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ART FOR AMERICA. 
 
ART 
 
 FOR AMERICA. 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM ORDWAY PARTRIDGE. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
 
 1895. 
 
6 96'^ Z 
 
 Copyright^ 1891^^ ^ 
 By Roberts Brothers. 
 
 SECOND EDITION. 
 
 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U. S. A. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The following essays I dedicate with all love 
 to the American people, for whom they were 
 written. The only purpose I have had, in doing 
 this work, has been to raise art to its rightful 
 place in the scheme of general education. I 
 must thank the editor of the '' Arena," Mr. B. O. 
 Flower, and Mr. Edwin D. Mead, editor of the 
 ** New England Magazine," for the place they 
 have given me in their respective magazines, 
 and for their courtesy in permitting me to re- 
 print such essays as they have published. 
 
 These essays make no claim to literary merit ; 
 but this saving grace they have, — namely, that 
 they have been lived before they were written. 
 It would sadden me if I did not believe they 
 might have some influence, no^ matter how slight, 
 toward bettering the art-idea in this land. I 
 believe in the possibility of a great national art 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 for America, and I believe that such an art must 
 be indissolubly bound up with the patriotic idea. 
 There are dangers enough which threaten, it is 
 true; but is not the same spirit which has held 
 the country together and guided it through the 
 past crises, alive to-day? 
 
 Of one thing I am sure, and that is that the 
 men who are to mould the destiny of this nation 
 in art or politics must be nurtured and devel- 
 oped upon its soil. One of the dangers which 
 threatens our art, and I may say our manhood, 
 is that of over-travel. We have much to learn 
 from other nations, but we have more to learn 
 from our own. We have as much to learn, for 
 instance, from Japan as we have from France. 
 No one nation can teach us all we must know. 
 I have no sympathy whatever with the Ameri- 
 cans who give up their native land and become 
 pseudo-French or pseudo-Italian. Look at the 
 men, for instance, who spend their lives in Rome 
 or Paris. What do they produce ? Pretty, idle, 
 senseless statues and paintings that are neither 
 good nor bad. It might be called a milk-and- 
 water kind of art, a hybrid production, which is 
 
PREFACE. Vll 
 
 neither American, nor French, nor Italian, nor 
 anything that is worthy of men. The French 
 surpass us easily on their own soil. The Ameri- 
 cans who live and paint there are engaged in a 
 futile rivalry. The French know this, and are 
 laughing in their sleeves at us to-day. No ! 
 In the name of the lives that make this ground 
 holy, let us be American or give up meddling 
 in art, and take to something that is worthy of 
 our forefathers. 
 
 How may we best bring about a great national 
 art for this country? The simplest and surest 
 way of doing so is by educating the children of 
 the common schools, studying the new system 
 of education, finding out what place art holds 
 in it, and rounding out your children accord- 
 ing to God's plan, and not to the abortion of it 
 so dexterously practised in our schools. Give 
 us a nation of finely developed and organized 
 men, and our art will take care of itself. 
 
 We must look, then, to the public schools, 
 because our art is not to depend on the few 
 children nurtured with dangerous carefulness in 
 high-class academies, where the humanities are 
 
viii PREFACE. 
 
 taught better than they are practised. We must 
 look to the great people and not to a few epi- 
 cures. It is their voice which is the voice of 
 God and the voice of art. Greek art was great 
 because of the great mind which stood behind 
 it. Athens educated her people, while the chil- 
 dren of Tyre and Sidon were merely trained. 
 The men who made Greek art supremely great 
 were of the same mould as those that died with 
 Leonidas at Thermopylae. The men who have 
 made a national art possible for America are 
 buried, many of them, in unknown graves in far 
 southern battle-fields. 
 
 " Go tell at Sparta, thou that passest by, 
 That here, obedient to her laws, we lie." 
 
 Let it be with us as it was with Athens ; let us 
 be known to posterity as a nation of roundedly 
 developed men, living sanely within ourselves 
 and not extravagantly upon ourselves, rilet us 
 have that large culture which becomes a Re- 
 public, bought and sealed with a great price. 
 Under such conditions, art will grow as natur- 
 ally as a flower grows in a garden, when you 
 have let in the sunlight and plucked out the 
 
PREFACE. ix 
 
 weeds which choked it round about. Art is as 
 inevitable under such conditions as the succes- 
 sion of night by day. No amount of straining 
 and striving will produce it. We must be it, 
 live it, before we can produce it jSSience 
 teaches us that color resides in the eye that 
 sees, not in the object looked upon| Let us 
 look to it that the eye is single, in order that our 
 whole body may be filled with light. 
 
 Let the world laugh at our national idiosyn- 
 crasies and our Yankee notions ; whatever may 
 be said of our Puritan ancestry, the enduring 
 work of this people, its strength, and its vital 
 energy are due to them and to the men who 
 fathered them and made England great. It is 
 the individuality of the nation, as of an artist, 
 which is forever the most precious birthright. 
 What shall we give or receive in exchange for 
 that ? 
 
 I thank my friend, Thomas Davidson, for the 
 love which has inspired me to my highest effort 
 in life and art. 
 
 WILLIAM ORDWAY PARTRIDGE. 
 
 Milton, Marchy 1894. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 The True Education and the False ... 7 
 
 An American School of Sculpture .... 33 
 
 The Outlook for Sculpture in America . 60 
 
 Manhood in Art 90 
 
 The Relation of the Drama to Education 117 
 
 Goethe as a Dramatist 157 
 
THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE 
 FALSE 
 
 Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, 
 
 Fool'd by these rebel powers that thee array, 
 
 Why dost thou pine within, and suffer dearth, 
 Painting thy outward walls so costly gay ? 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 Let me define from the beginning what I mear^ 
 by true and false education. The literal mean- 
 ing of the word " education " will serve my pur- 
 pose. This word is derived from the Latin 
 edncerey a leading or drawing out. fteducation 
 means, then, a leading or drawing out of every 
 human faculty. \ It is this, and nothing less, 
 which I take to be the true education : anything 
 less than this will do as a definition for the neg- 
 ative of my argument. If our common schools, 
 as they exist to-day, tend to lead out every 
 human faculty, they are fulfilling their mission ; 
 if, however, the curriculum of these schools 
 does not include the studies which tend to draw 
 out a child's higher nature, we must look upon 
 them, not as institutions of true education, but 
 
8 THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 
 
 more as factories where children are taught to 
 make a part of a thing, and where only one part 
 of their nature is developed. ' 
 
 It is not my purpose to juggle with words, 
 but to tell you plainly my hope for our public 
 schools, and to say that, instead of thinking of 
 curtailing art, music, and physical training in 
 the round of daily study, we ought to be 
 thinking of ways and means to introduce more 
 thoroughly and largely these studies, which to 
 the clear-eyed Greek were the essentials of edu- 
 cation. At the close of ** Sesame and Lilies " 
 is found the following quotation, which bears 
 directly upon our subject: — 
 
 " So with our youths. We once taught them to 
 make Latin verses, and called them educated ; now 
 we teach them to leap and to row, to hit a ball with a 
 bat, and call them educated. Can they plough, can 
 they sow, can they plant at the right time, or build 
 with a steady hand ? Is the effort of their lives to be 
 chaste, knightly, faithful, holy in thought, lovely in 
 word and deed? Indeed it is with some, nay, with 
 many, and the strength of England is in them." 
 
 So writes John Ruskin, one of the world's 
 great educators. Let us follow out his thought 
 a little, and see if the teaching of reading, writ- 
 
THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 9 
 
 ing (I mean chirography, and not composition), 
 arithmetic, as it is drilled into a boy to-day, fits 
 him to take his place among his fellow-men 
 in a world of order, love, and beauty, and to 
 sustain his part cheerfully, bravely, and tem- 
 perately. It is a common saying to-day that 
 schools are not made for genius ; then I say to 
 you that your schools are at fault, and the 
 sooner they are brought into harmonious rela- 
 tion with the genius in every child, the better it 
 will be for them and for the world. 
 
 And regarding the creative faculties of your 
 children — who is taking care of these? The 
 age is putting the receptive faculties of the 
 child to their utmost tension, while the creative 
 ones are starved. It is not right, it is not just. 
 What are you doing to develop and preserve 
 the dignity of manual labor? Have you set 
 aside on your playground a site for a carpenter's 
 shop, or a blacksmith's forge, or a chemical 
 laboratory, or a machine shop? Many of our 
 children have a contempt for manual labor, and 
 it is our fault that it is so. The greatest moral 
 teacher in the world was not ashamed to be a 
 carpenter; and Elihu Burritt planned the good 
 of mankind as he stood by his glowing forge. 
 
lO THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 
 
 A man never falls so low but that he may be 
 dignified by some kind of manual labor. All 
 this discernment must come, not alone through 
 mathematics, but through a harmonious draw- 
 ing out of those faculties which bring the child, 
 and later the man, into relationship with his 
 environment. Emerson may well say that 
 ** Things are in the saddle and ride mankind" ; 
 but are we not ahve to-day to grapple with 
 these obstinate things, and to turn them into 
 their own proper paths? 
 
 It is a part of the whole wrong thinking about 
 education, that study alone will make a boy 
 great or develop his higher nature. Phillips 
 Brooks once stopped the writer in the street, 
 and said a man might study until he became a 
 gray-head, and not be great. It was not in the 
 grammar school at Stratford that Shakespeare 
 learned the lessons which were to make him the 
 articulate voice of England. The little Latin 
 and Greek he got there would have made him, 
 at best, but a sorry pedagogue. Still, " no man 
 was ever wise by chance.'* The whole country 
 round about was his school-house. Some fine 
 spirit led his mind out of the narrow grooves of 
 mere book-knowledge, into the way of looking 
 
THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE II 
 
 upon the whole world as his workshop, whether 
 by the dreamy Avon side, in misty vales, by 
 winding hedgerows, or in the stately church- 
 yard, — no matter where, the boy learned to 
 bring himself into relationship with every living 
 thing, and to him everything was alive. It was 
 a world of spirit. If the Stratford school did 
 not furnish this order of education, it was not 
 the child Shakespeare's fault. 
 
 Let us learn to look upon every child-face 
 that comes before us as a possible Shakespeare 
 or Michael Angelo or Beethoven: believe me, 
 every child that comes up before you has hidden 
 away somewhere in its being this precious ca- 
 pacity for something creative. We must change 
 our attitude toward the common children. When 
 we look upon each as a possible genius, then 
 shall we add new dignity to human life. Words- 
 worth well said, — 
 
 '* Not in entire forge tfulness, 
 And not in utter nakedness. 
 But trailing clouds of glory, do we come." 
 
 Why do we neglect the words of our poet seers? 
 The artistic world is rejoicing over the discovery 
 in Greece of some beautiful fragments of sculp- 
 ture, hidden far beneath the debris of centuries; 
 
12 THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 
 
 shall we not rejoice more richly when we are 
 able to dig down beneath the uncouth surface 
 of the commonest child that comes to us from 
 our great cities, and discover and develop that 
 faculty in him which is to make him fit to live 
 in sobriety and usefulness with his fellow-men? 
 Seeking for these qualities in the child, we shall 
 best conserve, as is done in physical nature, the 
 highest type, until we have raised all human life 
 to a higher level. Then shall we have heaven 
 in our midst. 
 
 This is the more possible because of the quick, 
 expansive material with which we have to deal 
 in our country. We start even in the race of 
 life; we recognize no hampering bonds of 
 priestcraft or tradition. The men who have 
 filled the highest position in our State have 
 come, often, from the lowliest grades in society. 
 The lowliest child has in it something to com- 
 mand our respect. Let us have no more pol- 
 ishing of pebbles and dimming of diamonds. 
 There are no pebbles : we but think so, not 
 having the wit to discern the diamond in the 
 rough. 
 
 Let us, then, unfold the whole nature of the 
 child, and not a little corner of it. Let no ridi- 
 
THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 1 3 
 
 cule deter us from our desire to consider educa- 
 tion in its true light. We are to teach these 
 children, or rather to show them, the ways by 
 which they are to make this world spiritually, as 
 well as materially, their own : we are to be prac- 
 tical, but greatly, not meagrely, so. We are to 
 teach them that, before doing great things, they 
 must dream them ; that the wonderful bridge 
 that connects the throbbing heart of New York 
 with its sister city, Brooklyn, was first a dream 
 of that eminently practical engineer, Roebling. 
 
 We must bring into children's lives every 
 poetic influence, to quicken their minds and 
 develop the aesthetic nature. We speak much 
 of the beauty of holiness — not enough of the 
 holiness of beauty. Sappho sang, *' Who is 
 beautiful is good." Under the head of art 
 should be included music, — not only singing in 
 chorus, but the hearing of the best music we 
 can obtain. Our popular concerts will do no 
 good until you bring good music into the 
 common schools. I would have the great vio- 
 linists come, as they make a tour through our 
 cities and towns, and play to the children. Be 
 assured that the violin, with its appealing, sym- 
 pathetic voice, will touch something in the child 
 
14 THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 
 
 that your book-knowledge can never reach, and 
 the one whom you have considered the dullard 
 of the class may be awakened and produce 
 music for which the world is hungry. Many 
 great artists would come for the mere asking. 
 Great artists are magnahimgus : in their hearts 
 they would rather play and build for your chil- 
 dren than for all the money you may pile up 
 before them. 
 
 Suppose you go on filling your children with 
 the things that are falsely called the rudiments 
 or bases of education : will arithmetic fortify the 
 youth against the temptations of the world ? Will 
 any amount of reading make him great-hearted? 
 Our honest Longfellow claimed for him the 
 right to see and share in the beauty of the 
 universe. 
 
 We tell the child how big this world is, but 
 how much do^ we show him of its wondrous 
 beauty? Will he not turn upon us some day 
 for this cruel negligence, for our contempt of 
 the highest in him? Is not every murder, every 
 crime against the community, a criticism upon 
 our system of education? We have gone on 
 from the animal state — let us not stop until we 
 walk like angels ! Fill your children with sweet 
 
THE TRUE EDUCATION 
 
 music and the high thoughts of your poets, and 
 they will build up a fabric which in after life 
 will withstand the attacks of care, sin, poverty, 
 and grief; for they will have discovered some- 
 thing in life which the world can neither give 
 nor take away. Nothing will be commonplace 
 to them ; for their imagination will color all life 
 with its own rich hues, — just as science teaches 
 us that color actually resides, not in the object, 
 but in the eye that looks upon it. '* We see but 
 what we have the gift of seeing ; what we bring 
 we find." If these ideas are radical, then count 
 me as the most rabid of radicals ; but I know 
 and feel the time is coming when men will grasp 
 this question of education in the right way, when 
 they will work from within outward, and not try 
 to thrust revelation upon the child before its 
 nature has been prepared for it. All men are 
 blind until this divine order or beauty in the 
 universe has been revealed to them : order and 
 beauty are synonymous terms. 
 
 It may be justly urged that we cannot have a 
 teacher for every individual talent or disposi- 
 tion. This is true ; but we may have large in- 
 fluences at work which shall reach and develop 
 all children. We have but one sun, and yet by 
 
l6 THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 
 
 its rays are developed and perfected all orders 
 of flowers. The sweet perfume from the modest 
 violet is lovingly drawn out; the rich color and 
 luxurious odor of the Jacqueminot rose is like- 
 wise led forth by this universal educator. The 
 influence of art is not unlike the effect of the 
 sun's heat and light. There is not one living 
 being on the earth's surface but is affected in 
 some degree by the power of music, painting, 
 sculpture, and poetry. We need as teachers 
 men with a universal order of mind, men who 
 have in their natures large charity and the 
 broadest sympathy, and men who have nothing 
 at stake in the political arena. 
 
 If, for instance, a child hates arithmetic and 
 loves music, sympathetic leading-on will show 
 him that to understand and produce the music 
 he loves, he must know something of mathe- 
 matics. Do not thrust before him the dry bones 
 of a subject as a disagreeable skeleton, but 
 clothe it with its living beauty. Again, if a child 
 hates mathematics and loves to build, you can 
 soon make it clear to him that, in order to build 
 anything that will endure, or be sightly in the 
 eyes of his fellows, he must have an idea of 
 proportion, an idea of the relation of one thing 
 
THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 1/ 
 
 to another. When he once sees this necessity, 
 in order to construct, to put into palpable form 
 the ideas that possess him, he will soon acquire 
 a sufficient knowledge of mathematics for his 
 purpose. Let him look upon a photograph of 
 the Parthenon, or any other triumph of engineer- 
 ing skill, until he appreciates the use of this 
 science to mankind. There is nothing beautiful 
 about the keyboard of a piano, but out of it 
 may be brought sounds that move us to tears. 
 
 I have said enough, perhaps, to show that 
 there is a right and a wrong way of approach- 
 ing children, and that we have been teaching 
 them too often the letter of the law, while we 
 have ignored its spirit. Carry out the same 
 order of reasoning which I have shown regard- 
 ing mathematics and music, with the other 
 branches of school study. Show that the arts 
 of writing, chirography, and rhetoric are neces- 
 sary to poetry and prose composition, and to 
 acquiring a knowledge of what the world is, 
 has been, and is capable of becoming. Was it 
 not Aristotle who declared poetry to be truer 
 than history ? It is the spirit of a time that the 
 poet sings, while the historian turns over its 
 dry bones ! 
 
1 8 THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 
 
 I pray you, employ the large way of teach- 
 ing a child. Let the wide eyes of childhood 
 look first and clearly at the wonderful beauty 
 of the universe. Develop this wonder-loving 
 spirit. Do not starve it by thrusting dry, 
 uncanny things in its face. How many men 
 are great enough to go back upon them- 
 selves, and understand, through such going- 
 back, this complex child-nature, and so daily 
 renew their patience, and minister to it gently 
 and lovingly? 
 
 We have been used to look upon the children 
 as being, to a certain degree, at fault; but we 
 are at fault, not they. We call certain children 
 stupid because we cannot drive them into the 
 narrow ways we near-sightedly lay out for them. 
 It is not the children, but we, who are stupid. 
 Look again at the natural world ; see how many 
 different influences it takes to develop seed- 
 life. See what preparation has gone before : the 
 crystal must be dissolved, and the earth made 
 ready: it is the law of evolution, — the lower 
 must give way to the higher. If such thought 
 is necessary to the proper development of a 
 grain of corn, shall we not care more lovingly 
 and thoughtfully for these little ones, with their 
 
THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 1 9 
 
 immortal possibilities, *' while the dew is on the 
 flower fresh and sweet " ? 
 
 Not long ago, in one of our police courts, 
 a man was convicted of the crime of theft, 
 and sentenced to imprisonment. When asked 
 if he had anything to say for himself, he 
 replied only this, "I was taught to steal be- 
 fore I learned to read and write." Although 
 the man had learned to read and write and 
 count, he had not learned how to use his 
 reading and writing, and what they were good 
 for; he had learned these things as ends. No 
 one had shown him that they were merely the 
 keyboard, for the uttering of what was noble 
 in himself, or for the understanding of what 
 was beautiful and uplifting in the world. His 
 reading and writing and mathematics were 
 stepping stones to greater wretchedness and 
 crime. 
 
 It is thought that education will be the 
 saving of our country in the crises through 
 which it must pass. The true education may 
 actually save us ; but the false education will 
 do no more for us than it did in the past. 
 Was it not Voltaire who called all men fools, 
 and then placed loaded muskets in their hands ? 
 
20 THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 
 
 By SO doing has not such a one written him- 
 self down as the greatest fool of all? On 
 what does the future safety of our country 
 depend? On these magnificent war-vessels 
 that are fitting out, with the possibility of 
 doing such wonderful damage to human life 
 and human happiness? I think not! Does 
 it depend on the number of men we can bring 
 into the field, and the perfection of their 
 equipment? I think not! Upon what, then, 
 does it depend? It depends upon our public 
 schools, and the order of education we give 
 the child. A poetess has well said that the 
 cannon now speaks in the teacher's place. 
 
 At the dedication of the Bunker Hill monu- 
 ment, Daniel Webster spoke these words : — 
 
 " Let our age be an age of improvement. In a 
 day of peace let us advance the arts of peace and the 
 works of peace. Let us develop the resources of our 
 land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, 
 promote all its great interests, and see whether we 
 also, in our day and generation, may not perform 
 something worthy to be remembered. Let us culti- 
 vate a true spirit of union and harmony. Let our 
 conceptions be enlarged to the circle of our duties. 
 Let us extend our ideas over the whole vast fields in 
 which we are called to act.'* 
 
THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 21 
 
 So spoke one of America's greatest thinkers 
 and orators. Longfellow has put for us in 
 verse the same thought, in his noble poem of 
 "The Arsenal at Springfield": — 
 
 " Were half the power that fills the world with terror, 
 Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, 
 Given to redeem the human mind from error, 
 There were no need of arsenals and forts." 
 
 Follow back the history of any great life. 
 Find out what element made that life great. 
 In almost every instance you will find that 
 it was not the ordinary schooling, but some 
 sympathetic appreciation of the boy's capacity. 
 Perhaps it was an old sailor, who helped the 
 boy to carve a boat out of a block of wood, and 
 by his tales of great ships and their voyages 
 stimulated his ambition, and so made Colum- 
 bus and a new world possible. Perchance it 
 was a father, who stopped before a great statue 
 and told his boy what it stood for, until the 
 spirit within the child longed to come out 
 and create great statues. It may have been 
 the repetition to a child of some stirring poem 
 that in after years led him to write great 
 poems. Whatever it was, it must have been 
 a sympathetic drawing out of the boy's facul- 
 
22 THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 
 
 ties, what we call true education, as opposed 
 to the system of drilling and beating in, — the 
 drowsy education, as some one has called it. 
 An appeal was made to the imagination and 
 the spirit within him. 
 
 The one supreme thing that is left for men 
 to do in art to-day is the depiction of character. 
 Browning declared toward the close of his life 
 that the only thing he found worth studying 
 was the development of the human soul: — 
 
 "Machinery just meant 
 To give thy soul its bent.** 
 
 If character, then, is destiny in man, so is 
 it in a people. If order and temperance enable 
 a man to live a useful, dignified, happy life 
 among his fellows, it is equally true with that 
 larger association of men which we call a 
 nation. A sympathetic drawing and rounding- 
 out of the child's character has enabled the 
 man to live such a life as I describe; and what 
 is true of the man's life may be made true of 
 a people's life, so that the salvation and per- 
 petuation of our republic will depend on what 
 sort of training we give to mind and spirit in 
 our public schools. 
 
THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 23 
 
 When we have thoroughly understood the 
 influences which have made men great, and 
 brought our schools into harmony with such 
 influences, then and then only shall we have 
 the true education. The present system is 
 like looking through a distorted lens : it shows 
 you many brilliant colors, yet the object 
 is not enlarged harmoniously, but in a dis- 
 proportionate way. Why is it that the poet 
 dwells upon the education of field and street, 
 and not of the schoolroom, and exclaims, — 
 
 " Perhaps there lives some dreaming boy, untaught 
 In schools, some graduate of field and street, 
 Who shall become a master of the art " ? 
 
 Every one of us must be on the lookout for 
 such a child. Search every face. Looking 
 into the face of Jesus, the carpenter's son, 
 little did the neighbors dream He was the 
 Christ. 
 
 Is it possible to make our schools so com- 
 plete that they shall round out the nature of 
 every child.? If we say "No" to this, it is an 
 acknowledgment of weakness. Let us see, 
 then, what can be done. We have already 
 spoken of the introduction of music into the 
 schools. I mean great music, not alone that 
 
24 THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 
 
 of the singing master. Nothing will tend to 
 develop the imagination so much as this. 
 Then the children ought to be taken once a 
 fortnight, at least, to hear some fine orches- 
 tra or good opera. Tune their ears to fine 
 harmonies. 
 
 We should have, moreover, no blank walls 
 in our schoolrooms. It is just as important 
 to hang reproductions of great paintings and 
 frescos upon the walls, as it is to place books 
 under their eyes. Many of the city children 
 have never seen a meadow or the country in 
 the springtime. They know nothing of the 
 sweet delights of nature and her delicious 
 silences. These are all shut out from them. 
 It may be that they will never have an oppor- 
 tunity to see nature at her best. City life 
 becomes so habitual that many of them will 
 never care for such delight, never appreciate 
 it if the opportunity is offered to them in 
 after life. How, then, shall we keep alive 
 and cherish in the child this love of nature, 
 this sacred kinship with all green things .<* I 
 know of one sure way, — by placing before their 
 eyes the pictures of nature's sweetest haunts, 
 which great artists have transcribed for us 
 
THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 25 
 
 with such loving care. I believe it has been 
 with many others as with the writer. Born 
 in, and bred to, city life, he has learned to 
 love beautiful nature from beautiful pictures. 
 The time is not far distant when the introduc- 
 tion of pictures and statues will be considered 
 as essential to our schoolrooms as are the win- 
 dows; then shall we be truly, greatly eco- 
 nomical. We shall then give men a new 
 reason why they should care for their bodies 
 and keep them at their best: — 
 
 " To man propose this test — 
 Thy body at its best, 
 How far can that project 
 Thy soul on its lone way ? '* 
 
 By thus inculcating a love for art in a child, 
 you will make of him a citizen who will help 
 to embellish your cities, making them like 
 Athens, Venice, and Florence, — beautiful 
 forever. 
 
 But we must have more than this. We 
 must have workshops of all kinds. There 
 must be the same emulation and friendly 
 rivalry in the production of a good piece of 
 carpentering work, or piece of machinery, as 
 there is now in the game of baseball, football, 
 
26 THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 
 
 etc. Do not do away with your baseball- 
 ground, but set aside a part of it for a car- 
 penter's shop, a machine shop, and a forge. 
 Let the boy learn the material forces of nature, 
 and how he can best make use of them for the 
 good of his fellow-men, and for his own uplift- 
 ing. If any manual work is to be pursued 
 successfully in after life, the tool must be 
 placed in the hand of the child. 
 
