Page:Charles Grafly, Sculptor, an appreciatiative note, Trask, 1910.djvu/2



AN APPRECIATIVE NOTE

BY JOHN E. D. TRASK

N the awakening interest in the arts, of which evidence is now appearing all over the country, general educational conditions have compelled the first wide understanding to be given to music and literature. In the last decade or two has come a fuller knowledge of the painter's purpose, but the sculptor's appeal still reaches an audience numerically slight.

Yet sculpture has a language all its own, potent and full, no more akin to pictorial expression than is poetry to music; a language, too, which in its purity arouses sympathy and awakens admiration, even without understanding.

Just as the Lyrics of Shakespeare or of Heine have qualities which make them independent of linguistic knowledge so the Hermes of Praxiteles or the Samothiscian Victory appeal to every seeing man, however ignorant he be of their technical excellences or of their more subtle shades of meaning.

That the language of sculpture is not more widely understood or at least recognized, in America today, is largely the fault of American sculptors.

Too often have they clouded the expression of form with a semi-literary aspect or, as is the case with him whom we hold in reverent memory as our greatest sculptor, mixed with plastic ideals, certain pictorial qualities which, however beautiful, destroy in a measure, forceful Rh