, or creaking and
cracking trees that he loved, and facing the setting sun, and alone in
a secluded corner, just the place he would have chosen, there are the
head and shoulders of the real Bismarck. Here for once he has escaped
the fussy attentions of the artistry that he detested. Lehnbach, who
painted Bismarck so many scores of times, never gave him the color
that his face kept all through life, and with the exception of this
bust, of the scores of Bismarck memorials one sees all commiserate the
lack of artist ability; they do not commemorate Bismarck. If this is
what they do to the greatest man in their history, what is to be
expected elsewhere? What has poor Joachim Friedrich done that he
should pose forever in the Sieges Allee as an intoxicated hitching-post?
What, indeed, have his companions done that they should stand in
two rows there, studies in contortion, with a gilded Russian dancer
with wings at one end of their line, and a woodeny Roland at the
other? But there they are, simpering a paltry patriotism, insipid as
history and ridiculous as art. What has become of Lessing, and
Winckelmann, and Goethe, and their teachings? Is this the price that a
nation must pay for its industrial progress?

The German, with all his boasting about the "centre of culture," has
not discovered that the beauty of antiquity is the expression of those
virtues which were useful at the time of Theseus, as Stendhal rightly
tells us. Individual force, which was everything of old, amounts to
almost nothing in our modern civilization. The monk who invented
gunpowder modified sculpture; strength is only necessary now among
subalterns. No one thinks of asking whether Frederick the Great and
Napoleon were good swordsmen. The strength we admire, is the strength
of Napoleon advancing alone upon the First Battalion of the royal
troops near Lake Loffrey in March, 1815; that is strength of soul. The
moral qualities with which we are concerned are no longer the same as
in the days of the Greeks. Before this cockney sculpture was planned,
there should have been a closer study of the history and philosophy of
art in Berlin.

It is true that we in America are living in a glass house to some
extent in these matters, but where in all Germany is there any modern
sculpture to compare with our Nathan Hale, our Minute Man, and that
most spirited bit of modern plastic art in all the world, the Shaw
Monument in Boston? You cannot stand in front of it wit