I
Side by side with the academic current in French art has moved of recent
years a naturalist and romantic impulse whose manifestations have been
always vigorous though occasionally exaggerated. In any of the great
departments of activity nationally pursued--as art has been pursued in
France since Francis I.--there are always these rival currents, of which
now one and now the other constantly affects the ebb and flow of the
tide of thought and feeling. The classic and romantic duel of 1830, the
rise of the naturalist opposition to Hugo and romanticism in our own
day, are familiar instances of this phenomenon in literature. The revolt
of Géricault and Delacroix against David and Ingres are equally well
known in the field of painting. Of recent years the foundation of the
periodical _L'Art_ and its rivalry with the conservative _Gazette des
Beaux Arts_ mark with the same definiteness, and an articulate
precision, the same conflict between truth, as new eyes see it, and
tradition. Never, perhaps, since the early Renaissance, however, has
nature asserted her supremacy over convention in such unmistakable, such
insistent, and, one may say, I think, such intolerant fashion as she is
doing at the present moment. Sculpture, in virtue of the defiant
palpability of its material, is the most impalpable of the plastic arts,
and therefore it feels less quickly than the rest, perhaps, the impress
of the influences of the epoch and their classifying canons. Natural
imitation shows first in sculpture, and subsists in it longest. But
convention once its conqueror, the return to nature is here most tardy,
because, owing to the impalpable, the elusive quality of sculpture,
though natural standards may everywhere else be in vogue, no one thinks
of applying them to so specialized an expression. Its variation depends
therefore more completely on the individual artist himself. Niccolò
Pisano, for example, died when Giotto was two years old, but, at the
other end of the historic line of modern art, it has taken years since
Delacroix to furnish recognition for Auguste Rodin. The stronghold of
the Institute had been mined many times by revolutionary painters before
Dalou took the grand medal of the Salon.
Owing to the relative and in fact polemic position which these two
artists occupy, the movement which they represent, and of which as yet
they themselves form a chief part, a little obscures their respective
personalities, which are nevertheless, in sculpture, by far the most
positive and puissant of the present epoch. M. Rodin's work, especially,
is so novel that one's first impression in its presence is of its
implied criticism of the Institute. One thinks first of its attitude,
its point of view, its end, aim, and means, and of the utter contrast of
these with those of the accepted contemporary masters in his art--of
Dubois and Chapu, Mercié and Saint-Marceaux. One judges generally, and
instinctively avoids personal and direct impressions. The first thought
is not, Are the "Saint Jean" and the "Bourgeois de Calais" successful
works of art? But, _Can_ they be successful if the accepted masterpieces
of modern sculpture are not to be set down as insipid? One is a little
bewildered. It is easy to see and to estimate the admirable traits and
the shortcomings of M. Dubois's delightful and impressive reminiscences
of the Renaissance, of M. Mercié's refined and graceful compositions.
They are of their time and place. They embody, in distinguished manner
and in an accentuated degree, the general inspiration. Their spiritual
characteristics are traditional and universal, and technically, without
perhaps often passing beyond it, they exhaust cleverness. You may enjoy
or resent their classic and exemplary excellences, as you feel your
taste to have suffered from the lack or the superabundance of academic
influences; I cannot fancy an American insensitive to their charm. But
it is plain that their perfection is a very different thing from the
characteristics of a strenuous artistic personality seeking expression.
If these latter when encountered are seen to be evidently of an
extremely high order, contemporary criticism, at all events, should feel
at once the wisdom of beginning with the endeavor to appreciate, instead
of making the degree of its own familiarity with them the test of their
merit.
French æsthetic authority, which did this in the instances of Barye, of
Delacroix, of Millet, of Manet, of Puvis de Chavannes, did it also for
many years in the instance of M. Rodin. It owes its defeat in the
contest with him--for like the recalcitrants in the other contests, M.
