modern sculpture abounds in, reflect
an undisciplined race of men, one in which neither soul nor body has
done anything well, because the two have done nothing together. The
frame has remained gross or awkward, while the face has taken on a tense
expression, betraying loose and undignified habits of mind. To carve
such a creature is to perpetuate a caricature. The modern sculptor is
stopped short at the first conception of a figure; if he gives it its
costume, it is grotesque; if he strips it, it is unmeaning and pitiful.

[Sidenote: It is essentially obsolete.]

Greece was in all these respects a soil singularly favourable to
sculpture. The success there achieved was so conspicuous that two
thousand years of essential superfluity have not availed to extirpate
the art. Plastic impulse is indeed immortal, and many a hand, even
without classic example, would have fallen to modelling. In the middle
ages, while monumental sculpture was still rudely reminiscent,
ornamental carving arose spontaneously. Yet at every step the
experimental sculptor would run up against disaster. What could be seen
in the streets, while it offered plenty of subjects, offered none that
could stimulate his talent. His patrons asked only for illustration and
applied ornament; his models offered only the smirk and sad humour of a
stunted life. Here and there his statues might attain a certain
sweetness and grace, such as painting might perfectly well have
rendered; but on the whole sculpture remained decorative and infantile.

The Renaissance brought back technical freedom and a certain
inspiration, unhappily a retrospective and exotic one. The art cut
praiseworthy capers in the face of the public, but nobody could teach
the public itself to dance. If several great temperaments, under the
auspices of fashion, could then call up a magic world in which bodies
still spoke a heroic language, that was a passing dream. Society could
not feed such an artificial passion, nor the schools transmit an
arbitrary personal style that responded to nothing permanent in social
conditions. Academies continued to offer prizes for sculpture, the nude
continued to be seen in studios, and equestrian or other rhetorical
statues continued occasionally to be erected in public squares. Heroic
sculpture, however, in modern society, is really an anomaly and
confesses as much by being a failure. No personal talent avails to
rescue an art from laboured insignificance when it ha