Page:Woman in Art.djvu/68

WOMAN IN ART nineteenth century left to American art the statue called "The Lost Pleiad," representing a star missed from heaven seeking her group of six sister stars. Her attitude is of swiftness of flight through the ether; she is above the clouds represented beneath her feet; her hand shields the eyes from the light of dazzling suns that she passes in her wanderings amid cosmic worlds. The eager forward bending of the body, only one foot touching a cloud; the gossamer drapery and hair floating with the speed of a star through space, all picture an ideal of diaphanous loveliness that carries thought and imagination to the heights. A world and a woman are etherealized.

Nothing is so intangible as the human soul. It makes or mars the house-beautiful in which it lives its human years. It moulds, it colors, it expresses by look, word, or deed, its own quality, character, and influence. It is life. You cannot see it enter or leave the body. You may be in a throng of thousands intent on a world celebration, yet you are alone, individual, unknown and not knowing your crowd-crushing neighbor. Or you may praise God in company with the music of æolian pines on Mount Shasta, because of created glory spread beneath that mountain majesty. Your soul is in a native harmony—it thrills.

But humans live mostly on the plains of earth, not on the heights. Man is not prone to lift his eyes to the mountains from whence cometh help; eyes and mind are sadly devoted to the muck-rake. The experiences of life are doing a vital work in your soul and in that of your neighbor or nearest friend, yet neither may know the soul of the other.

Another American sculptor, an Introspective Seer, we may call him, has given to the world his thought of this universal fact, in the medium of marble. There is much of poetry in the life of every true artist, it being an attribute of the human variously and individually expressed. Therefore, in "The Solitude of the Soul," Lorado Taft has given poetic expression of the human endowment of the aloneness of soul.

The modern master struck a deep note in American art in giving form to that wonderful and suggestive group. Man—woman, of the earth earthy, and out of the clay emanates the profundity of soul, the ego man. Each figure of the group stands alone. The thought life, the emotional life is lived in individual solitude.

The soul as God-given and God-recalled is cumbered or unencumbered with the fallacies of earth—as the mind wills. "There is a natural body and there is a 48