more frequently than he did. When he did, he
was hardly less successful; and the four splendid groups that decorate
the Pavillons Denon and Richelieu of the Louvre are in the very front
rank of the heroic sculpture of the modern world.

V

ACADEMIC SCULPTURE

I

From Barye to the Institute is a long way. Nothing could be more
interhostile than his sculpture and that of the professors at the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts. And in considering the French sculpture of the present
day we may say that, aside from the great names already
mentioned--Houdon, David d'Angers, Rude, Carpeaux, and Barye--and apart
from the new movement represented by Rodin and Dalou, it is represented
by the Institute, and that the Institute has reverted to the Italian
inspiration. The influence of Canova and the example of Pradier and Etex
were not lasting. Indeed, Greek sculpture has perished so completely
that it sometimes seems to live only in its legend. With the modern
French school, the academic school, it is quite supplanted by the
sculpture of the Renaissance. And this is not unreasonable. The
Renaissance sculpture is modern; its masters did finely and perfectly
what since their time has been done imperfectly, but essentially its
artistic spirit is the modern artistic spirit, full of personality,
full of expression, careless of the type. Nowadays we patronize a little
the ideal. You may hear very intelligent critics in Paris--who in Paris
is not an intelligent critic?--speak disparagingly of the Greek want of
expression; of the lack of passion, of vivid interest, of significance
in a word, in Greek sculpture of the Periclean epoch. The conception of
absolute beauty having been discovered to be an abstraction, the
tradition of the purely ideal has gone with it. The caryatids of the
Erechtheum, the horsemen of the Parthenon frieze, the reliefs of the
Nike Apteros balustrade are admired certainly; but they are hardly
sympathetically admired; there is a tendency to relegate them to the
limbo of subjects for aesthetic lectures. And yet no one can have
carefully examined the brilliant productions of modern French sculpture
without being struck by this apparent paradox: that, whereas all its
canons are drawn from a study of the Renaissance, its chief
characteristic is, at bottom, a lack of expression, a carefulness for
the type. The explanation is this: in the course of time, which "at last
makes all things even," the individuality, the roman