I have already mentioned the most representative among those who have
"arrived" of the school of academic French sculpture as it exists
to-day, though it would be easy to extend the list with Antonin Carlès,
whose "Jeunesse" of the World's Fair of 1889 is a very graceful
embodiment of adolescence; Suchetet, whose "Byblis" of the same
exhibition caused his early death to be deplored; Adrien Gaudez,
Etcheto, Idrac, and, of course, many others of distinction. There is no
looseness in characterizing this as a "school;" it has its own qualities
and its corresponding defects. It stands by itself--apart from the Greek
sculpture and from its inspiration, the Renaissance, and from the more
recent traditions of Houdon, or of Rude and Carpeaux. It is a thoroughly
legitimate and unaffected expression of national thought and feeling at
the present time, at once splendid and simple. The moment of triumph in
any intellectual movement is, however, always a dangerous one. A
slack-water period of intellectual slothfulness nearly always ensues.
Ideas which have previously been struggling to get a hearing have
become accepted ideas that have almost the force of axioms; no one
thinks of their justification, of their basis in real truth and fact;
they take their place in the great category of conventions. The mind
feels no longer the exhilaration of discovery, the stimulus of fresh
perception; the sense becomes jaded, enthusiasm impossible. Dealing with
the same material and guided by the same principles, its production
becomes inevitably hackneyed, artificial, lifeless; the _Zeit-Geist_,
the Time-Spirit, is really a kind of Sisyphus, and the essence of life
is movement. This law of perpetual renewal, of the periodical quickening
of the human spirit, explains the barrenness of the inheritance of the
greatest men; shows why originality is a necessary element of
perfection; why Phidias, Praxiteles, Donatello, Michael Angelo (not to
go outside of our subject), had no successors. Once a thing is done it
is done for all time, and the study of perfection itself avails only as
a stimulus to perfection in other combinations. In fact, the more nearly
perfect the model the greater the necessity for an absolute break with
it in order to secure anything like an equivalent in living force; in
_its_ direction at least everything vital has been done. So its lack of
original force, its over-carefulness for style, its inevitable
sensitiveness to the criticism that is based on convention, make the
weak side of the French academic sculpture of the present day, fine and
triumphant as it is. That the national thought and feeling are not a
little conventional, and have the academic rather than a spontaneous
inspiration, has, however, lately been distinctly felt as a misfortune
and a limitation by a few sculptors whose work may be called the
beginning of a new movement out of which, whatever may be its own
limitations, nothing but good can come to French sculpture and of which
the protagonists are Auguste Rodin and Jules Dalou.