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Frederic Remington wasn’t any impressionist either; and so far as I can learn he didn’t have a cubiform idea in stock. When Remington painted an Indian on a pony it was a regular Indian and a regular pony–not one of those cotton-batting things with fat legs that an impressionist slaps on to a canvas and labels a horse. You could smell the lathered sweat on the pony’s hide and feel the dust of the dry prairie tickling your nostrils. You could see the slide of the horse’s withers and watch the play of the naked Indian’s arm muscles. I should like to enroll as a charter member of a league of Americans who believe that Frederic Remington and Howard Pyle were greater painters than any Old Master that ever turned out blistered saints and fly-blown cherubim. And if every one who secretly thinks the same way about it would only join in–of course they wouldn’t, but if they would–we’d be strong enough to elect a president on a platform calling for a prohibitive tariff against the foreign-pauper-labor Old Masters of Europe.

While we were about it our league could probably do something in the interests of sculpture. It is apparent to any fair-minded person that sculpture has been very much overdone in this country. It seems to us there should be a law against perpetuating any of our great men in marble or bronze or stone or amalgam fillings until after he has been dead a couple of hundred years, and by that time a fresh crop ought to be coming on and probably we shall have lost the desire to create such statues.

A great man who cannot live in the affectionate and grateful memories of his fellow countrymen isn’t liable to live if you put up statues of him; that, however, is not the main point.

The artistic aspect is the thing to consider. So few of our great men have been really pretty to look at. Andrew Jackson made a considerable dent in the history of his period, but when it comes to beauty, there isn’t a floor-walker in a department store anywhere that hasn’t got him backed clear off the pedestal. In addition to that, the sort of clothes we’ve been wearing for the last century or so do not show up especially well in marble. Putting classical draperies on our departed solons has been tried, but carving a statesman with only a towel draped over him, like a Roman senator coming out of a Turkish bath, is a departure from the real facts and must be embarrassing to his shade. The greatest celebrities were ever the most modest of men. I’ll bet the spirit of the Father of His Country blushes every time he flits over that statue of himself alongside the Capitol at Washington–the one showing him sitting in a bath cabinet with nothing on but a sheet.

Sticking to the actual conditions doesn’t seem to help much either. Future generations will come and stand in front of the statue of a leader of thought who flourished back about 1840, say, and wonder how anybody ever had feet like those and lived. Horace Greeley’s chin whiskers no doubt looked all right on Horace when he was alive, but when done in bronze they invariably present a droopy not to say dropsical appearance; and the kind of bone-handled umbrella that Daniel Webster habitually carried has never yet been successfully worked out in marble. When you contemplate the average statue of Lincoln–and most of them, as you may have noticed, are very average–you do not see there the majesty and the grandeur and the abiding sorrow of the man and the tragedy of his life. At least I know I do not see those things. I see a pair of massive square-toed boots, such as I’m sure Father Abe never wore–he couldn’t have worn ’em and walked a step–and I see a beegum hat weighing a ton and a half, and I say to myself: “This is not the Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves and penned the Gettysburg address. No, sir! A man with those legs would never have been president–he’d have been in a dime museum exhibiting his legs for ten cents a look–and they’d have been worth the money too.”

Nobody seems to have noticed it, but we undoubtedly had the cube form of expression in our native sculpture long before it came out in painting.

To get a better idea of what I’m trying to drive at, just take a trip up through Central Park the next time you are in New York and pause a while before those bronzes of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns which stand on the Mall. They are called bronzes, but to me they always looked more like castings. I don’t care if you are as Scotch as a haggis, I know in advance what your feelings will be. If you decide that these two men ever looked in life like those two bronzes you are going to lose some of your love and veneration for them right there on the spot; or else you are going to be filled with an intense hate for the persons who have libeled them thus, after they were dead and gone and not in position to protect themselves legally. But you don’t necessarily have to come to New York–you’ve probably got some decoration in your home town that is equally sad. There’ve been a lot of good stone-masons spoiled in this country to make enough sculptors to go round.

But while we are thinking these things about art and not daring to express them, I take note that new schools may come and new schools may go, but there is one class of pictures that always gets the money and continues to give general satisfaction among the masses.

I refer to the moving pictures.