dainty, exquisite, infallibly charming in their arrangement—­things which are so dependent on design for their very existence that they seem scarcely modelled at all.  He goes on to decorative figures in the round, to heroic statues, to monumental groups, but always it is design that he thinks of first and last—­design, now, in three dimensions rather than in two—­design properly sculptural rather than pictorial, in so much as it deals with bosses and concaves, with solid matter in space—­but still design.  This power of design rises to higher uses as time goes on, is bent to the interpretation of lofty themes and the expression of deep emotions, but it is in its nature the same power that produced the delicate, ethereal beauty of the reliefs.  The infinite fastidiousness of a master designer, constantly reworking and readjusting his design, that every part shall be perfect and that no fold or spray of leafage shall be out of its proper place, never satisfied that his composition is beyond improvement while an experiment remains untried—­this is what cost him years of labor.  His first important statue, the “Farragut,” is a masterpiece of restrained and elegant yet original and forceful design—­a design, too, that includes the pedestal and the bench below, and of which the figures in bas-relief are almost as important a part as the statue itself.  In later and maturer work, with a more clarified taste and a deeper feeling, he can reach such unsurpassable expressiveness of composition as is shown in the “Shaw Memorial” or the great equestrian statue of Sherman.

Saint-Gaudens’s mastery of low relief was primarily a matter of this power of design, but it was conditioned also upon two other qualities:  knowledge of drawing and extreme sensitiveness to delicate modulation of surface.  And by drawing I mean not merely knowledge of form and proportion and the exact rendering of these, in which sense a statue may be said to be well drawn if its measurements are correct—­I mean that much more subtle and difficult art, the rendering in two dimensions only of the appearance of objects of three dimensions.  Sculpture in the round is the simplest and, in a sense, the easiest of the arts.  It deals with actual form—­a piece of sculpture does not merely look like the form of an object, it is the form of an object.  Leaving out of the count, for the moment, the refinements and the illusions which may be added to it—­which must be added to it to make it art—­it is the reproduction in another material of the actual forms of things.  Something which shall answer for it, to the uninitiate, may be produced by merely casting natural objects; and there is a great deal that is called sculpture which scarcely aims at anything more than the production, by a more difficult method, of something like a plaster cast from nature.  It is the very simplicity of the art that makes its difficulty, for to avoid the look of casting and achieve the feeling of art requires the most delicate handling