From Barye to the Institute is a long way. Nothing could be more interhostile than his sculpture and that of the professors at the École des Beaux-Arts. And in considering the French sculpture of the present day we may say that, aside from the great names already mentioned—Houdon, David d'Angers, Rude, Carpeaux, and Barye—and apart from the new movement represented by Rodin and Dalou, it is represented by the Institute, and that the Institute has reverted to the Italian inspiration. The influence of Canova and the example of Pradier and Etex were not lasting. Indeed, Greek sculpture has perished so completely that it sometimes seems to live only in its legend. With the modern French school, the academic school, it is quite supplanted by the sculpture of the Renaissance. And this is not unreasonable. The Renaissance sculpture is modern; its masters did finely and perfectly what since their time has been done imperfectly, but essentially its artistic spirit is the modern artistic spirit, full of personality, full of expression, careless of the type. Nowadays we patronize a little the ideal. You may hear very intelligent critics in Paris—who in Paris is not an intelligent critic?—speak disparagingly of the Greek want of expression; of the lack of passion, of vivid interest, of significance in a word, in Greek sculpture of the Periclean epoch. The conception of absolute beauty having been discovered to be an abstraction, the tradition of the purely ideal has gone with it. The caryatids of the Erechtheum, the horsemen of the Parthenon frieze, the reliefs of the Nike Apteros balustrade are admired certainly; but they are hardly sympathetically admired; there is a tendency to relegate them to the limbo of subjects for æsthetic lectures. And yet no one can have carefully examined the brilliant productions of modern French sculpture without being struck by this apparent paradox: that, whereas all its canons are drawn from a study of the Renaissance, its chief characteristic is, at bottom, a lack of expression, a carefulness for the type. The explanation is this: in the course of time, which "at last makes all things even," the individuality, the romanticism of the Renaissance has itself become the type, is now itself become "classical," and the modern attitude toward it, however sympathetic compared with the modern attitude toward the antique, is to a noteworthy degree factitious and artificial. And in art everything depends upon the attitude of mind. It is this which prevents Ingres from being truly Raphaelesque, and Pradier from being really classical. If, therefore, it can justly be said of modern French sculpture that its sympathy for the Renaissance sculpture obscures its vision of the ideal, it is clearly to be charged with the same absence of individual significance with which its thick-and-thin partisans reproach the antique. The circumstance that, like the Renaissance sculpture, it deals far more largely in pictorial expression than the antique does, is, if it deals in them after the Renaissance fashion and not after a fashion of its own, quite beside the essential fact. There is really nothing in common between an academic French sculptor of the present day and an Italian sculptor of the fifteenth century, except the possession of what is called the modern spirit. But the modern spirit manifests itself in an enormous gamut, and the differences of its manifestations are as great in their way, and so far as our interest in them is concerned, as the difference between their inspiration and the mediæval or the antique inspiration.
II
Chapu, who died a year or two ago, is perhaps the only eminent sculptor of the time whose inspiration is clearly the antique, and when I add that his work appears to me for this reason none the less original, it will be immediately perceived that I share imperfectly the French objection to the antique. Indeed, nowadays to have the antique inspiration is to be original ex vi termini; nothing is farther removed from contemporary conventions. But this is true in a much more integral sense. The pre-eminent fact of Greek sculpture, for example, is, from one point of view, the directness with which it concerns itself with the ideal—the slight temporary or personal element with which it is alloyed. When one calls an artist or a work Greek, this is what is really meant; it is the sense in which Raphael is Greek. Chapu is Greek in this way, and thus individualized among his contemporaries, not only by having a different inspiration from them, but by depending for his interest on no convention fixed or fleeting and on no indirect support of accentuated personal characteristics. Perhaps the antiquary of a thousand years from now, to whom the traits which to us distinguish so clearly the work of certain sculptors who seem to have nothing in common will betray only their common inspiration, will be even less at a loss than ourselves to find traces of a common origin in such apparently different works as Chapu's "Mercury" and his "Jeunesse" of the Regnault