Our reference to the super-symbolism in Houdon’s Washington (a flaw partly explained, it may be, by the inexorable demands of our forefathers as well as of practical marble-cutting) leads us to the observation that to-day, taken by and large, French monumental art suffers enormously from emblematic excrescences. What scales of justice and of mermaids, what pinions of angels and eagles and doves, what garlands and garters and gaiters, what palettes and portfolios, what seines and scrolls and T-squares have been gathered together in the French marketplaces as candidates for immortality! And what complication of silhouette, what lack of massing in light and shade, have resulted thereby! This paradox of the over-explained wrongs the clear French mind, the intuitive French eye. How is it in our own country? But I studiously avoid breathing any word here of any lesson for our own sculptors. It is enough to point out that a healthy, if high-strung, revolt against all this easy offhand grab-bag naturalistic symbolism will not only bring in its train the sculpture of serious protest; it will also pick up on its fringes plenty of those tongue-in-cheek specimens of so-called sculpture familiar in our century. From Rodin’s candle-lit and blanketed Balzac of the previous generation down to the latest Greenwich Village absurdity, in which human portraiture once more achieves its apotheosis on the surface of an egg, such revolt is visible. It is of course a revolt against many things besides an overdone symbolism; but the symbolism may well serve as a symbol for the rest. All honor then to the austerity of Ward’s Washington. As Ward in his youth worked for an older man, so he himself in his later years had the good fortune to meet the newer ideals in his art through collaboration with younger sculptors. Mr. Bartlett’s sympathetic assistance is apparent in the Stock Exchange pediment, and in the equestrian statue of General Hancock, for Fairmount Park. This last was the work that engaged Ward’s thought to the very day of his death. But nowhere shall we study Ward better than in the statue of Washington. Here we see this sculptor as he himself would wish to be seen; a sculptor of mankind at its most heroic, for mankind at its daily average. “Our work,” he often said, “must touch the ordinary human heart.” His rugged, straightforward genius was not suited for revealing the more exquisite aspects of beauty, the more whimsical secrets of the soul. Never fear; later sculptors, both men and women, will fully attend to those things. In the words of Ward’s historic observation to the Farragut statue committee, “Give the younger man the chance!” V AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS Born eighteen years after Ward, and dying while Ward still had three years of strenuous work before him, Augustus Saint-Gaudens lives in our annals as the most illustrious figure in American art. Both the Old World and the New see it so.