 Too much time, interest, and excitement are 
 given to-day to the so-called " sports ; '* too 
 little to the precious handicrafts and arts. 
 Teach children wood-carving, which has be- 
 come almost a lost art, but which was carried 
 to such wonderful perfection by Delia Quercia 
 in Siena in the fifteenth century. All such 
 instructions will prepare them, without their 
 knowing it, for the more serious duties of life. 
 Let them learn that there is something in this 
 life better than baseball; that man is created 
 for something higher. Do not do away with 
 any healthful exercise, but let these games 
 take their proper places. The true education 
 is not entirely physical, not entirely intel- 
 lectual, nor is it entirely moral, but it is all 
 three in proportion. Let us call for mental, 
 
THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 2/ 
 
 as well as physical, work. Let us offer prizes 
 of silver cups for a good piece of handiwork, 
 and so keep before our children a proper regard 
 for the dignity of manual labor. 
 
 Cannot debates be established between dif- 
 ferent schools and classes ? Assign characters 
 to the different boys, — the character of Ham- 
 ilton to one, Jefferson to another, Washington 
 to a third : in this way they will become inter- 
 ested in our history in a natural way, and in 
 a way they can never forget. We may even 
 go so far as to hope that each school may have 
 a small theatre where plays may be produced 
 at festal seasons, and where children may learn 
 what a good play is, and what is truly dramatic. 
 And a serious order of criticism and critics 
 may be developed. In fact, no influence should 
 be shut out from the child which tends to 
 develop man; all may be softened, however, 
 and modified to suit his nature. Every public 
 school should have its telescope. An oppor- 
 tunity should be given one evening in the 
 week for children to come and study the 
 heavens in their silent majesty. When we 
 have done even a part of what is here sug- 
 gested, the difficulty will have solved itself, 
 
28 THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 
 
 and one of the greatest problems of modern 
 life, namely, what men and children shall do 
 with their leisure hours, will find natural solu- 
 tion. I offer this practical solution, namely, 
 the true education in the public schools. 
 
 Some one, I imagine, here says to me. 
 These plans of yours are all very beautiful, 
 but how are we to make them* possible? My 
 answer to him is this : The first step towards 
 making them possible has been taken by our 
 showing our willingness to consider them at 
 all. The second step, and perhaps the final 
 one, will be when each one of us tries, in 
 some large or humble way, to bring about the 
 changes suggested, gradually to substitute the 
 true education for the false. Our present 
 system we may call good; "but humanity 
 sweeps onward." To-morrow must see us a 
 step higher in the scale of civilization, and we 
 must not rest until our children shall embody 
 the highest good that we see in the highest 
 type of child-life to-day. This new child must 
 be a resultant spiritual being. 
 
 The things for which we speak to-day have 
 been termed by a certain part of the commu- 
 nity "fads." If they be "fads," then let us 
 
THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 29 
 
 have "fads " without end. The word " Gothic," 
 once used in scorn, came in time to designate 
 the most graceful style of architecture, and the 
 most lovely, perhaps the world has ever known. 
 Let no penny-wise and pound-foolish cry of 
 economy deter us from seeing that the truest 
 economy is in getting the best we are worthy of, 
 and producing the highest we are capable of. 
 We shall not be discouraged, if the Philistines 
 carry their point for a moment. We have 
 learned that the return of the wave prepares 
 for a more magnificent upward sweep. If we 
 are driven back, it will not be for long: we 
 shall return with a new life, myriad-colored, 
 rich, God-given, and God-giving, and carry 
 it far upon the blank meadows, to enrich and 
 beautify them for all time. ''The crutch of 
 Time does more than the club of Hercules." 
 Such education as I have described prepares 
 the ground for a higher order of revelation 
 than we yet dream of. When it comes, we 
 shall not need mediums and spiritualists : every 
 man will be a medium, when he shall have 
 learned to give the God within him a right to 
 speak. Let us give our children something 
 that will raise them above the power of chance. 
 
 CM\fO^W\K 
 
30 THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 
 
 I am appealing to you for the larger education 
 of a people. No amount of learning will save 
 our country, in the present and future, from 
 the evils that threaten her; nothing will do 
 so but a higher order of living, and the only 
 way to have such living is to begin with the 
 children. Conversions like that of Saint Paul 
 are rare; but a little love and sympathy will 
 win any child. 
 
 I would dwell especially and again upon the 
 careful finding out of the creative element 
 or faculty in every child, — what that child can 
 produce. This you will find out most easily 
 by asking or studying what the child best 
 loves. Our famous painter, William Hunt, 
 once said to a parent who came with his child 
 as a pupil to the studio : " Tell me how much 
 your child loves this work, not what he has 
 thus far accomplished." This order of educa- 
 tion, from its very nature, will lead the child 
 to consider the good in others and to show a 
 proper respect for their rights. 
 
 " Childhood has its secrets and its mysteries ; but 
 who can tell or who can explain them ? We have all 
 roamed through this silent wonder-wood ; we have all 
 once opened our eyes in blissful astonishment as the 
 
THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 3 1 
 
 beautiful reality of life overflowed our souls. We 
 knew not where or who we were ; the whole world 
 was ours, and we were ihe whole world's. That was 
 an infinite life, without beginning and without end, 
 without rest and without pain. In the heart it was as 
 clear as the spring heavens, fresh as the violet's per- 
 fume, hushed and holy as a Sabbath morning. 
 
 " What disturbs this God's peace of the child ? How 
 can this unconscious and innocent existence ever 
 cease? What dissipates the rapture of this individu- 
 ality and universality, and suddenly leaves us solitary 
 and alone in a clouded life? " 
 
 So wrote Max Muller in the "Memories" 
 that make up his wonderful story of German 
 love. Let us remember this truth, which 
 Schiller also aptly puts when he writes that 
 " common natures pay by what they do, noble 
 natures by what they are." And what is more 
 noble and holy than a child? It is we, really, 
 who go to school to be taught of these chil- 
 dren. The older we grow, and the deeper and 
 richer our life becomes, the more readily do 
 we understand and appreciate the sayings of 
 the world's inspired teachers; especially of 
 that quiet, unassuming carpenter, who once 
 drew a little child to Him, and told His lis- 
 tening disciples that they must attain to the 
 
32 THE TRUE EDUCATION AND THE FALSE 
 
 same purity of heart before they could enter 
 the kindgom of heaven. What a great spir- 
 itual truth the Master spoke! We are apt to 
 think that these wondrous eyes of childhood 
 are given to them to con over the books we 
 place before them. It is well for us to dwell 
 sometimes on the thought that these eyes are 
 theirs to let out the light of the pure soul 
 within. Was it not Wordsworth who said, — 
 
 ** To me, the meanest flower that blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears '* ? 
 
 In this appeal for the divinity in the child, 
 I believe I am making a plea for the most 
 essentially practical and true order of educa- 
 tion. I go back again to the original idea of 
 sympathy; and such sympathy exists, I have 
 endeavored to show, only where there is a 
 giving and taking. Let us, as teachers, not 
 forget that we are pupils as well. Let us 
 strive, in our time and place, to learn the 
 lessons which shall fit us also for the highest 
 life. 
 
AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF 
 SCULPTURE 
 
 But art itself, which is the faculty of perceiving and ex- 
 pressing the leading character of objects, is as enduring as the 
 civilization of which it is the best and earliest fruit. 
 
 Taine. 
 
 In order to know how the American people 
 rank to-day in the art of sculpture, and what 
 possibilities are ours for the development of 
 a great national art, we must determine, first, 
 what constitutes greatness in plastic art, and 
 secondly, what are the conditions that produce 
 such greatness. Having considered these two 
 questions, we shall be able to decide, by com- 
 paring our conditions with those of other 
 great art-epochs, what probability there is 
 that America will achieve distinction in the 
 art of sculpture. 
 
 We shall have to review briefly the history 
 of those nations which have achieved such 
 distinction; the cause of their success and 
 how their art arose; its highest period and its 
 
34 AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 
 
 decadence. Then, applying the tests of expe- 
 rience and history to our time, we shall be 
 able to form our conclusions upon facts. 
 • All men, no matter what their state of civi- 
 lization, have practised the art of sculpture. 
 From the first, men have had pleasure in 
 imitating natural objects and sounds. From 
 this love of imitation, the art of sculpture 
 came into existence. While all men have the 
 imitative faculty, but few are creators ; and a 
 piece of carving can be called a work of art 
 only when it embodies an aesthetic or artistic 
 idea. The mere imitation of a natural object 
 is not sufficient; art demands that something 
 be added to the natural. No better definition 
 can be given, perhaps, than that of Bacon. 
 "Art," he says, "is man added to nature." 
 Such art we are wont to call ideal or super- 
 natural; that is, something in harmony with 
 and embodying our highest thought. Ideal 
 art, then, is the embodiment of a thought; 
 such embodiment alone has the right to be 
 called fine art. Art that lifts us above the 
 commonplace and trivial, into the calm regions j 
 of the infinite, cultured people are wont to call ] 
 great. Art, to be great and ideal, must appeal 
 
AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 35 
 
 to the wide intelligence of a people, and it 
 must express their noblest life. 
 
 The art of sculpture has its limits; its laws 
 are firmly fixed, and plastic ideas can be prop- 
 erly expressed only by one who understands 
 its conditions. We shall see, then, that to 
 speak plastically, or to embody a thought in 
 harmonious and enduring form, requires knowl- 
 edge, self-restraint, and a mastery over the 
 material from which the thought is to be cut 
 or fused. This art requires complete knowl- 
 edge of the limitations and laws governing 
 plastic art, and thought sufficient to create a 
 suitable idea. The sculptor must also have 
 acquired sufficient technical power to master 
 the material he works in, and to make it 
 obedient to his thought. A sculptor's natural 
 vehicle of expression is form, as is music to 
 the musician. 
 
 A work of art is the natural product or result 
 of refined and cultured living. It is so of 
 necessity. Then, too, experience and history 
 prove it to be so. A modern Frenchman, with 
 his distorted ideas of life and abnormal moral 
 conceptions, could no more produce a statue 
 like the Venus of Melos, than could Phidias, 
 
$6 AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 
 
 living in the calm, normal, refined atmosphere 
 of Hellas, have produced a figure like a Diana 
 of the French Salon. An artist is the voice of 
 his people and time. It cannot be otherwise, 
 or the time will not own him. History shows 
 that great art has existed only where great 
 ideas were current; and history also shows 
 that every statue or monument of artistic 
 worth has come of an intelligent people, and 
 come, not isolated, but together with other 
 like works of art, and where schools of sculp- 
 ture have existed. There is no exception to 
 this rule. As in later days Shakespeare was 
 the natural climax of the Elizabethan age of 
 letters and dramatics, so was Phidias, in an- 
 tiquity, the result of the great age of Pericles, 
 and Michael Angelo the perfect flower of the 
 Renaissance. A great critic has shown that 
 we may trace a work of art back, not only to 
 the period and school which produced it, but 
 to the artist himself, and the very time of his 
 life when he created it. The rise, climax, 
 and decadence of an art is one with the rise, 
 climax, and decadence of a people. 
 
 While much of the carving done by pre- 
 historic nations, and by the monks of the 
 
AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 3/ 
 
 Middle Ages, is interesting from an archaeo- 
 logical and historical standpoint, and from the 
 patience and labor expended upon its produc- 
 tion, it cannot properly be classified with the 
 fine arts. There are peoples of antiquity who 
 had no great original art, and yet were known 
 throughout the then civilized world for their 
 wide commercial importance. The Phoenicians 
 were such a people. When a nation has no 
 ideas worthy to be perpetuated, no sculptor 
 arises to put them in enduring form. So, Tyre 
 and Sidon, famous in their day, are known to 
 us only as lying between Egypt and Assyria, 
 and copying the art-idea of both these nations. 
 A nation, then, to be great in art, must have 
 creative genius, and that genius must find 
 complete and rounded expression. So we 
 may pass over the crude arts that antedated 
 the great monumental art of Egypt, and also 
 those that came after her, and all peoples 
 whose art idea has been merely imitative, 
 decorative, or fantastic. 
 
 Coming to Egyptian art, one should under- 
 stand, first, the period, secondly, the school, 
 and thirdly and naturally, the artist him- 
 self. Carlyle speaks to our purpose when 
 
38 AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 
 
 he calls Dante the articulate voice of the 
 Italian people, and Shakespeare the voice of 
 England. 
 
 Taine the critic was, no doubt, thinking 
 of Egypt when he said that every school de- 
 generates and falls, simply through its neglect 
 of exact imitation and its abandonment of the 
 living model. If he intended this statement 
 to apply to schools of art in general, he is 
 in error. History shows that almost every 
 school that has existed has fallen into deca- 
 dence through a too close following of human 
 models, a too exact imitation, resulting in utter 
 realism, which has meant and still means utter 
 degradation of art. It is also true that a 
 neglect of the human model, and a dry, literal 
 imitation of antique casts, is as bad as the 
 other extreme. If imitation were the chief 
 end of art, as some claim it is, the man who 
 makes plaster casts from life would do better 
 work than the sculptor. No piece of sculp- 
 ture can, by the most careful study, be made 
 so like as a death mask or a cast from the 
 living model; and yet who would think of 
 comparing such a cast with a statue .-^ 
 
 The processes of casting furnish valuable 
 
AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 39 
 
 data for a work of art, but are only means to 
 an end. No sculptor intends, I take it, to 
 make a statue so like life that the spectator 
 shall be deceived and think it to be alive. 
 Such attempts always end in the art of the 
 waxwork show. Is not one of the chief attrac- 
 tions in sculpture the pure white or amber- 
 tinted marble from which it is cut, and which 
 is in no particular like life.'* In entering the 
 church of San Pietro-in-Vincoli, in Rome, to 
 see the Moses of Michael Angelo, one is led 
 past a painted statue of the Virgin, actually 
 clothed, and evidently made to resemble real 
 life. What a contrast between the art of the 
 image-maker and that of the sculptor! The 
 former, trivial, debased, panders to the credu- 
 lities of a superstitious people; and for all 
 its dressing, it is far from life in form, color, 
 and spirit, having in common with it only 
 the externals of dress. The latter, a spiritual 
 symbolical interpretation of life, the firm em- 
 bodiment of enduring will and faith that does 
 not falter. Moses, not as he was in flesh, 
 blood, and mantle, but as he is for all time 
 in spirit; an indomitable leader of the chosen 
 people, one who has actually walked and talked 
 
40 AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 
 
 with God, sublimely calm, the embodiment of 
 noblest human dignity. 
 
 Let us understand that imitation belongs 
 merely to the technical side of art. We must 
 not belittle its office, nor must we make it 
 all-sufficient. We cannot have a great art 
 through a mere system of mechanics, no mat- 
 ter how complete or perfect it may be. We 
 are driven back to the critic who says, "Art 
 is man added to nature." The sublime sibyls 
 of Michael Angelo are sublime because they 
 have passed through the crucible of his mas- 
 terful genius; born as much of his intelligence 
 as of the models who posed for him. To the 
 fine physical forms which he selected in human 
 nature, he added the poetic beauty of his own 
 thought and soul. What this was, we may 
 see in his sonnets: — 
 
 " What the cloud doeth 
 The Lord knoweth, 
 The cloud knoweth not. 
 What the artist doeth, 
 The Lord knoweth ; 
 Knoweth the artist not ? " 
 
 Having once understood the man's rounded 
 nature, we can better understand how he 
 created these inspired virgins. One may urge 
 
AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 4 1 
 
 that they are not like life, and they are not 
 like the life that passed his studio door each 
 day; but somewhere he had seen such beings. 
 In the subdued light of a silent cathedral, or 
 against the evening skies beyond Florence, 
 or at some brilliant festival, somewhere, no 
 matter where, he had seen women like these. 
 To imitation he added memory and poetic 
 feeling, and produced, in their calm, dignified 
 sweetness, these immortal creations. 
 
 In endeavoring to show that art is not mere 
 imitation, it has been shown that art is not 
 realism; and we come back to the point first 
 urged, that great art is ideal. It is the essen- 
 tial of a person that art produces, that fleeting 
 something (shall we call it spirit ?) in a face 
 that lifts it out of the crowd and fastens it 
 upon our memory. We may call this char- 
 acter as well as spirit. We have shown that 
 art is the spiritual representation of an idea 
 or of a person. While there are different 
 manifestations of the ideal, varying as differ- 
 ent peoples vary, all ideal arts have had this 
 in common, — that they uplift, dignify, and 
 ennoble human life and human thought. 
 
 We have omitted to mention an important 
 
 i 
 
42 AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 
 
 factor in the artist's composition. It is the 
 power for artistic selection. When this power 
 has been cultivated, we call it taste. To the 
 inborn trait must be added much wise seeing. 
 This instinct for selection, or taste, is a dis- 
 tinctive characteristic of the great art eras, as 
 well as of great artists. 
 
 To quote again a great critic, regarding the 
 object of art: "The end of a work of art is 
 to manifest some essential or salient character, 
 consequently some important idea, clearer and 
 more completely than is attainable from real 
 objects." Art manifesting the highest aspira- 
 tions of man must, to be great, be intelligible 
 to all, and not merely to a chosen few. The 
 great artists of all time have been rounded 
 men and products of a complete and advanced 
 civilization, and great arts have naturally been 
 the same. 
 
 Having discussed our first question, namely, 
 what greatness is in art, and more particularly 
 sculpture, let us consider the conditions that 
 have been found necessary to produce such 
 great art and artists. If genius in man is like 
 the vital, germinating force in all seed life, 
 so, like this force, does it depend on benig- 
 
AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 43 
 
 nant and congenial surroundings. A tempered 
 atmosphere is needed to develop that which 
 otherwise would remain undeveloped, or at 
 best remain an abortive growth. Genius in 
 art is dependent upon prevailing tendency, the 
 trend of life, what ideas or purpose may be 
 current; and these decide what manifestation, 
 if any, genius shall take on. To the begetting 
 of a great art, certain moral and political con- 
 ditions have been found necessary. Calm joy 
 and clear faith are present in all great works 
 of art. People given over to scepticism and 
 despondency seldom produce a great statue or 
 monument. A nation must enjoy a certain 
 tranquillity if it is to practise the plastic arts. 
 Statues must be thought out. 
 
 Prosperity, too, is necessary to the devel- 
 opment of a rounded art. Art cannot flourish 
 in abject poverty. The conditions of life and 
 society must be such as to enforce a proper 
 respect for the artist's calling. Ancient Rome 
 never had a native artist, because the calling 
 was thought undignified and effeminate. An 
 artist, to produce great work, must be a part 
 of the highest culture of his time. Ruskin 
 has said that he should be fitted for the best 
 
 I 
 
44 AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 
 
 society and keep out of it. Is it not truer that 
 he should be fitted for the best society and 
 keep in it? No great art is born of an attic 
 studio alone. Art must have breadth and 
 depth, must strike its roots deep into the soil 
 upon which humanity lives, if it is to live. If 
 it is not so, it will become the dry, hard, suf- 
 fering, ascetic art of the monasteries, that 
 cannot stand the light and joy of every day. 
 Great artists, then, are heirs to all that has 
 gone before, as well as part and parcel of their 
 epochs. Great art may be pathetic as well as 
 joyful, but never despairing; it is the pathos 
 of unstable man looking upon the calm, eternal 
 repose of the mind's creations. The pathos, 
 after all, is subjective, rather than objective. 
 In the joyful eras of time, the conditions of 
 life have been such that men have had leisure 
 to create and care for the embodiments of their 
 noblest aspirations; and wishing to perpetuate 
 such ideals, they have put them in stone or 
 lasting bronze. 
 
 Let us look at this question of condition 
 more closely. Taking the Greek school, for 
 example, which attained the highest perfec- 
 tion possible, what conditions had it more 
 
AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 45 
 
 favorable to sculpture than had Egypt and 
 Assyria, from which Greece took her beginning 
 in art? These nations furnished each an indis- 
 pensable letter of an alphabet, which, in the 
 hands of the clear-eyed Greek, was made to 
 express his free-born intelligence, his symme- 
 trical idea of human life, and the forces that 
 govern itc 
 
 The first condition of Greek life was free- 
 dom. The Greek citizen served neither priest 
 nor king. He elected his own magistrates and 
 pontiffs, and might, in turn, be elected to any 
 office himself. He was liable to be called 
 upon to judge important political cases in the 
 tribunal, and to decide grave matters of state 
 in the assemblies. Every man was a trained 
 soldier as well as a politician. It was neces- 
 sary to be able to protect one's self from a 
 possible inroad of the barbarians. All men 
 were eligible to national offices. The warfare 
 of that day called for personal prowess and 
 agility, and the individual was developed to 
 his highest possible capacity, capable of the 
 utmost human endurance. The producing of 
 fine physical form was a chief art among the 
 Greeks. The Olympic games consisted of 
 
46 AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 
 
 a triumphal display of the nude figure. Before 
 the eyes of the whole nation, the Greek youth 
 contended for supremacy. Poets chanted the 
 praises of the victor, and his name was given 
 to the Olympiad. His native city received 
 him in triumph, and the deeds of his prowess 
 became her pride. Many tales are told of the 
 excessive admiration and constant joy which 
 the Greek had in perfection of human form. 
 The costume was light and easily put off, 
 while the long, sweeping folds of the mantle 
 gave dignity and grace to the draped figure. 
 We know that the flower of Athenian youth 
 entered into these contests; and it is recorded 
 that Sophocles, when a youth, and distin- 
 guished for his beauty, stripped off his gar- 
 ment to dance, and chant paeans. Phidias not 
 only entered to admire and study the nude 
 form at these joyful festivals, but was wont 
 himself to contend; so he knew from expe- 
 rience all possible movements of the human 
 body and every expression of the face. At 
 the baths, too, sculptors had the opportunity 
 of studying the human figure in a thousand 
 listless, graceful attitudes. 
 
 Not only did the Greek admire a finely 
 
AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 47 
 
 developed human form, but he considered it 
 to be actually the abode of divinity. To him 
 the body was the temple of the spirit, as the 
 word is used in its pagan interpretation. It 
 was natural for the Greek to seek an enduring 
 expression for the beautiful human forms which 
 it was the chief end of his existence to develop; 
 and a successful athlete, when crowned, was 
 entitled to a statue. 
 
 The Greek system of education included all 
 that Delsarte has sought to formulate. The 
 educated Greek had an abounding faith in the 
 moral government of the universe, and his life 
 was not harassed or disquieted by anxious 
 doubt. At peace with himself and with his 
 gods, he had time and inclination to cultivate 
 the beautiful arts; and all his statuary is 
 the reflection of a serene state of mind, well 
 adapted to plastic thought. In this healthful 
 atmosphere, sculpture found nothing to retard 
 its growth. We have seen it fettered by 
 priestcraft in Egypt, and by unvarying con- 
 ventionality in Assyria. We have discussed 
 the conditions necessary to the successful 
 growth of sculpture, and we have seen that 
 these conditions belong to Greece more than 
 
48 AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 
 
 to any country, perhaps, before or since. The 
 Athenian had abundant leisure. His work 
 was done by slaves. But this leisure was not 
 given over to bloody shows, as was the case 
 with the more brutal Roman, but was devoted 
 to intellectual and physical education. The 
 gymnasium of that day was the great art- 
 school, where the sculptor might bring his 
 clay and study the youth as they ran, wrestled, 
 hurled the spear, or threw the discus. On 
 festival occasions, in the choral and orchestral 
 dances, was seen every beautiful position and 
 movement of the human body. 
 
 The greatest Greek sculptor, Phidias, lived 
 at the same time as the greatest architect, Icti- 
 nus, the most revered philosopher, Socrates, and 
 the distinguished dramatist, Sophocles. We see, 
 then, that the age which produced the greatest 
 men in literature, art, and science produced 
 the grandest works of sculpture in Greece. 
 We know that Pericles, the chief statesman 
 of that era, was the friend of Phidias, and 
 could, no doubt, talk as intelligently about 
 art as Phidias could converse about letters 
 and affairs of state. 
 
 Athenian civilization was at its zenith. The 
 
AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 49 
 
 fragments which remain of the frieze and ped- 
 iment groups of the Parthenon exhibit the 
 handiwork of a firmly poised, symmetrical 
 mind, and a hand thoroughly trained to exe- 
 cute its bidding. Were we not charmed with 
 the perfect proportion and satisfying beauty 
 of the whole, it would be easy to lose ourselves 
 in the subtlety of finish and the delicate rela- 
 tion of plane to plane. Dignity, reverence, 
 and self-control are the chief characteristics, 
 and must have distinguished the man who 
 created these marvellous works. Supreme 
 knowledge of the laws and limitations of 
 sculpture is shown. Each figure is perfectly 
 adapted to the place it fills. 
 
 We may take these sculptures as typical of 
 the symmetrical, harmonious, and completely 
 rounded Greek life which gave them existence. 
 Each man bore easily and unconsciously the 
 political and social duties laid upon him by 
 the state. That the Greeks were a people of 
 infinite possibilities, and capable of indefinite 
 expansion, may be seen by the way in which 
 they represent repose in action. The Greek 
 knew where to place his climax. His emo- 
 tional nature was subordinated to his intelli- 
 
 4 
 
50 AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 
 
 gence. There is no running riot; something 
 is forever kept back. We feel that we may 
 any day find some statue more beautiful than 
 the last. His nature is at times dramatic, 
 never theatrical. All this can be seen in his 
 sculpture more than any other manifestation 
 of his genius. Sculpture was the soul and 
 the central art of Greece, and must remain 
 forever its most splendid attraction. 
 
