idity! It is not only Milanese sculpture better done, the
execution beautifully sapient and truthful instead of cheaply imitative,
the idea broadly enforced by the details instead of frittered away among
them; it is Milanese sculpture essentially elevated and dignified.
Loosely speaking, the mere _article de vertu_ becomes a true work of
art. And this transformation, or rather this development of a germ of
not too great intrinsic importance, is brought about in the work of
Saint-Marceaux by the presence of an element utterly foreign to the
Canova sculpture and its succession--the element of character. If to the
clever workmanship of the Italians he merely opposed workmanship of a
superior kind as well as quality--thoroughly artistic workmanship, that
is to say--his sculpture would be far less interesting than it is. He
does, indeed, noticeably do this; there is a felicity entirely
delightful, almost magical, in every detail of his work. But when one
compares it with the sculpture of M. Dubois, it is not of this that one
thinks so much as of a certain individual character with which M.
Saint-Marceaux always contrives to endue it. This is not always in its
nature sculptural, it must be admitted, and it approaches perhaps too
near the character of _genre_ to have the enduring interest that purely
sculptural qualities possess. But it is always individual, piquant, and
charming, and in it consists M. Saint-Marceaux's claim upon us as an
artist. No one else, even given his powers of workmanship, that is to
say as perfectly equipped as he, could have treated so thoroughly
conventional a _genre_ subject as the "Harlequin" as he has treated it.
The mask is certainly one of the stock properties of the subject, but
notice how it is used to confer upon the whole work a character of
mysterious witchery. It is as a whole, if you choose, an _article de
Paris_, with the distinction of being seriously treated; the modelling
and the movement admirable as far as they go, but well within the bounds
of that anatomically artistic expression which is the _raison d'etre_ of
sculpture and its choice of the human form as its material. But the
character saves it from this category; what one may almost call its
psychological interest redeems its superficial triviality.

M. Saint-Marceaux is always successful in this way. One has only to look
at the eyes of his figures to be convinced how subtle is his art of
expressing character. Here he swings qui