Part 5 (1/2)

Still the fantastic has not made much headway in the Inst.i.tute, and it is so foreign to the French genius, which never tolerates it after it has ceased to be novel, that it probably never will. It is a great tribute to French ”catholicity of mind and largeness of temper” that Carpeaux's ”La Danse” remains in its position on the facade of the Grand Opera. French sentiment regarding it was doubtless accurately expressed by the fanatic who tried to ink it indelibly after it was first exposed.

This vandal was right from his point of view--the point of view of style. Almost the one work of absolute spontaneity among the hundreds which without and within decorate M. Garnier's edifice, it is thus a distinct jar in the general harmony; it distinctly mars the ”order and movement” of M. Garnier's thought, which is fundamentally opposed to spontaneity. But imagine the devotion to style of a _milieu_ in which a person who would throw ink on a confessedly fine work of art is actuated by an impersonal dislike of incongruity! Dislike of the incongruous is almost a French pa.s.sion, and, like all qualities, it has its defect, the defect of tolerating the conventional. It is through this tolerance, for example, that one of the freest of French critics of art, a true Voltairian, Stendhal, was led actually to find Guido's ideal of beauty higher than Raphael's, and to miss entirely the grandeur of Tintoretto. Critical opinion in France has not changed radically since Stendhal's day.

VI

The French sculptor may draw his inspiration from the sources of originality itself, his audience will measure the result by conventions.

It is this fact undoubtedly that is largely responsible for the over-carefulness for style already remarked. Hence the work of M.

Aime-Millet and of Professors Guillaume and Cavelier, and the fact that they are professors. Hence also the election of M. Falguiere to succeed to the chair of the Beaux-Arts left vacant by the death of Jouffroy some years ago. All of these have done admirable work. Professor Guillaume's Gracchi group at the Luxembourg is alone enough to atone for a ma.s.s of productions of which the ”Castalian Fount” of a recent Salon is the cold and correct representative. Cavalier's ”Gluck,” destined for the Opera, is spirited, even if a trifle galvanic. Millet's ”Apollo,” which crowns the main gable of the Opera, stands out among its author's other works as a miracle of grace and rhythmic movement. M. Falguiere's admirers, and they are numerous, will object to the a.s.sociation here made. Falguiere's range has always been a wide one, and everything he has done has undoubtedly merited a generous portion of the prodigious encomiums it has invariably obtained. Yet, estimating it in any other way than by energy, variety, and ma.s.s, it is impossible to praise it highly with precision. It is too plainly the work of an artist who can do one thing as well as another, and of which cleverness is, after all, the spiritual standard. Bartholdi, who also should not be forgotten in any sketch of French sculpture, would, I am sure, have acquitted himself more satisfactorily than Falguiere did in the colossal groups of the Trocadero and the Arc de Triomphe de l'etoile. To acquit himself satisfactorily is Bartholdi's specialty. These two groups are the largest and most important that a sculptor can have to do. The crowning of the Arc de Triomphe at least was a splendid opportunity. Neither of them had any distinction of outline, of ma.s.s, of relation, or of idea.

Both were conventional to the last degree. That on the Arc had even its ludicrous details, such as occur only from artistic absent-mindedness in a work conceived and executed in a fatigued and hackneyed spirit. The ”Saint Vincent de Paul” of the Pantheon, which justly pa.s.ses for the sculptor's _chef-d'oeuvre_ is in idea a work of large humanity. M.

Falguiere is behind no one in ability to conceive a subject of this kind with propriety, and his subject here is inspiring if ever a subject was.

The ”Pet.i.t Martyr” of the Luxembourg has a real charm, but it too is content with too little, as one finds out in seeing it often; and it is in no sense a large work, scarcely larger than the tiresomely popular ”Running Boy” of the same museum, which nevertheless in its day marked an epoch in modelling. Indeed, so slight is the spiritual hold that M.

Falguiere has on one, that it really seems as if he were at his best in such a frankly carnal production as his since variously modified ”Nymph Hunting” of the Triennial Exposition of 1883. The idea is nothing or next to nothing, but the surface _faire_ is superb.

