The commonest criticism on Saint-Gaudens’s art has been that it is not, primarily, sculptural in its inspiration; and, in a sense, the criticism is justified.  One need not, perhaps, greatly care whether it is true or not.  It is, after all, only a matter of definition, and if we were forbidden to call his work sculpture at all and required to find another name for it, the important fact that it is art—­art of the finest, the most exquisite, at times the most powerful—­would in no wise be altered.  Ghiberti went beyond the traditions of sculpture in relief, introduced perspective into his compositions, modelled trees and rocks and clouds and cast them in bronze, made pictures, if you like, instead of reliefs.  Does any one care?  Is it not enough that they are beautiful pictures?  The gates of the Baptistry of Florence are still worthy, as the greatest sculptor since the Greeks thought them, to be the gates of paradise.  A work of art remains a work of art, call it what you please, and a thing of beauty will be a joy forever, whether or not you can pigeonhole it in some ready-made category.  After all, the critical pigeonholes are made for the things, not the things for the pigeonholes.  The work is there, and if it does not fit your preconceived definition the fault is as likely to be in the definition as in the work itself.

And the first and most essential thing to note about the art of Augustus Saint-Gaudens is that it is always art of the purest—­free in an extraordinary degree from the besetting sins of naturalism and the scientific temper on the one hand and of the display of cleverness and technical brilliancy on the other.  Never more than in our own day have these been the great temptations of an able artist:  that he should in the absorption of study forget the end in the means and produce demonstrations of anatomy or of the laws of light rather than statues or pictures; or that he should, in the joy of exercising great talents, seem to say, “See how well I can do it!” and invent difficulties for the sake of triumphantly resolving them, becoming a virtuoso rather than a creator.  Of the meaner temptation of mere sensationalism—­the desire to attract attention by ugliness and eccentricity lest one should be unable to secure it by truth and beauty—­one need not speak.  It is the temptation of vulgar souls.  But great and true artists have yielded, occasionally or habitually, to these other two; Saint-Gaudens never does.  I know no work of his to which raw nature has been admitted, in which a piece of study has been allowed to remain as such without the moulding touch of art to subdue it to its place; and I know only one which has any spice of bravura—­the Logan statue—­and the bravura is there because the subject seemed to demand it, not because the artist wished it.  The dash and glitter are those of “Black Jack Logan,” not of Saint-Gaudens.  The sculptor strove to render them as he strove to render higher qualities at other times, but they remain antipathetic to his nature, and the statue is one of the least satisfactory of his works.  He is essentially the artist—­the artificer of beauty—­ever bent on the making of a lovely and significant thing; and the study of nature and the resources of his craft are but tools and are never allowed to become anything more.