individuality restrained on the hither side of
peculiarity. The "Maid" is hearing her "voices" as distinctly as
Bastien-Lepage's figure is, but the fact is not forced upon the sense,
but is rather disclosed to the mind with great delicacy and the dignity
becoming sculpture. No one could, of course, mistake this work for an
antique--an error that might possibly be made, supposing the conditions
favorable, in the case of Chapu's "Mercury;" but it presents,
nevertheless, an excellent illustration of a modern working naturally
and freely in the antique spirit. It is as affecting, as full of direct
appeal, as a modern work essays to be; but its appeal is to the sense of
beauty, to the imagination, and its effect is wrought in virtue of its
art and not of its reality. No, individuality is no more inconsistent
with the antique spirit than it is with eccentricity, with the
extravagances of personal expression. Is there more individuality in a
thirteenth-century grotesque than in the "Faun" of the Capitol? For
sculpture especially, art is eminently, as it has been termed, "the
discipline of genius," and it is only after the sculptor's genius has
submitted to the discipline of culture that it evinces an individuality
which really counts, which is really thrown out in relief on the
background of crude personality. And if there be no question of
perfection, but only of the artist's attitude, one has but to ask
himself the real meaning of the epithet Shakespearian to be assured of
the harmony between individuality and the most impersonal practice.

Nevertheless, this attitude and this perfection, characteristic as they
are of Chapu's work, have their peril. When the quickening impulse, of
whose expression they are after all but conditions, fails, they suddenly
appear so misplaced as to render insignificant what would otherwise have
seemed "respectable" enough work. Everywhere else of great
distinction--even in the execution of so perfunctory a task as a
commission for a figure of "Mechanical Art" in the Tribunal de
Commerce--at the great Triennial Exposition of 1883 Chapu was simply
insignificant. There was never a more striking illustration of the
necessity of constant renewal of inspiration, of the constant danger of
lapse into the perfunctory and the hackneyed, which threatens an artist
of precisely Chapu's qualities. Another of equal eminence escapes this
peril; there is not the same interdependence of form and "content" to be