Artist and Public Part 4

Others of our artists are going still further back in the history of art for a part of their inspiration. Mr. Brush has always been a linealist and a student of form, but his earlier canvases, admirable as they were, were those of a docile pupil of Gerome applying the thoroughness of Gerome's method to a new range of subjects and painting the American Indian as Gerome had painted the modern Egyptian. In recent years each new picture of his has shown more clearly the influence of the early Italians--each has been more nearly a symphony of pure line.

Even in purely technical matters our painters have been experimenting backward, trying to recover lost technical beauties. The last pictures of Louis Loeb were underpainted throughout in monochrome, the final colors being applied in glazes and rubbings, and to-day a number of others, landscape and figure painters, are attempting to restore and master this, the pure Venetian method, while still others, among them Emil Carlsen, are reviving the use of tempera.

But it is in our mural painting even more than elsewhere that the conservative or reactionary tendency of American painting is most clearly marked. John La Farge was always himself, but when the general movement in mural painting began in this country with the Chicago World's Fair and the subsequent decoration of the Library of Congress, the rest of us were much under the influence of Puvis de Chavannes. Even then the design was not his, but was founded on earlier examples of decorative composition, but his pale tones were everywhere. Little by little the study of the past has taught us better. American mural painting has grown steadily more monumental in design, and at the same time it has grown richer and fuller in color. To-day, while it is not less but more personal and original than it was, it has more kins.h.i.+p with the n.o.ble achievements of Raphael and Veronese than has any other modern work extant.

And this brings us to the second characteristic of the American school of painting: it is rapidly becoming a school of color. We have still plenty of painters who work in the blackish or chalky or muddy and opaque tones of modern art, but I think we have more men who produce rich and powerful color and more men who produce subtle and delicate color than any other modern school. The experiments in reviving old technical methods have been undertaken for the sake of purity and luminosity of color and have largely succeeded. The pictures of Mr.

Tarbell are far more colored than those of the European painter whose work is, in some ways, most a.n.a.logous to his, M. Joseph Bail. Mr.

Ha.s.sam's color is always sparkling and brilliant, Mr. Dewing's delicate and charming, Mr. Weir's subtle and harmonious and sometimes very full.

Even Mr. Brush's linear arrangements are clothed in sombre but often richly harmonious tones, and the decorative use of powerful color is the main reliance of such painters as Hugo Ballin. But the note of color runs through the school and one hardly needs to name individual men.

Whether our landscapists glaze and sc.u.mble with the tonalists, or use some modification of the impressionist hatching, it is for the sake of color; and even our most forthright and das.h.i.+ng wielders of the big brush often achieve a surprising power of resonant coloring.

Power, fulness, and beauty of coloring are hardly modern qualities. Much as impressionism has been praised for restoring color to a colorless art, its result has been, too often, to subst.i.tute whitishness for blackishness. Color has characterized no modern painting since that of Delacroix and Millet as it characterizes much of the best American painting. The love for and the success in color of our school is, after all, a part of its conservatism.

It may seem an odd way of praising a modern school to call it the least modern of any. It _would_ be an odd way of praising that school if its lack of modernness were a mere matter of lagging behind or of standing still and marking time. But if the "march of progress" has been down-hill--if the path that is trod leads into a swamp or over a precipice--then there may be most hopefulness for those who can 'bout face and march the other way. I have, elsewhere in this volume, given at some length some of my reasons for thinking that modern art has been following a false route and is in danger of peris.h.i.+ng in the bog or falling over the cliff. If it is so we may congratulate ourselves that those of our painters who are still following the rest of the world have not so nearly reached the end of the road, and that those who are more independent have discovered in time what that end is and have turned back.

It is because it is least that of to-day that I believe our art may be that of to-morrow--it is because it is, of all art now going, that which has most connection with the past that I hope the art of America may prove to be the art of the future.

VII

AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS[C]

[C] Address delivered before the Brooklyn Inst.i.tute of Arts and Sciences on February 22, 1908. Now revised and enlarged.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin, Ireland, on the first day of March, 1848, but was brought to America at the age of six months. His childhood and youth were pa.s.sed in the city of New York, as was a great part of his working life; and though his origin was foreign, lifelong a.s.sociations had stamped him indelibly an American. The greater part of his work was done in America; almost all of it was done for America; and I do not think it is fancy that sees in his art the expression of a distinctively American spirit. Yet from his mixed French and Irish blood he may well have derived that mingling of the Latin sense of form with a Celtic depth of sentiment which was so markedly characteristic of his genius.

