His lack of early education gave him a
certain diffidence and a distrust of his own gifts of expression. He was
apt to overrate the mere verbal facility of others and to underestimate
himself in the comparison--indeed, a certain humility was strongly
marked in him, even as regards his art, though he was self-confident
also. When he was unconstrained his great powers of observation, his
shrewdness of judgment, his bubbling humor, and a picturesque vivacity
of phrase not uncommon among artists made him one of the most entrancing
of talkers.
[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 23.--Saint-Gaudens. "Plaquette Commemorating Cornish Masque."]
Underneath his humor and his gayety, however, there lay a deep-seated
Celtic melancholy, and beside his energy was an infinite patience at the
service of an exacting artistic conscience. The endless painstaking of
his work and the time he took over it were almost proverbial. He was
twelve years engaged upon the "Shaw Memorial" and eleven upon the
"Sherman," and, though he did much other work while these were in
progress, yet it was his constant revision, his ever-renewed striving
for perfection that kept them so long achieving. The "Diana" of the
Madison Square Garden was taken down from her tower because he and the
architect, Stanford White, thought her too large, and was entirely
remodelled on a smaller scale.
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