production really forced pedantry upon culture, and prevented
any but the most strenuous personalities from being genuine, because of
the immensely increased authoritativeness of what had become classic.

Certainly M. Dalou is far more nearly in the current of contemporary art
than his friend Rodin, who stands with his master Barye rather defiantly
apart from the regular evolution of French sculpture, whereas one can
easily trace the derivation of M. Dalou and his relations to the present
and the immediate past of his art in his country. His work certainly has
its Fragonard, its Clodion, its Carpeaux side. Like every temperament
that is strongly attracted by the decorative as well as the significant
and the expressive, pure style in and for itself has its fascinations,
its temptations for him. Of course it does not succeed in getting the
complete possession of him that it has of the Institute. And there is,
as I have suggested, an important difference, disclosed in the fact that
M. Dalou uses his faculty for style in a personal rather than in the
conventional way. His decoration is distinctly Dalou, and not
arrangements after classic formulae. It is full of zest, of ardor, of
audacity. So that if his work has what one may call its national side,
it is because the author's temperament is thoroughly national at bottom,
and not because this temperament is feeble or has been academically
repressed. But the manifest fitness with which it takes its place in the
category of French sculpture shows the moral difference between it and
the work of M. Rodin. Morally speaking, it is mainly--not altogether,
but mainly--rhetorical, whereas M. Rodin's is distinctly poetic. It is
delightful rhetoric and it has many poetic strains--such as the charm of
penetrating distinction I have mentioned. But with the passions in their
simplest and last analysis he hardly occupies himself at all. Such a
work as "La Republique," the magnificent bas-relief of the Hotel de
Ville in Paris, is a triumph of allegorical rhetoric, very noble, not a
little moving, prodigious in its wealth of imaginative material,
composed from the centre and not arranged with artificial felicity, full
of suggestiveness, full of power, abounding in definite sculptural
qualities, both moral and technical; it again is Rubens-like in its
exuberance, but of firmer texture, more closely condensed. But anything
approaching the _kind_ of impressiveness of the Dante portal it
certainl