The major heroes of sculpture may well receive the tribute of shrine or exedra or canopy, but what of the more numerous lesser heroes? In avoiding a commonplace rendering, the imaginative sculptor has other avenues of escape beside those offered by the architect, sometimes gloomily called by unbelievers in collaboration the sculptor’s evil genius. A first aid is the impressionist manner, used by O’Connor in his Worcester Soldier, and in his masterly statue of General Lawton at Indianapolis. In these works the modeling is fluid, the planes vibrate in light; we feel the happy absence of a sample-card arrangement of buttons; no one could for a moment say, Here are two more triumphs of bronze tailoring. Already in some of our new War memorials, our sculptors are making use, but not always the best use, of broad simplifications of mass and surface. They are showing us young heroes of the Argonne not cap-a-pie in their uniforms, (no one asks that) but with torn tunics, if any, and with riven flesh. Rodin and the grand old Bourgeois de Calais are indirectly responsible for some of these compositions. But will these bronze pictures of human agony long satisfy the human heart? Have such memorials the permanence of spirit we implore, or are they big bronze studies that are really almost as far from the heroic greatness of the Bourgeois de Calais as from the unpretending littleness of a Rogers group, say the Wounded Scout in the Swamp? The answer depends entirely upon the artist. We have no right to dictate his manner, but we demand that beneath the manner there shall be sound construction as well as feeling: we ask also a knowledge of ensemble, of silhouette. The impressionist style is a fine instrument in the right hands. But in the hands of mediocrity, this style of sculptural language performs the third and most regrettable function of all language, that of concealing the lack of thought. The result is what Mr. Grafly might well call “union-suit sculpture.” Between the Devil of a prosaic literalness of rendering, and the deep sea of a sloppy and would-be poetical impressionism, the genius of the sculptor is our only salvation. Impressionism ill-handled will not save from the commonplace either a group or a figure. While the problem of the portrait statue remains as difficult as it now is, one is glad to see that of late committees are turning toward other ways of perpetuating the memory of greatness. Here in New York, the Pulitzer Memorial in the Plaza has taken the form of a fountain, surmounted by a figure of Abundance, the last work from the hands of Karl Bitter; and the Straus Memorial is a fountain, in which the chief motive is a reclining figure of Contemplation, at the head of a large pool. Other cities also have their successful memorial avoidances of the “iron photograph,” as the darkened bronze effigy has been called. A distinguished example is Daniel French’s Du Pont fountain in Washington, made to replace a portrait statue. Mrs.