One sculptor there was, an Englishman, endowed with a beautiful fancy,
and possessing at his fingers' ends the capability of doing beautiful
things. He was a quiet, simple, elderly personage, with eyes brown and
bright, under a slightly impending brow, and a Grecian profile, such as
he might have cut with his own chisel. He had spent his life, for forty
years, in making Venuses, Cupids, Bacchuses, and a vast deal of other
marble progeny of dreamwork, or rather frostwork: it was all a vapory
exhalation out of the Grecian mythology, crystallizing on the dull
window-panes of to-day. Gifted with a more delicate power than any other
man alive, he had foregone to be a Christian reality, and perverted
himself into a Pagan idealist, whose business or efficacy, in our
present world, it would be exceedingly difficult to define. And, loving
and reverencing the pure material in which he wrought, as surely this
admirable sculptor did, he had nevertheless robbed the marble of its
chastity, by giving it an artificial warmth of hue. Thus it became a sin
and shame to look at his nude goddesses. They had revealed themselves
to his imagination, no doubt, with all their deity about them; but,
bedaubed with buff color, they stood forth to the eyes of the profane in
the guise of naked women. But, whatever criticism may be ventured on
his style, it was good to meet a man so modest and yet imbued with such
thorough and simple conviction of his own right principles and practice,
and so quietly satisfied that his kind of antique achievement was all
that sculpture could effect for modern life.
This eminent person's weight and authority among his artistic brethren
were very evident; for beginning unobtrusively to utter himself on
a topic of art, he was soon the centre of a little crowd of younger
sculptors. They drank in his wisdom, as if it would serve all the
purposes of original inspiration; he, meanwhile, discoursing with
gentle calmness, as if there could possibly be no other side, and often
ratifying, as it were, his own conclusions by a mildly emphatic "Yes."
The veteran Sculptor's unsought audience was composed mostly of our own
countrymen. It is fair to say, that they were a body of very dexterous
and capable artists, each of whom had probably given the delighted
public a nude statue, or had won credit for even higher skill by the
nice carving of buttonholes, shoe-ties, coat-seams, shirt-bosoms, and
other such graceful peculiarities of modern costume. Smart, practical
men they doubtless were, and some of them far more than this, but still
not precisely what an uninitiated person looks for in a sculptor. A
sculptor, indeed, to meet the demands which our preconceptions make upon
him, should be even more indispensably a poet than those who deal in
measured verse and rhyme. His material, or instrument, which serves
him in the stead of shifting and transitory language, is a pure, white,
undecaying substance. It insures immortality to whatever is wrought in
it, and therefore makes it a religious obligation to commit no idea
to its mighty guardianship, save such as may repay the marble for
its faithful care, its incorruptible fidelity, by warming it with an
ethereal life. Under this aspect, marble assumes a sacred character; and
no man should dare to touch it unless he feels within himself a certain
consecration and a priesthood, the only evidence of which, for the
public eye, will be the high treatment of heroic subjects, or the
delicate evolution of spiritual, through material beauty.