II

Aubé is another sculptor of acknowledged eminence who ranges himself

with M. Rodin in his opposition to the Institute. His figures of

"Bailly" and "Dante" are very fine, full of a most impressive dignity in

the _ensemble_, and marked by the most vigorous kind of modelling. One

may easily like his "Gambetta" less. But for years Rodin's only eminent

fellow sculptor was Dalou. Perhaps his protestantism has been less

pronounced than M. Rodin's. It was certainly long more successful in

winning both the connoisseur and the public. The state itself, which is

now and then even more conservative than the Institute, has charged him

with important works, and the Salon has given him its highest medal. And

he was thus recognized long before M. Rodin's works had risen out of the

turmoil of critical contention to their present envied if not cordially

approved eminence. But for being less energetic, less absorbed, less

intense than M. Rodin's, M. Dalou's enthusiasm for nature involves a

scarcely less uncompromising dislike of convention. He had no success at

the École des Beaux Arts. Unlike Rodin, he entered those precincts and

worked long within them, but never sympathetically or felicitously. The

rigor of academic precept was from the first excessively distasteful to

his essentially and eminently romantic nature. He chafed incessantly.

The training doubtless stood him in good stead when he found himself

driven by hard necessity into commercial sculpture, into that class of

work which is on a very high plane for its kind in Paris, but for which

the manufacturer rather than the designer receives the credit. But he

probably felt no gratitude to it for this, persuaded that but for its

despotic prevalence there would have been a clearer field for his

spontaneous and agreeable effort to win distinction in. He greatly

preferred at this time the artistic anarchy of England, whither he

betook himself after the Commune--not altogether upon compulsion, but by

prudence perhaps; for like Rodin, his birth, his training, his

disposition, his ideas, have always been as liberal and popular in

politics as in art, and in France a man of any sincerity and dignity of

character has profound political convictions, even though his profession

be purely æsthetic. In England he was very successful both at the

Academy and with the amateurs of the aristocracy, of many of whom he

made portraits, besides finding ready purchasers among them for his

imaginative works. The list of these latter begins, if we except some

delightful decoration for one of the Champs-Élysées palaces, with a

statue called "La Brodeuse," which won for him a medal at the Salon of

1870. Since then his production has been prodigious in view of its

originality, of its lack of the powerful momentum extraneously supplied

to the productive force that follows convention and keeps in the beaten

track.

His numerous peasant subjects at one time led to comparison of him with

Millet, but the likeness is of the most superficial kind. There is no

spiritual kinship whatever between him and Millet. Dalou models the

Marquis de Dreux-Brézé with as much zest as he does his "Boulonnaise

allaitant son enfant;" his touch is as sympathetic in his Rubens-like

"Silenus" as in his naturalistic "Berceuse." Furthermore, there is

absolutely no note of melancholy in his realism--which, at the present

time, is a point well worth noting. His vivacity excludes the pathetic.

Traces of Carpeaux's influence are plain in his way of conceiving such

subjects as Carpeaux would have handled. No one could have come so

closely into contact with that vigorous individuality without in some

degree undergoing its impress, without learning to look for the alert

and elegant aspects of his model, whatever it might be. But with

Carpeaux's distinction Dalou has more poise. He is considerably farther

away from the rococo. His ideal is equally to be summarized in the word

Life, but he cares more for its essence, so to speak, than for its

phenomena, or at all events manages to make it felt rather than seen.

One perceives that humanity interests him on the moral side, that he is

interested in its significance as well as its form. Accordingly with him

the movement illustrates the form, which is in its turn truly

expressive, whereas occasionally, so bitter was his disgust with the

pedantry of the schools, with Carpeaux the form is used to exhibit

movement. Then, too, M. Dalou has a certain nobility which Carpeaux's

vivacity is a shade too animated to reach. Motive and treatment blend in

a larger sweep. The graver substance follows the planes and lines of a

statelier if less brilliant style. It _has_, in a word, more style.

I can find no exacter epithet, on the whole, for Dalou's large

distinction, and conscious yet sober freedom, than the word Venetian.

There is some subtle phrenotype that associates him with the great

colorists. His work is, in fact, full of color, if one may trench on the

jargon of the studios. It has the sumptuousness of Titian and Paul

Veronese. Its motives are cast in the same ample mould. Many of his

figures breathe the same air of high-born ease and well-being, of serene

and not too intellectual composure. There is an aristocratic tincture

even in his peasants--a kind of native distinction inseparable from his

touch. And in his women there is a certain gracious sweetness, a certain

exquisite and elusive refinement elsewhere caught only by Tintoretto,

but illustrated by Tintoretto with such penetrating intensity as to

leave perhaps the most nearly indelible impression that the sensitive

amateur carries away with him from Venice. The female figures in the

colossal group which should have been placed in the Place de la

République, but was relegated by official stupidity to the Place des

Nations, are examples of this patrician charm in carriage, in form, in

feature, in expression. They have not the witchery, the touch of

Bohemian sprightliness that make such figures as Carpeaux's "Flora" so

enchanting, but they are at once sweeter and more distinguished. The

sense for the exquisite which this betrays excludes all dross from M.

Dalou's rich magnificence. Even the "Silenus" group illustrates

exuberance without excess: I spoke of it just now as Rubens-like, but it

is only because it recalls Rubens's superb strength and riotous fancy;

it is in reality a Rubens-like motive purged in the execution of all

Flemish grossness. There is even in Dalou's fantasticality of this sort

a measure and distinction which temper animation into resemblance to

such delicate blitheness as is illustrated by the Bargello "Bacchus" of

Jacopo Sansovino. Sansovino afterward, by the way, amid the

artificiality of Venice, whither he went, wholly lost his individual

force, as M. Dalou, owing to his love of nature, is less likely to do.

