most difficult to keep up in the region of art and out of the region of imitation. Nothing is more tiresome than any sculpture but the best. A painter may be far from possessing the highest genius, yet find in some part of his manysided art an escape from the commonplace and the real, but a mediocre sculptor is lost. The sculptor must be a genius or a nobody.

Here, then, has been the great problem of the sculptors of all ages, and they have met it in various ways. The noble abstraction of Pheidias degenerated, in the later Greek and Roman work, into a dead conventionality, and, the works of Pheidias being unknown to them, the artists of the Italian Renaissance struck out a new road for themselves and found the means by a vague elusiveness of modeling to express all their new and peculiarly modern interest in individuality of character and the personality of their models without ever falling into the dry literalness of the plaster cast. In the earlier part of this century dead-alive conventionalism was again regnant, and when the sculptors of to-day, following the lead of the painters who had already begun the movement, turned again to the independent study of nature, they naturally reverted to the study of Renaissance models. In the sculpture of the Renaissance only could they find nature represented as she appeared to them. There only could they find the modern man with his pronounced individuality and his special development of character, and there only could they find the means of representing him in their art. And so, jumping over four hundred years, jumping over the inroad of academicism and all the subsequent degradation of art, the best sculpture of to-day is the legitimate successor to that of the fifteenth century, its successor, not its imitator. The sculptors of to-day are working in the spirit of the Renaissance, but the very essence of that spirit is personality individualism — independent study. Now, having a general view of the movement of which he is a part, we are prepared to approach the work of St. Gaudens himself, and to search there the qualities of his school and their particular development by his own personality. The feeling for individuality,- the modern idea that a man is not merely one of a species but is a character,- the caring less for the perfection of a race and more for the man himself as he is, with his faults as well as his merits, is one of the noticeable qualities of Mr. St. Gaudens's work. It is easy to see in his Farragut how he has been penetrated with the personality of his model and has bent himself to its expression. The statue is as living as vital as one of the Mino da Fiesole's Florentines, who died four hundred

years ago, and whom we should be quite prepared to meet in the streets as we come out of the museum where his likeness is preserved. There is no cold conventionalism, neither is there any romanticism or melodrama, but a penetrating imagination which has got at the heart of the man and given him to us "in his habit as he lived," cool, ready, determined, standing firmly, feet apart, upon his swaying deck, a sailor, a gentleman, and a hero. In his Randall statue at Sailors' Snug Harbor, there is much of the same quality, for though, from the lack of authentic portraits this latter was necessarily a pure work of imagination, yet it is none the less a portrait of a man an individual - if not precisely the Randall whose name it bears. There is nothing of the ideal Greek hero about this rugged block of humanity. This kindly, keen, alert, old man, sharp-eyed, hooked-nosed, firm-mouthed, with a sea breeze in his look, is a modern and an American and, one would say, an old sailor, with crotchets and eccentricities as well as a good head and a good heart.*

Another and a more recent work in the same line of what we may call ideal portraiture is the "Deacon Chapin," which is perhaps the finest embodiment of Puritanism in our art. Surely those old searchers for a "liberty of conscience" that should not include the liberty to differ from themselves could not fail to recognize in this swift-striding, sternlooking old man, clasping his Bible as Moses clasped the tables of the law, and holding his peaceful walking-stick with as firm a grip as the handle of a sword surely they could not fail to recognize in him a man after their own hearts. But he is not merely a Puritan of the Puritans, he is a man also, a rough-hewn piece of humanity enough, with plenty of the old Adam about him; and one feels that so and not otherwise must some veritable old Puritan deacon have looked.

In these statues it is easy, I say, to see the spirit of the Renaissance, but to show the appropriation of Renaissance methods and the rare technical skill with which they are employed in the embodiment of this spirit is a more difficult task, and to attempt it, I wish more especially to draw attention to a class of work which was particularly characteristic of the Italian Renaissance and in the revival of which Mr. St. Gaudens seems to me one of the most successful of modern sculptors. I mean low-relief. Something of what he can do in this way any one may see in the allegorical figures on the base of the Farragut monument, and, I remember, these figures were even more * I believe that, in point of fact, Randall was not a sailor, but the text refers to the type of the statue rather than to the historic character.