long series. It can show no more than
the composition and the draughtsmanship. The refinement of workmanship,
the sensitiveness and subtlety of modelling, can be appreciated only
before the works themselves. And this sensitiveness and delicacy of
workmanship, this mastery of the problems of relief, with its reliance
on illusion and its necessary abstention from realization, is applied to
sculpture in the round, and becomes with Saint-Gaudens, as it did with
the sculptors of the Florentine Renaissance, the means of escape from
the matter of fact. The concrete art of sculpture becomes an art of
mystery and of suggestion--an art having affinities with that of
painting. Hollows are filled up, shadows are obliterated, lines are
softened or accentuated, as the effect may require, details are
eliminated or made prominent as they are less or more essential and
significant, as they hinder or aid the expressiveness of the whole. It
is by such methods that beauty is achieved, that the most unpromising
material is subdued to the purposes of art, that even our hideous modern
costume may be made to yield a decorative effect. Pure sculpture, as the
ancients understood it, the art of form _per se_, demands the nude
figure, or a costume which reveals it rather than hides it. The costume
of to-day reveals as little of the figure as possible, and, unlike
mediaeval armor, it has no beauty of its own. A painter may make it
interesting by dwelling on color or tone or texture, or may so lose it
in shadow that it ceases to count at all except as a space of darkness.
A sculptor can do none of these things, and if he is to make it serve
the ends of beauty he has need of all the resourcefulness and all the
skill of the master of low relief. It was fortunate that the artist
whose greatest task was to commemorate the heroes of the Civil War
should have had the temperament and the training of such a master, and I
know of no other sculptor than Saint-Gaudens who has so magnificently
succeeded in the rendering of modern clothing--no other who could have
made the uniform of Farragut or the frock coat of Lincoln as interesting
as the armor of Colleone or the toga of Augustus.

[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 26.--Saint-Gaudens. "Sarah Redwood Lee."]

But if the genius of Saint-Gaudens was primarily a decorative genius--if
it was, even, in his earlier work, a trifle picturesque, so that, as he
said himself, he had "to fight against pictur