His father, Bernard Paul Ernest Saint-Gaudens, was a shoemaker from the little town of Aspet in Haute-Garonne, only a few miles from the town of Saint-Gaudens, from which the family must have drawn its origin and its name. His mother was Mary McGuinness, a native of Dublin. Augustus Saint-Gaudens was one of several children born to this couple and not the only artist among them, for his younger brother Louis also attained some reputation as a sculptor, though his entire lack of ambition prevented his achieving all that was expected of him by those who knew his delicate talent. The boy Augustus attended the public schools of New York and received there all the formal education he ever had; but at thirteen it was necessary for him to face the problem of earning his living. His artistic proclivities were probably already well marked, and to give them some scope, while a.s.suring him a regular trade at which money could be earned, he was apprenticed in the good old way to a cameo cutter named Louis Avet, said to be the first man to cut stone cameos in the United States. Thus it came about that the greatest of American sculptors had much such a practical apprentices.h.i.+p as a Florentine of the fifteenth century might have had. He himself always spoke of it as "one of the most fortunate things that ever happened to him" and attributed much of his success to the habit of faithful labor acquired at this time. Probably, also, the habit of thinking in terms of relief, fostered by years of work at this ancient art, was not without influence in the moulding of his talent.

His relations with Avet lasted from 1861 to 1864, when his master quarrelled with him and abruptly dismissed him from his shop. The boy was already a determined person; he believed that he had suffered an injustice, and, though Avet went to his parents and tried to induce them to send him back, he refused to return. A new master was found for him in the person of a sh.e.l.l-cameo cutter named Jules LeBrethon, and with him Saint-Gaudens remained three years. During his six years'

apprentices.h.i.+p under his two masters the youth showed already that energy and power of will that made him what he was. He meant to be something more than an artisan, and he spent his evenings in the cla.s.ses, first of the Cooper Union, afterward of the National Academy of Design, in the hard study of drawing, the true foundation of all the fine arts. It was one of the elements of his superiority in his profession that he could draw as few sculptors can, and he always felt that he owed an especial debt to the Cooper Union, which he was glad to repay when he modelled the statue of its venerable founder. Of the other inst.i.tution by whose freely given instruction he had profited, the National Academy of Design, he became one of the most honored members.

By 1867, when he was nineteen years old, he had saved a little money and was master of a trade that could be relied on to bring in more, and he determined to go to Paris and begin the serious study of sculpture. He worked, for a time, at the Pet.i.te ecole, and entered the studio of Jouffroy in the ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1868, remaining until 1870.

During this time, and afterward, he was self-supporting, working half his time at cameo cutting until his efforts at sculpture on a larger scale began to bring in an income.

When the Franco-Prussian War broke out Paris ceased to be a place for the carrying on of the serious study of art, and Saint-Gaudens went to Rome, where his a.s.sociates were the French prizemen of the day, of whom Mercie was one. He remained there until 1874, except for a visit to New York in the winter of 1872-3 for the purpose of modelling a bust of Senator Evarts, and one or two other busts, which were put into marble upon his return to Rome. In those Roman days he executed his first statue, a "Hiawatha," one of his few studies of the nude, and a "Silence," a not very characteristic draped figure which yet fills with some impressiveness her niche at the head of the grand stairway of the Masonic Temple on Twenty-fourth Street.

From 1875 to 1877 he had a studio in New York, where he seems to have executed some of his earliest portrait reliefs. During these years he came into contact with La Farge, for whom he turned painter and aided in the execution of the decorations of Trinity Church in Boston. It was at this time, also, that he received his first commissions for important public work, those for the Farragut statue in Madison Square, the Randall at Sailors' Snug Harbor, and the angels for Saint Thomas's Church. He had married Augusta F. Homer in 1877, and in that year, taking his bride and his commissions with him, he returned to Paris, feeling, as many another young Paris-bred artist has felt, that there only could such important works be properly carried out. The "Farragut"

was completed and exhibited in the plaster at the Salon of 1880, and from that time his success was a.s.sured. For the rest of his life he was constantly busy, receiving almost more commissions for work of importance than it was possible for him to carry out. He returned to New York in 1880, and in 1881 he opened the studio in Thirty-sixth Street, where he remained for sixteen years and where so many of his greatest works were executed. From that studio came many of his exquisite portraits in relief, his caryatids and angelic figures, such as those for the Morgan tomb, so unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1882 (a fate since shared by the earlier angels of Saint Thomas's), the great statues of Lincoln and Chapin, the "Shaw Memorial," and the "Adams Memorial"; and in it was done all the preliminary work of the great equestrian monument to General Sherman.

