M. Saint-Marceaux is always successful in this way. One has only to look at the eyes of his figures to be convinced how subtle is his art of expressing character. Here he swings quite clear of all convention and manifests his genius positively and directly. The unfathomable secret of the tomb is in the spiritual expression of the guarding genius, and the elaborately complex movement concentrated upon the urn and directly inspired by the ephebes of the Sistine ceiling is a mere blind. The same is true of the portrait heads which within his range M. Saint Marceaux does better than almost anyone. M. Renan's "Confessions" hardly convey as distinct a notion of character as his bust exhibited at the Triennial of 1883. Many of the sculptors' anonymous heads, so to speak, are hardly less remarkable. Long after the sharp edge of one's interest in the striking pose of his "Harlequin" and the fine movement and bizarre features of his "Genius" has worn away, their curious spiritual interest, the individualcachetof their character, will sustain them. And so integrally true is this of all the productions of M. Saint-Marceaux's talent, that it is quite as perceptible in works where it is not accentuated and emphasized as it is in those of which I have been speaking; it is a quality that will bear refining, that is even better indeed in its more subtle manifestations. The figure of the Luxembourg Gallery, the young Dante reading Virgil, is an example; a girl's head, the forehead swathed in a turban, first exhibited some years ago, is another. The charm of these is more penetrating, though they are by no means either as popular or as "important" works as the "Genius of the Tomb" or the "Harlequin." In the time to come M. Saint-Marceaux will probably rely more and more on their quality of grave and yet alert distinction, and less on striking and eccentric variations of themes from Michael Angelo like the "Genius," and illustrations like the "Harlequin" of the artistic potentialities of the Canova sculpture.
With considerably less force than M. Dubois and decidedly less piquancy than M. Saint-Marceaux, M. Antonin Mercié has perhaps greater refinement than either. His outline is a trifle softer, his sentiment more gracious, more suave. His work is difficult to characterize satisfactorily, and the fact may of course proceed from its lack of force, as well as from the well-understood difficulty of translating into epithets anything so essentially elusive as suavity and grace of form. At one epoch in any examination of academic French sculpture that of M. Mercié seems the most interesting; it is so free from exaggeration of any kind on the one hand, it realizes its idea so satisfactorily on the other, and this idea is so agreeable, so refined, and at the same time so dignified. The "David" is an early work now in the Luxembourg gallery, reproductions of which are very popular, and the reader may judge how well it justifies these remarks. Being an early work, one cannot perhaps insist on its originality; in France, a young sculptor must be original at his peril; his education is so complete, he must have known and studied the beauties of classic sculpture so thoroughly, that not to be impressed by them so profoundly as to display his appreciativeness in his first work is apt to argue a certain insensitiveness. And every one cannot have creative genius. What a number of admirable works we should be compelled to forego if creative genius were demanded of an artist of the present day when the best minds of the time are occupied with other things than art! One is apt to forget that in our day the minds that correspond with the artistic miracles of the Renaissance are absorbed in quite different departments of effort. M. Mercié's "David" would perhaps never have existed but for Donatello's. As far as plastic motive is concerned, it may without injustice be called a variant of that admirable creation, and from every point of view except that of dramatic grace it is markedly inferior to its inspiration; as an embodiment of triumphant youth, of the divine ease with which mere force is overcome, it has only a superficial resemblance to the original.
But if with M. Mercié "David" was simply a classic theme to be treated, which is exactly what it of course was not with Donatello, it is undeniable that he has expressed himself very distinctly in his treatment. A less sensitive artist would have vulgarized instead of merely varying the conception, whereas one can easily see in M. Mercié's handling of it the ease, science, and felicitous movement that have since expressed themselves more markedly, more positively, but hardly more unmistakably, in the sculptor's maturer works. Of these the chief is perhaps the "Gloria Victis," which now decorates the Square Montholon; and its identity of authorship with the "David" is apparent in spite of its structural complexity and its far greater importance both in subject and execution. Its subject is the most inspiring that a French sculptor since the events of 1870-71 (so lightly considered by those who only see the theatric side of French character) could treat. Its general interest, too, is hardly inferior; there is something generally ennobling in the celebration of the virtues of the brave defeated that surpasses the commonplace of pæans. M. Mercié was, in this sense, more fortunate than the sculptor to whom the Berlinese owe the bronze commemoration of their victory. Perhaps to call his treatment entirely worthy of the theme, is to forget the import of such works as the tombs of the Medici Chapel at Florence. There is a region into whose precincts the dramatic quality penetrates only to play an insufficient part. But in modern art to do more than merely to keep such truths in mind, to insist on satisfactory plastic illustrations of them, is not only to prepare disappointment for one's self, but to risk misjudging admirable and elevated effort; and to regret the fact that France had only M. Mercié and not Michael Angelo to celebrate her "Gloria Victis" is to commit both of these errors. After all, the subjects are different, and the events of 1870-71 had compensations for France which the downfall of Florentine liberty was without; so that, indeed, a note of unmixed melancholy, however lofty its strain, would have been a discord which M. Mercié has certainly avoided. He has avoided it in rather a marked way, it is true. His monument is dramatic and stirring rather than inwardly moving. It is rhetorical rather than truly poetic; and the admirable quality of its rhetoric, its complete freedom from vulgar or sentimental alloy—its immense superiority to Anglo-Saxon rhetoric, in fine—does not conceal the truth that it is rhetoric, that it is prose and not poetry after all. Mercié's "Gloria Victis" is very fine; I know nothing so fine in modern sculpture outside of France. But then there is not very much that is fine at all in modern sculpture outside of France; and modern French sculpture, and M. Mercié along with it as one of its most eminent ornaments, have made it impossible to speak of them in a relative way. The antique and the Renaissance sculpture alone furnish their fit association, and like the Renaissance and the antique sculpture they demand a positive and absolute, and not a comparative criticism.
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Well, then, speaking thus absolutely and positively, the cardinal defect of the Institute sculpture—and the refined and distinguished work of M. Mercié better perhaps than almost any other assists us to see this—is its over-carefulness for style. This is indeed the explanation of what I mentioned at the outset as the chief characteristic of this sculpture, the academic inelasticity, namely, with which it essays to reproduce the Renaissance romanticism. But for the fondness for style integral in the French mind and character, it would perceive the contradiction between this romanticism and any canons except such as are purely intuitive and indefinable. In comparison with the Renaissance sculptors, the French academic sculptors of the present day are certainly too exclusive devotees of Buffon's "order and movement," and too little occupied with the thought itself—too little individual. In comparison with the antique, this is less apparent, but I fancy not less real. We are so accustomed to think of the antique as the pure and simple embodiment of style, as a sublimation, so to speak of the individual into style itself, that in this respect we are scarcely fair judges of the antique. In any case we know very little of it; we can hardly speak of it except by periods. But it is plain that the Greek is so superior to any subsequent sculpture in this one respect of style that we rarely think of its other qualities. Our judgment is inevitably a comparative one, and inevitably a comparative judgment fixes our attention on the Greek supremacy of style. Indeed, in looking at the antique the thought itself is often alien to us, and the order and movement, being more nearly universal perhaps, are all that occupy us. A family tombstone lying in the cemetery at Athens, and half buried in the dust which blows from the Piræus roadway, has more style than M. Mercié's "Quand-Même" group for Belfort, which has been the subject of innumerable encomiums, and which has only style and no individuality whatever to commend it. And the Athenian tombstone was probably furnished to order by the marble-cutting artist of the period, corresponding to those whose signs one sees at the entrances of our own large cemeteries. Still we may be sure that the ordinary Athenian citizen who adjudged prizes between Æschylus and Sophocles, and to whom Pericles addressed the oration which only exceptional culture nowadays thoroughly appreciates, found plenty of individuality in the decoration of the Parthenon, and was perfectly conscious of the difference between Phidias and his pupils. Even now, if one takes the pains to think of it, the difference between such works as the so-called "Genius" of the Vatican and the Athenian marbles, or between the Niobe group at Florence and the Venus torso at Naples, for example, seems markedly individual enough, though the element of style is still to our eyes the most prominent quality in each. Indeed, if one really reflects upon the subject, it will not seem exaggeration to say that to anyone who has studied both with any thoroughness it would be more difficult to individualize the mass of modern French sculpture than even that of the best Greek epoch—the epoch when style was most perfect, when its reign was, as it sometimes appears to us, most absolute. And if we consider the Renaissance sculpture, its complexity is so great, its individuality is so pronounced, that one is apt to lose sight of the important part which style really plays in it. In a work by Donatello we see first of all his thought; in a Madonna of Mino's it is the idea that charms us; the Delia Robbia frieze at Pistoja is puregenre.
