Our tendency is to desire a motive in decoration beyond the decorative one. So we make our statuary expressive of patriotism or what not. Well and good; but we do so without that instinct of propriety which should be as careful of the setting of the statue as of the statue itself. Thus in city squares and public parks we multiply our memorials without adding, as effectively as might be, to the beauty of their environment. It was this fact which, by a display of the opposite, the Buffalo Exposition was designed to enforce. In another chapter I have alluded to our preference for portrait-statues with their prosaic accompaniment of tailor-made trimmings to statues which, while commemorating the individual, would be more essentially decorative. But it is equally to be desired that better use should be made of such statues as we decide to encourage; for a statue set down promiscuously in a public square or thoroughfare, facing in no particular direction, forming the termination of no vista of sight, supported and isolated by no architectonic arrangement, loses the greater part of its impressiveness. Indeed it is very generally forgotten that there is an element of formality in a statue, which necessitates some formality in its placing, and that the accompaniment of wriggling paths and of the haphazard sprinkling of trees, such as we find in our New York smaller parks, is directly opposed to the spirit of the statue. It is equally a violation of propriety and a waste of good material to set a fine statue on the line of a thoroughfare, where it is seldom seen from the front, but continually passed by unnoticed. Yet these and similar incongruities are only too frequent. XIII THE IDEAL MOTIVE The value of the imaginative quality in a work of sculpture must depend chiefly upon the degree to which it is governed and prompted by, impregnated with, the sculptural feeling. This is, of course, true of any other work of art: that it should be the offspring of a wedding of the thought with the medium; a union in which the medium is not compelled into alliance with the thought, or dallied with in a more or less honourable concubinage, but fitly mated in the liberty of mutual dependence. Yet it is so habitual with us to clothe our thoughts in words, actually to think in words, that the artist finds it difficult to shake himself free of the verbal subjection and to think in the language of his particular medium. Some evade the difficulty by not burdening themselves with thought; others succumb to it and force their medium and technique to a literal rendering of their ideas, whether shallow ones or deeper; while a few succeed in deriving motive from the medium, or in so moulding their thought to it, that both become indissolubly blended and mutually enforcing.