M. Barrias, M. Delaplanche, and M. Le Feuvre have each of them quite as much spontaneity as M. Falguiere, though the work of neither is as important in ma.s.s and variety. M. Delaplanche is always satisfactory, and beyond this there is something large about what he does that confers dignity even in the absence of quick interest. His proportions are simple, his outline flowing, and the agreeable ease of his compositions makes up to a degree for any lack of sympathetic sentiment or impressive significance: witness his excellent ”Maternal Instruction,” of the little park in front of Sainte Clothilde. M. Le Feuvre's qualities are very nearly the reverse of these: he has a fondness for integrity quite hostile in his case to simplicity. In his very frank appeal to one's susceptibility he is a little careless of sculptural considerations, which he is p.r.o.ne to sacrifice to pictorial ends. The result is a mannerism that in the end ceases to impress, and even becomes disagreeable. As nearly as may be in a French sculptor it borders on sentimentality, and finally the swaying att.i.tudes of his figures become limp, and the startled-fawn eyes of his maidens and youths appear less touching than lackadaisical. But his being himself too conscious of it should not obscure the fact that he has a way of his own. M. Barrias is an artist of considerably greater powers than either M. Le Feuvre or M.

Delaplanche; but one has a vague perception that his powers are limited, and that to desire in his case what one so sincerely wishes in the case of M. Dubois, namely, that he would ”let himself go,” would be unwise.

Happily, when he is at his best there is no temptation to form such a wish. The ”Premieres Funerailles” is a superb work--”the chef-d'oeuvre of our modern sculpture,” a French critic enthusiastically terms it. It is hardly that; it has hardly enough spiritual distinction--not quite enough of either elegance or elevation--to merit such sweeping praise.

But it may be justly termed, I think, the most completely representative of the masterpieces of that sculpture. Its triumph over the prodigious difficulties of elaborate composition ”in the round”--difficulties to which M. Barrias succ.u.mbed in the ”Spartacus” of the Tuileries Gardens--and its success in subordinating the details of a group to the end of enforcing a single motive, preserving the while their individual interest, are complete. Nothing superior in this respect has been done since John of Bologna's ”Rape of the Sabines.”

VII

M. Emmanuel Fremiet occupies a place by himself. There have been but two modern sculptors who have shown an equally p.r.o.nounced genius for representing animals--namely, Barye, of course, and Barye's clever but not great pupil, Cain. The tigress in the Central Park, perhaps the best bronze there (the compet.i.tion is not exacting), and the best also of the several variations of the theme of which, at one time, the sculptor apparently could not tire, familiarizes Americans with the talent of Cain. In this a.s.sociation Rouillard, whose horse in the Trocadero Gardens is an animated and elegant work, ought to be mentioned, but it is hardly as good as the neighboring elephant of Fremiet as mere animal representation (the _genre_ exists and has excellences and defects of its own), while in more purely artistic worth it is quite eclipsed by its rival. Still if _fauna_ is interesting in and of itself, which no one who knows Barye's work would controvert, it is still more interesting when, to put it brutally, something is done with it. In his ambitious and colossal work at the Trocadero, M. Fremiet does in fact use his _fauna_ freely as artistic material, though at first sight it is its zoological interest that appears paramount. The same is true of the elephant near by, in which it seems as if he had designedly attacked the difficult problem of rendering embodied awkwardness decorative. Still more conspicuous, of course, is the artistic interest, the fancy, the humor, the sportive grace of his Luxembourg group of a young satyr feeding honey to a brace of bear's cubs, because he here concerns himself more directly with his idea and gives his genius freer play. And everyone will remember the sensation caused by his impressively repulsive ”Gorilla Carrying off a Woman.” But it is when he leaves this kind of thing entirely, and, wholly forgetful of his studies at the Jardin des Plantes, devotes himself to purely monumental work, that he is at his best. And in saying this I do not at all mean to insist on the superiority of monumental sculpture to the sculpture of _fauna_; it is superior, and Barye himself cannot make one content with the exclusive consecration of admirable talent to picturesque anatomy ill.u.s.trating distinctly unintellectual pa.s.sions. M. Fremiet, in ecstasy over his picturesque anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes, would scout this; but it is nevertheless true that in such works as the ”age de la pierre,”

