ticism of the
Renaissance has itself become the type, is now itself become
"classical," and the modern attitude toward it, however sympathetic
compared with the modern attitude toward the antique, is to a noteworthy
degree factitious and artificial. And in art everything depends upon
the attitude of mind. It is this which prevents Ingres from being truly
Raphaelesque, and Pradier from being really classical. If, therefore, it
can justly be said of modern French sculpture that its sympathy for the
Renaissance sculpture obscures its vision of the ideal, it is clearly to
be charged with the same absence of individual significance with which
its thick-and-thin partisans reproach the antique. The circumstance
that, like the Renaissance sculpture, it deals far more largely in
pictorial expression than the antique does, is, if it deals in them
after the Renaissance fashion and not after a fashion of its own, quite
beside the essential fact. There is really nothing in common between an
academic French sculptor of the present day and an Italian sculptor of
the fifteenth century, except the possession of what is called the
modern spirit. But the modern spirit manifests itself in an enormous
gamut, and the differences of its manifestations are as great in their
way, and so far as our interest in them is concerned, as the difference
between their inspiration and the mediaeval or the antique inspiration.

II

Chapu, who died a year or two ago, is perhaps the only eminent sculptor
of the time whose inspiration is clearly the antique, and when I add
that his work appears to me for this reason none the less original, it
will be immediately perceived that I share imperfectly the French
objection to the antique. Indeed, nowadays to have the antique
inspiration is to be original _ex vi termini_; nothing is farther
removed from contemporary conventions. But this is true in a much more
integral sense. The pre-eminent fact of Greek sculpture, for example,
is, from one point of view, the directness with which it concerns itself
with the ideal--the slight temporary or personal element with which it
is alloyed. When one calls an artist or a work Greek, this is what is
really meant; it is the sense in which Raphael is Greek. Chapu is Greek
in this way, and thus individualized among his contemporaries, not only
by having a different inspiration from them, but by depending for his
interest on no convention fixed or fleeting and on no indirect s