I
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.