Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still, Ere any names of Serf and Peer Could Nature's equal scheme deface Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face. Lowell, gathering up into his "Commemoration Ode" the traits which all men have learned to see in Lincoln, gives us a portrait with an accent of its own. SaintGaudens does the same thing. We think first of Lincoln when seated in the stately exedra with which Stanford White partly enclosed the statue, but one of the many thoughts with which we leave the work is of its origi nality, of the way in which Saint-Gaudens has stamped his own individuality upon the bronze. I come back to the question of his style, its polish that is never hard, its freedom that never passes into license. In the treatment of the hopelessly commonplace costume in the statue, all depended upon an avoidance of anything like selfassertion. When occasion requires it, Saint-Gaudens can beguile us with every touch that he bestows upon the clay. We see a work of his as a whole, and yet linger with pleasure over this or that passage. In the Lincoln the modelling is so broad, it is so sterling an example of the art of generalization, that no single detail attracts the eye. This is the grand style as the classicists of our old school failed to understand it, to their lasting cost. Saint-Gaudens abandoned it, consciously or unconsciously, when he modelled the equestrian statue of General Logan for Chicago, and was, no doubt, justified in so doing. He had a valiant warrior to portray, and perhaps it was fitting to represent him controlling a fiery animal and bearing a flag aloft with the air of a conqueror in the face of the enemy. It is a stirring piece of sculpture, ebulliently alive, and, like the Farragut, a wonderfully intimate interpretation of a moving personality. All that the motive demanded is adequately expressed. The smell of the battlefield has to go into a good portrait of "Black Jack" Logan, and Saint-Gaudens, conscientious artist that he was, paid it due attention. But somehow he does not seem happy in this work, he is not wholly himself. The flamboyant lies outside the sphere in which he moved with greatest ease and contentment, and I cite the Logan both for its confirmation, by contrast, of the broad drift of his art and for its perfect illustration of what the French critic I have quoted called the "beautiful integrity" of Saint-Gaudens's work. If the Logan does not impress us as the Lincoln does, it is the fault of the subject, not of the sculptor; he at least did his duty by it. One is easily lured from this, |