[Illustration: BUST OF THE ARTIST’S WIFE By Herbert Adams] therefore, the architect has sought the models for the decoration in medieval sculpture of the eleventh or early twelfth century. It is a characteristic example of the way in which the American architectural mind frequently works. Such a course is so obvious and reasonable, yet what a meagerness of imagination it displays! It has mastered the “styles” and lives up to its tables of laws and formulas as rigidly, as literally and with as little regard for their spirit as the Jews of old clung to their Decalogue. It dare not, or cannot, rekindle the spirit of the past with an infusion of the present, as has been done in all living periods of architecture, but to commemorate a New Yorker of the nineteenth century, reproduces the ungainly types of figures, fashioned at a time when architecture was better understood than sculpture. So in the principal panels of the doors the architect has arranged four apostles--rude, formalistic figures, too short in the leg--and filled the subordinate ovals with dry little rigid groups; succeeding in his desire to remind us of the past and failing utterly to affect us in the present. For what possible appeal, religious, emotional or esthetic, can these groups make to the modern imagination? Yet, from the point of view of the subject we are discussing, the saddest thing is that a sculptor of “delicately imagined sensations” should be so distorted from the true bent of his genius and compelled to exert ingenuity in lieu of imagination. It is an incredible waste, for only in the borders can we discover Adams’s real self; yet, if he had been permitted to work in a reasonable liberty of imagination, he might have made the groups conformable to the style of the building and possessed also of some vital elements of beauty and of beautiful appeal. One effect, however, of this unequal coöperation with the architect which may bring some compensating benefit to Adams’s art has been that his mind has been directed more than previously to the architectonics of decoration and to the sculptural value of form. For, while the figures in these doors have no individual interest, the sum total of the whole decoration has a very marked structural dignity, which arouses one’s respect, if it does not warm one to enthusiasm. And this enforcement of the structural quality reappears even more conspicuously in the tympanum, both in the increased sense of force which the figures convey, and in the organic relation of the forms to the shape of the space and to its architectural function.