It is in these years of his prime that he will ever be most fondly remembered by those--and they are many--who had the privilege of his friends.h.i.+p. Admittedly our foremost sculptor, and one of the founders of the Society of American Artists, he became at once a person of importance in the world of art; and as his brilliant career developed he established intimate relations.h.i.+ps with an ever-widening circle of men in every walk of life, while no one who ever knew him well can have felt anything but an abiding affection for him. That long, white studio became a familiar meeting-place for all who were interested in any form of art; and the Sunday afternoon concerts that were held there for many years will be looked back to with regret as long as any of their auditors remain alive.

This studio was given up when Saint-Gaudens went abroad for the third time, in 1897, to execute the Sherman group, and he never resumed his residence in New York. In 1885 he had purchased a property at Cornish, N.H., just across the Connecticut River from Windsor, Vt., and when he returned to this country in 1900, covered with fresh honors but an ill man, he made what had been a summer home his permanent abode. He named it Aspet, after his father's birthplace, and there he erected two studios and finished his Sherman statue. In these studios were executed the second "Lincoln," the Parnell statue for Dublin, and much other work. The larger studio was burned in 1904, but was rebuilt and the lost work re-begun and carried to a conclusion. What can never be quite replaced were two portraits of himself. A study, of the head only, in the collection of the National Academy of Design and a sketch by Will H.

Low, painted in Paris in 1877, are now the only existing portraits of him done from life in his best years. The Metropolitan Museum possesses a portrait of him in his last years, by Miss Ellen Emmet, and a replica, painted since his death, of my own earlier portrait.

From the illness he brought back from Paris in 1900 Saint-Gaudens never recovered. At times he showed something of his old vigor and was able not only to do fine work but to indulge more in out-of-door sports than he had ever done in his youth, while a growing love for nature and for literature made his life fuller, in some respects, than in the days when his own art more entirely absorbed him. But year by year his strength grew less and his intervals of freedom from pain grew shorter, and he was more and more forced to rely upon the corps of able and devoted a.s.sistants which he gathered about him. He developed to an extraordinary extent the faculty of communicating his ideas and desires to others and of producing through their hands work essentially his own and of a quality entirely beyond their ability; but it was at the cost of a strain upon brain and nerve almost infinitely greater than would have been involved in work done with his own hand. In the summer of 1906 he broke down utterly, the work of his studio was interrupted, and he ceased to see even his most intimate friends. He rallied somewhat from this attack, and began again his heroic struggle against fate, directing the work of a.s.sistants while himself so weak that he had to be carried from the house to the studio. The end came on the evening of August 3, 1907. He died as he had lived, a member of no church, but a man of pure and lofty character. As he had wished, his body was cremated, and his ashes were temporarily deposited in the cemetery at Windsor, Vt., across the river from his home. An informal funeral service was held in his private studio on August 7, attended by friends and neighbors and by a few old friends from a distance; but the gathering could include but a few of the many who felt his death as a personal loss.

The merits of Saint-Gaudens's work were fully recognized in his lifetime. He was an officer of the Legion of Honor, a Corresponding Member of the Inst.i.tute of France, a member of half a dozen academies, and the bearer of honorary degrees from the universities of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. But of all the honors he received there were two, one of a public, the other of a private nature, which he himself valued most highly: the one as showing the estimation in which his art was held by his fellow artists, the other as an evidence of the personal affection felt for him by his friends. At the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, upon the unanimous recommendation of the Jury of Fine Arts, composed of painters, sculptors, and architects, he was awarded a special diploma and medal of honor, "apart from and above all other awards," an entirely exceptional honor, which marked him as the first of American artists, as previously received honors had marked him one of the greatest sculptors of his time. On June 23, 1905, the artistic and literary colony which had gradually grown up about his home in Cornish celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his coming there by a fete and open-air masque held in the groves of Aspet. The beauty of this spectacle has become almost legendary. The altar with its columned canopy, which served for a background to the play, still stands, or recently stood, though much dilapidated by weather, as it was immortalized by the sculptor himself in a commemorative plaquette (Pl.

