CHAPTER XIV
THE MODERN FRENCH SCHOOL
(AFTER 1848)
We are now approaching the end of our task. It only remains to gather together the various strands of our argument, with a view to the solution of the final problem—the position of sculpture in our own times. Though we shall first deal with the art of France and then turn to that of England, the sequence of events will be found to be practically the same in both countries. A single super-title—“The Renascence of Individualism”—might properly characterize both chapters.
Speaking roughly, the pseudo-Hellenic style of Canova and his followers persisted until the middle of the nineteenth century. So long as it lasted, the sculptor chose to fit his thoughts and emotions into an entirely alien form. It was a form of his own choosing, it is true, but it could scarcely be said to be of his own making.
Now, we have seen again and again, that the production of vital sculpture, whether by the nation or the individual, depends upon absolute sincerity. It must spring from the deep-felt emotions of the artist. The class of work—portraiture or what not—matters little. The subject matters even less. What is all-important is that the design in which the sculptor seeks to embody his ideas shall grow spontaneously from his experience in the world of Nature. Apart from that—n’importe!
“There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And-every-single-one-of-them-is-right.”
But the adoption of an alien form was not the only obstacle to a revival of sculpture. During the greater part of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the prevailing philosophy had condemned the intellectuals of Western Europe to the suppression of all natural passion and emotion. A cataclysm like the French Revolution was necessary to regain for mankind the right to feel. Once this right had been asserted, the results were immediate. At first, individualism took a political form. Napoleon arose—the incarnation of the Frenchman’s desire to impress his newly discovered social ideas upon the civilized world. When the Emperor fell in 1815, the passion for individual expression took artistic shape. What Napoleon did in the world of politics, Shelley and Victor Hugo, Delacroix and Turner did in the world of art. Romance in action became Romance in imagination. Criticism, which had been academic, became individual; thought became profoundly subjective. The philosopher was no longer content with a few abstractions and an elaborate terminology; he sought to know the import of the broad earth and the still broader heaven. These were times
“In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways Of custom, law, and statute, took at once The attraction of a country in romance.