te clear of all convention and
manifests his genius positively and directly. The unfathomable secret of
the tomb is in the spiritual expression of the guarding genius, and the
elaborately complex movement concentrated upon the urn and directly
inspired by the ephebes of the Sistine ceiling is a mere blind. The same
is true of the portrait heads which within his range M. Saint Marceaux
does better than almost anyone. M. Renan's "Confessions" hardly convey
as distinct a notion of character as his bust exhibited at the Triennial
of 1883. Many of the sculptors' anonymous heads, so to speak, are
hardly less remarkable. Long after the sharp edge of one's interest in
the striking pose of his "Harlequin" and the fine movement and bizarre
features of his "Genius" has worn away, their curious spiritual
interest, the individual _cachet_ of their character, will sustain them.
And so integrally true is this of all the productions of M.
Saint-Marceaux's talent, that it is quite as perceptible in works where
it is not accentuated and emphasized as it is in those of which I have
been speaking; it is a quality that will bear refining, that is even
better indeed in its more subtle manifestations. The figure of the
Luxembourg Gallery, the young Dante reading Virgil, is an example; a
girl's head, the forehead swathed in a turban, first exhibited some
years ago, is another. The charm of these is more penetrating, though
they are by no means either as popular or as "important" works as the
"Genius of the Tomb" or the "Harlequin." In the time to come M.
Saint-Marceaux will probably rely more and more on their quality of
grave and yet alert distinction, and less on striking and eccentric
variations of themes from Michael Angelo like the "Genius," and
illustrations like the "Harlequin" of the artistic potentialities of the
Canova sculpture.

With considerably less force than M. Dubois and decidedly less piquancy
than M. Saint-Marceaux, M. Antonin Mercie has perhaps greater
refinement than either. His outline is a trifle softer, his sentiment
more gracious, more suave. His work is difficult to characterize
satisfactorily, and the fact may of course proceed from its lack of
force, as well as from the well-understood difficulty of translating
into epithets anything so essentially elusive as suavity and grace of
form. At one epoch in any examination of academic French sculpture that
of M. Mercie seems the most interesting; it is so free from exagge