 After six hundred years of effort, Rome 
 conquered Greece, and robbed her of her art 
 treasures to decorate her own gaudy villas. 
 Glancing for a moment at the condition of 
 national and private life at Rome, we shall 
 see why she never produced a great art or 
 even a single distinguished sculptor. Could 
 we have followed Greek art from the moment 
 of her supreme glory to the second period of 
 her career, of which epoch Praxiteles was the 
 most illustrious creator, we should have seen 
 her stripped of her sublimity, but still beau- 
 tiful. The distinguishing characteristic of 
 this second epoch, when the decadence of art 
 had begun, was a sensuous loveliness. The 
 spiritual meaning was becoming more and 
 more confused, the standards of life were low- 
 
AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 5 1 
 
 ered, and all that was ennobling and poetical 
 in the Greek religion was fast becoming lost 
 in affectation. As life was degraded, art fol- 
 lowed its footsteps. Art had still, however, 
 its canons of modesty. After the death of 
 Praxiteles, sensual representation became its 
 chief object. 
 
 To be a great artist in Greece was to be the 
 equal of the greatest in the land. In Rome 
 it was not so. Artists were relegated to the 
 mechanic classes. The Roman was a distinct 
 realist, and never rose above the level of por- 
 traiture and imitation. The chief object of 
 Roman life was to possess and dominate. 
 Amid such selfish and ignoble surroundings, 
 art could not flourish. Caesar, Agrippa, and 
 Augustus affected a love for the fine arts. 
 The plundering of Greece finally led to the 
 establishment of a second-rate school at Rome, 
 which we may call the Graeco-Roman. The 
 conditions of life in Rome were utterly opposed 
 to the creation or development of a national 
 school that can, with any propriety, be called 
 great. Rome's chief art was warfare, and in 
 this she excelled. Public and private life 
 was immoral to the point of licentiousness. 
 
52 AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 
 
 Rome may be quoted as a negative example, 
 to show the conditions under which art cannot 
 exist, or reach any lofty development. 
 
 The little art which Rome possessed was 
 swept away or buried by the barbarian hordes. 
 What followed upon the invasions is painful 
 enough, when we think of monuments muti- 
 lated that were once the glory of Greece. In 
 the ten centuries that follow upon the fall of 
 Rome there is no art worthy of record; nor 
 has this brutalized, debased existence any 
 direct bearing upon the subject. The condi- 
 tions under which men lived were not those 
 from which art is developed. 
 
 With the Gothic period, new life was infused 
 into sculpture, as well as into architecture. 
 But sculpture was for the most part decora- 
 tive and so much the handmaiden of archi- 
 tecture, that it is difficult to separate one from 
 the other. The workmen who carved the orna- 
 ments of these vast Gothic cathedrals became, 
 by practice and aspiration and by study of 
 new-found classical models, the sculptors who 
 formed the early Italian Renaissance. Human 
 life was taking on new aspects. Man's rest- 
 less, feverish desires were satisfied by the new 
 
AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 53 
 
 ideals which Christianity had planted in his 
 breast. Life became joyful once more, as it 
 was in ancient Greece, and expressed itself 
 in manifold lovely forms, weird, mystical, and 
 enchanting. Sculpture was more personal 
 than with the Greek. Life was more direct, 
 and every moment, to the Christian, was of 
 divine importance. 
 
 There was a happy blending in this Renais- 
 sance period of the grand style with a style so 
 tender and full of human affection, that we 
 may best characterize it by the word " Chris- 
 tian." Human life was again serious, beau- 
 tiful, and expansive. Human rights were 
 respected, and law was re-established. Life 
 became once more normal, intelligent, and 
 free; and art, corresponding to these condi- 
 tions, arose and was developed to a marvellous 
 degree of perfection. Donatello and Michael 
 Angelo are the men whose art makes up and 
 colors the new-found Renaissance school. The 
 art of Donatello shows classical influence, and 
 that of Michael Angelo consummate knowl- 
 edge of antique sculpture. The greatest men 
 of this school in sculpture were roundedly 
 developed men of broad ideas and liberal cul- 
 
54 AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 
 
 ture. The relief work of Donatello is known 
 throughout the world. It is tinged, but 
 sweetly, with the mystical spirit of those who 
 created Gothic art. It is a happy blending 
 of a contented. Christian living, with calm, 
 classical feeling for outline and form. 
 
 We have already spoken of the art of Michael 
 Angelo, and need not return to it now. Art 
 was again down-trodden, or lost sight of, in 
 the scepticism of the seventeenth and eigh- 
 teenth centuries. Life was not worthy of 
 perpetuation in sculpture. Human thought 
 was too fickle and changeable. So we may pass 
 over the interlude after of the Italian Renais- 
 sance, until we come to the modern re-birth 
 of art in France. France was the cradle of 
 modern sculpture. Whatever criticisms or 
 strictures we may see fit to make upon French 
 sculpture, we must give France credit for the 
 splendid and fearless way in which she initi- 
 ated a new art era. In dealing with the 
 modern art of France, it is difficult to be just, 
 — to hold the matter at arm's length, as it 
 were, and look upon its every side. We are 
 apt to be fascinated with its brilliant qualities 
 and forget that the first test by which we must 
 
AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 55 
 
 judge it, is whether or not it be sculpturesque. 
 While it has produced some fine work and 
 isolated statues, here and there, taken as an 
 art, as a school of sculpture, it cannot be called 
 great, — not in the sense, certainly, in which 
 we have applied the term to the art of Greece 
 and that of the Italian Renaissance. The 
 French have shown intimate knowledge of the 
 human form, together with much technical 
 skill. Certain of their statues exhibit action 
 and force and even original genius. If the 
 conditions of French life had not demanded 
 the sensual realism that dominates their art, 
 the art of France might have become great. 
 Then, too, this realistic tendency has carried 
 them so far that their statues are little more 
 than literal copies of the nude models one may 
 see at the Julian schools or at the academy. 
 The statue of Saint John, by Bodin, is only 
 a common Italian model of a low type, with a 
 head that forbids any intellectual activity. 
 The statue is an exact copy of this model. 
 This example may stand for almost all of their 
 statues. The too close following of the living 
 model has led them into a style that argues 
 a sure decadence. French sculpture reflects 
 
 !t 
 
56 AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 
 
 French life. Can we call that life great? I 
 think not; nor can we call their art great. 
 The conditions of life in France are not true 
 and noble enough, not pure and frank enough, 
 in their essence, to produce a great and lasting 
 art, and no amount of artifice will enable her 
 to do so. It is clever, brilliant, if you will; 
 but no one can say that France has produced 
 a great school of sculpture. Is not the supreme 
 test for work of art this : Does it teach us to 
 live better, more calmly and greatly .!* If not, 
 it cannot be called great and will not endure. 
 
 The beginnings of our modern school were 
 made by men who had studied in Italy and 
 France, many of them in both schools. Of 
 the early American school of sculpture, which 
 has almost entirely passed away and left to 
 us, alas, so many dull, lifeless pseudo-Greek 
 works, it is scarcely worth while to speak. 
 No sculpture of this school rose even to the 
 level of Canova or Thorwaldsen, and these 
 sculptors were simply imitators of the Greek 
 school. 
 
 We come now to our own epoch; to men 
 like St. Gaudens, Warner, French, Ward, and, 
 among the older men, Thomas Ball, and some 
 
9^ OF THK ^^F^ 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 AN AMERICAN SCHOOL ^fe^^^gQl^^^y^ 
 
 others whom I need not mention. This school 
 has had courage and thought sufficient to escape 
 from that pseudo-classical thraldom which had 
 made slaves and imitators of their predeces- 
 sors. They are the pioneers or early settlers in 
 the new art-era which is dawning upon Amer- 
 ica. And are not the conditions of our life, 
 as we hold them calmly away and look at them 
 from an abstract standpoint, such as to promise 
 a great national art for this country.'* 
 
 We, like the Greeks, are free men. The 
 conditions of our life, the new life that is 
 beginning everywhere, are much the same as 
 those which existed in Athens in her palmy 
 days of art. Education is free and universal. 
 We are not harassed by warfare, or by a mili- 
 tary system that takes a number of the best 
 years of a man's life and devotes them to mili- 
 tary routine. We are a prosperous people; 
 abject poverty is rarely found. Then, too, we 
 have numerous processes for reproducing works 
 of art, and carrying them into every home in 
 the land, so that all may know what other people 
 have achieved in art and letters. We are the 
 heirs, more than any people, perhaps, to-day, 
 of the past history of the world. Life with 
 
S8 AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 
 
 US is, in the main, frank and open. Every man 
 is supposed to have some occupation. Our 
 religion does not fetter us. We are free to 
 represent what we will in sculpture or paint- 
 ing, so long as our representation be not igno 
 ble or licentious. There are laws prohibiting 
 representations of this order. We are a people 
 who love the beautiful; this is amply mani- 
 fested by our poets, historians, and novelists. 
 Our art is yet in its youth; but there is some- 
 thing in the American genius akin to the Greek, 
 — a most precious quality: that power to be 
 evolved and evolve itself unendingly; capa- 
 city for indefinite expansion. So far, it has 
 shown itself chiefly in science and mechanics; 
 but these are the natural precursors of art 
 epochs. Among the Continental nations of 
 Europe, we are held to be a great people. Is 
 it not natural to assume, then, that our art, 
 when it has had time for a proper and rounded 
 development, will be great also.^ We have 
 now some of the best examples of monumental 
 sculpture in the world. I may mention a few 
 examples, such as the " Farragut " of St. 
 Gaudens; a number of fine statues by Daniel 
 French; the Governor Buckingham statue, by 
 
AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF SCULPTURE 59 
 
 Warner, the "Washington'' by Thomas Ball 
 in Boston, the Washington statue by Ward, 
 in Wall Street, and many others. . 
 
 If, then, our country shall follow the tradi- 
 tions of the past, shall take its example from 
 the successes, and its warnings from the fail- 
 ures, of nations which have preceded it in art, 
 we may fully expect a great art era for America. 
 We may never reach the height attained by 
 Greece, in the days of Phidias or Praxiteles, 
 Dut yet even this is not impossible. 
 
THE OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE 
 IN AMERICA 
 
 In discussing the possibility, or probabilit 
 of America's achieving distinction in the art 
 sculpture, we must look for a little at the ar 
 and artists of other peoples, both past ai 
 present. We must consider the conditio] 
 of life which have produced great art ai 
 great artists. It is easy to establish the fa 
 that the great artists of all times have be( 
 not only men of large endowment, but m( 
 who participated in the culture of their time 
 and had their share in creating whatever ide 
 were uppermost in civic, political, as well 
 aesthetic, life. The artist's calling in Gree^ 
 was held to be respectable and desirable; na 
 even more, the artist who achieved success 
 his profession was treated with the same di 
 tinction as the poet, philosopher, and state 
 man. Artists in that time were men traine 
 not only in the technique of art, but, moreove 
 in the art of thinking. It was held of chi 
 
OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA. 6 1 
 
 importance that the artist should have great 
 ideas to express, as well as sufficient technical 
 ibility to embody them. Education in those 
 plays meant literally a drawing out, and round- 
 fng out of every faculty. From the study of 
 :he frieze of the Parthenon, where we may 
 read better than in history what Athenian life 
 actually was, and to what sublime heights it 
 rose, we may know to what order of man 
 Phidias belonged and how to classify him. 
 Mo man could have produced this work who 
 was not essentially great; and great in the 
 sense of magnanimous. The work exhibits 
 lot only masterly intelligence and complete 
 :echnical achievement, but it shows itself to 
 DC the work of a finely organized, great-souled 
 3eing. This is evident in the breadth and 
 implicity of the style, and the freedom from 
 ill artifice. The petty tricks and short cuts 
 3f technical skill are wanting here. No matter 
 low carefully the detail be wrought out, it 
 is always subordinated to the thought and 
 nass. 
 
 Ruskin classes Phidias with Giotto and 
 iMichael Angelo, and calls them the greatest 
 Architects of the world; and again, and with 
 
62 OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 especial pertinence here, in his remarks on *^ Re- 
 pose " as a test of greatness in art, he says : 
 
 *' We shall see by this light three colossal imager 
 standing up side by side, looming in their great rest o 
 spirituality above the whole world-horizon, — Phidias 
 Michael Angelo, and Dante. These quahties coulc 
 not have been produced by any direct will of the 
 sculptor, no matter how he may have striven. Thej 
 must have been a part of his environment." 
 
 We know, then, that Phidias moved readily 
 and naturally in the best society in Athens, 
 and made whatever ideas were uppermost in 
 such society a part of himself, and therefore,; 
 of necessity, a part of his art. 
 
 " Awful is art, because 't is free ; 
 The artist trembles o'er his plan 
 W^here men his Self must see." 
 
 The great sculpture of Phidias gives us 
 most satisfactory knowledge of Athenian life 
 at its highest. And Athenian life in her mos' 
 advanced state of culture and refinement pro 
 duces, naturally, a Phidias. Lowell speaks 
 with a full and loving appreciation of tlii^ 
 period of Greek art, when he says, — 
 
 " The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness, 
 Unanswerable as Euclid, self contained, 
 The one thing finished in this hasty world." 
 
 "i 
 
OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 63 
 
 So much for this example. We have seen 
 that to be a great artist in Greece was to be 
 the equal of the greatest in the land. How 
 different with the Roman, who affected all 
 that the Greek naturally was. To practise 
 the fine arts in early Rome was considered 
 effeminate and trivial. The gross, sensual 
 nature of the Romans could not well grasp the 
 calm pleasure of pure form. Their sculptures 
 are chiefly images of the Caesars and their dis- 
 solute wives, and of the favorite court nobles. 
 Their statues were manufactured often before 
 they were needed, and heads were added to suit 
 the reigning sovereign. Their portrait busts 
 are modelled with a certain vigor and power 
 that characterized all they did. The Roman 
 was better suited to carry out vast archi- 
 tectural plans, to bridge over great rivers, to 
 construct gigantic aqueducts and theatres, to 
 build enduring roadways, than to create pure 
 and beautiful forms. His nature lacked all 
 the fi7iesse of the Greek. His education was 
 essentially different. In the Augustine age, 
 ^ is true, Greek influence and letters, and the 
 preek sculpture which they had stolen, had 
 iJone something to refine and uplift a nature 
 
64 OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 that was naturally coarse. But the love of art 
 at its highest was an affectation rather than a 
 sincerity. It was the fashion among the late 
 Romans to affect a love for the fine arts. 
 
 Religion with them had become theatrical. 
 They served their own selfish aims rather than 
 the gods whom their fathers had worshipped 
 in reality. The conditions of life and the 
 ideas current were not such as to demand ex- 
 pression in great and enduring forms. There 
 was no demand for creative genius, hence no 
 creative genius arose. So much for the condi- 
 tions of life that produce no distinguished 
 artist. We need hardly attempt to show that 
 the conditions of our life in America are ver}? 
 different. 
 
 Having considered the art, or lack of art, 
 among the Romans, we may pass to the grea1 
 period of the Italian Renaissance. We see,j 
 in studying this period, that the conditiom! 
 of life in Italy then were much the same a^i 
 in Athens in the days of her highest art. 
 Indeed, there had been a great revival of clas 
 sical learning in Florence, which led largel) 
 to the Renaissance movement. Men enjoyec 
 personal freedom, and a love of the fine art 
 
OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 65 
 
 became a passion with the Italians. After the 
 long and deep darkness of the Middle Ages, 
 man had awakened 'with new aspirations and 
 new power in heart and brain. Whatever 
 manifestation art took on, whatever was done 
 in it, was done with a seriousness and a spiri- 
 tual fervor that would, alone, make the period 
 most interesting. The greatest sculptor of this 
 school was unquestionably one of the greatest 
 men of his time; a man of fine sensibilities, 
 of complete and rounded education, of deep 
 religious feeling and great poetic insight 
 ^\ This man was Michael Angelo. He practised 
 ^^ many arts, but he believed sculpture to be his 
 5 most natural vehicle for expressing thought and 
 feeling. He considered it the most divine of 
 all arts, and the most like nature, which 
 ^ "fashions all her works in high relief.'* 
 
 " This vast ball, the earth, 
 Was moulded out of clay, and baked in fire ; 
 Men, women, and all animals that breathe 
 Are statues, and not paintings. Even the plants, 
 The flowers, the fruits, the grasses, were first 
 Sculptured, and colored later." 
 
 Michael Angelo himself said, — 
 
 " Sculpture is more than painting. It is greater 
 To raise the dead to life, than to create 
 Phantoms that seem to live." 
 5 
 
66 OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 His reverence for antique sculpture amounted 
 almost to worship. He held himself an abashed 
 and untutored schoolboy in its presence. To 
 him the traditions of the past, the canons of 
 art, were sacred. It was only after consum- 
 mate study, pursued often far into the night, 
 that he felt himself able to create. Work was 
 his joy and recreation, and his art is the lesson 
 of untiring industry. He was a man, as we 
 know, who helped to form the political, social, 
 and moral ideas of his time, more even than 
 such ideas helped to mould him. His faith 
 in God was unfaltering : let his Sibyls of the 
 Sistine Chapel and his Moses testify to this. 
 Of his love for man and belief in him his let- 
 ters as well as his sculpture give us abundant 
 proof. He was a man who mastered the prob- 
 lems of the time, and his art is essentially 
 ideal art. To him the true was the ideal ; he 
 saw the typical beyond the accidental. It was 
 this and this alone that he strove to embody. 
 There were in his day, as now, realists enough, 
 but their names are of no meaning to us ; they 
 passed away together with the literal facts 
 from which they could not escape. To Michael 
 Angelo belongs that — 
 
OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 6/ 
 
 ' " Divine insanity of noble minds 
 
 That never falters or abates, 
 But labors and endures and waits 
 Till all that it foresees it finds, 
 And what it cannot find, creates.*' 
 
 So we may leave the splendid period of the 
 Italian Renaissance, and come to the modern 
 era. The only school that is worth our con- 
 sideration, from the standpoint of sculpture, 
 is, at the beginning of this modern era, the 
 school of France. No matter how we may 
 criticise the morale of her art to-day, we must 
 give her full and complete appreciation for 
 the splendid initiative step she has taken. 
 
 In the Salon of this year (1892) was a group 
 representing the Cyprian king, Pygmalion, in 
 that ecstatic moment when his statue of Galatea 
 is changed from ivory to actual life. It at- 
 tracted a great deal of attention. The public 
 was interested in it chiefly for two reasons, — 
 first, because it was the plastic work of a painter 
 who has been ranked among the first in France 
 for the past twenty years; and, secondly, be- 
 cause the dramatic moment chosen by the 
 sculptor was one in which the strongest feel- 
 ings of man's nature are called into play. It 
 was an opportunity to do a noble piece of 
 
68 OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 work. The royal artist, Pygmalion, having 
 wrought long and carefully over his ivory 
 figure, sees it actually transformed to life 
 before his eyes. His prayer to the gods has 
 been answered. Had such a subject been 
 given to Phidias, or even to Praxiteles, what 
 a glorious group might have come down to us! 
 But the subject is suggested to an artist of a 
 later day, in a country of advanced civiliza- 
 tion, of remarkable ingenuity, and of vast re- 
 sources. All these, we say, go toward the 
 making of a great art ; and with such a splen- 
 did thought, in the hands of a man who stood 
 at the head of his country in art, was it not 
 right to expect a result supremely beautiful? 
 The artist had had every advantage of study 
 in his own country and in foreign lands. There 
 was only one thing lacking in the country that 
 produced him, and in the man who represented 
 her art. What this was, has been so senten- 
 tiously and aptly put by our own poet, Sidney 
 Lanier, that I shall quote his words as he wrote 
 them : — 
 
 *^ Let any sculptor hew us out the most ravishing 
 combination of tender curves and spheric softness 
 that ever stood for woman ; yet, if the lip have a cer- 
 
OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 69 
 
 tain fulness that hints of the flesh, if the brow be in- 
 sincere, if in the minutest particular the physical 
 beauty suggest a moral ugliness, that sculptor, unless 
 he be portraying a moral ugliness for a moral purpose, 
 may as well give over his marble for paving- stones. 
 Time, whose judgments are inexorably moral, will not 
 accept his work. For, indeed, we may say that he 
 who has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and 
 moral beauty are convergent lines which run back into 
 a common ideal origin, and who, therefore, is not afire 
 with moral beauty, just as with artistic beauty, — that 
 he, in short, who has not come to that stage of quiet 
 and eternal frenzy, in which the beauty of holiness 
 and the holiness of beauty mean one thing, burn as 
 one fire, shine as one light within him, he is not yet 
 the great artist." 
 
 Had Sidney Lanier stood before this group, 
 he could not have written a more pertinent 
 criticism of it, or a more just one. The su- 
 preme moment in a sculptor's life is brought 
 down to express merely the animal side of 
 human love. A noble thought is debased. 
 In the utter realism to which the sculptor has 
 abandoned himself is found not one trace of 
 ideal beauty. Had a Greek treated this sub- 
 ject, he would have made uppermost the un- 
 utterable joy that a creator feels in seeing 
 
 I 
 
^0 OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 his work given that final touch which is beyond 
 the hand of the greatest genius; a joy akin to 
 that with which a mother looks upon her first 
 child, and hears its cry. The legend tells us 
 that many eminent critics had visited Pyg- 
 malion's studio, had looked upon his statue, 
 and told him it all but lived. This breath 
 of life is the one thing his wonderful creation 
 lacked; when lo! entering his studio for a last 
 look at his work, in the fading light of per- 
 haps a day of hopeless endeavor, he hears a 
 voice, soft, undulating, and distant, calling 
 him by name. He looks about the studio and 
 sees no one. Again he hears this soft, bird- 
 like note calling to him. Something leads 
 him to the niche which he had set apart for 
 this darling expression of his highest thought. 
 As he draws back the heavy curtain, his head 
 swims and he clings convulsively for support 
 to its heavy folds. The gods have' wrought 
 a miracle; his tireless prayers have been an- 
 swered, and the one thing that his work lacked 
 is given to it before his eyes. He sees the 
 warm blood mount from the heart and flush 
 into the rounded curve of the cheek. He sees 
 the cold, ivory lips red with sweet new life; 
 
OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 7 1 
 
 and more than all else, the expression which 
 he wrought upon for so many months is sud- 
 denly consummated, and the eyes look down 
 upon him with inexpressible tenderness and 
 gratitude; and the lips express, in tha word, 
 "Pygmalion," all that any woman could say to 
 one who had called her from unconscious to 
 conscious being. What are the feelings of a 
 finely organized normal nature under such con- 
 ditions? Would he not fall upon his knees, 
 or upon his face, before the living statue? If 
 he could express himself at all, would it not 
 be in monosyllables, or in the expression of 
 his own unworthiness ? For the moment, 
 surely he would not dare to touch a thing so 
 fresh from the hands of the gods. No Greek 
 could have done so. How, then, has this 
 French sculptor treated the subject? He 
 represents the man clinging madly on tiptoe 
 to his living statue, and pressing upon her 
 lips a kiss, that, from the expression upon 
 his face, has in it not one trace of a man 
 endowed with spiritual feeling. 
 
 I have dwelt for some length upon this 
 creation, because it is a typical manifestation 
 of the modern school of sculpture in France. 
 
72 OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 French sculpture deals too much with poetical 
 legends, and thoughts that admit of, while 
 they do not originally mean to convey, an 
 obscene interpretation; or it is given over to 
 the clever copying of some model, to which 
 the sculptor affixes a title of his own, either 
 to sell, or draw attention to his work, — a title 
 which in no way belongs to the figure. As 
 examples of this latter representation, one may 
 instance the Dianas of M. Falguiere, one of 
 which is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 
 and the Saint John of M. Bodin, in the Luxem- 
 bourg gallery in Paris. These names belong 
 in no respect to these statues; the former, as 
 one may see, has no possible claim to the name 
 of Diana, the chaste and exquisite goddess of 
 the Greek, and the latter has certainly no char- 
 acteristic by which we may recognize a Saint 
 John prophesying in the wilderness the coming 
 of a Saviour. The calling it a Saint John 
 must have been the suggestion of one who knew 
 little of that inspired character. 
 
 So much for this brief description of the 
 main stream and tendency of much French 
 sculpture. To this there are some notable 
 exceptions, as for instance, the work of MM. 
 
OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 73 
 
 Barrias, Chapu, Thomas, and Dubois. The 
 way a thing is told has come to mean more in 
 France than the thing or idea itself. The 
 Salon has bred a number of men who seek for 
 cheap notoriety through the by-ways and arti- 
 fices of technical skill, or by the depiction of 
 some licentious subject. Better the dry, suf- 
 fering, ascetic art of the monk, which has 
 devotion and inspiration as its fountain head, 
 than an art in which the expression dominates 
 the thought. 
 
