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GREAT man quotes bravely," said Emerson, "and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good." No sentiment could be more acceptable to the inexperienced writer straining after impressive statement, and no sentiment could lead more surely to flabby faculties and prosy utterance. Emerson drew it, as he drew most of his counsel to others, from the depths of his The Art of own experience, and his experience Making Tags taught him also the corollary, commonly omitted by the professional quoter. "Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor." There is the meat in the shell. An inventor may do as he will with the materials at his hand, while the copyist can use them only to his destruction. Since most of us find it easy to copy and difficult to invent, the habit of prolific quotation has grown with the growth of a certain hasty and idle spirit easily to be discerned in modern literature, and the London Saturday Review has recently stood for an honest and wholesome reaction in favor of writing neatly woven from the author's individual thought, and unbedecked with maxims from familiar sources. It offered some months ago a prize for the worst three "tags" in use at the present day, a tag being understood to mean a quotation that has grown stale with repetition. Hundreds flowed into the columns of the Review, and not until they were there did many a reader recognize how often their aged faces had been seen upon the pages of young books and magazines. Here are a few of them: "It is the unexpected that happens," "more honored in the breach than in the observance," "Homeric laughter," "the thin end of the wedge," "the right man in the right place," "there is much virtue in an if."

If the time has come, and apparently it is here, for these and similar phrases borrowed from the big grab-bag of the classics, frequently without any distinct knowledge of their origin, to be discarded from the product

of the average writer, the naked dulness of the average style will be more than ever conspicuous, and inevitably there will be more or less striving to create verbal ornaments of a reasonable originality. Already the popular parodist has found a way out of the difficulty that is not without its appropriateness to a flippant age. Instead of illuminating his text with the wise sayings of his predecessors, he adopts them only after fortifying them with his mother wit, as the prudent physician fortifies his anæsthetic remedies. For "A word to the wise is sufficient" he gives "A word to the wise is superfluous," or for "Procrastination is the thief of time" he sagaciously substitutes "Punctuality is the thief of time," altering, with consummate impudence, dignified gray sentiments that have walked with Shakespeare and Milton. The other alternative to the old stupid method of quotation without variation-to produce our own tags, to make a literature of concise, richly colored, expressive phrases worthy to be quoted by subsequent generations-involves an amount of labor discouraging to the small writer, living upon his wares.

We must keep a stout heart and look to our style to express our common little thoughts, many of which are, after all, as good as those of Montaigne or Hazlitt or Bacon, with a delicate consideration for their individuality. Though they are no more original than we are Adam and Eve, they need not be quite like the thoughts of any other mind. To play them gently as a good fisherman his trout; to follow their moods and let them suggest their conclusions and modifications without rude interruption; to fit words to them as kindly and artistically as if they were the dearest of our children about to be introduced into a critical society, there to be judged by the appropriateness of their dress; to treat them in all ways politely and honestly-this is to make them valuable if the elements of value are in them; if not, it is the way to find the sad truth out.

W

STOCK EXCHANGE.

HEN so important a work of art as this comes our way, description of it and comparison with other achievements may be the first and most needed form of criticism. It is not likely to attract any observers who will dispute the power and judgment of such a pair of sculptors as J. Q. A. Ward and Paul Wayland Bartlett. The one is of all our good men the best for VOL. XXXVI.-42

sculpturesque grasp; the other is past-master of detail, at home in all that academic traditions can give; and is also an expressional artist unsurpassed among modern artists of pure form.

In the case of this pediment it is Ward who has made the design, it is "his job"; the original small model is his, and the larger subsequent studies are his in their conception; but everywhere, in the modelling of every fig

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ure, as it would seem, Bartlett's hand appears as the actual creator of the figures as we now see them. Such statements as these must always be made with a feeling of some uncertainty. No good-will, no frankness, no desire on the part of either artist to give full credit to his yoke-fellow, can enable a third person to judge exactly what the share of each sculptor has been.

But

Ward has never given to his sculptured work that charm of which some men have the secret; he is not a master of sentiment in outward expression, and there are living men, his inferior in much, who have yet more than he of the secret of grace. Bartlett, triumphant in his "Michelangelo" and also successful in his "Columbus" and his "Lafayette," has still to give us a great composition. it is not sentiment nor even grace as a primary need which such a great piece of architectural sculpture requires to make it noble, and the power of Ward as a sculptor on a great scale, aided by Bartlett's extraordinary feeling for truth and significance of modelling, would commend these two men working together to any person wishing to give to a great monument its principal sculptured adornment.

The pediment in question is about 100 feet above the street, and is 110 feet long. From the high floor of the portico of the SubTreasury on the one side, from some point within the vestibule of the Mills Building on the other, angle views can be had, the firstnamed of which is fairly well reproduced in our first picture; but to get the view shown in our second illustration—or any view from the front except of one figure at a time, and that with a disagreeable straining of the neck muscles you must mount to the roof of the buildings opposite or look through one of their uppermost windows. It is probably this disadvantageous placing of the monument which has caused Ward to give to his figures very great scale and to diminish their number. The pediment of the Panthéon and that of the Corps Législatif, at Paris, are each about as large as this one. The Panthéon is by that Pierre Jean David whom we call David d'Angers, and contains many human figures, so grouped and arranged that it is not sufficient merely to count them, as is shown below, and much paraphernaliamany small subdivisions. The other, by Philippe Henri Lemaire, contains seventeen figures and, again, many accessories, with out seeming sufficiently filled. The Stock

Exchange pediment, on the other hand, contains seven colossal figures and four much smaller. And yet when seen from the street, or at all in the way shown in our Fig. 1, it seems remarkably full, even crowded with the huge groups.

