and has made mistakes. Even in the flush of success his high resolves for the future must be stiffened by his invaluable experience of having seen himself for months as his opponents see him.

No doubt as a people we have our defects and failings, and always shall have; no doubt in all political campaigns the open appeal is mainly to the voters' sense of right; still, the great discussion that ended this month is more than usually encouraging as to our ethical and intellectual condition. In the presidential contest there was no supreme issue of temporary importance to divert attention from the general tendencies of parties and policies, and no personal defect in either can

The

didate to deflect consideration from his probable usefulness as a public servant. It was a dispassionate and rather amiable campaign, as campaigns go, but an unusually thoughtful one. And in several of the State campaigns for governor the issues were unusually interesting, and the fight for purer government unusually brisk and hopeful. millennium is probably not close at hand notwithstanding we have elected a President and some governors, but it does seem, as we look back, as if the aspirations of the American people were mounting higher; that they are showing increased will to walk in peace and deal justly with all men, and a growing purpose to have all men-especially their own legislators and administrators-deal justly by them.

BRONZE DOORS FOR THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY,

S'

IX great bronze valves, weighing fifteen hundred pounds apiece, were on exhibition in New York during a part of the month of September, and are now, as we go to press, in place in the three great doorways fronting Copley Square. These are the new doors of the Boston Public Library, the work of Daniel Chester French; and the excellent and really marvellous castings are of the John Williams foundry.

They are unusual in appearance for bronze doors. When those of the Library of Congress were designed by Olin Warner and were put into place eight years ago the tall single figures occupying large panels in the middle of each door were surprising enough, supported though they were by broad frames with floral decoration of a Renaissance type and having, under their feet and above their heads, panels deeply sunken and filled with purely decorative compositions.

But Mr. French has gone a step farther, a long step farther, in the way of reducing his bronze valves to the condition of pure sculpture. If he were to put up in each of the three square door-openings two statues of more than life size, stopping the way by their mere mass and relieved against the dark interior, he would not eliminate more completely that which is commonly called the decorative element in sculpture. Here is no semblance of panelling, or of other breakingup of the smooth door; the human figure, about six feet high, is the whole design. Granted that in these flat panels there are laurel wreaths hung at top with the halfveiled inscriptions, Knowledge, Truth, and the like, and granted that the supposed statues would hardly have the little soaring birds of the panel "Music," or the rising incense-smoke and the stars of the panel "Poetry"-granted so much deference to that semi-pictorial influence which is identified in our minds with decorative relief sculptVOL. XXXVI.-85

ure-it is yet a very surprising motive of design, the frank abandonment of those broad surfaces of metal to draped human figures, grouped in couples. As for the legends at the foot of each panel, we may take them as the equivalent of the statue's pedestal in each case; and indeed it is very much in that way that the eye sees those firm horizontal lines of lettering in the low relief of the bronze.

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In what has been said above neither praise nor deprecation is even suggested. reader is asked to consider how very unusual the treatment is before he begins to admire the work of combined and organized fine art. And this further consideration may be entertained, that the front of the library is not one of those columnar designs of a rather cold neoclassical character which our recent public buildings affect; it is a very close imitation of a Parisian building of the time of Louis Philippe-a building of the Romantic School, if there ever was one-a building without a single classical detail in its whole façade. And it is in the light of these thoughts that one remarks upon the statue-like treatment of the figures in the first place, and upon their unusual posing in the second place. If we imagined six statues in the place of these six reliefs we should find our supposed statues unusual in the continued repetition of what is an unusual action for a statue-the raised arms with the hands carrying and displaying attributes.

Yet it is not to be supposed for a moment that objection to this pose is even suggested.

It would be unusual, but it might be a splendid composition, even for a statue, this throwing up of the arms, as it were, to display the emblems which the hands securely hold. But in the low relief of the bronze panels it is of all possible attitudes the most effectiveeffective in the way of non-artistic sentiment as calling attention strongly to the purpose of the figure; effective artistically as filling, in the most admirable way, the lofty and somewhat narrow flat surface of the bronze plate.

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The left-hand or southern doorway is filled with the two subjects, Music and Poetry; the middle doorway by Knowledge and Wisdom; the right-hand or northern doorway by Truth and Romance. Music holds a lyre against her left side, supported firmly by the left arm and hand, and she holds the plectron high in the right hand, as if in an ecstasy of meditation before touching the strings. An ecstasy of meditation-yes, but still with the practical thought in face and in pose, the

meeting of the practical question how that musical thought shall be developed into sound. There can be no mistake as to the purposeful action of the musician. Poetry is in meditation absolutely. She holds the double lamp high on the fingers of the right hand,. and the left is raised as if towards the stars whose visible presence is suggested, merely, by the four or five pentagrams embossed upon the background. The smoke from the two wicks is seen rising in snaky coils, half hiding the imagined stars. The hair of the figure, which in Music we find arranged nearly à la Sapho and only a little disheveled, escaping only in parts from its ligatures, is in Poetry gathered loosely into long braids which are afloat in an imagined breeze. There is a halo distinctly relieved about her head, and from this we may infer that to the sculptor poetry is a loftier and more abstract, a less work-a-day conception than, for instance, music. Something of the same motive is found in the devoting of

one panel to Truth, for

Truth might have been assumed to be a presiding genius for each one of the arts and each one of the qualifications. There is truth in wisdom, there is (or there ought to be) truth in romance; and so is there knowledge in wisdom and certainly knowledge in music. We have, then, to notice a difference in treatment, if any exists in these reliefs in so far as their subjects are more or less abstract, and the difference is well marked in these twin compositions, Music and Poetry; for poetry

RUSSELL STURGIS.