VICTORY 234 By Augustus Saint-Gaudens THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN SCULPTURE CHAPTER I MRS. PATIENCE WRIGHT SPEAKS THE PROLOGUE I What a pity that Thackeray, surveying our pre-Revolutionary American world in the interest of his Esmond and his Virginians, had not chanced to espy the valiant figure of our first American sculptor, Mrs. Patience Lovell Wright of New Jersey,--Quaker, wax-image-maker, traveler, keen Republican observer of the moods of British royalty and the movements of British troops! Had his mind’s eye but once seen her in her eagerly-frequented rooms on Pall Mall, with the notables of the town literally under her thumb, in wax, and over her shoulder, in the flesh, we might have had from his pen a portrait worthy to live beside that of Beatrix, or of Madam Esmond, or of the Fotheringay herself. Similarly, if Lytton Strachey, building his Books and Characters, had followed out a line or two of Horace Walpole’s concerning the “artistess,” he might have given us a Mrs. Wright fully as engaging as his Madame du Deffand, perhaps almost as “inexplicable, grand, preposterous” as his Lady Hester. Such joys were not to be ours. Some of the traits that Thackeray and Strachey might have dwelt on for our delight have been well sketched by. Abigail Adams, incorruptible eye-witness and letter-writer. Mrs. Adams, though taken aback by the “hearty buss” with which the sculptress greeted ladies and gentlemen alike, observed that “there was an old clergyman sitting reading a paper in the middle of the room, and though I went prepared to see strong representations of real life, I was effectually deceived in this figure for ten minutes, and was finally told that it was only wax.” And Elkanah Watson, meeting Mrs. Wright in Paris, where she was living in her dual capacity as artist and patriot, notes that “the wild flights of her powerful mind stamped originality on all her acts and language.” He tells us that the British king and queen often visited her in her London rooms, where they would induce her to work on her heads regardless of their presence, and where, at times, as if forgetting mundane deferences in the swirl of her inspiration, she would address them offhand as George and Charlotte.