“Yes, for he does not know the true character of those for whom he works, nor care to know his subject. The smirking advertisements one sees are a good example of prettiness. But many artists, working for money alone, fall into this cheap, easy habit of pleasing the worst taste.”
“Wouldn’t you call ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’ a pretty book?” asked Henry.
“No, indeed,” I answered; “it is far too genuine and lifelike to be merely pretty.”
Henry insisted it was written for money, and was merely sweet and pleasing. The others disagreed with him so strenuously, I had hardly a chance to say, as before, that one might write for money the thing needful to be said. Virginia asked whether I did not think Jessie Wilcox Smith’s drawings merely pretty? I said I thought them so now and then, but that sometimes her deep love and understanding of childhood made them shine with loveliness.
Marian said: “Some people are merely pretty and uninteresting.”
“Often,” I answered, “they want just that. They look for superficial admiration, and show only their superficial prettiness.”
“But, of course, that isn’t art,” said Marian.
I spoke of sculpture as the Greek drama of visual art, a metaphor that appealed to those of them—Florence, Marian, Henry—who knew enough of Greek drama, with its masks and buskins, and its far-offness, to understand. The distance, the unlifelikeness of the material, is its charm. The colored German marbles lose artistic beauty in gaining lifelike color.
“In that case,” said Alfred, “I should think the process of coloring and the newness of the material would interest one so much as to draw one’s attention away from the statue.”
“I don’t think it is only that,” I answered; “for surely wax works, which are quite common, with all their lifelike color and softness, do not give us the thrill of reality and beauty that we get from a marble statue.”
“I think,” said Henry, “it is just the coldness and hardness of marble, changed by the artist into shapes of life and warmth, that make it beautiful.”
“Yes,” I said, “exactly. The sculptor expresses his idea in every curve of the human form, and makes human shapes say universal things. They express by attitude and line power, beauty, tenderness. In the ‘Mercury,’ the lines of that headlong figure, to half-shut eyes, represent the curve and angle of flight itself.”