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Ward had in his nature and in his art the great elements of the precursor. He represents not only the pioneer in American sculpture, but in no small measure and sometimes in a singular way, the prophet. Witness the dog with scalloped mane in his admirable group of the Indian Hunter, a work that much impressed the youthful Saint-Gaudens, fresh from years of study among European masters and masterpieces. Here we have a fore-taste of that delightful treatment of animal form found in the bronzes of the young men from the American Academy in Rome. To be sure, Ward's dog does not seem to spring forward full-armed in a beautifully conventionalized linear panoply of bone and muscle resurrected from some newly revealed Klazomenian sarcophagus; he is not quite so Cretanly curled as some of the appealing animal figures of to-day, but 'tis enough, 't will serve. And the whole group, as seen happily placed in Central Park, reveals the naturalism in which Ward envelops his own peculiar kind of classicism. For a nobler instance of Ward's forward-looking quality, choose the bronze Washington standing on the steps of the Sub-Treasury in New York, in the very heart of all our heart-breaking yet inspiring financial traffic. That statue is not merely a portrait of Washington, but a symbolic expression of early American greatness in leadership.

A comparison between the Ward Washington and the Houdon Washington is permitted here; Houdon's position as a commanding figure among the sculptors of all time is too securely based on his incomparable busts and on his Voltaire at the Com?die-Fran?aise to be in the least disturbed by any of our observations. Remembering that Ward's task was naturally less difficult than Houdon's, we shall do no injustice to our earliest foreign master in sculpture when we remark that Ward's Washington, rather than Houdon's, bears away the palm for the larger monumental qualities of design. The great Frenchman's work is cumbered from the waist down with naturalistic emblems from field and forum. Neither ploughshare nor fasces nor cane nor sword nor cloak are omitted. Their insistence is of course redeemed in general by Houdon's general mastery, and in particular by his particular prowess in rendering the head; it is Houdon's glory that in some inexplicable way his hand makes every face it touches come alive. Ward's statue, appearing almost a century later, owes something to Houdon; every portrait statue of Washington, if worth much, will owe something to Houdon. But what we would especially note is, that in this virile presentment of Washington, Ward has chosen the better part of both realism and classicism; The work has something of the serenity of synthesis and elimination of detail that we love in the Parthenon masterpieces, yet it has enough of modern individualism and modern insistence upon expression and emotion to satisfy the longings of the everyday American spectator.

Our reference to the super-symbolism in Houdon's Washington leads us to the observation that to-day, taken by and large, French monumental art suffers enormously from emblematic excrescences. What scales of justice and of mermaids, what pinions of angels and eagles and doves, what garlands and garters and gaiters, what palettes and portfolios, what seines and scrolls and T-squares have been gathered together in the French marketplaces as candidates for immortality! And what complication of silhouette, what lack of massing in light and shade, have resulted thereby! This paradox of the over-explained wrongs the clear French mind, the intuitive French eye. How is it in our own country? But I studiously avoid breathing any word here of any lesson for our own sculptors. It is enough to point out that a healthy, if high-strung, revolt against all this easy offhand grab-bag naturalistic symbolism will not only bring in its train the sculpture of serious protest; it will also pick up on its fringes plenty of those tongue-in-cheek specimens of so-called sculpture familiar in our century. From Rodin's candle-lit and blanketed Balzac of the previous generation down to the latest Greenwich Village absurdity, in which human portraiture once more achieves its apotheosis on the surface of an egg, such revolt is visible. It is of course a revolt against many things besides an overdone symbolism; but the symbolism may well serve as a symbol for the rest. All honor then to the austerity of Ward's Washington.

As Ward in his youth worked for an older man, so he himself in his later years had the good fortune to meet the newer ideals in his art through collaboration with younger sculptors. Mr. Bartlett's sympathetic assistance is apparent in the Stock Exchange pediment, and in the equestrian statue of General Hancock, for Fairmount Park. This last was the work that engaged Ward's thought to the very day of his death. But nowhere shall we study Ward better than in the statue of Washington. Here we see this sculptor as he himself would wish to be seen; a sculptor of mankind at its most heroic, for mankind at its daily average. "Our work," he often said, "must touch the ordinary human heart." His rugged, straightforward genius was not suited for revealing the more exquisite aspects of beauty, the more whimsical secrets of the soul. Never fear; later sculptors, both men and women, will fully attend to those things. In the words of Ward's historic observation to the Farragut statue committee, "Give the younger man the chance!"

AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS

Born eighteen years after Ward, and dying while Ward still had three years of strenuous work before him, Augustus Saint-Gaudens lives in our annals as the most illustrious figure in American art. Both the Old World and the New see it so.

