[Illustration:  Copyright, De W.C.  Ward.  Plate 23.—­Saint-Gaudens.  “Plaquette Commemorating Cornish Masque.”]

Underneath his humor and his gayety, however, there lay a deep-seated Celtic melancholy, and beside his energy was an infinite patience at the service of an exacting artistic conscience.  The endless painstaking of his work and the time he took over it were almost proverbial.  He was twelve years engaged upon the “Shaw Memorial” and eleven upon the “Sherman,” and, though he did much other work while these were in progress, yet it was his constant revision, his ever-renewed striving for perfection that kept them so long achieving.  The “Diana” of the Madison Square Garden was taken down from her tower because he and the architect, Stanford White, thought her too large, and was entirely remodelled on a smaller scale.  And with this patience went a gentleness, a sweetness, a delicate sensitiveness, and an abounding humanity and sympathy.  He could be almost ruthless in the assertion of his will when the interests of his art or of justice seemed to demand it, yet there was a tender-heartedness in him which made it distressing to him to inflict pain on any one.  The conflict of these elements in his nature sometimes made his actions seem inconsistent and indecipherable even to those who knew him.  He would be long-suffering, compromising, disinclined to strike; but when he was at last roused the blow would be as staggering as it was unexpected.  It was as if he struck the harder to have done with it and to spare himself the pain of striking again.

It was his whole-hearted devotion to his art which caused his rare acts of self-assertion, and it was this same devotion, no less than his natural kindliness, that made him ever helpful to younger artists who showed any promise of future worth.  Even in his last days of unspeakable suffering he would summon what was left of his old strength to give a word of criticism and advice, above all, a word of commendation, to any one who needed the one or had earned the other.  The essential goodness of the man was most felt by those who stood nearest him, and most of all, perhaps, by his actual coworkers.  He could command, as few have been able to do, the love and devotion of his assistants.  To all who knew him the man himself seemed finer, rarer, sweeter than his work, and the gap he has left in their lives will be even more impossible to fill than his place in American art.

But the personality of an artist, though he be a great one, is for the memory of his private friends.  It is only as it colors his art that it is of public interest.  It is his art itself, his gift to the world, that the world cares for; it is of the kind and quality of that art, the nature and the degree of its greatness, that the world wishes to hear.  Because the man was my friend I have wished to give some glimpse of the manner of man he was; because the artist was the greatest our country has produced I am to try to give some idea of his art, of the elements of its strength, and of the limitations which are as necessary as its qualities.