But modern academic French sculpture feels the weight of De Musset's handicap—it is born too late into a world too old. French art in general feels this, I think, and painting suffers from it equally with sculpture. Culture, the Institute, oppress individuality. But whereas Corot and Millet have triumphed over the Institute there are—there were, at least, till yesterday—hardly any Millets and Corots of sculpture whose triumph is as yet assured. The tendency, the weight of authority, the verdict of criticism, always conservative in France, are all the other way. At the École des Beaux-Arts one learns, negatively, not to be ridiculous. This is a great deal; it is more than can be learned anywhere else nowadays—witness German, Italian, above all English exhibitions. Positively one learns the importance of style; and if it were not for academic French sculpture, one would say that this was something the importance of which could not be exaggerated. But in academic French sculpture it is exaggerated, and, what is fatal, one learns to exaggerate it in the schools. The traditions of Houdon are noticeably forgotten. Not that Houdon's art is not eminently characterized by style; the "San Bruno" at Rome is in point of style an antique. But compare his "Voltaire" in the foyer of the Comédie Française with Chapu's "Berryer" of the Palais de Justice, to take one of the very finest portrait-statues of the present day. Chapu's statue is more than irreproachable, it is elevated and noble, it is in the grand style; but it is plain that its impressiveness is due to the fact that the subject is conceived as the Orator in general and handled with almost a single eye to style. The personal interest that accentuates every detail of the "Voltaire"—the physiognomy, the pose, the right hand, are marvellously characteristic—simply is not sought for in Chapu's work. Of this quality there is more in Houdon's bust of Molière, whom of course Houdon never saw, than in almost any production of the modern school. Chapu's works, and such exceptions as the heads of Baudry and Renan already mentioned, apart, one perceives that the modern school has made too many statues of the République, too many "Ledas" and "Susannahs" and "Quand-Mêmes" and "Gloria Victis." And its penchant for Renaissance canons only emphasizes the absolute commonplace of many of these.
On the other hand, if Houdon's felicitous harmony of style and individual force are forgotten, there is hardly any recognized succession to the imaginative freedom, theverve, the triumphant personal fertility of Rude and Carpeaux. At least, such as there is has not preserved the dignity and in many instances scarcely the decorum of those splendid artists. Much of the sculpture which figures at the yearly Salons is, to be sure, the absolute negation of style; its main characteristic is indeed eccentricity; its main virtues, sincerity (which in art, of course, is only a very elementary virtue) and good modelling (which in sculpture is equally elementary). Occasionally in the midst of this display of fantasticality there is a work of promise or even of positive interest. The observer who has not a weak side for the graceful conceits, invariably daintily presented and beautifully modelled, of M. Moreau-Vauthier for example, must be hard to please; they are of the very essence of thearticle de Paris, and only abnormal primness can refuse to recognize the truth that thearticle de Parishas its art side. M. Moreau-Vauthier is not perhaps a modern Cellini; he has certainly never produced anything that could be classed with the "Perseus" of the Loggia de' Lanzi, or even with the Fontainebleau "Diana;" but he does more than anyone else to keep alive the tradition of Florentine preciosity, and about everything he does there is something delightful.
Still the fantastic has not made much headway in the Institute, and it is so foreign to the French genius, which never tolerates it after it has ceased to be novel, that it probably never will. It is a great tribute to French "catholicity of mind and largeness of temper" that Carpeaux's "La Danse" remains in its position on the façade of the Grand Opéra. French sentiment regarding it was doubtless accurately expressed by the fanatic who tried to ink it indelibly after it was first exposed. This vandal was right from his point of view—the point of view of style. Almost the one work of absolute spontaneity among the hundreds which without and within decorate M. Garnier's edifice, it is thus a distinct jar in the general harmony; it distinctly mars the "order and movement" of M. Garnier's thought, which is fundamentally opposed to spontaneity. But imagine the devotion to style of amilieuin which a person who would throw ink on a confessedly fine work of art is actuated by an impersonal dislike of incongruity! Dislike of the incongruous is almost a French passion, and, like all qualities, it has its defect, the defect of tolerating the conventional. It is through this tolerance, for example, that one of the freest of French critics of art, a true Voltairian, Stendhal, was led actually to find Guido's ideal of beauty higher than Raphael's, and to miss entirely the grandeur of Tintoretto. Critical opinion in France has not changed radically since Stendhal's day.
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The French sculptor may draw his inspiration from the sources of originality itself, his audience will measure the result by conventions. It is this fact undoubtedly that is largely responsible for the over-carefulness for style already remarked. Hence the work of M. Aimé-Millet and of Professors Guillaume and Cavelier, and the fact that they are professors. Hence also the election of M. Falguière to succeed to the chair of the Beaux-Arts left vacant by the death of Jouffroy some years ago. All of these have done admirable work. Professor Guillaume's Gracchi group at the Luxembourg is alone enough to atone for a mass of productions of which the "Castalian Fount" of a recent Salon is the cold and correct representative. Cavalier's "Gluck," destined for the Opéra, is spirited, even if a trifle galvanic. Millet's "Apollo," which crowns the main gable of the Opéra, stands out among its author's other works as a miracle of grace and rhythmic movement. M. Falguière's admirers, and they are numerous, will object to the association here made. Falguière's range has always been a wide one, and everything he has done has undoubtedly merited a generous portion of the prodigious encomiums it has invariably obtained. Yet, estimating it in any other way than by energy, variety, and mass, it is impossible to praise it highly with precision. It is too plainly the work of an artist who can do one thing as well as another, and of which cleverness is, after all, the spiritual standard. Bartholdi, who also should not be forgotten in any sketch of French sculpture, would, I am sure, have acquitted himself more satisfactorily than Falguière did in the colossal groups of the Trocadéro and the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile. To acquit himself satisfactorily is Bartholdi's specialty. These two groups are the largest and most important that a sculptor can have to do. The crowning of the Arc de Triomphe at least was a splendid opportunity. Neither of them had any distinction of outline, of mass, of relation, or of idea. Both were conventional to the last degree. That on the Arc had even its ludicrous details, such as occur only from artistic absent-mindedness in a work conceived and executed in a fatigued and hackneyed spirit. The "Saint Vincent de Paul" of the Panthéon, which justly passes for the sculptor'schef-d'oeuvreis in idea a work of large humanity. M. Falguière is behind no one in ability to conceive a subject of this kind with propriety, and his subject here is inspiring if ever a subject was. The "Petit Martyr" of the Luxembourg has a real charm, but it too is content with too little, as one finds out in seeing it often; and it is in no sense a large work, scarcely larger than the tiresomely popular "Running Boy" of the same museum, which nevertheless in its day marked an epoch in modelling. Indeed, so slight is the spiritual hold that M. Falguière has on one, that it really seems as if he were at his best in such a frankly carnal production as his since variously modified "Nymph Hunting" of the Triennial Exposition of 1883. The idea is nothing or next to nothing, but the surfacefaireis superb.