Brought to this country at the age of six months, the Dublin-born child of a French father and an Irish mother, he soon became more American than the Americans themselves. We see him first as the typical New York sidewalk boy, learning not much in school, but far more from eager contacts in the city boy's world of home, parents, streets, policemen, processions; the atmosphere of the Civil War stirs his young blood, and will long afterward quicken his sculpture of our Civil War heroes. At fourteen he is by day a cameo-cutter's apprentice, by night a rapt student of drawing at Cooper Institute. At nineteen, with a hundred dollars and his father's blessing, he sails abroad for his first three years of foreign study and travel; in Paris and Rome he learns and earns; he has a stout heart, a lean purse, and an undying passion for his art. His return to New York with a few small commissions picked up, as the custom then was, from American travellers sojourning in Rome; his second stay abroad; his early struggles to obtain a footing; his marriage and subsequent three years in Paris while creating the Farragut; his ardent friendship with Stanford White, John La Farge, and other strong personalities of the day;--surely all this seems quite the usual story. But Saint-Gaudens had always his own innermost unusualness that somehow placed him above his fellows; and the victorious completion of the Farragut in 1881 was but the first of a long line of signal triumphs. And even his almost forgotten triumphs are signal triumphs. There was no branch of his art in which he did not excel; it was an art designed in general for the flowingness of bronze rather than for reproduction within the confines of the marble block.

Too often versatility connotes a superficiality of mind, an easily satisfied outlook. Not so with Saint-Gaudens. He was if anything over-critical of his work; for instance, he never forgot that the snare of the picturesque was in his path, as it is in the path of every sculptor trying to infuse a genial human warmth into the sculptural order. His knowledge in the lesser art of cameo-cutting, a knowledge which in some sculptors would have been swept aside as detrimental to a spacious style, helped rather than hindered him in his advance toward his ultimate mastery over relief of all kinds,--the coin, the intimate portrait medallion, the heroic monumental relief. He may be truly said to have invented that charming form of bas-relief likeness shown in the portraits of the Schiff children, the Butler children, Bastien-Lepage, Violet Sargent, and many others. Nothing quite like these works had ever before been produced, either in the French medalists' fertile art of the nineteenth century or in that still richer period of the Italian Renaissance medal, heralded by Pisano. And yet, since little in the field of art is utterly original, we are reminded here of that old saying about the power of the man meeting the power of the moment. In beautiful angel-figures such as the Amor-Caritas in high relief, Saint-Gaudens realized and expressed the spiritual meanings of other artists of his time, both sculptors and painters; this we see when we study French's noble Angel of Death, and the Burne-Jones figures on their golden stair.

Critics are divided, not as to the greatness of Saint-Gaudens, but as to the work which best stores up within itself the true elements of his greatness. Those who have seen tears start from the eyelids of gray veterans standing before the Shaw Memorial will perhaps say the Shaw, while those who perceive with delight all that the sculptor has attained in the Sherman equestrian group, with its thrilling harmony of spiritual and realistic presentation, will perhaps say the Sherman. Londoners and Chicagoans will rest content in their great possession of the standing Lincoln. Others again will find their truest vision of this artist's power in the enfolded mystery of the Rock Creek figure, sometimes called Nirvana, but better named the Peace of God. And if this is indeed his consummate, his culminating work, how strange that it is, in a sense, a somewhat unexpected, uncharacteristic work! In its profound other-worldliness, it seems as withdrawn from the Sherman and the Puritan and the Farragut as from those happy portrait-reliefs of living beings in their loveliness or strength. How often artists have mused on the beauty of the head of this figure! Every trace of artistic knowingness is eliminated here; nothing so vain and petty as any suggestion of accomplished technique intrudes. The beholder's attention is directed solely toward whatever inner meaning he finds in those shadowed lineaments.

How I wish I might make myself clear when touching this vexed subject of apprenticeship! The romantic part of the world dwelling far from the realities of studio life loves to picture a pathetic situation of gifted youth silently wasting its genius in saving the day for the commonplace performances of a middle-aged employer. But this poetic view squares with cinema ideals rather than with the facts. At a recent exhibition of weird works by the immature young sculptor X, I heard an ardent lady worshipper of something she called "the new spirit of expressionism," denounce the greed and vanity of the middle-aged sculptor Y, basely employing the bright unrecognized wings of X, to give fire and movement to the pedestrian Y inventions. Ah, if that lady only knew the truth about X and Y! But it was closing-time, and I made no attempt to tell her the truth; it would have seemed rather gray and commonplace compared with her own glamorous moving-picturization of studio life. All her thought was of heroism and oppression, not of work and wages. Yet I might at least have given her this one helpful fact; that almost without exception, the successful sculptors of to-day look back with gratitude toward the multitudinous activities of their young apprenticeships; sometimes they even feel a secret amazement that their former masters should have put up with them so long.

DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH

Last summer, revisiting Concord after many years, I crossed "the rude bridge that arched the flood," and found Mr. French's Minute Man, embattled still, though embowered in quietness, and made safe from the ruder motor traffic of the day. It seemed incredible that a youth of twenty-three, with no models except the Apollo Belvidere and himself, and with no instruction beyond that derived from a month in Ward's studio and from Dr. Rimmer's anatomy lectures, could have produced a statue so competent and so sculptural as this. Then I remembered that in 1919 the most proudly acclaimed work of American art for the year was Mr. French's marble figure of Memory; and it was interesting to note that the Minute Man, however immediately convincing in general appeal, appeared in a sense as the work of an artist older than the sculptor of the Memory. For the Minute Man has here and there a lean gravity of modeling that we rightly or wrongly associate with passing maturity, while the forms of the Memory are rich and commanding, yet enveloped with that serenity for which we have no better word than classic. And what is the true meaning of classic, except as it describes that which is fresh and vivid to-day, yet has the underlying force of permanence, the very tide of immortality flowing in its veins? Many of our artists acquire the classic spirit, many have it thrust upon them, some reject it utterly. But Mr. French is the classic spirit personified among us; born so, not made so; and what he creates is illumined by his understanding of the dignity of the human soul, and by his belief that beauty and truth are acceptable to the human mind. This gracious seated figure of Memory, gazing calmly into the glass that reflects, not her own person but the shapes of the past, is admirably composed from every point of view and within the natural limits of the marble. A critic has written of it as "showing at its best Mr. French's idealism, and being at the same time a masterly study of the nude, true to the nobler forms of nature, yet with a skillful avoidance of what is commonly known as realism." That phrase "true to the nobler forms of nature" well describes this sculptor's great ideal figures. Mr. French is to-day the dean of American sculpture, the honorary President of the National Sculpture Society; a presence with all the gracious authority conferred by deanship, and with nothing whatever of the dry ancientry at times associated with that honor.

There is something of the unexpected in the course of every great artist. With Ward it is one thing, with Saint-Gaudens another. With Daniel Chester French, born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1850, the unexpected thing is that in his art education he seems somehow to have skipped the slow Preamble and the voluminous Whereas, and to have reached almost at a bound the precincts of the Resolved. Concord has never lacked favorite sons, and young Daniel among the lions of that town of his later boyhood felt only their appreciation and encouragement. But with one year in Florence, spent largely under the genial influence of Thomas Ball, sculptor of the first equestrian monument placed in New England, his so-called study-period ends. A pediment for the St. Louis Custom House awaits him in 1877; within the next few years he executes similar architectural sculpture for Philadelphia and Boston. In 1879 he models from life his beautiful portrait bust of Emerson.

Surely we cannot say that his art education was finished before these things were attempted. It progressed with them, and with those other creations, more idealistic in type, in which his imagination had fuller play. When in 1888 he went to Paris to make the model for his marble statue of General Cass of Michigan, he went as a master, yet as a seeker; one well prepared to gain without groping all that was worth while in the influence of the time and place. Five years later, at the Columbian Exposition, his genius makes an extraordinary appeal to his fellow-countrymen in two imposing works, the Republic and the consoling Angel of Death. These of course differ widely in their inspiration and in the emotion they arouse, but they are equally eloquent. The Gallaudet group, placed in Washington in 1889, had already spoken its message to the human heart. An inner radiance of the spirit shines from that very solidly and beautifully composed group of the great teacher and the little deaf-mute; nowhere else in sculpture have we found so adequate and touching an expression of the fatherliness that should animate those who teach, and of the trust of those who must needs learn or be lost. Who would have guessed that sculpture could have found out this way of saying Faith, Hope, and Charity? And beneath all that captivates the general public, how much there is in the Angel, the Republic, and the Gallaudet that remains of special interest to artists, because of the individual mastery of a special problem! In collaboration with Mr. Potter, the accomplished master of animal sculpture, Mr. French has created some of our most notable equestrian statues; the General Grant and the General Meade for Philadelphia, the General Washington, presented to France by an association of American women, the General Hooker for Boston. Other works of high import are the majestic Alma Mater at Columbia University, the bronze doors in delicately shadowed relief for the Boston Public Library, the colossal seated bronze figure of Lincoln enshrined within the Lincoln Memorial at Washington.