23) which is among the most charming of his minor works. He planned if he had lived to perpetuate it in enduring marble, and this task has now been taken up by his wife, who means to dedicate the monument as a fitting memorial to a great artist and a n.o.ble man in the place he loved as his chosen home.

Some part of the vivid and lovable personality of Augustus Saint-Gaudens must have been visible, almost at a glance, to any one who ever came in contact with him--to any one, even, who ever saw his portrait. In his spare but strong-knit figure, his firm but supple hands, his manner of carrying himself, his every gesture, one felt the abounding vitality, the almost furious energy of the man. That extraordinary head, with its heavy brow beetling above the small but piercing eyes, its red beard and crisp, wiry hair, its projecting jaw and great, strongly modelled nose, was alive with power--with power of intellect no less than of will. His lack of early education gave him a certain diffidence and a distrust of his own gifts of expression. He was apt to overrate the mere verbal facility of others and to underestimate himself in the comparison--indeed, a certain humility was strongly marked in him, even as regards his art, though he was self-confident also. When he was unconstrained his great powers of observation, his shrewdness of judgment, his bubbling humor, and a picturesque vivacity of phrase not uncommon among artists made him one of the most entrancing of talkers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.

Plate 23.--Saint-Gaudens. "Plaquette Commemorating Cornish Masque."]

Underneath his humor and his gayety, however, there lay a deep-seated Celtic melancholy, and beside his energy was an infinite patience at the service of an exacting artistic conscience. The endless painstaking of his work and the time he took over it were almost proverbial. He was twelve years engaged upon the "Shaw Memorial" and eleven upon the "Sherman," and, though he did much other work while these were in progress, yet it was his constant revision, his ever-renewed striving for perfection that kept them so long achieving. The "Diana" of the Madison Square Garden was taken down from her tower because he and the architect, Stanford White, thought her too large, and was entirely remodelled on a smaller scale. And with this patience went a gentleness, a sweetness, a delicate sensitiveness, and an abounding humanity and sympathy. He could be almost ruthless in the a.s.sertion of his will when the interests of his art or of justice seemed to demand it, yet there was a tender-heartedness in him which made it distressing to him to inflict pain on any one. The conflict of these elements in his nature sometimes made his actions seem inconsistent and indecipherable even to those who knew him. He would be long-suffering, compromising, disinclined to strike; but when he was at last roused the blow would be as staggering as it was unexpected. It was as if he struck the harder to have done with it and to spare himself the pain of striking again.

It was his whole-hearted devotion to his art which caused his rare acts of self-a.s.sertion, and it was this same devotion, no less than his natural kindliness, that made him ever helpful to younger artists who showed any promise of future worth. Even in his last days of unspeakable suffering he would summon what was left of his old strength to give a word of criticism and advice, above all, a word of commendation, to any one who needed the one or had earned the other. The essential goodness of the man was most felt by those who stood nearest him, and most of all, perhaps, by his actual coworkers. He could command, as few have been able to do, the love and devotion of his a.s.sistants. To all who knew him the man himself seemed finer, rarer, sweeter than his work, and the gap he has left in their lives will be even more impossible to fill than his place in American art.

But the personality of an artist, though he be a great one, is for the memory of his private friends. It is only as it colors his art that it is of public interest. It is his art itself, his gift to the world, that the world cares for; it is of the kind and quality of that art, the nature and the degree of its greatness, that the world wishes to hear.

Because the man was my friend I have wished to give some glimpse of the manner of man he was; because the artist was the greatest our country has produced I am to try to give some idea of his art, of the elements of its strength, and of the limitations which are as necessary as its qualities.

The time of Saint-Gaudens's study in Paris was a time of great importance in the development of modern sculpture, and, although Jouffroy was not himself a sculptor of the highest rank, his studio was a centre for what was then the new movement in the sculpture of France.

