death-blow. There is a deep dent on his helmet on the left side, just above the forehead. The effect of such a blow would cause a man to whirl round as he falls, and thus is he represented. The left leg is bent: the weight of the figure is on it. The right is stretched out at its full tension just before the figure sways leftwards as it sinks down. The effect of this line, from the arm upraised above the head (grasping the weapon and in the act of dealing the blow), along the side, thigh, and leg, is beautiful. The development of the chest, the muscular strength of the limbs, the fulness of life in the whole figure, are forcibly expressed, but without exaggeration. The muscles do not stand out like ropes around a fleshless torso; there is athletic strength, the perfection of trained manhood, but no gauntness or unsightliness; sound elastic flesh clothes sinews powerful as steel. The hand which holds the sword has closed on it with the rigidity of death. The passage from life to death is portrayed with great fidelity. The art-students in Paris, who saw this figure on its way from Boston to Florence, were so struck with its marvellous truth that they decided it must be a trick; that it had been moulded on a living man. They declared it impossible otherwise that certain details could be rendered with such exactness. The absurdity of such an opinion is self-evident. No model could remain in such an attitude. He must inevitably fall.
There is no idealisation attempted in this figure. It is to the minutest fibre an athlete and nothing more. What particularly struck me, both in the bust and the figure, was the finish and delicacy of the modelling. The wrinkles in the face of St. Stephen, the hollowness of the cheeks, the swollen veins round the sunken temples, the bony projection of the forehead over the eyes, are singularly lifelike. So, too, with the Gladiator. The massive yet elegant proportions, the noble throat, the herculean chest, the vigorous tension of one side contrasted with the fast approaching collapse of the other, are all instinct with vitality.
The smooth, hard, flat surface, which so many sculptors seem to think expressive of beauty, is a falsehood. To learn to see, and seeing to copy, the undulations and indentations of the human body which prove that blood and life are beneath the skin, is the secret of art. In painting, what wonderful lights, what tender shadows, what exquisite chiaro-oscuro reveal them; and in sculpture, what breaking up into soft swellings and almost imperceptible lines is necessary before the hard material can be changed into living flesh. This has been done by this sculptor. But who is he?
Dr. Bremner, of Boston, is now at the head of a school of art established by the Lowell Institute. Up to this time, however, he has had few oportunities of following his art-calling. The exigencies of life have made him a professional man, but there are voices which call even louder than the demand for daily broad, and which no man can disobey. In the intervals of his medical avocations, and under every possible disadvantage, these two works have been executed, and prove what Dr. Bremner is capable of.
The bust was, as I have said, hewn out of the granite. Every twenty minutes the chisels became blunted, and it was necessary to sharpen them. So vivid was the conception of the head, that the block of granite was cut down at once into the present pose. Owing to some accident, the clay in which the figure of the Gladiator was modelled, cracked, and began to fall before the figure was half finished. A cast was taken of it as it stood, and the rest of the figure was cut in the plaster.
In our estimate of works of art, I think it a mistake to make the difficulties or hindrances attendant on their execution excuse their faults. They should be judged intrinsically, with no reference to aught but themselves. But when these difficulties or hindrances are so successfully overcome, our admiration of the workman who has persevered so manfully with his work is enhanced, and we revere what Balzac calls the sublime patience of genius. As I stood for a moment outside the studio, and looked at the blue and cloudless sky above, I could not help thinking how long Italy had monopolised all the utterances of the soul; how adapted its climate, its religion, and the idiosyncrasy of its people, are to Art in the widest acceptation of the term; and yet, how far from Italian culture and Italian influences some of the great ones of the earth had wrought their work. Never was the glorious independence of genius more impressed on my mind than at this moment. An absorbing profession, poverty, inadequate mechanical means, deficiency in art companionship and in the power of art contemplation, had not prevented a true artist from thus executing works which only require to be known to take a foremost place in the most elaborately selected collections of modern art.
I. B.
MAKE-BELIEVE PLACES OF BUSINESS.
You meet with these in all our large towns, but in London they form a most striking feature. The number of spectral shops, phantom wharves, and ghostly warehouses to be met with in the metropolis is startling. Every such place has the peculiarity that, with all the usual preparation for business, it still successfully avoids the slightest transaction of trade of any kind. In some cases, to judge from the situation of the premises, this must be a task of great difficulty; but, some way, these apparitional tradesmen and illusive tradeswomen manage to achieve it. Only an archway, the sharp corner of another building, or ten yards, say, of street, separate them from the roaring tides of buyers and sellers, yet no customer ever throws an impertinent shadow over their counter or upon their desk. The Thames, for instance, is said to be a busy river, and still I know wharves on its banks which have long since rotted on their piles, but where no barge has unladen cargo for seven years past. Myriads of craft pass up and down the turbid stream, and as far as those spots go they always do pass, for not a cockle-boat by any accident ever anchors there. There are undertakers’ shops, which I know, where the last and only business transaction was the sale by the new-comer of a coffin-plate for the use of the previous proprietor. Brokers’ stores may be counted in many neighbourhoods by the half-dozen, at which
