THE value of the imaginative quality in a work of sculpture must depend chiefly upon the degree to which it is governed and prompted by, impregnated with, the sculptural feeling. This is, of course, true of any other work of art: that it should be the offspring of a wedding of the thought with the medium; a union in which the medium is not compelled into alliance with the thought, or dallied with in a more or less honourable concubinage, but fitly mated in the liberty of mutual dependence. Yet it is so habitual with us to clothe our thoughts in words, actually to think in words, that the artist finds it difficult to shake himself free of the verbal subjection and to think in the language of his particular medium. Some evade the difficulty by not burdening themselves with thought; others succumb to it and force their medium and technique to a literal rendering of their ideas, whether shallow ones or deeper; while a few succeed in deriving motive from the medium, or in so moulding their thought to it, that both become indissolubly blended and mutually enforcing.

Thus in those signal examples of Michelangelo upon the Medici tombs, we may call them “Night” and “Day,” “Dawn” and “Twilight,” for convenience of reference, but it is because the conceptions embodied in them cannot be captured into the precision of words that they have so profound a significance. Consciousness grows upon us first of huge, bony structures and elastic muscles; of torso and limbs contorted; more developed than the normal; in attitudes impossible to it, or well nigh so. We derive from this consciousness an impression of struggle; but no emblem or visible cause for it is introduced; only it is borne in upon us by the forms themselves. With this clue to understanding we note the more than human strength, the superb sensuousness, the eternal fixity of these supple figures and, again, their distortion, and the struggle which they body forth is realised as one of spirit, a conflict of soul. But to have discovered this is not to have captured the conception. It still eludes all exact comprehension; vague, limitless, the lapping up upon our shore of sense of an ocean that stretches to immensity.

This is to cite the example of a genius, beside whom the wits of most other men seem petty; yet surely it contains the principle upon which all truly imaginative work must be based. It is thus that Rodin bases his; bodying forth in structure, modelling and expression of movement his imaginings, just so far as they are to be made palpable to sight, but with a residuum always of what the mind alone can conceive or approximate to.

In every work of art there should be present the imagination of the artist, arousing our own imagination, directing it and then leaving it to its own unhampered speculation. This quality is not to be confined to the so-called “ideal” subject, it must appear in every bust or statue to make it vital. For while it is given to but few men to have creative imagination, we have a right to expect in the artist that degree of imagination which can penetrate beyond the outer integument of his subject, and find inside the tailor-made or millinery outworks the man or woman, the revelation in the flesh, however infinitesimally fractional, whether divine or devilish, of infinity.

How many American sculptors have infused their work in portraiture with this vital quality has been reviewed elsewhere. But the number is not complete without mention, at least, of W. R. O’Donovan, Samuel Murray, Charles Calverly, Henry H. Kitson and his wife, Alice Ruggles Kitson, R. E. Brooks, A. A. Weinman and Birtley Canfield. The last named’s treatment of the child in portraiture is full of tender imagination.

And elsewhere I have treated of some of our sculptors whose decorative works have exhibited imagination; the sweet and gaysome kind of it that plays like sunlight upon water; or, if occasion demands it, the kind of deeper, serious import. But there is a kind of decorative sculpture for which we can have little patience: the nude or draped inanities that spread themselves over space, exploitations of brainless facility; or, again, the figure which would be meaningless except for the added symbols, and which we only recognise as a model, posturing with something borrowed or stolen from the Old World property-room.

Yet one of the shibboleths glibly passed around the studio is “ideal sculpture,” and it is largely applied to just such sculpture as this; to works which are barren of ideas, or in which the subject of the statue is declared only through some time-worn symbol. Not that the introduction of a symbol is of itself objectionable, though it is a fact that the works of finest imagination, as Saint-Gaudens’s “Grief,” to quote a modern example, are free of such aids to suggestion. But I am thinking of that vast majority of statues

in which the figure would convey no hint to our imagination if it were not for the symbol introduced. And how far, I wonder, does the symbol succeed in leading us? We are apt to find it either trite or, as in the case of some of the mystically symbolic work of modern times, abstruse. With religious symbolism it is different. In old days, at least, the artist and the public had a common starting-ground of knowledge, and the symbol awoke a clear impression, invested by religious habit with a weighty import.