Our twentieth century admits that the latter years of the nineteenth century were spacious years in our sculpture, and that there are as yet no leaders who overtop these three. With these will always be associated, in the minds of those who know things as they are, that distinguished artist Olin Warner, whose death cut short a career splendidly ready for its zenith. For some unknown reason, his work has missed something of its due praise among us; time will perhaps readjust this. The delightful caryatids of his fountain at Portland, Oregon, are indeed greatly prized; his portrait statues are truly sculptural in their ensemble, and fine in their characterization; and with the passing of years, his spirited yet beautifully classic portrait busts of Alden Weir, of Cottier, and of Maud Morgan gain rather than lose in the esteem of the student.

OF EXPOSITIONS AND COLLABORATIONS

An unpublished satiric drawing of the 'eighties shows a family of American tourists in the Louvre. They contemplate the Melian Venus. With one exception, they are dumb with awe. The exception is Aunt Maria, the masterful old lady in the foreground. Aunt Maria has seen men and cities, but she doesn't know as there's much that can beat South Bend. So

"Aunt Maria gazes with distrust Upon the goddess in her bloom perennial. 'Talk about art,--you should have seen the bust, The butter bust we had at our Centennial.'"

The Sleeping Iolanthe in butter! In 1876, her name melted in the American mouth. Though barred from the Fine Arts section, she was believed by many to express the spirit of American art. Shamed by her popularity, certain sensitive American artists did not quite recover a jubilant tone until, long years afterward, a full-sized Melian Venus in chocolate contributed to the gayety of the greatest of French expositions. After that, the butter bust incident weighed less heavily on thoughtful minds.

Just before our Centennial exposition, the scholarly John Fiske, admitting that "the classical picture and the undraped statue" have "a high place in our esteem," ruefully adds that "it will probably be some time before genuine art ceases to be an exotic among us, and becomes a plant of unhindered native growth." The Centennial showed us the truth of just that. The Centennial was a glory, and a profound disturbance. To our sculpture, this disturbance was its great gain. For the first time, the American sculptor saw his work side by side with that of Europeans. He was dismayed. He had had his doubts, his forebodings. He now perceived for a certainty that in spite of half a century spent in the pursuit of all the best that Italian pseudo-classicism could offer, our apprentice days in sculpture, far from being well over, were scarcely begun. Perhaps a fresh start was needed. At a time when Munich, as well as Paris, was calling to the young painter, Paris, rather than Rome or Florence, beckoned to the sculptor. New forces were abroad in art, and American sculpture of the next generation profited eagerly from the vigorous new French school.

The lesson taught by the Columbian exposition of 1893 was just as important as that learned from the Centennial, though far less sobering. A holiday spirit, not without dignity, spoke from those pleasure-domes and lagoons and abounding sculptural forms of the White City. The progress made by our art during seventeen years packed with artistic adventure and endeavor was blown abroad in triumph. On the whole, we were justified in our joy. As the Centennial by its dismaying jolt had enlarged the outlook of our artists, so the Columbian, by its varied harmonies, liberated the imagination of the public, of the art-lover. To a marked extent, it created anew the art-lover, a personage already made possible by the prosperity following the conclusion of the Civil War. In the World's Fair of 1893, the apparently inexhaustible advantages of a sympathetic collaboration between architect, painter, sculptor, and landscape architect were for the first time sketched out large for the American vision. Our many succeeding expositions have of course emphasized and amplified the suggestions so gallantly given and so eagerly noted in 1893. Not that our whole broad land is to-day the dwelling-place of beauty. Far from it. Great reaches of time and great strivings of the spirit must match our great stretches of space before art is everywhere at home here. And collaboration at its best is jointly and severally a striving of the spirit.

In 1825, when Charles Bulfinch, then architect of the Capitol, receives an inquiry "respecting the ornaments wanted for the pediment of the Capitol," and writes in answer that "the object of advertising was to obtain designs in various styles, from which to select one," an ardent collaboration between sculptor and architect was clearly not the order of the day. The hard fate of Greenough's Olympian Washington, dragged in 1843 from inner shrine to outdoor platform, shows that in almost twenty years conditions had not changed. For a long time after that, a work of sculpture was seldom considered, during its creation, with special reference to its destined surroundings. Artist and public satisfied themselves with the bland half-truth that a good thing looks well anywhere. There were of course vague gestures of collaboration when the first statues were placed in Central Park; and in the good fellowship existing between students of the different arts in the few schools we had here as well as in the foreign schools there was a basis for later harmonious co-operation. But the Saint-Gaudens Farragut, unveiled in 1881, and showing in detail and ensemble the results of an extraordinarily happy and sympathetic collaboration, roused the minds of all artists. And twelve years afterward, the intelligent public was fully ready to appreciate the happy collaborations it saw on every hand at the Fair.