Rodin has definitively triumphed--to the unwise attempt to define him in
terms heretofore applicable enough to sculptors, but wholly inapplicable
to him. It failed to see that the thing to define in his work was the
man himself, his temperament, his genius. Taken by themselves and
considered as characteristics of the Institute sculptors, the obvious
traits of this work might, that is to say, be adjudged eccentric and
empty. Fancy Professor Guillaume suddenly subordinating academic
disposition of line and mass to true structural expression! One would
simply feel the loss of his accustomed style and harmony. With M. Rodin,
who deals with nature directly, through the immediate force of his own
powerful temperament, to feel the absence of the Institute training and
traditions is absurd. The question in his case is simply whether or no
he is a great artistic personality, an extraordinary and powerful
temperament, or whether he is merely a turbulent and capricious
protestant against the measure and taste of the Institute. But this is
really no longer a question, however it may have been a few years ago;
and when his Dante portal for the new Palais des Arts Décoratifs shall
have been finished, and the public had an opportunity to see what the
sculptor's friend and only serious rival, M. Dalou, calls "one of the
most, if not the most original and astonishing pieces of sculpture of
the nineteenth century," it will be recognized that M. Rodin, so far
from being amenable to the current canon, has brought the canon itself
to judgment.
How and why, people will perceive in proportion to their receptivity.
Candor and intelligence will suffice to appreciate that the secret of M.
Rodin's art is structural expression, and that it is this and not any
superficial eccentricity of execution that definitely distinguishes him
from the Institute. Just as his imagination, his temperament, his
spiritual energy and ardor individualize the positive originality of his
motive, so the expressiveness of his treatment sets him aside from all
as well as from each of the Institute sculptors in what may be broadly
called technical attitude. No sculptor has ever carried expression
further. The sculpture of the present day has certainly not occupied
itself much with it. The Institute is perhaps a little afraid of it. It
abhors the _baroque_ rightly enough, but very likely it fails to see
that the expression of such sculpture as M. Rodin's no more resembles
the contortions of the Dresden Museum giants than it does the composure
of M. Delaplanche. The _baroque_ is only violent instead of placid
commonplace, and is as conventional as any professor of sculpture could
desire. Expression means individual character completely exhibited
rather than conventionally suggested. It is certainly not too much to
say that in the sculpture of the present day the sense of individual
character is conveyed mainly by convention. The physiognomy has usurped
the place of the physique, the gesture of the form, the pose of the
substance. And face, gesture, form are, when they are not brutally
naturalistic and so not art at all, not individual and native, but
typical and classic. Very much of the best modern sculpture might really
have been treated like those antique figurines of which the bodies were
made by wholesale, being supplied with individual heads when the time
came for using them.
This has been measurably true since the disappearance of the classic
dress and the concealment of the body by modern costume. The nudes of
the early Renaissance, in painting still more than in sculpture, are
differentiated by the faces. The rest of the figure is generally
conventionalized as thoroughly as the face itself is in Byzantine and
the hands in Giottesque painting. Giotto could draw admirably, it need
not be said. He did draw as well as the contemporary feeling for the
human figure demanded. When the Renaissance reached its climax and the
study of the antique led artists to look beneath drapery and interest
themselves in the form, expression made an immense step forward. Color
was indeed almost lost sight of in the new interest, not to reappear
till the Venetians. But owing to the lack of visible nudity, to the lack
of the classic gymnasia, to the concealments of modern attire, the
knowledge of and interest in the form remained, within certain limits,
an esoteric affair. The general feeling, even where, as in the Italy of
the _quattro_ and _cinque centi_, everyone was a connoisseur, did not
hold the artist to expression in his anatomy as the general Greek
feeling did. Everyone was a connoisseur of art alone, not of nature as
well. Consequently, in spite of such an enthusiastic genius as
Donatello, who probably more than any other modern has most nearly
approached the Greeks--not in spiritual attitude, for he was eminently
of his time, but in his attitude toward nature--the human form in art
has for the most part remained, not conventionalized as in the Byzantine
and Gothic times, but thoroughly conventional. Michael Angelo himself
certainly may be charged with lending the immense weight of his majestic
genius to perpetuate the conventional. It is not his distortion of
nature, as pre-Raphaelite limitedness glibly asserts, but his
carelessness of her prodigious potentialities, that marks one side of
his colossal accomplishment. Just as the lover of architecture as
architecture will protest that Michael Angelo's was meretricious,
however inspiring, so M. Rodin declares his sculpture unsatisfactory,
however poetically impressive. "He used to do a little anatomy
evenings," he said to me, "and used his chisel next day without a model.
