upport
of accentuated personal characteristics. Perhaps the antiquary of a
thousand years from now, to whom the traits which to us distinguish so
clearly the work of certain sculptors who seem to have nothing in
common will betray only their common inspiration, will be even less at a
loss than ourselves to find traces of a common origin in such apparently
different works as Chapu's "Mercury" and his "Jeunesse" of the Regnault
monument. He will by no means confound these with the classical
productions of M. Millet or M. Cavelier, we may be sure. And this, I
repeat, because their purely Greek spirit, the subordination in their
conception and execution of the personal element, the direct way in
which the sculptor looks at the ideal, the type, not only distinguish
them among contemporary works, which are so largely personal
expressions, but give them an eminent individuality as well. Like the
Greek sculpture, they are plainly the production of culture, which in
restraining wilfulness, however happily inspired, and imposing measure
and poise, nevertheless acutely stimulates and develops the faculties
themselves. The skeptic who may very plausibly inquire the distinction
between that vague entity, "the ideal," and the personal idea of the
artist concerned with it, can be shown this distinction better than it
can be expressed in words. He will appreciate it very readily, to return
to Chapu, by contrasting the "Jeanne d'Arc" at the Luxembourg Gallery
with such different treatment of the same theme as M. Bastien-Lepage's
picture, now in the New York Metropolitan Museum, illustrates. Contrary
to his almost invariable practice of neglecting even design in favor of
impersonal natural representation, Bastien-Lepage's "Jeanne d'Arc" is
the creature of wilful originality, a sort of embodied protest against
conventionalism in historical painting; she is the illustration of a
theory, she is this and that systematically and not spontaneously; the
predominance of the painter's personality is plain in every detail of
his creation. Chapu's "Maid" is the ideal, more or less perfectly
expressed; she is everybody's "Maid," more or less adequately embodied.
The statue is the antipodes of the conventional much more so, even, to
our modern sense, than that of Rude; it suggests no competition with
that at Versailles or the many other characterless conceptions that
abound. It is full of expression--arrested just before it ceases to be
suggestive; of