M. Barrias, M. Delaplanche, and M. Le Feuvre have each of them quite as much spontaneity as M. Falguière, though the work of neither is as important in mass and variety. M. Delaplanche is always satisfactory, and beyond this there is something large about what he does that confers dignity even in the absence of quick interest. His proportions are simple, his outline flowing, and the agreeable ease of his compositions makes up to a degree for any lack of sympathetic sentiment or impressive significance: witness his excellent "Maternal Instruction," of the little park in front of Sainte Clothilde. M. Le Feuvre's qualities are very nearly the reverse of these: he has a fondness for integrity quite hostile in his case to simplicity. In his very frank appeal to one's susceptibility he is a little careless of sculptural considerations, which he is prone to sacrifice to pictorial ends. The result is a mannerism that in the end ceases to impress, and even becomes disagreeable. As nearly as may be in a French sculptor it borders on sentimentality, and finally the swaying attitudes of his figures become limp, and the startled-fawn eyes of his maidens and youths appear less touching than lackadaisical. But his being himself too conscious of it should not obscure the fact that he has a way of his own. M. Barrias is an artist of considerably greater powers than either M. Le Feuvre or M. Delaplanche; but one has a vague perception that his powers are limited, and that to desire in his case what one so sincerely wishes in the case of M. Dubois, namely, that he would "let himself go," would be unwise. Happily, when he is at his best there is no temptation to form such a wish. The "Premières Funérailles" is a superb work—"the chef-d'oeuvre of our modern sculpture," a French critic enthusiastically terms it. It is hardly that; it has hardly enough spiritual distinction—not quite enough of either elegance or elevation—to merit such sweeping praise. But it may be justly termed, I think, the most completely representative of the masterpieces of that sculpture. Its triumph over the prodigious difficulties of elaborate composition "in the round"—difficulties to which M. Barrias succumbed in the "Spartacus" of the Tuileries Gardens—and its success in subordinating the details of a group to the end of enforcing a single motive, preserving the while their individual interest, are complete. Nothing superior in this respect has been done since John of Bologna's "Rape of the Sabines."
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M. Emmanuel Frémiet occupies a place by himself. There have been but two modern sculptors who have shown an equally pronounced genius for representing animals—namely, Barye, of course, and Barye's clever but not great pupil, Cain. The tigress in the Central Park, perhaps the best bronze there (the competition is not exacting), and the best also of the several variations of the theme of which, at one time, the sculptor apparently could not tire, familiarizes Americans with the talent of Cain. In this association Rouillard, whose horse in the Trocadéro Gardens is an animated and elegant work, ought to be mentioned, but it is hardly as good as the neighboring elephant of Frémiet as mere animal representation (thegenreexists and has excellences and defects of its own), while in more purely artistic worth it is quite eclipsed by its rival. Still iffaunais interesting in and of itself, which no one who knows Barye's work would controvert, it is still more interesting when, to put it brutally, something is done with it. In his ambitious and colossal work at the Trocadéro, M. Frémiet does in fact use hisfaunafreely as artistic material, though at first sight it is its zoölogical interest that appears paramount. The same is true of the elephant near by, in which it seems as if he had designedly attacked the difficult problem of rendering embodied awkwardness decorative. Still more conspicuous, of course, is the artistic interest, the fancy, the humor, the sportive grace of his Luxembourg group of a young satyr feeding honey to a brace of bear's cubs, because he here concerns himself more directly with his idea and gives his genius freer play. And everyone will remember the sensation caused by his impressively repulsive "Gorilla Carrying off a Woman." But it is when he leaves this kind of thing entirely, and, wholly forgetful of his studies at the Jardin des Plantes, devotes himself to purely monumental work, that he is at his best. And in saying this I do not at all mean to insist on the superiority of monumental sculpture to the sculpture offauna; it is superior, and Barye himself cannot make one content with the exclusive consecration of admirable talent to picturesque anatomy illustrating distinctly unintellectual passions. M. Frémiet, in ecstasy over his picturesque anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes, would scout this; but it is nevertheless true that in such works as the "Âge de la pierre," which, if it may be called a monumental clock-top, is nevertheless certainly monumental; his "Louis d'Orléans," in the quadrangle of the restored Château de Pierrefonds; his "Jeanne d'Arc" (the later statue is not, I think, essentially different from the earlier one); and his "Torch-bearer" of the Middle Ages, in the new Hôtel de Ville of Paris, not only is his subject a subject of loftier and more enduring interest than his elephants and deer and bears, but his own genius finds a more congenial medium of expression. In other words, any one who has seen his "Torch-bearer" or his "Louis d'Orléans" must conclude that M. Frémiet is losing his time at the Jardin des Plantes. In monumental works of the sort he displays a commanding dignity that borders closely upon the grand style itself. The "Jeanne d'Arc" is indeed criticised for lack of style. The horse is fine, as always with M. Frémiet; the action of both horse and rider is noble, and the homogeneity of the two, so to speak, is admirably achieved. But the character of the Maid is not perfectly satisfactory toà prioricritics, to critics who have more or less hard and fast notions about the immiscibility of the heroic and the familiar. The "Jeanne d'Arc" is of course a heroic statue, illustrating one of the most puissant of profane legends; and it is unquestionably familiar and, if one chooses, defiantly unpretentious. Perhaps the Maid as M. Frémiet represents her could never have accomplished legend-producing deeds. Certainly she is the Maid neither of Chapu, nor of Bastien-Lepage, nor of the current convention. She is, rather, pretty, sympathetically childlike,mignonne; but M. Frémiet's conception is an original and a gracious one, and even the critic addicted to formulæ has only to forget its title to become thoroughly in love with it; beside this merità priorishortcomings count very little. But the other two works just mentioned are open to no objection of this kind or of any other, and in the category to which they belong they are splendid works. Since Donatello and Verrocchio nothing of the kind has been done which surpasses them; and it is only M. Frémiet's penchant for animal sculpture, and his fondness for exercising his lighter fancy in comparatively trivialobjets de vertu, that obscure in any degree his fine talent for illustrating the grand style with natural ease and large simplicity.