He repeats endlessly his one type--the youth of the Sistine ceiling. Any
particular felicity of expression you are apt to find him borrowing from
Donatello--such as, for instance, the movement of the arm of the
'David,' which is borrowed from Donatello's 'St. John Baptist.'" Most
people to whom Michael Angelo's creations appear celestial in their
majesty at once and in their winningness would deny this. But it is
worth citing both because M. Rodin strikes so many crude apprehensions
as a French Michael Angelo, whereas he is so radically removed from him
in point of view and in practice that the unquestionable spiritual
analogy between them is rather like that between kindred spirits working
in different arts, and because, also, it shows not only what M. Rodin is
not, but what he is. The grandiose does not run away with him. His
imagination is occupied largely in following out nature's suggestions.
His sentiment does not so drench and saturate his work as to float it
bodily out of the realm of natural into that of supernal beauty, there
to crystallize in decorative and puissant visions appearing out of the
void and only superficially related to their corresponding natural
forms. Standing before the Medicean tombs the modern susceptibility
receives perhaps the most poignant, one may almost say the most
intolerable, impression to be obtained from any plastic work by the hand
of man; but it is a totally different impression from that left by the
sculptures of the Parthenon pediments, not only because the sentiment is
wholly different, but because in the great Florentine's work it is so
overwhelming as wholly to dominate purely natural expression, natural
character, natural beauty. In the Medici Chapel the soul is exalted; in
the British Museum the mind is enraptured. The object itself seems to
disappear in the one case, and to reveal itself in the other.
I do not mean to compare M. Rodin with the Greeks--from whom in
sentiment and imagination he is, of course, as totally removed as what
is intensely modern must be from the antique--any more than I mean to
contrast him with Michael Angelo, except for the purposes of clearer
understanding of his general æsthetic attitude. Association of anything
contemporary with what is classic, and especially with what is greatest
in the classic, is always a perilous proceeding. Very little time is apt
to play havoc with such classification. I mean only to indicate that the
resemblance to Michael Angelo, found by so many persons in such works as
the Dante doors, is only of the loosest kind--as one might, through
their common lusciousness, compare peaches with pomegranates--and that
to the discerning eye, or the eye at all experienced in observing
sculpture, M. Rodin's sculpture is far more closely related to that of
Donatello and the Greeks. It, too, reveals rather than constructs
beauty, and by the expression of character rather than by the suggestion
of sentiment.
An illustration of M. Rodin's affinity with the antique is an incident
which he related to me of his work upon his superb "Âge d'Airain." He
was in Naples; he saw nature in freer inadvertence than she allows
elsewhere; he had the best of models. Under these favoring circumstances
he spent three months on a leg of his statue; "which is equivalent to
saying that I had at last absolutely mastered it," said he. One day in
the Museo Nazionale he noticed in an antique the result of all his study
and research. Nature, in other words, is M. Rodin's _material_ in the
same special sense in which it was the antique material, and in which,
since Michael Angelo and the high Renaissance, it has been for the most
part only the sculptor's _means_. It need not be said that the
personality of the artist may be as strenuous in the one case as in the
other; unless, indeed, we maintain, as perhaps we may, that
individuality is more apt to atrophy in the latter instance; for as one
gets farther and farther away from nature he is in more danger from
conventionality than from caprice. And this is in fact what has happened
since the high Renaissance, the long line of conventionalities being
continued, sometimes punctuated here and there as by Clodion or Houdon,
David, Rude, or Barye, sometimes rising into great dignity and
refinement of style and intelligence, as in the contemporary sculpture
of the Institute, but in general almost purely decorative or
sentimental, and, so far as natural expression is concerned, confining
itself to psychological rather than physical character.
What is it, for instance, that distinguishes a group like M. Dubois's
"Charity" from the _genre_ sentiment or incident of some German or
Italian "professor?" Qualities of style, of refined taste, of elegance,
of true intelligence. Its artistic interest is purely decorative and
sentimental. Really what its average admirer sees in it is the same
moral appeal that delights the simple admirers of German or Italian
treatment of a similar theme. It is simply infinitely higher bred. Its
character is developed no further. Its significance as form is not
insisted on. The parts are not impressively differentiated, and their
mysterious mutual relations and correspondences are not dwelt on. The
physical character, with its beauties, its salient traits of every kind,
appealing so strongly to the sculptor to whom nature appears plastic as
well as suggestive, is wholly neglected in favor of the psychological
suggestion. And the individual character, the _cachet_ of the whole, the
artistic essence and _ensemble_, that is to say, M. Dubois has, after
the manner of most modern sculpture, conveyed in a language of
convention, which since the time of the Siennese fountain, at all
events, has been classical.
