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-assertion, 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 assistants. 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 substitution 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 wh