But what of the frequent statues, representing “Law,” “Truth,” “Justice” and the like by a draped model, alternately holding a tablet, serpent, mirror, scale and swords, or what not; or that countless family of undraped statues, clever studies merely of anatomy and academic composition? Their only suggestion to the cultivated imagination is one of weariness, yet they pass in the studios for “ideal.” Let us clear our minds of cant and see these things for what they really are—more or less skilful imitations of the model, but of creative imagination, of the faculty to give expression to an idea, possessing nothing.

On the other hand, some sculptors, in their avoidance of the trite, run to the opposite extreme of the abstruse—to that occult and mystic symbolism, which has been sporadic for half a century in Europe and has found at least two exponents in this country.

Here again, if the artist makes the figure the main source of expression, establishing a chord of communication between his own imagination and ours, and uses the symbolic object solely as an accessory, the latter may possibly help our act of appreciation, or, at least, will not hinder it. But, when it usurps the chief function in the composition and we find in the figure no clue to any line of imagination, having to turn to the symbol for assistance, it is then that our distress begins. We may or may not recognise the object, and, if we do, may be baffled in our attempt to discover its allusion in the present case; haunted meanwhile by a disagreeable doubt as to whether it was really intended to be allusive or only introduced for decorative effect. It is not by such little stepping-stones to understanding, slippery and insecure, that the truly creative imagination proceeds. It takes its leap into the air, clear of obstructions, relying upon its own power of flight. For, even if we comprehend the meaning of the symbol and its allusion, how far, I wonder, does it carry us? When from the mysteries of Egypt, for example, the modern artist borrows a symbol to garnish his modern thought, I wonder if we are much impressed? He uses, we will say, the device of the winged globe. We know that it once stood to people as a sign of immortality; we recognise that much, but does it touch our feeling—will it increase our belief in immortality or promise anything to our yearning after it? The statue itself must do that, and if it does, the symbol is likely to be felt intrusive.

I do not forget that Sargent in his Boston decoration has made noble use of symbolism. Yet I feel strongly that the earlier part of the work which involved Egyptian, Assyrian and Judaic symbolism is inferior to the subsequent work, which is impregnated with the Byzantine. For in the latter the artist has identified himself so completely with the medieval mind, that he is thinking in it, while working in the modern technique; consequently his work is veritably a reincarnation of the old thought. Compared with this his earlier use of symbolism appears only scholarly and ingenious. So, one may infer, it is not the use of symbolism that is alien to the modern mind, but that use of it which borrows from the past and does not reproduce the ancient spirit or incorporate the old with modern thought.

In his “Fountain of Man” at the Pan-American Exposition, Charles Grafly combined a cryptic motive with what was otherwise simply and intelligibly sculpturesque. The crowning and most prominent feature of the composition, to which the remainder served as an elaborate base, was a draped mass, which on nearer view proved to be two figures back to back, their heads covered with perforated casques, joined together over the top by what had the appearance of a handle. The faces were visible, but from the rim of the casques descended curtains of drapery, enshrouding the figures, but leaving exposed the hands, which grasped short cylinders. There can be no doubt of the general suggestion of the symbolism, the twofold nature of man, the mystery of it; but I must confess that I am baffled by the headgear and the cylinders. Yet the mass was impressive as a finial to the fountain, having something of the character of a low obelisk. Indeed, for decorative purposes it might almost as well have been a shaft, the special aptitude of the human form for the expression of ornamental design having been obliterated by the drapery. Not so, however, in the lower part of the composition. The pedestal on which the figure rested was surrounded by nude forms of youths and maidens intended to represent the seasons, while the platform on which they rested was supported by crouching male and female forms, personifying, I believe, the virtues and vices. Yet with all Grafly’s inclination toward symbolism, there is very little expressional suggestion in his treatment of the nude. He becomes preoccupied with the model and his imagination seems to leave him. However, in one statue at least, “The Vulture of War,” he has shown what he can accomplish, when he permits his imagination to control. Here the nude is made a vehicle of emotional force: a male figure stooping forward, as if he were on some lofty crag and about to hurl himself to earth; his face treacherous and cruel; the limbs constricted like a beast of prey’s. There is a largeness of design in this figure as well as expression; something infinitely finer than mere close studies of anatomy, accompanied with accessories of abstruse suggestion; a real incentive to one’s imagination which is lacking, if I mistake not, in such compositions as “Symbol of Life,” “In Much Wisdom” and “From Generation to Generation.” On the other hand, in his busts Grafly exhibits a directness of insight into character and a vigorous, very personal technique that make them most distinguished.