The essential thing in this movement was the abandoning of the formal imitation of second-rate antiques and the subst.i.tution of the sculpture of the Italian Renaissance as a source of inspiration and of the direct study of nature as a means of self-expression. There had always been individual sculptors of power and originality in France, but the movement of the French school of sculpture, as a whole, away from the pseudo cla.s.sicism which had long dominated it was really inaugurated by Paul Dubois only a few years before Saint-Gaudens's arrival in Paris.

Many of the men destined to a brilliant part in the history of modern sculpture were trained in the _atelier_ of Jouffroy. Falguiere and Saint-Marceau had but just left that studio when the young American entered it, and Mercie was his fellow student there. Dalou and Rodin have since made these men seem old-fas.h.i.+oned and academic, but they were then, and for many years afterward, the heads of the new school; and of this new school, so different from anything he had known in America, Saint-Gaudens inevitably became a part. His own p.r.o.nounced individuality, and perhaps his comparative isolation during the years of his greatest productivity, gave his art a character of its own, unlike any other, but to the French school of sculpture of the third quarter of the nineteenth century he essentially belonged.

Of course, his style was not formed in a moment. His "Hiawatha" seems, to-day, much such a piece of neo-cla.s.sicism as was being produced by other men in the Rome of that time, and the "Silence," though somewhat more modern in accent, is an academic work such as might have been expected from a docile pupil of his master. The relief of angels for the reredos of Saint Thomas's Church is the earliest important work which shows his personal manner. It was undertaken in collaboration with John La Farge, and perhaps the influence of La Farge, and of that eminently picturesque genius Stanford White, mingled with that of the younger French school in forming its decorative and almost pictorial character.

It was a kind of improvisation, done at prodigious speed and without study from nature--a sketch rather than a completed work of art, but a sketch to be slowly developed into the reliefs of the Farragut pedestal, the angels of the Morgan tomb, the caryatids of the Vanderbilt mantelpiece, and, at length, into such a masterpiece as the "Amor-Caritas." In each of these developments the work becomes less picturesque and more formal, the taste is purified, the exuberance of decorative feeling is more restrained. The final term is reached in the caryatids for the Albright Gallery at Buffalo--works of his last days, when his hands were no longer able to shape the clay, yet essentially his though he never touched them; works of an almost austere n.o.bility of style, the most grandly monumental figures he ever produced.

The commonest criticism on Saint-Gaudens's art has been that it is not, primarily, sculptural in its inspiration; and, in a sense, the criticism is justified. One need not, perhaps, greatly care whether it is true or not. It is, after all, only a matter of definition, and if we were forbidden to call his work sculpture at all and required to find another name for it, the important fact that it is art--art of the finest, the most exquisite, at times the most powerful--would in no wise be altered.

Ghiberti went beyond the traditions of sculpture in relief, introduced perspective into his compositions, modelled trees and rocks and clouds and cast them in bronze, made pictures, if you like, instead of reliefs.

Does any one care? Is it not enough that they are beautiful pictures?

The gates of the Baptistry of Florence are still worthy, as the greatest sculptor since the Greeks thought them, to be the gates of paradise. A work of art remains a work of art, call it what you please, and a thing of beauty will be a joy forever, whether or not you can pigeonhole it in some ready-made category. After all, the critical pigeonholes are made for the things, not the things for the pigeonholes. The work is there, and if it does not fit your preconceived definition the fault is as likely to be in the definition as in the work itself.

And the first and most essential thing to note about the art of Augustus Saint-Gaudens is that it is always art of the purest--free in an extraordinary degree from the besetting sins of naturalism and the scientific temper on the one hand and of the display of cleverness and technical brilliancy on the other. Never more than in our own day have these been the great temptations of an able artist: that he should in the absorption of study forget the end in the means and produce demonstrations of anatomy or of the laws of light rather than statues or pictures; or that he should, in the joy of exercising great talents, seem to say, "See how well I can do it!" and invent difficulties for the sake of triumphantly resolving them, becoming a virtuoso rather than a creator. Of the meaner temptation of mere sensationalism--the desire to attract attention by ugliness and eccentricity lest one should be unable to secure it by truth and beauty--one need not speak. It is the temptation of vulgar souls. But great and true artists have yielded, occasionally or habitually, to these other two; Saint-Gaudens never does. I know no work of his to which raw nature has been admitted, in which a piece of study has been allowed to remain as such without the moulding touch of art to subdue it to its place; and I know only one which has any spice of bravura--the Logan statue--and the bravura is there because the subject seemed to demand it, not because the artist wished it. The dash and glitter are those of "Black Jack Logan," not of Saint-Gaudens. The sculptor strove to render them as he strove to render higher qualities at other times, but they remain antipathetic to his nature, and the statue is one of the least satisfactory of his works. He is essentially the artist--the artificer of beauty--ever bent on the making of a lovely and significant thing; and the study of nature and the resources of his craft are but tools and are never allowed to become anything more.

