degree of relief varies, also, from the lowest possible to that
highest relief which, nearly approaches sculpture in the round, the
problems involved constantly vary. At each stage there is a new
compromise to be made, a new adjustment to find, between fact and
illusion, between the real form and the desired appearance. And there
may be a number of different degrees of relief in the same work, even in
different parts of the same figure, so that the art of relief becomes
one of the most complicated and difficult of arts. It has not, indeed,
the added complication of color, but neither has it the resources of
color, success in which will more or less compensate for failure
elsewhere. There is no permissible failure in bas-relief, any more than
in sculpture in the round, and its difficulties are far greater. Nothing
but truest feeling, completest knowledge, consummate skill will serve.

This explanation may give some measure of what I mean when I say that I
believe Augustus Saint-Gaudens the most complete master of relief since
the fifteenth century.

He has produced a series of works which run through the whole range of
the art, from lowest relief to highest; from things of which the relief
is so infinitesimal that they seem as if dreamed into existence rather
than wrought in bronze or marble to things which are virtually engaged
statues; from things which you fear a chance touch might brush away,
like a pastel of Whistler's, to things as solid and enduring in
appearance as in actual material. And in all these things there is the
same inevitable mastery of design and of drawing, the same infinite
resource and the same technical perfection. The "Butler Children" (Pl.
25), the "Schiff Children," the "Sarah Redwood Lee" (Pl. 26), to name
but a few of his masterpieces of this kind, are in their perfection of
spacing, their grace of line, their exquisite and ethereal illusiveness
of surface, comparable only to the loveliest works of the Florentine
Renaissance; while the assured mastery of the most complicated problems
of relief evinced in the "Shaw Memorial"--a mastery which shows, in the
result, no trace of the strenuous and long-continued effort that it
cost--is unsurpassed--I had almost said unequalled--in any work of any
epoch.

[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 25.--Saint-Gaudens. "The Butler Children."]

Illustration can give but a faint idea of the special beauties of this
or that particular work in this