monument. He will by no means confound these with the classical productions of M. Millet or M. Cavelier, we may be sure. And this, I repeat, because their purely Greek spirit, the subordination in their conception and execution of the personal element, the direct way in which the sculptor looks at the ideal, the type, not only distinguish them among contemporary works, which are so largely personal expressions, but give them an eminent individuality as well. Like the Greek sculpture, they are plainly the production of culture, which in restraining wilfulness, however happily inspired, and imposing measure and poise, nevertheless acutely stimulates and develops the faculties themselves. The skeptic who may very plausibly inquire the distinction between that vague entity, "the ideal," and the personal idea of the artist concerned with it, can be shown this distinction better than it can be expressed in words. He will appreciate it very readily, to return to Chapu, by contrasting the "Jeanne d'Arc" at the Luxembourg Gallery with such different treatment of the same theme as M. Bastien-Lepage's picture, now in the New York Metropolitan Museum, illustrates. Contrary to his almost invariable practice of neglecting even design in favor of impersonal natural representation, Bastien-Lepage's "Jeanne d'Arc" is the creature of wilful originality, a sort of embodied protest against conventionalism in historical painting; she is the illustration of a theory, she is this and that systematically and not spontaneously; the predominance of the painter's personality is plain in every detail of his creation. Chapu's "Maid" is the ideal, more or less perfectly expressed; she is everybody's "Maid," more or less adequately embodied. The statue is the antipodes of the conventional much more so, even, to our modern sense, than that of Rude; it suggests no competition with that at Versailles or the many other characterless conceptions that abound. It is full of expression—arrested just before it ceases to be suggestive; of individuality restrained on the hither side of peculiarity. The "Maid" is hearing her "voices" as distinctly as Bastien-Lepage's figure is, but the fact is not forced upon the sense, but is rather disclosed to the mind with great delicacy and the dignity becoming sculpture. No one could, of course, mistake this work for an antique—an error that might possibly be made, supposing the conditions favorable, in the case of Chapu's "Mercury;" but it presents, nevertheless, an excellent illustration of a modern working naturally and freely in the antique spirit. It is as affecting, as full of direct appeal, as a modern work essays to be; but its appeal is to the sense of beauty, to the imagination, and its effect is wrought in virtue of its art and not of its reality. No, individuality is no more inconsistent with the antique spirit than it is with eccentricity, with the extravagances of personal expression. Is there more individuality in a thirteenth-century grotesque than in the "Faun" of the Capitol? For sculpture especially, art is eminently, as it has been termed, "the discipline of genius," and it is only after the sculptor's genius has submitted to the discipline of culture that it evinces an individuality which really counts, which is really thrown out in relief on the background of crude personality. And if there be no question of perfection, but only of the artist's attitude, one has but to ask himself the real meaning of the epithet Shakespearian to be assured of the harmony between individuality and the most impersonal practice.
Nevertheless, this attitude and this perfection, characteristic as they are of Chapu's work, have their peril. When the quickening impulse, of whose expression they are after all but conditions, fails, they suddenly appear so misplaced as to render insignificant what would otherwise have seemed "respectable" enough work. Everywhere else of great distinction—even in the execution of so perfunctory a task as a commission for a figure of "Mechanical Art" in the Tribunal de Commerce—at the great Triennial Exposition of 1883 Chapu was simply insignificant. There was never a more striking illustration of the necessity of constant renewal of inspiration, of the constant danger of lapse into the perfunctory and the hackneyed, which threatens an artist of precisely Chapu's qualities. Another of equal eminence escapes this peril; there is not the same interdependence of form and "content" to be disturbed by failure in the latter; or, better still, the merits of form are not so distinguished as to require imperatively a corresponding excellence of intention. In fact, it is because of the exceptional position that he occupies in deriving from the antique, instead of showing the academic devotion to Renaissance romanticism which characterizes the general movement of academic French sculpture, that in any consideration of this sculpture Chapu's work makes a more vivid impression than that of his contemporaries, and thus naturally takes a foremost place.