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I have already mentioned the most representative among those who have "arrived" of the school of academic French sculpture as it exists to-day, though it would be easy to extend the list with Antonin Carlès, whose "Jeunesse" of the World's Fair of 1889 is a very graceful embodiment of adolescence; Suchetet, whose "Byblis" of the same exhibition caused his early death to be deplored; Adrien Gaudez, Etcheto, Idrac, and, of course, many others of distinction. There is no looseness in characterizing this as a "school;" it has its own qualities and its corresponding defects. It stands by itself—apart from the Greek sculpture and from its inspiration, the Renaissance, and from the more recent traditions of Houdon, or of Rude and Carpeaux. It is a thoroughly legitimate and unaffected expression of national thought and feeling at the present time, at once splendid and simple. The moment of triumph in any intellectual movement is, however, always a dangerous one. A slack-water period of intellectual slothfulness nearly always ensues. Ideas which have previously been struggling to get a hearing have become accepted ideas that have almost the force of axioms; no one thinks of their justification, of their basis in real truth and fact; they take their place in the great category of conventions. The mind feels no longer the exhilaration of discovery, the stimulus of fresh perception; the sense becomes jaded, enthusiasm impossible. Dealing with the same material and guided by the same principles, its production becomes inevitably hackneyed, artificial, lifeless; theZeit-Geist, the Time-Spirit, is really a kind of Sisyphus, and the essence of life is movement. This law of perpetual renewal, of the periodical quickening of the human spirit, explains the barrenness of the inheritance of the greatest men; shows why originality is a necessary element of perfection; why Phidias, Praxiteles, Donatello, Michael Angelo (not to go outside of our subject), had no successors. Once a thing is done it is done for all time, and the study of perfection itself avails only as a stimulus to perfection in other combinations. In fact, the more nearly perfect the model the greater the necessity for an absolute break with it in order to secure anything like an equivalent in living force; initsdirection at least everything vital has been done. So its lack of original force, its over-carefulness for style, its inevitable sensitiveness to the criticism that is based on convention, make the weak side of the French academic sculpture of the present day, fine and triumphant as it is. That the national thought and feeling are not a little conventional, and have the academic rather than a spontaneous inspiration, has, however, lately been distinctly felt as a misfortune and a limitation by a few sculptors whose work may be called the beginning of a new movement out of which, whatever may be its own limitations, nothing but good can come to French sculpture and of which the protagonists are Auguste Rodin and Jules Dalou.
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Side by side with the academic current in French art has moved of recent years a naturalist and romantic impulse whose manifestations have been always vigorous though occasionally exaggerated. In any of the great departments of activity nationally pursued—as art has been pursued in France since Francis I.—there are always these rival currents, of which now one and now the other constantly affects the ebb and flow of the tide of thought and feeling. The classic and romantic duel of 1830, the rise of the naturalist opposition to Hugo and romanticism in our own day, are familiar instances of this phenomenon in literature. The revolt of Géricault and Delacroix against David and Ingres are equally well known in the field of painting. Of recent years the foundation of the periodicalL'Artand its rivalry with the conservativeGazette des Beaux Artsmark with the same definiteness, and an articulate precision, the same conflict between truth, as new eyes see it, and tradition. Never, perhaps, since the early Renaissance, however, has nature asserted her supremacy over convention in such unmistakable, such insistent, and, one may say, I think, such intolerant fashion as she is doing at the present moment. Sculpture, in virtue of the defiant palpability of its material, is the most impalpable of the plastic arts, and therefore it feels less quickly than the rest, perhaps, the impress of the influences of the epoch and their classifying canons. Natural imitation shows first in sculpture, and subsists in it longest. But convention once its conqueror, the return to nature is here most tardy, because, owing to the impalpable, the elusive quality of sculpture, though natural standards may everywhere else be in vogue, no one thinks of applying them to so specialized an expression. Its variation depends therefore more completely on the individual artist himself. Niccolò Pisano, for example, died when Giotto was two years old, but, at the other end of the historic line of modern art, it has taken years since Delacroix to furnish recognition for Auguste Rodin. The stronghold of the Institute had been mined many times by revolutionary painters before Dalou took the grand medal of the Salon.
Owing to the relative and in fact polemic position which these two artists occupy, the movement which they represent, and of which as yet they themselves form a chief part, a little obscures their respective personalities, which are nevertheless, in sculpture, by far the most positive and puissant of the present epoch. M. Rodin's work, especially, is so novel that one's first impression in its presence is of its implied criticism of the Institute. One thinks first of its attitude, its point of view, its end, aim, and means, and of the utter contrast of these with those of the accepted contemporary masters in his art—of Dubois and Chapu, Mercié and Saint-Marceaux. One judges generally, and instinctively avoids personal and direct impressions. The first thought is not, Are the "Saint Jean" and the "Bourgeois de Calais" successful works of art? But,Canthey be successful if the accepted masterpieces of modern sculpture are not to be set down as insipid? One is a little bewildered. It is easy to see and to estimate the admirable traits and the shortcomings of M. Dubois's delightful and impressive reminiscences of the Renaissance, of M. Mercié's refined and graceful compositions. They are of their time and place. They embody, in distinguished manner and in an accentuated degree, the general inspiration. Their spiritual characteristics are traditional and universal, and technically, without perhaps often passing beyond it, they exhaust cleverness. You may enjoy or resent their classic and exemplary excellences, as you feel your taste to have suffered from the lack or the superabundance of academic influences; I cannot fancy an American insensitive to their charm. But it is plain that their perfection is a very different thing from the characteristics of a strenuous artistic personality seeking expression. If these latter when encountered are seen to be evidently of an extremely high order, contemporary criticism, at all events, should feel at once the wisdom of beginning with the endeavor to appreciate, instead of making the degree of its own familiarity with them the test of their merit.
French æsthetic authority, which did this in the instances of Barye, of Delacroix, of Millet, of Manet, of Puvis de Chavannes, did it also for many years in the instance of M. Rodin. It owes its defeat in the contest with him—for like the recalcitrants in the other contests, M. Rodin has definitively triumphed—to the unwise attempt to define him in terms heretofore applicable enough to sculptors, but wholly inapplicable to him. It failed to see that the thing to define in his work was the man himself, his temperament, his genius. Taken by themselves and considered as characteristics of the Institute sculptors, the obvious traits of this work might, that is to say, be adjudged eccentric and empty. Fancy Professor Guillaume suddenly subordinating academic disposition of line and mass to true structural expression! One would simply feel the loss of his accustomed style and harmony. With M. Rodin, who deals with nature directly, through the immediate force of his own powerful temperament, to feel the absence of the Institute training and traditions is absurd. The question in his case is simply whether or no he is a great artistic personality, an extraordinary and powerful temperament, or whether he is merely a turbulent and capricious protestant against the measure and taste of the Institute. But this is really no longer a question, however it may have been a few years ago; and when his Dante portal for the new Palais des Arts Décoratifs shall have been finished, and the public had an opportunity to see what the sculptor's friend and only serious rival, M. Dalou, calls "one of the most, if not the most original and astonishing pieces of sculpture of the nineteenth century," it will be recognized that M. Rodin, so far from being amenable to the current canon, has brought the canon itself to judgment.
