French Art Part 4

After Goujon, Clodion is the great name in French sculpture, until we come to Houdon, who may almost be a.s.signed to the nineteenth century.

There were throughout the eighteenth century honorable artists, sculptors of distinction beyond contest. But sculpture is such an abstract art itself that the sculpture which partook of the artificiality of the eighteenth century has less interest for us, less that is concrete and appealing than even the painting of the epoch. It derived its canons and its practice from Puget--the French Bernini, who with less grace and less dilettante extravagance than his Italian exemplar had more force and solidity. With less cleverness, less charm--for Bernini, spite of the disesteem in which his juxtaposition to Michael Angelo and his apparent unconsciousness of the att.i.tude such juxtaposition should have imposed upon him, cause him to be held, has a great deal of charm and is extraordinarily clever--he is more sincere, more thorough-going, more respectable. Coysevox is chiefly Puget exaggerated, and his pupil, Coustou, who comes down to nearly the middle of the eighteenth century, contributed nothing to French sculptural tradition.

But Clodion is a distinct break. He is as different from Coysevox and Coustou as Watteau is from Lebrun. He is the essence of what we mean by Louis Quinze. His work is clever beyond characterization. It has in perfection what sculptors mean by color--that is to say a certain warmth of feeling, a certain _insouciance_, a brave carelessness for sculpturesque traditions, a free play of fancy, both in the conception and execution of his subjects. Like the Louis Quinze painters, he has his thoughtless, irresponsible, involuntary side, and like them--like the best of them, that is to say, like Watteau--he is never quite as good as he could be. He seems not so much concerned at expressing his ideal as at pleasing, and pleasing people of too frivolous an appreciation to call forth what is best in him. He devoted himself almost altogether to terra-cotta, which is equivalent to saying that the exquisite and not the impressive was his aim. Thoroughly cla.s.sic, so far as the avoidance of everything naturalistic is concerned, he is yet as little severe and correct as the painters of his day. He spent nine years in Rome, but though enamoured in the most sympathetic degree of the antique, it was the statuettes and figurines, the gay and social, the elegant and decorative side of antique sculpture that exclusively he delighted in. His work is Tanagra Gallicized. It is not the group of "The Deluge," or the "Entry of the French into Munich," or "Hercules in Repose," for which he was esteemed by contemporaries or is prized by posterity. He is admirable where he is inimitable--that is to say, in the delightful decoration of which he was so prodigal. It is not in his compositions essaying what is usually meant by sculptural effect, but in his vases, clocks, pendants, volutes, little reliefs of nymphs riding dolphins over favoring breakers and amid hospitable foam, his toilettes of Venus, his facade ornamentations, his applied sculpture, in a word, that his true talent lies. After him it is natural that we should have a reversion to quasi-severity and imitation of the antique--just as David succeeded to the Louis Quinze pictorial riot--and that the French contemporaries of Canova and Thorwaldsen, those literal, though enthusiastic ill.u.s.trators of Winckelmann's theories, should be Pradier and Etex and the so-called Greek school. Pradier's Greek inspiration has something Swiss about it, one may say--he was a Genevan--though his figures were simple and largely treated. He had a keen sense for the feminine element--the _ewig Weibliche_--and expressed it plastically with a zest approaching gusto. Yet his statues are women rather than statues, and, more than that, are handsome rather than beautiful. Etex, it is to be feared, will be chiefly remembered as the unfortunately successful rival of Rude in the Arc de Triomphe de l'etoile decoration.

