ntends that he must wait for
inspiration, and so excuses long periods of unproductive idleness,
during which he grows weaker and weaker for lack of exercise. The great
artist compels inspiration by whipping himself to his work and setting
grimly about it, knowing that the "inspiration," so-called, will come.
For inspiration is only seeing a thing clearly, and the one way to see
it clearly is to keep the eyes and mind fixed upon it.

At the age of twenty, then, Saint Gaudens was not only a trained artist,
but an industrious one. Three years in the inspiring atmosphere of
Paris, and three years in Italy, followed; and finally, in 1874, he
landed again at New York with such an equipment as few sculptors ever
had. And seven years later he proved his mastery when his statue of
Admiral Farragut was unveiled in Union Square, New York. That superb
work of art made its author a national figure, and Saint Gaudens took
definitely that place at the head of American sculpture which was his
until his death.

Six years later Saint Gaudens's "Lincoln" was unveiled in Lincoln Park,
Chicago, and was at once recognized as the greatest portrait statue in
the United States. It has remained so--a masterpiece of exalted
conception and dignified execution. Other statues followed, each
memorable in its way; but Saint Gaudens proved himself not only the
greatest but the most versatile of our sculptors by his work in other
fields--by portraits in high and low relief, by ideal figures, and
notably by the memorial to Robert Gould Shaw, a work distinctively
American and without a counterpart in the annals of art. It is the
spiritual quality of Saint Gaudens's work which sets it apart upon a
lofty pinnacle--the largeness of the man behind it, the artist mind and
the poet heart.

Saint Gaudens's death in 1907 deprived American art of one of its most
commanding figures, but there are other American sculptors alive to-day
whose work is noteworthy in a high degree. One of these is Daniel
Chester French. Born of a substantial New England family, and showing no
especial artistic talent in youth, one day, in his nineteenth year, he
surprised his family by showing them the grotesque figure of a frog in
clothes which he had carved from a turnip. Modelling tools were secured
for him, and he went to work. The schooling which prepared him for his
remarkable career was of the slightest. He studied for a month with J.
Q. A. Ward, and for the rest, worked out hi