How and why, people will perceive in proportion to their receptivity. Candor and intelligence will suffice to appreciate that the secret of M. Rodin's art is structural expression, and that it is this and not any superficial eccentricity of execution that definitely distinguishes him from the Institute. Just as his imagination, his temperament, his spiritual energy and ardor individualize the positive originality of his motive, so the expressiveness of his treatment sets him aside from all as well as from each of the Institute sculptors in what may be broadly called technical attitude. No sculptor has ever carried expression further. The sculpture of the present day has certainly not occupied itself much with it. The Institute is perhaps a little afraid of it. It abhors thebaroquerightly enough, but very likely it fails to see that the expression of such sculpture as M. Rodin's no more resembles the contortions of the Dresden Museum giants than it does the composure of M. Delaplanche. Thebaroqueis only violent instead of placid commonplace, and is as conventional as any professor of sculpture could desire. Expression means individual character completely exhibited rather than conventionally suggested. It is certainly not too much to say that in the sculpture of the present day the sense of individual character is conveyed mainly by convention. The physiognomy has usurped the place of the physique, the gesture of the form, the pose of the substance. And face, gesture, form are, when they are not brutally naturalistic and so not art at all, not individual and native, but typical and classic. Very much of the best modern sculpture might really have been treated like those antique figurines of which the bodies were made by wholesale, being supplied with individual heads when the time came for using them.
This has been measurably true since the disappearance of the classic dress and the concealment of the body by modern costume. The nudes of the early Renaissance, in painting still more than in sculpture, are differentiated by the faces. The rest of the figure is generally conventionalized as thoroughly as the face itself is in Byzantine and the hands in Giottesque painting. Giotto could draw admirably, it need not be said. He did draw as well as the contemporary feeling for the human figure demanded. When the Renaissance reached its climax and the study of the antique led artists to look beneath drapery and interest themselves in the form, expression made an immense step forward. Color was indeed almost lost sight of in the new interest, not to reappear till the Venetians. But owing to the lack of visible nudity, to the lack of the classic gymnasia, to the concealments of modern attire, the knowledge of and interest in the form remained, within certain limits, an esoteric affair. The general feeling, even where, as in the Italy of thequattroandcinque centi, everyone was a connoisseur, did not hold the artist to expression in his anatomy as the general Greek feeling did. Everyone was a connoisseur of art alone, not of nature as well. Consequently, in spite of such an enthusiastic genius as Donatello, who probably more than any other modern has most nearly approached the Greeks—not in spiritual attitude, for he was eminently of his time, but in his attitude toward nature—the human form in art has for the most part remained, not conventionalized as in the Byzantine and Gothic times, but thoroughly conventional. Michael Angelo himself certainly may be charged with lending the immense weight of his majestic genius to perpetuate the conventional. It is not his distortion of nature, as pre-Raphaelite limitedness glibly asserts, but his carelessness of her prodigious potentialities, that marks one side of his colossal accomplishment. Just as the lover of architecture as architecture will protest that Michael Angelo's was meretricious, however inspiring, so M. Rodin declares his sculpture unsatisfactory, however poetically impressive. "He used to do a little anatomy evenings," he said to me, "and used his chisel next day without a model. He repeats endlessly his one type—the youth of the Sistine ceiling. Any particular felicity of expression you are apt to find him borrowing from Donatello—such as, for instance, the movement of the arm of the 'David,' which is borrowed from Donatello's 'St. John Baptist.'" Most people to whom Michael Angelo's creations appear celestial in their majesty at once and in their winningness would deny this. But it is worth citing both because M. Rodin strikes so many crude apprehensions as a French Michael Angelo, whereas he is so radically removed from him in point of view and in practice that the unquestionable spiritual analogy between them is rather like that between kindred spirits working in different arts, and because, also, it shows not only what M. Rodin is not, but what he is. The grandiose does not run away with him. His imagination is occupied largely in following out nature's suggestions. His sentiment does not so drench and saturate his work as to float it bodily out of the realm of natural into that of supernal beauty, there to crystallize in decorative and puissant visions appearing out of the void and only superficially related to their corresponding natural forms. Standing before the Medicean tombs the modern susceptibility receives perhaps the most poignant, one may almost say the most intolerable, impression to be obtained from any plastic work by the hand of man; but it is a totally different impression from that left by the sculptures of the Parthenon pediments, not only because the sentiment is wholly different, but because in the great Florentine's work it is so overwhelming as wholly to dominate purely natural expression, natural character, natural beauty. In the Medici Chapel the soul is exalted; in the British Museum the mind is enraptured. The object itself seems to disappear in the one case, and to reveal itself in the other.
I do not mean to compare M. Rodin with the Greeks—from whom in sentiment and imagination he is, of course, as totally removed as what is intensely modern must be from the antique—any more than I mean to contrast him with Michael Angelo, except for the purposes of clearer understanding of his general æsthetic attitude. Association of anything contemporary with what is classic, and especially with what is greatest in the classic, is always a perilous proceeding. Very little time is apt to play havoc with such classification. I mean only to indicate that the resemblance to Michael Angelo, found by so many persons in such works as the Dante doors, is only of the loosest kind—as one might, through their common lusciousness, compare peaches with pomegranates—and that to the discerning eye, or the eye at all experienced in observing sculpture, M. Rodin's sculpture is far more closely related to that of Donatello and the Greeks. It, too, reveals rather than constructs beauty, and by the expression of character rather than by the suggestion of sentiment.
An illustration of M. Rodin's affinity with the antique is an incident which he related to me of his work upon his superb "Âge d'Airain." He was in Naples; he saw nature in freer inadvertence than she allows elsewhere; he had the best of models. Under these favoring circumstances he spent three months on a leg of his statue; "which is equivalent to saying that I had at last absolutely mastered it," said he. One day in the Museo Nazionale he noticed in an antique the result of all his study and research. Nature, in other words, is M. Rodin'smaterialin the same special sense in which it was the antique material, and in which, since Michael Angelo and the high Renaissance, it has been for the most part only the sculptor'smeans. It need not be said that the personality of the artist may be as strenuous in the one case as in the other; unless, indeed, we maintain, as perhaps we may, that individuality is more apt to atrophy in the latter instance; for as one gets farther and farther away from nature he is in more danger from conventionality than from caprice. And this is in fact what has happened since the high Renaissance, the long line of conventionalities being continued, sometimes punctuated here and there as by Clodion or Houdon, David, Rude, or Barye, sometimes rising into great dignity and refinement of style and intelligence, as in the contemporary sculpture of the Institute, but in general almost purely decorative or sentimental, and, so far as natural expression is concerned, confining itself to psychological rather than physical character.
What is it, for instance, that distinguishes a group like M. Dubois's "Charity" from thegenresentiment or incident of some German or Italian "professor?" Qualities of style, of refined taste, of elegance, of true intelligence. Its artistic interest is purely decorative and sentimental. Really what its average admirer sees in it is the same moral appeal that delights the simple admirers of German or Italian treatment of a similar theme. It is simply infinitely higher bred. Its character is developed no further. Its significance as form is not insisted on. The parts are not impressively differentiated, and their mysterious mutual relations and correspondences are not dwelt on. The physical character, with its beauties, its salient traits of every kind, appealing so strongly to the sculptor to whom nature appears plastic as well as suggestive, is wholly neglected in favor of the psychological suggestion. And the individual character, thecachetof the whole, the artistic essence andensemble, that is to say, M. Dubois has, after the manner of most modern sculpture, conveyed in a language of convention, which since the time of the Siennese fountain, at all events, has been classical.