Nor does the symbolism of F. E. Elwell, as shown for example, in his “Goddess of Fire,” stir more in me than an interested curiosity. Why should he have drawn the type of his figure and its accessories from the art of ancient Egypt? Had he the intention of fashioning something beautiful, or that should pique the appetite for surprise? Was his motive to allure or tantalise our imagination? For my own part, I admit the fascination of this spritish figure, so queerly bedizened, but am not conscious of any appeal to the imagination. On the other hand, when his work is not abstruse it is apt to be too obvious. The “Orchid Dancer” is clearly posing for effect, looking for applause, and, I should judge from the expression of her face, quite unable to understand why any one could withhold it. However, while the movement of the figure lacks expression, there is a very pleasing fancifulness in the treatment of the drapery, curling across the body and upward from the feet in petal-like volutes. I think I do not fail to appreciate the sentiment which inspired this statue, and, if I speak of it as being too obvious, it is because it seems to me that the sentiment stands out clear of the sculptural feeling. Thought and technique are not wedded in such manner, that you not only cannot feel them separately, but would find it impossible to distinguish how much had been inspired by the one, how much by the other.

Elwell’s work suggests a man of poetic and intellectual capacity who has resorted to sculpture to express his ideas, and this is a different thing from the sculptural instinct, influenced by intellect and poetry. Accompanying this lack of a predominant feeling for form is a lack of mastery of it, which becomes apparent when he confronts his model. The latter does not act as stimulus to sculptural motive, but becomes something to be reproduced, and his invention is absorbed in the details which shall convey a suggestion of the intellectual and poetic motive. One may even feel that this intellectual or poetic motive becomes an obsession, which interferes with his receiving sculptural stimulus from the model. For among his later works are two in which evidently the same model has been used; but in one case he has been filled with an idea, and the use he has made of the model is tame, whereas in the other case it would appear to have been the model herself which engaged his imagination. He has made a close study of her head and bust, producing something in which the nobility of form and flesh are very apparent, which, in fact, has very strongly the sculpturesque feeling. He calls the finished work “Mary Magdalen,” but this, one feels sure, was a convenient afterthought, and that the original intention, as I have said, was simply a study of form and flesh; and his temporary escape from the prepossession of an idea has given free course to the sculptural purpose. Two earlier works, regarded as being his most important productions, were the Dickens Memorial and a statue of General Hancock at Gettysburg.

These two, Grafly and Elwell, are the only American sculptors within my knowledge who have been drawn toward symbolic mysticism; for the mysticism that appears in Barnard’s work, and must have been present in the colossal “Spirit” by John Donoghue, a work known to me only by report, is of a grander, deeper character, growing out of and penetrating the form itself. This statue of Donoghue’s, a seated, winged figure thirty feet high, represented the Spirit, the “Thou” of Milton’s apostrophe, who

Described as a work of great impressiveness, with suggestion of sublimity, benignity and mysterious power, it was executed in the artist’s studio on the Roman Campagna and sent to this country for exhibition at the Chicago World’s Fair. But for some reason it never reached its destination, and was allowed to crumble away in the warehouse of a Brooklyn wharf. Other works of his also—“Sophocles,” “Diana,” “Venus”—for lack of appreciation lie in storage.

