n piece of marble the
beautiful figure he had to cut out of that particular block and no
other. Professor Mahaffy has suggested that the decay of genius may be
traced to the enfeebling facilities of our complex civilization. "In
art," he maintained, "it is often the conventional shackles,--the
necessities of rime and meter, the triangle of a gable, the circular top
of a barrel--which has led the poet, the sculptor, or the painter, to
strike out the most original and perfect products of their art.
Obstacles, if they are extrinsic and not intrinsic, only help to feed
the flame." Professor Butcher has declared that genius "wins its most
signal triumphs from the very limitations within which it works." And
this is what Gautier meant when he declared that the greater the
difficulty the more beautiful the work; or, as Mr. Austin Dobson has
paraphrased it:

Yes; when the ways oppose--
When the hard means rebel,
Fairer the work outgrows,--
More potent far the spell.

Not only has a useful addition to the accepted devices of the craft been
the guerdon of a victorious grapple with a difficulty, but the
successful effort to solve a purely technical problem has often led to
an ennobling enlargement of the original suggestion, with which the
artist might have rested content if he had not been forced to the
struggle. From the history of sculpture and of architecture here in the
United States during the last years of the nineteenth century, it is
easy to select two instances of this enrichment of the fundamental idea,
as the direct consequence of an unexpected obstacle which the artist
refused to consider a stumbling-block, preferring to make it a
stepping-stone to a loftier achievement.

When the city of New York was making ready to welcome the men of the
navy on their return from Manila and Santiago, the Architectural League
offered to design a triumphal arch. The site assigned, in front of
Madison Square, just where Broadway slants across Fifth Avenue, forced
the architect to face a difficulty seemingly unsurmountable. The line of
march was to be along Fifth Avenue, and, therefore, the stately monument
was set astride that street. But the line of approach, for most of the
multitude certain to come to gaze on the temporary addition to civic
beauty, was along Broadway; and the arch built squarely across the
avenue would seem askew to all who first caught sight of it from the
other street. To avoid this unfortunate ef