mere expression of a thought in a manner peculiar
to the artist (in words, color, marble, what not), but it is such
expression penetrated with both reminiscence and anticipation. It is,
indeed, on the contrary, very nearly the reverse of what we mean by
expression, which is mainly a matter of personal energy. Style means
correctness, precision, that feeling for the _ensemble_ on which an
inharmonious detail jars. Expression results from a sense of the value
of the detail. If Walt Whitman, for example, were what his admirers'
defective sense of style fancies him, he would be expressive. If French
academic art had as little expression as its censors assert, it would
still illustrate style--the quality which modifies the native and
apposite form of the concrete individual thing with reference to what
has preceded and what is to follow it; the quality, in a word, whose
effort is to harmonize the object with its environment. When this
environment is heightened, and universal instead of logical and
particular, we have the "grand style;" but we have the grand style
generally in poetry, and to be sure of style at all prose--such prose as
Goujon's, which in no wise emulates Michael Angelo's poetry--may
justifiably neglect in some degree the specific personality that tends
to make it poetic and individual.

IV

After Goujon, Clodion is the great name in French sculpture, until we
come to Houdon, who may almost be assigned to the nineteenth century.
There were throughout the eighteenth century honorable artists,
sculptors of distinction beyond contest. But sculpture is such an
abstract art itself that the sculpture which partook of the
artificiality of the eighteenth century has less interest for us, less
that is concrete and appealing than even the painting of the epoch. It
derived its canons and its practice from Puget--the French Bernini, who
with less grace and less dilettante extravagance than his Italian
exemplar had more force and solidity. With less cleverness, less
charm--for Bernini, spite of the disesteem in which his juxtaposition to
Michael Angelo and his apparent unconsciousness of the attitude such
juxtaposition should have imposed upon him, cause him to be held, has a
great deal of charm and is extraordinarily clever--he is more sincere,
more thorough-going, more respectable. Coysevox is chiefly Puget
exaggerated, and his pupil, Coustou, who comes down to nearly the middle
of the eighteenth century, contributed