Working fitfully and with painful hindrances from insufficient facility in the handling of his medium, Theodore Bauer has produced some works full of imagination. Nature gave him the gifts of music and of dreaming; and, nursing these, he slipped on into middle life, without ceasing to be a child. The grit of manhood, the practicality of the world and the need of responding to it in kind, are outside his comprehension. He lives within himself in a world of his own: a world of rosy lights and purple shadows; soft, Æolian breezes, whose wailing arouses a rapture of mild despair; distant mountains, whose inaccessible snows prompt sweet imaginings of purity and high endeavour, while he meditates in his valley of unlaborious delight and delicious, pleasurable pain. A world of reverie, darkened, however, at times by storm-clouds and disturbed by the deep moan of thunder along the distant heights.

For in Bauer’s work delicate fancy alternates with sadness, as one may see in his two statues in the Library of Congress. “Religion” is represented as a young girl peering into the far beyond with wistful, visionary gaze and holding before her a poppy flower with leaves and seed-pod. In her grasp is the pride of life and the narcotic with which the world lulls its pain; but she looks beyond them to the ideal and to the balm of spiritual ecstasy. In the “Beethoven,” however, is expressed the world-wearied yearning of the artistic soul. The well-known face, rugged and graven with the lines of time and suffering, is slightly bowed, and the right hand is held to the ear as it listens intently for the far-off strain of inspiration, while the other hand is poised as if above a keyboard, the fingers searching to express the music in his brain. A heavy cloak with high-standing collar gives breadth and picturesqueness to the figure. It is, indeed, too picturesque, one may feel—with too expanded a composition and too much play of movement, to satisfy its architectonic function of relieving by a vertical line the horizontal of the balustrade. But, however that may be, as the portrait of a great musician and an idealisation of his art, it is a statue full of suggestion—a work of imagination, elevated, tender, deep and true.

Bauer had long pondered a series of four groups, representing “The Tragedy of the Sphinx”; her awakening to love, her passion, disillusion and death; and in one of the buildings of the Chicago World’s Fair, amid the chaos of the construction period and in a winter of unusual severity, a winter of veritable discontent to him, he worked upon the first of these, “The Sphinx and the Cupid.” During the exposition months it stood in a retreat of foliage near the Art Palace unnoticed. Yet, even unfinished as it was, it exerted an extraordinary fascination. The little Love God was whispering in the creature’s ear, and as the honey of his words sweetly melted her slow imagination, a smile of aroused appetite began to play upon her lips, hunger shone in her eye; a passion hot and cold, eager with desire, callous to everything but its own satisfaction; a cruelty that would not be appeased until it had consumed itself.

I have said that Bauer is painfully hindered by a lack of facility in the handling of his medium; but I doubt if it is from lack of skill in technique, as is sometimes said. He is, in fact, a very rapid and sure worker up to a certain point, that of bodying forth his conception in its broad, general aspect; and the subsequent embarrassment is due to the subtlety of the expression for which he is striving; a kind of subtlety, often alien, I expect, to the expressional capacity of his medium. For Bauer has long wished that fate had made him a painter instead of a sculptor, and there is no doubt that the quality of his imagination is more suited to the medium of colour.

In contrast with the mysticism and subtlety of imagination, more or less displayed in the work we have been considering, is that form of imagination which turns to earth and to the facts of things for its inspiration. How it has operated in the work of some of our sculptors has been noticed elsewhere, as well as the fact that the Indian subject has made frequent appeal to their imagination. A further example of the latter is “The Medicine Man,” by C. E. Dallin, which was a prominent feature on the grounds of the Paris Exposition. Mounted on a stringy pony, the man himself lean and gaunt, the group counted very little as a mass, yet compelled attention by the keenness of the characterisation. Amid the extreme modernness of the scene and its variety of impressions, the impassiveness of this figure, survival of an age so remote, was strangely moving; a proud, stern figure, conscious of its dignity, in pitiful, solemn protest against the inexorable march of destiny; the last echo of an unrecorded epic. No sculptor has succeeded better in combining with complete naturalism the poetry of the Indian subject. Gutzon Borglum in his statuettes has represented with realism and vigour its actualities, and H. A. MacNeil has reached inward into the thought of the Indian; but Dallin has given us the realism, spirit and some suggestion of the Indian environment, such as Brush did in his early paintings.