The literary artist does not proceed in this way. He does not content
himself with telling us, for example, that one of his characters is a
good man or a bad man, an able, a selfish, a tall, a blonde, or a stupid
man, as the case may be. He takes every means to express his character,
and to do it, according to M. Taine's definition of a work of art, more
completely than it appears in nature. He recognizes its complexity and
enforces the sense of reality by a thousand expedients of what one may
almost call contrasting masses, derivative movements, and balancing
planes. He distinguishes every possible detail that plays any structural
part, and, in short, instead of giving us the mere symbol of the
Sunday-school books, shows us a concrete organism at once characteristic
and complex. Judged with this strictness, which in literary art is
elementary, how much of the best modern sculpture is abstract, symbolic,
purely typical. What insipid fragments most of the really eminent
Institute statues would make were their heads knocked off by some band
of modern barbarian invaders. In the event of such an irruption, would
there be any torsos left from which future Poussins could learn all they
should know of the human form? Would there be any _disjecta membra_ from
which skilled anatomists could reconstruct the lost _ensemble_, or at
any rate make a shrewd guess at it? Would anything survive mutilation
with the serene confidence in its fragmentary but everywhere penetrating
interest which seems to pervade the most fractured fraction of a Greek
relief on the Athenian acropolis? Yes, there would be the débris of
Auguste Rodin's sculpture.
In our day the human figure has never been so well understood. Back of
such expressive modelling as we note in the "Saint Jean," in the "Adam"
and "Eve," in the "Calaisiens," in a dozen figures of the Dante doors,
is a knowledge of anatomy such as even in the purely scientific
profession of surgery can proceed only from an immense fondness for
nature, an insatiable curiosity as to her secrets, an inexhaustible
delight in her manifestations. From the point of view of such knowledge
and such handling of it, it is no wonder that the representations of
nature which issue from the Institute seem superficial. One can
understand that from this point of view very delightful sculpture, very
refined, very graceful, very perfectly understood within its limits, may
appear like _baudruche_--inflated gold-beater's skin, that is to say, of
which toy animals are made in France, and which has thus passed into
studio _argot_ as the figure for whatever lacks structure and substance.
Ask M. Rodin the explanation of a movement, an attitude, in one of his
works which strikes your convention-steeped sense as strange, and he
will account for it just as an anatomical demonstrator would--pointing
out its necessary derivation from some disposition of another part of
the figure, and not at all dwelling on its grace or its other purely
decorative felicity. Its artistic function in his eyes is to aid in
expressing fully and completely the whole of which it forms a part, not
to constitute a harmonious detail merely agreeable to the easily
satisfied eye. But then the whole will look anatomical rather than
artistic. There is the point exactly. Will it? I remember speculating
about this in conversation with M. Rodin himself. "Isn't there danger,"
I said, "of getting too fond of nature, of dissecting with so much
enthusiasm that the pleasure of discovery may obscure one's feeling for
pure beauty, of losing the artistic in the purely scientific interest,
of becoming pedantic, of imitating rather than constructing, of missing
art in avoiding the artificial?" I had some difficulty in making myself
understood; this perpetual see-saw of nature and art which enshrouds
æsthetic dialectics as in a Scotch mist seems curiously factitious to
the truly imaginative mind. But I shall always remember his reply, when
he finally made me out, as one of the finest severings conceivable of a
Gordian knot of this kind. "Oh, yes," said he; "there is, no doubt, such
a danger for a mediocre artist."
M. Rodin is, whatever one may think of him, certainly not a mediocre
artist. The instinct of self-preservation may incline the Institute to
assert that he obtrudes his anatomy. But prejudice itself can blind no
one of intelligence to his immense imaginative power, to his poetic
"possession." His work precisely illustrates what I take to have been,
at the best epochs, the relations of nature to such art as is loosely
to be called imitative art--what assuredly were those relations in the
mind of the Greek artist. Nature supplies the parts and suggests their
cardinal relations. Insufficient study of her leaves these superficial
and insipid. Inartistic absorption in her leaves them lifeless. The
imagination which has itself conceived the whole, the idea, fuses them
in its own heat into a new creation which is "imitative" only in the
sense that its elements are not inventions. The art of sculpture has
retraced its steps far enough to make pure invention, as of Gothic
griffins and Romanesque symbology, unsatisfactory to everyone. But, save
in M. Rodin's sculpture, it has not fully renewed the old alliance with
nature on the old terms--Donatello's terms; the terms which exact the
most tribute from nature, which insist on her according her completest
significance, her closest secrets, her faculty of expressing character
as well as of suggesting sentiment. Very beautiful works are produced
without her aid to this extent. We may be sure of this without asking M.