Expositions bring in their train certain evils. Is superficiality one of these? In theory, sculptural work for exposition buildings and approaches and vistas must often stress too much the gala-day aspect of life; it must sound the hurrah at any cost; the note is gayety and triumph; let no other chord intrude. So much for theory. As a matter of fact, the making of red-letter-day sculpture injures only those sculptors who are already too much enamoured of the "fa?ade and froth" side of human achievement. Nothing could be more serious in matter or in manner than was Mr. French's stately Republic, a dominant note of the plan of the Columbian Exposition. And no work was more thoroughly appreciated. Some of the very gayest of our exposition sculptures owe their vitality to the very serious studies and the very solid mastery of the artists who have produced them. There was wide-spread regret because the MacMonnies Fountain, that thing of joy for the exposition of 1893, could not sprinkle its dews permanently for our refreshment. And in our later expositions, there have always been temporary works achieved with bravura by the artist, enjoyed without reservation by the public, and consigned to oblivion by the powers. The story of the Fair of 1893, the exemplar, one might say, for subsequent celebrations, has been exceedingly well told by Mr. Charles Moore, in his recently published Life of Daniel Burnham. Nowhere else will one find so true and inspiring a picture of our American architects, painters, sculptors, and landscape gardeners working together in exalted collaboration. Those men set a great standard and a great stride for artists of the present century. To quote from Mr. Moore's book a paragraph concerning the sculptors:

"Marshalled by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the sculptors for the first time in America took their rightful place in co-operation with the architects. And what a troop they were. There was Daniel French, embodying the spirit of permanence and clear-sightedness in the serene figure of the Republic that graciously presided over the Court of Honor; and again, in conjunction with Edward Potter, manifesting sustained ability in the quadriga surmounting the Peristyle; Frederick MacMonnies, giving vent to the exuberance of America in the joyous fountain that lent gayety to the great central motive of the Fair; Olin Warner, whose early death lost to the country an artist on the way to the heights; Paul Bartlett, then a promise which opportunity has fulfilled; Edwin Kemeys, with his animal sculpture that came to attract all the money Theodore Roosevelt could spare for art; and Louis Saint-Gaudens, wanting only the intellectual element to put him in the same class with his brother; and Karl Bitter, capable and conscientious, whose accidental death brought grief to a host of admirers; and Lorado Taft, who has put the ethereal, haunting spirit of the Great Lakes into his Chicago fountain; Larkin Mead, sculptor of the old school; Phimister Proctor, lover of American animals; besides Bela Pratt, Rohl-Smith, Bush-Brown, Rideout, Boyle, Waagen, Bauer, Martiny, Blenkenship, and the satisfactory Partridge."

Later Fairs have but exemplified what was well suggested by the White City. The Exposition at San Francisco, most recent of all, and taking place in bright evanescence while Europe was already in the bitter throes of the World War, brought forward, under the vigorous direction of Mr. Calder, sculptor of the Pioneer Mother and of the Triumph of Energy, much that was stimulating and fresh in our sculpture, even though none of these American exhibits labelled themselves as Dynamic Decompositions, and few attempted the earnest sort of modernism found in French works such as Bernard's Maiden with Water Jar. The fountain in particular was delightfully renewed in Mr. Aitken's Fountain of the Earth, Mrs. Burroughs's Fountain of Youth, Mr. Taft's Fragment from the Fountain of Time, Mrs. Whitney's Fountain with Pristine Motives from Aztec Civilization, Mr. Putnam's Fountain with Mermaids, and Miss Longman's Fountain of Ceres. Individual pieces such as William Sergeant Kendall's half-length portrait of a peasant girl, carved in wood and realistically colored, attracted attention for successful originality.

Our American Academy in Rome, with its stirring legend, "Not merely fellowships, but fellowship," is the direct outcome of the World's Fair of 1893. Burnham, McKim, Mead, La Farge, Millet, Saint-Gaudens, and other artists who by collaboration made that Fair a thing of beauty resolved then and there that younger men should have such advantages as these that they themselves had gained by working together. Through their efforts, the project took shape. Though a National institution, our American Academy in Rome is endowed and maintained by private citizens. Its beneficiaries are young sculptors, painters, architects, classical scholars, landscape architects, and musicians who have already shown themselves signally fitted for their chosen work, and who, for the sake of our country's art, ought to have the benefit of the three years of intensive and inter-related study in Rome. To-day, our Academy in Rome is regarded as the most important modern influence in American sculpture. "My reason for thinking it admirable," writes Saint-Gaudens, "is my belief that the strenuous competition required to gain access to the Villa Medici, as well as the three years of study in that wonderful spot, tend to a more earnest and thorough training than could elsewhere be gained under the present conditions of life in our times."