The literary artist does not proceed in this way. He does not content himself with telling us, for example, that one of his characters is a good man or a bad man, an able, a selfish, a tall, a blonde, or a stupid man, as the case may be. He takes every means to express his character, and to do it, according to M. Taine's definition of a work of art, more completely than it appears in nature. He recognizes its complexity and enforces the sense of reality by a thousand expedients of what one may almost call contrasting masses, derivative movements, and balancing planes. He distinguishes every possible detail that plays any structural part, and, in short, instead of giving us the mere symbol of the Sunday-school books, shows us a concrete organism at once characteristic and complex. Judged with this strictness, which in literary art is elementary, how much of the best modern sculpture is abstract, symbolic, purely typical. What insipid fragments most of the really eminent Institute statues would make were their heads knocked off by some band of modern barbarian invaders. In the event of such an irruption, would there be any torsos left from which future Poussins could learn all they should know of the human form? Would there be anydisjecta membrafrom which skilled anatomists could reconstruct the lostensemble, or at any rate make a shrewd guess at it? Would anything survive mutilation with the serene confidence in its fragmentary but everywhere penetrating interest which seems to pervade the most fractured fraction of a Greek relief on the Athenian acropolis? Yes, there would be the débris of Auguste Rodin's sculpture.
In our day the human figure has never been so well understood. Back of such expressive modelling as we note in the "Saint Jean," in the "Adam" and "Eve," in the "Calaisiens," in a dozen figures of the Dante doors, is a knowledge of anatomy such as even in the purely scientific profession of surgery can proceed only from an immense fondness for nature, an insatiable curiosity as to her secrets, an inexhaustible delight in her manifestations. From the point of view of such knowledge and such handling of it, it is no wonder that the representations of nature which issue from the Institute seem superficial. One can understand that from this point of view very delightful sculpture, very refined, very graceful, very perfectly understood within its limits, may appear likebaudruche—inflated gold-beater's skin, that is to say, of which toy animals are made in France, and which has thus passed into studioargotas the figure for whatever lacks structure and substance. Ask M. Rodin the explanation of a movement, an attitude, in one of his works which strikes your convention-steeped sense as strange, and he will account for it just as an anatomical demonstrator would—pointing out its necessary derivation from some disposition of another part of the figure, and not at all dwelling on its grace or its other purely decorative felicity. Its artistic function in his eyes is to aid in expressing fully and completely the whole of which it forms a part, not to constitute a harmonious detail merely agreeable to the easily satisfied eye. But then the whole will look anatomical rather than artistic. There is the point exactly. Will it? I remember speculating about this in conversation with M. Rodin himself. "Isn't there danger," I said, "of getting too fond of nature, of dissecting with so much enthusiasm that the pleasure of discovery may obscure one's feeling for pure beauty, of losing the artistic in the purely scientific interest, of becoming pedantic, of imitating rather than constructing, of missing art in avoiding the artificial?" I had some difficulty in making myself understood; this perpetual see-saw of nature and art which enshrouds æsthetic dialectics as in a Scotch mist seems curiously factitious to the truly imaginative mind. But I shall always remember his reply, when he finally made me out, as one of the finest severings conceivable of a Gordian knot of this kind. "Oh, yes," said he; "there is, no doubt, such a danger for a mediocre artist."
M. Rodin is, whatever one may think of him, certainly not a mediocre artist. The instinct of self-preservation may incline the Institute to assert that he obtrudes his anatomy. But prejudice itself can blind no one of intelligence to his immense imaginative power, to his poetic "possession." His work precisely illustrates what I take to have been, at the best epochs, the relations of nature to such art as is loosely to be called imitative art—what assuredly were those relations in the mind of the Greek artist. Nature supplies the parts and suggests their cardinal relations. Insufficient study of her leaves these superficial and insipid. Inartistic absorption in her leaves them lifeless. The imagination which has itself conceived the whole, the idea, fuses them in its own heat into a new creation which is "imitative" only in the sense that its elements are not inventions. The art of sculpture has retraced its steps far enough to make pure invention, as of Gothic griffins and Romanesque symbology, unsatisfactory to everyone. But, save in M. Rodin's sculpture, it has not fully renewed the old alliance with nature on the old terms—Donatello's terms; the terms which exact the most tribute from nature, which insist on her according her completest significance, her closest secrets, her faculty of expressing character as well as of suggesting sentiment. Very beautiful works are produced without her aid to this extent. We may be sure of this without asking M. Rodin to admit it. He would not do his own work so well were he prepared to; as Millet pointed out when asked to write a criticism of some other painter's canvas, in estimating the production of his fellows an artist is inevitably handicapped by the feeling that he would have done it very differently himself. It is easy not to share M. Rodin's gloomy vaticinations as to French sculpture based on the continued triumph of the Institute style and suavity. The Institute sculpture is too good for anyone not himself engaged in the struggle to avoid being impressed chiefly by its qualities to the neglect of its defects. At the same time it is clear that no art can long survive in undiminished vigor that does not from time to time renew its vitality by resteeping itself in the influences of nature. And so M. Rodin's service to French sculpture becomes, at the present moment, especially signal and salutary because French sculpture, however refined and delightful, shows, just now, very plainly the tendency toward the conventional which has always proved so dangerous, and because M. Rodin's work is a conspicuous, a shining example of the return to nature on the part not of a mere realist, naturalist, or other variety of "mediocre artist," but of a profoundly poetic and imaginative temperament.
This is why, one immediately perceives in studying his works, Rodin's treatment, while exhausting every contributary detail to the end of complete expression, is never permitted to fritter away its energy either in the mystifications of optical illusion, or in the infantine idealization of what is essentially subordinate and ancillary. This is why he devotes three months to the study of a leg, for example—not to copy, but to "possess" it. Indeed, no sculptor of our time has made such a sincere and, in general, successful, effort to sink the sense of the material in the conception, the actual object in the artistic idea. One loses all sense of bronze or marble, as the case may be, not only because the artistic significance is so overmastering that one is exclusively occupied in apprehending it, but because there are none of those superficial graces, those felicities of surface modelling, which, however they may delight, infallibly distract as well. Such excellences have assuredly their place. When the motive is conventional or otherwise insipid, or even when its character is distinctly light without being trivial, they are legitimately enough agreeable. And because, in our day, sculptural motives have generally been of this order we have become accustomed to look for such excellences, and, very justly, to miss them when they are absent. Grace of pose, suavity of outline, pleasing disposition of mass, smooth, round deltoids and osseous articulations, and perpetually changing planes of flesh and free play of muscular movement, are excellences which, in the best of academic French sculpture, are sensuously delightful in a high degree. But they invariably rivet our attention on the successful way in which the sculptor has used his bronze or marble to decorative ends, and when they are accentuated so as to dominate the idea they invariably enfeeble its expression. With M. Rodin one does not think of his material at all; one does not reflect whether he used it well or ill, caused it to lose weight and immobility to the eye or not, because all his superficial modelling appears as an inevitable deduction from the way in which he has conceived his larger subject, and not as "handling" at all. In reality, of course, it is the acme of sensitive handling. The point is a nice one. His practice is a dangerous one. It would be fatal to a less strenuous temperament. To leave, in a manner and so far as obvious insistence on it goes, "handling" to take care of itself, is to incur the peril of careless, clumsy, and even brutal, modelling, which, so far from dissembling its existence behind the prominence of the idea, really emphasizes itself unduly because of its imperfect and undeveloped character. Detail that is neglected really acquires a greater prominence than detail that is carried too far, because it is sensuously disagreeable. But when an artist like M. Rodin conceives his spiritual subject so largely and with so much intensity that mere sensuous agreeableness seems too insignificant to him even to be treated with contempt, he treats his detail solely with reference to its centripetal and organic value, which immediately becomes immensely enhanced, and the detail itself, dropping thus into its proper place, takes on a beauty wholly transcending the ordinary agreeable aspect of sculptural detail. And theensemble, of course, is in this way enforced as it can be in no other, and we get an idea of Victor Hugo or St. John Baptist so powerfully and yet so subtly suggested, that the abstraction seems actually all that we see in looking at the concrete bust or statue. Objections to M. Rodin's "handling" as eccentric or capricious, appear to the sympathetic beholder of one of his majestic works the very acme of misappreciation, and their real excuse—which is, as I have said, the fact that such "handling" is as unfamiliar as the motives it accompanies—singularly poor and feeble.