 Going back to the Salon of this year, as a 
 , showing of the last work done by the best 
 I known school of sculpture in the modern world, 
 I namely, that of France, there was one piece 
 of work of vast importance by an American 
 sculptor. It was placed quite at the other end 
 of the hall, far away from the Pygmalion and 
 Galatea which has been described. It was 
 poorly placed and in a bad light. Many visi- 
 tors did not see it at all. The work was in 
 high relief, and was intended to be placed 
 upon the tomb of a young sculptor. It con- 
 sisted of two figures. A youth of noble mien 
 and intelligent, quick sensibilities, stands 
 before a design of a sphinx which he is cut- 
 
74 OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 ting in low relief from the background. His 
 right arm is drawn back, the whole body 
 braced; his left hand holds his chisel firmly, 
 and his entire self is wrapt up in the bringing 
 his thought out of that stubborn material. To 
 the left, and but slightly removed from him, 
 is a stately female figure, Greek in contour, 
 but modern in feeling, representing Death. 
 In her right hand is a spray of laurel ; her left 
 hand has been raised silently, and rests gently 
 and regretfully, fatefully one may see, upon 
 the point of the eager chisel. She would not 
 stay that impetuous stroke, could she help it; 
 but one reads in her face what she does not 
 speak, — namely, that she is but the transmitter 
 of a message of whose import she is uncon- 
 scious, but that it is her duty to deliver it 
 sealed. The head is half veiled. The sculp- 
 tor has achieved in this work a thing after 
 which many men have striven, — the happy 
 blending, we may call it, of the antique feel- 
 ing for form and proportion, — what in Greek 
 art appeals to us most, and what we may term 
 sculpturesque, — with a modern and, perhaps, 
 Christian expression of character. This work 
 has behind it a great poetic thought, and a 
 
OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 75 
 
 conscious, or unconscious, moral purpose. The 
 sculptor's convictions were clear, and he ex- 
 pressed them firmly. 
 
 I am more glad than I can say, that our 
 people have produced a work of this quality, 
 and that America's conditions of life have 
 been such as to develop a sculptor of this 
 order. The man who created it was Mr. 
 Daniel C. French. There is in it something 
 that belongs, while it is cosmopolitan in a 
 way, essentially to the Anglo-Saxon. There 
 are one or two men in England who might 
 have produced this work, but it belongs espe- 
 cially to the finer American. It is of such 
 work that Lanier was thinking when he wrote 
 thus to a young American artist: — 
 
 " Cannot one say with authority to the young 
 artist, whether working in stone, in color, in tones, 
 or in character- forms of the novel, so far from dread- 
 ing that your moral purpose will interfere with your 
 beautiful creation, go forward in the clear conviction 
 that unless you are suffused — soul and body, one 
 might say — with that moral purpose which finds its 
 largest expression in love, that is, the love of all 
 things in their proper relation ; unless you are suffused 
 with this love, do not dare to meddle with beauty; 
 unless you are suffused with beauty, do not dare to 
 
 it 
 
^6 OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 meddle with love ; unless you are suffused with truth, 
 do not dare to meddle with goodness ; in a word, 
 unless you are suffused with truth, wisdom, goodness, 
 and love, abandon the hope that the ages will accept 
 you as an artist." 
 
 If the conditions of our national life have 
 been such as to produce one example, — and I 
 could instance other works of art of this order 
 and merit by Americans, — the outlook for 
 American sculpture is certainly most auspi- 
 cious. But there are certain things in our edu- 
 cational institutions that need careful thought 
 and sagacious handling. Every young artist 
 or lover of the fine arts should be taught, and! 
 made to understand, that a great national art 
 is possible only v^ith a great national life. He 
 must be shov^n, through history and experi- 
 ence, that art is the plastic manifestation of 
 the ideas that are current when such art is 
 produced. Let him fill himself with the lovely 
 art of Greece in her best periods, and then 
 make himself familiar with the conditions of 
 Hellenic life that produced such art. Let him 
 see that it was inevitable and that our art is 
 not yet sufficiently inevitable. We are striv- 
 ing still to express great ideas and thoughts 
 
OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA ^J 
 
 that are not generally accepted. Let him learn 
 that he must do his share in the propagating 
 of such great ideas, if he is to make a great 
 art era for America possible. 
 
 Art is still, as it always has been, largely 
 a question of supply and demand. Let the 
 demand be for art of a spiritual and enduring 
 beauty, and the supply will not fail. Let the 
 student take to heart also the thought that art 
 is not invention, but subject to the laws of 
 evolution, as is science; and let him put away 
 at once and forever the foolish idea that science 
 and mechanics are at war with art. Indeed, 
 we may safely say that great art is impossible 
 without great science. The hand that exe- 
 cuted, and the brain that devised, the Parthenon 
 at Athens were the hand of a completely trained 
 artisan and the brain of a man who was master 
 of the science of his own day and of the ages 
 that had preceded him. Going back still further, 
 to the great days of Egypt under the Mem- 
 phian dynasty, we see that the sculptor and 
 architects who planned and placed the wonderful 
 pyramids and sphinx, — 
 
 '* With eyes that see on and far 
 Unto the lights of the great Past, new-lit 
 Fair for the Future's track/' 
 
y^ OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 were men trained in a school of engineering 
 superior to our own. I have been told by an 
 explorer that in the great ruins he had visited, 
 the immense blocks of granite were so nicely 
 put together that he could not thrust a needle 
 point between the cracks. 
 
 Coming down to the Italian Renaissance, we 
 find that Michael Angelo and Lionardo not only 
 knew their own particular art, and its sister 
 arts, but were in the possession of the best 
 scientific knowledge of their day. They werel 
 called upon to plan fortifications, and to throw 
 up the defences of a city, as well as to paint 
 sublime frescoes, and to cut enduring thoughts 
 and ideas in stone. From these ages and men, 
 the artist, old or young, must learn the vital 
 lesson of a rounded development, and this 
 comes only with great reverence for the past. , 
 
 Having seen that science is not at war with, 
 but positively friendly to and necessary for, 
 the production of great art, let our artists 
 move along the lines of established princi- 
 ples, taking all that is worthy from the past; 
 and with the same reverence that all great men 
 have shown for Greek art, we shall be able, ii 
 we are worthy, to create something lasting.! 
 
OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 79 
 
 It is only when we know what has gone before, 
 that we are able to give some new manifesta- 
 tion in art, growing out of the leading ideas 
 and aspirations of our people. It is creation 
 and not invention that belongs to art. 
 
 Institutions that teach the fine arts must not 
 only embrace complete technical departments, 
 but must throw open to the students lectures 
 upon history, archaeology, science, and litera- 
 ture, and a special course in the province of 
 criticism. Might not such institutions have 
 a department for the training of men to criti- 
 cise the fine arts intelligently and sympatheti- 
 cally.^ There are men in our own city who 
 are capable of criticising a statue from an 
 intellectual standpoint, but who lack alto- 
 gether that sympathetic grasp of the artist's 
 plastic thought which should characterize a 
 man who makes criticism his vocation. One 
 needs to have the sensuous nature developed, 
 as well as the intellectual. Nothing would 
 help more to realize this than the study of 
 poetry. One would rather have had Keats to 
 cfiticise a statue, or our own poet, Lanier, 
 than the most learned of men. Then, too, 
 students should be taught what is bad art, as 
 
80 OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 well as what is good art. Indeed, I have 
 thought, at times, that it would be well to 
 preserve in museums the statues of bad men 
 of our day and time, as well as representations 
 of noble men; for on no paper is written so 
 plainly the history of crime and vice as it is 
 written upon the human face. What com- 
 mentary more essentially truthful than the 
 sculptor's art.^ Look at the busts of Nero, for 
 example, in the Capitoline Museum, in Rome. 
 In early life the face is fine, frank, and prom- 
 ising. Study its gradual debasement until 
 you see the spirit of the man utterly elimi- 
 nated. It is a history that one can follow 
 without knowing how to read, and it is a his- 
 tory as lasting as bronze. 
 
 A child must, then, learn to distinguish 
 between good and bad art, to learn what ideas! 
 are worthy and capable of being represented 
 in sculpture. He must be made to see the 
 limitations of this art, and to understand its 
 principles. Past schools of art should be care- 
 fully followed; their rise, the period of their 
 highest achievements, and their decadence; 
 and all this should be illustrated by casts from 
 such fragments as remain to us of such schools. 
 
OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 8 1 
 
 Would it not be well if the children of the 
 public schools, as well as of the art-academies, 
 could be taken once a week, at least, to the art- 
 museum to hear interesting lectures upon the 
 sculptures, as they stand face to face with 
 them ? The work recently inaugurated by the 
 Public School Art League is a long step in the 
 right direction. Taste does not come of itself. 
 The power of selection should be dwelt upon as 
 all-important, and the study of composition, so 
 little thought of to-day in schools of art. In- 
 deed, education must be of an order to develop a 
 child harmoniously, and then, even if he do not 
 pursue the fine arts as a calling, a love of the 
 beautiful will be a saving grace in his nature. 
 
 The study of sculpture teaches, if anything, 
 the lesson of moderation. Balance and self- 
 poise are necessary to one who would either 
 practise or understand sculpture. Above, all, 
 should not a student learn that art is so much 
 a part of life that it cannot be separated from 
 it; that the great men of all time, who have 
 produced great art, have been great in them- 
 selves ? Emerson has said, — 
 
 ** Not from a vain or shallow thought 
 His awful Jove young Phidias brought." 
 6 
 
82 OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 What is needed most in America, perhaps, 
 is a quickening of the spiritual life; then art 
 will follow naturally. 'Tis the spiritual sig- 
 nificance of a work of art that we must look 
 for; this is as utterly opposed to the sickly 
 sentimental as to the purely materialistic. Per- 
 haps the best way of attaining this is through 
 the study of poetry. There is little danger of 
 our people's having too much poetry; too few 
 of us feel with Keats that, " the poetry of earth 
 is never dead." The trend of our life sets too 
 steadily toward the prosaic and practical. We 
 are taught that a practical sense is not com- 
 patible with a love of poetry and ideal beauty. 
 Is not this an error .'^ Have not the great 
 spiritual ideas of the world been ultimately 
 the most practical.? The love of art is dis- 
 tinctly spiritualizing. We have need of poetic 
 thought to express the masterly ideas of our 
 civilization, its freedom, its generous humanity, 
 and its democratic simplicity. Nor can we 
 hammer away too much upon the idea of his- 
 toric reverence. 
 
 There is a sad inclination now, visible in 
 architecture and in music, perhaps, more than 
 in painting and in sculpture, to endeavor to 
 
OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 83 
 
 produce some startling effect by a mingling 
 of many styles into one building or oratorio. 
 We must inculcate a love for style. What a 
 pity that there has not been a more general 
 following of a style of architecture, for exam- 
 ple, to which Richardson gave such a splen- 
 did impetus! Daniel French, St. Gaudens, 
 Warner, and, before them, Thomas Ball, have 
 given us new standards for an American school 
 of sculpture. Let us follow and develop this 
 splendid leading. When our artists and our 
 public are moving along the lines of spiritual 
 and poetic thought, where great ideas alone 
 flourish, then shall We have creations and 
 embodiments of beauty, power, and truth, of 
 which we now hardly dream. Our civilization 
 must learn the lesson of spiritual freedom, the 
 freedom of self-control. We shall learn then 
 how best to dispose of the immense wealth we 
 are accumulating. Throughout our country 
 has sprung up a generous emulation among 
 wealthy men to endow and build educational 
 institutions; but these are often hampered 
 seriously by the conditions imposed by the 
 generous but perhaps not far-seeing donor. 
 Let such men learn to place their wealth in 
 
84 OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 the hands of those who understand education. 
 It is a science, and needs as much study as 
 the art of accumulating material fortunes. 
 
 It is the imaginative faculty, then, that we 
 must seek to develop in our people. There 
 are few men without ideals; indeed, the poets, 
 who know life, tell us that every man has 
 within himself a pure ideal or aspiration. 
 Then let us do all we can in our city and in 
 our country to develop and provide for an 
 artist, when we find one. Let not the good 
 seed of genius fall on sterile ground. Let us 
 not cross the seas to buy works of foreign 
 masters, when the same money here will pro- 
 duce a master. In other words, let us have a 
 disinterested love of art. Many fine pictures 
 and statues fall into the hands of wealthy 
 men; and they hold them much as they hold 
 their fast horses. They are put away where the 
 public cannot see them, and the owner boasts 
 of the fact that he possesses the original. 
 
 If art is worthy and beautiful, it belongs to 
 the people as much as does freedom. Let us 
 do honor, then, to those men who, setting aside 
 selfish desires, will buy a picture or statue 
 and present it to a museum, where it may be 
 
OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 85 
 
 seen by all, and where all may be benefited by 
 it. The giving that gives itself, its own love, 
 is the only giving worth having. 
 
 The moral temperature, as Taine would call 
 it, is ripe for a great art with us. Our wars 
 are over, at least it would seem so for the 
 present, and the keen appreciation which the 
 American people feel for those who fought 
 and died to preserve the Union and to estab- 
 lish universal freedom has given birth to an 
 earnest desire to commemorate in some last- 
 ing form the heroic services rendered. In no 
 country in the civilized world are so many 
 monuments projected as here in America. 
 Money is freely given for this purpose, both 
 by the government and by private individuals. 
 The only thing lacking seems to be a proper 
 discrimination as to who shall be chosen to 
 build such monuments and where they shall be 
 erected ; yet even this want is being provided 
 for, and Boston has the honor of taking the 
 initiative and establishing an Art Commission. 
 When public taste has been sufficiently de- 
 veloped, there will naturally be little need of 
 such censorship. When our educational sys- 
 tems have been so modified and developed as 
 
86 OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 to provide for proper and rounded artistic edu- 
 cation in school and college, this matter will 
 need no further remedy. 
 
 The age and, more directly, our own people 
 are concerned in the study of truth and char- 
 acter. There is a wide-spread desire to know 
 the essential worth and count of a man, as 
 well as the amount of his material possessions. 
 This spiritual desire is a most favorable sign 
 for art, and especially for sculpture. The age 
 is seeking for the very thing that it is the 
 distinctive province of sculpture to furnish. 
 History shows that a love for the sculptur- 
 esque — I speak not of rude carving or imita- 
 tion, but of pure form — comes last in the 
 history of development. Color is with us 
 from our infancy ; but the love of form, in the 
 individual as well as the nation, grows only 
 with spiritual life. The study, during the past 
 century, of man's mental characteristics and 
 their highest possible attainment has led us 
 unconsciously to the point where we are to 
 study and understand better the development 
 of the spiritual. 
 
 We have shown, then, that our people are 
 ready for their great sculptor; that the con- 
 
OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 8/ 
 
 ditions of life with us are in the main those 
 necessary to the production of a great art. 
 Along with this spiritual desire has sprung 
 up a love for perfect physical development. 
 Athletics, to-day, are as much a part of our 
 school and university life (whether ostensibly 
 included in the curriculum or no) as they were 
 in the palmy days of Greece. A sound mind 
 in a sound body is an axiom known to every 
 young American, and our healthful return to 
 out-of-door exercise and games, and to suburban 
 living, is bound to produce a finely developed 
 race of men and women. We are learning to 
 look upon the nude form in the way that 
 Greece regarded it, — namely, as the highest 
 possible embodiment of a man's conception of 
 and love for ideal beauty, veritably the temple 
 of the spirit. Together with that sickly-sen- 
 timental literature of the cheap news-stand is 
 passing away that pseudo-sentimental idea, 
 engendered by a prudish and false modesty, 
 that the nude figure is indecent. When we 
 learn that to have a beautiful and finely de- 
 veloped form requires moderation in life and 
 subjection to the spiritual, then shall we know 
 that the nude form is as pure as God made it. 
 
88 OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 One thinks, with great pity, of the poet 
 Heine, dragging himself with effort and pain 
 through the courts of the Louvre, along the 
 corridor and into the room where the statue 
 of the Venus of Melos is placed. To him it 
 was the embodiment of a sublime morality, 
 which he, in his innermost self, aspired to, 
 but failed to realize. No art has so con- 
 tributed to the highest enjoyment and calm 
 intellectual satisfaction, no art has so well 
 realized man's aspirations for absolute and 
 calm beauty, as this great and benignant art 
 of sculpture. From it poets have drawn their 
 most exalted images; upon it they have built 
 their choicest expressions. It has been from 
 the first a saving grace to man; its power to 
 ennoble and dignify and exalt is unbounded. 
 It is the central and most complete develop- 
 ment that human life has ever taken on. No 
 one has ever dared to attribute to it an impure 
 or unworthy object. Where carving has had 
 an unworthy or ignoble office, it has from its 
 very purpose and nature placed itself without 
 the domain of the sculpturesque, and such 
 effort cannot legitimately be called sculpture. 
 It is all and more than poets boast of it: the 
 
OUTLOOK FOR SCULPTURE IN AMERICA 89 
 
 calmest and simplest of all the arts, the most 
 moderate, the most holy, the most exalting, 
 and the most enduring of man's efforts to place 
 human life upon the plane which God originally 
 intended it to occupy. More than all word of 
 teacher does it spontaneously show man's body 
 to be the lovely possession of an immortal and 
 beautiful spirit. Well does Michael Angelo, 
 who knew it as well as any who has ever lived, 
 speak of it as, — 
 
 " All that embellishes and sweetens life 
 And lifts it from the level of low cares 
 Into the purer atmosphere of beauty." 
 
MANHOOD IN ART 
 
 I AM not, under this title of "Manhood in 
 Art," to write an essay on those famous pic- 
 tures and sculptures of the world which have 
 set forth the idea of manhood. Yet even if 
 the reader were to interpret my title in this 
 way, he would not go far astray. Any paint- 
 ing or sculpture which has given the world a 
 noble, symbolical idea of true manhood speaks 
 to us of the manhood which called it into being. 
 A man can produce only what he is. Men do 
 not gather figs of thistles. 
 
 There is a curious hue and cry to-day among 
 artists and art critics, about "art for art's 
 sake." What do men mean by this.^ I may 
 be pardoned if I say that I do not believe that 
 a quarter of these criers know themselves what 
 they mean. It is one of those catch-phrases 
 that we take as we do a cold, half uncon- 
 sciously, and which makes us wretched. The 
 great men of all time have wrought their art 
 
MANHOOD IN ART 9 1 
 
 for God's sake and for the saving grace which 
 it brings to humanity. Keats said, "Beauty 
 for truth's sake." He meant the same thing. 
 That was a sublime saying of Epictetus, 
 " Wretch, thou carriest about a God with thee, 
 and knowst it not." Is it not the high office 
 of art to reveal to every human being the God 
 within, from the contemplation of the God 
 without ? 
 
 It was that sensitive apostle of the inner 
 life, Amiel, who wrote one day in his diary: 
 " Every landscape is to me, as it were, a state 
 of the soul." Let us have no more jugglery 
 with words, but let us speak plainly and openly, 
 and say that we love and practise art because 
 it reveals to us, in every face and form and in 
 the universe, the divine spirit. It leads us 
 a little closer to that spirit. 
 
 My subject, from which I have already wan- 
 dered a little, is tempting, and must lead me, I 
 fear, as May days do, into by-ways and hedges ; 
 but if I return with some sweet wild flower, 
 my wandering may not be lamented. What 
 a fallacy it is to think that life to-day calls for 
 less heroic effort and sacrifice than the years 
 from 1 86 1 to 1865! Those years did indeed 
 
92 MANHOOD IN ART 
 
 try men's souls, but not more so than the 
 present hour, provided men are tuned to its 
 problems and pledged to their solution. And 
 how are we to solve these terrible social prob- 
 lems ? The artist may say that he has nothing 
 to do with such problems. Then surely he can 
 have nothing to do with the great art of his 
 time. The great artists of all ages have been 
 men who understood their own epoch. It is 
 only the petty artist who reflects the base and 
 frivolous side of the age in which he lives, as 
 it is the penny-a-liner who reflects the ignoble 
 and frivolous phase of its literature. 
 
 There have been examples of men who have 
 done good work in art, without having caught 
 the spirit of their times, — the "Zeitgeist,'' 
 as the Germans call it. Notable among those 
 was Canova. There is something pitiful about 
 his talent, to me, in spite of Byron's high- 
 sounding praises. Byron was not sufficiently 
 real, not true enough, essentially, to distin- 
 guish pseudo-art from the genuine inspiration. 
 Have you ever seen one of the figures of Canova 
 placed beside a statue from the hand of Praxi- 
 teles ? Have you ever placed " Childe Harold, " 
 fine as it is, beside Wordsworth's "Ode to 
 
 I 
 
MANHOOD IN ART 9 J 
 
 Immortality," or the ''Ode to a Grecian Urn/' 
 by Keats, or Shelley's "Adonais"? 
 ! The history of great art is the history of 
 great lives. Given a statue or picture, and 
 pne may determine at once what kind of a man 
 ft was who produced it. This is a scientific 
 fact, as true as that, given a bone, the scientist 
 ^an reproduce the entire anatomy of an animal 
 fextinct ages ago. Is not this a tremendous 
 Fact, one that ought to make us tremble for 
 Dur creations and for ourselves.^ 
 
 " Our thoughts are moulding unseen spheres 
 And, like a blessing or a curse, 
 They thunder down the formless years, 
 And ring throughout the universe." 
 
 It is from France that the saying has come, 
 '' Separate art from religion." To do this, you 
 must separate art from itself. Can a dismem- 
 bered art be great .^^ Our earliest American 
 sculptors followed the blind leading of blind 
 men, — Thorwaldsen, Canova, and his school. 
 It was their thought to live as it were apart 
 [rom the great suffering world We have 
 already begun, alas! to take down the monu- 
 ments which they expected to endure through- 
 out time. There are sculptors in America 
 
94 MANHOOD IN ART 
 
 now who live with America as well as in it. 
 It takes courage to do this; but it would not 
 be worthy our manhood if it did not. If we 
 are to have a great art, however, we must not 
 give our students over to teachers who, while 
 versed in all past arts, are ignorant of the 
 present and blind to it. How can men help 
 us if they do not know us.'^ Help means 
 sympathy, and sympathy means love. The 
 love of many of our teachers for us and for 
 this great noble country is but a fancy rather 
 than a fact. It was not so with Lowell and 
 Emerson. 
 
 Men die of broken hearts to-day as they have 
 from the beginning. They die because they 
 cannot express themselves. They have in 
 their hearts a song to sing. It may be a color- 
 song, or a time-song, no matter what. They 
 have this message to deliver to their fellow- 
 men; but those whom we appoint as censors 
 of our art tell us that their song is not worth 
 listening to. How do they know their song 
 is not worth listening to.-* They are so buried 
 in the dead past, in old prints and harpsichords 
 and Gothic figures, that they would not hear 
 the trumpet of Gabriel. Oh for a Victor 
 
MANHOOD IN ART 95 
 
 Hugo, to put before us a new "Hernani," and 
 drive the mummies from the boards ! 
 
 That was an eventful scene upon the stage 
 of the Theatre Frangais in 1829. From that 
 hour reality triumphed over the conventional 
 false classicism, which hung like a wet rag 
 about every new inspiration. When the two 
 forces of the past and present are pitted against 
 each other, who would not like to come into 
 one of the stalls with a flaming red vest, as 
 Gautier did at the production of "Hernani," 
 and shock the Philistines, till the slow blood 
 is made to flow once more through their dry 
 veins? Let us speak with no lack of rever- 
 ence for what is sacred in the past; but the 
 living present is rich with manly deeds. We 
 are, I believe, on the threshold of the greatest 
 art the world has ever known. Are we not 
 the heirs of all the ages.? Is not this life and 
 art, with which we now stand face to face, the 
 consummation of all art and all living.? Swin- 
 burne says somewhere, "Unto each man his 
 handiwork, unto each his crown, the just fate 
 gives;" and some one has well said that we 
 have a right to the expression of every human 
 soul. Let us stand out for this right. Let us 
 
96 MANHOOD IN ART 
 
 respect the potentiality in every human beingj 
 to express something. It is for this, I take it,| 
 that America was called into existence. Let 
 no past fetter us. The veriest wretch who 
 feeds some benumbing piece of machinery in 
 the noisy room of a manufacturing town has 
 something to give the world. It may be only 
 that drop of his hopeless prison-experience; 
 but no matter what it is, there are two rights 
 which must be served before we can be spir- 
 itually free or actually just. The one right is 
 that of every individual to express himself, 
 and the other right is the world's claim to 
 that expression. Little did men dream, two 
 thousand years ago, that the poor, wretched, 
 crippled slave, Epictetus, had something to 
 say of greater import than all the patricians 
 in the land. We have not yet done with 
 slavery ; we have only advanced a plane higher 
 in the scale of civilized living. 
 
 Shall we not find out what manliness in art 
 means, if we can discover what it is in life? 
 The young artist must be made to feel that 
 he has within him that which is sacred and 
 precious, worth striving to develop with that 
 high faith that belongs to youth and proph- 
 
MANHOOD IN ART 97 
 
 ets. To be a genius requires not only divine 
 patience, but daring. No critic could shut 
 off Shakespeare. We know that the critics of 
 his time criticised him caustically; but he i 
 had a song to sing, and he dared to sing it, ' 
 although he doubtless knew that his technique 
 was imperfect and his knowledge limited. It 
 took faith to launch those argosies of song. 
 Through faith and courage, England found an 
 articulate voice in her peasant lad. 
 
 From Shakespeare my mind passes — strangely 
 it may seem, but really not inaptly — to our 
 own Gen. Ulysses Grant. He had something 
 to tell the world, and with a courage that 
 should be an inspiration to every living man 
 he held disease and death back until his thought 
 had found complete expression. So it has been 
 with great men always. Mrs. Browning has 
 put the thought in a most definitive way in her 
 sonnet : — 
 
 *' With stammering lips and insufficient sound, 
 I strive and struggle to deliver right 
 The music of my nature, day and night 
 With dream and thought and feeling interwound, 
 And inly answering all the senses round 
 With octaves of a mystic depth and height, 
 Which step out grandly to the infinite 
 From the dark edges of the sensual ground. 
 
 7 
 
98 MANHOOD IN ART 
 
 This song of songs T struggle to outbear 
 
 Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole, 
 
 And utter all myself unto the air; 
 
 But if I did it, — as the thunder-roll 
 
 Breaks its own cloud, — my flesh will perish there 
 
 Before that dread apocalypse of soul." 
 
