mpress of his
personality. At the same time it is equally evident that Rude's own
temperament took its color from the transitional epoch in which he
lived, and of which he was _par excellence_ the sculptor. He was the
true inheritor of his Burgundian traditions. His strongest side was that
which allies him with his artistic ancestor, Claux Sluters. But he
lived in an era of general culture and aestheticism, and all his
naturalistic tendencies were complicated with theory. He accepted the
antique not merely as a stimulus, but as a model. He was not only a
sculptor but a teacher, and the formulation of his didacticism
complicated considerably the free exercise of his expression. At the
last, as is perhaps natural, he reverted to precedent and formulary, and
in his "Hebe and the Eagle of Jupiter" and his "L'Amour Dominateur du
Monde," is more at variance than anywhere else with his native instinct,
which was, to cite the admirable phrase of M. de Fourcaud, _exterioriser
nos idees et nos ames_. But throughout his life he halted a little
between two opinions--the current admiration of the classic, and his own
instinctive feeling for nature unsystematized and unsophisticated. His
"Jeanne d'Arc" is an instance. In spite of the violation of tradition,
which at the time it was thought to be, it seems to-day to our eyes to
err on the side of the conventional. It is surely intellectual, classic,
even factitious in conception as well as in execution. In some of its
accessories it is even modish. It illustrates not merely the abstract
turn of conceiving a subject which Rude always shared with the great
classicists of his art, but also the arbitrariness of treatment against
which he always protested. Without at all knowing it, he was in a very
intimate sense an eclectic in many of his works. He believed in forming
a complete mental conception of every composition before even posing a
model, as he used to tell his students, but in complicated compositions
this was impossible, and he had small talent for artificial composition.
Furthermore, he often distrusted--quite without reason, but after the
fatal manner of the rustic--his own intuitions. But one mentions these
qualifications of his genius and accomplishment only because both his
genius and accomplishment are so distinguished as to make one wish they
were more nearly perfect than they are. It is really idle to wish that
Rude had neglected the philosophy of his art, with which he was