only see the theatric side of French character) could treat.
Its general interest, too, is hardly inferior; there is something
generally ennobling in the celebration of the virtues of the brave
defeated that surpasses the commonplace of paeans. M. Mercie was, in this
sense, more fortunate than the sculptor to whom the Berlinese owe the
bronze commemoration of their victory. Perhaps to call his treatment
entirely worthy of the theme, is to forget the import of such works as
the tombs of the Medici Chapel at Florence. There is a region into whose
precincts the dramatic quality penetrates only to play an insufficient
part. But in modern art to do more than merely to keep such truths in
mind, to insist on satisfactory plastic illustrations of them, is not
only to prepare disappointment for one's self, but to risk misjudging
admirable and elevated effort; and to regret the fact that France had
only M. Mercie and not Michael Angelo to celebrate her "Gloria Victis"
is to commit both of these errors. After all, the subjects are
different, and the events of 1870-71 had compensations for France which
the downfall of Florentine liberty was without; so that, indeed, a note
of unmixed melancholy, however lofty its strain, would have been a
discord which M. Mercie has certainly avoided. He has avoided it in
rather a marked way, it is true. His monument is dramatic and stirring
rather than inwardly moving. It is rhetorical rather than truly poetic;
and the admirable quality of its rhetoric, its complete freedom from
vulgar or sentimental alloy--its immense superiority to Anglo-Saxon
rhetoric, in fine--does not conceal the truth that it is rhetoric, that
it is prose and not poetry after all. Mercie's "Gloria Victis" is very
fine; I know nothing so fine in modern sculpture outside of France. But
then there is not very much that is fine at all in modern sculpture
outside of France; and modern French sculpture, and M. Mercie along with
it as one of its most eminent ornaments, have made it impossible to
speak of them in a relative way. The antique and the Renaissance
sculpture alone furnish their fit association, and like the Renaissance
and the antique sculpture they demand a positive and absolute, and not a
comparative criticism.

V

Well, then, speaking thus absolutely and positively, the cardinal defect
of the Institute sculpture--and the refined and distinguished work of M.
Mercie better perhaps than almost any other assists us to