If, then, the accusation that Saint-Gaudens's art is not sculptural means that he was a designer rather than a modeller, that he cared for composition more than for representation, that the ensemble interested him more than the details, I would cheerfully admit that the accusation is well founded. Such marvels of rendering as Rodin could give us, before he lost himself in the effort to deserve that reputation as a profound thinker which has been thrust upon him, were not for Saint-Gaudens. The modelling of the _morceau_ was not particularly his affair. The discrimination of hard and soft, of bone and muscle and integument, the expression of tension where a fleshy tissue is tightly drawn over the framework beneath, or of weight where it falls away from it--these were not the things that most compelled his interest or in which he was most successful. For the human figure as a figure, for the inherent beauty of its marvellous mechanism, he did not greatly care.

The problems of bulk and ma.s.s and weight and movement which have occupied sculptors from the beginning were not especially his problems.

It may have been due to the nature of the commissions he received that, after the "Hiawatha" of his student days, he modelled no nude except the "Diana" of the tower--a purely decorative figure, designed for distant effect, in which structural modelling would have been out of place because invisible. But it was not accident that in such draped figures as the "Amor-Caritas" (Pl. 24) or the caryatids of the Vanderbilt mantelpiece there is little effort to make the figure visible beneath the draperies. In the hands of a master of the figure--of one of those artists to whom the expressiveness and the beauty of the human structure is all in all--drapery is a means of rendering the ma.s.ses and the movement of the figure more apparent than they would be in the nude. In such works as these it is a thing beautiful in itself, for its own ripple and flow and ordered intricacy. The figure is there beneath the drapery, but the drapery is expressive of the mood of the artist and of the sentiment of the work rather than especially explanatory of the figure.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.

Plate 24.--Saint-Gaudens. "Amor Caritas."]

First of all, by nature and by training, Saint-Gaudens was a designer, and exquisiteness of design was the quality he most consciously strove for--the quality on which he expended his unresting, unending, persevering toil. From the start one feels that design is his princ.i.p.al preoccupation, that he is thinking mainly of the pattern of the whole, its decorative effect and play of line, its beauty of ma.s.ses and s.p.a.ces, its fitness for its place and its surroundings; in a word, its composition. In the beginning, as a workman in the shop of the cameo cutter, he was concerned with a kind of art in which perfection of composition is almost the sole claim to serious consideration. Then he produces a multiplicity of small reliefs, dainty, exquisite, infallibly charming in their arrangement--things which are so dependent on design for their very existence that they seem scarcely modelled at all. He goes on to decorative figures in the round, to heroic statues, to monumental groups, but always it is design that he thinks of first and last--design, now, in three dimensions rather than in two--design properly sculptural rather than pictorial, in so much as it deals with bosses and concaves, with solid matter in s.p.a.ce--but still design. This power of design rises to higher uses as time goes on, is bent to the interpretation of lofty themes and the expression of deep emotions, but it is in its nature the same power that produced the delicate, ethereal beauty of the reliefs. The infinite fastidiousness of a master designer, constantly reworking and readjusting his design, that every part shall be perfect and that no fold or spray of leaf.a.ge shall be out of its proper place, never satisfied that his composition is beyond improvement while an experiment remains untried--this is what cost him years of labor. His first important statue, the "Farragut," is a masterpiece of restrained and elegant yet original and forceful design--a design, too, that includes the pedestal and the bench below, and of which the figures in bas-relief are almost as important a part as the statue itself. In later and maturer work, with a more clarified taste and a deeper feeling, he can reach such unsurpa.s.sable expressiveness of composition as is shown in the "Shaw Memorial" or the great equestrian statue of Sherman.