THE STATUE AND THE BUST AND THE IDEAL FIGURE

Following hard upon the three leaders who remain central figures in our hundred years of sculpture came the outriders of that large and ever increasing group whose creative genius, fostered by the training enthusiastically received in the French school, now stands four-square among us. The men and women of this group are the present-day nucleus of sculptural activity here. Most of them keep a firm footing in two centuries; they still profit by the light of the later nineteenth century French masters, and they themselves pass on their own clear new light to twentieth century learners. When the names of Falgui?re and Merci?, Dubois and Chapu, Saint-Marceaux and Fr?miet and Rodin are spoken, these men and women are thrilled, just as Heine's Grenadier was thrilled by an imagined footstep; and these men and women know why Schumann's song soars up into the Marseillaise. They know that their French masters once gave them something priceless, yet left them free to use the gift according to their own bent and will. The principles taught in the atelier seemed to them necessary and suggestive, not despotic.

To-day, both the New World and the Old are altered. Good art schools are now found in most of our large cities; as far as mere technical training is concerned, opportunities for art-study are at present brighter here than in Europe. But nothing can ever replace the inspiration given by the sight of European masterpieces of painting, sculpture, and architecture on European soil. Therefore we no longer say with Ward, "Go abroad to study, but not to stay." We say instead, "Remain at home for your study, but go abroad during vacation periods for travel and for inspiration." A generation ago, the eager young student body of returning painters and sculptors would not have believed that this change of base in an artist's education could occur within their lifetime.

Until rather lately, the youthful sculptor returning to America to practise his profession would hope first of all to make a portrait bust or two, eking out his income by teaching classes in modeling, or by assisting some more experienced sculptor in developing important commissions. Then if he were lucky, a fountain figure for some one's garden or a portrait statue for his native town would loom up on his horizon, and he would be fairly started on his way to glory.

The portrait statue; imperishable bronze trousers; the frock-coat immortalized. Art thou there, truepenny?

Most of those persons who are now confirmed haters of sculpture probably became so through having in tender childhood looked too long on the bronze portrait statue when it was dark, when it gave its color all wrong to the countenance of some beloved hero. Even among sculptors there are many who admit a secret distaste for the portrait statue, except when it proceeds from the art of the rare absolute master. Hearing the grumblings of sculptors as to the difficulties of this form, one is tempted to ask with Mr. Caudle, "If painful, why so often do it?" The answer is, "The portrait statue is what committees want, and will pay for. The portrait statue is my children's bread; the ideal figure will not keep them in shoes."

So then, the situation must be examined on all sides. And is there not a certain high courage in that sculptor who takes his age as it is, and, like Saint-Gaudens and Ward, manfully makes the truthful best out of Peter Cooper's whiskers, and Horace Greeley's long-legged boots? "But," retorts the sculptor, "the whiskers we can endure and celebrate; the boots are not too much to bear. These things are not decorative, but they have character, they tell their times. It is the frock-coat and the trousers that paralyze our imagination."

Perhaps it will never be known how much the modern male costume, convenient indeed, but uncomely,--tyrannously uniform in its formlessness, and rejecting any individuality as an indecency,--has contributed to the rather wide indifference of the public toward the usual dark effigy of estimable manhood set up in the marketplace. Well, no conflict, no drama! If there were no inherent difficulties in the problem of the portrait statue, there would be no exultation for the sculptor in his successful solution. True, our days lack beauty; man's apparel is not a sculptural delight. But unless the artist can do something to mend matters, there is little use in mournfully reminding the world that there was no Wragg by the Ilissus. It is interesting to mark how our American sculptors have come out from their clash with the commonplace, and whether they emerge as victors or vanquished.

The major heroes of sculpture may well receive the tribute of shrine or exedra or canopy, but what of the more numerous lesser heroes? In avoiding a commonplace rendering, the imaginative sculptor has other avenues of escape beside those offered by the architect, sometimes gloomily called by unbelievers in collaboration the sculptor's evil genius. A first aid is the impressionist manner, used by O'Connor in his Worcester Soldier, and in his masterly statue of General Lawton at Indianapolis. In these works the modeling is fluid, the planes vibrate in light; we feel the happy absence of a sample-card arrangement of buttons; no one could for a moment say, Here are two more triumphs of bronze tailoring. Already in some of our new War memorials, our sculptors are making use, but not always the best use, of broad simplifications of mass and surface. They are showing us young heroes of the Argonne not cap-a-pie in their uniforms, but with torn tunics, if any, and with riven flesh. Rodin and the grand old Bourgeois de Calais are indirectly responsible for some of these compositions. But will these bronze pictures of human agony long satisfy the human heart? Have such memorials the permanence of spirit we implore, or are they big bronze studies that are really almost as far from the heroic greatness of the Bourgeois de Calais as from the unpretending littleness of a Rogers group, say the Wounded Scout in the Swamp?

