Читать книгу Ten Years in Washington: Inside Life and Scenes in Our National Capital as a Woman Sees Them - Mary Clemmer - Страница 13

Table of Contents

The Famous Bronze Doors—The Capitol Grounds—Statue of Washington Criticised—Peculiar Position for “the Father of his Country”—Horace Greenough’s Defence of the Statue—Picturesque Scenery Around the Capitol—The City and Suburbs—The Public Reservation—The Smithsonian Institution—The Potomac and the Hights of Arlington.

We come back to the grand vestibule of the southern wing, to the flowering magnolias, tobacco and corn-leaves of the marble capitals, and pass out to the great portico. This is one of the famous bronze doors designed by Rogers, and cast in Munich. How heavy, slow, and still, its swing! The other opens and closes upon the central door of the north wing, leading to the vestibule of the Senate.

Here, from the portico we look out upon the eastern grounds of the Capitol in the unsullied panoply of a June morning, across the closely shorn grass, the borders of roses and beds of flowers, through the vista of maples with their green arcade of light and shadow, to the august form of George Washington sitting in the centre of the grounds in a lofty cerule chair mounted on a pedestal of granite twelve feet high.

This is the grandest and most criticised work of art about the Capitol. The form being nude to the waist and the right arm outstretched, it is a current vulgar joke that he is reaching out his hand for his clothes which are on exhibition in a case at the Patent Office. It is true that a sense of personal discomfort seems to emanate from the drapery—or lack of it—and the posé of this colossal figure. George Washington with his right arm outstretched, his left forever holding up a Roman sword, half naked, yet sitting in a chair, beneath bland summer skies, within a veiling screen of tender leaves is a much more comfortable looking object than when the winds and rains and snows of winter beat upon his unsheltered head and uncovered form. This statue was designed in imitation of the antique statue of Jupiter Tonans. The ancients made their statues of Jupiter naked above and draped below as being visible to the gods but invisible to men. But the average American citizen, being accustomed to seeing the Father of his country decently attired in small clothes, naturally receives a shock at first beholding him in next to no clothes at all. It is impossible for him to reconcile a Jupiter in sandals with the stately George Washington in knee-breeches and buckled shoes. The spirit of the statue, which is ideal, militates against the spirit of the land which is utilitarian if not commonplace.

Nevertheless, in poetry of feeling, in grandeur of conception, in exquisite fineness of detail and in execution, Horatio Greenough’s statue of George Washington is transcendently the greatest work in marble yet wrought at the command of the government for the Capitol. It is scarcely human, certainly not American, but it is godlike. The face is a perfect portrait of Washington. The veining of a single hand, the muscles of a single arm are triumphs of art.

Washington’s chair is twined with acanthus leaves and garlands of flowers. The figure of Columbus leans against the back of the seat to the left, connecting the history of America with that of Europe; an Indian chief on the right represents the condition of the country at the time of its discovery. The back of the seat is ornamented in basso-relievo with the rising sun, the crest of the American arms, under which is this motto: “Magnus ab integro sæculorum nascitur ordo.” On the left is sculptured in bas-relief the genii of North and South America under the forms of the infant Hercules strangling the serpent, and Iphiclus stretched on the ground shrinking in fear from the contest. The motto is “Incipe posse puer cui non risere parentes.” On the back of the seat is the following motto: “Simulacrum istud ad magnum Libertatis exemplum. Nec sine ipsa duraturum.”

One of the greatest works of contemporary art, the masterpiece of a master, it has been the subject of more rude and vulgar jests than any other piece of American sculpture. The painful disparity which so often exists between the judgment of the multitude and the inspiration of the creator has never been more touchingly illustrated than in the following words of Horatio Greenough, concerning this monument to his own genius and to the Father of his country. He says: “It is the birth of my thoughts, I have sacrificed to it the flower of my days, and the freshness of my strength; its every lineament has been moistened with the sweat of my toil and the tears of my exile. I would not barter away its association with my name for the proudest fortune that avarice ever dreamed of. In giving it up to the nation that has done me the honor to order it at my hands, I respectfully claim for it that protection which is the boast of civilization to afford art, and which a generous enemy has more than once been seen to extend even to the monuments of its own defeat.”

Retracing our steps to the rotunda, we turn westward through the main hall of the Congressional Library to the lofty colonnade outside, from whose balcony we look down upon the view which Humbolt declared to be the most beautiful of its type in the whole world. Directly below us, past the western terrace of the Capitol, with its open basin full of gold fishes flashing in the sun, stretch the Capitol grounds. Many varieties of trees already grown to forest hight spread their interlacing roof of cool, green shadow over the malachite sward below. Beds of flowers set in the grass, from the early March crocuses to the November blooming roses, make the grounds fragrant and precious with their presence. Here the dandelion spreads its cloth of gold in early May. Here the chrysanthemums fringe the snow with pallid gold in white December. Now the fountains are lapsing in dreamy tune through the long June hours, and the seats under the trees are filled with visitors. Nurses with children in their arms, old men and women leaning on their staffs, lovers “billing and cooing” through the long twilight and starlight seasons. Beyond spreads the city, every ugly outline hidden and lost in a waving sea of greenery rippling and tossing above it. The great avenues run and radiate in all directions. Pennsylvania Avenue stretches straight on between its border of shade trees to its acropolis one mile distant, the great Treasury gleaming in the sun, and the white chimneys of the Executive Mansion peering above the trees; and still on, till it joins the primitive streets of Georgetown. Massachusetts Avenue, broad, straight, magnificent, spans the city from end to end unbroken. Virginia Avenue to the left, goes on to meet Long Bridge, leading far into the Old Dominion. Directly in front stretches the public reservation yet to be made splendid as the Nation’s Boulevards, but already holding the Congressional gardens and conservatories, the unique towers, and picturesque grounds of the Smithsonian Institution, the broad flower-banded terraces of the Agricultural Department, and the incomplete Washington Monument. Beyond we see the wide Potomac, flecked all over with snowy sails, far down old Alexandria, dingy on its farther shore; opposite the Heights of Arlington, and amid its immemorial oaks; Arlington House with the stars and stripes floating free from its crowning summit.