Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1908 (Heft 21))

somehow the statue was not yet finished, and the ship finally left without it.
A few months later when the task was accomplished to the artist’s own
satisfaction, and all the sculptors of Rome had journeyed into the Campagna
to see it, it fell upon Donoghue to defray the expenses of shipment, only to
find out when he had brought it over, that for some reason or other it had
been judged too unwieldy for exhibition. The sculptor’s resources had been
completely exhausted, and the colossal “Spirit,” perhaps the most important
work ever produced by an American sculptor, moldered away unseen on a
Brooklyn wharf, and finally was broken to pieces.
It was one of the most tragic incidents that has ever occurred in
American art.
It would be too pitiful to dwell upon his utter disillusionment. May
it suffice to state that he never recovered from this blow. He saw the abso-
lute uselessness of making further efforts to realize his ideals, and gave it up
in despair. With the exception of an Iris, and a few charming composites
tinted like Tanagra figures, nothing left his studio worthy of his name. He
received a few commercial orders, he struggled hard with them, and his
“St. Paul” for the Congressional Library was quite an able work,but the archi-
tect did not approve of it, and he was forced to mutilate it. He finally lost
all interest in sculpture, he lost himself in mysticism, wrote a book on
religious symbols, began to paint, and worked on a scientific system of culti-
vating the human voice for singing. I met him from time to time, and
noticed with alarm how rapidly he was sinking. Without friends and
influence, living in narrow circumstances, he seemed to have lost all faith in
the world and, what was worse, in himself. Wearily the years dragged by,
middle age advanced slowly and surely, and with it the last call of the senses
that rises in a man and makes him brim with the desires of youth and its
stress of passion before its slumbering quiet. But it did not urge him on to
new endeavor, it found him a tired man with a disordered vision, the outlook
of the future all blurred by the calamities of his past.
He had done all he could. It was up to the other side, the public.
And as no response was forthcoming, it was a futile quest.
And so it came to pass that he was found one morning with a bullet in
his left temple on the shores of Lake Whitney near New Haven.
Yes, Donoghue's life was a failure, and the sole cause of it was that he
would not or could not conform, like St. Gaudens, his great contemporary,
to the demands of his time. One day when I expressed my astonishmentv*
to St. Gaudens that he had submitted to the ridiculous accusations of the
impropriety of his World’s Fair Medal instead of flinging it into the face of
his critics, he answered that the sculptor's vocation was not so much to raise
himself above the narrow lines that contemporary conditions have so tightly
drawn around American art, but rather to accomplish some good, conscien-
tious work within these limitations; and I have since then realized the truth
ofhis remark. A man with an ideal is apt to lose the wide view that looks
at life as a whole. He forgets that you and I and he himself, and each liv-
ing man and woman, is but a bit of color, red or gray, as that may be, of the

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