 So wrote the greatest woman poet who has 
 lived since the days of Sappho. Let us dwell 
 for a moment on the thought of this sonnet; 
 for it bears directly on our subject. It ex- 
 presses that struggle which every artist feels, 
 when he attempts to deliver aright the music 
 of his nature. The world imagines that his 
 music is given without effort, as the lark sings. 
 But as the lark soars into the deep blue of 
 heaven and sings, is he not making his utmost 
 effort to rise above all earthly things.^ It is 
 so likewise with the artist. Let us have done 
 with the idea that genius gives birth to its 
 creations without labor. Rather is it born, 
 this statue or symphony, with an agony that 
 brings drops of sweat from the brow. 
 
 This thought of the labor of creation brings 
 us to another element which goes to the making 
 up of manhood in art, — namely, the element of 
 sacrifice. This is the very soul of the subject. 
 Sacrifice, with patience and daring, makes the 
 
MANHOOD IN ART 99 
 
 trinity complete. Some one has said that it 
 is the province of science to minister to the 
 body, while art appeals directly to the soul. 
 Yet the eyes of sense and the eye of reason 
 in a man work in wondrous harmony. Brown- 
 ing has even dared to say, " Not a soul helps 
 sense the more than sense helps soul." But 
 in the greatest art the soul dominates the 
 sense. The color must not be so aggressive 
 that it conceals the artist's fine intention. 
 Equipoise is needed. Indeed the first thing 
 that speaks to us in a great work of art is its 
 harmony, and harmony implies proportion and 
 symmetry. Harmony is not born with us, but 
 is the result of intelligent living. The true 
 artist is one who recognizes the perfect har- 
 mony of the universe, and compels, in his own 
 nature and its expression, a kindred harmony. 
 
 The American people have been almost in- 
 clined to look upon the artist as a "crank," or 
 a man who is only half balanced. This is a 
 curious misapprehension. Genius is not in- 
 sanity, as some foolishly claim. The men who 
 have given us greater insight into the beauty 
 of the two worlds, the natural and the spir- 
 itual, have been men who were not less but 
 
100 MANHOOD IN ART 
 
 more sane than their fellows. Longfellow, 
 indeed, has called this harmonious seeing a 
 divine insanity, as he says in "Keramos": — 
 
 ** The exultation, the divine 
 Insanity of noble minds. 
 That never falters or abates, 
 But labors and endures and waits, 
 Till all that it foresees it finds. 
 Or what it cannot find creates." 
 
 I have proven, I hope, without direct inten- 
 tion of doing so, that the great artist is a 
 roundly developed man. To be this implies 
 a rounded order of living, and that the artist 
 must be surrounded by men of culture and 
 great heart, magnanimous men. Why are 
 men forever disputing about art, as to what 
 it is and what it is not ? The great minds of 
 the world have defined it for us in plain and 
 unmistakable language; it is only those who 
 hang about its skirts, never reaching its soul, 
 who seem mystified. The great inspired artist 
 has always felt his genius to be a vehicle for 
 a clearer interpretation or expression of the 
 divine beauty in the universe. 
 
 The greater the artist, the more willing has 
 he been to attribute the glory to God. No 
 great art has come into existence by means of 
 
MANHOOD IN ART lOI 
 
 a fraud. Great art as well as great artists are 
 wholly sincere. What is it that makes Mil- 
 let's peasant different from the thousand imi- 
 tations of him that have sprung up on every 
 side.'^ One is fact, the other is fancy. The 
 tender, earnest, religious nature of the great 
 French painter loved and understood the 
 meagre, overworked, starved life of this mar- 
 vellously patient class. Did he not go down 
 and talk and live with them, and learn every 
 phase of their existence? Through love for 
 them he came into closer sympathy with them 
 than any other man. Not even Victor Hugo 
 has done so much for them as Millet; he has 
 written their history in a way that can never 
 be mistaken or forgotten. He has told their 
 wrongs, the long-suffering patience they have 
 exhibited, better than any man of his time. 
 Truly, as Henry Drummond says, "Love is 
 the greatest thing in the world." 
 
 Art, then, is nature passed through the 
 crucible of man's sympathetic intelligence; 
 and great art is nature passed through the in- 
 telligence of a great man. It is this to-day; 
 it was this twenty-five hundred years ago in 
 Greece. You know the great artist and the 
 
I02 MANHOOD IN ART 
 
 great poet by his choice of subject. It may 
 be the whole expanse of heaven, as Michael 
 Angelo saw it; or it may be in the setting 
 forth the homely beauty of a little field-flower, 
 as Burns has clone it. You know it by its 
 gw'rluineness. 
 
 " Illusion underneath there lies 
 The common life of every day ; 
 Only the spirit glorifies, 
 
 With its own tints, the sober gray." 
 
 We cannot have too great a respect or too 
 much admiration for great works of art and 
 the great men who have produced them, nor 
 can we care too tenderly for the children and 
 the young men who have the seeds of this 
 larger inspiration sown in their hearts. The 
 time is not far distant in this country, when 
 the State will be compelled, by a consensus 
 of public opinion, to endow and protect its 
 geniuses. The artistic nature has in itself 
 difficulties enough to overcome, enough of 
 passion and impulse to be subdued, without 
 having to contend in the arena of commercial 
 life for the bare necessities of existence. There 
 must be leisure for the working-out of the great 
 thought. ^Our cities, with all their intellectual 
 
MANHOOD IN ART IO3 
 
 activity, are still far behind the great cities 
 of the Old World in a genuine appreciation 
 of art^ 
 
 Manliness in art, if it means anything, means 
 a steady determination to endure the inevi- 
 table hardships that attend any great effort. 
 It means the shutting out from one's life of 
 many alluring pleasures. The moment an 
 artist gives himself over to the benumbing 
 pleasure of sense, that moment he ceases to 
 be a great artist, because he ceases to govern 
 himself. Intelligence has become subordinate 
 to its servant, passion. He is no longer an 
 orderly being. Not only the intellectual and 
 physical being begins to decay, but the spir- 
 itual insight into nature is confused, and soon 
 languishes; and this insight, as I have endeav- 
 ored to show, is the artist/''s supreme vehicle 
 and loftiest attainment. ^The spiritual man 
 has a grasp upon the universe that Napoleon, 
 with his armies and his train of kings, failed 
 utterly to possess. The world cannot give a 
 man this, he must win it. Like heaven, it is 
 a result, not a reward. A man may possess 
 it in the humblest walks- of life; he may be 
 ostensibly a slave, and yet, like Epictetus, one 
 
104 MANHOOD IN ART 
 
 of the kings of thought. A man may also 
 possess this genius and live in a palace, like 
 Marcus Aurelius, surrounded by fawning court- 
 iers, with an empire at his feet, and it keeps 
 him unspotted from the world. 
 
 It is one of the most flagrant wrongs and 
 errors of the day, this idea that an artist is a 
 child of the senses, or that he must abandon 
 himself to them to attain success^ France is 
 falling into decadence because her virility is 
 cankered at the heart through such abandon- 
 ment. Turn from the perfervid, sensual art 
 of the Paris Salon, to the lovely and temperate 
 art of Greece. It is like turning from the 
 gaudy faces and bedizened appearance of the 
 women who haunt the London streets at night, 
 to the pure and innocent faces of the primi- 
 tive virgins. Dear God ! save us from a like 
 decadence. The most tragic thought in all 
 such falling away is that the decline is seldom 
 seen or realized by the nation or individual 
 which suffers it. If it be true, indeed, that to 
 the pure all things are pure, is it not also true 
 that to the impure all things are impure.^ We 
 must set aside, at once and forever, this fal- 
 lacy that from an impure nature can be born 
 
MANHOOD IN ART IDS 
 
 some noble, enduring art-product. Just as 
 surely as the child bears the instinct and taint 
 of its parent, so surely does the picture or the 
 statue reveal the blemish or the glory of its 
 creator. No amount of jugglery or sleight of 
 hand will bring sweet roses from an unwhole- 
 some weed. Natural law holds in the spiritual 
 world of art. 
 
 We hear it said to-day that there is little 
 left for us to do in art. Are there no stars 
 left in heaven that men have not fixed and 
 counted with their searching lenses.^ 
 
 " Who shall call his dream fallacious, 
 Who has searched and sought 
 All the vast and unimagined 
 Universe of thought ? '* 
 
 Are there not ten thousand times greater 
 opportunities in art to-day than there have 
 been since the beginning of things.? Do we 
 not stand in the magnificent result of an evo- 
 lution so extensive that the mind can hardly 
 grasp it.? Is not the world ours, and all its 
 unspeakable treasures.? Men go down to the 
 depths of the ocean and bring back to us its 
 [ivondrous flora; travellers to the heart of Africa 
 bring back sights and sounds that astound us. 
 
I06 MANHOOD IN ART 
 
 Above and beyond this are not the unspeakable 
 dreams and realities of the spiritual world open- 
 ing out to us each hour? Nothing left to us! 
 The man who does not find modern life pic- 
 turesque, either does not know it, or has not 
 the picturesque within him; it is left out of 
 his composition just as some men are born 
 crippled. 
 
 Are not the faces of our American people 
 interesting? Do you not see in them the 
 working out of the great social problems of 
 the race ? Is the human heart here, its love, its 
 passion, its hate, its ambition, and its aspira- 
 tion, different from the heart of Egypt, of 
 Assyria, and Greece? 
 
 Have we not won for art a new and splendid 
 domain in the school of landscape painting? 
 And as to sculpture, is it true that there is 
 no reason for its being in this practical and 
 mechanical age? Have not the ages which 
 have been mechanical and practical produced 
 great and enduring arts? Is there not left 
 for us the most sublime and consummate 
 achievement of which man is capable, namely, 
 the depiction of character, the writing of life 
 upon the human face? Christianity has fur- 
 
MANHOOD IN ART 10/ 
 
 nished us with a motive which even Greece 
 in her palmiest days hardly dared aspire to. 
 The fault is not with modern life, but with 
 the way we look at it. The artist's calling 
 must be looked upon with more seriousness. 
 He is as much your minister as he who inter- 
 prets your Bible to you. He reads to you from 
 the book of nature. The Japanese, in their 
 great days of art, considered their artists 
 prophets, feeling it a privilege to minister 
 to their wants, and were overjoyed if, after 
 having entertained a travelling artist, he left 
 to their town or village some small piece of 
 his handiwork, to be cherished and handed 
 down as a sacred heirloom. 
 
 What artists want to-day is not adulation, 
 not airy flatteries. They need sincere and 
 genuine sympathy. Only through this sym- 
 pathetic appreciation, this entering into the 
 artist's thought and inspiration and sacrifice, 
 can he and his work be understood. Such 
 love and appreciation will inspire the artist to 
 a higher accomplishment than men yet dream 
 of. The artist does not ask much from the 
 world. A moderate living suffices for him. 
 If you give him of your very best, it is not too 
 
I08 MANHOOD IN ART 
 
 much ; for does he not reveal to you that which 
 makes your life worth the living? Let our 
 critics, those who understand what true criti- 
 cism means (there is perhaps a more painful 
 lack of great critics than great artists), come 
 out of the dead past and try, through loving 
 their fellow-men better, to understand better 
 the living present and its possibilities. Let 
 us have more earnest criticism. To criticise 
 a thing means to understand it, not to stand 
 outside and throw stones. I had rather be a 
 dog and bay the moon, than stand and bay a 
 work of art I had not soul enough to under- 
 stand. Criticism is left to-day, often, to 
 silly men and women of meagre education, 
 with little sagacity and little sympathy. To 
 be a true critic, a man must, first of all, be 
 magnanimous; and this means culture and re- 
 finement, balance, and the temperance which 
 comes only after much wise seeing and think- 
 ing. How many men, of those who affect to 
 criticise public statues, know what the quali- 
 ties are in a work of art which make it monu- 
 mental or trivial.? Have they studied the 
 great art-periods of Egypt, Greece, and Italy ? 
 Have they travelled and seen what statues 
 
MANHOOD 
 
 and monuments are left to us from antiquity? 
 Have they read what Winckelmann, Lessing, 
 Ruskin, and the poets have said of great 
 statues and of art? Are they fitted to criti- 
 cise sympathetically and intelligently a work 
 of art? If not, why do they speak at all? It 
 was of such that Michael Angelo said, "Every 
 ass thinks himself a stag until he comes to 
 jump the brook." 
 
 We need to have more reverence and respect 
 for the artist's calling. What do men labor 
 for, from morning to evening? Is it for a 
 mere shelter, and for food to satisfy the crav- 
 ings of their bodies? Is it not rather that 
 they may attain to a position where they may 
 surround themselves with beautiful things. 
 All the wealth in the world will not buy 
 such objects, unless we care for the men 
 who create them. Every university that pre- 
 tends to teach art should have a complete col- 
 lection of casts of antique and modern models, 
 that a man may grasp the central truths of art 
 with his sense as with his intellect. In our 
 modern life we know that the intellect domi- 
 nates the heart; but we cannot have a great 
 art until intellect and heart work together. 
 
no MANHOOD IN ART 
 
 I have spoken of the conditions of life and 
 the social state most congenial to the develop- 
 ment of genius in art. Enough has been said 
 to exhibit clearly the fact that manhood in 
 art means a manly tone in society, which art 
 reflects. We know that many imperfect blos- 
 soms fell to the ground and were tossed about 
 and destroyed by the whirlwind of ignorance, 
 superstition, and selfishness, before the per- 
 fect flower of Italian art bloomed into such 
 unspeakable loveliness. It takes many an im- 
 perfect man to make a perfect one ; and many 
 crude artists go on before, as pioneers, to clear 
 the way for the master-spirits. Before we 
 had Fra Bartolommeo, Michael Angelo, and 
 Raphael, it was necessary to have Masaccio and 
 his noble contemporaries. 
 
 *' He came to Florence long ago, 
 
 And painted here those walls, that shone 
 For Raphael and for Angelo 
 
 With secrets deeper than his own." 
 
 Shakespeare was the result of an age wher 
 culture was so common that every gentlemar 
 could turn his quatrains or play some sweet- 
 sounding instrument. There is nothing won- 
 derful about Shakespeare or Dante when on< 
 
 I 
 
MANHOOD IN ART III 
 
 has once entered into the spirit of their epochs 
 and understands them. Genius is a result. 
 Let those who lament what seems to them the 
 barren soil of modern art see to it that the soil 
 be properly prepared, so that the good seed fall 
 not on stony ground. If we have one cardinal 
 sin as a people, it is a disintegrating flippancy, 
 which we ought to abhor. Our comic papers 
 and our wits do not direct their ridicule and 
 satire wisely, — sometimes, indeed, simply in- 
 decently, and in a cowardly spirit unworthy of 
 men. If we wish to keep our national life 
 and our home-life pure and high-toned, let us 
 see that our ridicule is not directed against 
 holy things. It has become a fashion to sneer 
 at the "old masters." If the men who sneer 
 at them should attempt to handle their tools, 
 it would be like Sancho Panza attempting to 
 wield the lance of Bayard. As we press for- 
 ward bravely to the future, let it be with a 
 feeling of reverence for those noble spirits 
 who have made this great present possible. 
 Let us cling to all that is worthy in the past, 
 while we do not let it prison us. 
 
 I "Thoughts that great hearts once broke for, we 
 
 t Breathe cheaply in the common air." 
 
112 MANHOOD IN ART 
 
 The criticism is often made regarding the 
 artist that he is a narrow, one-sided being, 
 impetuous, indiscreet, irritable, melancholy, 
 and vain. Much of such criticism comes from 
 the Philistines, — men who, lost in the com- 
 mercial round, would let die out of their lives, 
 as they are dying in their hearts, ''glory and 
 genius and joy." Huxley has said, "Genius, 
 to my mind, means innate capacity of any 
 kind above the average mental level." It 
 must certainly be acknowledged that the real 
 artist is a being richly endowed. He holds 
 within himself powers and possibilities be^ 
 yond the reach of common men. But without 
 appreciation and love, he dies. "Orchids do 
 not grow among wayside stones." He may 
 tend sheep as Giotto did on the hills of Tus- 
 cany, or he may be born of a noble race, like 
 Angelo, and have easy access to courts through- 
 out his life. Giotto needed the sympathy and 
 love of his master, Cimabue, to develop his 
 versatile genius, and, later, the love and 
 friendship of Dante, to round out and perfect 
 that genius. Angelo needed, first, the careful 
 influence of his master, Ghirlandaio, then the 
 interest and kindness of Lorenzo the Magnifi- 
 
MANHOOD IN ART II3 
 
 cent, and, lastly, the devotion of his servant 
 Urbino and the admiration of Vittoria Colonna, 
 before his mighty genius could find expres- 
 sion. Genius must find sympathetic apprecia- 
 tion or it cannot live, any more than a flower 
 can live without sunlight. 
 
 The most precious characteristic of true 
 genius, and the surest sign by which we can 
 recognize it, is a capacity for indefinite expan- 
 sion. Many men pose as artists to-day who 
 have no right to that appellation. The ten- 
 dency of modern life has been to force men 
 into narrowing grooves. The artist, alas ! has 
 often succumbed to the strain and pressure of 
 existence as other men have. He has fallen 
 into looking at life through the wrong end of 
 the field-glass. Our artists are not big enough 
 men; first man and then artist! Fame is won 
 for painting fabrics and making dots of color 
 like the actual stuff. One becomes known 
 for the brilliant way in which he handles sun- 
 light; another I have heard of in New York 
 has won fame for painting eyes that look down. 
 Is art a matter of paint and bristles, or is it 
 the expression of a man's highest understand- 
 ing of the universe.-^ Have you heard Sarasate 
 8 
 
114 MANHOOD IN ART 
 
 play the violin? His reputation has not been 
 won by painting eyes that look down, — rather 
 for painting eyes that look up. The artist 
 to-day is too much the slave of his palette and 
 the latest sensation of the Paris school. 
 
 The claim of certain literary men that artists 
 are often narrow men is half true. The train- 
 ing of an artist is not yet understood in this 
 country, and only dimly realized abroad. In- 
 stead of wondering how Shakespeare and Giotto 
 and Donatello managed to do such perfect work 
 with such poor schooling, we had better look 
 more closely into the conditions of life which 
 rounded out such men, and then attempt to 
 make our schools correspond to those condi- 
 tions. We cannot have a great art until art 
 education is more generally taught in the 
 public schools. What the clear-eyed Greek 
 thought to be the most essential thing in the 
 educational plan, we relegate to the last place. 
 Art is a thing that must grow with a child's 
 life; it can seldom be engrafted in later years. 
 Our whole system of education is wrong in 
 this respect. A child will knock out reading 
 and writing from almost any environment in 
 which he may be placed; but a love and taste i 
 
MANHOOD IN ART IIS 
 
 for the beautiful come only through associa- 
 tion with beautiful things. Let the starved 
 natures of the children in our great city schools 
 learn to know that outside those brick walls 
 there is a world of surpassing loveliness. This 
 they will learn through seeing beautiful pic- 
 tures and beautiful statuary. Let them hear 
 not only the droning voice of the teacher, but 
 the music of the violin and the human voice 
 in song. So will you give them something 
 to think about besides their books, and so will 
 they begin slowly to take their places in the 
 eternal harmony of the universe. Place round 
 the school-room beautiful statues, that children 
 may learn to respect and care for their bodies 
 as the veritable temples of the immortal soul. 
 This kind of religion they will not fly from; 
 it will be a saving grace to them in after years. 
 From seeing Greek sculpture they will wish 
 to know something about Greek life, and from 
 this they cannot fail to catch that lesson of 
 temperance which will hallow all thereafter. 
 From such contemplation will come something 
 calm and holy to stand by them through the 
 tempests of after years. And,' lastly, write 
 upon the walls the living words of our great 
 
Il6 MANHOOD IN ART 
 
 poets, Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Whit- 
 tier, and all those who have striven to uplift 
 and dignify human life. So they will go about 
 among our great cities as did Hermes Tris- 
 megistus in the streets of Thebes, — 
 
 *' In the thoroughfare 
 
 Breathing as if consecrated, 
 
 A diviner air. 
 
 And amid discordant noises, 
 
 Of the jostling throng, 
 
 Hearing afar celestial voices 
 
 Of Olympian song." 
 
 This is the true education that we are long- 
 ing for and striving for. No false cry of 
 economy can keep it from us. This is the 
 order of education that will produce great 
 artists and a great order of manly living. 
 
THE RELATION OF THE DRAMA 
 TO EDUCATION 
 
 In this essay I purpose (i) to examine the rela- 
 tion of the dramatic, as such, to education in its 
 essential nature; (2) to consider the drama as 
 it exists at present, especially in our own coun- 
 try, in its relation to the purely dramatic and to 
 education, pointing out its more salient defects 
 and shortcomings; and (3) to suggest means 
 whereby these defects and shortcomings may be 
 remedied, and the drama raised to a position 
 from which it may exercise its legitimate func- 
 tion as a factor in education. 
 
 An important step toward the accomplish- 
 ment of the first of these purposes — namely, the 
 defining of the relation of the dramatic to edu- 
 cation — will be taken if we can make clear the 
 meaning of the terms in which our subject is 
 couched. 
 
 Education (from e-ducd), at bottom, means a 
 leading or drawing out of the faculties of the 
 human being. To this etymological definition, 
 
Il8 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 usage, guided by experience, has added some- 
 thing more, so that education means the harmo- 
 nious drawing out of all the human faculties 
 with a view to perfect intelligence, perfect no- 
 bility of feeling, and perfect moral action, 
 guided by intelligence and feeling. Further- 
 more, education, in ordinary speech, is used 
 sometimes in a narrower, sometimes in a broader' 
 sense. In the former, it means that instruction 
 which is given in schools, colleges, and universi- 
 ties ; in the latter, it embraces all the influences 
 that shape our characters from the cradle to the 
 grave. I purpose to use the term in both 
 senses, but mainly in the latter; for true it is 
 that ** All the world 's a stage, and all the men 
 and women merely players." 
 
 Passing now to the other term, drama, we find 
 ourselves again guided, in some degree, to its 
 meaning by its etymology. Drama (from draOy 
 to act) literally signifies action ; but to this 
 meaning, also, usage has added something more, 
 so that dra7na has come to mean the representa- 
 tion in the form of action of a moral problem, 
 or collision, in such a way that the motives for 
 the whole series of events are clearly revealed,' 
 and all fortuitous circumstances, which in actual 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION II 9 
 
 life serve to complicate such problems and to 
 conceal their import, are excluded. 
 
 Having thus defined the terms education and 
 drama, we may now put our subject in the form 
 of a question, and substitute for these terms 
 their definitions. The problem will then assume 
 something like this form : What eff"ect will the 
 presentation of a moral collision in the form of 
 a motivated action, displaying the whole round 
 of its natural consequences and excluding all 
 fortuitous circumstances, have in harmoniously 
 drawing out the faculties of the human being, 
 so as to insure perfect intelligence, nobility of 
 feeling, and moral action? Plainly, unless we 
 can show that the dramatic presentation of 
 moral problems has some peculiar advantages, 
 either in the way of clearness or impressiveness, 
 we shall be unable to claim for it a distinctive 
 place in a system of education. This, however, 
 seems by no means difficult. It is a time- 
 honored adage, confirmed by the experience of 
 centuries,'p:lTat example is more powerful than 
 precept]' and what is the dramatic representa- 
 tion of a moral problem other than teaching by 
 example? It may be objected that examples 
 sufficient for this purpose are to be found in 
 
I20 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 actual life, and that, therefore, the drama is 
 superfluous. Unfortunately, however, actual life 
 is not under our control, and hence we cannot 
 command such examples either at the time, or 
 in the form, or in the number in which we 
 require them. But even granting that we could 
 to some extent command such examples, they 
 would in almost every case be subject to one 
 or other of two disadvantages : either, through 
 the crowding of fortuitous circumstances, the 
 moral import of the problem would be obscured, 
 and so lose its impressiveness, or else this im- 
 pressiveness would be gained by such an outlay 
 of time and physical and moral strength as to 
 neutralize its own possible benefits. Experience, 
 undoubtedly, is the most efficient moral instruc- 
 tor; but, as Jean Paul says, the school fees are 
 rather high, and we may add, the curriculum is 
 rather tedious. Evidently, then, if we could find 
 some substitute for experience, costing less and 
 producing the same or a better effect, we ought 
 to hail it as an important factor in education. 
 If the drama, then, has any place in education, it 
 must be on the ground that it takes the place of 
 a large amount of experience and performs the 
 same function, either as well or better, and not 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 121 
 
 that it takes the place of direct instruction ' 
 addressed to the intellect. What, then, we may- 
 ask, is the value of experience as distinguished 
 from intellectual instruction? It lies in this, 
 that while intellectual instruction, however per- 
 fect, may simply remain in the memory, leaving 
 the heart cold and the will uninfluenced, experi- 
 ence appeals strongly to the feelings and imagi- 
 nation, and through these affects the will. If, 
 then, the drama is to take the place of experi- 
 ence, it must appeal to the feelings and imagina- 
 tion with the same result. Now, there can be no 
 doubt that the drama, when properly presented, 
 is eminently calculated to do this; and not 
 only so, but it does it in a way in which experi- 
 ence can rarely accomplish it. By presenting 
 the consequences of the moral problem in their 
 isolation within a brief space of time, the drama 
 adds much to their clearness and impressiveness ; 
 and, indeed, this is the very function of the drama.i^ 
 This result in no way conflicts with that article 
 in Aristotle's definition of tragedy, according to 
 which the purpose of tragedy is to accomplish, by 
 means of fear and pity, the purification of such 
 emotions. For what, after all, is impressiveness 
 but the arousing and purifying of pity and fear. . 
 
