As the degree of relief varies, also, from the lowest possible to that highest relief which, nearly approaches sculpture in the round, the problems involved constantly vary.  At each stage there is a new compromise to be made, a new adjustment to find, between fact and illusion, between the real form and the desired appearance.  And there may be a number of different degrees of relief in the same work, even in different parts of the same figure, so that the art of relief becomes one of the most complicated and difficult of arts.  It has not, indeed, the added complication of color, but neither has it the resources of color, success in which will more or less compensate for failure elsewhere.  There is no permissible failure in bas-relief, any more than in sculpture in the round, and its difficulties are far greater.  Nothing but truest feeling, completest knowledge, consummate skill will serve.

This explanation may give some measure of what I mean when I say that I believe Augustus Saint-Gaudens the most complete master of relief since the fifteenth century.

He has produced a series of works which run through the whole range of the art, from lowest relief to highest; from things of which the relief is so infinitesimal that they seem as if dreamed into existence rather than wrought in bronze or marble to things which are virtually engaged statues; from things which you fear a chance touch might brush away, like a pastel of Whistler’s, to things as solid and enduring in appearance as in actual material.  And in all these things there is the same inevitable mastery of design and of drawing, the same infinite resource and the same technical perfection.  The “Butler Children” (Pl. 25), the “Schiff Children,” the “Sarah Redwood Lee” (Pl. 26), to name but a few of his masterpieces of this kind, are in their perfection of spacing, their grace of line, their exquisite and ethereal illusiveness of surface, comparable only to the loveliest works of the Florentine Renaissance; while the assured mastery of the most complicated problems of relief evinced in the “Shaw Memorial”—­a mastery which shows, in the result, no trace of the strenuous and long-continued effort that it cost—­is unsurpassed—­I had almost said unequalled—­in any work of any epoch.

[Illustration:  Copyright, De W.C.  Ward.  Plate 25.—­Saint-Gaudens.  “The Butler Children.”]

Illustration can give but a faint idea of the special beauties of this or that particular work in this long series.  It can show no more than the composition and the draughtsmanship.  The refinement of workmanship, the sensitiveness and subtlety of modelling, can be appreciated only before the works themselves.  And this sensitiveness and delicacy of workmanship, this mastery of the problems of relief, with its reliance on illusion and its necessary abstention from realization, is applied to sculpture in the round, and becomes with Saint-Gaudens, as it did with the sculptors of