bookand ask him to wait for a little while that he might add a few touchesto the picture. " He would then go into his studio and take a freshcanvas, or a panel, and in two hours bring out a little nude figure, which he had painted during that time, and for which he would receivetwenty or twenty-five francs. It was the work of this time that Diazadmired for its color and its "immortal flesh painting"; that causedGuichard, a pupil of Ingres, to tell his master that Millet was thefinest draughtsman of the new school; that earned for its author thetitle of "master of the nude. "

He did all kinds of work in these days, even painting signs andillustrating sheet music, and it was all capital practice for a youngman, but it was not what he wanted to do. A great deal has been made ofthe story of his overhearing some one speak of him as "a fellow whonever paints anything but naked women, " and he is represented asundergoing something like a sudden conversion and as resolving to "do nomore of the devil's work. " As a matter of fact, he had, from thefirst, wanted to paint "men at work in the fields, " with their "fineattitudes, " and he only tried his hand at other things because he hadhis living to earn. Sensier saw what seems to have been the first sketchfor "The Sower" as early as 1847, and it existed long before that, while"The Winnower" was exhibited in 1848; and the overheard conversation issaid to have taken place in 1849. There was nothing indecent or immoralin Millet's early work, and the best proof that he felt no moralreprobation for the painting of the nude--as what true painter, especially in France, ever did?--is that he returned to it in the heightof his power and, in the picture of the little "Goose Girl" (Pl. 1) bythe brook side, her slim, young body bared for the bath, produced theloveliest of his works. No, what happened to Millet in 1849 was simplythat he resolved to do no more pot-boiling, to consult no one's tastebut his own, to paint what he pleased and as he pleased, if he starvedfor it. He went to Barbizon for a summer's holiday and to escape thecholera. He stayed there because living was cheap and the place washealthful, and because he could find there the models and the subjectson which he built his highly abstract and ideal art. 

[Illustration: Plate 3. --Millet. "The Gleaners. "In the Louvre. ]

At Barbizon he neither resumed the costume nor led the life of apeasant. He wore sabots, as hundreds of other artists have done, beforeand since, when living in the country in France. Sabots are very cheapand very dry and not uncomfortable when you have acquired the knack ofwearing them. In other respects he dressed and lived like a smallbourgeois, and was _monsieur_ to the people about him. Barbizon wasalready a summer resort for artists before he came there, and the innwas full of painters; while others, of whom Rousseau was one, weresettled there more or less permanently. It is but a short distance fromParis, and the exhibitions and museums were readily accessible. The lifethat Millet lived there was that of many poor, self-respecting, hard-working artists, and if he had been a landscape painter that lifewould never have seemed in any way exceptional. It is only because hewas a painter of the figure that it seems odd he should have lived inthe country; only because he painted peasants that he has been thoughtof as a peasant himself. If he accepted the name, with a kind of pride, it was in protest against the frivolity and artificiality of thefashionable art of the day. But if too much has been made of Millet'speasant origin, perhaps hardly enough has been made of his race. It isat least interesting that the two Frenchmen whose art has most incommon with his, Nicolas Poussin and Pierre Corneille, should have beenNormans like himself. In the severely restrained, grandly simple, profoundly classical work of these three men, that hard-headed, strong-handed, austere, and manly race has found its artisticexpression. 

For Millet is neither a revolutionary nor a sentimentalist, nor even aromanticist; he is essentially a classicist of the classicists, aconservative of the conservatives, the one modern exemplar of the grandstyle. It is because his art is so old that it was "too new" for evenCorot to understand it; because he harked back beyond thepseudoclassicism of his time to the great art of the past, and wasclassic as Phidias and Giotto and Michelangelo were classic, that heseemed strange to his contemporaries. In everything he was conservative. He hated change; he wanted things to remain as they had always been. Hedid not especially pity the hard lot of the peasant; he considered itthe natural and inevitable lot of man who "eats bread in the sweat ofhis brow. " He wanted the people he painted "to look as if they belongedto their place--as if it would be impossible for them ever to think ofbeing anything else but what they are. " In the herdsman and theshepherd, the sower and the reaper, he saw the immemorial types ofhumanity whose labors have endured since the world began and wereessentially what they now are when Virgil wrote his "Georgics" and whenJacob kept the flocks of Laban. This is the note of all his work. It isthe permanent, the essential, the eternally significant that he paints. The apparent localization of his subjects in time and place is anillusion. He is not concerned with the nineteenth century or withBarbizon but with mankind. At the very moment when the EnglishPre-raphaelites were trying to found a great art on the exhaustiveimitation of natural detail, he eliminated detail as much as possible. At the very beginning of our modern preoccupation with the directrepresentation of facts, he abandoned study from the model almostentirely and could say that he "had never painted from nature. " Hissubjects would have struck the amiable Sir Joshua as trivial, yet no onehas ever more completely followed that writer's precepts. His confessionof faith is in the words, "One must be able to make use of the trivialfor the expression of the sublime"; and this painter of "rustic genre"is the world's greatest master of the sublime after Michelangelo. 

[Illustration: Plate 4. --Millet. "The Spaders. "]

The comparison with Michelangelo is inevitable and has been made againand again by those who have felt the elemental grandeur of Millet'swork. As a recent writer has remarked: "An art highly intellectualized, so as to convey a great idea with the lucidity of language, must needsbe controlled by genius akin to that which inspired the ceilingpaintings of the Sistine Chapel. "[A] This was written of the Trajanicsculptors, whose works both Michelangelo and Millet studied and admired, and indeed it is to this old Roman art, or to the still older art ofGreece, that one must go for the truest parallel of Millet's temper andhis manner of working. He was less impatient, less romantic andemotional than Michelangelo; he was graver, quieter, more serene; and ifhe had little of the Greek sensuousness and the Greek love of physicalbeauty, he had much of the antique clarity and simplicity. To expresshis idea clearly, logically, and forcibly; to make a work of art thatshould be "all of a piece" and in which "things should be where theyare for a purpose"; to admit nothing for display, for ornament, even forbeauty, that did not necessarily and inevitably grow out of his centraltheme, and to suppress with an iron rigidity everything useless orsuperfluous--this was his constant and conscious effort. It is an idealeminently austere and intellectual--an ideal, above all, especially andeternally classic. 

[A] Eugénie Strong, "Roman Sculpture, " p. 224. 

Take, for an instance, the earliest of his masterpieces, the first greatpicture by which he marked his emancipation and his determinationhenceforth to produce art as he understood it without regard to thepreferences of others. Many of his preliminary drawings and studiesexist and we can trace, more or less clearly, the process by which thefinal result was arrived at. At first we have merely a peasant sowinggrain; an everyday incident, truly enough observed but nothing more. Gradually the background is cut down, the space restricted, the figureenlarged until it fills its frame as a metope of the Parthenon isfilled. The gesture is ever enlarged and given more sweep and majesty, the silhouette is simplified and divested of all accidental orinsignificant detail. A thousand previous observations are compared andresumed in one general and comprehensive formula, and the typical hasbeen evolved from the actual. What generations of Greek sculptors did intheir slow perfectioning of certain fixed types he has done almost atonce. We have no longer a man sowing, but "The Sower" (Pl. 2), justifying the title he instinctively gave it by its air of permanence, of inevitability, of universality. All the significance which there isor ever has been for mankind in that primæval action of sowing the seedis crystallized into its necessary expression. The thing is done oncefor all, and need never--can never be done again. Has any one elsehad this power since Michelangelo created his "Adam"?

[Illustration: Plate 5. --Millet. "The Potato Planters. "In the Quincy A. Shaw Collection. ]

If even Millet never again attained quite the august impressiveness ofthis picture it is because no other action of rustic man has so wide orso deep a meaning for us as this of sowing. All the meaning there is inan action he could make us feel with entire certainty, and always heproceeds by this method of elimination, concentration, simplification, insistence on the essential and the essential only. One of the mostperfect of all his pictures--more perfect than "The Sower" on account ofqualities of mere painting, of color, and of the rendering of landscape, of which I shall speak later--is "The Gleaners" (Pl. 3). Here one figureis not enough to express the continuousness of the movement; the utmostsimplification will not make you feel, as powerfully as he wishes you tofeel it, the crawling progress, the bending together of back andthighs, the groping of worn fingers in the stubble. The line must bereinforced and reduplicated, and a second figure, almost a facsimile ofthe first, is added. Even this is not enough. He adds a third figure, not gathering the ear, but about to do so, standing, but stooped forwardand bounded by one great, almost uninterrupted curve from the peak ofthe cap over her eyes to the heel which half slips out of the sabot, andthe thing is done. The whole day's work is resumed in that one moment. The task has endured for hours and will endure till sunset, with only anoccasional break while the back is half-straightened--there is not timeto straighten it wholly. It is the triumph of significant composition, as "The Sower" is the triumph of significant draughtsmanship. 

Or, when an action is more complicated and difficult of suggestion, asis that, for instance, of digging, he takes it at the beginning and atthe end, as in "The Spaders" (Pl. 4), and makes you understandeverything between. One man is doubled over his spade, his whole weightbrought to bear on the pressing foot which drives the blade into theground. The other, with arms outstretched, gives the twisting motionwhich lets the loosened earth fall where it is to lie. Each of thesepositions is so thoroughly understood and so definitely expressed thatall the other positions of the action are implied in them. You feel therecurrent rhythm of the movement and could almost count the falling ofthe clods. 

So far did Millet push the elimination of non-essentials that his headshave often scarcely any features, his hands, one might say, are withoutfingers, and his draperies are so simplified as to suggest the wittyremark that his peasants are too poor to afford any folds in theirgarments. The setting of the great, bony planes of jaw and cheek andtemple, the bulk and solidity of the skull, and the direction of theface--these were, often enough, all he wanted of a head. Look at thehand of the woman in "The Potato Planters" (Pl. 5), or at those of theman in the same picture, and see how little detail there is in them, yethow surely the master's sovereign draughtsmanship has made you feeltheir actual structure and function! And how inevitably the garments, with their few and simple folds, mould and accent the figures beneaththem, "becoming, as it were, a part of the body and expressing, evenmore than the nude, the larger and simpler forms of nature"! Howexplicitly the action of the bodies is registered, how perfectly theamount of effort apparent is proportioned to the end to be attained! Onecan feel, to an ounce, it seems, the strain upon the muscles implied bythat hoe-full of earth. Or look at the easier attitude of "TheGrafter" (Pl. 6), engaged upon his gentler task, and at the monumentalsilhouette of the wife, standing there, babe in arms, a type of eternalmotherhood and of the fruitfulness to come. 

[Illustration: Plate 6. --Millet. "The Grafter. "In the collection of William Rockefeller. ]

Oftener than anything, perhaps, it was the sense of weight thatinterested Millet. It is the adjustment of her body to the weight of thechild she carries that gives her statuesque pose to the wife of thegrafter. It is the drag of the buckets upon the arms that gives herwhole character to the magnificent "Woman Carrying Water, " in theVanderbilt collection. It is the erect carriage, the cautious, rhythmicwalk, keeping step together, forced upon them by the sense of weight, which gives that gravity and solemnity to the bearers of "The New-BornCalf" (Pl. 7), which was ridiculed by Millet's critics as more befittingthe bearers of the bull Apis or the Holy Sacrament. The artist himselfwas explicit in this instance as in that of the "Woman Carrying Water. ""The expression of two men carrying a load on a litter, " he says, "naturally depends on the weight which rests upon their arms. Thus, ifthe weight is equal, their expression will be the same, whether theybear the Ark of the Covenant or a calf, an ingot of gold or a stone. "Find that expression, whether in face or figure, render it clearly, "with largeness and simplicity, " and you have a great, a grave, aclassic work of art. "We are never so truly Greek, " he said, "as when weare simply painting our own impressions. " Certainly his own way ofpainting his impressions was more Greek than anything else in the wholerange of modern art. 

In the epic grandeur of such pictures as these there is something akinto sadness, though assuredly Millet did not mean them to be sad. Did henot say of the "Woman Carrying Water": "I have avoided, as I always do, with a sort of horror, everything that might verge on the sentimental"?He wished her to seem "to do her work simply and cheerfully ... As apart of her daily task and the habit of her life. " And he was not alwaysin the austere and epical mood. He could be idyllic as well, and if hecould not see "the joyous side" of life or nature he could feel and makeus feel the charm of tranquillity. Indeed, this remark of his about thejoyous side of things was made in the dark, early days when life washardest for him. He broadened in his view as he grew older andconditions became more tolerable, and he has painted a whole series oflittle pictures of family life and of childhood that, in their smilingseriousness, are endlessly delightful. The same science, the samethoughtfulness, the same concentration and intellectual grasp thatdefined for us the superb gesture of "The Sower" have gone to thedepiction of the adorable uncertainty, between walking and falling, ofthose "First Steps" (Pl. 8) from the mother's lap to the outstretchedarms of the father; and the result, in this case as in the other, is athing perfectly and permanently expressed. Whatever Millet has done isdone. He has "characterized the type, " as it was his dream to do, andwritten "hands off" across his subject for all future adventurers. 

Finally, he rises to an almost lyric fervor in that picture of thelittle "Goose Girl" bathing, which is one of the most purely andexquisitely beautiful things in art. In this smooth, young bodyquivering with anticipation of the coolness of the water; in theserounded, slender limbs with their long, firm, supple lines; in theunconscious, half-awkward grace of attitude and in the glory ofsunlight splashing through the shadow of the willows, there is a wholesong of joy and youth and the goodness of the world. The picture existsin a drawing or pastel, which has been photographed by Braun, as well asin the oil-painting, and Millet's habit of returning again and again toa favorite subject renders it difficult to be certain which is theearlier of the two; but I imagine this drawing to be a study for thepicture. At first sight the figure in it is more obviously beautifulthan in the other version, and it is only after a time that one beginsto understand the changes that the artist was impelled to make. It isalmost too graceful, too much like an antique nymph. No one could findany fault with it, but by an almost imperceptible stiffening of the linehere and there, a little greater turn of the foot upon the ankle and ofthe hand upon the wrist, the figure in the painting has been given anaccent of rusticity that makes it more human, more natural, and moreappealing. She is no longer a possible Galatea or Arethusa, she is onlya goose girl, and we feel but the more strongly on that account theeternal poem of the healthy human form. 

[Illustration: Plate 7. --Millet. "The New-Born Calf. "In the Art Institute, Chicago. ]

The especial study of the nineteenth century was landscape, and Milletwas so far a man of his time that he was a great landscape painter; buthis treatment of landscape was unlike any other, and, like his owntreatment of the figure, in its insistence on essentials, itselimination of the accidental, its austere and grand simplicity. I haveheard, somewhere, a story of his saying, in answer to praise of his workor inquiry as to his meaning: "I was trying to express the differencebetween the things that lie flat and the things that stand upright. "That is the real motive of one of his masterpieces--one that in somemoods seems the greatest of them all--"The Shepherdess" (Pl. 9), thatis, or used to be, in the Chauchard collection. In this nobly tranquilwork, in which there is no hint of sadness or revolt, are to be foundall his usual inevitableness of composition and perfection ofdraughtsmanship--note the effect of repetition in the sheep, "fortyfeeding like one"--but the glory of the picture is in the infiniterecession of the plain that lies flat, the exact notation of thesuccessive positions upon it of the things that stand upright, from thetrees and the hay wain in the extreme distance, almost lost in sky, through the sheep and the sheep-dog and the shepherdess herself, knitting so quietly, to the dandelions in the foreground, each with its"aureole" of light. Of these simple, geometrical relations, and of theenveloping light and air by which they are expressed, he has made a hymnof praise. 