V

Having in each case more or less relation with, but really wholly outside of and superior to all "schools" whatever--except the school of nature, which permits as much freedom as it exacts fidelity--is the succession of the greatest of French sculptors since the Renaissance and down to the present day: Houdon, David d'Angers, Rude, Carpeaux, and Barye. Houdon is one of the finest examples of the union of vigor with grace. He will be known chiefly as a portraitist, but such a masterpiece as his "Diana" shows how admirable he was in the sphere of purely imaginative theme and treatment. Cla.s.sic, and even conventionally cla.s.sic as it is, both in subject and in the way the subject is handled--compared for example with M. Falguiere's "Nymph Hunting," which is simply a realistic Diana--it is designed and modelled with as much personal freedom and feeling as if Houdon had been stimulated by the ambition of novel accomplishment, instead of that of rendering with truth and grace a time-honored and traditional sculptural motive. Its treatment is beautifully educated and its effect refined, chaste, and elevated in an extraordinary degree. No master ever steered so near the reef of "clock-tops," one may say, and avoided it so surely and triumphantly. The figure is light as air and wholly effortless at the same time. There has rarely been such a distinguished success in circ.u.mventing the great difficulty of sculpture--which is to rob marble or metal of its specific gravity and make it appear light and buoyant, just as the difficulty of the painter is to give weight and substance to his fictions. But Houdon's admirable busts of Moliere, Diderot, Was.h.i.+ngton, Franklin, and Mirabeau, his unequalled statue of Voltaire in the _foyer_ of the Francais and his San Bruno in Santa Maria degli Angeli at Rome are the works on which his fame will chiefly rest, and, owing to their masterly combination of strength with style, rest securely.

To see the work of David d'Angers, one must go to Angers itself and to Pere-Lachaise. The Louvre is lamentably lacking in anything truly representative of this most eminent of all portraitists in sculpture, I think, not excepting even Houdon, if one may reckon the ma.s.s as well as the excellence of his remarkable production and the way in which it witnesses that portraiture is just what he was born to do. The "Philopoemen" of the Louvre is a fine work, even impressively large and simple. But it is the competent work of a member of a school and leaves one a little cold. Its academic quality quite overshadows whatever personal feeling one may by searching find in the severity of its treatment and the way in which a cla.s.sic motive has been followed out naturally and genuinely instead of perfunctorily. It gives no intimation of the faculty that produced the splendid gallery of medallions accentuated by an occasional bust and statue, of David's celebrated contemporaries and quasi-contemporaries in every field of distinction.

It is impossible to overestimate the interest and value, the truth and the art of these. Whether the subject be intractable or not seems to have made no difference to David. He invariably produced a work of art at the same time that he expressed the character of its motive with uncompromising fidelity. His portraits, moreover, are pure sculpture.

There is nothing of the cameo-cutter's art about them. They are modelled not carved. The outline is no more important than it is in nature, so far as it is employed to the end of identification. It is used decoratively. There are surprising effects of fore-shortening, exhibiting superb, and as it were unconscious ease in handling relief--that most difficult of illusions in respect of having no law (at least no law that it is worth the sculptor's while to try to discover) of correspondence to reality. Forms and ma.s.ses have a definition and a firmness wholly remarkable in their independence of the usual low relief's reliance on pictorial and purely linear design. They do not blend picturesquely with the background, and do not depend on their suggestiveness for their character. They are always realized, executed--sculpture in a word whose suggestiveness, quite as potent as that of feebler executants, begins only when actual representation has been triumphantly achieved instead of impotently and skilfully avoided.

Of Rude's genius one's first thought is of its robustness, its originality. Everything he did is stamped with the impress of his personality. At the same time it is equally evident that Rude's own temperament took its color from the transitional epoch in which he lived, and of which he was _par excellence_ the sculptor. He was the true inheritor of his Burgundian traditions. His strongest side was that which allies him with his artistic ancestor, Claux s.l.u.ters. But he lived in an era of general culture and aestheticism, and all his naturalistic tendencies were complicated with theory. He accepted the antique not merely as a stimulus, but as a model. He was not only a sculptor but a teacher, and the formulation of his didacticism complicated considerably the free exercise of his expression. At the last, as is perhaps natural, he reverted to precedent and formulary, and in his "Hebe and the Eagle of Jupiter" and his "L'Amour Dominateur du Monde," is more at variance than anywhere else with his native instinct, which was, to cite the admirable phrase of M. de Fourcaud, _exterioriser nos idees et nos ames_. But throughout his life he halted a little between two opinions--the current admiration of the cla.s.sic, and his own instinctive feeling for nature unsystematized and unsophisticated. His "Jeanne d'Arc" is an instance. In spite of the violation of tradition, which at the time it was thought to be, it seems to-day to our eyes to err on the side of the conventional. It is surely intellectual, cla.s.sic, even fact.i.tious in conception as well as in execution. In some of its accessories it is even modish. It ill.u.s.trates not merely the abstract turn of conceiving a subject which Rude always shared with the great cla.s.sicists of his art, but also the arbitrariness of treatment against which he always protested. Without at all knowing it, he was in a very intimate sense an eclectic in many of his works. He believed in forming a complete mental conception of every composition before even posing a model, as he used to tell his students, but in complicated compositions this was impossible, and he had small talent for artificial composition.

