ine art of any kind--namely, the expression of
a personal conception of what is not only true but beautiful as well. In
France less than anywhere else is it likely that even such a powerful
force as modern realism will long dominate the constructive, the
architectonic faculty, which is part of the very fibre of the French
genius. The exposition and illustration of a theory believed in with a
fervency to be found only among a people with whom the intelligence is
the chief element and object of experiment and exercise, are a natural
concomitant of mental energy and activity. But no theory holds them long
in bondage. At the least, it speedily gives place to another formulation
of the mutinous freedom its very acceptance creates. And the conformity
that each of them in succession imposes on mediocrity is always varied
and relieved by the frequent incarnations in masterful personalities of
the natural national traits--of which, I think, the architectonic spirit
is one of the most conspicuous. Painting will again become creative,
constructive, personally expressive. Its basis having been established
as scientifically impeccable, its superstructure will exhibit the
taste, the elegance, the imaginative freedom, exhibited within the
limits of a cultivated sense of propriety, that are an integral part of
the French painter's patrimony.

IV

CLASSIC SCULPTURE

I

French sculpture naturally follows very much the same course as
French painting. Its beginnings, however, are Gothic, and the
Renaissance emancipated rather than created it. Italy, over which the
Gothic wave passed with less disturbing effect than anywhere else, and
where the Pisans were doing pure sculpture when everywhere farther north
sculpture was mainly decorative and rigidly architectural, had a potent
influence. But the modern phases of French sculpture have a closer
relationship with the Chartres Cathedral than modern French painting has
with its earliest practice; and Claux Sluters, the Burgundian Fleming
who modelled the wonderful Moses Well and the tombs of Jean Sans Peur
and Phillippe le Hardi at Dijon, among his other anachronistic
masterpieces, exerted considerably greater influence upon his successors
than the Touraine school of painting and the Clouets did upon theirs.

These works are a curious compromise between the Gothic and the modern
spirits. Sluters was plainly a modern temperament working with Gothic
material and amid Gothic ideas.