The background of "The Gleaners, " with its baking stubble-field underthe midday sun, its grain stacks and laborers and distant farmstead, alltremulous in the reflected waves of heat, indistinct and almostindecipherable yet unmistakable, is nearly as wonderful; and no one hasever so rendered the solemnity and the mystery of night as has he in themarvellous "Sheepfold" of the Walters collection. But the greatest ofall his landscapes--one of the greatest landscapes ever painted--is his"Spring" (Pl. 10), of the Louvre, a pure landscape this time, containingno figure. In the intense green of the sunlit woods against the blackrain-clouds that are passing away, in the jewel-like brilliancy of theblossoming apple-trees, and the wet grass in that clear air after theshower; in the glorious rainbow drawn in dancing light across the sky, we may see, if anywhere in art, some reflection of the "infinitesplendors" which Millet tells us he saw in nature. 

[Illustration: Plate 8. --Millet. "The First Steps. "]

In the face of such results as these it seems absurd to discuss thequestion whether or not Millet was technically a master of his trade, asif the methods that produced them could possibly be anything but goodmethods for the purpose; but it is still too much the fashion to say andthink that the great artist was a poor painter--to speak slightingly ofhis accomplishment in oil-painting and to seem to prefer his drawingsand pastels to his pictures. We have seen that he was a supremely abletechnician in his pot-boiling days and that the color and handling ofhis early pictures were greatly admired by so brilliant a virtuoso asDiaz. But this "flowery manner" would not lend itself to the expressionof his new aims and he had to invent another. He did so stumblingly atfirst, and the earliest pictures of his grand style have a certainharshness and ruggedness of surface and heaviness of color which hiscritics could not forgive any more than the Impressionists, who haveoutdone that ruggedness, can forgive him his frequent use of a warmgeneral tone inclining to brownness. His ideal of form and ofcomposition he possessed complete from the beginning; his mastery oflight and color and the handling of materials was slower of acquirement;but he did acquire it, and in the end he is as absolute a master ofpainting as of drawing. He did not see nature in blue and violet, asMonet has taught us to see it, and little felicities and facilities ofrendering, and anything approaching cleverness or the parade ofvirtuosity he hated; but he knew just what could be done with thick orthin painting, with opaque or transparent pigment, and he could make hisfew and simple colors say anything he chose. In his mature work there isa profound knowledge of the means to be employed and a great economyin their use, and there is no approach to indiscriminate or meaninglessloading. "Things are where they are for a purpose, " and if the surfaceof a picture is rough in any place it is because just that degree ofroughness was necessary to attain the desired effect. He could make merepaint express light as few artists have been able to do--"TheShepherdess" is flooded with it--and he could do this without anysacrifice of the sense of substance in the things on which the lightfalls. If some of his canvases are brown it is because brown seemed tohim the appropriate note to express what he had to say; "The Gleaners"glows with almost the richness of a Giorgione, and other pictures arehoney-toned or cool and silvery or splendidly brilliant. And in whateverkey he painted, the harmony of his tones and colors is as large, assimple, and as perfect as the harmony of his lines and masses. 

[Illustration: Plate 9. --Millet. "The Shepherdess. "In the Chauchard collection, Louvre. ]

But if we cannot admit that Millet's drawings are better than hispaintings, we may be very glad he did them. His great epic of the soilmust have lacked many episodes, perhaps whole books and cantos, if ithad been written only in the slower and more elaborate method. Thecomparative slightness and rapidity of execution of his drawings andpastels enabled him to register many inventions and observations that wemust otherwise have missed, and many of these are of the highest value. His long training in seizing the essential in anything he saw enabledhim, often, to put more meaning into a single rapid line than anothercould put into a day's painful labor, and some of his slightest sketchesare astonishingly and commandingly expressive. Other of his drawingswere worked out and pondered over almost as lovingly as his completestpictures. But so instinctively and inevitably was he a composer thateverything he touched is a complete whole--his merest sketch or his mostelaborated design is a unit. He has left no fragments. His paintings, his countless drawings, his few etchings and woodcuts are all of apiece. About everything there is that air of finality which marks thework destined to become permanently a classic. 

[Illustration: Plate 10. --Millet. "Spring. "In the Louvre. ]

Here and there, by one or another writer, most or all of what I havebeen trying to say has been said already. It is the more likely to betrue. And if these true things have been said, many other things havebeen said also which seem to me not so true, or little to the purpose, so that the image I have been trying to create must differ, for betteror for worse, from that which another might have made. At least I mayhave looked at the truth from a slightly different angle and so haveshown it in a new perspective. And, at any rate, it is well that truethings should be said again from time to time. It can do no harm thatone more person should endeavor to give a reason for his admiration of agreat and true artist and should express his conviction that among theworld's great masters the final place of Jean François Millet is notdestined to be the lowest. 

III

THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS[B]

[B] Read before the joint meeting of The American Academy of Arts andLetters and The National Institute of Arts and Letters, December 13, 1912. 

In these days all of us, even Academicians, are to some extent believersin progress. Our golden age is no longer in the past, but in the future. We know that our early ancestors were a race of wretched cave-dwellers, and we believe that our still earlier ancestors were possessed of tailsand pointed ears. Having come so far, we are sometimes inclined toforget that not every step has been an advance and to entertain anillogical confidence that each future step must carry us still furtherforward; having indubitably progressed in many things, we think ofourselves as progressing in all. And as the pace of progress in scienceand in material things has become more and more rapid, we have come toexpect a similar pace in art and letters, to imagine that the art of thefuture must be far finer than the art of the present or than that of thepast, and that the art of one decade, or even of one year, mustsupersede that of the preceding decade or the preceding year, as the1913 model in automobiles supersedes the model of 1912. More than everbefore "To have done is to hang quite out of fashion, " and the onlytitle to consideration is to do something quite obviously new or toproclaim one's intention of doing something newer. The race grows madderand madder. It was scarce two years since we first heard of "Cubism"when the "Futurists" were calling the "Cubists" reactionary. Even thegasping critics, pounding manfully in the rear, have thrown away allimpedimenta of traditional standards in the desperate effort to keep upwith what seems less a march than a stampede. 

But while we talk so loudly of progress in the arts we have an uneasyfeeling that we are not really progressing. If our belief in our own artwere as full-blooded as was that of the great creative epochs, we shouldscarce be so reverent of the art of the past. It is, perhaps, a sign ofanæmia that we have become founders of museums and conservers of oldbuildings. If we are so careful of our heritage, it is surely from somedoubt of our ability to replace it. When art has been vigorously aliveit has been ruthless in its treatment of what has gone before. Nocathedral builder thought of reconciling his own work to that of thebuilder who preceded him; he built in his own way, confident of itssuperiority. And when the Renaissance builder came, in his turn, hecontemptuously dismissed all mediæval art as "Gothic" and barbarous, andwas as ready to tear down an old façade as to build a new one. Even themost cock-sure of our moderns might hesitate to emulate Michelangelo inhis calm destruction of three frescoes by Perugino to make room for hisown "Last Judgment. " He, at least, had the full courage of hisconvictions, and his opinion of Perugino is of record. 

Not all of us would consider even Michelangelo's arrogance entirelyjustified, but it is not only the Michelangelos who have had this beliefin themselves. Apparently the confidence of progress has been as greatin times that now seem to us decadent as in times that we think of astruly progressive. The past, or at least the immediate past, has alwaysseemed "out of date, " and each generation, as it made its entrance onthe stage, has plumed itself upon its superiority to that which wasleaving it. The architect of the most debased baroque grafted his"improvements" upon the buildings of the high Renaissance with anassurance not less than that with which David and his contemporariesbanished the whole charming art of the eighteenth century. Van Orley andFrans Floris were as sure of their advance upon the ancient Flemishpainting of the Van Eycks and of Memling as Rubens himself must havebeen of his advance upon them. 

We can see plainly enough that in at least some of these cases the senseof progress was an illusion. There was movement, but it was not alwaysforward movement. And if progress was illusory in some instances, may itnot, possibly, have been so in all? It is at least worth inquiry how farthe fine arts have ever been in a state of true progress, going forwardregularly from good to better, each generation building on the work ofits predecessors and surpassing that work, in the way in which sciencehas normally progressed when material conditions were favorable. 

If, with a view to answering this question, we examine, howevercursorily, the history of the five great arts, we shall find a somewhatdifferent state of affairs in the case of each. In the end it may bepossible to formulate something like a general rule that shall accordwith all the facts. Let us begin with the greatest and simplest of thearts, the art of poetry. 

In the history of poetry we shall find less evidence of progress thananywhere else, for it will be seen that its acknowledged masterpiecesare almost invariably near the beginning of a series rather than nearthe end. Almost as soon as a clear and flexible language has been formedby any people, a great poem has been composed in that language, whichhas remained not only unsurpassed, but unequalled, by any subsequentwork. Homer is for us, as he was for the Greeks, the greatest of theirpoets; and if the opinion could be taken of all cultivated readers inthose nations that have inherited the Greek tradition, it is doubtfulwhether he would not be acclaimed the greatest poet of the ages. Dantehas remained the first of Italian poets, as he was one of the earliest. Chaucer, who wrote when our language was transforming itself fromAnglo-Saxon into English, has still lovers who are willing for his saketo master what is to them almost a foreign tongue, and yet other loverswho ask for new translations of his works into our modern idiom; whileShakespeare, who wrote almost as soon as that transformation had beenaccomplished, is universally reckoned one of the greatest of worldpoets. There have, indeed, been true poets at almost all stages of theworld's history, but the pre-eminence of such masters as these canhardly be questioned, and if we looked to poetry alone for a type of thearts, we should almost be forced to conclude that art is the reverse ofprogressive. We should think of it as gushing forth in full splendorwhen the world is ready for it, and as unable ever again to rise to thelevel of its fount. 

The art of architecture is later in its beginning than that of poetry, for it can exist only when men have learned to build solidly andpermanently. A nomad may be a poet, but he cannot be an architect; aherdsman might have written the Book of Job, but the great builders aredwellers in cities. But since men first learned to build they have neverquite forgotten how to do so. At all times there have been somewherepeoples who knew enough of building to mould its utility into forms ofbeauty, and the history of architecture may be read more continuouslythan that of any other art. It is a history of constant change and ofcontinuous development, each people and each age forming out of the oldelements a new style which should express its mind, and each stylereaching its point of greatest distinctiveness only to begin a furthertransformation into something else; but is it a history of progress?Building, indeed, has progressed at one time or another. The Romans, with their domes and arches, were more scientific builders than theGreeks, with their simple post and lintel, but were they betterarchitects? We of to-day, with our steel construction, can scrape thesky with erections that would have amazed the boldest of mediævalcraftsmen; can we equal his art? If we ask where in the history ofarchitecture do its masterpieces appear, the answer must be: "Almostanywhere. " Wherever men have had the wealth and the energy to buildgreatly, they have builded beautifully, and the distinctions are lessbetween style and style or epoch and epoch than between building andbuilding: The masterpieces of one time are as the masterpieces ofanother, and no man may say that the nave of Amiens is finer than theParthenon or that the Parthenon is nobler than the nave of Amiens. Onemay say only that each is perfect in its kind, a supreme expression ofthe human spirit. 

Of the art of music I must speak with the diffidence becoming to theignorant; but it seems to me to consist of two elements and to containan inspirational art as direct and as simple as that of poetry, and ascience so difficult that its fullest mastery is of very recentachievement. In melodic invention it is so far from progressive that itsmost brilliant masters are often content to elaborate and to decorate atheme old enough to have no history--a theme the inventor of which hasbeen so entirely forgotten that we think of it as sprung not from themind of one man, but from that of a whole people, and call it afolk-song. The song is almost as old as the race, but the symphony hashad to wait for the invention of many instruments and for a mastery ofthe laws of harmony, and so symphonic music is a modern art. We arestill adding new instruments to the orchestra and admitting to ourcompositions new combinations of sounds, but have we in a hundred yearsmade any essential progress even in this part of the art? Have weproduced anything, I will not say greater, but anything as great as thenoblest works of Bach and Beethoven?

Already, and before considering the arts of painting and sculpture, weare coming within sight of our general law. This law seems to be that, so far as an art is dependent upon any form of exact knowledge, so farit partakes of the nature of science and is capable of progress. So faras it is expressive of a mind and soul, its greatness is dependent uponthe greatness of that mind and soul, and it is incapable of progress. Itmay even be the reverse of progressive, because as an art becomes morecomplicated and makes ever greater demands upon technical mastery, itbecomes more difficult as a medium of expression, while the mind to beexpressed becomes more sophisticated and less easy of expression in anymedium. It would take a greater mind than Homer's to express modernideas in modern verse with Homer's serene perfection; it would take, perhaps, a greater mind than Bach's to employ all the resources ofmodern music with his glorious ease and directness. And greater mindsthan those of Bach and Homer the world has not often the felicity topossess. 

The arts of painting and sculpture are imitative arts above all others, and therefore more dependent than any others upon exact knowledge, moretinged with the quality of science. Let us see how they illustrate oursupposed law. 

Sculpture depends, as does architecture, upon certain laws of proportionin space which are analogous to the laws of proportion in time and inpitch upon which music is founded. But as sculpture represents the humanfigure, whereas architecture and music represent nothing, sculpturerequires for its perfection the mastery of an additional science, whichis the knowledge of the structure and movement of the human body. Thisknowledge may be acquired with some rapidity, especially in times andcountries where man is often seen unclothed. So, in the history ofcivilizations, sculpture developed early, after poetry, but witharchitecture, and before painting and polyphonic music. It reached thegreatest perfection of which it is capable in the age of Pericles, andfrom that time progress was impossible to it, and for a thousand yearsits movement was one of decline. After the dark ages sculpture was oneof the first arts to revive; and again it develops rapidly--though notso rapidly as before, conditions of custom and climate being lessfavorable to it--until it reaches, in the first half of the sixteenthcentury, something near its former perfection. Again it can go nofurther; and since then it has changed but has not progressed. InPhidias, by which name I would signify the sculptor of the pediments ofthe Parthenon, we have the coincidence of a superlatively great artistwith the moment of technical and scientific perfection in the art, and asimilar coincidence crowns the work of Michelangelo with a peculiarglory. But, apart from the work of these two men, a the essential valueof a work of sculpture is by no means always equal to its technical andscientific completeness. There are archaic statues that are almost asnobly beautiful as any work by Phidias and more beautiful than almostany work that has been done since his time. There are bits of Gothicsculpture that are more valuable expressions of human feeling thananything produced by the contemporaries of Buonarroti. Even in times ofdecadence a great artist has created finer things than could beaccomplished by a mediocre talent of the great epochs, and the worldcould ill spare the Victory of Samothrace or the portrait busts ofHoudon. 

As sculpture is one of the simplest of the arts, painting is one of themost complicated. The harmonies it constructs are composed of almostinnumerable elements of lines and forms and colors and degrees oflight and dark, and the science it professes is no less than that of thevisible aspect of the whole of nature--a science so vast that it neverhas been and perhaps never can be mastered in its totality. Anythingapproaching a complete art of painting can exist only in an advancedstage of civilization. An entirely complete art of painting never hasexisted and probably never will exist. The history of painting, afterits early stages, is a history of loss here balancing gain there, of anew means of expression acquired at the cost of an old one. 

