tides are not
classical goddesses but modern women, lovely, but with a personal and
particular loveliness, not insisted upon but delicately suggested. And
it is not the personality of the model who chanced to pose for them but
an invented personality, the expression of the nobility, the sweetness,
and the pure-mindedness of their creator. And in such a figure as that
of the "Adams Memorial" (Pl. 30), in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington,
his imaginative power reaches to a degree of impressiveness almost
unequalled in modern art. One knows of nothing since the tombs of the
Medici that fills one with the same hushed awe as this shrouded, hooded,
deeply brooding figure, rigid with contemplation, still with an eternal
stillness, her soul rapt from her body on some distant quest. Is she
Nirvana? Is she The Peace of God? She has been given many names--her
maker would give her none. Her meaning is mystery; she is the
everlasting enigma.

[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 28.--Saint-Gaudens. "Lincoln."]

Not the greatest artist could twice sound so deep a note as this. The
figure remains unique in the work of the sculptor as it is unique in the
art of the century. Yet, perhaps, Saint-Gaudens's greatest works are two
in which all the varied elements of his genius find simultaneous
expression; into which his mastery of composition, his breadth and
solidity of structure, his technical skill, his insight into character,
and his power of imagination enter in nearly equal measure: the "Shaw
Memorial" and the great equestrian group of the "Sherman Monument."

The "Shaw Memorial" (Pl. 31) is a relief, but a relief of many planes.
The marching troops are in three files, one behind the other, the
varying distances from the spectator marked by differences of the degree
of projection. Nearer than all of them is the equestrian figure of Shaw
himself, the horse and rider modelled nearly but not quite in the round.
The whole scale of relief was altered in the course of the work, after
it had once been nearly completed, and the mastery of the infinitely
complicated problem of relief in many degrees is supreme. But all the
more because the scheme was so full and so varied, the artist has
carefully avoided the pictorial in his treatment. There is no
perspective, the figures being all on the same scale, and there is no
background, no setting of houses or landscape. Everywhere, between and
above the figures, is the flat surface whic