For in this figure Macmonnies revealed perhaps for the first time, certainly in most marked manner, his tendency to lose himself in the natural facts of the model. Some extenuation might be found in the haste with which the work was bound to be completed; and a similar insufficiency of time--as commissions piled upon him in unexampled profusion--may account for his subsequent addiction to bare naturalism. Yet it scarcely excuses it, and still less that the naturalism should take a grosser form, until in the colossal groups at Indianapolis it reached a degree of coarseness in the female figures which is very far indeed from the exquisite feeling of the artist’s early work. In the freshness of his youth he reflected the national grace of gaiety. God forbid that the grossness of type and orgy of action displayed in these latter groups should be indicative of anything American! VI PAUL WEYLAND BARTLETT In the Metropolitan Museum of New York there is a group, called “The Bohemian,” which represents a man leaning over a young bear, endeavouring by voice and gesture to encourage it to antics. The attitude and play of movement are very true to life. One knows the action of a trained bear at the end of its keeper’s chain; how it balances from foot to foot, moves its body up and down like a huge, slow piston rod, while its head turns this way, that way, keeping rude time to the rhythm, half chant, half howl, of the man’s voice. The latter seemed to our childhood’s imagination to have some affinity with the bear; both strange creatures appearing in the village, whence no one knew; performing their uncouth antics, silent but for the man’s mournful, monotonous dirge or an occasional burst of gibberish as he rattled the chain; then disappearing, whither? In the posturing of the man in this group we can anticipate what will be the movement of the bear when it is trained, and feel the suggestion also of an animal kinship between them and of their outcast, vagrant fellowship. Not only is the technique sure and facile, the observation of form and action just, but the conception is one in which imagination has played a distinct part. It is an early work of Paul Weyland Bartlett, executed shortly after he had studied with Frémiet. One may fancy that he, too, had come under the spell of these strange travelling companions, and the absorbing question to his boy’s mind had been: How was the bear taught? Then, in after years, when his interest in animals, quickened by the example of his master, took artistic shape, he bethought him of his old-time wonder and set himself to solve it. However that may be, it is clear that Bartlett’s preoccupation in the subject extended beyond mere deftness of craftsmanship, and that in some way or other his imagination had been roused.