Carpeaux perhaps never did anything that quite equals the masterpiece of
his master Rude. But the essential quality of the "Chant du Départ" he
assimilated 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 passion 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 attitude. 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 classic
detachment of Clodion he substitutes for it a quality of closer
attachment and more intimate appeal. He is at his best perhaps in the
"Danse" of the Nouvel Opéra façade, wherein his elfin-like grace and
exuberant vitality animate a group carefully, and even classically
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
transmutation 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 Institute, 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 illustration in intimate
elaboration of elemental force, strength, passion, 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 association 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