Rodin to admit it. He would not do his own work so well were he prepared
to; as Millet pointed out when asked to write a criticism of some other
painter's canvas, in estimating the production of his fellows an artist
is inevitably handicapped by the feeling that he would have done it very
differently himself. It is easy not to share M. Rodin's gloomy
vaticinations as to French sculpture based on the continued triumph of
the Institute style and suavity. The Institute sculpture is too good for
anyone not himself engaged in the struggle to avoid being impressed
chiefly by its qualities to the neglect of its defects. At the same time
it is clear that no art can long survive in undiminished vigor that does
not from time to time renew its vitality by resteeping itself in the
influences of nature. And so M. Rodin's service to French sculpture
becomes, at the present moment, especially signal and salutary because
French sculpture, however refined and delightful, shows, just now, very
plainly the tendency toward the conventional which has always proved so
dangerous, and because M. Rodin's work is a conspicuous, a shining
example of the return to nature on the part not of a mere realist,
naturalist, or other variety of "mediocre artist," but of a profoundly
poetic and imaginative temperament.
This is why, one immediately perceives in studying his works, Rodin's
treatment, while exhausting every contributary detail to the end of
complete expression, is never permitted to fritter away its energy
either in the mystifications of optical illusion, or in the infantine
idealization of what is essentially subordinate and ancillary. This is
why he devotes three months to the study of a leg, for example--not to
copy, but to "possess" it. Indeed, no sculptor of our time has made such
a sincere and, in general, successful, effort to sink the sense of the
material in the conception, the actual object in the artistic idea. One
loses all sense of bronze or marble, as the case may be, not only
because the artistic significance is so overmastering that one is
exclusively occupied in apprehending it, but because there are none of
those superficial graces, those felicities of surface modelling, which,
however they may delight, infallibly distract as well. Such excellences
have assuredly their place. When the motive is conventional or otherwise
insipid, or even when its character is distinctly light without being
trivial, they are legitimately enough agreeable. And because, in our
day, sculptural motives have generally been of this order we have become
accustomed to look for such excellences, and, very justly, to miss them
when they are absent. Grace of pose, suavity of outline, pleasing
disposition of mass, smooth, round deltoids and osseous articulations,
and perpetually changing planes of flesh and free play of muscular
movement, are excellences which, in the best of academic French
sculpture, are sensuously delightful in a high degree. But they
invariably rivet our attention on the successful way in which the
sculptor has used his bronze or marble to decorative ends, and when they
are accentuated so as to dominate the idea they invariably enfeeble its
expression. With M. Rodin one does not think of his material at all; one
does not reflect whether he used it well or ill, caused it to lose
weight and immobility to the eye or not, because all his superficial
modelling appears as an inevitable deduction from the way in which he
has conceived his larger subject, and not as "handling" at all. In
reality, of course, it is the acme of sensitive handling. The point is a
nice one. His practice is a dangerous one. It would be fatal to a less
strenuous temperament. To leave, in a manner and so far as obvious
insistence on it goes, "handling" to take care of itself, is to incur
the peril of careless, clumsy, and even brutal, modelling, which, so far
from dissembling its existence behind the prominence of the idea, really
emphasizes itself unduly because of its imperfect and undeveloped
character. Detail that is neglected really acquires a greater prominence
than detail that is carried too far, because it is sensuously
disagreeable. But when an artist like M. Rodin conceives his spiritual
subject so largely and with so much intensity that mere sensuous
agreeableness seems too insignificant to him even to be treated with
contempt, he treats his detail solely with reference to its centripetal
and organic value, which immediately becomes immensely enhanced, and the
detail itself, dropping thus into its proper place, takes on a beauty
wholly transcending the ordinary agreeable aspect of sculptural detail.
And the _ensemble_, of course, is in this way enforced as it can be in
no other, and we get an idea of Victor Hugo or St. John Baptist so
powerfully and yet so subtly suggested, that the abstraction seems
actually all that we see in looking at the concrete bust or statue.
