arch.

To this illustration from architecture may be added another from
sculpture, as suggestive and as useful in showing how a conquest of
technical difficulty is likely ever to increase the resources of the
art. The sculptor of the statue of Lincoln, which ennobles a park of
Chicago, was instructed that the work of his hands was to stand upon a
knoll, visible from all sides, stark against the sky, unprotected by any
background of entablature or canopy. The gaunt figure of Lincoln is not
a thing of beauty to be gazed at from all the points of the compass; and
the stern veracity of the artist would not permit him to disguise the
ill-fitting coat and trousers by any arbitrary draperies, mendaciously
cloaking the clothes which were intensely characteristic of the man to
be modeled. To shield the awkwardness of the effigy when seen from the
rear, a chair was placed behind it; and so the sculptor was led to
present Lincoln as the Chief Magistrate of the Republic, arisen from the
chair of state, to address the people from whom he had received his
authority. And thus, at that late day, at the end of the nineteenth
century, Mr. Saint-Gaudens did a new thing; altho there had been
standing statues and seated statues, no sculptor had ever before
designed a figure just rising from his seat.

It is by victories like these over technical difficulties that the arts
advance; and it is in combats like these that the true artist finds his
pleasure. The delight of battle is his, as he returns to the attack,
again and again, until at last he wins the day and comes home laden with
the spoil. The true artist hungers after technic for its own sake, well
knowing the nourishment it affords. He even needlessly puts on fetters
now and again, that he may find sharper zest in his effort. This
ravenous appetite for technic leads many an artist to go outside his own