We know comparatively little of the painting of antiquity, but we haveno reason to suppose that that art, however admirable, ever attained toripeness, and we know that the painting of the Orient has stopped shortat a comparatively early stage of development. For our purpose the artto be studied is the painting of modern times in Europe from its originin the Middle Ages. Even in the beginning, or before the beginning, while painting is a decadent reminiscence of the past rather than aprophecy of the new birth, there are decorative splendors in theByzantine mosaics hardly to be recaptured. Then comes primitivepainting, an art of the line and of pure color with little modulationand no attempt at the rendering of solid form. It gradually attains tosome sense of relief by the use of degrees of light and less light; butthe instant it admits the true shadow the old brightness and purity ofcolor have become impossible. The line remains dominant for a time andis carried to the pitch of refinement and beauty, but the love for solidform gradually overcomes it, and in the art of the high Renaissance ittakes a second place. Then light-and-shade begins to be studied for itsown sake; color, no longer pure and bright, but deep and resonant, comesin again; the line vanishes altogether, and even form becomessecondary. The last step is taken by Rembrandt, and even color issubordinated to light-and-shade, which exists alone in a world ofbrownness. At every step there has been progress, but there has alsobeen regress. Perhaps the greatest balance of gain against loss and thenearest approach to a complete art of painting were with the greatVenetians. The transformation is still going on, and in our own day wehave conquered some corners of the science of visible aspects which wereunexplored by our ancestors. But the balance has turned against us; ourloss has been greater than our gain; and our art, even in its scientificaspect, is inferior to that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 

And just because there never has been a complete art of painting, entirely rounded and perfected, it is the clearer to us that the finalvalue of a work in that art never has depended on its approach to suchcompletion. There is no one supreme master of painting but a longsuccession of masters of different yet equal glory. If the masterpiecesof architecture are everywhere because there has often been a completeart of architecture, the masterpieces of painting are everywhere for theopposite reason. And if we do not always value a master the more as hisart is more nearly complete, neither do we always value him especiallywho has placed new scientific conquests at the disposal of art. PalmaVecchio painted by the side of Titian, but he is only a minor master;Botticelli remained of the generation before Leonardo, but he is one ofthe immortal great. Paolo Ucello, by his study of perspective, made adistinct advance in pictorial science, but his interest for us is purelyhistoric; Fra Angelico made no advance whatever, but he practisedconsummately the current art as he found it, and his work is eternallydelightful. At every stage of its development the art of painting hasbeen a sufficient medium for the expression of a great man's mind; andwherever and whenever a great man has practised it, the result has beena great and permanently valuable work of art. 

For this seems, finally, to be the law of all the arts--the oneessential prerequisite to the production of a great work of art is agreat man. You cannot have the art without the man, and when you havethe man you have the art. His time and his surroundings will color him;his art will not be at one time or place precisely what it might be atanother; but at bottom the art is the man and at all times and in allcountries is just as great as the man. 

Let us clear our minds, then, of the illusion that there is in anyimportant sense such a thing as progress in the fine arts. We may witha clear conscience judge every new work for what it appears in itself tobe, asking of it that it be noble and beautiful and reasonable, not thatit be novel or progressive. If it be great art it will always be novelenough, for there will be a great mind behind it, and no two great mindsare alike. And if it be novel without being great, how shall we be thebetter off? There are enough forms of mediocre or evil art in the worldalready. Being no longer intimidated by the fetich of progress, when athing calling itself a work of art seems to us hideous and degraded, indecent and insane, we shall have the courage to say so and shall notcare to investigate it further. Detestable things have been produced inthe past, and they are none the less detestable because we are able tosee how they came to be produced. Detestable things are produced now, and they will be no more admirable if we learn to understand the mindsthat create them. Even should such things prove to be not the merefreaks of a diseased intellect that they seem but a necessary outgrowthof the conditions of the age and a true prophecy of "the art of thefuture, " they are not necessarily the better for that. It is only thatthe future will be very unlucky in its art. 

IV

RAPHAEL

There used to be on the cover of the "Portfolio Monographs" littlemedallions of Raphael and Rembrandt, placed there, as the editor, Mr. Hamerton, has somewhere explained, as portraits of the two most widelyinfluential artists that ever lived. In the eighteenth century, oneimagines, Rembrandt's presence by the side of Raphael would have beenthought little less than a scandal. To-day it is Raphael's place thatwould be contested, and he would be superseded, likely enough, byVelazquez. 

There is no more striking instance of the vicissitudes of criticalopinion than the sudden fall of Raphael from his conceded rank as "theprince of painters. " Up to the middle of the nineteenth century hisright to that title was so uncontested that it alone was a sufficientidentification of him--only one man could possibly be meant. That heshould ever need defending or re-explaining to a generation grown coldto him would have seemed incredible. Then came the rediscovery of anearlier art that seemed more frank and simple than his; still later thediscovery of Rembrandt and Velazquez--the romanticist and thenaturalist--and Raphael, as a living influence, almost ceased to exist. It was but a few years ago that the author of a volume of essays on artwas gravely praised by a reviewer for the purely accidental circumstancethat that volume contained no essay on Raphael; and a little later thewriter of a book on the pictures in Rome "had to confess unutterableboredom" in the presence of the Stanze of the Vatican. 

It is not probable that any critic who greatly valued his reputation, orwho had any serious reputation to value, would take quite this tone;but, leaving out of consideration the impressionistic and ultra-moderncriticism which ignores Raphael altogether, it is instructive to notethe way in which a critic so steeped in Italian art as Mr. Berensonapproaches the fallen prince. The artist who used to be considered thegreatest of draughtsmen he will hardly admit to be a draughtsman at all, ranking him far below Pollaiuolo and positively speaking of him as "apoor creature, most docile and patient. " As a colorist and a manipulatorof paint, he places him with Sebastiano del Piombo--that is, among themediocrities. Almost the only serious merit, from his point of view, which he will allow him is a mastery in the rendering of space, sharedin nearly equal measure by Perugino, as, to some extent, by nearly allthe painters of the Umbrian school. For, while he admits that Raphaelwas the greatest master of composition that Europe has produced, heevidently thinks of composition, as do so many other moderns, as amatter of relatively little importance. 

It is not Raphael's popularity that is in question; that is, perhaps, asgreat as ever it was. His works, in one form or another of reproduction, from the finest carbon print to the cheapest lithograph, are still to befound, in the humblest homes as in the most splendid, in nearly everyquarter of the globe. That popularity was always based on what Berensoncalls the "illustrative" qualities of Raphael's work, on the beauty ofhis women, the majesty of his men; on his ability to tell a story as welike it told and to picture a world that we wish might be real. One maynot be prepared to consider these illustrative qualities so negligibleas do many modern critics, or to echo Mr. Berenson's phrase about "thatwhich in art ... Is so unimportant as what ... We call beauty. " Onemight point out that the greatest artists, from Phidias to Rembrandt, have occupied themselves with illustration, and that to formulate theideals of a race and an epoch is no mean task. But, for the moment, wemay neglect all that, our present inquiry being why an artist, oncecounted the greatest of all, is no longer considered very significant bythose who measure by purely artistic standards rather than by that ofillustrative success and consequent popularity. 

We may also leave out of our present consideration Raphael's achievementin the suggestion of space. It is a very real quality and a high one. Ithas doubtless always been an important element in the enjoyability ofRaphael's art, as it is almost the only enjoyable element, for many ofus, in the art of Perugino. But it is an element that has only veryrecently been clearly perceived to exist. If it was enjoyed by theartists and critics, from Raphael's day almost to our own, they wereunconscious of the fact, and the probability is that we enjoy it morethan they did. It will not account for the estimation in which they heldRaphael, and still less will it account for the relative lack ofinterest in him to-day. 

In truth the reason why many modern critics and painters almost dislikeRaphael is the very reason for which he was so greatly revered. Comingin the nick of time, at the close of an epoch of investigation, himselfa man of wide culture and quick intellect but of no special originalityor emotional power, he learned from all his predecessors what they hadto teach and, choosing from the elements of their art those which weresuited to his purpose, formed a perfectly balanced and noble style whichwas immediately accepted as the only style suitable to the expression oflofty ideas in monumental form. He became the lawgiver, the founder ofclassicism, the formulator of the academic ideal. Not to admire him wasto confess oneself a barbarian, and even those who did not really carefor his art hardly dared to say so. As long as the academic idealretained any validity his supremacy endured, and it was only with thedefinitive turning of modern art into the paths of romanticism andnaturalism that revolt became possible. 

But when the world became tired of Raphaelism it inevitably becameunjust to Raphael. It forgot that it was not he who had made his art thetest of that of others--who had erected what, with him, was aspontaneous and original creation into a rigid system of laws. Itconfounded him with his followers and imitators, and, being bored bythem, began to find the master himself a bore. 

For, eclectic as he was by nature, and founder as he was of the academicrégime, the "grand style" of Raphael was yet a new and personalcontribution to art. He drew from many sources, but the principle ofcombination was his own. His originality was in that mastery ofcomposition which no one has ever denied him, but which is verydifferently rated as a quality of art by different temperaments. Almosteverything specifically Raphaelesque in his work is the offspring ofthat power of design in which he is still the unapproached master. Modern criticism is right in denying that he was a draughtsman, if bydraughtsman is meant one deeply preoccupied with form and structure forits own sake. His distinction was to invest the human figure with suchforms as should best fit it to play its part in a scheme of monumentalcomposition. The "style" of his draperies, so much and so justlyadmired, is composition of draperies. He was not a colorist as Titianwas a colorist, or a painter as Velazquez was a painter--he was just somuch of a colorist and a painter as is compatible with being thegreatest of decorative designers. Everything in his finest works isentirely subordinated to the beauty and expressiveness of composition, and nothing is allowed to have too great an individual interest for itspredestined part in the final result. Probably he could not have drawnlike Michelangelo or painted like Hals--certainly, when he onceunderstood himself, he would not have desired to do so. 

Even in his early work he showed his gifts as a composer, and some ofthe small pictures of his Florentine period are quite perfect indesign. Nothing could be better composed within their restricted fieldthan the "Madonna del Cardellino" or the "Belle Jardinière. " Nearly atthe end of the period he made his greatest failure, the "Entombment" ofthe Borghese Gallery. It was his most ambitious effort up to this timeand he wanted to put everything that he had learned into it, to drawlike Michelangelo and to express emotion like Mantegna. He made a hostof studies for it, tried it this way and that, lost all spontaneity andall grasp of the ensemble. What he finally produced is a thing offragments, falling far below his models in the qualities he wasattempting to rival and redeemed by little or nothing of the qualityproper to himself. But, apparently, it answered its purpose. It freedhim from preoccupation with the work of others. When his greatopportunity came to him, in the commission to decorate the Camera dellaSegnatura, his painfully acquired knowledge was sufficiently at hiscommand to give him no further trouble. He could concentrate himself onthe essential part of his problem, the creation of an entirelyappropriate, dignified, and beautiful decorative design. It was the workfor which he was born, and he succeeded so immediately and so admirablyin it that neither he nor any one else has ever been able to fill suchspaces so perfectly again. 

There are fourteen important compositions in the room. The decoration ofthe ceiling had already been begun by Sodoma, and Sodoma's decorativeframework Raphael allowed to remain; partly, perhaps, from courtesy, more probably because its general disposition was admirable and not tobe improved on. If Sodoma had begun any of the larger paintings whichwere to fill his frames they were removed to make way for the new work. There has always been a great deal of discussion as to whether Raphaelhimself invented the admirable scheme of subjects by which the room wasmade to illustrate the Renaissance ideal of culture with its divisioninto the four great fields of learning: divinity, philosophy (includingscience), poetry, and law. In reality, the question is of littleimportance. There seems to be at least one bit of internal evidence, tobe mentioned presently, that even here the artist did not have aperfectly free hand, as we know he did not later. Whoever thought of thesubjects, it was Raphael who discovered how to treat them in such a wayas to make of this room the most perfectly planned piece of decorationin the world. Sodoma had left, on the vaulting, four circular medallionsand four rectangular spaces which were to be filled with figurecompositions. In the circles, each directly above one of the great wallspaces, Raphael placed figures personifying Theology, Philosophy, Poetry and Justice; in the rectangles he illustrated these subjects withthe stories of "The Fall of Man, " "Apollo and Marsyas, " and "TheJudgment of Solomon, " and with that figure, leaning over a celestialglobe, which must be meant for Science. All of these panels are oncurved surfaces, and Raphael's decorative instinct led him, on thisaccount and to preserve the supremacy of the great wall spaces below, tosuppress all distance, placing his figures against a background ofsimulated gold mosaic and arranging them, virtually, upon one plane. There is, therefore, no possible question of "space composition" here. These panels depend for their effect entirely upon composition in twodimensions--upon the perfect balancing of filled and empty spaces, theinvention of interesting shapes, and the arrangement of beautiful lines. It is the pattern that counts, and the pattern is perfect. 

The "Poetry" (Pl. 11) is the most beautiful of the medallions, but theyare all much alike: a draped female figure in the middle, seated to giveit scale, large enough to fill the height of the circle amply butwithout crowding, and winged _putti_, bearing inscribed tablets, oneither side. There are other ways of filling a circle acceptably, asBotticelli had shown and as Raphael was to show again in more than one_tondo_, but for their situation, marking the principal axes of theroom, there is no way so adequate as this. As Mr. Blashfield has said, speaking from experience: "When a modern painter has a medallion to filland has tried one arrangement after another, he inevitably realizes thatit is Raphael who has found the best ordering that could be found; andthe modern painter builds upon his lines, laid down so distinctly thatthe greater the practice of the artist the more complete becomes hisrealization of Raphael's comprehension of essentials in composition. "Not only so, but the modern painter finds as inevitably that, acceptingthis ordering as the best, even then he cannot add another figure tothese four. He may, perhaps, draw it better in detail or give morecharacter to the head, but he cannot capture that felicity of spacing, that absoluteness of balance, that variety and vivacity combined withmonumental repose. The more his nature and training have made him adesigner the more certainly he feels, before that single medallion ofPoetry, that he is in the presence of the inimitable master of design. 

[Illustration: Plate 11. --Raphael. "Poetry. "In the Vatican. ]

If the composition of the rectangles is less inevitable it is onlybecause the variety of ways in which such simple rectangles may befilled is almost infinite. Composition more masterly than that of the"Judgment of Solomon" (Pl. 12), for instance, you will find nowhere; somuch is told in a restricted space, yet with no confusion, the space isso admirably filled and its shape so marked by the very lines thatenrich and relieve it. It is as if the design had determined the spacerather than the space the design. If you had a tracing of the figures inthe midst of an immensity of white paper you could not bound them by anyother line than that of the actual frame. One of the most remarkablethings about it is the way in which the angles, which artists usuallyavoid and disguise, are here sharply accented. A great part of thedignity and importance given to the king is due to the fact that hishead fills one of these angles, and the opposite one contains the handof the executioner and the foot by which the living child is held aloft, and to this point the longest lines of the picture lead. The deadchild and the indifferent mother fill the lower corners. In the middle, herself only half seen and occupying little space, is the true mother, and it seems that her explosive energy, as she rushes to the rescue ofher child, has forced all these other figures back to the confines ofthe picture. Compare this restless yet subtly balanced composition, fullof oblique lines and violent movement, with the gracious, placidformality of the "Adam and Eve, " and you will have some notion of themeaning of this gift of design. 

[Illustration: Plate 12. --Raphael. "The Judgment of Solomon. "In the Vatican. ]

But it is the frescoes on the four walls of this room which areRaphael's greatest triumphs--the most perfect pieces of monumentaldecoration in the world. On the two longer walls, nearly unbrokenlunettes of something over a semicircle, he painted the two greatcompositions of Theology and Philosophy known as the "Disputa" and the"School of Athens. " The "Disputa" (Pl. 13), the earlier of the two, hasthe more connection with the art of the past. The use of gilded reliefin the upper part recalls the methods of Pintoricchio, and the hint ofthe whole arrangement was doubtless taken from those semidomes whichexisted in many churches. But what an original idea it was to transformthe flat wall of a room into the apse of a cathedral, and what asolemnity it imparts to the discussion that is going on! The upper partis formal in the extreme, as it need be for the treatment of such atheme, but even here there is variety as well as stateliness in theattitudes and the spacing. In the lower part the variety becomes almostinfinite, yet there is never a jar--not a line or a fold of drapery thatmars the supreme order of the whole. Besides the uncounted cherubs whichfloat among the rays of glory or support the cloudy thrones of thesaints and prophets, there are between seventy and eighty figures inthe picture; yet the hosts of heaven and the church on earth seemgathered about the altar with its sacred wafer--the tiny circle which isthe focus of the great composition and the inevitable goal of allregards, as it is the central mystery of Catholic dogma. 

