"St.
John Baptist" of the Luxembourg, and his admirable bust of Baudry one
feels like asking for more freedom still, for more "swing." Dubois
certainly is the last artist who needs to be on his guard against
"letting himself go." Why is it that in varying so agreeably Renaissance
themes--compare the "Military Courage" and Michael Angelo's "Pensiero,"
or the "Charity" and the same group in Della Quercia's fountain at
Sienna--it is restraint, rather than audacity, that governs him? Is it
caution or perversity? In a word, imaginativeness is what permanently
interests and attaches, the imaginativeness to which in sculpture the
ordinary conventions of form are mere conditions, and the ordinary
conventions of idea mere material. One can hardly apply generalities of
the kind to M. Dubois without saying too much, but it is nevertheless
true that one may illustrate the grand style and yet fail of being
intimately and acutely sympathetic; and M. Dubois, to whose largeness of
treatment and nobility of conception no one will deny something truly
suggestive of the grand style, does thus fail. It is not that he does
not possess charm, and charm in no mean proportion to his largeness and
nobility, but for the elevation of these into the realm of magic, into
the upper air of spontaneous spiritual activity, his imagination has,
for the romantic imagination which it is, a trifle too much
self-possession--too much sanity, if one chooses. He has the ambitions,
the faculties, of a lyric poet, and he gives us too frequently
recitative.

IV

It is agreeable in many ways to turn from the rounded and complete
impeccability of M. Dubois to the fancy of M. Saint-Marceaux. More than
any of his rivals, M. Saint-Marceaux possesses the charm of
unexpectedness. He is not perhaps to be called an original genius, and
his work will probably leave French sculpture very nearly where it found
it. Indeed, one readily perceives that he is not free from the trammels
of contemporary convention. But how easily he wears them, and if no
"severe pains and birth-throes" accompany the evolution of his
conceptions, how graceful these conceptions are! They are perhaps of the
Canova family; the "Harlequin," for instance, which has had such a
prodigious success, is essentially Milanese sculpture; essentially even
the "Genius Guarding the Secret of the Tomb" is a fantastic rather than
an original work. But how the manner, the treatment, triumphs over the
Canova insip