122 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 From what has been said, it is evident that 
 the drama, to educate, must aim above all things 
 at impressiveness; and this it can do only under 
 certain conditions, which may be regarded as 
 technical rules of dramatic art. In the first 
 place, the action in which the moral collision is 
 
 -^worked out must be a unity, including every- 
 thing that would tend to render the import of 
 the problem impressive, and rigorously con- 
 cluding everything of an opposite tendency, — 
 everything that would distract the attention and 
 withdraw it from the main issue. At the same 
 time the utmost care must be taken not to trench 
 upon the province of the pulpit or lecture-room 
 by explicitly drawing the moral. This the 
 audience itself must be allowed to deduce from 
 the impression made upon it by the events of 
 
 %rthe drama. In the second place the subject 
 chosen must be of a lofty character and the 
 treatment ideal, and free from meretricious ele- 
 ments. And, above all, it must clearly exhibit 
 the intrinsic difference between virtue and vice 
 and the natural consequences of each. In the! 
 third place the subjects chosen and their work- 
 ing-out must be such as are calculated to appeal 
 vividly and in a thought-stimulating way to the 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 1 23 
 
 audiences for which they are intended. It is 
 sufficiently evident that many plays which would 
 deeply move a highly cultivated audience would 
 fall dead upon a rude and uncultured one ; and 
 the opposite is no less true. It may perhaps be 
 observed that, although the drama has some- 
 thing for all conditions of men, its most bene- 
 ficial effect as an elevating influence will be 
 exerted upon the lowly, who compose the mass 
 of mankind. Cultivated men are to a con- 
 siderable extent guided by reason, whereas, in 
 the words of a philosopher of the Middle 
 Ages, ^* Simple men are more guided by repre- 
 sentations than by reasons." We must not, 
 therefore, in our devotion to high art, fail 
 to recognize the value of those less preten- 
 tious dramas which find a response in the hearts 
 of the lowly. As Lowell has so generously 
 said, — 
 
 " It may be glorious to write 
 
 Thoughts that shall glad the two or three 
 High souls, like those far stars that come in sight j 
 Once in a century. 
 
 " But better far to write some verse or line, 
 Which, seeking not the praise of art, 
 Shall make a clearer faith and manhood shine 
 In the untutored heart." 
 
124 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 Having thus shown that the drama, being so 
 much idealized experience, may with advantage 
 replace in education a large amount of actual 
 experience by presenting moral problems so as 
 ultimately to affect and purify the will, we pass 
 to the consideration of the next point, which is 
 the present condition of the drama, especially 
 in our own country, and its fitness to exert a 
 beneficial influence as a substitute for experi- 
 ence in education. This part of our subject 
 may be treated under two divisions: (i) the 
 pieces represented on the stage, and (2) the 
 influence exerted by those who represent them. 
 It must never be forgotten that the character of 
 a teacher has much to do with the efficiency of 
 his instruction. 
 
 As to the former of these divisions, the pieces 
 represented on the stage may, roughly speaking, 
 be divided into four classes: 
 
 (i) What may be called the classical drama, 
 including the plays of Shakespeare and other 
 dramatists of the Elizabethan period, and those 
 of such later writers as Dryden, Milton, Addison, 
 Sheridan, Goldsmith, and others. 
 
 (2) Dramatized novels, both native and 
 foreign. 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 125 
 
 (3) Translation from foreign languages, espe- 
 cially from the French. 
 
 (4) Original production of modern English 
 and American playwrights. 
 
 Each of these divisions must be treated sep- 
 arately, inasmuch as, though all are open to 
 objections from an educational point of view, 
 they are not all open to the same objections. 
 Evidently, the objections against the classical 
 drama will be very different from those to be 
 urged against the other three divisions. Indeed, 
 it will surprise most people to hear that plays 
 like those of Shakespeare are open to any ob- 
 jection whatever. From certain points of view 
 these works will doubtless always hold a supreme 
 position ; but it does not follow from this that 
 they are in every respect adapted to our stage. 
 
 We have little to urge against these from a 
 moral standpoint, although George Eliot has 
 said, *' One has need of as nice a distillation as 
 the bee's to suck nothing but honey from Shake- 
 speare." 
 
 We cannot, however, agree with Charles 
 Lamb, who maintained that the plays of Shake- 
 speare are less calculated for performance on a 
 stage than those of almost any other dramatist 
 
126 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 whatever; but we may safely maintain that they 
 are to some degree obsolete, and in many ways 
 unfitted to influence in the highest degree the 
 generality of people who attend our theatres. 
 
 The truth is, the problems of Shakespeare 
 are in a great measure no longer our problems, 
 his motives no longer our motives. The very 
 conditions of life from which the majority of 
 his plots are drawn do not even exist among 
 us. A sentiment like this, — 
 
 " There 's such divinity doth hedge a king, 
 That treason can but peep to what it would," 
 
 finds no response in the American bosom. 
 Indeed, our very existence as a nation is the 
 result of a rebellion against that very order of 
 things which forms the basis of Shakespeare's 
 dramas. It might even be maintained that 
 Sophocles appeals more directly to us than 
 Shakespeare, just as the Athenian republic is 
 in many respects nearer to us than the English 
 monarchy. Indeed, what the eminent German 
 critic Freytag has said in regard to the Greek 
 drama is in great measure applicable to the 
 Shakespearian. 
 
 "The intellectual and ethical status of man, the 
 relation of the individual to his race and to the high- 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION \2^ 
 
 est powers of mundane life, our notion of freedom, 
 and the ideas we entertain of the being of God have 
 undergone great transformation. While a wide field 
 of dramatic material has been lost to us, a more ex- 
 tensive territory has been won. Alongside the ethical 
 and political principles which govern our lives, the 
 ideas of what is beautiful and effective in art have 
 developed." ^^ 
 
 Bearing this in mind, we shall recognize 
 that a lack of appreciation for Shakespeare's 
 plays, as compared with works of far less 
 artistic merit, is due mainly to the indifferent 
 culture of the audience, and, in some degree, 
 perhaps, to the plays themselves, which no 
 longer completely reflect the moral problems 
 which interest us. While their grandeur and 
 truth must appeal to us and to all time, they 
 have in some relations fallen into an historical 
 position, as far, at least, as the popular stage 
 is concerned. 
 
 We pass next to such pieces as are transla- 
 tions from foreign languages, and especially 
 from the French. The objections to these will, 
 of course, be very different to those urged 
 against the English classical drama; they will 
 be mainly of a moral character ; for few dramas 
 
128 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 can vie with those of the French stage in artistic 
 construction and dramatic effectiveness. This, 
 no doubt, accounts for their popularity on our 
 stage ; but these advantages are more than coun- 
 terbalanced by their defective morality. This 
 defectiveness lies sometimes in the mode of 
 treatment. Not infrequently the moral collision 
 is of an ignoble kind, and, therefore, altogether 
 unfit for dramatic representation. This is the 
 case with *' Camille '* and plays of that order, 
 which, by investing certain relations with an air 
 of respectability, tend to weaken our just moral 
 aversion to them. On the other hand, many 
 plots, in themselves unexceptionable, are worked 
 out in such a way as to present vice in an attrac- 
 tive aspect, so that it pleasingly haunts the im- 
 agination, and tends to bribe the conscience. 
 Of course these strictures on French plays do 
 not in any way refer to the classical French 
 drama, — the works of Corneille, Racine, and 
 MoHere, — or even to some modern political plays, 
 as Sardou's ** Diplomacy," and others. Objec- 
 tions that may be raised against Victor Hugo's 
 plays are mostly of another order, — morbid- 
 ness, horribleness of detail, overheatedness of 
 imagination. Striking examples of these sins 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 1 29 
 
 against taste we find in '* Liicrezia Borgia" and 
 *^ Le Roi s'amuse.'* 
 
 From the other languages so Httle has been 
 translated for the stage that what there is may- 
 be passed over in silence. We may merely 
 remark that all foreign plays labor under the 
 same disadvantage; viz., that they do not accu- 
 rately mirror our problems. 
 
 We now take up our third class of plays; 
 namely, those founded upon popular novels. 
 Such dramas are open, first of all, to the same ob- 
 jections as the novels from which they are drawn ; 
 e. g., frivolity of plot, mawkish sentimentality, 
 conventionality, flippancy, vulgarity, and even 
 downright immorality. Besides these they are 
 ?' liable to have other defects which, though due 
 to their parent novels, would not be regarded 
 as defects in the novels themselves; for eicam- 
 pie, long narrations and descriptions, episodic 
 arrangement of scenes and consequent lack of 
 unity in the action. An example of these 
 defects is " Little Emily," founded upon Dick- 
 ens's '' David Copperfield." One criticism to 
 which nearly all plays founded upon novels are 
 amenable is, that, strictly speaking, they are to 
 a certain degree undramatic, and, by depending 
 9 
 
I30 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 for part of their interest upon things external to 
 the drama, tend to confuse the dramatic sense, 
 whose existence is always a mark of high 
 culture. 
 
 Our fourth, and last, class of plays includes 
 pieces by modern English and American dram- 
 atists. 
 
 This class is so extensive and includes such 
 diverse elements that we can hardly be expected 
 to treat it exhaustively. Nevertheless, it does 
 seem to have this general characteristic, that the 
 pieces composing it tend rather to the comic 
 and the burlesque than to the tragic and serious. 
 This fact is perhaps as much due to the lack of 
 tragic poets as to the lack of appreciation for 
 the tragic on the part of audiences. Even the 
 best of our recent poets have almost uniformly 
 failed in their efforts to produce actable trage- 
 dies, — notably the greatest of them, Tennyson, 
 Longfellow, Swinburne, Buchanan. 
 
 It may be said that on the whole the 
 nearest approach on our stage to the tragic is 
 the melodramatic, which in many ways may 
 be said to be the abuse of the tragic, in that 
 it uses the means of impressiveness, not to 
 solemnize the mind and purify the will, but 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION I31 
 
 to arouse the physical side of emotion and 
 exhaust our nervous vitality. One leaves the 
 theatre at the conclusion of such plays com- 
 pletely unstrung. Such mawkish, sensational, 
 mock-heroic pieces, instead of producing a 
 wholesome and purifying effect upon the 
 mind, have rather a malarial and feverish ten- 
 dency. Unquestionably, the best part of our 
 modern drama is the comic, and there need 
 be no question that it often has a beneficial 
 effect. Plays like "Lord Dundreary" have 
 done much to banish from the theatre of actual 
 life certain weak and contemptible types of 
 character by making them universally ridicu- 
 lous. On the whole, the comic drama, though 
 generally reckoned inferior to the tragic, is, 
 when properly managed, hardly a less power- 
 ful force in education, and it moreover reaches 
 a lower and more numerous class. But in 
 order to do this, it must, at bottom, be serious, 
 and have an earnest purpose ; in other words, it 
 must direct its ridicule against actual abuses, 
 foibles, and follies, being careful to show the 
 utmost respect to that which deserves respect. 
 It was this fine tact, which, while seizing the 
 truly ridiculous, bows before the good, the 
 
132 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 true, and the beautiful, that lent such scath- 
 ing force to the plays of Aristophanes, Moli^re, 
 arid Beaumarchais, and made them powerful 
 agents in the moral regeneration of their times. 
 Whatever objections may be urged against our 
 comic drama are due to a lack of this tact. 
 The American comedian, like many of his 
 countrymen, in his effort to be funny at all 
 hazards, very often fails to distinguish be- 
 tween ridicule and flippancy, which is but 
 ridicule directed against what deserves rev- 
 erence. Flippancy is the cardinal sin of 
 American comedy, as, indeed, of much else 
 in our literature and art. Few things short 
 of vulgarity or obscenity have a more baleful 
 effect on the tone and temper of men's minds 
 than this same flippancy, which saps at its very 
 foundation that fine reverence which Goethe, 
 with good reason, regarded as the essential 
 condition of all true education. If our comic 
 writers had, instead of this indiscriminating 
 flippancy, a true sense of the intrinsically 
 ridiculous, they would find ample material in 
 the conditions of our political and social life 
 to employ their talents upon, with infinite 
 advantage to our people and institutions. An 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 1 33 
 
 Aristophanes in Washington would do more 
 than our President to grease the wheels of 
 Civil Service Reform; while a Moliere or a 
 Beaumarchais in New York would go far to 
 put an extinguisher upon anglomania, dudism, 
 snobbery, and tawdry display, and to help the 
 solution of the vexed question between labor 
 and capital, by visibly exemplifying the remark 
 of Swift, that the Lord shows the value which 
 he sets upon money by the kind of people he 
 gives it to ! How would our boarding-school or 
 boy-farming institutions look after a Moliere 
 had been imprisoned in one of them for a 
 month or two, and survived to record his ex- 
 perience on the stage? 
 
 Besides these objections, which apply to very 
 many of our modern plays, there are others 
 which apply only to particular grades or classes 
 of plays; such as those that might fairly be 
 urged against all pieces written to exhibit the 
 special characteristics of actors or actresses, 
 which are often but mere mannerisms. These 
 plays most frequently lack unity of action, 
 moral import, and, in all cases, proportion. 
 Another objection applies to the use of adven- 
 titious and meretricious means for the pur- 
 
134 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 pose of exciting vulgar interest. Among such 
 means are the introduction of notorious char- 
 acters, merely on account of their notoriety; 
 the use of glaring or gaudy scenic effects, 
 the interlarding of the dialogue with popu- 
 lar slang, cheap repartee, local allusions, and 
 tinsavory insinuations. It is sad to think 
 that a large number of our most popular 
 plays derive their chief interest from these 
 defects. 
 
 It would be impossible, even if it were de- 
 sirable, to point out all the shortcomings of 
 the modern drama ; but enough has, perhaps, 
 been said to show that a very large portion 
 of it fails to perform the function which the 
 drama ought to perform in education. But 
 after all deductions have been made, there 
 still remains a considerable residue of plays, 
 especially from the classical period, to serve 
 as a model and basis for a great educational 
 drama, such as we may hope will some day 
 grace our national literature and the literature 
 of the world. 
 
 Having thus passed in rapid review the 
 repertory of our modern stage, and pointed 
 out its most salient defects, we come next to 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 1 35 
 
 consider the actors and their personal influ- 
 ence upon the drama which they present. It 
 is no part of my purpose to criticise the pri- 
 vate life of actors and actresses ; but I should 
 be neglecting an important element in the 
 educational effect of the drama if I failed to 
 notice the damage done to it by the reputa- 
 tion in which theatrical people are held by 
 a large and respectable part of the community. 
 This reputation is by no means flattering. To 
 explain how it came into existence and to be 
 as widespread as it is would require more space 
 than I have at my disposal. About the fact 
 there can be no doubt. Even Shakespeare 
 complains that his "name receives a brand" 
 from his connection with the histrionic pro- 
 fession. At all events, the important points 
 for us to consider are: (i) that this prejudice 
 against the histrionic profession has a certain 
 amount of excuse; and (2) that this reacts 
 prejudicially against the profession itself, by 
 preventing many persons well fitted to adorn 
 it from joining it. With regard to the former 
 point, — namely, that the prejudice has some 
 excuse, — it should always be remembered that 
 the moral defects so often complained of in 
 
136 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 actors and actresses are due in part to the 
 same causes which render eminence in their 
 calling possible; that is, sensuous and viva- 
 cious temperament, personal vanity, and the 
 craving for immediate recognition and ap- 
 plause. They are, however, also due in part 
 to the arrangements of the theatre and other 
 circumstances incidental to the actor's mode 
 of life. One must be little acquainted with 
 that life not to know the extraordinary tempta- 
 tions to which the profession is exposed, and it 
 is no small credit that it furnishes fewer crimi- 
 nals than any other class in the community. 
 
 As to the second point, there can be no 
 doubt that the prejudice of which we have been 
 speaking reacts injuriously upon the personnel 
 of the theatre by preventing many respectable 
 persons from entering the profession, and so 
 leaving it mostly to those who have but a 
 small stake in the world's opinion. Thus, 
 through action and reaction, the character of 
 the profession has for a long time remained 
 unchanged, — at least in our own country. 
 Signs, however, are not wanting to encourage 
 us in the belief that this state of things will 
 soon be remedied; that persons of the highest 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 1 37 
 
 respectability will enroll themselves in the 
 histrionic profession, as, indeed, they have 
 begun to do, and the stage take a position, in 
 point of respectability, alongside the pulpit. 
 Goethe says : — 
 
 ^' The theatre has often been at variance with the 
 pulpit ; they ought not, I think, to quarrel. How 
 much it is to be wished that the celebration both of 
 nature and of God were entrusted to none but men of 
 noble minds." 
 
 That Goethe's hope bids fair to be realized, 
 we are led to believe from the words of Henry 
 Irving — one of the few highly educated ac- 
 tors — in his speech last March at Harvard 
 University. "The profession," he says, "is 
 steadily growing in credit with the educated 
 classes ; it is drawing more recruits from these 
 classes. The enthusiasm for our calling has 
 never reached a higher pitch." 
 
 From all that has been said upon the drama 
 and the actor, it is evident that we have no 
 theatre at once popular and calculated to per- 
 form its proper functions in education. The 
 ! ^question that remains to be considered, the 
 •^ third which we proposed to ourselves, is: 
 How shall such a theatre be realized.? Before 
 
138 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 we can answer this question, and suggest 
 means for the remedying of the present de- 
 plorable condition of the stage, we must 
 look deeper into the causes of this condition. 
 These nearly all lie in one fact, highly char- 
 acteristic of our material civilization: The 
 drama, like almost everything else in our day, 
 has fallen under the iron law of political econ- 
 omy, and has thus become an article of mer- 
 chandise. Obedient to this law of supply and 
 demand, our theatre-managers ask only one 
 question respecting any play or actor: How 
 will it or he draw? — which means, how much 
 hard cash will it or he bring into the till? 
 This being so, the larger the public whose 
 tastes he can gratify, the better. Aiming thus 
 at the multitude with his vulgar, glaring play- 
 bills, which disgrace our fences, he takes the 
 average taste and ideas of the multitude as 
 his standard. These are of necessity con- 
 ventional, and lacking in elevation. In this 
 respect our drama stands at a great disadvan- 
 tage as compared with that of the great 
 periods when poets like Sophocles, Shake- 
 speare, and Goethe, writing for an intelligent 
 public, produced works corresponding to its 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 1 39 
 
 intelligence and taste. That the taste of the 
 multitude is in the main conventional and far 
 from elevated is shown in the most distressing 
 way by what it applauds, which in most cases 
 argues lack of intelligence and good taste. 
 
 If we now go a little deeper, and ask our- 
 selves what is the cause of this unfortunate 
 lack of fine discrimination, we must answer 
 that it is due in part to the want of aesthetic 
 education in early youth, and in part to sub- 
 sequent associations and mode of life. It is 
 a notorious fact that our educational institu- 
 tions, from the lowest to the highest, do almost 
 nothing to develop the dramatic, or even the 
 artistic sense. In fact, that whole department 
 of human education which the Greeks em- 
 phasized so strongly under the name of puri- 
 fication, and to which Aristotle assigned the 
 drama as a powerful agency, is almost entirely 
 overlooked in our education. Furthermore, the 
 restless, anxious life of the average American, 
 devoted as it is to the pursuit of wealth and 
 mere position, leaves him little time or strength 
 for the loftier occupations of existence, — his- 
 tory, art, science, philosophy, religion. Even 
 when he does devote some time to the last, — 
 
140 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 namely, religion, — the effect is perhaps more 
 frequently to narrow and suppress thought 
 than to broaden and develop it. Indeed, the 
 mass of Americans are at that stage of cul- 
 ture when they wish to be amused, without 
 having to reflect. They look for relaxation 
 of spirit in something less serious than their 
 daily occupations, and not in something more 
 serious. They do not appreciate that an ascent 
 into the calm empyrean of earnest thought 
 is more restful to the jaded spirit than a de- 
 scent into the garish world of burlesque and 
 caricature. 
 
 What they most care for is to see their lives 
 reflected in a mock-humorous way, which is any- 
 thing but holding the "mirror up to nature.'* 
 Here we are confronted by the oft-recurring 
 difficulty of action and reaction. We cannot 
 elevate the public until we elevate the theatre, 
 and we cannot elevate the theatre until we 
 elevate the public, so long as the drama is a 
 question of supply and demand. In order, 
 then, to elevate either one or the other, we 
 must elevate both at once, and each through 
 the other. In other words, we must, in our 
 homes, schools, and colleges, educate the rising 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION I4I 
 
 generation to an appreciation of the earnest 
 drama and its import ; and, on the other hand, 
 we must furnish it with an earnest drama to 
 appreciate. Thus, .education in its narrower 
 sense can be made a preparation for educa- 
 tion in its broader, life-sense; and the latter, 
 idealized in the drama, will be made to react 
 upon school education, by familiarizing edu- 
 cators with great ideas, presented as object- 
 lessons. In this connection let me quote a 
 few more sentences from Henry Irving. The 
 drama in its " highest developments acts as a 
 constant medium for the diffusion of great 
 ideas, and by throwing new lights upon the 
 best dramatic literature it largely helps the 
 growth of education. . . . Some of the most 
 thoughtful students of Shakespeare have rec- 
 ognized their indebtedness to actors. 
 
 "... Am I presumptuous, then, in assert- 
 ing that the stage is not only an instrument 
 of amusement, but a very active agent in the 
 spread of knowledge and taste.?*' 
 
 We are now, at last, brought face to face 
 with two perfectly definite questions, answers 
 to which it is the ultimate purpose of this 
 paper to suggest. These are: (i) How shall 
 
142 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 we make the rising generation capable of ap- 
 preciating the truly dramatic, and of critically 
 discerning it in the plays put before them? 
 (2) How shall we procure and present to it 
 and the general public the truly dramatic in 
 a suitable form? 
 
 The answer to the former of these questions 
 is, "By instruction," which ought to begin in 
 the family, and be carried on through all the 
 grades of education. 
 
 In the family alone, a great deal can be 
 accomplished in this direction. Children are 
 in the highest degree imitative, and many of 
 the commonest games in which they partici- 
 pate — such as, playing house, London Bridge, 
 Oats be beans, and barley grows, Going to 
 Jerusalem — are the rude beginnings of the 
 drama. These, and similar games thought- 
 fully developed and improved, could not fail 
 to be excellent first lessons in dramatic educa- 
 tion. This would not only develop in the 
 children the dramatic sense, but would also 
 accustom them to amuse themselves in a 
 rational manner. The importance of doing 
 this can hardly be over-estimated; for, if we 
 consider carefully, we shall find that the great- 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION I43 
 
 est good and the greatest evil in men's lives 
 are learned in their hours of amusement, and, 
 conversely, their moral condition can be accu- 
 rately gauged by the sum of their amusements 
 which they seek in their leisure hours. It 
 may truly be affirmed that no more important 
 step can be taken in education than by teach- 
 ing people to amuse themselves in a dignified 
 way, and that few things would more power- 
 fully contribute to this end than the accus- 
 toming of them from childhood to witness, 
 and take part in, properly conducted dramatic 
 representations. 
 
 Once for all, we must rise above the fool- 
 ish and injurious prejudice that there is any 
 antagonism between education and amusement. 
 Almost the contrary is true; for amusements 
 properly conducted are among the most power- 
 ful and far-reaching means of education. In- 
 deed, Aristotle, from whose authority on 
 matters of education there will hardly be any 
 appeal, maintains the function, not only of the 
 drama, but of the fine arts generally, to be 
 educative amusement^ — an opinion in which 
 the world will certainly concur as soon as it 
 has recognized the claim of amusement to a 
 
144 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 high place among educational agencies. The 
 function of the fine arts is to present the ideal 
 world toward which we are struggling, and in 
 the contemplation of which the soul, wearied 
 with the often hopeless-seeming moral struggle 
 of actual life, finds rest, refreshment, inspira- 
 tion, and renewed strength. 
 
 But to return to the question of dramatic 
 education. The course of training begun in the 
 family ought to be continued throughout the 
 whole school-life, including that of the univer- 
 sity, and be treated as an essential part of the 
 curriculum. This might be done in a variety 
 of ways. For example, every educational in- 
 stitution ought to require the production, at 
 certain festive seasons of the year, of well- 
 selected plays, previously studied and rehearsed 
 with the utmost care. This is done in some of 
 the best English schools. At the same time, 
 pupils should be encouraged, under proper 
 supervision, to attend good plays in the public 
 theatres, and the import of these plays made 
 clear to them, either before or after. In the 
 higher institutions of education there ought 
 to be special departments of literary and, above 
 all, dramatic criticism. The course in this 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 145 
 
 department should include mainly two things : 
 (i) the reading of the dramatic masterpieces 
 of ancient and modern times, with analysis 
 and exposition from the highest dramatic and 
 philosophic point of view; (2) the interpreta- 
 tion of the greatest critical works on the 
 drama, beginning with the Poetics of Aris- 
 totle, whose value even in our day can hardly 
 be over-estimated. The lessons of this course 
 should be varied at certain seasons, and im- 
 pressed by the production, on the part of the 
 students, of some of the plays that have been 
 studied. With what success this might be 
 done was shown, a few years ago, by the pro- 
 duction of the " GEdipus Tyrannus " at Harvard. 
 There seems no good reason why any institu- 
 tion having courses in any of the fine arts, such 
 as music and ^drawing (Harvard has courses in 
 both), shmrfd not include a course in drama- 
 tics, generally acknowledged to be the highest 
 of all the arts. How readily students would 
 take to such a course is shown by the fact that 
 many college societies annually produce plays 
 as a part of their amusement. Some of these 
 plays are original and not wanting in merit. 
 If there existed such a course in our chief 
 
146 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 universities, we might look forward with some 
 confidence to a race of playwrights, actors, and 
 critics who would insure the total reformation 
 of the stage. 
 
