And elsewhere I have treated of some of our sculptors whose decorative works have exhibited imagination; the sweet and gaysome kind of it that plays like sunlight upon water; or, if occasion demands it, the kind of deeper, serious import. But there is a kind of decorative sculpture for which we can have little patience: the nude or draped inanities that spread themselves over space, exploitations of brainless facility; or, again, the figure which would be meaningless except for the added symbols, and which we only recognise as a model, posturing with something borrowed or stolen from the Old World property-room. Yet one of the shibboleths glibly passed around the studio is “ideal sculpture,” and it is largely applied to just such sculpture as this; to works which are barren of ideas, or in which the subject of the statue is declared only through some time-worn symbol. Not that the introduction of a symbol is of itself objectionable, though it is a fact that the works of finest imagination, as Saint-Gaudens’s “Grief,” to quote a modern example, are free of such aids to suggestion. But I am thinking of that vast majority of statues [Illustration: BUST OF A CHILD By Birtley Canfield] [Illustration: THE STONE AGE By John J. Boyle] in which the figure would convey no hint to our imagination if it were not for the symbol introduced. And how far, I wonder, does the symbol succeed in leading us? We are apt to find it either trite or, as in the case of some of the mystically symbolic work of modern times, abstruse. With religious symbolism it is different. In old days, at least, the artist and the public had a common starting-ground of knowledge, and the symbol awoke a clear impression, invested by religious habit with a weighty import. But what of the frequent statues, representing “Law,” “Truth,” “Justice” and the like by a draped model, alternately holding a tablet, serpent, mirror, scale and swords, or what not; or that countless family of undraped statues, clever studies merely of anatomy and academic composition? Their only suggestion to the cultivated imagination is one of weariness, yet they pass in the studios for “ideal.” Let us clear our minds of cant and see these things for what they really are--more or less skilful imitations of the model, but of creative imagination, of the faculty to give expression to an idea, possessing nothing. On the other hand, some sculptors, in their avoidance of the trite, run to the opposite extreme of the abstruse--to that occult and mystic symbolism, which has been sporadic for half a century in Europe and has found at least two exponents in this country.