Saint-Gaudens's mastery of low relief was primarily a matter of this power of design, but it was conditioned also upon two other qualities: knowledge of drawing and extreme sensitiveness to delicate modulation of surface. And by drawing I mean not merely knowledge of form and proportion and the exact rendering of these, in which sense a statue may be said to be well drawn if its measurements are correct--I mean that much more subtle and difficult art, the rendering in two dimensions only of the appearance of objects of three dimensions. Sculpture in the round is the simplest and, in a sense, the easiest of the arts. It deals with actual form--a piece of sculpture does not merely look like the form of an object, it _is_ the form of an object. Leaving out of the count, for the moment, the refinements and the illusions which may be added to it--which must be added to it to make it art--it is the reproduction in another material of the actual forms of things. Something which shall answer for it, to the uninitiate, may be produced by merely casting natural objects; and there is a great deal that is called sculpture which scarcely aims at anything more than the production, by a more difficult method, of something like a plaster cast from nature. It is the very simplicity of the art that makes its difficulty, for to avoid the look of casting and achieve the feeling of art requires the most delicate handling and the most powerful inspiration, and there is need in the art of sculpture for the rarest qualities of the greatest minds.

The art of drawing is entirely different. It is all illusion, it deals only in appearances. Its aim is to depict on a flat surface the aspect of objects supposed to stand behind it and to be seen through it, and its means are two branches of the science of optics. It is based on the study of perspective and on the study of the way light falls upon objects and reveals their shapes and the direction of their surfaces by the varying degrees of their illumination. Of this art a sculptor in the round need not necessarily know anything, and, in fact, many of them, unfortunately, know altogether too little of it. The maker of a statue need not think about foreshortenings: if he gives the correct form the foreshortening will take care of itself. Sometimes it does so in a disastrous manner! Theoretically he need not worry over light and shade, although of course he does, in practice, think about it and rely upon it, more or less. If he gives the true forms they will necessarily have the true light and shade. But low relief, standing between sculpture and drawing, is really more closely related to drawing than to sculpture--is really a kind of drawing--and this is why so few sculptors succeed in it.

It is a kind of drawing but an exceedingly difficult kind--the most delicate and difficult of any of the arts that deal with form alone. As to the contour, it stands on the same ground with drawing in any other material. The linear part of it requires exactly the same degree and the same kind of talent as linear design with a pen or with a burin. But for all that stands within the contour, for the suggestion of interior forms and the illusion of solidity, it depends on means of the utmost subtlety. It exists, as all drawing does, by light and shade, but the shadows are not produced by the mere darkening of the surface--they are produced by projections and recessions, by the inclination of the planes away from or toward the light. The lower the relief the more subtle and tender must be the variation of the surface which produces them, and therefore success in relief is one of the best attainable measures of a sculptor's fineness of touch and perfection of craftsmans.h.i.+p. But as the light and shade is produced by actual forms which are yet quite unlike the true forms of nature, it follows that the artist in relief can never imitate either the shape or the depth of the shadow he sees in nature.

His art becomes one of suggestions and equivalents--an art which can give neither the literal truth of form nor the literal truth of aspect--an art at the farthest remove from direct representation. And success in it becomes, therefore, one of the best tests of a sculptor's artistry--of his ability to produce essential beauty by the treatment of his material, rather than to imitate successfully external fact.

As the degree of relief varies, also, from the lowest possible to that highest relief which, nearly approaches sculpture in the round, the problems involved constantly vary. At each stage there is a new compromise to be made, a new adjustment to find, between fact and illusion, between the real form and the desired appearance. And there may be a number of different degrees of relief in the same work, even in different parts of the same figure, so that the art of relief becomes one of the most complicated and difficult of arts. It has not, indeed, the added complication of color, but neither has it the resources of color, success in which will more or less compensate for failure elsewhere. There is no permissible failure in bas-relief, any more than in sculpture in the round, and its difficulties are far greater. Nothing but truest feeling, completest knowledge, consummate skill will serve.

This explanation may give some measure of what I mean when I say that I believe Augustus Saint-Gaudens the most complete master of relief since the fifteenth century.

He has produced a series of works which run through the whole range of the art, from lowest relief to highest; from things of which the relief is so infinitesimal that they seem as if dreamed into existence rather than wrought in bronze or marble to things which are virtually engaged statues; from things which you fear a chance touch might brush away, like a pastel of Whistler's, to things as solid and enduring in appearance as in actual material. And in all these things there is the same inevitable mastery of design and of drawing, the same infinite resource and the same technical perfection. The "Butler Children" (Pl.