see this--is
its over-carefulness for style. This is indeed the explanation of what I
mentioned at the outset as the chief characteristic of this sculpture,
the academic inelasticity, namely, with which it essays to reproduce the
Renaissance romanticism. But for the fondness for style integral in the
French mind and character, it would perceive the contradiction between
this romanticism and any canons except such as are purely intuitive and
indefinable. In comparison with the Renaissance sculptors, the French
academic sculptors of the present day are certainly too exclusive
devotees of Buffon's "order and movement," and too little occupied with
the thought itself--too little individual. In comparison with the
antique, this is less apparent, but I fancy not less real. We are so
accustomed to think of the antique as the pure and simple embodiment of
style, as a sublimation, so to speak of the individual into style
itself, that in this respect we are scarcely fair judges of the antique.
In any case we know very little of it; we can hardly speak of it except
by periods. But it is plain that the Greek is so superior to any
subsequent sculpture in this one respect of style that we rarely think
of its other qualities. Our judgment is inevitably a comparative one,
and inevitably a comparative judgment fixes our attention on the Greek
supremacy of style. Indeed, in looking at the antique the thought
itself is often alien to us, and the order and movement, being more
nearly universal perhaps, are all that occupy us. A family tombstone
lying in the cemetery at Athens, and half buried in the dust which blows
from the Piraeus roadway, has more style than M. Mercie's "Quand-Meme"
group for Belfort, which has been the subject of innumerable encomiums,
and which has only style and no individuality whatever to commend it.
And the Athenian tombstone was probably furnished to order by the
marble-cutting artist of the period, corresponding to those whose signs
one sees at the entrances of our own large cemeteries. Still we may be
sure that the ordinary Athenian citizen who adjudged prizes between
AEschylus and Sophocles, and to whom Pericles addressed the oration which
only exceptional culture nowadays thoroughly appreciates, found plenty
of individuality in the decoration of the Parthenon, and was perfectly
conscious of the difference between Phidias and his pupils. Even now, if
one takes the pains to think of it, the difference between su