The answer depends entirely upon the artist. We have no right to dictate his manner, but we demand that beneath the manner there shall be sound construction as well as feeling: we ask also a knowledge of ensemble, of silhouette. The impressionist style is a fine instrument in the right hands. But in the hands of mediocrity, this style of sculptural language performs the third and most regrettable function of all language, that of concealing the lack of thought. The result is what Mr. Grafly might well call "union-suit sculpture." Between the Devil of a prosaic literalness of rendering, and the deep sea of a sloppy and would-be poetical impressionism, the genius of the sculptor is our only salvation. Impressionism ill-handled will not save from the commonplace either a group or a figure. While the problem of the portrait statue remains as difficult as it now is, one is glad to see that of late committees are turning toward other ways of perpetuating the memory of greatness. Here in New York, the Pulitzer Memorial in the Plaza has taken the form of a fountain, surmounted by a figure of Abundance, the last work from the hands of Karl Bitter; and the Straus Memorial is a fountain, in which the chief motive is a reclining figure of Contemplation, at the head of a large pool. Other cities also have their successful memorial avoidances of the "iron photograph," as the darkened bronze effigy has been called. A distinguished example is Daniel French's Du Pont fountain in Washington, made to replace a portrait statue. Mrs. Whitney's Titanic Memorial, a memorial for many rather than for one, is admirable in its sincere originality of inspiration.

At least one thing could be done which is now left undone by most of the City Fathers in our land. Under the direction of Municipal Art Commissions, bronze statues could be cleaned; not polished until they are a glittering congeries of high lights, an effect heartily detested by sculptors, but cleaned reasonably, with a decent regard for the opinions of those who made them. Is it not a singular superstition that a statue once placed should never be touched by the hand of cleanliness, but should suffer in silence whatever indignities the soot and the birds and the climate heap upon it? Again, in a country in which gold is said to be no rare possession, this metal, properly toned, could often without prohibitive expense be used to dignify our statues, and prevent dark oxidization. And this would be done, if we of today cared as much about art as we do, let us say, about advertising. Future civilization will probably have a place for a new profession, that of the well-trained custodian of statues. The first attempts in this work will not in the nature of things be as destructive as were the labors of the old-time picture-restorer, so-called, a personage long reviled for his ignorant or dishonest acts, but now becoming extinct. And what a boon it would be if this statue-custodian of the future, with a body of intelligent criticism behind him, could be depended upon for judicious removals as well as for faithful guardianship! This liberating thought is brought to the attention of all Municipal Art Commissions.

Among appealing portraits in the Louvre is Ghirlandaio's Priest and Boy. Whatever might be hideous in its realism is at once atoned for by something singularly lovely. The priest has the ugliest nose in the world; Cyrano is a Hermes to him; but the child looks up to him in intimate childlike trust. The most unflinching realism and the tenderest idealism meet in that portrait. And our American portraits in sculpture, taken one by one, run that gamut. From the day of William Rush's rude self-portrait down to the present hour of an occasional polychrome marble bust of exquisite workmanship, our sculpture has advanced in the art of the portrait bust. The creator of the Greek Slave was happier, whether he knew it or not, in rugged masculine portrait heads such as his Jackson and his Calhoun, than in his famed ideal figures; those male likenesses have a living quality that is lacking in his series of idealized busts of classic heroines such as Proserpine and Psyche, all much the same in feature, and all appropriately corseted in a kind of marble corolla, springing up from a leafy marble base. The ending of a bust, that is to say its base or support, is always a question with the sculptor, unless, like Houdon, he chooses one type of base for all, or unless, as Rodin in his marble portraits of women, he counts upon the richly associative charm of the unachieved.

Since the time of Verocchio's bust of a woman with flowers in her hands, many sculptors, for the sake of added interest, a more vivid characterization, or a more striking composition, have attempted to show the hands as well as the face of the person portrayed. In this difficult undertaking, no modern sculptor has succeeded better than Mr. Niehaus, well-known for his imposing monuments. His portrait bust of John Quincy Adams Ward is not only a work of distinguished realism, worthy of the artist it represents; it is also a perfect solution of an almost insolvable problem in arrangement.