[Illustration: Plate 13. --Raphael. The "Disputa. "In the Vatican. ]

Opposite, in the "School of Athens" (Pl. 14), the treatment is differentbut equally successful. The hieratic majesty of the "Disputa" was hereunnecessary, but a tranquil and spacious dignity was to be attained, andit is attained through the use of vertical and horizontal lines--thelines of stability and repose, while the bounding curve is echoed againand again in the diminishing arches of the imagined vaulting. Thefigures, fewer in number than in the "Disputa" and confined to the lowerhalf of the composition, are ranged in two long lines across thepicture; but the nearer line is broken in the centre and the twofigures on the steps, serving as connecting-links between the two ranks, give to the whole something of that semicircular grouping so noticeablein the companion picture. The bas-reliefs upon the architecture and thegreat statues of Apollo and Minerva above them draw the eye upward atthe sides, and this movement is intensified by the arrangement of thelateral groups of figures. By these means the counter curve to the archabove, the one fixed necessity, apparently, of the lunette, isestablished. It is more evident in the perspective curve of the painteddome. Cover this line with a bit of paper, or substitute for it astraight lintel like that seen beyond, and you will be surprised to findhow much of the beauty of the picture has disappeared. The grouping ofthe figures themselves, the way they are played about into clumps orseparated to give greater importance, by isolation, to a particularhead, is even more beyond praise than in the "Disputa. " The whole designhas but one fault, and that is an afterthought. In the cartoon thedisproportioned bulk of Heraclitus, thrust into the foreground andwriting in an impossible attitude on a desk in impossible perspective, is not to be found. It is such a blot upon the picture that one cannotbelieve that Raphael added it of his own motion; rather it must havebeen placed there at the dictation of some meddling cardinal or learnedhumanist who, knowing nothing of art, could not see why any vacant spaceshould not be filled with any figure whose presence seemed to himhistorically desirable. One is tempted to suspect even, so clumsy is thefigure and so out of scale with its neighbors, that the master refusedto disfigure his work himself and left the task to one of hisapprentices. If it had been done by one of them, say Giulio Romano, after the picture was entirely completed and at the time of the"Incendio del' Borgo, " it could not be more out of keeping. 

[Illustration: Plate 14. --Raphael. "The School of Athens. "In the Vatican. ]

Each of these walls has a doorway at one end, and the way in which theseopenings are dissimulated and utilized is most ingenious, particularlyin the "Disputa, " where the bits of parapet which play an important partat either side of the composition, one pierced, the other solid, weresuggested solely by the presence of this door. In the end walls theopenings, large windows much higher than the doors, become of suchimportance that the whole nature of the problem is changed. It is thepierced lunette that is to be dealt with, and Raphael has dealt with itin two entirely different ways. One wall is symmetrical, the window inthe middle, and on that wall he painted the "Parnassus" (Pl. 15), Apolloand the Muses in the centre with groups of poets a little lower oneither side and other groups filling the spaces to right and left of thewindow head. At first sight the design seems less symmetrical and formalthan the others, with a lyrical freedom befitting the subject, but inreality it is no less perfect in its ponderation. The group of treesabove Apollo and the reclining figures either side of him accent thecentrality of his position. From this point the line of heads rises ineither direction to the figures of Homer and of the Muse whose back isturned to the spectator, and the perpendicularity of these two figurescarries upward into the arch the vertical lines of the window. From thispoint the lateral masses of foliage take up the drooping curve and uniteit to the arch, and this curve is strongly reinforced by the building uptoward either side of the foreground groups and by the disposition ofthe arms of Sappho and of the poets immediately behind her, while, todisguise its formality, it is contradicted by the long line of Sappho'sbody, which echoes that of the bearded poet immediately to the right ofthe window and gives a sweep to the left to the whole lower part of thecomposition. It is the immediate and absolute solution of the problem, and so small a thing as the scarf of the back-turned Muse plays itsnecessary part in it, balancing, as it does, the arm of the Muse whostands highest on the left and establishing one of a number ofsubsidiary garlands that play through and bind together the wonderfuldesign. 

[Illustration: Plate 15. --Raphael. "Parnassus. "In the Vatican. ]

The window in the opposite wall is to one side of the middle, and hereRaphael meets the new problem with a new solution. He places a separatepicture in each of the unequal rectangles, carries a simulated corniceacross at the level of the window head, and paints, in the segmentallunette thus left, the so-called "Jurisprudence" (Pl. 16), whichseems to many decorators the most perfect piece of decorative designthat even Raphael ever created--the most perfect piece of design, therefore, in the world. Its subtlety of spacing, its exquisiteness ofline, its monumental simplicity, rippled through with a melody offalling curves from end to end, are beyond description--the reader muststudy them for himself in the illustration. One thing he might miss werenot his attention called to it--the ingenious way in which the wholecomposition is adjusted to a diagonal axis that the asymmetry of thewall may be minimized. Draw an imaginary straight line from the boss inthe soffit of the arch through the middle of the Janus-head of Prudence. It will accurately bisect the central group, composed of this figure andher two attendant genii, will pass through her elevated left knee, thecentre of a system of curves, and the other end of it will strike thetop of the post or mullion that divides the window opening into twoparts. 

[Illustration: Plate 16. --Raphael. "Jurisprudence. "In the Vatican. ]

This single room, the Camera della Segnatura, marks the brief blossomingtime of Raphael's art, an art consummate in science yet full of afreshness and spontaneity--the dew still upon it--as wonderful as itslearning. The master himself could not duplicate it. He tried forVenetian warmth of color in the "Mass of Bolsena" (Pl. 17) andexperimented with tricks of illumination in the "Deliverance of Peter"(Pl. 18), and in these two compositions, struck out new and admirableways of filling pierced lunettes. The balancing, in the one, of thesolitary figure of the pope against the compact group of sevenfigures--a group that has to be carried up above the curved screen inorder to counteract the importance given to Julius by his isolation andby the greater mass of his supporting group below--is a triumph ofarrangement; and here, again, it is notable that the bleeding wafer, thenecessary centre of interest, is situated on a straight line drawndiagonally from the keystone of the arch to the centre of the windowhead, and almost exactly half-way between these two points, while thegreat curve of the screen leads to it from either side. In thesymmetrically pierced lunette opposite, the distribution of the spaceinto three distinct but united pictures, the central one seen throughthe grating of the prison, is a highly ingenious and, on the whole, anacceptable variant on previous inventions. But these two are the last ofthe Vatican frescoes that show Raphael's infallible instinct as acomposer. He grows tired, exaggerates his mannerisms, gives a greaterand greater share of the work to his pupils. The later Stanze are eitherpompous or confused, or both, until we reach the higgledy-piggledy ofthe "Burning of the Borgo" or that inextricable tangle, suggestive ofnothing so much as of a dish of macaroni, the "Battle of Constantine, " apicture painted after the master's death, but for which he probably leftsomething in the way of sketches. 

[Illustration: Plate 17. --Raphael. "The Mass of Bolsena. "In the Vatican. ]

Yet even in what seems this decadence of his talent Raphael only neededa new problem to revive his admirable powers in their full splendor. In1514 he painted the "Sibyls" (Pl. 19) of Santa Maria della Pace, in afrieze-shaped panel cut by a semicircular arch, and the new shape givenhim to fill inspired a composition as perfect in itself and asindisputably the only right one for the place as anything he ever did. Among his latest works were the pendentives of the Farnesina, with thestory of Cupid and Psyche--works painted and even drawn by his pupils, coarse in types and heavy in color but altogether astonishing in freedomand variety of design. The earlier painters covered their vaultingwith ornamental patterns in which spaces were reserved for independentpictures, like the rectangles of the Stanza della Segnatura. It was abold innovation when Michelangelo discarded this system and placed inthe pendentives of the Sistine his colossal figures of the Prophets andthe Sibyls, each on its architectural throne. It was reserved forRaphael to take a step that no earlier painter could have dreamed of andto fill these triangular spaces with free groups relieved against aclear sky which is the continuous background of the whole series. Onemay easily think the earlier system more architecturally fitting, butthe skill with which these groups are composed, their perfectnaturalness, their exhaustless variety, the perfection with which theyfill these awkward shapes, as it were inevitably and without effort, isnothing short of amazing. It is decoration of a festal and informalorder--the decoration of a kind of summer house, fitted for pleasure, rather than of a stately chamber--but it is decoration the mostconsummate, the fitting last word of the greatest master of decorativedesign that the world has seen. 

[Illustration: Plate 18. --Raphael. "The Deliverance of Peter. "In the Vatican. ]

It is this master designer that is the real Raphael, and, but for theelement of design always present in the least of his works, the charmingillustrator, the mere "painter of Madonnas, " might be allowed to sinkcomfortably into artistic oblivion without cause for protest. But thereis another Raphael we could spare less easily, Raphael theportrait-painter. The great decorators have nearly always been greatportrait-painters as well, although--perhaps because--there is littleresemblance between the manner of feeling and working necessary forsuccess in the two arts. The decorator, constantly occupied withrelations of line and space which have little to do with imitation, finds in the submissive attention to external fact necessary to successin portraiture a source of refreshment and of that renewed contact withnature which is constantly necessary to art if it is not to become tooarid an abstraction. Certainly it was so with Raphael, and the master ofdesign has left us a series of portraits comparable only to those ofthat other great designer whose fate was to leave little but portraitsbehind him, Hans Holbein. Allowing for the necessary variation of typeand costume in their models and for the difference between an Italianand a northern education, their methods are singularly alike. Raphaelhas greater elegance and feeling for style, Holbein a richer color senseand, above all, a finer craftsmanship, an unapproachable materialperfection. They have the same quiet, intense observation, the sameimpeccable accuracy, the same preoccupation with the person before themand with nothing else--an individuality to be presented with all itcontains, neither more nor less--to be rendered entirely, and withoutflattery as without caricature. There have been portrait-painters whowere greater painters, in the more limited sense of the word, than thesetwo, and there has been at least one painter whose imaginative sympathygave an inner life to his portraits absent from theirs, but in theessential qualities of portraiture, as distinguished from all otherforms of art, perhaps no one else has quite equalled them. One can giveno greater praise to the "Castiglione" or the "Donna Velata" than to saythat they are fit to hang beside the "Georg Gyze" or the "Christina ofMilan"; and at least one portrait by Raphael, the "Tommaso Inghirami, "in the collection of Mrs. Gardner (Pl. 20)--the original of which thepicture in the Pitti Palace is a replica--has a beauty of surface andof workmanship almost worthy of Holbein himself. 

[Illustration: Plate 19. --Raphael. "The Sibyls. "Santa Maria della Pace, Rome. ]

[Illustration: Plate 20. --Raphael. "Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami. "In the collection of Mrs. Gardner. ]

Raphael's portraits alone, had he done nothing else, would justify agreat reputation, but they form so relatively small a part of his workthat they may almost be neglected in examining his claims to the rankthat used to be assigned him among the world's greatest artists. It is, after all, his unique mastery of composition that is his chief title tofame, and his glory must always be in proportion to the estimation inwhich that quality is held. It was because composition was to him acomparatively unimportant part of painting that Velazquez thought littleof Raphael. It is because, for them, composition, as a distinct elementof art, has almost ceased to exist that so many modern painters andcritics decry Raphael altogether. The decorators have always known thatdesign is the essence of their art, and therefore they have alwaysappreciated the greatest of designers. That is why Paul Baudry, in thethird quarter of the nineteenth century, idolized Raphael and based hisown art upon that of the great Umbrian. To-day, in our own country, mural decoration is again becoming a living art, and the desire for theappropriate decoration of important buildings with monumental works ofpainting is more wide-spread, perhaps, than it has been anywhere at anytime since the Italian Renaissance. So surely as the interest indecorative painting and the knowledge of its true principles become morewidely spread, so surely will the name of Raphael begin to shine againwith something of its ancient splendor. 

But design is something more than the essential quality of muraldecoration--it is the common basis of all the arts, the essential thingin art itself. Each of the arts has its qualities proper to it alone, and it may be right to estimate the painter, the sculptor, thearchitect, or the musician according to his eminence in those qualitieswhich are distinctive of his particular art and which separate it mostsharply from the other arts. In that sense we are right to call FransHals a greater painter than Raphael. But if we estimate a man's artistryby the same standard, whatever the form of art in which it expressesitself, rating him by his power of co-ordinating and composing notes orforms or colors into a harmonious and beautiful unity, then must weplace Raphael pretty near where he used to be placed, admitting but achoice few of the very greatest to any equality with him. If we nolonger call him "the prince of painters" we must call him one of thegreatest artists among those who have practised the art of painting. 

V

TWO WAYS OF PAINTING

Among the modern paintings in the Metropolitan Museum is a brilliant andaltogether remarkable little picture by John Sargent, entitled "TheHermit" (Pl. 21). Mr. Sargent is a portrait-painter by vocation, and thepublic knows him best as a penetrating and sometimes cruel reader ofhuman character. He is a mural painter by avocation and capable, onoccasion, of a monumental formality. In this picture, as in thewonderful collection of watercolors in the Brooklyn Institute of Artsand Sciences, one fancies one sees the essential John Sargent, workingfor himself alone without regard to external demands, and doing what hereally cares most to do. In such work he is a modern of the modernsand, in the broadest sense of the word, a thorough Impressionist. Notthat he shows himself a disciple of Monet or occupies himself with thebroken touch or the division of tones--his method is as direct as thatof Sorolla and his impressionism is of the same kind--a bending of allhis energies to the vivid realization of the effect of the scenerendered as one might perceive it in the first flash of vision if onecame upon it unexpectedly. This picture is better than Sorolla--it isbetter than almost any one. It is perhaps the most astonishingrealization of the modern ideal, the most accomplished transcript of theactual appearance of nature, that has yet been produced. It is becauseof its great merit, because of its extraordinary success in what itattempts, that it leads one to the serious consideration of the natureof the attempt and of the gain and loss involved in the choice thatmodern art has made. 

The picture is exactly square--the choice of this form is, of itself, typically modern in its unexpectedness--and represents a bit of roughwood interior under intense sunlight. The light is studied for itsbrilliancy rather than for its warmth, and if the picture has a fault, granted the point of view of the painter, it is in a certain coldness ofcolor; but such conditions of glaring and almost colorless light doexist in nature. One sees a few straight trunks of some kind of pine orlarch, a network of branches and needles, a tumble of moss-spotted andlichened rocks, a confusion of floating lights and shadows, and that isall. The conviction of truth is instantaneous--it is an actual bit ofnature, just as the painter found it. One is there on that raggedhillside, half dazzled by the moving spots of light, as if set downthere suddenly, with no time to adjust one's vision. Gradually one'seyes clear and one is aware, first of a haggard human head with tangledbeard and unkempt hair, then of an emaciated body. There is a man in thewood! And then--did they betray themselves by some slightmovement?--there are a couple of slender antelopes who were but nowinvisible and who melt into their surroundings again at the slightestinattention. It is like a pictorial demonstration of protective coloringin men and animals. 

[Illustration: Plate 21. --Sargent. "The Hermit. "In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ]

Now, almost any one can see how superbly all this is rendered. Any onecan marvel at and admire the free and instantaneous handling, the web ofslashing and apparently meaningless brush strokes which, at a givendistance, take their places by a kind of magic and _are_ the things theyrepresent. But it takes a painter to know how justly it is observed. Inthese days no painter, whatever may be his deepest convictions, canescape the occasional desire to be modern; and most of us haveattempted, at one time or another, the actual study of the human figurein the open air. We have taken our model into a walled garden or a deepwood or the rocky ravine of a brook and have set ourselves seriously tofind out what a naked man or woman really looks like in the setting ofoutdoor nature. And we have found just what Sargent has painted. Thehuman figure, as a figure, has ceased to exist. Line and structure andall that we have most cared for have disappeared. Even the color offlesh has ceased to count, and the most radiant blond skin of thefairest woman has become an insignificant pinkish spot no more importantthan a stone and not half so important as a flower. Humanity is absorbedinto the landscape. 