The figures seem to be even overwhelmingly massive, as if they were about to fall from their places by sheer overhang and by unsupported mass. It is a step that has been taken consciously, in order that the sculpture may tell from below-so much is evident. What, indeed, would be the value of the sculpture if it could not be seen from the opposite side of Broad Street? As for the Madeleine in Paris, that is altogether on a larger scale and there, with openings all around the monument, and the power of looking at the pediment at any desired angle with a distance of 350 feet horizontal, and a quarter of a mile away on its axis, through the Rue Royal and from the middle of the Place de la Concorde, there has been no need of making the figures excessive in rotundity and projection. It has been, indeed, the custom in the filling of modern pediments, to leave them rather bare, with a great deal of blank background, or at least a very imperfectly filled area. Thus in the composition by David d'Angers, the design required the “grands Hommes" to whom "la Patrie reconnaissante" is awarding crowns to come up to receive them in ranks, as it were, the grouping on the right of the central figure being especially noted for its arrangement in lines of men seen in perspective. Then the triangle at either end is filled with a rather unorganized medley of human figures and of attributes of war and of peace, and in fact the whole pediment is designed ' as if the scheme were to make an impressive centre and to taper off into nothing at the right and left.

Lemaire's composition for the parliamentary building is a dignified and sufficient piece of work. Here, again, there has been a disposition not to crowd it. The heads of the figures do not reach to its highest level except at one or two points; the awkward triangles at either end are, in this instance also, filled with nothing particular; it seems as if it were beyond the strength of the designers to overcome the great difficulty of filling those triangles with dignified human figures. Or, perhaps that was more than anybody thought worth his while to do as the artist of the Stock Exchange pediment

In the case before us, the New York pediment, the angles are filled with human sculpture as important as any in the group; mighty giants who would stand eighteen feet high. Figures equally large flank the presiding goddess in the middle. Those six great nude figures form, indeed, the design. It is only the two female figures, the two draped figures, which are in a way out of harmony-one cannot quite believe in them; their drapery does not seem either real or ideally graceful. The question of scale troubles the spectator a little, if he looks upon the composition otherwise than as a purely sculpturesque mass; for the slight and short young man with the dynamo and the young woman with the ram are in an unaccountable way associated with the mighty forms about them.

The non-artistic significance of the design is, no doubt, that Integrity holds the centre of the world's business, which is going on around her. On her left comes the farmer with his crushing back-load of grain, a huge sackful which is to be poured into measuring vessels, and the farmer's daughter, with her hand on the head of a magnificent ram; while, filling the angular space beyond, the two giants to whom there has been allusion represent all those who explore for minerals, trying and testing the surface indications in search of promise of hidden wealth below. On the right hand of Integrity, the nearest great figure represents Machinery and the Mechanical Arts, and next to him is Electricity; while the figures at the end and filling the southernmost part of the pediment, stand for surveyors and builders who are engaged in laying out grounds and establishing a building site. That is the whole story -a group of two figures engaged in planning and building, one of two figures exploring and mining, a group of two who stand for Industry and Applied Science, still a fourth group which stands for Agriculture; those figures, with the central presiding one, form the whole composition, if we except the

the corners of the pedestal on which stands Integrity. And yet, few as the figures are, the space seems in no place insufficiently occupied, and as the eye draws toward the two ends the pediment seems even excessively filled, the huge figures there affording even more variety and mass of form than perhaps was required. It is a magnificent fault enough—if fault it be-to meet the difficulty boldly and to put your most important figure in the awkwardest place, the place which almost every artist shuns.

There is one more very important and striking characteristic of the design. It is the surprising development given to the muscles of the gigantic nude figures which chiefly compose it. Here is no collection of statues of the Apollo Belvedere type-soft rounded figures with smooth limbs like the arms which a beautiful woman shows in her evening dress; here is, on the other hand, even an excess (if we compare this with other modern work) of muscular detail. It is probable that some lovers of great sculpture would wish to see the figures modified in this respect. It is probable that some would say that the sculptor was deceived by the look of his four-foot models, and allowed them to be enlarged without due consideration of the result of their colossal size; but then this cannot be urged in the face of the senior sculptor's presence in New York and his continual supervision of his work. No, it is deliberately chosen; the remarkable emphasis laid upon muscular development is taken deliberately as the fitting treatment for nude statues used in decorative, that is architectural, work.

There is one fact, however, which every careful observer will note and will learn how to allow for-the fact that the marble is not of a single tint, but is (most unfortunately, as it appears to this writer) veined and spotted with gray. This clouding of the surface interferes with the purity of the form in very many cases. It interferes, too, with the spectator's entire grasp of the subject at given points, for how are you to tell what is local color and what is shade? And if you cannot be sure of your shades, then what becomes of that detail of modelling which is the life of refined sculpture?

RUSSELL STURGIS.