Arts and Letters

The American Academy of Arts and Letters was founded in 1904. Daniel Chester French was elected a member in the following year. He was thus early received into this body in the very nature of things. He was thoroughly in harmony with its spirit, moved in all that he did by a high feeling for tradition but convinced in his soul that "the letter killeth," that tradition is only fruitful when it fertilizes and enriches the personal, creative energy with which the true artist is endowed. He was born, at Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1850. He died on October 7th, 1931. It was a long life and it was a happy one, happy for him, and inspiring for his fellow countrymen, because it was dedicated from beginning to end to the production of noble work.

A rich source of the distinction which French achieved as a sculptor resided in the resolution with which, in his youthful, formative period, he "hitched his wagon to a star.” It was the star of high thinking, of an idealism which looked through and above the phenomena of the visible world, and, without ignoring the claims of realism, gave to what he saw a certain elevated significance. The vitalized bust of Emerson which he modelled at the outset of his career has a dual status. It is, in the first place, an authentic portrait of the man. "Yes, that is the face I shave," said the sage. But it is also a souvenir of French's insight into the imponderables of the philosopher's character, of his alliance with what was finest in the old cultural habit of New England. He was himself a born Emersonian, which is to say that he was a thoughtful, sensitive individual, delicately tinctured in the fibre of his being. He had imagination and a flair for spiritual values. A beautiful seriousness of purpose animated him.

Along with the subtler elements in his cosmos there went a lively, racy faculty for the interpretation of character. He was in his early twenties when he produced "The Minute Man," which launched him, but even then he knew as though by clairvoyance the traits of the essential American and in statue after statue he confirmed the promise given by his initial work of an art rooted in our soil. The stately, symbolical figure in his Death and the Young Sculptor is not more eloquent in its solemnity than is the figure of the artist in its manly vigor. By the time French came to model his Lincoln, in the great Memorial at Washington, his mind, and, indeed, his whole nature, had become saturated in human character as it functions in American life. He was a singularly penetrating interpreter of the types it fell to him to commemorate.

As a sculptor pure and simple, as a stylist, he practised an art flowing from the older and more or less classical phase of the American school. He was all for simplicity and a grave, measured handling of a problem, he drove absolutely at poise and dignity. To the newer generation, for which sculpture started with Rodin and was continued by Bourdelle and Maillol, he made no appeal. He was, in its prejudiced eyes, flatly "academic," and that summarily settled the matter. As a matter of fact he had abilities far transcending any merely "academic" formula. I once asked him why there was so much bad sculpture scattered about. Humorously he replied—and I may say in passing that French's sense of fun was one of his most attractive traits—“Why, don't you know? It is because sculpture is the easiest of all the arts." He went on to speak of the facility with which the veriest dabster could worry a lump of clay into resemblance to this or that object—and then he went on to talk of the difficulty with which the qualities that make good sculpture are brought under control. French mastered these latter qualities, qualities of imaginative evocation, of design, of style, and so on, through innate power, but also through devotional hard work. He had his reward in the emergence of some memorable images from under his hands.

One of the noblest of them is the Memory at the Metropolitan Museum, a seated nude reminiscent of antique ideas. The first impression one receives from it is that of a figure of great dignity and loveliness. On closer scrutiny one sees also how much the statue owes to learned research into form, to art in composition, to authority in the development of line and in the nuances of modelling. First and last, in looking at this serene marble and at numerous other productions of French's, one is conscious of his idealism, of his reverence for beauty and the loftier issues of his craft. Sculpture was not "easy" for him, for he made it an affair of depth and emotion. At every stage of his long, successful life, he was faithful to his star.