Obviously, there are two courses open to the painter. If he is a modernby feeling and by training, full of curiosity and of the scientifictemper, caring more for the investigation of the aspects of nature andthe rendering of natural light and atmosphere than for the telling of astory or the construction of a decoration, he will, if he is ableenough, treat his matter much as Sargent has treated it. The figure willbecome, for him, only an incident in the landscape. It will be importantonly as a thing of another texture and another color, valuable for thedifferent way in which it receives the light and reflects the sky, justas rocks and foliage and water and bare earth are valuable. For to thetrue Impressionist light and atmosphere are the only realities, andobjects exist only to provide surfaces for the play of light andatmosphere. He will abandon all attempt at rendering the material andphysical significance of the human form and will still less concernhimself with its spiritual significance. He will gain a great vividnessof illusion, and he may console himself for what he loses with thereflection that he has expressed the true relation of man to theuniverse--that he has expressed either man's insignificance or man'soneness with nature, according as his temper is pessimistic oroptimistic. 

If, on the other hand, the painter is one to whom the figure as a figuremeans much; one to whom line and bulk and modelling are the principalmeans of expression, and who cares for the structure and stress of boneand muscle; if the glow and softness of flesh appeal strongly to him;above all, if he has the human point of view and thinks of his figuresas people engaged in certain actions, having certain characters, experiencing certain states of mind and body; then he will give up thestruggle with the truths of aspect that seem so vital to the painter ofthe other type and, by a frank use of conventions, will seek toincrease the importance of his figure at the expense of itssurroundings. He will give it firmer lines and clearer edges, willstrengthen its light and shade, will dwell upon its structure or itsmovement and expression. He will so compose his landscape as tosubordinate it to his figure and will make its lines echo and accentuatethat figure's action or repose. When he has accomplished his task hewill have painted not man insignificant before nature but man dominatingnature. 

For an example of this way of representing man's relation to the worldabout him, let us take Titian's "Saint Jerome" (Pl. 22)--a picturesomewhat similar to Sargent's in subject and in the relative size of thefigure and its surroundings. Titian has here given more importance tothe landscape than was common in his day. He also has meant, as Sargenthas, to make a great deal of the wilderness to which his saint hasretired, and to make his saint a lonely human being in a savage place. But the saint and his emotion is, after all, what interests Titian most, and the wildness of nature is valuable to him mainly for its sympathywith this emotion. He wants to give a single powerful feeling and togive it with the utmost dramatic force--to give it theatrically even, one might admit of this particular picture; for it is by no means sofavorable an example of Titian's method, or of the older methods of artin general, as is Sargent's "Hermit" of the modern way of seeing andpainting. To attain this end he simplifies and arranges everything. Helowers the pitch of his coloring to a sombre glow and concentrates thelittle light upon his kneeling figure. He spends all his knowledge on sodrawing and modelling that figure as to make you feel to the utmost itsbulk and reality and the strain upon its muscles and tendons, and heso places everything else on his canvas as to intensify its action andexpression. The gaze of the saint is fixed upon a crucifix high on theright of the picture, and the book behind him, the lines of the rocks, the masses of the foliage, even the general formation of the ground, areso disposed as to echo and reinforce the great diagonal. There is asplendid energy of invention in the drawing of the tree stems, but theeffect is clear and simple with nothing of Sargent's dazzle andconfusion. As for the lion, he is a mere necessary mark ofidentification, and Titian has taken no interest in him. 

[Illustration: Plate 22. --Titian. "St. Jerome in the Desert. "In the Brera Gallery, Milan. ]

Now, it is evident that there is not nearly so much literal truth to theappearance of nature in this picture as in Sargent's. It is not onlythat it would never have occurred to Titian to try to paint theglittering spottiness of sunlight splashing through leafage, or toattempt to raise his key of light to something like that of nature, atthe cost of fulness of color. It is not merely that he translates andsimplifies and neglects certain truths that the world had not yetlearned to see. He deliberately and intentionally falsifies. He knew aswell as we do that a natural landscape would not arrange itself in suchlines and masses for the purpose of throwing out the figure and ofenhancing its emotion. But to him natural facts were but so muchmaterial, to be treated as he pleased for the carrying out of hispurpose. He was a colorist and a chiaroscurist; and he had a great dealmore interest in light and in landscape than most of the painters of histime. If he had been pre-eminently a draughtsman, like Michelangelo, hewould have reduced his light and shade to the amount strictly necessaryto give that powerful modelling of the figure which is the draughtsman'smeans of expression, would have greatly increased the relative size andimportance of the figure, and would have reduced the landscape to abarely intelligible symbol. Had he been a linealist, like Botticelli, hewould have eliminated modelling almost altogether, would haveconcentrated his attention upon the edges of things, and would havereduced his picture to a flat pattern in which the beauty andexpressiveness of the lines should be almost the only attraction. 

For all art is an exchange of gain against loss--you cannot haveSargent's truth of impression and Titian's truth of emotion in the samepicture, nor Michelangelo's beauty of structure with Botticelli's beautyof line. To be a successful artist is to know what you want and to getit at any necessary sacrifice, though the greatest artists maintain anoble balance and sacrifice no more than is necessary. And if a painterof to-day is like-minded with these older masters he will have toexpress himself much in their manner. He will have to make, with hiseyes open, the sacrifices which they made, more or less unconsciously, and to deny a whole range of truths with which his fellows are occupiedthat he may express clearly and forcibly the few truths which he haschosen. 

All truths are good, and all ways of painting are legitimate that arenecessary to the expression of any truth. I am not here concerned toshow that one way is better than another or one set of truths moreimportant than another set of truths. For the present I am desirous onlyof showing why there is more than one way--of explaining the necessityof different methods for the expression of different individualities anddifferent ways of envisaging nature and art. But a little while ago itwas the modern or impressionistic manner that needed explanation. Itwas new, it was revolutionary, and it was misunderstood and disliked. Ageneration of critics has been busy in explaining it, a generation ofartists has been busy in practising it, and now the balance has turnedthe other way. The pressure of conformity is upon the other side, and itis the older methods that need justification and explanation. Theprejudices of the workers and the writers have gradually and naturallybecome the prejudices of at least a part of the public, and it hasbecome necessary to show that the small minority of artists who stillfollow the old roads do so not from ignorance or stupidity or a stolidconservatism, still less from mere wilful caprice, but from necessity, because those roads are the only ones that can lead them where they wishto go. No more magnificent demonstration of the qualities possible tothe purely modern methods of painting has been made than this brilliantlittle picture of Sargent's. All the more is it a demonstration of thequalities impossible to these methods. If such qualities have anypermanent value and interest for the modern world it is a gain for artthat some painters should try to keep alive the methods that renderpossible their attainment. 

VI

THE AMERICAN SCHOOL

In the catalogues of our museums you may find entries like this: "JohnSmith, American school; The Empty Jug" or what-not. In such entrieslittle more than a bare statement of nationality is intended. John Smithis an American, by birth or adoption; that is all that the statement ismeant to convey. But the question occurs: Have we an American school ina more specific sense than this? Have we a body of painters with certaintraits in common and certain differences from the painters of othercountries? Has our production in painting sufficient homogeneity andsufficient national and local accent to entitle it to the name ofAmerican school in the sense in which there is, undoubtedly, a Frenchschool and an English school?

Under the conditions of to-day there are no longer anywhere suchdistinctive local schools as existed in the Renaissance. In Italy, inthose days, there were not only such great schools as the Venetian, theFlorentine, and the Umbrian, differing widely in their point of view, their manner of seeing, and their technical traditions--each little townhad a school with something characteristic that separated its paintersfrom those of other schools in the surrounding towns. To-day every oneknows and is influenced by the work of every one else, and it is onlybroad national characteristics that still subsist. Modern pictures aresingularly alike, but, on the whole, it is still possible to tell anEnglish picture from a French one, and a German or Italian picture fromeither. We may still speak of a Dutch school or a Spanish school withsome reasonableness. Is it similarly and equally reasonable to speak ofan American school? Does a room full of American pictures have adifferent look from a room full of pictures by artists of any othernationality? Does one feel that the pictures in such a room have asomething in common that makes them kin and a something different thatdistinguishes them from the pictures of all other countries? I think theanswer must be in the affirmative. 

We have already passed the stage of mere apprenticeship, and it can nolonger be said that our American painters are mere reflections of theirEuropean masters. Twenty or even ten years ago there may have been sometruth in the accusation. To-day many of our younger painters have had noforeign training at all, or have had such as has left no specific mark of aparticular master; and from the work of most of our older painters it wouldbe difficult to guess who their masters were without reference to acatalogue. They have, through long work in America and under Americanconditions, developed styles of their own bearing no discoverableresemblance to the styles of their first instructors. To take specificexamples, who would imagine from the mural paintings of Blashfield or thedecorations by Mowbray in the University Club of New York that either hadbeen a pupil of Bonnat? Or who, looking at the exquisite landscapes ordelicate figure pieces of Weir, would find anything to recall the name ofGérôme? Some of the pupils of Carolus Duran are almost the only painters wehave who acquired in their school-days a distinctive method of work whichstill marks their production, and even they are hardly distinguishableto-day from others; for the method of Duran, as modified and exemplified byJohn Sargent, has become the method of all the world, and a pupil of Carolussimply paints in the modern manner, like the rest. Those American painterswho have adopted the impressionist point of view, again, have modified itstechnic to suit their own purposes and are at least as different from theImpressionists of France as are the Impressionists of Scandinavia. We havepainters who are undeniably influenced by Whistler, but so have othercountries--the school of Whistler is international--and, after all, Whistlerwas an American. In short, the resemblances between American painting andthe painting of other countries are to-day no greater than the resemblancesbetween the painting of any two of those countries. And I think thedifferences between American painting and that of other countries are quiteas great as, if not greater than, the differences between the paintings ofany two of those countries. 

Another accusation that used to be heard against our painters has beenout-lived. We used to be told, with some truth, that we had learned topaint but had nothing to say with our painting, that we producedadmirable studies but no pictures. The accusation never was true of ourlandscape-painting. Whatever may be the final estimation of the works ofInness and Wyant, there can be no doubt that they producedpictures--things conceived and worked out to give one definite andcomplete impression; things in which what was presented and what waseliminated were equally determined by a definite purpose; things inwhich accident and the immediate dominance of nature had little or nopart. As for Winslow Homer, whether in landscape or figure painting, hiswork was unfailingly pictorial, whatever else it might be. He was agreat and original designer, and every canvas of his was completely anddefinitely composed--a quality which at once removes from the categoryof mere sketches and studies even his slighter and more rapidproductions. And our landscape-painters of to-day are equally paintersof pictures. Some of them might be thought, by a modern taste, tooconventionally painters of pictures--too much occupied with compositionand tone and other pictorial qualities at the expense of freshness ofobservation--while our briskest and most original observers have, manyof them, a power of design and a manner of casting even their freshestobservations into pictorial form that is as admirable as it isremarkable. 

No one could enter one of our exhibitions without feeling the definitelypictorial quality of American landscape-painting, but these exhibitionsdo less justice to the achievement of our figure-painters. The principalreason for this is that many of our most serious figure-painters havebeen so much occupied with mural decoration that their work seldomappears in the exhibitions at all, while the work that they have done isso scattered over our vast country that we rather forget its existenceand, assuredly, have little realization of its amount. It is one of thedefects of our exhibition system that work of this kind, while it is, ofcourse, on permanent exhibition in the place for which it is painted, ishardly ever "exhibited, " in the ordinary sense, in the centres where itis produced. The regular visitor to the Paris salons might know almostall that has been done in France in the way of mural painting. Thepublic of our American exhibitions knows only vaguely and by hearsaywhat our mural painters have done and are doing. It is true that suchwork is infinitely better seen in place, but it is a pity it cannot beseen, even imperfectly, by the people who attend our exhibitions--peoplewho can rarely have the necessary knowledge to read such collections ofsketches, studies, and photographs as are shown at the exhibitions ofthe Architectural League, where, alone, our mural painters can showanything. If it were seen it would surely alter the estimation in whichAmerican figure-painting is held. Such work as was done by the late JohnLa Farge, such work as is being done by Blashfield and Mowbray andSimmons and a dozen others, if not, in the most limited sense of theword, pictorial, is even further removed from the mere sketch orstudy--the mere bit of good painting--than is the finest easel picture. 

But it is not only in mural decoration that serious figure-painting isbeing done in this country. I do not see how any one can deny the nameof pictures to the genre paintings of Mr. Tarbell and Mr. Paxton unlesshe is prepared to deny pictorial quality to the whole Dutch school ofthe seventeenth century; and the example of these men is influencing anumber of others toward the production of thoroughly thought-out andexecuted genre pictures. We have long had such serious figure-paintersas Thayer and Brush, Dewing and Weir. The late Louis Loeb was attemptingfigure subjects of a very elaborate sort. To-day every exhibition showsan increasing number of worthy efforts at figure-painting in either thenaturalistic or the ideal vein. We have pictures with subjectsintelligently chosen and intelligibly treated, pictures with a patternand a clear arrangement of line and mass, pictures soundly drawn andharmoniously colored as well as admirably painted. 

The painters of America are no longer followers of foreign masters orstudents learning technic and indifferent to anything else. They are aschool producing work differing in character from that of other schoolsand at least equal in quality to that of any school existing to-day. 

If so much may be taken as proved, the question remains forconsideration: What are the characteristics of the American school ofpainting? Its most striking characteristic is one that may be considereda fault or a virtue according to the point of view and theprepossessions of the observer. It is a characteristic that hascertainly been a cause of the relatively small success of American workat recent international exhibitions. The American school is, among theschools of to-day, singularly old-fashioned. This characteristic has, undoubtedly, puzzled and repelled the foreigner. It is a time when themadness for novelty seems to be carrying everything before it, whenanything may be accepted so long as it is or seems new, when the effortof all artists is to get rid of conventions and to shake off the"shackles of tradition. " Here is a new people in the blessed state ofhaving no traditions to shake off and from whom, therefore, some pepperywildness might be expected for the tickling of jaded palates. Behold, they are sturdily setting themselves to recover for art the things theothers have thrown away! They are trying to revive the old fashion ofthoughtful composition, the old fashion of good drawing, the old fashionof lovely color, and the old fashion of sound and beautiful workmanship. 

This conservatism of American painting, however, is not of the kind thatstill marks so much of the painting of England. Excepting exceptions, English painting is somewhat stolidly staying where it was. America'sconservatism is ardent, determined, living. It is not standing still;it is going somewhere as rapidly as possible--it might, perhaps, be moretruly called not conservatism but reaction. We have, of course, ourultramodernists, but their audacities are mild compared to those of theFrench or German models they imitate. We have, even more of course, thefollowers of the easiest way--the practitioners of current and acceptedmethods who are alike everywhere. But our most original and mostdistinguished painters, those who give the tone to our exhibitions andthe national accent to our school, are almost all engaged in trying toget back one or another of the qualities that marked the great art ofthe past. They have gone back of the art of the day and are retying theknots that should bind together the art of all ages. 

This tendency shows itself strongly even in those whose work seems, atfirst sight, most purely naturalistic or impressionistic. Among thoseof our painters who have adopted and retained the impressionist technic, with its hatching of broken colors, the two most notable are Mr. Hassamand Mr. Weir. But Mr. Hassam, at his best, is a designer with a sense ofbalance and of classic grace almost equal to that of Corot, and he oftenuses the impressionist method to express otherwise the delicate shimmerof thin foliage that Corot loved. Nay, so little is he a purenaturalist, he cannot resist letting the white sides of naked nymphsgleam among his tree trunks--he cannot refrain from the artist'simmemorial dream of Arcady. As for Mr. Weir, surely nothing could bemore unlike the instantaneousness of true impressionism than hislong-brooded-over, subtle-toned, infinitely sensitive art. 