which, if it may be called a monumental clock-top, is nevertheless certainly monumental; his ”Louis d'Orleans,” in the quadrangle of the restored Chateau de Pierrefonds; his ”Jeanne d'Arc” (the later statue is not, I think, essentially different from the earlier one); and his ”Torch-bearer” of the Middle Ages, in the new Hotel de Ville of Paris, not only is his subject a subject of loftier and more enduring interest than his elephants and deer and bears, but his own genius finds a more congenial medium of expression. In other words, any one who has seen his ”Torch-bearer” or his ”Louis d'Orleans” must conclude that M. Fremiet is losing his time at the Jardin des Plantes. In monumental works of the sort he displays a commanding dignity that borders closely upon the grand style itself. The ”Jeanne d'Arc” is indeed criticised for lack of style. The horse is fine, as always with M. Fremiet; the action of both horse and rider is n.o.ble, and the h.o.m.ogeneity of the two, so to speak, is admirably achieved. But the character of the Maid is not perfectly satisfactory to _a priori_ critics, to critics who have more or less hard and fast notions about the immiscibility of the heroic and the familiar. The ”Jeanne d'Arc” is of course a heroic statue, ill.u.s.trating one of the most puissant of profane legends; and it is unquestionably familiar and, if one chooses, defiantly unpretentious. Perhaps the Maid as M. Fremiet represents her could never have accomplished legend-producing deeds. Certainly she is the Maid neither of Chapu, nor of Bastien-Lepage, nor of the current convention. She is, rather, pretty, sympathetically childlike, _mignonne_; but M. Fremiet's conception is an original and a gracious one, and even the critic addicted to formulae has only to forget its t.i.tle to become thoroughly in love with it; beside this merit _a priori_ shortcomings count very little. But the other two works just mentioned are open to no objection of this kind or of any other, and in the category to which they belong they are splendid works. Since Donatello and Verrocchio nothing of the kind has been done which surpa.s.ses them; and it is only M. Fremiet's penchant for animal sculpture, and his fondness for exercising his lighter fancy in comparatively trivial _objets de vertu_, that obscure in any degree his fine talent for ill.u.s.trating the grand style with natural ease and large simplicity.

VIII

I have already mentioned the most representative among those who have ”arrived” of the school of academic French sculpture as it exists to-day, though it would be easy to extend the list with Antonin Carles, whose ”Jeunesse” of the World's Fair of 1889 is a very graceful embodiment of adolescence; Suchetet, whose ”Byblis” of the same exhibition caused his early death to be deplored; Adrien Gaudez, Etcheto, Idrac, and, of course, many others of distinction. There is no looseness in characterizing this as a ”school;” it has its own qualities and its corresponding defects. It stands by itself--apart from the Greek sculpture and from its inspiration, the Renaissance, and from the more recent traditions of Houdon, or of Rude and Carpeaux. It is a thoroughly legitimate and unaffected expression of national thought and feeling at the present time, at once splendid and simple. The moment of triumph in any intellectual movement is, however, always a dangerous one. A slack-water period of intellectual slothfulness nearly always ensues.

Ideas which have previously been struggling to get a hearing have become accepted ideas that have almost the force of axioms; no one thinks of their justification, of their basis in real truth and fact; they take their place in the great category of conventions. The mind feels no longer the exhilaration of discovery, the stimulus of fresh perception; the sense becomes jaded, enthusiasm impossible. Dealing with the same material and guided by the same principles, its production becomes inevitably hackneyed, artificial, lifeless; the _Zeit-Geist_, the Time-Spirit, is really a kind of Sisyphus, and the essence of life is movement. This law of perpetual renewal, of the periodical quickening of the human spirit, explains the barrenness of the inheritance of the greatest men; shows why originality is a necessary element of perfection; why Phidias, Praxiteles, Donatello, Michael Angelo (not to go outside of our subject), had no successors. Once a thing is done it is done for all time, and the study of perfection itself avails only as a stimulus to perfection in other combinations. In fact, the more nearly perfect the model the greater the necessity for an absolute break with it in order to secure anything like an equivalent in living force; in _its_ direction at least everything vital has been done. So its lack of original force, its over-carefulness for style, its inevitable sensitiveness to the criticism that is based on convention, make the weak side of the French academic sculpture of the present day, fine and triumphant as it is. That the national thought and feeling are not a little conventional, and have the academic rather than a spontaneous inspiration, has, however, lately been distinctly felt as a misfortune and a limitation by a few sculptors whose work may be called the 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 cla.s.sic 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 a.s.serted her supremacy over convention in such unmistakable, such insistent, and, one may say, I think, such intolerant fas.h.i.+on 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 cla.s.sifying 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. Niccol 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 Inst.i.tute had been mined many times by revolutionary painters before Dalou took the grand medal of the Salon.

