beginning of a new movement out of which, whatever may be its own
limitations, nothing but good can come to French sculpture and of which
the protagonists are Auguste Rodin and Jules Dalou.

VI

THE NEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPTURE

I

Side by side with the academic current in French art has moved of recent
years a naturalist and romantic impulse whose manifestations have been
always vigorous though occasionally exaggerated. In any of the great
departments of activity nationally pursued--as art has been pursued in
France since Francis I.--there are always these rival currents, of which
now one and now the other constantly affects the ebb and flow of the
tide of thought and feeling. The classic and romantic duel of 1830, the
rise of the naturalist opposition to Hugo and romanticism in our own
day, are familiar instances of this phenomenon in literature. The revolt
of Gericault and Delacroix against David and Ingres are equally well
known in the field of painting. Of recent years the foundation of the
periodical _L'Art_ and its rivalry with the conservative _Gazette des
Beaux Arts_ mark with the same definiteness, and an articulate
precision, the same conflict between truth, as new eyes see it, and
tradition. Never, perhaps, since the early Renaissance, however, has
nature asserted her supremacy over convention in such unmistakable, such
insistent, and, one may say, I think, such intolerant fashion as she is
doing at the present moment. Sculpture, in virtue of the defiant
palpability of its material, is the most impalpable of the plastic arts,
and therefore it feels less quickly than the rest, perhaps, the impress
of the influences of the epoch and their classifying canons. Natural
imitation shows first in sculpture, and subsists in it longest. But
convention once its conqueror, the return to nature is here most tardy,
because, owing to the impalpable, the elusive quality of sculpture,
though natural standards may everywhere else be in vogue, no one thinks
of applying them to so specialized an expression. Its variation depends
therefore more completely on the individual artist himself. Niccolo
Pisano, for example, died when Giotto was two years old, but, at the
other end of the historic line of modern art, it has taken years since
Delacroix to furnish recognition for Auguste Rodin. The stronghold of
the Institute had been mined many times by revolutionary painters before
Dalou took the grand medal of the Salon.