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.




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