The “Shaw Memorial” (Pl. 31) is a relief, but a relief of many planes.  The marching troops are in three files, one behind the other, the varying distances from the spectator marked by differences of the degree of projection.  Nearer than all of them is the equestrian figure of Shaw himself, the horse and rider modelled nearly but not quite in the round.  The whole scale of relief was altered in the course of the work, after it had once been nearly completed, and the mastery of the infinitely complicated problem of relief in many degrees is supreme.  But all the more because the scheme was so full and so varied, the artist has carefully avoided the pictorial in his treatment.  There is no perspective, the figures being all on the same scale, and there is no background, no setting of houses or landscape.  Everywhere, between and above the figures, is the flat surface which is the immemorial tradition of sculpture in relief; and the fact that it is a surface, representing nothing, is made more clear by the inscription written upon it—­an inscription placed there, consciously or unconsciously, that it might have that very effect.  The composition is magnificent, whether for its intrinsic beauty of arrangement—­its balancing of lines and spaces—­or for its perfect expressiveness.  The rhythmic step of marching men is perfectly rendered, and the guns fill the middle of the panel in an admirable pattern, without confusion or monotony.  The heads are superb in characterization, strikingly varied and individual, yet each a strongly marked racial type, unmistakably African in all its forms.

[Illustration:  Plate 29.—­Saint-Gaudens.  “Deacon Chapin.”]

These are merits, and merits of a very high order, enough of themselves to place the work in the front rank of modern sculpture, but they are, after all, its minor merits.  What makes it the great thing it is is the imaginative power displayed in it—­the depth of emotion expressed, and expressed with perfect simplicity and directness and an entire absence of parade.  The negro troops are marching steadily, soberly, with high seriousness of purpose, and their white leader rides beside them, drawn sword in hand, but with no military swagger, courageous, yet with a hint of melancholy, ready not only to lay down his life but to face, if need be, an ignominious death for the cause he believes to be just.  And above them, laden with poppy and with laurels, floats the Death Angel pointing out the way.

[Illustration:  Copyright, Curtis & Cameron.  Plate 30.—­Saint-Gaudens.  “Adams Memorial.”]

It is a work which artists may study again and again with growing admiration and increasing profit, yet it is one that has found its way straight to the popular heart.  It is not always—­it is not often—­that the artists and the public are thus at one.  When they are it is safe to assume that the work they equally admire is truly great—­that it belongs to the highest order of noble works of art.