As for the common nature of these motives, the character of the personality which appears in their varied presentments, it is almost idle to speak in the absence of the work itself, so eloquent is this at once and so untranslatable. But it may be said approximately that M. Rodin's temperament is in the first place deeply romantic. Everything the Institute likes repels him. He has the poetic conception of art and its mission, and in poetry any authoritative and codifying consensus seems to him paradoxical. Style, in his view, unless it is something wholly uncharacterizable, is a vague and impalpable spirit breathing through the work of some strongly marked individuality, or else it is formalism. He delights in the fantasticality of the Gothic. The west façade of Rouen inspires him more than all the formulæ of Palladian proportions. He detests systematization. He reads Shakespeare, Schiller, Dante almost exclusively. He sees visions and dreams dreams. The awful in the natural forces, moral and material, seems his element. He believes in freedom, in the absolute emancipation of every faculty. As for study, study nature. If then you fail in restraint and measure you are a "mediocre artist," whom no artificial system devised to secure measure and restraint could have rescued from essential insignificance. No poet or landscape painter ever delighted more in the infinitely varied suggestiveness and exuberance of nature, or ever felt the formality of much that passes for art as more chill and drear. Hence in all his works we have the sense, first of all, of an overmastering sincerity; then of a prodigious wealth of fancy; then of a marvellous acquaintance with his material. His imagination has all the vivacity and tumultuousness of Rubens's, but its images, if not better understood, which would perhaps be impossible, are more compact and their evolution more orderly. And they are furthermore one and all vivified by a wholly remarkable feeling for beauty. In spite of all his knowledge of the external world, no artist of our time is more completely mastered by sentiment. In the very circumstance of being free from such conventions as the cameo relief, the picturesque costume details, the goldsmith's work characteristic of the Renaissance, now so much in vogue, M. Rodin's things acquire a certain largeness and loftiness as well as simplicity and sincerity of sentiment. The same model posed for the "Saint Jean" that posed for a dozen things turned out of the academic studios, but compared with the result in the latter cases, that in the former is even more remarkable for sentiment than for its structural sapience and general physical interest. How perfectly insignificant beside its moral impressiveness are the graceful works whose sentiment does not result from the expression of the form, but is conveyed in some convention of pose, of gesture, of physiognomy! It is like the contrast between a great and a graceful actor. The one interests you by his intelligent mastery of convention, by the tact and taste with which he employs in voice, carriage, facial expression, gesture, diction, the several conventions according to which ideas and emotions are habitually conveyed to your comprehension. Salvini, Coquelin, Got, pass immediately outside the realm of conventions. Their language, their medium of communication, is as new as what it expresses. They are inventive as well as intelligent. Their effect is prodigiously heightened because in this way, the warp as well as the woof of their art being expressive and original, the artistic result is greatly fortified. Given the same model, M. Rodin's result is in like manner expressly and originally enforced far beyond the result toward which the academic French school employs the labels of the Renaissance as conventionally as its predecessor at the beginning of the century employed those of the antique. "Formerly we used to do Greek," says M. Rodin, with no small justice; "now we do Italian. That is all the difference there is." And I cannot better conclude this imperfect notice of the work of a great master, in characterizing which such epithets as majestic, Miltonic, grandiose suggest themselves first of all, than by calling attention to the range which it covers, and to the fact that, even into the domain which one would have called consecrate to the imitators of the antique and the Renaissance, M. Rodin's informing sentiment and sense of beauty penetrate with their habitual distinction; and that the little child's head entitled "Alsace," that considerable portion of his work represented by "The Wave and the Shore," for example, and a small ideal female figure, which the manufacturer might covet for reproduction, but which, as Bastien-Lepage said to me, is "a definition of the essence of art," are really as noble as his more majestic works are beautiful.
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Aubé is another sculptor of acknowledged eminence who ranges himself with M. Rodin in his opposition to the Institute. His figures of "Bailly" and "Dante" are very fine, full of a most impressive dignity in theensemble, and marked by the most vigorous kind of modelling. One may easily like his "Gambetta" less. But for years Rodin's only eminent fellow sculptor was Dalou. Perhaps his protestantism has been less pronounced than M. Rodin's. It was certainly long more successful in winning both the connoisseur and the public. The state itself, which is now and then even more conservative than the Institute, has charged him with important works, and the Salon has given him its highest medal. And he was thus recognized long before M. Rodin's works had risen out of the turmoil of critical contention to their present envied if not cordially approved eminence. But for being less energetic, less absorbed, less intense than M. Rodin's, M. Dalou's enthusiasm for nature involves a scarcely less uncompromising dislike of convention. He had no success at the École des Beaux Arts. Unlike Rodin, he entered those precincts and worked long within them, but never sympathetically or felicitously. The rigor of academic precept was from the first excessively distasteful to his essentially and eminently romantic nature. He chafed incessantly. The training doubtless stood him in good stead when he found himself driven by hard necessity into commercial sculpture, into that class of work which is on a very high plane for its kind in Paris, but for which the manufacturer rather than the designer receives the credit. But he probably felt no gratitude to it for this, persuaded that but for its despotic prevalence there would have been a clearer field for his spontaneous and agreeable effort to win distinction in. He greatly preferred at this time the artistic anarchy of England, whither he betook himself after the Commune—not altogether upon compulsion, but by prudence perhaps; for like Rodin, his birth, his training, his disposition, his ideas, have always been as liberal and popular in politics as in art, and in France a man of any sincerity and dignity of character has profound political convictions, even though his profession be purely æsthetic. In England he was very successful both at the Academy and with the amateurs of the aristocracy, of many of whom he made portraits, besides finding ready purchasers among them for his imaginative works. The list of these latter begins, if we except some delightful decoration for one of the Champs-Élysées palaces, with a statue called "La Brodeuse," which won for him a medal at the Salon of 1870. Since then his production has been prodigious in view of its originality, of its lack of the powerful momentum extraneously supplied to the productive force that follows convention and keeps in the beaten track.
His numerous peasant subjects at one time led to comparison of him with Millet, but the likeness is of the most superficial kind. There is no spiritual kinship whatever between him and Millet. Dalou models the Marquis de Dreux-Brézé with as much zest as he does his "Boulonnaise allaitant son enfant;" his touch is as sympathetic in his Rubens-like "Silenus" as in his naturalistic "Berceuse." Furthermore, there is absolutely no note of melancholy in his realism—which, at the present time, is a point well worth noting. His vivacity excludes the pathetic. Traces of Carpeaux's influence are plain in his way of conceiving such subjects as Carpeaux would have handled. No one could have come so closely into contact with that vigorous individuality without in some degree undergoing its impress, without learning to look for the alert and elegant aspects of his model, whatever it might be. But with Carpeaux's distinction Dalou has more poise. He is considerably farther away from the rococo. His ideal is equally to be summarized in the word Life, but he cares more for its essence, so to speak, than for its phenomena, or at all events manages to make it felt rather than seen. One perceives that humanity interests him on the moral side, that he is interested in its significance as well as its form. Accordingly with him the movement illustrates the form, which is in its turn truly expressive, whereas occasionally, so bitter was his disgust with the pedantry of the schools, with Carpeaux the form is used to exhibit movement. Then, too, M. Dalou has a certain nobility which Carpeaux's vivacity is a shade too animated to reach. Motive and treatment blend in a larger sweep. The graver substance follows the planes and lines of a statelier if less brilliant style. Ithas, in a word, more style.
