esqueness," his work was
never pictorial. He never indulged in perspective or composed his
reliefs on more than one plane; never took such liberties with the
traditions of sculpture as did Ghiberti, or painted pictures in bronze
or marble as more than one modern has done. His very feeling for
decoration kept him from pictorial realism, and his fight against
picturesqueness was nobly won. His design becomes ever cleaner and more
classic; by years of work and of experience he becomes stronger and
stronger in the more purely sculptural qualities--attains a grasp of
form and structure only second to his mastery of composition. He is
always a consummate artist--in his finest works he is a great sculptor
in the strictest sense of the word.

I have dwelt somewhat at length upon technical matters because technical
power is the first necessity for an artist; because technical mastery is
that for which he consciously endeavors; because the technical language
of his art is the necessary vehicle of expression for his thoughts and
emotions, and determines, even, the nature of the thoughts and emotions
he shall express. But while the technical accomplishment of an artist
is the most necessary part of his art, without which his imagination
would be mute, it is not the highest or the most significant part of it.
I have tried to show that Saint-Gaudens was a highly accomplished
artist, the equal of any of his contemporaries, the superior of most.
What made him something much more than this--something infinitely more
important for us--was the vigor and loftiness of his imagination.
Without his imaginative power he would have been an artist of great
distinction, of whom any country might be proud; with it he became a
great creator, able to embody in enduring bronze the highest ideals and
the deepest feelings of a nation and of a time.

It is a penetrating and sympathetic imagination that gave him his
unerring grasp of character, that enabled him to seize upon the
significant elements of a personality, to divine the attitude and the
gesture that should reveal it, to eliminate the unessential, to present
to us the man. This is the imagination of the portrait-painter, and
Saint-Gaudens has shown it again and again, in many of his reliefs and
memorial tablets, above all in his portrait statues. He showed it
conclusively in so early a work as the "Farragut" (Pl. 27), a work that
remains one of the modern masterpieces of portrait statuary. The