Owing to the relative and in fact polemic position which these two artists occupy, the movement which they represent, and of which as yet they themselves form a chief part, a little obscures their respective personalities, which are nevertheless, in sculpture, by far the most positive and puissant of the present epoch. M. Rodin's work, especially, is so novel that one's first impression in its presence is of its implied criticism of the Inst.i.tute. One thinks first of its att.i.tude, its point of view, its end, aim, and means, and of the utter contrast of these with those of the accepted contemporary masters in his art--of Dubois and Chapu, Mercie and Saint-Marceaux. One judges generally, and instinctively avoids personal and direct impressions. The first thought is not, Are the ”Saint Jean” and the ”Bourgeois de Calais” successful works of art? But, _Can_ they be successful if the accepted masterpieces of modern sculpture are not to be set down as insipid? One is a little bewildered. It is easy to see and to estimate the admirable traits and the shortcomings of M. Dubois's delightful and impressive reminiscences of the Renaissance, of M. Mercie's refined and graceful compositions.

They are of their time and place. They embody, in distinguished manner and in an accentuated degree, the general inspiration. Their spiritual characteristics are traditional and universal, and technically, without perhaps often pa.s.sing beyond it, they exhaust cleverness. You may enjoy or resent their cla.s.sic and exemplary excellences, as you feel your taste to have suffered from the lack or the superabundance of academic influences; I cannot fancy an American insensitive to their charm. But it is plain that their perfection is a very different thing from the characteristics of a strenuous artistic personality seeking expression.

If these latter when encountered are seen to be evidently of an extremely high order, contemporary criticism, at all events, should feel at once the wisdom of beginning with the endeavor to appreciate, instead of making the degree of its own familiarity with them the test of their merit.

French aesthetic authority, which did this in the instances of Barye, of Delacroix, of Millet, of Manet, of Puvis de Chavannes, did it also for many years in the instance of M. Rodin. It owes its defeat in the contest with him--for like the recalcitrants in the other contests, M.

Rodin has definitively triumphed--to the unwise attempt to define him in terms heretofore applicable enough to sculptors, but wholly inapplicable to him. It failed to see that the thing to define in his work was the man himself, his temperament, his genius. Taken by themselves and considered as characteristics of the Inst.i.tute sculptors, the obvious traits of this work might, that is to say, be adjudged eccentric and empty. Fancy Professor Guillaume suddenly subordinating academic disposition of line and ma.s.s to true structural expression! One would simply feel the loss of his accustomed style and harmony. With M. Rodin, who deals with nature directly, through the immediate force of his own powerful temperament, to feel the absence of the Inst.i.tute training and traditions is absurd. The question in his case is simply whether or no he is a great artistic personality, an extraordinary and powerful temperament, or whether he is merely a turbulent and capricious protestant against the measure and taste of the Inst.i.tute. But this is really no longer a question, however it may have been a few years ago; and when his Dante portal for the new Palais des Arts Decoratifs shall have been finished, and the public had an opportunity to see what the sculptor's friend and only serious rival, M. Dalou, calls ”one of the most, if not the most original and astonis.h.i.+ng pieces of sculpture of the nineteenth century,” it will be recognized that M. Rodin, so far from being amenable to the current canon, has brought the canon itself to judgment.

How and why, people will perceive in proportion to their receptivity.

Candor and intelligence will suffice to appreciate that the secret of M.

Rodin's art is structural expression, and that it is this and not any superficial eccentricity of execution that definitely distinguishes him from the Inst.i.tute. Just as his imagination, his temperament, his spiritual energy and ardor individualize the positive originality of his motive, so the expressiveness of his treatment sets him aside from all as well as from each of the Inst.i.tute sculptors in what may be broadly called technical att.i.tude. No sculptor has ever carried expression further. The sculpture of the present day has certainly not occupied itself much with it. The Inst.i.tute is perhaps a little afraid of it. It abhors the _baroque_ rightly enough, but very likely it fails to see that the expression of such sculpture as M. Rodin's no more resembles the contortions of the Dresden Museum giants than it does the composure of M. Delaplanche. The _baroque_ is only violent instead of placid commonplace, and is as conventional as any professor of sculpture could desire. Expression means individual character completely exhibited rather than conventionally suggested. It is certainly not too much to say that in the sculpture of the present day the sense of individual character is conveyed mainly by convention. The physiognomy has usurped the place of the physique, the gesture of the form, the pose of the substance. And face, gesture, form are, when they are not brutally naturalistic and so not art at all, not individual and native, but typical and cla.s.sic. Very much of the best modern sculpture might really have been treated like those antique figurines of which the bodies were made by wholesale, being supplied with individual heads when the time came for using them.