Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920 -- Childhood and youth
beard, and a close-cropped head of red hair, like Michelangelo, and a
flattened nose like the Florentine's, so that I rejoiced in him as the
ideal of a sculptor. I still think him, for certain Greek qualities, the
greatest of American sculptors; his "Indian Hunter" in Central Park must
bear witness of our historic difference from other peoples as long as
bronze shall last, and as no other sculpture can. But the "Kenton" was
never to be eternized in bronze or marble for that niche in the rotunda
of the capital where Ward may have imagined it finding itself. The cloud
thickened over us, and burst at last in the shot fired on Fort Sumter;
the legislature appropriated a million dollars as the contribution of
the state to the expenses of the war, and Ward's hopes vanished as
utterly as if the bolt had smitten his plaster model into dust.
Before Ward, almost, indeed, with my first coming to Columbus, there had
been another sculptor whom I was greatly interested to know. This was
Thomas D. Jones, who had returned to Ohio from an attempt upon the
jealous East, where he had suffered that want of appreciation which was
apt, in a prevalent superstition of the West, to attend any æsthetic
endeavor from our section. He frankly stood for the West, though I
believe he was a Welshman by birth; but in spite of his pose he was a
sculptor of real talent. He modeled a bust of Chase, admirable as a
likeness, and of a very dignified simplicity. I do not know whether it
was ever put in marble, but it was put in plaster very promptly and sold
in many such replicas. The sculptor liked to be seen modeling it, and I
can see him yet, stepping back a little from his work, and then
advancing upon it with a sensitive twitching of his mustache and a black
censorious frown. The Governor must have posed in the pleasant room
which Jones had in the Neil House where he lived, how I do not know,
for he was threadbare poor; but in those days many good things seemed
without price to the debtor class; and very likely the management liked
to have him there, where his work attracted people. One day while I was
in the room the Governor came in and, not long after, a lady who
appeared instinctively to time her arrival when it could be most largely
impressive. As she was staying in the hotel, she wore nothing on her
dewily disheveled hair, as it insists upon characterizing itself in the
retrospect, and she had the effect of moving about on a stage. She had,
in fact, just come up on some theatrical wave from her native Tennessee,
and she had already sent her album of favorable notices to the _Journal_
office with the appeal inscribed in a massive histrionic hand, "Anything
but your silence, gentlemen!" She played a short engagement in Columbus,
and then departed for the East and for the far grander capitals of the
Old World, where she became universally famous as Ada Isaacs Menken, and
finally by a stroke of her fearless imagination figured in print as the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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