But his sketch for a monument to Victor Hugo, and perhaps still more his

memorial of Delacroix in the Luxembourg Gardens, point warningly in this

direction, and it would perhaps be easier than he supposes to permit his

extraordinary decorative facility to lead him on to execute works

unpenetrated by personal feeling, and recalling less the acme of the

Renaissance than the period just afterward, when original effort had

exhausted itself and the movement of art was due mainly to

momentum--when, as in France at the present moment, the enormous mass of

artistic production really forced pedantry upon culture, and prevented

any but the most strenuous personalities from being genuine, because of

the immensely increased authoritativeness of what had become classic.

Certainly M. Dalou is far more nearly in the current of contemporary art

than his friend Rodin, who stands with his master Barye rather defiantly

apart from the regular evolution of French sculpture, whereas one can

easily trace the derivation of M. Dalou and his relations to the present

and the immediate past of his art in his country. His work certainly has

its Fragonard, its Clodion, its Carpeaux side. Like every temperament

that is strongly attracted by the decorative as well as the significant

and the expressive, pure style in and for itself has its fascinations,

its temptations for him. Of course it does not succeed in getting the

complete possession of him that it has of the Institute. And there is,

as I have suggested, an important difference, disclosed in the fact that

M. Dalou uses his faculty for style in a personal rather than in the

conventional way. His decoration is distinctly Dalou, and not

arrangements after classic formulæ. It is full of zest, of ardor, of

audacity. So that if his work has what one may call its national side,

it is because the author's temperament is thoroughly national at bottom,

and not because this temperament is feeble or has been academically

repressed. But the manifest fitness with which it takes its place in the

category of French sculpture shows the moral difference between it and

the work of M. Rodin. Morally speaking, it is mainly--not altogether,

but mainly--rhetorical, whereas M. Rodin's is distinctly poetic. It is

delightful rhetoric and it has many poetic strains--such as the charm of

penetrating distinction I have mentioned. But with the passions in their

simplest and last analysis he hardly occupies himself at all. Such a

work as "La République," the magnificent bas-relief of the Hôtel de

Ville in Paris, is a triumph of allegorical rhetoric, very noble, not a

little moving, prodigious in its wealth of imaginative material,

composed from the centre and not arranged with artificial felicity, full

of suggestiveness, full of power, abounding in definite sculptural

qualities, both moral and technical; it again is Rubens-like in its

exuberance, but of firmer texture, more closely condensed. But anything

approaching the _kind_ of impressiveness of the Dante portal it

certainly does not essay. It is in quite a different sphere. Its

exaltation is, if not deliberate, admirably self-possessed. To find it

theatrical would be simply a mark of our absurd Anglo-Saxon preference

for reserve and repression in circumstances naturally suggesting

expansion and elation--a preference surely born of timorousness and

essentially very subtly theatrical itself. It is simply not deeply,

intensely poetic, but, rather, a splendid piece of rhetoric, as I say.

So, too, is the famous Mirabeau relief, which is perhaps M. Dalou's

masterpiece, and which represents his national side as completely as the

group for the Place des Nations does those of his qualities I have

endeavored to indicate by calling them Venetian. Observe the rare

fidelity which has contributed its weight of sincerity to this admirable

relief. Every prominent head of the many members of the Assembly, who

nevertheless rally behind Mirabeau with a fine pell-mell freedom of

artistic effect, is a portrait. The effect is like that of similar works

designed and executed with the large leisure of an age very different

from the competition and struggling hurry of our own. In every respect

this work is as French as it is individual. It is penetrated with a

sense of the dignity of French history. It is as far as possible removed

from the cheap _genre_ effect such a scheme in less skilful hands might

easily have had. Mirabeau's gesture, in fact his entire presence, is

superb, but the marquis is as fine in his way as the tribune in his. The

beholder assists at the climax of a great crisis, unfolded to him in the

impartial spirit of true art, quite without partisanship, and though

manifestly stimulated by sympathy with the nobler cause, even more

acutely conscious of the grandeur of the struggle and the distinction of

those on all sides engaged in it, and acquiring from these a kind of

elation, of exaltation such as the Frenchman experiences only when he

may give expression to his artistic and his patriotic instincts at the

same moment.

The distinctly national qualities of this masterpiece, and their

harmonious association with the individual characteristics of M. Dalou,

his love of nature, his native distinction, his charm, and his power, in

themselves bear eminent witness to the vitality of modern French

sculpture, in spite of all the influences which tend to petrify it with

system and convention. M. Rodin stands so wholly apart that it would be

unsafe perhaps to argue confidently from his impressive works the

potentiality of periodical renewal in an art over which the Institute

presides with still so little challenge of its title. But it is

different with M. Dalou. Extraordinary as his talent is, its

unquestioned and universal recognition is probably in great measure due

to the preparedness of the environment to appreciate extraordinary work

of the kind, to the high degree which French popular æsthetic education,

in a word, has reached. And one's last word about contemporary French

sculpture--even in closing a consideration of the works of such

protestants as Rodin and Dalou--must be a recognition of the immense

service of the Institute in education of this kind. Let some country

without an institute, around which what æsthetic feeling the age permits

may crystallize, however sharply, give us a Rodin and a Dalou!