There is little dreaminess in the work of Mr. Tarbell and the growingnumber of his followers. Theirs is almost a pure naturalism, a "makingit like. " Yet, notably in the work of Mr. Tarbell himself, and to someextent in that of the others, there is an elegance of arrangement, athoroughness in the notation of gradations of light, a beauty and acharm that were learned of no modern. Their art is an effort to bringback the artistic quality of the most artistic naturalism everpractised, that of Vermeer of Delft. 

Others of our artists are going still further back in the history of artfor a part of their inspiration. Mr. Brush has always been a linealistand a student of form, but his earlier canvases, admirable as they were, were those of a docile pupil of Gérôme applying the thoroughness ofGérôme's method to a new range of subjects and painting the AmericanIndian as Gérôme had painted the modern Egyptian. In recent years eachnew picture of his has shown more clearly the influence of the earlyItalians--each has been more nearly a symphony of pure line. 

Even in purely technical matters our painters have been experimentingbackward, trying to recover lost technical beauties. The last picturesof Louis Loeb were underpainted throughout in monochrome, the finalcolors being applied in glazes and rubbings, and to-day a number ofothers, landscape and figure painters, are attempting to restore andmaster this, the pure Venetian method, while still others, among themEmil Carlsen, are reviving the use of tempera. 

But it is in our mural painting even more than elsewhere that theconservative or reactionary tendency of American painting is mostclearly marked. John La Farge was always himself, but when the generalmovement in mural painting began in this country with the ChicagoWorld's Fair and the subsequent decoration of the Library of Congress, the rest of us were much under the influence of Puvis de Chavannes. Eventhen the design was not his, but was founded on earlier examples ofdecorative composition, but his pale tones were everywhere. Little bylittle the study of the past has taught us better. American muralpainting has grown steadily more monumental in design, and at the sametime it has grown richer and fuller in color. To-day, while it is notless but more personal and original than it was, it has more kinshipwith the noble achievements of Raphael and Veronese than has any othermodern work extant. 

And this brings us to the second characteristic of the American schoolof painting: it is rapidly becoming a school of color. We have stillplenty of painters who work in the blackish or chalky or muddy andopaque tones of modern art, but I think we have more men who producerich and powerful color and more men who produce subtle and delicatecolor than any other modern school. The experiments in reviving oldtechnical methods have been undertaken for the sake of purity andluminosity of color and have largely succeeded. The pictures of Mr. Tarbell are far more colored than those of the European painter whosework is, in some ways, most analogous to his, M. Joseph Bail. Mr. Hassam's color is always sparkling and brilliant, Mr. Dewing's delicateand charming, Mr. Weir's subtle and harmonious and sometimes very full. Even Mr. Brush's linear arrangements are clothed in sombre but oftenrichly harmonious tones, and the decorative use of powerful color is themain reliance of such painters as Hugo Ballin. But the note of colorruns through the school and one hardly needs to name individual men. Whether our landscapists glaze and scumble with the tonalists, or usesome modification of the impressionist hatching, it is for the sake ofcolor; and even our most forthright and dashing wielders of the bigbrush often achieve a surprising power of resonant coloring. 

Power, fulness, and beauty of coloring are hardly modern qualities. Muchas impressionism has been praised for restoring color to a colorlessart, its result has been, too often, to substitute whitishness forblackishness. Color has characterized no modern painting since that ofDelacroix and Millet as it characterizes much of the best Americanpainting. The love for and the success in color of our school is, afterall, a part of its conservatism. 

It may seem an odd way of praising a modern school to call it the leastmodern of any. It _would_ be an odd way of praising that school if itslack of modernness were a mere matter of lagging behind or of standingstill and marking time. But if the "march of progress" has beendown-hill--if the path that is trod leads into a swamp or over aprecipice--then there may be most hopefulness for those who can 'boutface and march the other way. I have, elsewhere in this volume, given atsome length some of my reasons for thinking that modern art has beenfollowing a false route and is in danger of perishing in the bog orfalling over the cliff. If it is so we may congratulate ourselves thatthose of our painters who are still following the rest of the world havenot so nearly reached the end of the road, and that those who are moreindependent have discovered in time what that end is and have turnedback. 

It is because it is least that of to-day that I believe our art may bethat of to-morrow--it is because it is, of all art now going, that whichhas most connection with the past that I hope the art of America mayprove to be the art of the future. 

VII

AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS[C]

[C] Address delivered before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences onFebruary 22, 1908. Now revised and enlarged. 

Augustus Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin, Ireland, on the first day ofMarch, 1848, but was brought to America at the age of six months. Hischildhood and youth were passed in the city of New York, as was a greatpart of his working life; and though his origin was foreign, lifelongassociations had stamped him indelibly an American. The greater part ofhis work was done in America; almost all of it was done for America; andI do not think it is fancy that sees in his art the expression of adistinctively American spirit. Yet from his mixed French and Irishblood he may well have derived that mingling of the Latin sense of formwith a Celtic depth of sentiment which was so markedly characteristic ofhis genius. 

His father, Bernard Paul Ernest Saint-Gaudens, was a shoemaker from thelittle town of Aspet in Haute-Garonne, only a few miles from the town ofSaint-Gaudens, from which the family must have drawn its origin and itsname. His mother was Mary McGuinness, a native of Dublin. AugustusSaint-Gaudens was one of several children born to this couple and notthe only artist among them, for his younger brother Louis also attainedsome reputation as a sculptor, though his entire lack of ambitionprevented his achieving all that was expected of him by those who knewhis delicate talent. The boy Augustus attended the public schools of NewYork and received there all the formal education he ever had; but atthirteen it was necessary for him to face the problem of earning hisliving. His artistic proclivities were probably already well marked, andto give them some scope, while assuring him a regular trade at whichmoney could be earned, he was apprenticed in the good old way to a cameocutter named Louis Avet, said to be the first man to cut stone cameos inthe United States. Thus it came about that the greatest of Americansculptors had much such a practical apprenticeship as a Florentine ofthe fifteenth century might have had. He himself always spoke of it as"one of the most fortunate things that ever happened to him" andattributed much of his success to the habit of faithful labor acquiredat this time. Probably, also, the habit of thinking in terms of relief, fostered by years of work at this ancient art, was not without influencein the moulding of his talent. 

His relations with Avet lasted from 1861 to 1864, when his masterquarrelled with him and abruptly dismissed him from his shop. The boywas already a determined person; he believed that he had suffered aninjustice, and, though Avet went to his parents and tried to induce themto send him back, he refused to return. A new master was found for himin the person of a shell-cameo cutter named Jules LeBrethon, and withhim Saint-Gaudens remained three years. During his six years'apprenticeship under his two masters the youth showed already thatenergy and power of will that made him what he was. He meant to besomething more than an artisan, and he spent his evenings in theclasses, first of the Cooper Union, afterward of the National Academy ofDesign, in the hard study of drawing, the true foundation of all thefine arts. It was one of the elements of his superiority in hisprofession that he could draw as few sculptors can, and he always feltthat he owed an especial debt to the Cooper Union, which he was glad torepay when he modelled the statue of its venerable founder. Of the otherinstitution by whose freely given instruction he had profited, theNational Academy of Design, he became one of the most honored members. By 1867, when he was nineteen years old, he had saved a little money andwas master of a trade that could be relied on to bring in more, and hedetermined to go to Paris and begin the serious study of sculpture. Heworked, for a time, at the Petite École, and entered the studio ofJouffroy in the École des Beaux-Arts in 1868, remaining until 1870. During this time, and afterward, he was self-supporting, working halfhis time at cameo cutting until his efforts at sculpture on a largerscale began to bring in an income. 

When the Franco-Prussian War broke out Paris ceased to be a place forthe carrying on of the serious study of art, and Saint-Gaudens went toRome, where his associates were the French prizemen of the day, of whomMercié was one. He remained there until 1874, except for a visit to NewYork in the winter of 1872-3 for the purpose of modelling a bust ofSenator Evarts, and one or two other busts, which were put into marbleupon his return to Rome. In those Roman days he executed his firststatue, a "Hiawatha, " one of his few studies of the nude, and a"Silence, " a not very characteristic draped figure which yet fills withsome impressiveness her niche at the head of the grand stairway of theMasonic Temple on Twenty-fourth Street. 

From 1875 to 1877 he had a studio in New York, where he seems to haveexecuted some of his earliest portrait reliefs. During these years hecame into contact with La Farge, for whom he turned painter and aidedin the execution of the decorations of Trinity Church in Boston. It wasat this time, also, that he received his first commissions for importantpublic work, those for the Farragut statue in Madison Square, theRandall at Sailors' Snug Harbor, and the angels for Saint Thomas'sChurch. He had married Augusta F. Homer in 1877, and in that year, taking his bride and his commissions with him, he returned to Paris, feeling, as many another young Paris-bred artist has felt, that thereonly could such important works be properly carried out. The "Farragut"was completed and exhibited in the plaster at the Salon of 1880, andfrom that time his success was assured. For the rest of his life he wasconstantly busy, receiving almost more commissions for work ofimportance than it was possible for him to carry out. He returned to NewYork in 1880, and in 1881 he opened the studio in Thirty-sixth Street, where he remained for sixteen years and where so many of his greatestworks were executed. From that studio came many of his exquisiteportraits in relief, his caryatids and angelic figures, such as thosefor the Morgan tomb, so unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1882 (a fatesince shared by the earlier angels of Saint Thomas's), the great statuesof Lincoln and Chapin, the "Shaw Memorial, " and the "Adams Memorial";and in it was done all the preliminary work of the great equestrianmonument to General Sherman. 

It is in these years of his prime that he will ever be most fondlyremembered by those--and they are many--who had the privilege of hisfriendship. Admittedly our foremost sculptor, and one of the founders ofthe Society of American Artists, he became at once a person ofimportance in the world of art; and as his brilliant career developedhe established intimate relationships with an ever-widening circle ofmen in every walk of life, while no one who ever knew him well can havefelt anything but an abiding affection for him. That long, white studiobecame a familiar meeting-place for all who were interested in any formof art; and the Sunday afternoon concerts that were held there for manyyears will be looked back to with regret as long as any of theirauditors remain alive. 

This studio was given up when Saint-Gaudens went abroad for the thirdtime, in 1897, to execute the Sherman group, and he never resumed hisresidence in New York. In 1885 he had purchased a property at Cornish, N. H. , just across the Connecticut River from Windsor, Vt. , and when hereturned to this country in 1900, covered with fresh honors but an illman, he made what had been a summer home his permanent abode. He namedit Aspet, after his father's birthplace, and there he erected twostudios and finished his Sherman statue. In these studios were executedthe second "Lincoln, " the Parnell statue for Dublin, and much otherwork. The larger studio was burned in 1904, but was rebuilt and the lostwork re-begun and carried to a conclusion. What can never be quitereplaced were two portraits of himself. A study, of the head only, inthe collection of the National Academy of Design and a sketch by Will H. Low, painted in Paris in 1877, are now the only existing portraits ofhim done from life in his best years. The Metropolitan Museum possessesa portrait of him in his last years, by Miss Ellen Emmet, and a replica, painted since his death, of my own earlier portrait. 

From the illness he brought back from Paris in 1900 Saint-Gaudens neverrecovered. At times he showed something of his old vigor and was ablenot only to do fine work but to indulge more in out-of-door sports thanhe had ever done in his youth, while a growing love for nature and forliterature made his life fuller, in some respects, than in the days whenhis own art more entirely absorbed him. But year by year his strengthgrew less and his intervals of freedom from pain grew shorter, and hewas more and more forced to rely upon the corps of able and devotedassistants which he gathered about him. He developed to an extraordinaryextent the faculty of communicating his ideas and desires to others andof producing through their hands work essentially his own and of aquality entirely beyond their ability; but it was at the cost of astrain upon brain and nerve almost infinitely greater than would havebeen involved in work done with his own hand. In the summer of 1906 hebroke down utterly, the work of his studio was interrupted, and heceased to see even his most intimate friends. He rallied somewhat fromthis attack, and began again his heroic struggle against fate, directingthe work of assistants while himself so weak that he had to be carriedfrom the house to the studio. The end came on the evening of August 3, 1907. He died as he had lived, a member of no church, but a man of pureand lofty character. As he had wished, his body was cremated, and hisashes were temporarily deposited in the cemetery at Windsor, Vt. , acrossthe river from his home. An informal funeral service was held in hisprivate studio on August 7, attended by friends and neighbors and by afew old friends from a distance; but the gathering could include but afew of the many who felt his death as a personal loss. 

The merits of Saint-Gaudens's work were fully recognized in hislifetime. He was an officer of the Legion of Honor, a CorrespondingMember of the Institute of France, a member of half a dozen academies, and the bearer of honorary degrees from the universities of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. But of all the honors he received there were two, one of a public, the other of a private nature, which he himself valuedmost highly: the one as showing the estimation in which his art was heldby his fellow artists, the other as an evidence of the personalaffection felt for him by his friends. At the Pan-American Exposition in1901, upon the unanimous recommendation of the Jury of Fine Arts, composed of painters, sculptors, and architects, he was awarded aspecial diploma and medal of honor, "apart from and above all otherawards, " an entirely exceptional honor, which marked him as the first ofAmerican artists, as previously received honors had marked him one ofthe greatest sculptors of his time. On June 23, 1905, the artistic andliterary colony which had gradually grown up about his home in Cornishcelebrated the twentieth anniversary of his coming there by a fête andopen-air masque held in the groves of Aspet. The beauty of thisspectacle has become almost legendary. The altar with its columnedcanopy, which served for a background to the play, still stands, orrecently stood, though much dilapidated by weather, as it wasimmortalized by the sculptor himself in a commemorative plaquette (Pl. 23) which is among the most charming of his minor works. He planned ifhe had lived to perpetuate it in enduring marble, and this task has nowbeen taken up by his wife, who means to dedicate the monument as afitting memorial to a great artist and a noble man in the place he lovedas his chosen home. 

Some part of the vivid and lovable personality of AugustusSaint-Gaudens must have been visible, almost at a glance, to any one whoever came in contact with him--to any one, even, who ever saw hisportrait. In his spare but strong-knit figure, his firm but supplehands, his manner of carrying himself, his every gesture, one felt theabounding vitality, the almost furious energy of the man. Thatextraordinary head, with its heavy brow beetling above the small butpiercing eyes, its red beard and crisp, wiry hair, its projecting jawand great, strongly modelled nose, was alive with power--with power ofintellect no less than of will. His lack of early education gave him acertain diffidence and a distrust of his own gifts of expression. He wasapt to overrate the mere verbal facility of others and to underestimatehimself in the comparison--indeed, a certain humility was stronglymarked in him, even as regards his art, though he was self-confidentalso. When he was unconstrained his great powers of observation, hisshrewdness of judgment, his bubbling humor, and a picturesque vivacityof phrase not uncommon among artists made him one of the most entrancingof talkers. 

[Illustration: Copyright, De W. C. Ward. Plate 23. --Saint-Gaudens. "Plaquette Commemorating Cornish Masque. "]

Underneath his humor and his gayety, however, there lay a deep-seatedCeltic melancholy, and beside his energy was an infinite patience at theservice of an exacting artistic conscience. The endless painstaking ofhis work and the time he took over it were almost proverbial. He wastwelve years engaged upon the "Shaw Memorial" and eleven upon the"Sherman, " and, though he did much other work while these were inprogress, yet it was his constant revision, his ever-renewed strivingfor perfection that kept them so long achieving. The "Diana" of theMadison Square Garden was taken down from her tower because he and thearchitect, Stanford White, thought her too large, and was entirelyremodelled on a smaller scale. And with this patience went a gentleness, a sweetness, a delicate sensitiveness, and an abounding humanity andsympathy. He could be almost ruthless in the assertion of his will whenthe interests of his art or of justice seemed to demand it, yet therewas a tender-heartedness in him which made it distressing to him toinflict pain on any one. The conflict of these elements in his naturesometimes made his actions seem inconsistent and indecipherable even tothose who knew him. He would be long-suffering, compromising, disinclined to strike; but when he was at last roused the blow would beas staggering as it was unexpected. It was as if he struck the harder tohave done with it and to spare himself the pain of striking again. 

