The garden sculptor should have above all a true dramatic instinct for the rôle his work is to play in the garden ensemble--a fine relation-sense which will by no means clip the wings of his design. You can not make pleasure-sculpture out of accurate letter-of-the-law nature-copying alone. In a fountain figure, for example, with its silhouette seen under varying conditions, today drenched with sun and tomorrow dripping with water, all according to wind and weather, surely the artist has much to consider aside from inch-by-inch anatomical modeling. Sculptors know this, but sometimes forget it, when once launched out on the simple joy of “copying a _morceau_.” Here we touch a great difficulty in our art education. In spite of all the chattered tomfoolishness of the hour, the fact remains that for most artists, the school training is the beginning of wisdom. It is not a goal, but a starting-point; it gives firm ground for future creative flights. Yet no house can be well built of foundation-stuff alone. The school provides a foundation, and something of a ground-floor besides, but the artist himself must build his own upper stories. He must create his own personal syntheses in art, with the help of the repeated analyses practised by him in school. And now comes his perilous moment; to survive, he needs time and opportunity. The most advanced type of artistic training, that offered by our American Academy in Rome, does not begin and end with Houdon’s “_Copiez toujours_,” but allows for contemplation, for self-communion, for the personal synthesis, and for the exchange of thought between sculptor, painter and architect, so that each may understand the other’s aims. American art today needs all the mellowing and broadening influences that both the contemplative and the communicative spirit can bestow. Mr. Manship’s figures and groups, with their rich inventions of rainbow-winged fancy, are here to prove that the Academy is not an ogre, whose chief delight is to crush personal genius. But human frailty does not easily part with its incurably romantic ideas of a fabulous monster; the public demands a scape-goat; it would rather than not believe in the Evil Eye; and the mood of the moment, with the injudicious, is to charge all untoward influences in art to some Gryphon of an Academy, of which little is known, and everything suspected. II