In Philadelphia, however, is an Indian group representing “The Stone Age,” which involves some further suggestion. A woman stands grasping a hatchet and clutching her infant to her breast, as she looks into the distance with wary, resolute courage, while a little child crouches up to her on one side, and on the other a bear’s cub lies dead. It is by John J. Boyle, one of his few ideal subjects, a work of powerful imagination. This sculptor has essayed decorative subjects, but with less success. His control of composition does not seem to extend beyond the treatment of a single figure or of a group in which one is predominant; and his strong point is the expression of character or sentiment. Thus his seated statue of Benjamin Franklin is one of the most interesting examples of portrait-sculpture in the country. It possesses a considerable share of monumental dignity and a very remarkable intimacy of feeling. The pose is informal, the expression of the head and body quite natural, yet the conception has no trace of obviousness, much less of commonplace. It is invested with just sufficient idealisation to preserve the impression of a statue; that it is not the counterfeit presentiment of a man, but a memorial of his qualities and what they imply to his admirers. And the qualities are expressed with admirable decision; the intellectual dignity of the head well sustained by the erect torso and the broad, firm carriage of the arms; the easy negligence of the costume according so well with the benevolence and genial humanity of the face. Indeed, in this portrait-statue Boyle reveals a penetrating and sympathetic insight and a choice of treatment that are the products of an active imagination; and when in a subject like the “Stone Age” his imagination can work as it lists, it reaches to that point where the particular becomes merged in the universal suggestion.

For in this group we pass from interest in the episode to a realisation of the rude grandeur of the primitive nature, the physical grandeur of untrammelled development and the natural instinct of the mother animal. I recall another group of his: a modern peasant woman with her baby folded in sleep upon her broad bosom and another child nestling at her feet. Here, too, the mother is vigorous and ample, but rounded and softened by more genial environment. Yet in the generousness of her form as in the strenuousness of the other’s, we feel the same suggestion of the earth-mother, the mother in closest affinity with nature. Only, as nature progresses from rigour to amenity, the primal instinct of preservation of her young has passed into the all-pervading tenderness of maternal solicitude. It is, in fact, the typical conception of motherhood, as compared with the merely individual representation that appears in each of these groups.

The conception, moreover, is coloured with modern thought, not a spiritualised abstraction, like Raphael’s, but enriched with the passion and fecundity of earth. Raphael may have sought his models among the girl-mothers of Trastevere or the Campagna; but his idea of motherhood he brought down from the region of artistic and intellectual speculation. On the other hand, the tendency of the modern artist is to set back his model in her actual environment and to discover her affinity thereto. Or, if his model be nature, he no longer attempts to spiritualise it by arrangement of lines and forms that accord with his abstract theories of beauty, or by investing it with atmosphere and sunlight, drawn from his own imagination. Nor is he satisfied with the objective nature-study of the Dutchmen of the sixteenth century; but, observing nature no less closely than they, he peers further into it in the search for a soul and heart within her that shall correspond to the heart and soul within himself.

The main current of the poetic imagination in modern art is to find the soul in the fact and it is a phase of the general tendency of modern thought. Our gaze is earthward; to the beauty, poetry and desirable goodness that are in nature and the natural life, and to the spiritual suggestion in the actual.

There are minor currents, too, little streams of rebellion that flow contrary to the general direction. The superesthetic and the superintellectual, equally are protests against the trend toward naturalism. The one responds to what there is in us of world-weariness, of a jaded epicureanism that needs the subtlest stimulants to its imagination; the other would emphasise the quality by which, it assumes, we are differentiated from, and superior to, the natural world. Disregarding the Universal Intellect which regulates the law of natural growth and of natural habits, it would force the little unit of intellect into premature development, into lifelong estrangement from the wholesomeness of nature. For facts it would substitute names; words, words and continually words, until they take the place of knowledge, of ideas and of all religious, moral and esthetic consciousness.

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