I can find no exacter epithet, on the whole, for Dalou's large distinction, and conscious yet sober freedom, than the word Venetian. There is some subtle phrenotype that associates him with the great colorists. His work is, in fact, full of color, if one may trench on the jargon of the studios. It has the sumptuousness of Titian and Paul Veronese. Its motives are cast in the same ample mould. Many of his figures breathe the same air of high-born ease and well-being, of serene and not too intellectual composure. There is an aristocratic tincture even in his peasants—a kind of native distinction inseparable from his touch. And in his women there is a certain gracious sweetness, a certain exquisite and elusive refinement elsewhere caught only by Tintoretto, but illustrated by Tintoretto with such penetrating intensity as to leave perhaps the most nearly indelible impression that the sensitive amateur carries away with him from Venice. The female figures in the colossal group which should have been placed in the Place de la République, but was relegated by official stupidity to the Place des Nations, are examples of this patrician charm in carriage, in form, in feature, in expression. They have not the witchery, the touch of Bohemian sprightliness that make such figures as Carpeaux's "Flora" so enchanting, but they are at once sweeter and more distinguished. The sense for the exquisite which this betrays excludes all dross from M. Dalou's rich magnificence. Even the "Silenus" group illustrates exuberance without excess: I spoke of it just now as Rubens-like, but it is only because it recalls Rubens's superb strength and riotous fancy; it is in reality a Rubens-like motive purged in the execution of all Flemish grossness. There is even in Dalou's fantasticality of this sort a measure and distinction which temper animation into resemblance to such delicate blitheness as is illustrated by the Bargello "Bacchus" of Jacopo Sansovino. Sansovino afterward, by the way, amid the artificiality of Venice, whither he went, wholly lost his individual force, as M. Dalou, owing to his love of nature, is less likely to do. But his sketch for a monument to Victor Hugo, and perhaps still more his memorial of Delacroix in the Luxembourg Gardens, point warningly in this direction, and it would perhaps be easier than he supposes to permit his extraordinary decorative facility to lead him on to execute works unpenetrated by personal feeling, and recalling less the acme of the Renaissance than the period just afterward, when original effort had exhausted itself and the movement of art was due mainly to momentum—when, as in France at the present moment, the enormous mass of artistic production really forced pedantry upon culture, and prevented any but the most strenuous personalities from being genuine, because of the immensely increased authoritativeness of what had become classic.
Certainly M. Dalou is far more nearly in the current of contemporary art than his friend Rodin, who stands with his master Barye rather defiantly apart from the regular evolution of French sculpture, whereas one can easily trace the derivation of M. Dalou and his relations to the present and the immediate past of his art in his country. His work certainly has its Fragonard, its Clodion, its Carpeaux side. Like every temperament that is strongly attracted by the decorative as well as the significant and the expressive, pure style in and for itself has its fascinations, its temptations for him. Of course it does not succeed in getting the complete possession of him that it has of the Institute. And there is, as I have suggested, an important difference, disclosed in the fact that M. Dalou uses his faculty for style in a personal rather than in the conventional way. His decoration is distinctly Dalou, and not arrangements after classic formulæ. It is full of zest, of ardor, of audacity. So that if his work has what one may call its national side, it is because the author's temperament is thoroughly national at bottom, and not because this temperament is feeble or has been academically repressed. But the manifest fitness with which it takes its place in the category of French sculpture shows the moral difference between it and the work of M. Rodin. Morally speaking, it is mainly—not altogether, but mainly—rhetorical, whereas M. Rodin's is distinctly poetic. It is delightful rhetoric and it has many poetic strains—such as the charm of penetrating distinction I have mentioned. But with the passions in their simplest and last analysis he hardly occupies himself at all. Such a work as "La République," the magnificent bas-relief of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, is a triumph of allegorical rhetoric, very noble, not a little moving, prodigious in its wealth of imaginative material, composed from the centre and not arranged with artificial felicity, full of suggestiveness, full of power, abounding in definite sculptural qualities, both moral and technical; it again is Rubens-like in its exuberance, but of firmer texture, more closely condensed. But anything approaching thekindof impressiveness of the Dante portal it certainly does not essay. It is in quite a different sphere. Its exaltation is, if not deliberate, admirably self-possessed. To find it theatrical would be simply a mark of our absurd Anglo-Saxon preference for reserve and repression in circumstances naturally suggesting expansion and elation—a preference surely born of timorousness and essentially very subtly theatrical itself. It is simply not deeply, intensely poetic, but, rather, a splendid piece of rhetoric, as I say.
So, too, is the famous Mirabeau relief, which is perhaps M. Dalou's masterpiece, and which represents his national side as completely as the group for the Place des Nations does those of his qualities I have endeavored to indicate by calling them Venetian. Observe the rare fidelity which has contributed its weight of sincerity to this admirable relief. Every prominent head of the many members of the Assembly, who nevertheless rally behind Mirabeau with a fine pell-mell freedom of artistic effect, is a portrait. The effect is like that of similar works designed and executed with the large leisure of an age very different from the competition and struggling hurry of our own. In every respect this work is as French as it is individual. It is penetrated with a sense of the dignity of French history. It is as far as possible removed from the cheapgenreeffect such a scheme in less skilful hands might easily have had. Mirabeau's gesture, in fact his entire presence, is superb, but the marquis is as fine in his way as the tribune in his. The beholder assists at the climax of a great crisis, unfolded to him in the impartial spirit of true art, quite without partisanship, and though manifestly stimulated by sympathy with the nobler cause, even more acutely conscious of the grandeur of the struggle and the distinction of those on all sides engaged in it, and acquiring from these a kind of elation, of exaltation such as the Frenchman experiences only when he may give expression to his artistic and his patriotic instincts at the same moment.
The distinctly national qualities of this masterpiece, and their harmonious association with the individual characteristics of M. Dalou, his love of nature, his native distinction, his charm, and his power, in themselves bear eminent witness to the vitality of modern French sculpture, in spite of all the influences which tend to petrify it with system and convention. M. Rodin stands so wholly apart that it would be unsafe perhaps to argue confidently from his impressive works the potentiality of periodical renewal in an art over which the Institute presides with still so little challenge of its title. But it is different with M. Dalou. Extraordinary as his talent is, its unquestioned and universal recognition is probably in great measure due to the preparedness of the environment to appreciate extraordinary work of the kind, to the high degree which French popular æsthetic education, in a word, has reached. And one's last word about contemporary French sculpture—even in closing a consideration of the works of such protestants as Rodin and Dalou—must be a recognition of the immense service of the Institute in education of this kind. Let some country without an institute, around which what æsthetic feeling the age permits may crystallize, however sharply, give us a Rodin and a Dalou!