What I feel beyond anything else is that Mr. Gaudens
somehow takes care of himself. To what measureless extent he does this on
occasion one was to learn, in due course, from his magnificent Lincoln at
Chicago- the lesson being simply that of a mystery exquisite, the absolute inscrutable;
one of the happiest cases known to our time, known doubtless to any time, of the
combination of intensity of effect with dissimulation, with the disavowal, of
process. After seeing the Lincoln one consents, for its author, to the drop of
questions –that is the lame truth; a truth in the absence of which I
should risk another word or two; address
perhaps even a brief challenge to a certain ambiguity in the Sherman.
Its idea, to which I have alluded, strikes me as equivocal, or more exactly as
double; the image being, on the one side, and splendidly rendered, that of an
overwhelming military advance, and irresistible march into an enemy’s country –
the strain forward, the very inflation of drapery with the rush, symbolizing the
very breath of the Destroyer. But the idea is at the same time- which part of
it is also admirably expressed – that the Destroyer is a messenger of peace,
with the olive branch too waved in the blast and with embodied grace, in the
form of a beautiful American girl, attending his business.
I confess to a lapse of satisfaction in the presence of this interweaving – the
result doubtless of a sharp suspicion of all attempts, however glittering and
golden, to confound destroyers with benefactors. The military monument in the
City Square responds evidently, whatever a pretext can be found for it to a
desire of men’s hearts; but I would have it always as military as possible, and
I would have the Destroyer, in intention at least, not docked of one of his
bristles. I would have him deadly and terrible, and, if he be wanted beautiful,
beautiful only as a war god and crested not with peace, but with snakes.
Peace is a long way round from him, and blood and ashes in between. So, with
less intense perversity, I think, than that of Saint-Gaudens’s brilliant scheme,
I would have had a Sherman of the terrible march (the ‘immortal’ march in all abundance, if
that be the needed note), not irritating benevolence, but satisfying, by very
ingenious device, the misery, the ruin and the vengeance of his track. It is
not one’s affair to attempt to teach an author how such horrors may be
monumentally signified; it is enough that their having been perpetrated that is the very ground of the monument. And
monuments should always have a clean, clear meaning.
~The
American Scene~
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