III
M. Paul Dubois, for example, in the characteristics just alluded to, presents the greatest possible contrast to Chapu; but he will never, we may be sure, give us a work that could be called insignificant. His work will always express himself, and his is a personality of very positive idiosyncrasy. M. Dubois, indeed, is probably the strongest of the Academic group of French sculptors of the day. The tomb of General Lamoricière at Nantes has remained until recently one of the very finest achievements of sculpture in modern times. There is in effect nothing markedly superior in the Cathedral of St. Denis, which is a great deal to say—much more, indeed, than the glories of the Italian Renaissance, which lead us out of mere momentum to forget the French, permit one to appreciate. Indeed, the sculpture of M. Dubois seems positively to have but one defect, a defect which from one point of view is certainly a quality, the defect of impeccability. It is at any rate impeccable; to seek in it a blemish, or, within its own limitations, a distinct shortcoming, is to lose one's pains. As workmanship, and workmanship of the subtler kind, in which every detail of surface and structure is perceived to have been intelligently felt (though rarely enthusiastically rendered), it is not merely satisfactory, but visibly and beautifully perfect. But in the category in which M. Dubois is to be placed that is very little; it is always delightful, but it is not especially complimentary to M. Dubois, to occupy one's self with it. On the other hand, by impeccability is certainly not here meant the mere success of expressing what one has to express—the impeccability of Canova and his successors, for example. The difficulty is with M. Dubois's ideal, with what he so perfectly expresses. In the last analysis this is not his ideal more than ours. And this, indeed, is what makes his work so flawless in our eyes, so impeccable. It seems as if of what he attempts he attains the type itself; everyone must recognize its justness.
The reader will say at once here that I am cavilling at M. Dubois for what I praised in Chapu. But let us distinguish. The two artists belong to wholly different categories. Chapu's inspiration is the antique spirit. M. Dubois, is, like all academic French sculptors, except Chapu indeed, absolutely and integrally a romanticist, completely enamoured of the Renaissance. The two are so distinct as to be contradictory. The moment M. Dubois gives us the type in a "Florentine Minstrel," to the exclusion of the personal and the particular, he fails in imaginativeness and falls back on the conventional. The type of a "Florentine Minstrel" is infallibly a convention. M. Dubois, not being occupied directly with the ideal, is bound to carry his subject and its idiosyncrasies much farther than the observer could have foreseen. To rest content with expressing gracefully and powerfully the notion common to all connoisseurs is to fall short of what one justly exacts of the romantic artist. Indeed, in exchange for this one would accept very faulty work in this category with resignation. Whatever we may say or think, however we may admire or approve, in romantic art the quality that charms, that fascinates, is not adequacy but unexpectedness. In addition to the understanding, the instinct demands satisfaction. The virtues of "Charity" and "Faith" and the ideas of "Military Courage" and "Meditation" could not be more adequately illustrated than by the figures which guard the solemn dignity of General Lamoricière's sleep. There is a certain force, a breadth of view in the general conception, something in the way in which the sculptor has taken his task, closely allied to real grandeur. The confident and even careless dependence upon the unaided value of its motive, making hardly any appeal to the fancy on the one hand, and seeking no poignant effect on the other, endues the work with the poise and purity of effortless strength. It conveys to the mind a clear impression of manliness, of qualities morally refreshing.
But such work educates us so inexorably, teaches us to be so exacting! After enjoying it to its and our utmost, we demand still something else, something more moving, more stirring, something more directly appealing to our impulse and instinct. Even in his free and charming little "St. John Baptist" of the Luxembourg, and his admirable bust of Baudry one feels like asking for more freedom still, for more "swing." Dubois certainly is the last artist who needs to be on his guard against "letting himself go." Why is it that in varying so agreeably Renaissance themes—compare the "Military Courage" and Michael Angelo's "Pensiero," or the "Charity" and the same group in Della Quercia's fountain at Sienna—it is restraint, rather than audacity, that governs him? Is it caution or perversity? In a word, imaginativeness is what permanently interests and attaches, the imaginativeness to which in sculpture the ordinary conventions of form are mere conditions, and the ordinary conventions of idea mere material. One can hardly apply generalities of the kind to M. Dubois without saying too much, but it is nevertheless true that one may illustrate the grand style and yet fail of being intimately and acutely sympathetic; and M. Dubois, to whose largeness of treatment and nobility of conception no one will deny something truly suggestive of the grand style, does thus fail. It is not that he does not possess charm, and charm in no mean proportion to his largeness and nobility, but for the elevation of these into the realm of magic, into the upper air of spontaneous spiritual activity, his imagination has, for the romantic imagination which it is, a trifle too much self-possession—too much sanity, if one chooses. He has the ambitions, the faculties, of a lyric poet, and he gives us too frequently recitative.