Adams began to ponder,
asking himself whether he knew of any American artist who had
ever insisted on the power of sex, as every classic had always
done; but he could think only of Walt Whitman; Bret Harte, as far
as the magazines would let him venture; and one or two painters,
for the flesh-tones. All the rest had used sex for sentiment,
never for force; to them, Eve was a tender flower, and Herodias
an unfeminine horror. American art, like the American language
and American education, was as far as possible sexless. Society
regarded this victory over sex as its greatest triumph, and the
historian readily admitted it, since the moral issue, for the
moment, did not concern one who was studying the relations of
unmoral force. He cared nothing for the sex of the dynamo until
he could measure its energy.
Vaguely seeking a clue, he wandered through the art exhibit,
and, in his stroll, stopped almost every day before St. Gaudens's
General Sherman, which had been given the central post of honor.
St. Gaudens himself was in Paris, putting on the work his usual
interminable last touches, and listening to the usual
contradictory suggestions of brother sculptors. Of all the
American artists who gave to American art whatever life it
breathed in the seventies, St. Gaudens was perhaps the most
sympathetic, but certainly the most inarticulate.
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