Among the greatest virile portraits of our age are those of the "all around" American sculptor, Charles Grafly; for style and workmanship and seizing of character any half-dozen of his busts would proudly hold their own if placed beside Rodin's male portraits in the Metropolitan Museum. Furthermore, they have the old-fashioned advantage of looking like the persons they represent, an advantage not always attained in the Rodin portrayals. Perhaps a fairer tribute to Mr. Grafly's power would be to say that his busts need not fear comparison with the Saint-Gaudens Sherman, that most spirited portrait of a war-chief. One of our memorable sculptured portraits is Mrs. Burroughs's bust of John La Farge, modeled at about the period of Mr. Lockwood's painted portrait. Both artists have attained truth. Mr. Lockwood's broadly enveloping technique shows La Farge as the cosmopolitan, the artist who is also the gracious citizen of the world; Mrs. Burroughs's point of view emphasizes La Farge the individualist, the thinker habitually pursuing his own spiritual adventures in many realms, oriental and occidental. The painting tells wherein La Farge resembles his fellow-men, while the sculpture with equal force brings out his valuable points of difference. Twenty years ago, Jonathan Scott Hartley's sturdy renderings of masculine character delighted his colleagues; and even today, his bust of John Gilbert as Sir Peter Teazle loses nothing of its rich whimsical earnestness when considered beside modern work of the highest order, such as Robert Aitken's portrait of Augustus Thomas, or one of Fraser's presentments of our great American citizens.

Naturally remote in intent and result from these virile modelings are the lovingly rendered portraits of women and children familiar in our sculpture. A well-known example is Manship's realistically carved marble image of his baby daughter placed within a captivating shrine of blue and gold. Portraits in the round, carried out in a polychrome ensemble of beautifully cut marble combined with other materials, such as wood, gold, and semi-precious stones, offer a fascinating field for the American sculptor willing to devote to such experiments the time and thought they demand. The pure white marble bust looks ill at ease in the warm precincts of the modern home; it is a thing of the past. We can but wonder that our elders bore it so long, even when it was in a measure suppressed by placing it looking streetward, between the parted lace curtains.

For the male portrait, modern taste generally prefers bronze to marble; and just as the dead whiteness of marble may be relieved by color, so the severe darkness of bronze in statue or bust may be altered by the use of a harmonious patina. Many of our sculptors have given long and patient study to this subject of "patine"; others again trust all to the bronze founder. But sculpture still has much to learn from chemistry; and there are still a few artists who keep enough of the weaker side of craftsmanship to believe in the advisability of secret processes. Is it not true that art is the last field where such secrecies should exist? Do we not look upon art as the liberator of great things, not as the locker-up of little things like craftsmen's receipts? For receipts that are not exposed to the air get mouldy with hugger-mugger and abracadabra; this is as true today as in good Cennino Cennini's time of "mordant with garlic," and "tempera with the yolk of the egg of a city hen."

OUR EQUESTRIAN STATUES

Our forefathers' first fond national desire in sculpture was for an equestrian statue of Washington, by Houdon; a wish never to be fulfilled. The Congressional impulse of 1783 was sobered on counting up the cost. It came to nothing until two generations had passed; and it came to very little even then. Today, our country is sometimes called the paradise of the equestrian statue. If any such paradise exists among us, it has been created since 1853, when Clark Mills, "never having seen General Jackson or an equestrian statue," at last succeeded, after heart-breaking difficulties, in casting in bronze the first equestrian statue ever made here. With what passionate dithyrambs Benvenuto Cellini would have told the world of such a feat, had it been his! How breathlessly he would have described the breaking of cranes and the bursting of furnaces and the six tragic failures in the body of the horse before the old cannon captured by Andrew Jackson were finally translated into the supposed immortality of the equestrian group in bronze! General Jackson and his horse are still balancing themselves at leisure in front of the White House; it is perhaps needless to report their aspect as a thing more strange than beautiful. No one thinks this work a triumph of art, but every serious student knows it as a much needed initial victory over the hard conditions of bronze casting. You may call the group bizarre and unsophisticated in effect, as well as wholly mechanistic by first intention; but you cannot take from it the honor of being first in our long procession of equestrian statues, some of them forms of the very highest distinction. And you will not fail to observe the amazing improvement in style that has somehow taken place by the time our second equestrian appears; Brown's Washington, though coming but three years after the Mills Jackson, remains among our fine examples in sculpture. Not so number three, the Mills Washington, belated and inadequate response to the Congressional resolve in 1783; least said, soonest mended. Better fortune came with number four, the Ball Washington, long the pride of Boston.

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