 We have thus endeavored to answer the first 
 of the two questions proposed; namely. How 
 shall we make the rising generation capable 
 of appreciating the truly dramatic? In doing 
 so we have, in fact, also furnished an answer 
 to the second; namely, How shall we present 
 to the general public the truly dramatic in a 
 suitable form ? This partial answer must now 
 be completed. It is not enough to have devel- 
 oped playwrights, actors, and critics ; we must 
 further provide that they shall have a fruitful 
 field for the exercise of their powers, — in 
 other words, that they shall have a large public. 
 No doubt, by their unaided exertions, they 
 would in some degree be able to secure this; 
 but in order to do so in the most extensive 
 and beneficial way, they would require such 
 co-operation as should render them indepen- 
 dent of the iron law of supply and demand. 
 Evidently, so long as the present demand 
 determines the supply, there will be no place 
 for the productions of cultured dramatists. 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 1 47 
 
 In order to reform the drama, the supply 
 must be made to determine the demand. And 
 this is not impossible; for as Goethe, who, as 
 theatre director, critic, actor, and playwright 
 in one, certainly had plenty of experience in 
 the matter, says, — 
 
 " By presenting excellence to the people you should 
 gradually excite in them a taste and feeling for the 
 excellent ; and they will pay their money with double 
 satisfaction when reason itself has nothing to object 
 against this outlay. . 
 
 '^ It is only because they are not used to the taste 
 of what is excellent that the generality of people take 
 delight in silly and insipid things." 
 
 Indeed, we must contrive to give to the 
 public, if we wish to elevate it, not what it 
 desires, which is often foolish enough, but 
 what it requires for its highest welfare. 
 
 In a country like ours, where the censorship 
 of the theatre is neither possible nor desirable, 
 it seems possible to furnish the public with 
 an educative drama in only one of two ways. 
 We must either convince all theatrical man- 
 agers of the dignity and sacredness of their 
 office, and induce them to defy the iron law 
 by giving the public what it needs rather than 
 
148 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 what it desires, or else some agency, conscious 
 of this dignity and sacredness, must take this 
 matter entirely out of their hands. 
 
 Inasmuch as the conversion of the theatri- 
 cal managers, who are too often inaccessible 
 to any motives save those of gain, seems un- 
 likely to be sudden, if at all possible, we are 
 thrown back upon the second alternative. 
 
 The question then is. When the matter is 
 taken out of the hands of the ordinary theatre 
 director, in whose hands shall it be placed.!^ 
 Here only suggestions can be given. The 
 first agency that naturally suggests itself is 
 the State or community. While assured that 
 the drama is an educative force, and ought to 
 take its place along with other educative in- 
 fluences, we must bear in mind two facts; 
 namely, (i) that the question how far the State 
 or community may with advantage interfere, 
 even with school education, is still unsettled; 
 and (2) that this is still more true in regard 
 to the question of what may be called life- 
 education, to which, in reality, the drama be- 
 longs. But so long as the State does assume 
 the responsibility of public education, and 
 bestows care and pecuniary support on libra- 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 1 49 
 
 ries, museums, and galleries of art, with a view- 
 to elevating public intelligence and taste, there 
 seems no good reason, to say the least, why it 
 should not assume the same responsibility for 
 the theatre, which has, or might have, a more 
 direct and powerful educative influence. We 
 have already seen that in Goethe's belief even 
 the State itself might derive great advantage 
 from assuming the direction of the theatre, 
 and placing upon the stage the ideal side 
 of the lives and occupations of all ranks of 
 society. But whatever advantage might di- 
 rectly accrue to the State from assuming the 
 responsibility of the theatre, we have ample 
 proof to convince us that State superintend- 
 ence has, in many cases, been of great benefit 
 to the theatre, raising it out of dependence 
 upon the caprice of popular taste, and render- 
 ing it a powerful agent in popular education. 
 In ancient Greece, where the drama reached 
 an unparalleled eminence of splendor and use- 
 fulness, the theatre was not only entirely under 
 the control of the State, but formed an essential 
 part of the public worship; and so thoroughly 
 convinced were the Athenians of the value 
 of the dramatic representations to the public 
 
150 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 that in the time of Pericles — the most glori- 
 ous period of Athenian history — a law was 
 passed providing that the entrance-fee for all 
 the citizens should be paid out of the public 
 treasury. 
 
 Likewise, in modern times, many of the 
 best theatres in Europe are managed by the 
 State. This is true in many of the German 
 States. Every one will remember the extreme 
 care bestowed upon the Weimar Court Theatre 
 by Goethe and Schiller, who, indeed, wrote 
 some of their best works for it. At the 
 present day the court theatre of the little 
 principality of Saxe-Meiningen is said, by 
 competent critics, to be one of the best in 
 the world; and there are many other high- 
 class theatres under State direction in other 
 parts of Germany, — for example, at Munich, 
 Carlsruhe, and Stuttgart. 
 
 In Austria and in France, also, where the 
 theatre forms a more important element in life 
 than, perhaps, anywhere else, it is largely under 
 State direction, and this with the very best 
 results. The Theatre Frangais, universally 
 looked up to as the model theatre of Europe, 
 being under State management, is able to mould 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 151 
 
 instead of serving public taste, and has thus 
 given to France, where it is said "poet never 
 grew," the best acting drama in the world. 
 
 It thus appears that in suggesting that the 
 State in our own country should undertake 
 the direction and maintenance of the public 
 theatre, we are not proposing any mere vision- 
 ary scheme, but a plan that has frequently 
 been realized with very great and obvious 
 advantages. 
 
 Granting the State's competency to assume 
 the direction of the theatre, there now arises 
 the very important question. How shall the 
 State be made to feel its obligation in this 
 matter, and induced to take some practical 
 action in regard to it? It must always be 
 borne in mind that State authorities are not 
 justified in introducing any means of reform, 
 however excellent theoretically, which does 
 not correspond to an expressed public demand 
 and bid fair to be supported by public senti- 
 ment. That the demand for a reformed theatre 
 is widely felt in our own country, there can be 
 no doubt. Since I began writing this paper, 
 I have received from a college friend a letter, 
 from which I venture to quote a sentence or 
 
152 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 two as indicative of the feeling of the best 
 of the rising generation: — 
 
 " The American drama of to-day I cannot consider 
 as a successful educator. We have a few good plays, 
 such as ' The Banker's Daughter/ and one or two of 
 Bartley Campbell's ; but for the most part our stage 
 is given over to plays of the feeblest and most slangy 
 description. The people evidently want to be amused, 
 and are ready to laugh at and pay for anything that 
 looks funny. Yet, on consideration, amusement as 
 recreation is a branch of education, and I sincerely 
 hope that the people will soon graduate from some of 
 the nauseous stuff that is now produced." 
 
 How, then, shall the feeling here expressed 
 be made to assume such a form as shall justify 
 the State, or let us say a city-government, in 
 taking action in the premises? The answer 
 is, What the State may be expected to do 
 must first be realized, by way of example and 
 inducement, under private auspices. When 
 under these auspices it has been shown that 
 the reformed theatre meets a public demand, 
 and is, by its elevating and educating influence, 
 increasing that demand, the State will, no 
 doubt, feel justified in stepping in and hand- 
 somely completing what private societies have 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 1 53 
 
 begun. Examples of this carrying-on by the 
 State of enterprises, originally private, are by 
 no means rare. In England the telegraphic 
 system, originally established and owned by 
 private companies, is now entirely managed 
 by the government, to the great advantage of 
 the public. In most European countries the 
 same is true of the railroad systems. In all 
 civilized countries it is true of the postal 
 system, which plainly could not have been 
 developed under any but State auspices to its 
 present degree of usefulness. What is true 
 of the telegraph, the railroad, the post-office, 
 is, in a measure, true of more directly edu- 
 cative institutions, — libraries, museums, art 
 galleries, etc. 
 
 Our view, then, in fine, is that while our 
 schools and colleges are being induced to 
 give theoretical and practical instruction in 
 dramatics, and thus preparing the rising gen- 
 eration to appreciate a good drama, those phil- 
 anthropic persons, who see the value of the 
 drama as a possible means of universal educa- 
 tion, should form themselves into an associa- 
 tion, with some such name as " Society for 
 the Reformation of the Drama," and devote 
 
154 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 themselves to furnishing the public with an 
 artistic and educative drama. 
 
 From the foregoing arguments it will be 
 sufficiently evident what the chief tasks of 
 this society will be: (i) To obtain the direc- 
 tion and, if possible, the possession of well- 
 appointed theatres; (2) to study carefully the 
 condition of public intelligence and taste, and 
 to produce upon their stage pieces calculated 
 at once to attract the public and elevate it; 
 (3) to give every possible encouragement and 
 opportunity to earnest playwrights and actors, 
 and to frown down those of an opposite char- 
 acter; (4) to exercise a rigorous but just criti- 
 cism upon all plays whatsoever produced in 
 public theatres, and with a view to this, to 
 give all aid and countenance to honest critics; 
 (5) to agitate in favor of the introduction of 
 dramatic study and criticism into all institu- 
 tions of general instruction. 
 
 In order to establish such a society as that 
 whose chief aims we have just enumerated, it 
 is obvious that two main conditions would be 
 essential: (i) A body of highly cultured men, 
 keenly alive to the artistic and educational 
 possibilities of a true drama, as well as to the 
 
RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 155 
 
 crying defects of the drama at present exist- 
 ing; (2) a sum of money sufficient to enable 
 such a body of men, formed into a society, to 
 carry out the ends we have mentioned. As 
 to the former condition, our country can for- 
 tunately boast of many highly cultured and 
 earnest men, who are only waiting for some 
 enthusiastic leader to initiate such a movement 
 as I have attempted to sketch, and to unite 
 them into a society for the furtherance of the 
 same. As to the second condition, — namely, 
 that of funds, — in such an organization of 
 cultured men there could hardly fail to be 
 some financiers, and to their practical judg- 
 ment we must leave the question of ways and 
 means. 
 
 And with this my task is ended. I have 
 attempted to show, (i) the ideal and true rela- 
 tion of the drama to education ; (2) the present 
 condition of the drama in our own country, 
 and (3) to suggest ways and means whereby 
 the drama may be lifted out of its present 
 degraded condition and reinstated in its legiti- 
 mate position as a powerful agent in educa- 
 tion. Whether I have accomplished the task 
 appointed to me with satisfaction to my hearers, 
 
156 RELATION OF DRAMA TO EDUCATION 
 
 it is for them to say, but of one thing I am 
 sure, and let this be my excuse for having 
 attempted it : If I could but impart to one of 
 my readers one half the enthusiasm which I 
 feel for the cause of the drama in America, 
 one half of my conviction respecting its ele- 
 vating and educative possibilities, and one 
 half of my readiness to spend and be spent in 
 its behalf, I should feel that these humble 
 efforts of mine had not been in vain, and I 
 should look forward with the greatest con- 
 fidence to the approaching day when America 
 shall have a drama of her own, — a drama 
 worthy of the lofty, civilizing, and educating 
 moral position which she holds, and, let us 
 hope, will ever hold, among the nations. 
 
GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 " We may affirm without arrogance that we of 
 the present day are better informed with regard 
 to the highest artistic effects of the drama and 
 the use of technical methods than were Lessing, 
 Schiller, and Goethe.*' These are the words of 
 Gustav Freitag, a German writer standing in all 
 but the first rank of literary men and dramatists, 
 and in the very foremost rank of dramatic critics. 
 In writing a criticism upon the work of a man 
 of Goethe's eminence, some part of which, at 
 least, must be unfavorable, one is fain to take 
 refuge under the shield of so great a critic, and 
 thus avoid all possible charge of arrogance. 
 Not only as a shield, however, have I quoted 
 the above passage ; it is of great significance as 
 pointing out the two distinguishing character- 
 istics of the successful playwright : (i) A clears- 
 conception of highest artistic effects; (2) The 
 power to apply the best technical methods for 
 the production of these. 
 
IS8 GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 ! We must here make a careful distinction be- 
 tween a playwright and a playwriter. And in 
 
 - the present paper we wish especially to insist 
 upon this distinction. It is not our intention to 
 criticise Goethe as a writer of plays, or his plays 
 as mere literary productions, or what are called 
 closet dramas, but to consider him strictly as a 
 
 < playwright, and his plays as productions intended 
 for representation on the stage. The dramatic 
 value of a play is its effectiveness upon the stage. 
 Whatever other merits a play may have, psycho- 
 logical, philosophical, or ethical, if it is not effec- 
 tive upon the stage, it lacks the first essential of 
 a good drama. A psychological, philosophical, 
 or ethical discussion may be cast in the form of 
 dialogue, or even of a drama, — as, for example, 
 the Dialogues of Plato ; but these are not dramas 
 in the proper sense. In order to arrive at clear- 
 ness in this matter, we must first inquire what 
 kind of effectiveness we have a right to expect 
 from the drama, and, secondly, through what 
 technical methods this effectiveness may be best 
 attained. Of course we must not expect from 
 the drama every kind of effectiveness, — as, for 
 instance, the effect of a philosophical argument, 
 sermon, or oratorio; we must not look for the 
 
GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 1 59 
 
 effect produced by an intoxicating draught or 
 by Niagara. 
 
 First, then, let us consider what constitutes 
 dramatic effectiveness. The question might be 
 answered hy one wordy — viz., the term " drama," 
 which properly means action ; so that a drama 
 without action is a contradiction in terms. The 
 essential element, then, in dramatic effectiveness 
 is action. It must, however, be action of a pe- i 
 culiar kind, — in a word, it must be motivated | 
 action; and the motive must at once be rational ' 
 and apparent to the spectators. This Goethe 
 himself believed, and has admirably expressed 
 in words put into the mouth of Wilhelm Meister 
 with regard to Shakespeare's characters : 
 
 *^ These very mysterious and composite creatures 
 of nature act before us in his plays as if they were 
 clocks with cases and dial-plates of crystal ; they show 
 in their determination the lapse of the hours, and at 
 the same time we can recognize the wheels and 
 springs that drive them." 
 
 The drama, then, in its true sense, is an action, 
 a rounded and complete action, whose various ' 
 parts or moments are evolved and connected by 
 intelligible motives. 
 
 These motives may have two sources, — that 
 
l60 GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 is, they may be either In the characters or in the 
 exigencies of the action itself. For example, 
 the fortunate termination of '' Iphigenie " finds 
 its motive in the perfect sincerity of Iphigenle's 
 character. In " Egmont," also, as well as in 
 ** Gotz,'* the hero's fate is plainly due to defects 
 in his own character. On the other hand, the 
 task imposed upon Hamlet of putting his uncle 
 to death plainly arises from the exigency of cir- 
 cumstances, — the moral demands of his time, 
 — and can in no wise be laid to the charge of 
 Hamlet's character. It may here be remarked 
 that the ancient differs from the modern drama 
 in the source from which it mainly draws its 
 motives. The ancient dramatists looked for 
 their motives chiefly in the exigencies of cir- 
 cumstances, which to them were synonymous 
 with necessity, destiny, or fate, whence the 
 majority of ancient plays are fate-dramas. 
 /Modern dramatists, on the other hand, — and 
 ' pre-eminently Goethe, — seek their motives 
 chiefly in character, whence most good modern 
 plays are, to a very large extent, character- 
 dramas. This difference accounts, In some 
 measure, for the superior effectiveness of the 
 ancient drama, inasmuch as motives originating 
 
GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST l6l 
 
 in external circumstances are far more easy 
 to portray than those drawn from character. 
 Probably the highest type of drama is that in 
 which the motives are drawn equally from cir- 
 cumstances (not necessarily conceived as fate) 
 and from character. This balance of motives we ; 
 find in Shakespeare's best plays, — for example, * 
 '' Hamlet " and '* Romeo and Juliet." In a 
 word, we may say that the prime and funda- 
 mental condition of dramatic effect, as such, is \ 
 perfect motivation. A series of brilliant scenes, 
 however effective otherwise, is not dramatic. 
 In this the drama differs from history, that in \ 
 the former the events are connected by perfect 
 motivation ; in the latter, merely by time and 
 imperfect, often non-apparent, motivation. 
 
 Although motivation is the first essential of j 
 dramatic effect, it is not, by itself alone, sufhcient » 
 to insure that effect. Other and secondary con- 
 ditions are requisite. In the first place the mo- 
 tives must be of a particular kind, since all 
 motives are not dramatic motives. True dra- 
 matic motives are such as an audience feel to be / 
 human and rational, — such as men like them- ' 
 selves in similar circumstances would act upon. 
 Consequently, all motives that affect only eccen- 
 
l62 GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 trie or exceptionally good or wicked characters, 
 must be used sparingly, if at all. The same is 
 true of all motives of a miraculous, revolting, or 
 fantastic kind. What is regarded as miraculous, 
 revolting, or fantastic, is not the same in all ages 
 or among all peoples; for which reason every 
 dramatist must keep very steadily in view his 
 own time and public. For example, some things 
 that the Greeks forbade to be represented on 
 the stage as revolting, — such as assassination, 
 murder, and suicide, — we permit and applaud. 
 The stabbing of Csesar, the suicide of Brutus, 
 the death of Romeo and Juliet, of Gretchen, etc., 
 are examples of this. 
 
 In the second place, dramatic motives, in 
 order to be effective, must produce certain 
 results. 
 
 (i) They must produce passion and action, 
 and not merely dialogue, however philosophi- 
 cal, beautiful, or moral it may be. 
 
 (2) The motivated action must be so ar- 
 ranged and rounded as to arouse a steadily in- 
 creasing sympathy, expectation, and anxiety 
 — or, as Aristotle puts it, pity and fear — on 
 the part of the audience, and then to satisfy 
 these emotions. 
 
GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 163 
 
 (3) The ultimate result of the whole action 
 must be to solemnize the mind by revealing to 
 it the workings of the human heart and the 
 moral order of the universe, and to send an au- 
 dience forth refreshed, strengthened, and inspired 
 for the duties of life ; in a word, it must result 
 in what Aristotle calls purification. 
 
 Having thus stated, in general terms, the true 
 artistic effect of the drama, we come next to 
 consider by what technical methods these re- 
 sults are to be obtained. Inasmuch as the first 
 condition of artistic effectiveness in the drama is 
 complete and thorough motivation, our first in- 
 quiry must relate to the mode in which this may 
 be reached. It is evident that this will in large 
 measure depend upon the choice of subject, the 
 fact being that it is much easier to find motives 
 for certain lines of action than for others. In- 
 deed, however this choice may be influenced by 
 fashion or by the intellectual and aesthetic idio- 
 syncrasies of the author, the subject must always 
 be one capable of being transformed into a dra- 
 matic idea, — that unital and initial germ from 
 which the whole drama is developed. There is 
 hardly any point in which the genius of an artist 
 is more apparent than in this ability to see 
 
1 64 GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 what subjects are capable of being permeated 
 with the living, causative, formative, dramatic 
 idea. 
 
 And this is especially true of the dramatist. 
 The question of what is really dramatic has been 
 much agitated ; but one may affirm that dramatic, 
 and more especially tragic subjects, are those 
 containing the elements of some great moral 
 collision, taking place in a sphere of life in which 
 the characters must be supposed capable of ex- 
 pressing this collision in speech and action. 
 This collision itself must be of a kind to give 
 ample opportunity for the display of passion and 
 action. This regulation effectively excludes all 
 subjects containing collisions which are fought 
 out within the breast of the individual, or in 
 philosophical and moral discussion with others. 
 Moral collisions that lead to no outward action, 
 but only to monologues or conversations, are 
 essentially undramatic. It would follow, of 
 course, that a subject could not be chosen from 
 among a people of a low degree of culture, or a 
 people whose lives are not dramatic. Granting 
 now that the subject is properly chosen, the 
 conditions specified being fulfilled, the question 
 arises how the subject is to be developed so as 
 
GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 1 65 
 
 to produce these dramatic effects we have men- 
 tioned above, — namely, (i) abundant display 
 of action and passion in the character; (2) the 
 excitement of a steadily increasing sympathy on 
 the part of the audience, and the satisfaction of 
 the same ; (3) the moral inspiration and physi- 
 cal refreshment that come from the clear pre- 
 sentation and solution of moral problems. To 
 exhaust this question is not easy, and, in a 
 brief paper like this, only the more prominent 
 means for producing effectiveness can even be 
 mentioned. 
 
 In the first place, then, care must be taken 
 to concentrate interest; and this can be done 
 only by preserving the unity of action, vi^hich 
 action must not be understood to mean a single 
 event, but a connected series of events, — or, 
 as Aristotle says, a praxis. In every drama 
 the action must be strictly one, — undivided. It 
 must then revolve about a single character, or a 
 single group of characters, involved in the con- 
 ception of the subject. What is true of the 
 drama is true of every other art. A picture, 
 for example, must have a single point of interest, 
 about which everything else is grouped. It 
 follows from this, that those accessory characters 
 
-7^ 
 
 4 
 
 1 66 GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 and groups which are necessary to the develop- 
 ment of the plot, and as foils to the principal 
 characters, must be subordinated, and not re- 
 ceive any prominence beyond what they derive 
 from their relation to these characters. Any 
 attempt to give them prominence on their own 
 account would only distract attention, scatter 
 interest, dilute sympathy, cause confusion, and 
 diminish effectiveness. 
 
 We must here note that the unity of the 
 actions, so essential to the effectiveness of a 
 drama, does not depend solely upon the unity or 
 oneness of the characters, or central group. 
 Actions belonging even to a single character do 
 not necessarily form a dramatic unity. A drama 
 is never a biography, nor a series of adventures 
 or episodes. In other words, a mere historic or 
 personal connection between events is utterly 
 different from that relation which produces 
 dramatic unity. A dramatic action, therefore, 
 is one which not only has its centre in a single 
 character, but must be a single action in the 
 sense that all its parts are connected as cause 
 and effect, and every event must tend to ad- 
 vance or relieve the progress of the action. And 
 not only so, but the action must have a natural 
 
GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 167 
 
 beginning in a deed or juncture forming the col- 
 lision of the piece, and an ending in which the 
 problem involved in the collision is naturally- 
 solved. Naturally solved, I repeat, because 
 there are unnatural solutions, and these are 
 essentially undramatic. A natural solution is 
 one whose elements are found in the action and 
 characters of the piece itself An unnatural 
 solution is one violently introduced from with- 
 out, in the shape of miracle, chance, or some 
 catastrophe of nature. Each of these is a Deus 
 ex machina, or, as the Italians say, a salto rnor- 
 tale, which is forever interdicted in art as nulli- 
 fying its true purpose. Other unities have, at 
 certain times, been insisted upon, especially 
 those of time and place ; but these are unessen- 
 tial, and have almost universally been discarded. 
 In the second place, it is not only necessary 
 to concentrate and sustain interest, but to arouse 
 it properly; and this can be done only by put- 
 ting the audience in possession of facts suffi- 
 cient to enable them to understand the nature of 
 the collision involved, and the relation of the 
 different characters to it. This Aristotle happily 
 calls the SeVtv, or tying of the knot. This must 
 be done in the opening scenes of a play, which 
 
1 68 GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 in a certain sense must always be Introductory. 
 Any attempt to put the audience in possession 
 of the necessary facts by means of a prologue 
 — though favored and practised by some dra- 
 matists, such as Euripides, Seneca, and Alfieri 
 — is inartistic, and bespeaks incapacity on the 
 part of the dramatist. A prologue hardly be- 
 comes more artistic even when it takes the form 
 of a mere explanatory dialogue, in no way ad- 
 vancing the action of the play. The opening 
 of a piece which puts the audience in possession 
 of the necessary facts will, by a good artist, be 
 so arranged as to be brief, and a part of the 
 action of the play; for only in this way can it 
 arouse the highest interest. 
 
 In the third place, the interest, once aroused, 
 must be steadily sustained, — which means, not 
 that it must be kept uniformly at the same 
 degree of intensity, but that it must gradually 
 increase until it reaches its climax and satisfac- 
 tion in the solution of the piece. In a word, we 
 may say that the interest must be compound 
 interest. At the same time, care must be taken 
 to retard the interest until the climax can be 
 fairly reached. This is perhaps the most diffi- 
 cult task imposed upon the playwright, inas- 
 
GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 1 69 
 
 much as it involves a profound knowledge of 
 psychology and an immense power of grading 
 and directing all the parts of his play to a single 
 end. With this in view he must carefully avoid 
 introducing anything, however tempting, not 
 bearing directly upon the action of the play, 
 and also the placing of less interesting scenes 
 after more interesting ones ; or in any way intro- 
 ducing mere explanatory matter without action. 
 For this reason, long messages interrupting the 
 action of the play, and similar things, should 
 be avoided. A play in which scenes can be 
 omitted or transposed, without affecting the 
 interest of the piece, is by that fact alone a poor 
 play, and argues an inferior playwright. Per- 
 haps the w^orst of all possible plays is one con- 
 sisting of a series of scenes in which the action 
 does not advance, or the characters are not 
 brought into any different relation to each other 
 at the end from that which they occupied at the 
 beginning. Such plays are the ''Hecuba" of 
 Euripides, and the '' Brunhilde," written some 
 years ago for the actress Janauschek. 
 
 In the fourth place, the interest, having been 
 
 f aroused, and sustained throughout the play, 
 
 must in the end secure complete satisfaction. 
 
I/O GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 Such satisfaction we are wont to call poetic jus- 
 tice. By this we mean that every one of the 
 principal characters must at the conclusion of 
 the piece meet with the just reward of his deeds, 
 thus impressing that most profound of all moral 
 truths, often so dimly visible in our actual lives, 
 — namely, that there is an inexorable moral law 
 ruling in the world, and giving to each man 
 ^an exact recompense. Only in this way can 
 a play produce that exhilaration and moral 
 inspiration which are the ultimate tests of the 
 value of a drama. But although a play, like 
 every true work of art, ought to produce a 
 moral effect, the artist's intention to produce 
 this effect should never be apparent. In other 
 words, a drama ought not, either in whole or in 
 part, to be a sermon or moral lecture. 
 
