-side in
Chicago, in the new avenues in St. Louis and elsewhere. One
millionaire's house is modelled on a French chateau, another on an old
Colonial house in Virginia, another on a monastery in Mexico, another is
like an Italian _palazzo_. And their imitations are never weak or
pretentious. The architects in America seem to me to be far more able
than ours, or else they have a freer hand and more money.

_The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens_

It is sad to remember that Mr. Stanford White was one of the best of
these splendid architects. It was Stanford White with Saint-Gaudens,
that great sculptor, whose work dignifies nearly all the great cities in
America, who had most to do with the Exhibition buildings of the World's
Fair in Chicago in 1893. It was odd to see that fair dream city rising
out of the lake, so far more beautiful in its fleeting loveliness than
the Chicago of the stock-yards and the pit which had provided the money
for its beauty. The millionaires did not interfere with the artists at
all. They gave their thousands--and stood aside. The result was one of
the loveliest things conceivable. Saint-Gaudens and the rest did their
work as well as though the buildings were to endure for centuries
instead of being burned in a year to save the trouble of pulling down!
The World's Fair recalled to me the story of how Michelangelo carved a
figure in snow which, says the chronicler Vasari who saw it, "was
superb."

Saint-Gaudens gave me a cast of his medallion of Bastien-Lepage, and
wrote to a friend of mine: "Bastien had '_le coeur au metier_.' So has
Miss Terry, and I will place that saying in the frame that is to replace
the present unsatisfactory one." He was very fastidious about this frame
and took such a lot of trouble to get it right.

It must have been very irritating to Saint-Gaudens when he fell a victim
to that extraordinary official Puritanism which sometimes exercises a
petty censorship over works of art in America. The medal that he made
for the World's Fair was rejected at Washington because it had on it a
beautiful little nude figure of a boy--holding an olive
branch--emblematical of young America. I think a commonplace wreath and
some lettering were substituted.

Saint-Gaudens did the fine bas-relief of Robert Louis Stevenson which
was chosen for the monument in St. Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh. He gave
my daughter a medallion cast from this, because he knew that she was a
great lover of Steve