Last summer, revisiting Concord after many years, I crossed “the rude bridge that arched the flood,” and found Mr. French’s Minute Man, embattled still, though embowered in quietness, and made safe from the ruder motor traffic of the day. It seemed incredible that a youth of twenty-three, with no models except the Apollo Belvidere and himself, and with no instruction beyond that derived from a month in Ward’s studio and from Dr. Rimmer’s anatomy lectures, could have produced a statue so competent and so sculptural as this. Then I remembered that in 1919 the most proudly acclaimed work of American art for the year was Mr. French’s marble figure of Memory; and it was interesting to note that the Minute Man, however immediately convincing in general appeal, appeared in a sense as the work of an artist older than the sculptor of the Memory. For the Minute Man has here and there a lean gravity of modeling that we rightly or wrongly associate with passing maturity, while the forms of the Memory are rich and commanding, yet enveloped with that serenity for which we have no better word than classic. And what is the true meaning of classic, except as it describes that which is fresh and vivid to-day, yet has the underlying force of permanence, the very tide of immortality flowing in its veins? Many of our artists acquire the classic spirit, many have it thrust upon them, some reject it utterly. But Mr. French is the classic spirit personified among us; born so, not made so; and what he creates is illumined by his understanding of the dignity of the human soul, and by his belief that beauty and truth are acceptable to the human mind. This gracious seated figure of Memory, gazing calmly into the glass that reflects, not her own person but the shapes of the past, is admirably composed from every point of view and within the natural limits of the marble. A critic has written of it as “showing at its best Mr. French’s idealism, and being at the same time a masterly study of the nude, true to the nobler forms of nature, yet with a skillful avoidance of what is commonly known as realism.” That phrase “true to the nobler forms of nature” well describes this sculptor’s great ideal figures. Mr. French is to-day the dean of American sculpture, the honorary President of the National Sculpture Society; a presence with all the gracious authority conferred by deanship, and with nothing whatever of the dry ancientry at times associated with that honor.