 The moral effect, on the contrary, ought to be 
 apparent in the very construction and action of 
 the play, and to be deduced therefrom by a 
 spontaneous action under the influence of emo- 
 tion on the part of the audience. We ought no 
 more to look for a sermon in a play, than we do 
 in the Venus of Melos or the Hermes of Praxi- 
 teles. True works of art, like lofty characters, 
 exercise their influence, not through what they 
 
GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST I/I 
 
 do or say, but through what they are. As 
 Schiller puts it, " There is nobihty even in the 
 moral world. Common natures pay with what 
 they do^ noble natures with what they are!' 
 
 Such, then, are some of the principal and 
 essential conditions of dramatic effectiveness : 
 (i) choice of subject, noble and capable of be- 
 ing developed and motivated into scenes of 
 action and passion, — in other words, into a 
 dramatic unity; (2) absolute unity and proba- 
 bility of action ; (3) interest artistically enlisted, 
 sustained, and satisfied at last by poetic justice. 
 In order to deal with Goethe as upright judges, 
 and not arbitrarily, as tyrants, we have now only 
 to apply the principles laid down, in all their 
 rigor, to his dramatic productions, — or, at least, 
 to such of them as may be supposed in any way 
 to determine his position as a playwright. 
 
 In doing so we shall deal mainly with those 
 plays which may be regarded as marking stages 
 in his dramatic development, — " Gotz von 
 Berlichingen," *' Egmont," " Torquato Tasso," 
 ** Iphigenie," and " Faust." Although Goethe 
 had previously written some smaller pieces for 
 special occasions, his career as a serious play- 
 wright begins with *^ Gotz von Berlichingen." 
 
1/2 GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 This play, of which the first draught was written 
 in six weeks, in the year 1 77 1, was conceived 
 under the influence of a powerful enthusiasm, 
 due to the reading of Shakespeare. With re- 
 spect to the effect of this first acquaintance with 
 the work of the English dramatist, Goethe him- 
 self says, speaking through the lips of Wilhelm 
 Meister : — 
 
 " I cannot recollect that any book, any man, any 
 incident of my life, has produced such effects on me. 
 . . . They seem as if they were performances of some 
 celestial genius, descending among men to make them, 
 by the mildest instructions, acquainted with them- 
 selves. They are no fictions ! You would think, while 
 reading them, you stood before the unclosed awful 
 books of Fate, while the whirlwind of most impas- 
 sioned life was howling through the leaves, and tossing 
 them fiercely to and fro. The strength and tenderness, 
 the power and peacefulness of this man, have so as- 
 tonished and transported me that I long vehemently 
 for the time when I shall have it in my power to read 
 further.'* 
 
 It was in this frame of mind that Goethe wrote 
 "Gotz," drawing his theme from the autobi- 
 ography of the old national hero of the Iron 
 Hand, — a theme capable of being treated in 
 the manner of Shakespeare. He wrote under 
 
GOETHE AS 
 
 the influence of an imitative enthusiasm, and not 
 in accordance with any theory of dramatic art. 
 Indeed, at that time he had not arrived at any 
 such theory. This fact accounts in great meas- 
 ure for the merits and the defects of the work. 
 The defects are very great ; but it has real 
 merits, and, indeed, from a purely dramatic 
 point of view, this piece, though the earliest, is 
 unquestionably the most popular and effective 
 of Goethe's plays. 
 
 Nor is this fact difficult to explain. Shake- 
 speare's influence upon Goethe had been of a 
 most healthy and stimulating kind. It had 
 roused the spontaneity of his genius, which was 
 naturally great, and supplied him with admirable 
 models, without subjecting him to any aesthetic 
 rules or theories. And this last negative advan- 
 tage was perhaps as valuable as the other two 
 positive ones; for so strong in all Germans is 
 the tendency to work according to rules ad- 
 dressed to the understanding, and so fatal is 
 this tendency to all German artists, even those 
 of high genius, that Goethe could hardly have 
 failed to be injured in his work by any such 
 restrictions. 
 
 This, indeed, we shall see, actually took place, 
 
174 GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 with much damage to Goethe's dramatic work, 
 after he became interested in dramatic theory. 
 Not only will theory never make an artist, but 
 it may even damage one, especially if he be a 
 . German. 
 
 ** Gotz von Berlichingen," in spite of its popu- 
 larity and its extraordinary value in the history 
 of German literature, will not stand the test of 
 rigorous dramatic criticism. The subject, in- 
 deed, is well chosen, being one in which the 
 unity of action might easily have been pre- 
 served, strict motivation introduced, and abun- 
 dant opportunities found for scenes of action 
 and passion. 
 
 But, unfortunately, Goethe was unable to per- 
 meate this subject with a dramatic idea, and 
 hence the work remains a series of interesting 
 but disconnected scenes, which do not form in 
 any sense a dramatic unity. The interest is 
 scattered, and broken into fragments, with neither 
 proper gradation, climax, nor satisfactory solu- 
 tion. Much crude historical matter, connected, 
 as historical matter usually is, by mere chrono- j 
 logical succession, instead of dramatic motiva- 
 tion, remains to burden the play. The result is, 
 that the catastrophe does not follow necessarily 
 
GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 1 75 
 
 from the conditions of the piece, and leaves the 
 demands of poetic justice unsatisfied. Gotz, it 
 is true, is a tragic character, and this for two 
 reasons. The former of these is his thoughtless, 
 incautious, and fond confidence in Weislingen, a 
 man who had abundantly proved himself fit for 
 a place in the lowest circle of Dante's Inferno ; 
 the latter is his failure to see that his efforts 
 are directed against the natural advance of 
 civilization, and in favor of an obsolete feu- 
 dalism. At the same time, these defects are not 
 sufficient to reconcile us to the hero's dying as 
 a coward might, with a feeling that his whole 
 heroic life had been worse than vain. This in- 
 artistic ending is the more to be regretted, inas- 
 much as it might easily have been avoided. 
 The fault is due in part to Goethe's following 
 too closely the facts of history, in defiance of 
 the aesthetic law, which demands poetic justice, 
 — that is, a recognition of a man's virtues as well 
 as of his defects ; but it was due perhaps even 
 more to the circumstance that, when '' Gotz " was 
 written, the author was in revolt against the 
 German pohtical system, just as Schiller was in 
 revolt against the social system when he wrote 
 "The Robbers," and wished to excite popular 
 
176 GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 indignation against that system by making Gotz 
 appear as a martyr to it. This purpose to ex- 
 cite indignation must be set down as inartistic, 
 as all tendentious purpose in art is. 
 
 In spite of all these great defects, the play has 
 a certain amount of confused effectiveness, both 
 in the action and in the characters. Notwith- 
 standing Gotz^s lamentable ending, he and his 
 little group of associates remain inspiring char- 
 acters; and this is so true, that the play has 
 always, perhaps more than any other of Goethe's 
 works, been a favorite upon the stage. This is 
 certainly only in a small degree due to its artistic 
 merits, since the interest which it excites is not, 
 strictly speaking, a dramatic interest; neverthe- 
 less, the general tone of the play is so healthy, 
 and its action so full of varied life, that the ulti- 
 mate effect is in a large degree inspiring and 
 exhilarating. As early as 1799, the drama of 
 *' Gotz von Berlichingen " was thought worthy 
 of a translation into English by so great an 
 artist as Sir Walter Scott. It ought, perhaps, 
 to be remarked that Goethe wrote three, if not 
 four, editions of '* Gotz," and that only the third 
 was really intended for the stage. 
 
 " Gotz von Berlichingen " may claim two great 
 
GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 1 77 
 
 merits. It was the first truly national German 
 play, and it was also the play in which was first 
 fully realized what Lessing and others had so 
 earnestly striven for without completely achiev- 
 ing, — a breach with traditional rules, and the 
 complete liberation of the German stage from 
 the artificial and conventional drama of France, 
 which had so baneful an influence on the litera- 
 ture and morals of Germany. The work has 
 thus the merit of marking a most important 
 epoch in German literature. 
 
 There must have been considerable outcry 
 on the part of the critics against this departure 
 from dramatic rules and precepts, and this 
 must have come, in part at least, from critics 
 whom Goethe felt bound to respect; for we 
 find him writing to his friend Kestner: "I am 
 now engaged upon a drama for the boards, in 
 order that the fellows may see that, if I please, 
 I can observe rules and portray morality and 
 sentimentality/' To what drama Goethe here 
 refers, we cannot say with certainty. It may 
 have been "Faust," the idea of which was 
 fermenting in his mind at this time. Be this 
 as it may, the first draught of "Faust" which, 
 in the main, was written shortly after "Gotz," 
 12 
 
1/8 GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 though not published till many years later 
 (1790), corresponds accurately with Goethe's 
 description, inasmuch as it follows dramatic 
 rules perhaps more than his other dramas, 
 and deals with morality and sentimentality. 
 And although "Faust," as a completed work, 
 did not appear till sixty years later, we may 
 here insert what has to be said concerning its 
 dramatic properties. Paradoxical as it may 
 seem, " Faust " is a drama to which the stand- 
 ard of dramatic criticism should not be applied, 
 if we do not wish to make it appear a failure, 
 as, indeed, Vischer and other eminent critics 
 have shown it to be. Indeed, as a whole, it 
 does not belong to the class of acting plays, 
 but to that of literary and philosophical dramas. 
 The dramatic idea in itself, though well and 
 profoundly chosen, is far too vast for a single 
 drama, and almost even for a trilogy. More- 
 over, many of the scenes are almost incapable 
 of being presented on the stage, such as the 
 two Walpurgisnachte and the Prologues. It 
 is true that the whole is now annually played 
 at Weimar, but under circumstances alto- 
 gether exceptional, and such as are hardly 
 possible on any ordinary stage. Moreover, 
 
GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 1 79 
 
 the dramatic unity is frequently violated, the 
 scenes being often bound together, not by 
 dramatic motivation, but by the personal iden- 
 tity of Faust. In fact, it is largely a series of 
 episodes in the life of an individual, Faust; and, 
 according to Aristotle, the episodic drama is 
 the worst of all. The only part that lies within 
 the sphere of strictly dramatic criticism is the 
 original fragment, published in 1790, founded 
 on popular legend, and embodying Faust's rela- 
 tion to Gretchen. This part will stand the 
 severest dramatic criticism. The subject is well 
 chosen, and capable of being thoroughly per- 
 meated by the dramatic idea. It also affords 
 excellent motives for scenes of action and pas- 
 sion. It rises naturally to a climax, and de- 
 scends as naturally to the catastrophe, which 
 satisfies all the claims of poetic justice. The 
 interest is sustained throughout, and the final 
 effect is in the highest degree solemnizing and 
 purifying. It cannot be otherwise than a matter 
 of regret that Goethe did not complete his 
 " Faust " in accordance with his original con- 
 ception ; for the additions which, after his meta- 
 physical and critical studies, he made even to 
 the first part, not to speak of the second, essen- 
 
l80 GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 tially injured the unity of the action^ and con- 
 siderably impaired its effectiveness for the 
 stage. 
 
 The other three plays of Goethe which we 
 purpose to criticise as typical productions are 
 *^ Egmont," '' Iphigenie," and '' Tasso." These 
 dramas were written nearly at the same time, — 
 between 1777 and 1789, when Goethe was in 
 the full possession of his powers. They may 
 therefore be considered his highest dramatic 
 efforts. First came " Egmont," 1777-1785. 
 The subject is an event in the rebelHon of the 
 Netherlands against Spanish domination, and 
 therefore may be considered a national subject. 
 Indeed, it is said that the play was intended as 
 a companion to '*Gotz." Here, for the first 
 time, we see the baneful effects of Goethe's 
 attempt to apply dramatic rules in a compre- 
 hensive way. And the result as a whole is a 
 mechanical production, devoid of dramatic 
 unity. 
 
 This criticism may appear unjust, especially 
 as the play has held the stage for so many years, 
 and possesses a certain effectiveness. But, after 
 all, this effectiveness is not truly dramatic, being/ 
 due in great part to a few graceful love-scenes \ 
 
GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST l8l 
 
 scattered through it, and in some degree also to 
 a certain historic and political interest, which 
 has no artistic bearing. The chief effectiveness 
 is derived, not from the dramatic idea, which is 
 political, but from a series of domestic scenes 
 utterly foreign to this idea. For the fundamen- 
 tal idea, or collision, is this : A nobleman finds 
 himself placed between duty to his conquered 
 and rebelling countrymen and fealty to their 
 conqueror, under whom he has accepted service. 
 Being of a generous, brave, tender, reckless, and 
 unreflective character, fond of pleasure and 
 popularity, he countenances his countrymen in 
 their seditious practices, thereby giving offence 
 to the conquerors, from whom, nevertheless, he 
 has not sufficient patriotism or foresight, as 
 Orange had, to disconnect himself 
 
 This tragic weakness brings about his destruc- 
 tion. To such a political idea, the domestic 
 scenes between Egmont and Clarchen are 
 plainly alien ; and, as a matter of fact, they have 
 no bearing upon the action of the play, and in 
 no way tend to relieve or develop it. Indeed, 
 the only case when she in any way enters into 
 the main action of the drama is after the catas- 
 trophe is certain, when her ghost appears as a 
 
1 82 GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 Deus ex machina in the garb of Freedom, from 
 a supernatural world, whose introduction is not 
 justified by the plan of the play. It is a rule of 
 dramatic art, that the miraculous and super- 
 natural should not be introduced into a play 
 unless they have been suggested as credible 
 agents early in the plot, as they are in the case 
 of the witches in '* Macbeth," the ghost in 
 *' Hamlet," and others. Indeed, the introduc- 
 tion of Clarchen in the winding-up of *' Egmont '* 
 is inartistic, being unmotivated, and, as Schiller 
 said, operatic. 
 
 Besides the weakness of the termination, the 
 play has other glaring defects. Many of the 
 scenes are too prolix, and so loosely connected 
 that they not only could be, but actually are, 
 transposed when the play is represented, which 
 shows that the interest is not properly graded. 
 A number of the scenes consist of mere padding 
 of talk; indeed, Goethe might, without impro- 
 priety, have called those scenes in which the 
 citizens so fortuitously meet to gossip, the choric 
 part, and assigned to his play a chorus of 
 Netherlanders. There is no binding and loos- 
 ing in the play, and of course no peripeteia. 
 On the whole, then, in spite of its popularity, 
 
GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 1 83 
 
 from the standard of just dramatic criticism the 
 play must be regarded as a failure. 
 
 In passing from " Egmont " to *^ Iphigenie," 
 we suddenly enter a new world. '' Iphigenie " 
 is in almost every respect a complete contrast 
 to the play we have just considered. Here 
 Goethe was dealing with a subject which had 
 already been dramatized by two great play- 
 wrights, Euripides and Racine. 
 
 The main incidents of the play, therefore, were 
 already given in the title, ** Iphigenie in Tauris," 
 and a new motivation alone remained to be sup- 
 plied. This, it must be admitted, Goethe has 
 accomplished with admirable taste and success. 
 In fact, the motivation is so entirely his own, 
 that he has given us one of the best of character- 
 dramas instead of a fate-drama. The dramatic 
 unity is preserved throughout; the tying and 
 untying of the knot, although classically simple, 
 are managed in a masterly way. Strangely 
 enough, although the characters are in large 
 measure foils to each other, they are all noble 
 and dignified. The character of Iphigenie, com- 
 bining princess and priestess, is perhaps the 
 purest and stateliest that Goethe or any drama- 
 tist ever conceived. One lingers before it with 
 
1 84 GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 ever-increasing delight, as he does before the 
 Venus ot Melos, or the Immaculate Conception 
 of Murillo. One especial feature of the *' Iphi- 
 genie " is the limpid flow of its stately language, 
 which has, perhaps, never been excelled. To 
 use the words of Keats, it reads like *' the large 
 utterance of the early gods." 
 
 Though entirely modern and un-Greek in tone 
 and sentiment, in form it is as perfect and self- 
 contained as the Parthenon of Iktinos; and, like 
 the Parthenon, its effect is calculated for an 
 audience of highly developed taste. The play 
 contains little external action or violent expres- 
 sion of passion to attract a popular audience. 
 Its strength lies mainly in its psychological 
 truthfulness, which in the hands of highly culti- 
 vated actors can be made very impressive. Al- 
 though exception might be taken to a few 
 features of the play, such as the Euripidean 
 prologue, and the somewhat too epigrammatic 
 and philosophical character of the dialogue, 
 '* Iphigenie " must be regarded as the most 
 finished of Goethe's dramatic efforts ; and this 
 is clearly shown by its ultimate effect, which 
 leaves the mind in the attitude of solemnity, 
 purity, and lofty courage. 
 
GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 1 85 
 
 From ** Iphigenie " we pass to the last of 
 Goethe's typical plays, — '' Torquato Tasso," fin- 
 ished in 1789. In the choice and development 
 of this subject, Goethe had to depend upon his 
 own resources; and when we compare the play 
 with '' Iphigenie," we see at once how much he 
 owed in the latter to his Greek predecessor, es- 
 pecially in the matter of incident. *' Tasso " is 
 almost purely a character-drama, and is well 
 motivated from beginning to end. Neverthe- 
 less, the result in the two cases is very different. 
 What in ** Iphigenie " was pure, living classical 
 stateliness, has here become rigidity, coldness, 
 formality. Instead of a Parthenon of lucent 
 Pentelic marble, we now enter the ice-palace 
 of a Russian autocrat. The cardinal defects of 
 this play are largely due to a false choice of 
 subject, which does not lend itself to dramatic 
 development. An almost sure test of a good 
 play is that its dramatic idea, or collision, can 
 be fully stated in a few words. " Macbeth," 
 '' Hamlet," '' Iphigenie," may be cited as ex- 
 amples of this. In '' Tasso," on the contrary, it is 
 extremely difficult to state, even in a prolix way, 
 the dramatic idea. The truth is, Goethe took 
 an incident from the life of an historic character. 
 
1 86 GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 and was unable to lift it out of its historic word- 
 ing into the refinement of a living dramatic idea. 
 A plebeian poet of passionate temperament finds 
 patronage and high favor at the court of a 
 powerful prince. In the moment of his highest 
 triumph he is brought face to face with another 
 favorite of the court, — a nobleman of practical 
 and diplomatic turn of mind. In the conflict 
 which follows between the two natures, the one- 
 sidedness of each is brought out. A dispute 
 arises, which has to be settled by the prince, 
 according to a purely conventional and unjust 
 standard, bringing disgrace upon the poet, who 
 was really blameless, and acquitting the culpable 
 nobleman. Partly under the influence of the 
 prince, the nobleman is induced to admit his 
 wrong, and sue for reconciliation, which he ulti- 
 mately effects, and draws from the poet an en- 
 thusiastic acknowledgment of his superiority. 
 This story, though long, does not really state 
 the entire plot of the play, for it does not in- 
 clude the very important roles played by the two 
 heroines ; but this fact only bears out the state- 
 ment that the idea is undramatic. And, indeed, 
 these roles are almost unrelated to the main 
 collision, — so much so that at the end the rela- 
 
GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 1 8/ 
 
 tion between Tasso and the princess is left 
 entirely unsolved. The same inferior and frag- 
 mentary art to which we called attention in ** Eg- 
 mont" reappears here. The effectiveness of 
 the play when represented is due in large meas- 
 ure to a few delicately constructed and tender 
 love scenes, which have no real relation to the 
 dramatic idea. In the arts of the playwright 
 and the novelist, love scenes are too frequently 
 the refuge of the destitute. 
 
 They are the refuge of the destitute, because 
 they are sure to interest a large public, whatever 
 the character of the work may be in which they 
 appear. In introducing such scenes, Goethe 
 shows that he was a true German himself, and 
 knew the character of his countrymen. In a 
 similar manner, a French painter who cannot 
 attract attention by legitimate means will fre- 
 quently resort to the introduction of nude figures, 
 sure that under any circumstances these will ap- 
 peal to something in his countrymen, if not to 
 their artistic sense. To sum up the dramatic 
 characteristics of the play, we must say that, 
 although conforming in many ways to the rules 
 of art, as a drama it is a distinct failure, and was 
 so considered even by Goethe's contemporaries. 
 
1 88 GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 At the present day the play has almost disap* 
 peared from the stage. 
 
 This ends our consideration of the acknowl- 
 edged typical dramas of Goethe. If time per- 
 mitted, other minor dramas might have been 
 considered with interest, but the general result 
 would not thereby be materially affected. What, 
 then, we may ask, is that result? Is it such as 
 to justify us in affirming that Goethe was a great 
 playwright? Without detracting from Goethe's 
 greatness in other directions, and indeed heartily 
 acknowledging it, we must, in accordance with 
 the verdict of rational criticism, answer the ques- 
 tion in the negative. And in order to justify 
 this answer, we have only to generalize what we 
 have already stated in particular. Goethe's 
 short-comings as a playwright may be said to 
 be four in number: — 
 
 1. A fundamental lack of the dramatic sense, 
 which in great measure prevented him from 
 recognizing what subjects were capable of being 
 transformed into dramatic ideas, and so becom- 
 ing dramatically effective. 
 
 2. A fundamental lack of constructive power, 
 which prevented him from producing works 
 distinguished by organic unity; thus leaving 
 
GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST i8Q 
 
 his dramas either a series of almost discon- 
 nected scenes, like ** Gotz " and ** Egmont," with 
 an operatic termination like the latter, or unitv^d 
 only by an abstract notion, not arising out of the 
 dramatic idea, but external to it, as in *' Tasso " 
 and in " Faust." 
 
 3. The lack of passionate expression and 
 vigorous action, leading him to dwell upon de- 
 scriptions of characters and scenes rather than 
 upon living actions and stirring events. 
 
 4. His inability to deal with the legitimate 
 rules of dramatic art, — at one time leading him 
 to set them aside altogether, at another time 
 allowing him to be completely overmastered by 
 them. 
 
 Of these cardinal defects some may be attri- 
 buted to Goethe's nationality, while one, at least, 1 
 — namely, the lack of constructive power, — must I 
 be ascribed to Goethe himself. As compared 
 with the other leading nations of Europe, the Ger- 
 mans may be said to be an undramatic people, 
 deficient in passionate expression, overflowing 
 energy, and, above all, in the keen dramatic 
 sense of the ludicrous and incongruous, which / 
 is the salt of active life, and which is incom- 
 patible with their phlegmatic temperament and 
 
igo GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 extreme sentimentality. That these national 
 drawbacks were not necessarily fatal to a great 
 dramatic genius, when relieved by a strong con- 
 structive ability, was shown in the case of 
 ^ Schiller, and, in a lower degree, by Lessing and 
 Iffland, all of whom, though inferior to Goethe 
 in other respects, are superior to him as play- 
 wrights. Goethe's failure as a playwright, there- 
 fore, was due in large measure to his lack of 
 constructive power, — that is, of the ability to 
 hold many things together, and reduce them to 
 a living organism permeated by a dramatic con- 
 cept. This defect appears not only in Goethe's 
 dramas, but also in his other works, — notably 
 in " Meister," — and may account for his failure 
 in the plastic and graphic arts. As a poet, 
 Goethe was essentially epic and lyric, but not dra- 
 matic. Germany owes him her best modern epic, 
 — namely, " Hermann und Dorothea," — and a 
 large number of the best lyrics in the language. 
 And, in confirmation of this, it is a curious fact 
 that Goethe's most perfect drama, *' Iphigenie," 
 is, like the Greek plays which he imitated, a 
 combination of epic and lyric elements. 
 
 If we were to look into the facts and habits of 
 Goethe's life for an explanation of his failure as 
 
GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST IQI 
 
 a playwright, we might perhaps find it in three 
 things: (i) his tendency to allow along interval 
 to elapse between his first conception of a piece 
 and its execution and completion, his views re- 
 specting life and art changing materially in the 
 meanwhile; (2) his exceptional good fortune, 
 which left him untouched by many forms of 
 human experience; (3) his ever-increasing with- 
 drawal from the world of human strife and suffer- 
 ing, which is pre-eminently the dramatic world. 
 The first of these facts accounts for much that 
 is fragmentary and inorganic in ** Faust," while 
 the second furnishes a sufficient reason for 
 Goethe's inferiority as a playwright to the poor, 
 much-tried Schiller, who during the most of his 
 brief life was deep in the world's hardships and 
 sufferings. It remains forever true that " we 
 learn in suffering what we teach in song.'* 
 
 But if, in a technical sense, we cannot speak 
 highly of Goethe as a playwright, we must not 
 fail to acknowledge his other great merits in 
 connection with the drama, his abundant efforts 
 to raise it from coarseness, conventionality, and 
 thraldom to French ideas, and to make it an in- 
 tegral part of the national literature of Germany. 
 By his long-continued personal efforts in con- 
 
192 GOETHE AS A DRAMATIST 
 
 nection with the stage at Weimar he raised the 
 standard of acting in Germany, and by his ad- 
 mirable and sympathetic criticisms, he elevated 
 the standard of dramatic taste ; and last, but not 
 least, by introducing Shakespeare to the notice 
 of his countrymen, he gave a lasting impulse for 
 good to German literary effort and life. 
 
 Beside all these great merits, his failure as a 
 playwright — insist upon it as we may, and as 
 we have a right to do — seems but a spot on the 
 face of the sun, which we mention oftener in 
 order to excuse something in ourselves than 
 to detract from the life-giving fulness of that 
 luminary. 
 
 THE END. 
 
dyasr 
 
 LIBRARY