Naturally
every detail interested him; every line; every touch of the
artist; every change of light and shade; every point of relation;
every possible doubt of St. Gaudens's correctness of taste or
feeling; so that, as the spring approached, he was apt to stop
there often to see what the figure had to tell him that was new;
but, in all that it had to say, he never once thought of
questioning what it meant. He supposed its meaning to be the one
commonplace about it -- the oldest idea known to human thought.
He knew that if he asked an Asiatic its meaning, not a man,
woman, or child from Cairo to Kamtchatka would have needed more
than a glance to reply. From the Egyptian Sphinx to the Kamakura
Daibuts; from Prometheus to Christ; from Michael Angelo to
Shelley, art had wrought on this eternal figure almost as though
it had nothing else to say. The interest of the figure was not in
its meaning, but in the response of the observer. As Adams sat
there, numbers of people came, for the figure seemed to have
become a tourist fashion, and all wanted to know its meaning.
Most took it for a portrait-statue, and the remnant were
vacant-minded in the absence of a personal guide. None felt what
would have been a nursery-instinct to a Hindu baby or a Japanese
jinricksha-runner. The only exceptions were the clergy, who
taught a lesson even deeper.
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