If, then, the accusation that Saint-Gaudens’s art is not sculptural means that he was a designer rather than a modeller, that he cared for composition more than for representation, that the ensemble interested him more than the details, I would cheerfully admit that the accusation is well founded.  Such marvels of rendering as Rodin could give us, before he lost himself in the effort to deserve that reputation as a profound thinker which has been thrust upon him, were not for Saint-Gaudens.  The modelling of the morceau was not particularly his affair.  The discrimination of hard and soft, of bone and muscle and integument, the expression of tension where a fleshy tissue is tightly drawn over the framework beneath, or of weight where it falls away from it—­these were not the things that most compelled his interest or in which he was most successful.  For the human figure as a figure, for the inherent beauty of its marvellous mechanism, he did not greatly care.  The problems of bulk and mass and weight and movement which have occupied sculptors from the beginning were not especially his problems.  It may have been due to the nature of the commissions he received that, after the “Hiawatha” of his student days, he modelled no nude except the “Diana” of the tower—­a purely decorative figure, designed for distant effect, in which structural modelling would have been out of place because invisible.  But it was not accident that in such draped figures as the “Amor-Caritas” (Pl. 24) or the caryatids of the Vanderbilt mantelpiece there is little effort to make the figure visible beneath the draperies.  In the hands of a master of the figure—­of one of those artists to whom the expressiveness and the beauty of the human structure is all in all—­drapery is a means of rendering the masses and the movement of the figure more apparent than they would be in the nude.  In such works as these it is a thing beautiful in itself, for its own ripple and flow and ordered intricacy.  The figure is there beneath the drapery, but the drapery is expressive of the mood of the artist and of the sentiment of the work rather than especially explanatory of the figure.

[Illustration:  Copyright, De W.C.  Ward.  Plate 24.—­Saint-Gaudens.  “Amor Caritas.”]

First of all, by nature and by training, Saint-Gaudens was a designer, and exquisiteness of design was the quality he most consciously strove for—­the quality on which he expended his unresting, unending, persevering toil.  From the start one feels that design is his principal preoccupation, that he is thinking mainly of the pattern of the whole, its decorative effect and play of line, its beauty of masses and spaces, its fitness for its place and its surroundings; in a word, its composition.  In the beginning, as a workman in the shop of the cameo cutter, he was concerned with a kind of art in which perfection of composition is almost the sole claim to serious consideration.  Then he produces a multiplicity of small reliefs,