The Statue of General Sherman
White House
Washington
Oyster Bay, N. Y.
August 3, 1903.
Personal
My dear Mr. Saint-Gaudens:
Your letter was a great relief and pleasure to me. I had been told that it was you personally who had opposed ——. I have no claim to be listened to about these matters, save such claim as a man of ordinary cultivation has. But I do think that ——, like Proctor, has done excellent work in his wild-beast figures.
By the way, I was very glad that the Grant decision in Washington went the way it did. The rejected figure, it seemed to me, fell between two schools. It suggested allegory; and yet it did not show that high quality of imagination which must be had when allegory is suggested. The figure that was taken is the figure of the great general, the great leader of men. It is not the greatest type of statue for the very reason that there is nothing of the allegorical, nothing of the highest type of the imaginative in it. But it is a good statue. Now to my mind your Sherman is the greatest statue of a commander in existence. But I can say with all sincerity that I know of no man—of course of no one living—who could have done it. To take grim, homely, old Sherman, the type and ideal of a democratic general, and put with him an allegorical figure such as you did, could result in but one of two ways—a ludicrous failure or striking the very highest note of the sculptor's art. Thrice over for the good fortune of our countrymen, it was given to you to strike this highest note.
Always faithfully yours,
Theodore Roosevelt.
Mr. Augustus Saint-Gaudens,
Aspet, Windsor, Vermont.