Objections to M. Rodin's "handling" as eccentric or capricious, appear
to the sympathetic beholder of one of his majestic works the very acme
of misappreciation, and their real excuse--which is, as I have said, the
fact that such "handling" is as unfamiliar as the motives it
accompanies--singularly poor and feeble.
As for the common nature of these motives, the character of the
personality which appears in their varied presentments, it is almost
idle to speak in the absence of the work itself, so eloquent is this at
once and so untranslatable. But it may be said approximately that M.
Rodin's temperament is in the first place deeply romantic. Everything
the Institute likes repels him. He has the poetic conception of art and
its mission, and in poetry any authoritative and codifying consensus
seems to him paradoxical. Style, in his view, unless it is something
wholly uncharacterizable, is a vague and impalpable spirit breathing
through the work of some strongly marked individuality, or else it is
formalism. He delights in the fantasticality of the Gothic. The west
façade of Rouen inspires him more than all the formulæ of Palladian
proportions. He detests systematization. He reads Shakespeare, Schiller,
Dante almost exclusively. He sees visions and dreams dreams. The awful
in the natural forces, moral and material, seems his element. He
believes in freedom, in the absolute emancipation of every faculty. As
for study, study nature. If then you fail in restraint and measure you
are a "mediocre artist," whom no artificial system devised to secure
measure and restraint could have rescued from essential insignificance.
No poet or landscape painter ever delighted more in the infinitely
varied suggestiveness and exuberance of nature, or ever felt the
formality of much that passes for art as more chill and drear. Hence in
all his works we have the sense, first of all, of an overmastering
sincerity; then of a prodigious wealth of fancy; then of a marvellous
acquaintance with his material. His imagination has all the vivacity and
tumultuousness of Rubens's, but its images, if not better understood,
which would perhaps be impossible, are more compact and their evolution
more orderly. And they are furthermore one and all vivified by a wholly
remarkable feeling for beauty. In spite of all his knowledge of the
external world, no artist of our time is more completely mastered by
sentiment. In the very circumstance of being free from such conventions
as the cameo relief, the picturesque costume details, the goldsmith's
work characteristic of the Renaissance, now so much in vogue, M. Rodin's
things acquire a certain largeness and loftiness as well as simplicity
and sincerity of sentiment. The same model posed for the "Saint Jean"
that posed for a dozen things turned out of the academic studios, but
compared with the result in the latter cases, that in the former is even
more remarkable for sentiment than for its structural sapience and
general physical interest. How perfectly insignificant beside its moral
impressiveness are the graceful works whose sentiment does not result
from the expression of the form, but is conveyed in some convention of
pose, of gesture, of physiognomy! It is like the contrast between a
great and a graceful actor. The one interests you by his intelligent
mastery of convention, by the tact and taste with which he employs in
voice, carriage, facial expression, gesture, diction, the several
conventions according to which ideas and emotions are habitually
conveyed to your comprehension. Salvini, Coquelin, Got, pass immediately
outside the realm of conventions. Their language, their medium of
communication, is as new as what it expresses. They are inventive as
well as intelligent. Their effect is prodigiously heightened because in
this way, the warp as well as the woof of their art being expressive and
original, the artistic result is greatly fortified. Given the same
model, M. Rodin's result is in like manner expressly and originally
enforced far beyond the result toward which the academic French school
employs the labels of the Renaissance as conventionally as its
predecessor at the beginning of the century employed those of the
antique. "Formerly we used to do Greek," says M. Rodin, with no small
justice; "now we do Italian. That is all the difference there is." And I
cannot better conclude this imperfect notice of the work of a great
master, in characterizing which such epithets as majestic, Miltonic,
grandiose suggest themselves first of all, than by calling attention to
the range which it covers, and to the fact that, even into the domain
which one would have called consecrate to the imitators of the antique
and the Renaissance, M. Rodin's informing sentiment and sense of beauty
penetrate with their habitual distinction; and that the little child's
head entitled "Alsace," that considerable portion of his work
represented by "The Wave and the Shore," for example, and a small ideal
female figure, which the manufacturer might covet for reproduction, but
which, as Bastien-Lepage said to me, is "a definition of the essence of
art," are really as noble as his more majestic works are beautiful.