et of his
excellence. No matter what you do, if you do it well enough, that is,
with enough elevation, enough spiritual distinction, enough
transmutation of the elementary necessity of technical perfection into
true significance--you succeed. And this is not the sense in which
motive in art is currently belittled. It is rather the suggestion of
Mrs. Browning's lines:

"Better far
Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means
Than a sublime art frivolously."

Nothing could be more misleading than to fancy Barye a kind of modern
Cellini. Less than any sculptor of modern times is he a decorative
artist. The small scale of his works is in great part due to his lack of
opportunity to produce larger ones. Nowadays one does what one can, even
the greatest artists; and Barye had no Lorenzo de'Medici for a patron,
but, instead, a frowning Institute, which confined him to such work as,
in the main, he did. He did it _con amore_ it need not be added, and
thus lifted it at once out of the customary category of such work. His
bronzes were never _articles de Paris_, and their excellence transcends
the function of teaching our sculptors and amateurs the lesson that
"household" is as dignified a province as monumental, art. His groups
are not essentially "clock-tops," and the work of perhaps the greatest
artist, in the line from Jean Goujon to Carpeaux can hardly be used to
point the moral that "clock-tops" ought to be good. Cellini's "Perseus"
is really more of a "parlor ornament" than Barye's smallest figure.

Why is he so obviously great as well as so obviously extraordinary? one
constantly asks himself in the presence of his bronzes. Perhaps because
he expresses with such concreteness, such definiteness and vigor a
motive so purely an abstraction. The illustration in intimate
elaboration of elemental force, strength, passion, seems to have been
his aim, and in everyone of his wonderfully varied groups he attains it
superbly--not giving the beholder a symbol of it merely; in no degree
depending upon association or convention, but exhibiting its very
essence with a combined scientific explicitness and poetic energy to
which antique art alone, one may almost say, has furnished a parallel.
For this, fauna served him as well as the human figure, though, could
he have studied man with the facility which the Jardin des Plantes
afforded him of observing the lower animals, he might have used the
medium of the human figure