It was his whole-hearted devotion to his art which caused his rare actsof self-assertion, and it was this same devotion, no less than hisnatural kindliness, that made him ever helpful to younger artists whoshowed any promise of future worth. Even in his last days of unspeakablesuffering he would summon what was left of his old strength to give aword of criticism and advice, above all, a word of commendation, to anyone who needed the one or had earned the other. The essential goodnessof the man was most felt by those who stood nearest him, and most ofall, perhaps, by his actual coworkers. He could command, as few havebeen able to do, the love and devotion of his assistants. To all whoknew him the man himself seemed finer, rarer, sweeter than his work, andthe gap he has left in their lives will be even more impossible to fillthan his place in American art. 

But the personality of an artist, though he be a great one, is for thememory of his private friends. It is only as it colors his art that itis of public interest. It is his art itself, his gift to the world, thatthe world cares for; it is of the kind and quality of that art, thenature and the degree of its greatness, that the world wishes to hear. Because the man was my friend I have wished to give some glimpse of themanner of man he was; because the artist was the greatest our countryhas produced I am to try to give some idea of his art, of the elementsof its strength, and of the limitations which are as necessary as itsqualities. 

The time of Saint-Gaudens's study in Paris was a time of greatimportance in the development of modern sculpture, and, althoughJouffroy was not himself a sculptor of the highest rank, his studio wasa centre for what was then the new movement in the sculpture of France. The essential thing in this movement was the abandoning of the formalimitation of second-rate antiques and the substitution of the sculptureof the Italian Renaissance as a source of inspiration and of the directstudy of nature as a means of self-expression. There had always beenindividual sculptors of power and originality in France, but themovement of the French school of sculpture, as a whole, away from thepseudo classicism which had long dominated it was really inaugurated byPaul Dubois only a few years before Saint-Gaudens's arrival in Paris. Many of the men destined to a brilliant part in the history of modernsculpture were trained in the _atelier_ of Jouffroy. Falguière andSaint-Marceau had but just left that studio when the young Americanentered it, and Mercié was his fellow student there. Dalou and Rodinhave since made these men seem old-fashioned and academic, but theywere then, and for many years afterward, the heads of the new school;and of this new school, so different from anything he had known inAmerica, Saint-Gaudens inevitably became a part. His own pronouncedindividuality, and perhaps his comparative isolation during the years ofhis greatest productivity, gave his art a character of its own, unlikeany other, but to the French school of sculpture of the third quarter ofthe nineteenth century he essentially belonged. 

Of course, his style was not formed in a moment. His "Hiawatha" seems, to-day, much such a piece of neo-classicism as was being produced byother men in the Rome of that time, and the "Silence, " though somewhatmore modern in accent, is an academic work such as might have beenexpected from a docile pupil of his master. The relief of angels for thereredos of Saint Thomas's Church is the earliest important work whichshows his personal manner. It was undertaken in collaboration with JohnLa Farge, and perhaps the influence of La Farge, and of that eminentlypicturesque genius Stanford White, mingled with that of the youngerFrench school in forming its decorative and almost pictorial character. It was a kind of improvisation, done at prodigious speed and withoutstudy from nature--a sketch rather than a completed work of art, but asketch to be slowly developed into the reliefs of the Farragut pedestal, the angels of the Morgan tomb, the caryatids of the Vanderbiltmantelpiece, and, at length, into such a masterpiece as the"Amor-Caritas. " In each of these developments the work becomes lesspicturesque and more formal, the taste is purified, the exuberance ofdecorative feeling is more restrained. The final term is reached in thecaryatids for the Albright Gallery at Buffalo--works of his last days, when his hands were no longer able to shape the clay, yet essentiallyhis though he never touched them; works of an almost austere nobility ofstyle, the most grandly monumental figures he ever produced. 

The commonest criticism on Saint-Gaudens's art has been that it is not, primarily, sculptural in its inspiration; and, in a sense, the criticismis justified. One need not, perhaps, greatly care whether it is true ornot. It is, after all, only a matter of definition, and if we wereforbidden to call his work sculpture at all and required to find anothername for it, the important fact that it is art--art of the finest, themost exquisite, at times the most powerful--would in no wise be altered. Ghiberti went beyond the traditions of sculpture in relief, introducedperspective into his compositions, modelled trees and rocks and cloudsand cast them in bronze, made pictures, if you like, instead of reliefs. Does any one care? Is it not enough that they are beautiful pictures?The gates of the Baptistry of Florence are still worthy, as the greatestsculptor since the Greeks thought them, to be the gates of paradise. Awork of art remains a work of art, call it what you please, and a thingof beauty will be a joy forever, whether or not you can pigeonhole it insome ready-made category. After all, the critical pigeonholes are madefor the things, not the things for the pigeonholes. The work is there, and if it does not fit your preconceived definition the fault is aslikely to be in the definition as in the work itself. 

And the first and most essential thing to note about the art of AugustusSaint-Gaudens is that it is always art of the purest--free in anextraordinary degree from the besetting sins of naturalism and thescientific temper on the one hand and of the display of cleverness andtechnical brilliancy on the other. Never more than in our own day havethese been the great temptations of an able artist: that he should inthe absorption of study forget the end in the means and producedemonstrations of anatomy or of the laws of light rather than statues orpictures; or that he should, in the joy of exercising great talents, seem to say, "See how well I can do it!" and invent difficulties for thesake of triumphantly resolving them, becoming a virtuoso rather than acreator. Of the meaner temptation of mere sensationalism--the desire toattract attention by ugliness and eccentricity lest one should be unableto secure it by truth and beauty--one need not speak. It is thetemptation of vulgar souls. But great and true artists have yielded, occasionally or habitually, to these other two; Saint-Gaudens neverdoes. I know no work of his to which raw nature has been admitted, inwhich a piece of study has been allowed to remain as such without themoulding touch of art to subdue it to its place; and I know only onewhich has any spice of bravura--the Logan statue--and the bravura isthere because the subject seemed to demand it, not because the artistwished it. The dash and glitter are those of "Black Jack Logan, " not ofSaint-Gaudens. The sculptor strove to render them as he strove to renderhigher qualities at other times, but they remain antipathetic to hisnature, and the statue is one of the least satisfactory of his works. Heis essentially the artist--the artificer of beauty--ever bent on themaking of a lovely and significant thing; and the study of nature andthe resources of his craft are but tools and are never allowed to becomeanything more. 

If, then, the accusation that Saint-Gaudens's art is not sculpturalmeans that he was a designer rather than a modeller, that he cared forcomposition more than for representation, that the ensemble interestedhim more than the details, I would cheerfully admit that the accusationis well founded. Such marvels of rendering as Rodin could give us, before he lost himself in the effort to deserve that reputation as aprofound thinker which has been thrust upon him, were not forSaint-Gaudens. The modelling of the _morceau_ was not particularly hisaffair. The discrimination of hard and soft, of bone and muscle andintegument, the expression of tension where a fleshy tissue is tightlydrawn over the framework beneath, or of weight where it falls away fromit--these were not the things that most compelled his interest or inwhich he was most successful. For the human figure as a figure, for theinherent beauty of its marvellous mechanism, he did not greatly care. The problems of bulk and mass and weight and movement which haveoccupied sculptors from the beginning were not especially his problems. It may have been due to the nature of the commissions he received that, after the "Hiawatha" of his student days, he modelled no nude except the"Diana" of the tower--a purely decorative figure, designed for distanteffect, in which structural modelling would have been out of placebecause invisible. But it was not accident that in such draped figuresas the "Amor-Caritas" (Pl. 24) or the caryatids of the Vanderbiltmantelpiece there is little effort to make the figure visible beneaththe draperies. In the hands of a master of the figure--of one of thoseartists to whom the expressiveness and the beauty of the human structureis all in all--drapery is a means of rendering the masses and themovement of the figure more apparent than they would be in the nude. Insuch works as these it is a thing beautiful in itself, for its ownripple and flow and ordered intricacy. The figure is there beneaththe drapery, but the drapery is expressive of the mood of the artist andof the sentiment of the work rather than especially explanatory of thefigure. 

[Illustration: Copyright, De W. C. Ward. Plate 24. --Saint-Gaudens. "Amor Caritas. "]

First of all, by nature and by training, Saint-Gaudens was a designer, and exquisiteness of design was the quality he most consciously strovefor--the quality on which he expended his unresting, unending, persevering toil. From the start one feels that design is his principalpreoccupation, that he is thinking mainly of the pattern of the whole, its decorative effect and play of line, its beauty of masses and spaces, its fitness for its place and its surroundings; in a word, itscomposition. In the beginning, as a workman in the shop of the cameocutter, he was concerned with a kind of art in which perfection ofcomposition is almost the sole claim to serious consideration. Then heproduces a multiplicity of small reliefs, dainty, exquisite, infalliblycharming in their arrangement--things which are so dependent on designfor their very existence that they seem scarcely modelled at all. Hegoes on to decorative figures in the round, to heroic statues, tomonumental groups, but always it is design that he thinks of first andlast--design, now, in three dimensions rather than in two--designproperly sculptural rather than pictorial, in so much as it deals withbosses and concaves, with solid matter in space--but still design. Thispower of design rises to higher uses as time goes on, is bent to theinterpretation of lofty themes and the expression of deep emotions, butit is in its nature the same power that produced the delicate, etherealbeauty of the reliefs. The infinite fastidiousness of a master designer, constantly reworking and readjusting his design, that every part shallbe perfect and that no fold or spray of leafage shall be out of itsproper place, never satisfied that his composition is beyond improvementwhile an experiment remains untried--this is what cost him years oflabor. His first important statue, the "Farragut, " is a masterpiece ofrestrained and elegant yet original and forceful design--a design, too, that includes the pedestal and the bench below, and of which the figuresin bas-relief are almost as important a part as the statue itself. Inlater and maturer work, with a more clarified taste and a deeperfeeling, he can reach such unsurpassable expressiveness of compositionas is shown in the "Shaw Memorial" or the great equestrian statue ofSherman. 

Saint-Gaudens's mastery of low relief was primarily a matter of thispower of design, but it was conditioned also upon two other qualities:knowledge of drawing and extreme sensitiveness to delicate modulation ofsurface. And by drawing I mean not merely knowledge of form andproportion and the exact rendering of these, in which sense a statue maybe said to be well drawn if its measurements are correct--I mean thatmuch more subtle and difficult art, the rendering in two dimensions onlyof the appearance of objects of three dimensions. Sculpture in the roundis the simplest and, in a sense, the easiest of the arts. It deals withactual form--a piece of sculpture does not merely look like the form ofan object, it _is_ the form of an object. Leaving out of the count, forthe moment, the refinements and the illusions which may be added toit--which must be added to it to make it art--it is the reproduction inanother material of the actual forms of things. Something which shallanswer for it, to the uninitiate, may be produced by merely castingnatural objects; and there is a great deal that is called sculpturewhich scarcely aims at anything more than the production, by a moredifficult method, of something like a plaster cast from nature. It isthe very simplicity of the art that makes its difficulty, for to avoidthe look of casting and achieve the feeling of art requires the mostdelicate handling and the most powerful inspiration, and there is needin the art of sculpture for the rarest qualities of the greatest minds. The art of drawing is entirely different. It is all illusion, it dealsonly in appearances. Its aim is to depict on a flat surface the aspectof objects supposed to stand behind it and to be seen through it, andits means are two branches of the science of optics. It is based on thestudy of perspective and on the study of the way light falls uponobjects and reveals their shapes and the direction of their surfaces bythe varying degrees of their illumination. Of this art a sculptor in theround need not necessarily know anything, and, in fact, many of them, unfortunately, know altogether too little of it. The maker of a statueneed not think about foreshortenings: if he gives the correct form theforeshortening will take care of itself. Sometimes it does so in adisastrous manner! Theoretically he need not worry over light and shade, although of course he does, in practice, think about it and rely uponit, more or less. If he gives the true forms they will necessarily havethe true light and shade. But low relief, standing between sculpture anddrawing, is really more closely related to drawing than to sculpture--isreally a kind of drawing--and this is why so few sculptors succeed init. 

It is a kind of drawing but an exceedingly difficult kind--the mostdelicate and difficult of any of the arts that deal with form alone. Asto the contour, it stands on the same ground with drawing in any othermaterial. The linear part of it requires exactly the same degree andthe same kind of talent as linear design with a pen or with a burin. Butfor all that stands within the contour, for the suggestion of interiorforms and the illusion of solidity, it depends on means of the utmostsubtlety. It exists, as all drawing does, by light and shade, but theshadows are not produced by the mere darkening of the surface--they areproduced by projections and recessions, by the inclination of the planesaway from or toward the light. The lower the relief the more subtle andtender must be the variation of the surface which produces them, andtherefore success in relief is one of the best attainable measures of asculptor's fineness of touch and perfection of craftsmanship. But as thelight and shade is produced by actual forms which are yet quite unlikethe true forms of nature, it follows that the artist in relief can neverimitate either the shape or the depth of the shadow he sees in nature. His art becomes one of suggestions and equivalents--an art which cangive neither the literal truth of form nor the literal truth ofaspect--an art at the farthest remove from direct representation. Andsuccess in it becomes, therefore, one of the best tests of a sculptor'sartistry--of his ability to produce essential beauty by the treatment ofhis material, rather than to imitate successfully external fact. 

As the degree of relief varies, also, from the lowest possible to thathighest relief which, nearly approaches sculpture in the round, theproblems involved constantly vary. At each stage there is a newcompromise to be made, a new adjustment to find, between fact andillusion, between the real form and the desired appearance. And theremay be a number of different degrees of relief in the same work, even indifferent parts of the same figure, so that the art of relief becomesone of the most complicated and difficult of arts. It has not, indeed, the added complication of color, but neither has it the resources ofcolor, success in which will more or less compensate for failureelsewhere. There is no permissible failure in bas-relief, any more thanin sculpture in the round, and its difficulties are far greater. Nothingbut truest feeling, completest knowledge, consummate skill will serve. 

This explanation may give some measure of what I mean when I say that Ibelieve Augustus Saint-Gaudens the most complete master of relief sincethe fifteenth century. 

He has produced a series of works which run through the whole range ofthe art, from lowest relief to highest; from things of which the reliefis so infinitesimal that they seem as if dreamed into existence ratherthan wrought in bronze or marble to things which are virtually engagedstatues; from things which you fear a chance touch might brush away, like a pastel of Whistler's, to things as solid and enduring inappearance as in actual material. And in all these things there is thesame inevitable mastery of design and of drawing, the same infiniteresource and the same technical perfection. The "Butler Children" (Pl. 25), the "Schiff Children, " the "Sarah Redwood Lee" (Pl. 26), to namebut a few of his masterpieces of this kind, are in their perfection ofspacing, their grace of line, their exquisite and ethereal illusivenessof surface, comparable only to the loveliest works of the FlorentineRenaissance; while the assured mastery of the most complicated problemsof relief evinced in the "Shaw Memorial"--a mastery which shows, in theresult, no trace of the strenuous and long-continued effort that itcost--is unsurpassed--I had almost said unequalled--in any work of anyepoch. 

