LITMIR.BIZ

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largely a question of classic titles which appealed to the mid-nineteenth-century authors whose judgment of art the twentieth century finds particularly amusing. Henry James has somewhere held up to ridicule the early Beacon Hill Boston for its impassioned devotion to the “attenuated outlines” of Flaxman’s art. But the work of Story will survive all transient variations of opinion, even of the present realistic age; for is not true realism, after all, to be found in the eternal ideals of truth, grace, dignity, refinement, significance, and beauty? These qualities have a message to convey; and no one can study with sympathetic appreciation any sculpture of William Wetmore Story without feeling that the work has something to say; that it is not a mere reproduction of some form, but is, rather, an idea impersonated, and therefore it has life, it has significance. The criticism of the immediate hour is not necessarily infallible because it is contemporary. What does William Watson say?

      “A deft musician does the breeze become

       Whenever an Æolian harp it finds;

       Hornpipe and hurdy-gurdy both are dumb

       Unto the most musicianly of winds.”

      It is an irretrievable loss if, in the passion for the vita nuova, a generation, or a century, shall substitute for the Æolian harp the mere hornpipe and hurdy-gurdy of the hour. In another of his keenly critical quatrains William Watson embodies this signal truth:—

      “His rhymes the poet flings at all men’s feet,

       And whoso will may trample on his rhymes.

       Should Time let die a song that’s pure and sweet,

       The singer’s loss were more than matched by Time’s.”

      Art is progressive, and the present is always the “heir of all the ages” preceding; but it cannot be affirmed that it invariably makes the best use of its rich inheritance.

      There are latter-day sculptors who excel in certain excellences that Story lacked; still, it would not be his loss, but our own, if we fail in a due recognition of that in his art which may appeal to the imagination; for, whatever the enthusiasms of other cults may be, there are qualities of beauty, strength, and profound significance in the art of Story that must insure their permanent recognition. Still, it remains true that Mr. Story owes his fame in an incalculable degree to the friendly pens of Hawthorne and others of his immediate circle—Lowell, Motley, Charles Eliot Norton, Thackeray, Browning—friends who, according to the latest standards of art criticism, were not unqualified nor absolute judges of art, but who were in sympathy with ideal expression and recognized this as embodied in the statues of Story.

      Browning wrote to the London Times an article on Mr. Story’s work, in which he conjured up most of the superlative phrases of commendation that the limits of the English language allow to praise his work, none of whose marshalled force was too poor to do him reverence. The versatile gifts of Story’s personality drew around him friends whose influence was potent and, indeed, authoritative in their time.

      Still, any analysis of these conditions brings the searcher back to the primary truth that without the gifts and grace to attract about him an eminent circle of choice spirits he could not have enjoyed this potent aid and inspiration; and thus, that

      “Man is his own star,”

      is an assertion that life, as well as poetry, justifies. In the full blaze of this fundamental truth, it is, not unfrequently, the mysterious spiritual tragedy of life that many an one as fine of fibre and with lofty ideals

      “Leads a frustrate life and blind,

       For the lack of favoring gales

       Blowing blithe on other sails.”

      Mr. Story was himself of too fine an order not to divine this truth. With what unrivalled power and pathos has he expressed it in his poem—one far too little known—the “Io Victis”:—

      “I sing the song of the Conquered, who fell in the Battle of Life—

       The hymn of the wounded, the beaten, who died overwhelmed in the strife;

       Not the jubilant song of the victors, for whom the resounding acclaim

       Of nations was lifted in chorus, whose brows wore the chaplet of fame,

       But the hymn of the low and the humble, the weary, the broken in heart,

      *****

      Whose youth bore no flower on its branches, whose hopes burned in ashes away,

       From whose hands slipped the prize they had grasped at, who stood at the dying of day

       With the wreck of their life all around them. …”

      

      In this poem Mr. Story touched the highest note of his life—as poet, sculptor, painter, or writer of prose; in no other form of expression has he equalled the sublimity of sentiment in these lines:—

      “… I stand on the field of defeat,

       In the shadow, with those who are fallen, and wounded, and dying, and there

      *****

      Hold the hand that is helpless, and whisper, ‘They only the victory win

       Who have fought the good fight, and have vanquished the demon that tempts us within;

       Who have held to their faith unseduced by the prize that the world holds on high;

       Who have dared for a high cause to suffer, resist, fight—if need be, to die.’ ”

      Such a poem must have its own immortality in lyric literature.

      For a period of forty years the home of the Storys in Palazzo Barberini was a noted centre of the most charming social life. Mr. Story’s literary work—in his contributions of essays and poems to the Atlantic Monthly; in his published works, the “Roba di Roma,” “Conversations in a Studio,” his collected “Poems,” and others—gave him a not transitory rank in literature which rivals, if it does not exceed, his rank in art.

      Meantime other artists were to take up their permanent abode in the Seven-hilled City—Elihu Vedder in 1866; Franklin Simmons two years later; Waldo and Julian Story, the two sons of William Wetmore Story, though claiming Rome as their home, are American by parentage and ancestry; and Mr. Waldo Story succeeds his father in pursuing the art of sculpture in the beautiful studios in the Via San Martino built by the elder Story. In 1902 Charles Walter Stetson, with his gifted wife, known to the contemporary literary world by her maiden name, Grace Ellery Channing, set up their household gods and lighted their altar fires in the city by the Tiber, ready, it may be, to exclaim with Ovid:—

      “Four times happy is he, and times without number is happy,

       Who the city of Rome uninterdicted enjoys.”

      THE DANCE OF THE PLEIADES

       Elihu Vedder

      If art is a corner of the universe seen through a temperament, the temperament of Mr. Vedder must offer an enthralling study, for it seems to be a lens whose power of refraction defies prophecy because it deals with the incalculable forces. His art concerns itself little with the æsthetic, but is chiefly the art of the intellect and the imagination. All manner of symbols and analogies; the laws of the universe that prevail beyond the stars; the celestial figures; the undreamed significance in prophecy or in destiny; omens, signs, and wonders; the world forces, advancing stealthily in the shadows of a dusky twilight; the Fates, under brilliant skies, gathering in the stars; oracles and supernatural coincidences that lurk in undreamed-of days; the Pleiades dancing in a light that never was on sea or land; unknown Shapes that meet outside space and time and question each other’s identity; the dead that come forth from their graves and glide, silent and spectral, through a crowd, unseen by any one; the prayer of the celestial powers poured forth in the utter solitude of the vast desert—it is these that are the realm of Vedder’s art, and what has the normal world of portrait and landscape to do with such

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