Furthermore, he often distrusted--quite without reason, but after the fatal manner of the rustic--his own intuitions. But one mentions these qualifications of his genius and accomplishment only because both his genius and accomplishment are so distinguished as to make one wish they were more nearly perfect than they are. It is really idle to wish that Rude had neglected the philosophy of his art, with which he was so much occupied, and had devoted himself exclusively to treating sculptural subjects in the manner of a nineteenth century successor of s.l.u.ters and Anthoniet. He might have been a greater sculptor than he was, but he is sufficiently great as he is. If his "Mercury" is an essay in conventional sculpture, his "Pet.i.t Pecheur" is frank and free sculptural handling of natural material. His work at Lille and in Belgium, his reclining figure of Cavaignac in the cemetery of Montmartre, his n.o.ble figures of Gaspard Monge at Beaune, of Marshal Bertrand, and of Ney, are all cast in the heroic mould, full of character, and in no wise dependent on speculative theory. Few sculptors have displayed anything like his variety and range, which extends, for example, from the "Baptism of Christ" to a statue of "Louis XIII. enfant," and includes portraits, groups, compositions in relief, and heroic statues. In all his successful work one cannot fail to note the force and fire of the man's personality, and perhaps what one thinks of chiefly in connection with him is the misfortune which we owe to the vacillation of M. Thiers of having but one instead of four groups by him on the piers of the Arc de Triomphe de l'etoile. Carpeaux used to say that he never pa.s.sed the "Chant du Depart" without taking off his hat. One can understand his feeling. No one can have any appreciation of what sculpture is without perceiving that this magnificent group easily and serenely takes its rank among the masterpieces of sculpture of all time. It is, in the first place, the incarnation of an abstraction, the spirit of patriotism roused to the highest pitch of warlike intensity and self-sacrifice, and in the second this abstract motive is expressed in the most elaborate and comprehensive completeness--with a combined intricacy of detail and singleness of effect which must be the despair of any but a master in sculpture.

VI

Carpeaux perhaps never did anything that quite equals the masterpiece of his master Rude. But the essential quality of the "Chant du Depart" he a.s.similated so absolutely and so naturally that he made it in a way his own. He carried it farther, indeed. If he never rose to the grandeur of this superb group, and he certainly did not, he nevertheless showed in every one of his works that he was possessed by its inspiration even more completely than was Rude himself. His pa.s.sion was the representation of life, the vital and vivifying force in its utmost exuberance, and in its every variety, so far as his experience could enable him to render it. He was infatuated with movement, with the attestation in form of nervous energy, of the quick translation of thought and emotion into interpreting att.i.tude. His figures are, beyond all others, so thoroughly alive as to seem conscious of the fact and joy of pure existence. They are animated, one may almost say inspired, with the delight of muscular activity, the sensation of exercising the functions with which nature endows them. And accompanying this supreme motive and effect is a delightful grace and winningness of which few sculptors have the secret, and which suggest more than any one else Clodion's decorative loveliness. An even greater charm of sprite-like, fairy attractiveness, of caressing and bewitching fascination, a more penetrating and seductive engagingness plays about Carpeaux's "Flora," I think, than is characteristic even of Clodion's figures and reliefs.

Carpeaux is at all events nearer to us, and if he has not the cla.s.sic detachment of Clodion he subst.i.tutes for it a quality of closer attachment and more intimate appeal. He is at his best perhaps in the "Danse" of the Nouvel Opera facade, wherein his elfin-like grace and exuberant vitality animate a group carefully, and even cla.s.sically composed, exhibiting skill and restraint as well as movement and fancy.

Possibly his temperament gives itself too free a rein in the group of the Luxembourg Gardens, in which he has been accused by his own admirers of sacrificing taste to turbulence and securing expressiveness at the expense of saner and more truly sculptural aims. But fancy the Luxembourg Gardens without "The Four Quarters of the World supporting the Earth." Parisian censure of his exuberance is very apt to display a conventional standard of criticism in the critic rather than to substantiate its charge.

