Some Artists at the Fair — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Some Artists at the Fair
John Stuart Mill · en
sculptured figure or beast. It lingers longest on MacMonnies’s fountain,
the fitting jewel resting lightly on the bosom of this Venetian beauty
whom but yesterday we called Chicago; and well it may, as in a degree
the fountain is the _clou_ of the Exposition. It seems but fair to call
this fountain the most important of all the decorative sculptures. Every
exposition has its great fountain, and the choice of Mr. MacMonnies to
execute this one was most happy. Our sculptors as a rule have had too
little opportunity to exercise the decorative side of their art, and we
do not possess as does France a small army of sculptors who can be, as
they were in ’89, turned loose to decorate a great exposition with
groups and figures. It demands not only a decorative instinct but
practice as well, a certain habit of and delight in handling huge masses
of form which men who are capable perhaps of graver and more ponderated
work may lack or have lost. Thus fifteen years ago Saint-Gaudens, fresh
from school and filled with its traditions, would have in the course of
natural selection been the man for the work; but with years and widening
experience it is a question whether he would have undertaken to design
and carry out in the short space of time that which his brilliant pupil
has undertaken and carried through with all the audacity and fire of
youth, tempered by a delicacy of taste which gives it after all its
greatest value. Anything more typical of the youth and hope which we
fondly believe to be the characteristic of our nation is hard to
conceive; and if, as is to be so greatly desired, the monument is to be
made permanent (which the completeness of the modelling of individual
parts, an unusual quality in works like this, would render easy), it
might well stand to represent an era. Mr. French’s massive and dignified
figure of America may be taken as the matron of this generation, tried
and made strong through war; but MacMonnies’s epitome of youth
represents the future of our as yet experimental civilization, and
though the boat is propelled by the arts and sciences, it is the young
girl who fills such a large part in our experiment who is really to the
fore. It is Smith and Wellesley who row with the young girl enthroned;
and _vogue la galère_, with pleasant waters ahead and a safe port at
last!