Active service in the Great War gave Sergeant Jagger an unparalleled insight into the realities of war. Awarded the Military Cross for gallantry, he was shot through the shoulder at Gallipoli and later gassed in the trenches and wounded once again in Flanders. Near the end of the Great War, he was appointed Official War Artist by the Ministry of Information.
Years ago. I came across his book Modelling & Sculpture in the Making. There are precious few text books on sculpture that date from the first half of the last century, and even fewer that have been published more recently. One thing that most of the early volumes have in common is lyrical content.
The author’s introductory notes to the student reader read as follows:
Before embarking on the main purpose of this book - the making of sculpture - I would like to say a few words of warning to the student-reader who, either from mere choice, natural inclination or environment, has selected the profession of sculpture as his career in life.
He has chosen the most exacting, the most arduous, and the least appreciated of all the arts. Financially, the future will be a gamble, with the odds against him. Physically, he will need to be strong, because his mistress is without mercy and will demand every ounce of vitality he possesses and more, If sculpture in its biggest sense is his ambition, he must be prepared to spend a year upon a single work, and when finished hear it damned, and - what is infinitely worse - know in his own heart it is damned.
Each new work upon which he embarks will hold forth the promise of successful and satisfying achievement. The end may be disappointment, bordering upon despair, for no real sculptor ever derived pleasure from his completed work. It is a will-o’-the- wisp which will elude him to the end of his days, ever beckoning but ever retreating.
All this he must be prepared for, but in the full assurance that if he faithfully serves his mistress to whom he has sworn allegiance, she will in her own way repay a thousand fold, In return for the misery, fatigue and despair of which he may have more than his share, she will fill his whole life with an absorbing passion to which all other worldly joys will minister as a foil. She will shield him with a coat of mail against which the shafts of adversity spend themselves in vain.
It may be, indeed, she will shower upon her faithful servant the golden awards of life in abundance, but always heartbreak and ecstasy march together in her train. What she first demands is a deep and sincere study of, and a capacity to reproduce, the beauteous forms of nature as they are, before launching forth into the joys of that final and culminating phase - self expression. She will likewise demand the skill of the master craftsman which will ultimately represent for her the self-created shapes and forms of the brain, He who faithfully performs her bidding will know happiness granted to but a few. When body and soul are satiated. or have outlived the pleasures and diversions of life, she - his mistress - will still be by his side, filling his imagination with pictures of loveliness, She alone will remain with him to the grave.
Than this, no man can want more.
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