International studio (33.1907/1908(1908))

Wf)e
INTERNATIONAL
• STUDIO •
VOL. XXXIII. No. 132 Copyright, 1908, by John Lane Company FEBRUARY, 1908

A

UGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS
BY TALCOTT WILLIAMS, LL.D.

Neither insight nor analysis is a
substitute for the surer criticism of
slow time. No age knows its own artists. Death
crowns. A man dead is of the past. His work
suddenly ranges itself. It were idle to decide now
the final place of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. We
are to-day no more insured against the errors of
contemporary criticism than those who sought in
1822 to decide the place of Canova or in 1844 of
Thorwaldsen. Neither stands to-day where those
who gathered about the grave of each placed him.
There are fewer great sculptors than great painters,
for while it is simpler—which is far from saying
easier—to model than to paint, final achievement is
more difficult for the sculptor than the painter.
The latter may, after all, win high place without
compassing some high idea. No sculptor lives
without this. Run over the brief bead-roll of the
great in sculpture and it is true of each that at the
end some philosophic conception overshadowed
his work. Some painters, like Titian, never had
this. Raphael only attained it once, perhaps
twice, not oftener.
His ultimate estimate none can know now. Those
who know most of the passing judgments of the
day, written on the sand of the beach over which
an artist’s steps have just passed, know best how
soon the next tide effaces them. It is indubitably
true that Saint-Gaudens stands apart with the
greater men of his art in all centuries because his

greatest works loom large with supernal con-
ception. They are their own interpreters. In them
is a sudden sense of the invisible spirit of the age
made visible by the artist who re-presents, not him-
self, but his time. This is after all the test of the
Phidian figures, the Medicean tomb, the front at
Rheims or Rodin’s earlier work. This test, Saint-
Gaudens meets. No man stands before his work
but feels there the same pulse of cosmic emotion

which suffuses these creations. No other American
sculptor, no sculptor of our day but Rodin, has
swept this sympathetic chord, sounded that strange
note so rarely struck in any art, to which respond
within those strange and inscrutable overtones
which are awakened, independent of analysis,
accuracy, specific imagination or technical skill.
For this final stroke, one has neither explanation
nor analysis. There are half lines of verse, a bar
of music, some stretch of color on canvas, some
bending figure or dowered face, and suddenly deep
calls unto deep and beauty walks on the whelming
waters, that void of passing time which our lives
measure by days that pass, and these things
bridge with the eternal vision.
This Saint-Gaudens shared, and I say this well
aware that it has now and then been shared by a
man whom posterity displaced from the pedestal
of his day and remembered only for one supreme
work. The assured judgment of the future still
eludes. Environing condition is more easily
grasped and recorded. He shared the Celtic strain.
He sprang of French descent. He had an Irish
birth. He came for his early and impressionable
years to New York, a city reproached for its sordid
prose and more full of poetry than any but one or
two on earth. Shining waters are never far from
its streets and in them seethes such alien stir and
ferment as no other thoroughfares know. New
York never sleeps. There is something in that
slender island on whose narrow platform the con-
verging forces of a continent wrestle, which brings
as near to men the problem of the Sphinx as the
solitude of the desert where that solitary figure
broods—the worship and the temple of men a
narrow and little thing between her paws.
Of these things in New York most men are un-
conscious and hear only the rattle of the Elevated
and the clamor of the crowd. Whitman was not.
The poet who has added his lament over Saint-
Gaudens to the greater threnodies of our tongue,
Richard Watson Gilder, is not. Nor was the

CXXIII