28), grandly dignified, austerely simple,
sorrowfully human, risen from the chair of state that marks his office,
but about to speak as a man to men, his bent head and worn face
filled with a sense of power, but even more with the sadness of
responsibility--filled, above all, with a yearning, tender passion of
sympathy and love. In imaginative presentation of character, in nobility
of feeling and breadth of treatment, no less than in perfection of
workmanship, these are among the world's few worthy monuments to its
great men.
[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 27.--Saint-Gaudens. "Farragut."]
And they are monuments to Americans by an American. Saint-Gaudens had
lived through the time of the Civil War, had felt, as a boy, the stir of
its great happenings in his blood, and its epic emotions had become a
part of his consciousness, deep-seated at the roots of his nature. The
feelings of the American people were his feelings, and his
representations of these and of other heroes of that great struggle are
among the most national as they are among the most vital things that our
country has produced in art.
But if Saint-Gaudens's imagination was thus capable of raising the
portrait to the dignity of the type, it was no less capable of endowing
the imagined type with all the individuality of the portrait.
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