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.