Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/231

Rh comes to Paul Manship—a "sound" man, of course, but no slave to the Rodin tradition, nor the Saint Gaudens tradition, nor whatever may have produced those fattish girls helplessly seated on either hand as you enter the Boston Public Library. Manship's statues, including the enlightened Injun at the Metropolitan, remind one a good deal of the remark (which appeared on the back page of I have forgotten which French funny paper while la guerre was still with us) of one gonzesse to another—"J'ai un bon truc chez les boches. Je leur dis que je suis française; ça prend toujours." Not that Manship tells us that he is française (gender aside) but that in his sculpture he is always chez les américains, besides having in everything a bon truc, a certain cleverness, a something "fakey." One wonders whether his winning the Prix de Rome accounts for the fact that in the last analysis Manship is neither a sincere alternative to thinking, nor an appeal to the pure intelligence, but a very ingenious titillation of that well-known element, the highly sophisticated unintelligence. At any rate, he was formerly very popular, just as Nadelman (who appeals less subtly to the H. S. U.) is at present supremely popular. Fundamentally Manship is one of those producers of "modern statues" whom Wright's four sentences wipe off the earth's face. His work is, of course, superior to the masterpieces of such people as French, Barnard, Bartlett, the Borglums, and Bela Pratt—in so far as something which is thoroughly dead is superior to something which has never been alive.

Wright is, after all, correct in his main thesis. We have bumped our heads altogether too often on "modern statues." Until recently we gave them a bump every time we passed the celebrated Arc de Triomphe at Twenty-third street. And if we have been caught in the modern sculpture section of the Metropolitan we have received gratis such a massage-of bumping as probably could not be duplicated in any one place in America. Let us then turn to Lachaise and exhaust our intelligences for a change, assuming that we can boast thereof.

In the light of contemporary "criticism" this assumption is decidedly daring. Lachaise has, in the past few years, made a large number of artists extremely enthusiastic, and a great many gallery-goers very nervous, not to mention the ladies and gentlemen who may have died of anger. But the official "critics," perhaps realizing the disastrous consequences to "criticism" of a genuine reaction on