its utmost
exuberance, and in its every variety, so far as his experience could
enable him to render it. He was infatuated with movement, with the
attestation in form of nervous energy, of the quick translation of
thought and emotion into interpreting attitude. His figures are, beyond
all others, so thoroughly alive as to seem conscious of the fact and joy
of pure existence. They are animated, one may almost say inspired, with
the delight of muscular activity, the sensation of exercising the
functions with which nature endows them. And accompanying this supreme
motive and effect is a delightful grace and winningness of which few
sculptors have the secret, and which suggest more than any one else
Clodion's decorative loveliness. An even greater charm of sprite-like,
fairy attractiveness, of caressing and bewitching fascination, a more
penetrating and seductive engagingness plays about Carpeaux's "Flora," I
think, than is characteristic even of Clodion's figures and reliefs.
Carpeaux is at all events nearer to us, and if he has not the classic
detachment of Clodion he substitutes for it a quality of closer
attachment and more intimate appeal. He is at his best perhaps in the
"Danse" of the Nouvel Opera facade, wherein his elfin-like grace and
exuberant vitality animate a group carefully, and even classically
composed, exhibiting skill and restraint as well as movement and fancy.
Possibly his temperament gives itself too free a rein in the group of
the Luxembourg Gardens, in which he has been accused by his own admirers
of sacrificing taste to turbulence and securing expressiveness at the
expense of saner and more truly sculptural aims. But fancy the
Luxembourg Gardens without "The Four Quarters of the World supporting
the Earth." Parisian censure of his exuberance is very apt to display a
conventional standard of criticism in the critic rather than to
substantiate its charge.

Barye's place in the history of art is more nearly unique, perhaps, than
that of any of the great artists. He was certainly one of the greatest
of sculptors, and he had either the good luck or the mischance to do
his work in a field almost wholly unexploited before him. He has in his
way no rivals, and in his way he is so admirable that the scope of his
work does not even hint at his exclusion from rivalry with the very
greatest of his predecessors. A perception of the truth of this apparent
paradox is the nearest one may come, I think, to the secr