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Lead garden statuary is experiencing a 
deserved vogue in America. Marian C. 
Coffin, landscape architect 
Statuary in the Small Garden 
(Continued from page 29 ) 
its surroundings ? Is there any kind of 
sympathy, obvious or subtle, between 
the sculptor’s thought and the lives and 
loves and aspirations of those who live 
with it, or is it as remote from them as 
the Group of the Laocoon?” 
Or to put the same idea in a different 
way, “Was the sculptor thinking of an 
American yard with trees, bushes, grass 
and flowers, or was he trying merely to 
express in human shape his sense of 
beauty, or strength or speed? Was he 
trying to personify some abstract idea, 
or to make a figure which would em¬ 
phasize and vivify the lines of some 
building?” 
It is fortunate that many sculptors 
are now at work in the spirit of the 
ancients in so far as they are trying to 
express the sentiment of their times, 
the ideas with which they are most 
familiar. As a consequence, instead of 
making fauns or Minervas, they are 
modeling modern men, women and 
children with such poetic atmosphere as 
they are able to give them. Many 
fountains, sundials and other garden ob¬ 
jects are designed with the human mo¬ 
tive by artists honestly trying to find 
the true and harmonious note. We 
have Yankee boys, girls, children, dogs, 
br’er rabbits, frogs, birds, toadstools and 
so on in sculpture. It looks as though 
in time our industrious garden sculptors 
would buUd us up a mythology of their 
own invention. 
This human touch is the best hope 
we have for the popularizing of sculp¬ 
ture in gardens. Things that used to 
be human in the days of Greece and 
Rome, figures of classical tradition, are 
so identified in the average mind with 
compositions of costly and ambitious 
character, that it is difficult or impos¬ 
sible to acclimate them in the unpre¬ 
tentious yards of an immense democ¬ 
racy. 
In time, this very democracy will de¬ 
velop an art of its own. Just now we 
must imagine and create statuary that 
will be as proper and indigenous to our 
landscape as an Aphrodite rising out of 
a pool is a fitting complement to a 
shaded garden in Rome. 
Gothic Statuary as Decorations 
(Continued from page 44 ) 
Christianity. But it went to such ex¬ 
tremes that the English people arose 
against it, overthrew it, and, in reaction, 
reverted in worse degree to the frailties 
and vices of the Stuarts, so that, after 
the fall of Cromwell, England was 
plunged under Charles II into an era of 
excesses that left a blight on English 
history and on English literature. 
During this reaction the Puritan, with 
his dolorous face and his austere mind, 
became the most hated thing in the 
realm. So unpleasant did the nation 
make it for him, and so bitterly did it 
persecute him, that he sought refuge on 
the bleak coast of New England. The 
iron that entered his soul became dear 
to him, one of the elemental things of 
which he was proud. Its reflex has per¬ 
meated American life and American de¬ 
velopment generally for more than three 
centuries and has become a part of the 
American tradition. 
Now Gothic art was an expression of 
the simplicity and the austerity of the 
Middle Ages, harking back to the times 
which the Puritan wished to see re¬ 
stored. The parallel reaches down 
through the ages and makes the Gothic 
feeling instinctively understood in 
America. 
But there is a vast deal more to 
Gothic art than there is simply in the 
applicability of its spirit to the Amer¬ 
ican character. It has just about lived 
down the two great calumnies with 
which its reputation was blighted in the 
19 th Century—one a calumny of friend¬ 
ship, the other a calumny of dislike. 
The first libel came from the fact that 
the Romanticists (or Decadents, if you 
like) claimed Medieval art as something 
of their very own, and thereby gave it 
an undeserved reputation for being 
sickly, plaintive and effeminate. The 
second came from the contention of its 
enemies, that it was stiff, formal and 
unreal—a view that is the direct oppo¬ 
site of the truth. 
Two things have combined to set 
Gothic style aright in the world—the 
growth of art appreciation in general, 
which has enabled people to discern 
that which is truly beautiful and simple 
and expressive from that which is the¬ 
atrical and ornate, and the way in which 
its architectural beauty has been util- 
(Continued from page 90 ) 
