Italy, the Magic Land Part 4

"Man is his own star....

Our acts, our angels, are, for good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still,"

it is true; yet has not Edith Thomas embodied something of that overruling destiny that every thoughtful observer must discern in life in these lines?--

"You may blame the wind or no, But it ever hath been so-- Something bravest of its kind Leads a frustrate life and blind, For the lack of favoring gales Blowing blithe on other sails."

Only occasionally have we

"... the time, and the place, And the loved one all together."

Mr. Story's nature was eminently sympathetic with the other arts; he was himself almost as much a literary man as he was a sculptor; he was the friend and companion of literary men, and to the fact that art in the middle years of the nineteenth century was far more a literary topic than a matter of critical scrutiny, Mr. Story owed an incalculable degree of his fame. He was an extremely interesting figure with his social grace, his liberal culture, and his versatile gifts. His life was centred in choice and refined a.s.sociations. If not dowered with lofty and immortal original genius, he had a singular combination of talent, of fastidious taste, and of the intellectual appreciation that enabled him to select interesting ideal subjects to portray in the plastic art.

These appealed to the special interest of his literary friends and were widely discussed in the press and periodicals of the day. It is a _bonmot_ of contemporary studio life that Hawthorne rather than Story created the "Cleopatra," and one ingenious spirit suggests that as Mr.

Story put nothing of expression or significance into his statues, the beholder could read into them anything he pleased; finding an empty mould, so to speak, into which to pour whatever image or embodiment he might conjure up from the infinite realm of imagination. One of the latest of these contemporary critics declares that "Story declined appreciably, year by year, falling away from his own standard; haunted to the point of obsession by visions of mournful female figures, generally seated, wrapped in gloom. It seems strange," this critic continues, "that so active a mind should dream of nothing but brooding, sinister souls, of bodies bowed in grief, or tense with rage. Never once, apparently, did there come to him a vision of buoyancy and grace; of a beauty that one could love; of good cheer and joy of very living; always these unwholesome creatures born of that belated Byronic romanticism."

This criticism, while it has as little appreciation of Mr. Story's exquisite culture and of the taste and refinement of his art as the general rush of the motor car and telephonic conversational life of the first decade of the twentieth century has of the thoughtful, the poetic, the leisurely atmosphere of Mr. Story's time, is yet not without a keen flashlight of truth. Painting had its reactionary crisis from the pre-Raphaelite ideals and the _intransigeants_ have had their own conflicts in which they survived, or disappeared, according to the degree of artistic vitality within. Sculpture and literature must also meet the series of tests to which the onward progress of life persists in subjecting them, and those who are submerged and perish can only encourage the survivors as did the Greeks, as sung by Theocritus:--

"A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast, Bids you set sail.

Full many a gallant ship, when we were lost, Weathered the gale."

"As we refine, our checks grow finer," said Emerson. As life becomes more elaborate and ambitious, the critical tests increase. Contemporary fame can be created for the artist by favorable contemporary comment; but it rests with himself, after all; it rests in the abiding significance of his work--or the lack of it--as to whether this fame is perpetuated. That of Mr. Story does not hold within itself all the qualities that insure the appreciation of the present day. It is, as the critic of the hour expresses himself, "too literary,"--too largely a question of cla.s.sic t.i.tles 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 impa.s.sioned 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 aeolian harp it finds; Hornpipe and hurdy-gurdy both are dumb Unto the most musicianly of winds."

It is an irretrievable loss if, in the pa.s.sion for the _vita nuova_, a generation, or a century, shall subst.i.tute for the aeolian 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 a.s.sertion 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 G.o.ds 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE DANCE OF THE PLEIADES"

Elihu Vedder _Page 92_]

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 aesthetic, but is chiefly the art of the intellect and the imagination.

All manner of symbols and a.n.a.logies; 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 s.p.a.ce and time and question each other's ident.i.ty; 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 art as this? Can it only be relegated to a cla.s.s, an order, of its own, and considered as being--Vedderesque? It seems to stand alone and unparalleled. In his work lies the transfiguration of all mystery. Vedder never paints nature, in the sense of landscapes, and yet one often feels that he has the key to the very creation of nature; that he has supped with G.o.ds and surprised the secrets of the stars. Do the winds whisper to him?--

"The Muse can knit What is past, what is done, With the web that's just begun."

How can he find the design to phrase his thought--this painter of ideas?

"Can blaze be done in cochineal, Or noon in mazarin?"

Whatever the Roman environment may have done for Allston, Page, and Story, there is no question but that to Vedder it has been as his soul's native air. For him the sirens sing again on the coast; the sorceress works her spell; the c.u.maean Sibyl again flies, wraithlike, over the plain, clasping her rejected leaves of destiny which Tarquin in his blindness has refused to buy. The Rome that lies buried under the ages rises for Vedder. His art cannot be catalogued under any known division of portrait, landscape, marine, or genre, but it is simply--the art of Vedder. It stands alone and absolutely unrivalled. The pictorial creations of Vedder are as wholly without precedent or comparison as if they were the sole pictorial treasures of the world. The visitor may care for them, or not care, according to his own ability to comprehend and to recognize the inscrutable genius there manifested; but in either case he will find nowhere else, in either ancient or contemporary art, any parallel to these works.

One could well fancy that to any interrogation of his conceptions the artist might reply:--

"I am seeker of the stone, Living gem of Solomon.

But what is land, or what is wave, To me, who only jewels crave?

I'm all-knowing, yet unknowing; Stand not, pause not in my going."

In the rich, weird realm of Omar Khayyam's Persian poem, the Rubaiyat, Mr. Vedder found the opportunity of his life for translating its thought into strange, mystic symbolism. Never were artist and poet so blended in one as in Vedder's wonderful ill.u.s.trations for this poem. It has nothing in common with what we ordinarily call an ill.u.s.trated work. It is a great treasure of art for all the ages. It is a very fount of inspiration for painter and poet. An exquisite sonnet suggested by "The Angel of the Darker Cup" is the following by Louise Chandler Moulton:--

"She bends her lovely head to taste thy draught, O thou stern Angel of the Darker Cup!

With thee to-night in the dim shades to sup, Where all they be who from that cup have quaffed.

She had been glad in her own loveliness, and laughed At Life's strong enemies who lie in wait; Had kept with golden youth her queenly state, All unafraid of Sorrow's threat'ning shaft.