Barye's place in the history of art is more nearly unique, perhaps, than that of any of the great artists. He was certainly one of the greatest of sculptors, and he had either the good luck or the mischance to do his work in a field almost wholly unexploited before him. He has in his way no rivals, and in his way he is so admirable that the scope of his work does not even hint at his exclusion from rivalry with the very greatest of his predecessors. A perception of the truth of this apparent paradox is the nearest one may come, I think, to the secret of his excellence. No matter what you do, if you do it well enough, that is, with enough elevation, enough spiritual distinction, enough trans.m.u.tation of the elementary necessity of technical perfection into true significance--you succeed. And this is not the sense in which motive in art is currently belittled. It is rather the suggestion of Mrs. Browning's lines:

"Better far Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means Than a sublime art frivolously."

Nothing could be more misleading than to fancy Barye a kind of modern Cellini. Less than any sculptor of modern times is he a decorative artist. The small scale of his works is in great part due to his lack of opportunity to produce larger ones. Nowadays one does what one can, even the greatest artists; and Barye had no Lorenzo de'Medici for a patron, but, instead, a frowning Inst.i.tute, which confined him to such work as, in the main, he did. He did it _con amore_ it need not be added, and thus lifted it at once out of the customary category of such work. His bronzes were never _articles de Paris_, and their excellence transcends the function of teaching our sculptors and amateurs the lesson that "household" is as dignified a province as monumental, art. His groups are not essentially "clock-tops," and the work of perhaps the greatest artist, in the line from Jean Goujon to Carpeaux can hardly be used to point the moral that "clock-tops" ought to be good. Cellini's "Perseus"

is really more of a "parlor ornament" than Barye's smallest figure.

Why is he so obviously great as well as so obviously extraordinary? one constantly asks himself in the presence of his bronzes. Perhaps because he expresses with such concreteness, such definiteness and vigor a motive so purely an abstraction. The ill.u.s.tration in intimate elaboration of elemental force, strength, pa.s.sion, seems to have been his aim, and in everyone of his wonderfully varied groups he attains it superbly--not giving the beholder a symbol of it merely; in no degree depending upon a.s.sociation or convention, but exhibiting its very essence with a combined scientific explicitness and poetic energy to which antique art alone, one may almost say, has furnished a parallel.

For this, fauna served him as well as the human figure, though, could he have studied man with the facility which the Jardin des Plantes afforded him of observing the lower animals, he might have used the medium of the human figure more frequently than he did. When he did, he was hardly less successful; and the four splendid groups that decorate the Pavillons Denon and Richelieu of the Louvre are in the very front rank of the heroic sculpture of the modern world.

V

ACADEMIC SCULPTURE

I

From Barye to the Inst.i.tute is a long way. Nothing could be more interhostile than his sculpture and that of the professors at the ecole 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 Inst.i.tute, and that the Inst.i.tute 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 pa.s.sion, 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 hors.e.m.e.n of the Parthenon frieze, the reliefs of the Nike Apteros bal.u.s.trade are admired certainly; but they are hardly sympathetically admired; there is a tendency to relegate them to the limbo of subjects for aesthetic 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 "cla.s.sical," and the modern att.i.tude toward it, however sympathetic compared with the modern att.i.tude toward the antique, is to a noteworthy degree fact.i.tious and artificial. And in art everything depends upon the att.i.tude of mind. It is this which prevents Ingres from being truly Raphaelesque, and Pradier from being really cla.s.sical. 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 circ.u.mstance 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 fas.h.i.+on and not after a fas.h.i.+on 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 mediaeval 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 cla.s.sical 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 ent.i.ty, "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, ill.u.s.trates. 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 compet.i.tion 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 att.i.tude, one has but to ask himself the real meaning of the epithet Shakespearian to be a.s.sured of the harmony between individuality and the most impersonal practice.

Nevertheless, this att.i.tude 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 Lamoriciere 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 workmans.h.i.+p, and workmans.h.i.+p 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 ill.u.s.trated than by the figures which guard the solemn dignity of General Lamoriciere'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 refres.h.i.+ng.

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 ill.u.s.trate the grand style and yet fail of being intimately and acutely sympathetic; and M. Dubois, to whose largeness of treatment and n.o.bility 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 n.o.bility, 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.

