New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1917-10-04
On Monuments

denunciation of Mr.. Barnard's production
rs a portrait This is natural and proper.
The sculptors uncouth conception of his
subject offers point of attack as vuner-
able as it is obvious. But it is not by any
means the only invitation to criticism.
This episode revives in acute form the
whole question of what we can only de-
scribe as artistic manners These-if the
testimony of civilized peoples in all ages
is worth anything-are explicit on the
dignity essential to a public monument.
Consider the largeness, the grandeur, OF
every great statue that has really with
stood the test of time Consider the ma
jestic, impersonal character of Greek
sculpture and the severe stateliness of
Roman, the nobility superadded to the
realism Of heroic statuary in the Italian
Renaissance, and the measured, orderly
style predominant in modern France.
This uniform tendency through the his
toric schools has never been determined by
any vulgar triumph of academic formulas
over individual creative genius. 1t has
expressed, simply, mankind's innate sense
Of things, the natural human conviction
that public monument, as distinguished
from the statue in private gallery or
from the purely decorative work of art,
should be, above all things, monumental.
We are not playing with words, bring
t,1U 60 Nd Of
esoteric mumbo jumbo, behind which we
might mean anything we chose. This par
ticular word has not only fixed meaning,
hut certain inalienabe associations. The
same photographer who defines monu-
ment as anything erected to perpetuate
the memory of a person or an event" is
careful to indicate that what is "monu-
mental is among other things, ''im-
pressive," thus recognizing the eternal play
that universal instinct to which we have
referred How clearly the poets drive at
this point. How consistently they por-
tray their hero with an effort to detach
him from his ordinary surroundings, to
charge their every stroke with at once
the truest and the loftiest meaning, to free
the core of his character from petty de-
tails, to synthesize his traits and thereby
TO simplify them--to idealize him, in a
word, and by virtue of so doing to make
Immediately comprehensive 10 the world
not alone his outward seeming but the
very soul of him. Lowell, in his Common
Grafton Ode, thus goes to the root of the
matter:
Here was a type of the true elder race,
And one of Plutarchs men talked with US
face to face.
Stedman, in his lines on "The Hand of
Lincoln" looks with the same swift in
sight to the character underlying the
realistic fact:
For here in knotted cord and vein
| trace the varying chart of years;
] know the troubled heart, the strain,
The weight of Atlas-and the tears,
Lo, as gaze, the statured man,
Built up from yon large hand appears!
type that Nature wills to plan
But once in all peoples years.
Note that to both these poets-who, by
the way passed through the period of the
Civil War and formed upon Lincoln the
judgments of close contemporaries
great President is "a type" being in
whose personality are summed up tremen-
dous spiritual and national elements. For
them he was, in essence, monumental, and
they celebrated his genius in tones express
sive of that belief. They could not, as
artists, have done otherwise. In rising to
the level of their theme they were bound
to respect the integrity of true verse, to
give to their work something of the eleva-
tion of the man whose greatness they sang.
Must it not be so in sculpture, likewise
Is it not the negation of monumental art
to portray Abraham Lincoln as dipso-
maniacal peasant with pain in his stom-
ach?
1t is always open to the partisans of
an unconventional statue like Barnards
Lincoln to yammer about the horrors of
convention, and at the cost of very little
ingenuity they can cite instances to
"prove" their case. In fact, we may make
them a present Of one or two. When
Rodin executed his statue of Victor Hugo
meditatively reclining by the seashore in
the folds of sheet, Paris discreetly tucked
it away in the gardens of the Palais Royal,
which is to say in comparative seclusion.
, When the same sculptor produced his even
more startling Balzac the Societe des Gems
de Lettres, which had commissioned it,
summarily rejected it. Now, it is perfectly
true that the official" monument to Vic
tor Hugo in Paris, by Barrias, is a pitt
fully commonplace affair. 1t is also true
that the statue of Balzac by Falguiere,
substituted for Robins figure, turned out
dreary failure. Rodin, as it happens,
has more to say for himself than either
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