Gaudens had
passed beyond all. He liked the stately monuments much more than
he liked Gibbon or Ruskin; he loved their dignity; their unity;
their scale; their lines; their lights and shadows; their
decorative sculpture; but he was even less conscious than they of
the force that created it all -- the Virgin, the Woman -- by
whose genius "the stately monuments of superstition" were built,
through which she was expressed. He would have seen more meaning
in Isis with the cow's horns, at Edfoo, who expressed the same
thought. The art remained, but the energy was lost even upon the
artist.
Yet in mind and person St. Gaudens was a survival of the 1500;
he bore the stamp of the Renaissance, and should have carried an
image of the Virgin round his neck, or stuck in his hat, like
Louis XI. In mere time he was a lost soul that had strayed by
chance to the twentieth century, and forgotten where it came
from. He writhed and cursed at his ignorance, much as Adams did
at his own, but in the opposite sense. St. Gaudens was a child of
Benvenuto Cellini, smothered in an American cradle. Adams was a
quintessence of Boston, devoured by curiosity to think like
Benvenuto. St. Gaudens's art was starved from birth, and Adams's
instinct was blighted from babyhood. Each had but half of a
nature, and when they came together before the Virgin of Amiens
they ought both to have felt in her the force that made them one;
but it was not so.
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