Too often versatility connotes a superficiality of mind, an easily satisfied outlook. Not so with Saint-Gaudens. He was if anything over-critical of his work; for instance, he never forgot that the snare of the picturesque was in his path, as it is in the path of every sculptor trying to infuse a genial human warmth into the sculptural order. His knowledge in the lesser art of cameo-cutting, a knowledge which in some sculptors would have been swept aside as detrimental to a spacious style, helped rather than hindered him in his advance toward his ultimate mastery over relief of all kinds,--the coin, the intimate portrait medallion, the heroic monumental relief. He may be truly said to have invented that charming form of bas-relief likeness shown in the portraits of the Schiff children, the Butler children, Bastien-Lepage, Violet Sargent, and many others. Nothing quite like these works had ever before been produced, either in the French medalists’ fertile art of the nineteenth century or in that still richer period of the Italian Renaissance medal, heralded by Pisano. And yet, since little in the field of art is utterly original, we are reminded here of that old saying about the power of the man meeting the power of the moment. In beautiful angel-figures such as the Amor-Caritas in high relief, Saint-Gaudens realized and expressed the spiritual meanings of other artists of his time, both sculptors and painters; this we see when we study French’s noble Angel of Death, and the Burne-Jones figures on their golden stair. Critics are divided, not as to the greatness of Saint-Gaudens, but as to the work which best stores up within itself the true elements of his greatness. Those who have seen tears start from the eyelids of gray veterans standing before the Shaw Memorial will perhaps say the Shaw, while those who perceive with delight all that the sculptor has attained in the Sherman equestrian group, with its thrilling harmony of spiritual and realistic presentation, will perhaps say the Sherman. Londoners and Chicagoans will rest content in their great possession of the standing Lincoln. Others again will find their truest vision of this artist’s power in the enfolded mystery of the Rock Creek figure, sometimes called Nirvana, but better named the Peace of God. And if (as I think) this is indeed his consummate, his culminating work, how strange that it is, in a sense, a somewhat unexpected, uncharacteristic work! In its profound other-worldliness, it seems as withdrawn from the Sherman and the Puritan and the Farragut as from those happy portrait-reliefs of living beings in their loveliness or strength. How often artists have mused on the beauty of the head of this figure! Every trace of artistic knowingness is eliminated here; nothing so vain and petty as any suggestion of accomplished technique intrudes. The beholder’s attention is directed solely toward whatever inner meaning he finds in those shadowed lineaments.