[Illustration: Copyright, De W. C. Ward. Plate 25. --Saint-Gaudens. "The Butler Children. "]

Illustration can give but a faint idea of the special beauties of thisor that particular work in this long series. It can show no more thanthe composition and the draughtsmanship. The refinement of workmanship, the sensitiveness and subtlety of modelling, can be appreciated onlybefore the works themselves. And this sensitiveness and delicacy ofworkmanship, this mastery of the problems of relief, with its relianceon illusion and its necessary abstention from realization, is applied tosculpture in the round, and becomes with Saint-Gaudens, as it did withthe sculptors of the Florentine Renaissance, the means of escape fromthe matter of fact. The concrete art of sculpture becomes an art ofmystery and of suggestion--an art having affinities with that ofpainting. Hollows are filled up, shadows are obliterated, lines aresoftened or accentuated, as the effect may require, details areeliminated or made prominent as they are less or more essential andsignificant, as they hinder or aid the expressiveness of the whole. Itis by such methods that beauty is achieved, that the most unpromisingmaterial is subdued to the purposes of art, that even our hideous moderncostume may be made to yield a decorative effect. Pure sculpture, as theancients understood it, the art of form _per se_, demands the nudefigure, or a costume which reveals it rather than hides it. The costumeof to-day reveals as little of the figure as possible, and, unlikemediæval armor, it has no beauty of its own. A painter may make itinteresting by dwelling on color or tone or texture, or may so lose itin shadow that it ceases to count at all except as a space of darkness. A sculptor can do none of these things, and if he is to make it servethe ends of beauty he has need of all the resourcefulness and all theskill of the master of low relief. It was fortunate that the artistwhose greatest task was to commemorate the heroes of the Civil Warshould have had the temperament and the training of such a master, and Iknow of no other sculptor than Saint-Gaudens who has so magnificentlysucceeded in the rendering of modern clothing--no other who could havemade the uniform of Farragut or the frock coat of Lincoln as interestingas the armor of Colleone or the toga of Augustus. 

[Illustration: Copyright, De W. C. Ward. Plate 26. --Saint-Gaudens. "Sarah Redwood Lee. "]

But if the genius of Saint-Gaudens was primarily a decorative genius--ifit was, even, in his earlier work, a trifle picturesque, so that, as hesaid himself, he had "to fight against picturesqueness, " his work wasnever pictorial. He never indulged in perspective or composed hisreliefs on more than one plane; never took such liberties with thetraditions of sculpture as did Ghiberti, or painted pictures in bronzeor marble as more than one modern has done. His very feeling fordecoration kept him from pictorial realism, and his fight againstpicturesqueness was nobly won. His design becomes ever cleaner and moreclassic; by years of work and of experience he becomes stronger andstronger in the more purely sculptural qualities--attains a grasp ofform and structure only second to his mastery of composition. He isalways a consummate artist--in his finest works he is a great sculptorin the strictest sense of the word. 

I have dwelt somewhat at length upon technical matters because technicalpower is the first necessity for an artist; because technical mastery isthat for which he consciously endeavors; because the technical languageof his art is the necessary vehicle of expression for his thoughts andemotions, and determines, even, the nature of the thoughts and emotionshe shall express. But while the technical accomplishment of an artistis the most necessary part of his art, without which his imaginationwould be mute, it is not the highest or the most significant part of it. I have tried to show that Saint-Gaudens was a highly accomplishedartist, the equal of any of his contemporaries, the superior of most. What made him something much more than this--something infinitely moreimportant for us--was the vigor and loftiness of his imagination. Without his imaginative power he would have been an artist of greatdistinction, of whom any country might be proud; with it he became agreat creator, able to embody in enduring bronze the highest ideals andthe deepest feelings of a nation and of a time. 

It is a penetrating and sympathetic imagination that gave him hisunerring grasp of character, that enabled him to seize upon thesignificant elements of a personality, to divine the attitude and thegesture that should reveal it, to eliminate the unessential, to presentto us the man. This is the imagination of the portrait-painter, andSaint-Gaudens has shown it again and again, in many of his reliefs andmemorial tablets, above all in his portrait statues. He showed itconclusively in so early a work as the "Farragut" (Pl. 27), a work thatremains one of the modern masterpieces of portrait statuary. The manstands there forever, feet apart, upon his swaying deck, his glass inone strong hand, cool, courageous, ready, full of determination butabsolutely without bluster or braggadocio, a sailor, a gentleman, and ahero. He showed it again, and with ampler maturity, in that augustfigure of "Lincoln" (Pl. 28), grandly dignified, austerely simple, sorrowfully human, risen from the chair of state that marks his office, but about to speak as a man to men, his bent head and worn facefilled with a sense of power, but even more with the sadness ofresponsibility--filled, above all, with a yearning, tender passion ofsympathy and love. In imaginative presentation of character, in nobilityof feeling and breadth of treatment, no less than in perfection ofworkmanship, these are among the world's few worthy monuments to itsgreat men. 

[Illustration: Copyright, De W. C. Ward. Plate 27. --Saint-Gaudens. "Farragut. "]

And they are monuments to Americans by an American. Saint-Gaudens hadlived through the time of the Civil War, had felt, as a boy, the stir ofits great happenings in his blood, and its epic emotions had become apart of his consciousness, deep-seated at the roots of his nature. Thefeelings of the American people were his feelings, and hisrepresentations of these and of other heroes of that great struggle areamong the most national as they are among the most vital things that ourcountry has produced in art. 

But if Saint-Gaudens's imagination was thus capable of raising theportrait to the dignity of the type, it was no less capable of endowingthe imagined type with all the individuality of the portrait. In the"Deacon Chapin" (Pl. 29), of Springfield, we have a purely idealproduction, the finest embodiment of New England Puritanism in our art, for no portrait of the real Chapin existed. This swift-striding, stern-looking old man, who clasps his Bible as Moses clasped the tablesof the law and grips his peaceful walking-stick as though it were asword, is a Puritan of the Puritans; but he is an individual also--arough-hewn piece of humanity with plenty of the old Adam about him--anindividual so clearly seen and so vigorously characterized that one canhardly believe the statue an invention or realize that no such oldPuritan deacon ever existed in the flesh. Something of this imaginativequality there is in almost everything Saint-Gaudens touched, even inhis purely decorative figures. His angels and caryatides are notclassical goddesses but modern women, lovely, but with a personal andparticular loveliness, not insisted upon but delicately suggested. Andit is not the personality of the model who chanced to pose for them butan invented personality, the expression of the nobility, the sweetness, and the pure-mindedness of their creator. And in such a figure as thatof the "Adams Memorial" (Pl. 30), in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, his imaginative power reaches to a degree of impressiveness almostunequalled in modern art. One knows of nothing since the tombs of theMedici that fills one with the same hushed awe as this shrouded, hooded, deeply brooding figure, rigid with contemplation, still with an eternalstillness, her soul rapt from her body on some distant quest. Is sheNirvana? Is she The Peace of God? She has been given many names--hermaker would give her none. Her meaning is mystery; she is theeverlasting enigma. 

[Illustration: Copyright, De W. C. Ward. Plate 28. --Saint-Gaudens. "Lincoln. "]

Not the greatest artist could twice sound so deep a note as this. Thefigure remains unique in the work of the sculptor as it is unique in theart of the century. Yet, perhaps, Saint-Gaudens's greatest works are twoin which all the varied elements of his genius find simultaneousexpression; into which his mastery of composition, his breadth andsolidity of structure, his technical skill, his insight into character, and his power of imagination enter in nearly equal measure: the "ShawMemorial" and the great equestrian group of the "Sherman Monument. "

The "Shaw Memorial" (Pl. 31) is a relief, but a relief of many planes. The marching troops are in three files, one behind the other, thevarying distances from the spectator marked by differences of the degreeof projection. Nearer than all of them is the equestrian figure of Shawhimself, the horse and rider modelled nearly but not quite in the round. The whole scale of relief was altered in the course of the work, afterit had once been nearly completed, and the mastery of the infinitelycomplicated problem of relief in many degrees is supreme. But all themore because the scheme was so full and so varied, the artist hascarefully avoided the pictorial in his treatment. There is noperspective, the figures being all on the same scale, and there is nobackground, no setting of houses or landscape. Everywhere, between andabove the figures, is the flat surface which is the immemorial traditionof sculpture in relief; and the fact that it _is_ a surface, representing nothing, is made more clear by the inscription written uponit--an inscription placed there, consciously or unconsciously, that itmight have that very effect. The composition is magnificent, whether forits intrinsic beauty of arrangement--its balancing of lines andspaces--or for its perfect expressiveness. The rhythmic step of marchingmen is perfectly rendered, and the guns fill the middle of the panel inan admirable pattern, without confusion or monotony. The heads aresuperb in characterization, strikingly varied and individual, yet each astrongly marked racial type, unmistakably African in all its forms. 

[Illustration: Plate 29. --Saint-Gaudens. "Deacon Chapin. "]

These are merits, and merits of a very high order, enough of themselvesto place the work in the front rank of modern sculpture, but they are, after all, its minor merits. What makes it the great thing it is is theimaginative power displayed in it--the depth of emotion expressed, andexpressed with perfect simplicity and directness and an entireabsence of parade. The negro troops are marching steadily, soberly, with high seriousness of purpose, and their white leader rides besidethem, drawn sword in hand, but with no military swagger, courageous, yetwith a hint of melancholy, ready not only to lay down his life but toface, if need be, an ignominious death for the cause he believes to bejust. And above them, laden with poppy and with laurels, floats theDeath Angel pointing out the way. 

[Illustration: Copyright, Curtis & Cameron. Plate 30. --Saint-Gaudens. "Adams Memorial. "]

It is a work which artists may study again and again with growingadmiration and increasing profit, yet it is one that has found its waystraight to the popular heart. It is not always--it is not often--thatthe artists and the public are thus at one. When they are it is safe toassume that the work they equally admire is truly great--that it belongsto the highest order of noble works of art. 

The Sherman group (Pl. 32), though it has been more criticised than the"Shaw Memorial, " seems to me, if possible, an even finer work. The mainobjection to it has been that it is not sufficiently "monumental, " and, indeed, it has not the massiveness nor the repose of such a work asDonatello's "Gattamelata, " the greatest of all equestrian statues. Itcould not well have these qualities in the same degree, its motive beingwhat it is, but they are, perhaps, not ill exchanged for the characterand the nationalism so marked in horse and rider and for theirresistible onward rush of movement never more adequately expressed. Inall other respects the group seems to me almost beyond criticism. Thecomposition--composition, now, in the round and to be considered frommany points of view--builds up superbly; the flow of line in wing andlimb and drapery is perfect; the purely sculptural problems ofanatomical rendering, equine and human, are thoroughly resolved; themodelling, as such, is almost as fine as the design. 

[Illustration: Copyright, De. W. C. Ward. Plate 31. --Saint-Gaudens. "Shaw Memorial. "]

To the boyish Saint-Gaudens Sherman had seemed the typical Americanhero. To the matured artist he had sat for an admirable bust. Thesculptor had thus an unusual knowledge of his subject, a perfectsympathy with his theme; and he has produced a work of epic sweep andsignificance. Tall and erect, the general sits his horse, his militarycloak bellying out behind him, his trousers strapped down over hisshoes, his hat in his right hand, dropping at arm's length behind hisknee, his bare head like that of an old eagle, looking straight forward. The horse is as long and thin as his rider, with a tremendous stride;and his big head, closely reined in, twitches viciously at the bridle. Before the horse and rider, upon the ground, yet as if new-lighted therefrom an aerial existence, half walks, half flies, a splendid wingedfigure, one arm outstretched, the other brandishing the palm--Victoryleading them on. She has a certain fierce wildness of aspect, but herrapt gaze and half-open mouth indicate the seer of visions--peace isahead, and an end of war. On the bosom of her gown is broidered theeagle of the United States, for she is an American Victory, as this isan American man on an American horse; and the broken pine bough beneaththe horse's feet localizes the victorious march--it is the march throughGeorgia to the sea. 

Long ago I expressed my conviction that the "Sherman Monument" is thirdin rank of the great equestrian statues of the world. To-day I am notsure that that conviction remains unaltered. Donatello's "Gattamelata"is unapproached and unapproachable in its quiet dignity; Verrocchio's"Colleone" is unsurpassed in picturesque attractiveness. Both areconsecrated by the admiration of centuries. To-day I am not sure thatthis work of an American sculptor is not, in its own way, equal toeither of them. 

There are those who are troubled by the introduction of the symbolicalfigures in such works as the "Shaw Memorial" and the Sherman statue;and, indeed, it was a bold enterprise to place them where they are, mingling thus in the same work the real and the ideal, the actual andthe allegorical. But the boldness seems to me abundantly justified bysuccess. In either case the entire work is pitched to the key of thesefigures; the treatment of the whole is so elevated by style and soinfused with imagination that there is no shock of unlikeness ordifficulty of transition. And these figures are not merely necessary tothe composition, an essential part of its beauty--they are even moreessential to the expression of the artist's thought. Without thathovering Angel of Death, the negro troops upon the "Shaw Memorial" mightbe going anywhere, to battle or to review. We should have a passingregiment, nothing more. Without the striding Victory before him, theimpetuous movement of Sherman's horse would have no especialsignificance. And these figures are no mere conventional allegories;they are true creations. To their creator the unseen was as real as theseen--nay, it was more so. That Shaw was riding to his death at thecommand of duty was, the only thing that made Shaw memorable. ThatSherman was marching to a victory the fruits of which should be peacewas the essential thing about Sherman. Death and Duty--Victory andPeace--in each case the compound ideal found its expression in a figureentirely original and astonishingly living: a _person_ as truly as Shawor Sherman themselves. He could not have left them out. It werebetter to give up the work entirely than to do it otherwise than as hesaw it. 

[Illustration: Copyright, De W. C. Ward. Plate 32. --Saint-Gaudens. "Sherman. "]

I have described and discussed but a few of the many works of this greatartist, choosing those which seem to me the most significant and themost important, and in doing so I have keenly felt the inadequacy ofwords to express the qualities of an art which exists by forms. Fortunately, the works themselves are, for the most part, readilyaccessible. In the originals, in casts, or in photographs, they may bestudied by every one. Nothing is more difficult than to estimate justlythe greatness of an object that is too near to us--it is only as itrecedes into the distance that the mountain visibly overtops itsneighboring hills. It is difficult to understand that this man so latelyfamiliar to us, moving among us as one of ourselves, is of the companyof the immortals. Yet I believe, as we make this study of his works, aswe yield ourselves to the graciousness of his charm or are exalted bythe sweep of his imagination, we shall come to feel an assuredconviction that Augustus Saint-Gaudens was not merely the mostaccomplished artist of America, not merely one of the foremost sculptorsof his time--we shall feel that he is one of those great, creativeminds, transcending time and place, not of America or of to-day, but ofthe world and forever. 

Where, among such minds, he will take his rank we need not ask. It isenough that he is among them. Such an artist is assuredly a benefactorof his country, and it is eminently fitting that his gift to us shouldbe acknowledged by such tribute as we can pay him. By his works in otherlands and by his world-wide fame he sheds a glory upon the name ofAmerica, helping to convince the world that here also are those whooccupy themselves with the things of the spirit, that here also areother capabilities than those of industrial energy and material success. In his many minor works he has endowed us with an inexhaustible heritageof beauty--beauty which is "about the best thing God invents. " He is theeducator of our taste and of more than our taste--of our sentiment andour emotions. In his great monuments he has not only given us fittingpresentments of our national heroes; he has expressed, and in expressingelevated, our loftiest ideals; he has expressed, and in expressingdeepened, our profoundest feelings. He has become the voice of all thatis best in the American people, and his works are incentives topatriotism and lessons in devotion to duty. 

But the great and true artist is more than a benefactor of his country, he is a benefactor of the human race. The body of Saint-Gaudens isashes, but his mind, his spirit, his character have taken on enduringforms and are become a part of the inheritance of mankind. And if, inthe lapse of ages, his very name should be forgotten--as are the namesof many great artists who have gone before him--yet his work willremain; and while any fragment of it is decipherable the world will bethe richer in that he lived. 

[Transcriber's Note: In the Table of Illustrations and in the caption forplate 17, Bolensa was corrected to Bolsena. ]