IV

It is agreeable in many ways to turn from the rounded and complete impeccability of M. Dubois to the fancy of M. Saint-Marceaux. More than any of his rivals, M. Saint-Marceaux possesses the charm of unexpectedness. He is not perhaps to be called an original genius, and his work will probably leave French sculpture very nearly where it found it. Indeed, one readily perceives that he is not free from the trammels of contemporary convention. But how easily he wears them, and if no "severe pains and birth-throes" accompany the evolution of his conceptions, how graceful these conceptions are! They are perhaps of the Canova family; the "Harlequin," for instance, which has had such a prodigious success, is essentially Milanese sculpture; essentially even the "Genius Guarding the Secret of the Tomb" is a fantastic rather than an original work. But how the manner, the treatment, triumphs over the Canova insipidity! It is not only Milanese sculpture better done, the execution beautifully sapient and truthful instead of cheaply imitative, the idea broadly enforced by the details instead of frittered away among them; it is Milanese sculpture essentially elevated and dignified.

Loosely speaking, the mere _article de vertu_ becomes a true work of art. And this transformation, or rather this development of a germ of not too great intrinsic importance, is brought about in the work of Saint-Marceaux by the presence of an element utterly foreign to the Canova sculpture and its succession--the element of character. If to the clever workmans.h.i.+p of the Italians he merely opposed workmans.h.i.+p of a superior kind as well as quality--thoroughly artistic workmans.h.i.+p, that is to say--his sculpture would be far less interesting than it is. He does, indeed, noticeably do this; there is a felicity entirely delightful, almost magical, in every detail of his work. But when one compares it with the sculpture of M. Dubois, it is not of this that one thinks so much as of a certain individual character with which M.

Saint-Marceaux always contrives to endue it. This is not always in its nature sculptural, it must be admitted, and it approaches perhaps too near the character of _genre_ to have the enduring interest that purely sculptural qualities possess. But it is always individual, piquant, and charming, and in it consists M. Saint-Marceaux's claim upon us as an artist. No one else, even given his powers of workmans.h.i.+p, that is to say as perfectly equipped as he, could have treated so thoroughly conventional a _genre_ subject as the "Harlequin" as he has treated it.

The mask is certainly one of the stock properties of the subject, but notice how it is used to confer upon the whole work a character of mysterious witchery. It is as a whole, if you choose, an _article de Paris_, with the distinction of being seriously treated; the modelling and the movement admirable as far as they go, but well within the bounds of that anatomically artistic expression which is the _raison d'etre_ of sculpture and its choice of the human form as its material. But the character saves it from this category; what one may almost call its psychological interest redeems its superficial triviality.

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 individual _cachet_ of 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 Mercie 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. Mercie 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 cla.s.sic 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. Mercie'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. Mercie "David" was simply a cla.s.sic 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. Mercie'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 ident.i.ty of authors.h.i.+p 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 enn.o.bling in the celebration of the virtues of the brave defeated that surpa.s.ses the commonplace of paeans. M. Mercie 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 ill.u.s.trations 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. Mercie 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. Mercie 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. Mercie'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. Mercie 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 a.s.sociation, and like the Renaissance and the antique sculpture they demand a positive and absolute, and not a comparative criticism.

V

Well, then, speaking thus absolutely and positively, the cardinal defect of the Inst.i.tute sculpture--and the refined and distinguished work of M.

Mercie better perhaps than almost any other a.s.sists 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 Piraeus roadway, has more style than M. Mercie's "Quand-Meme"

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 aeschylus 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 ma.s.s 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 p.r.o.nounced, 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 pure _genre_.

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 Inst.i.tute, oppress individuality. But whereas Corot and Millet have triumphed over the Inst.i.tute there are--there were, at least, till yesterday--hardly any Millets and Corots of sculpture whose triumph is as yet a.s.sured. The tendency, the weight of authority, the verdict of criticism, always conservative in France, are all the other way. At the ecole 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 Comedie Francaise 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 n.o.ble, 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 Moliere, 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 Republique, too many "Ledas" and "Susannahs" and "Quand-Memes" 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, the _verve_, 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 the _article de Paris_, and only abnormal primness can refuse to recognize the truth that the _article de Paris_ has its art side. M. Moreau-Vauthier is not perhaps a modern Cellini; he has certainly never produced anything that could be cla.s.sed 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.