d for the "Saint Jean"
that posed for a dozen things turned out of the academic studios, but
compared with the result in the latter cases, that in the former is even
more remarkable for sentiment than for its structural sapience and
general physical interest. How perfectly insignificant beside its moral
impressiveness are the graceful works whose sentiment does not result
from the expression of the form, but is conveyed in some convention of
pose, of gesture, of physiognomy! It is like the contrast between a
great and a graceful actor. The one interests you by his intelligent
mastery of convention, by the tact and taste with which he employs in
voice, carriage, facial expression, gesture, diction, the several
conventions according to which ideas and emotions are habitually
conveyed to your comprehension. Salvini, Coquelin, Got, pass immediately
outside the realm of conventions. Their language, their medium of
communication, is as new as what it expresses. They are inventive as
well as intelligent. Their effect is prodigiously heightened because in
this way, the warp as well as the woof of their art being expressive and
original, the artistic result is greatly fortified. Given the same
model, M. Rodin's result is in like manner expressly and originally
enforced far beyond the result toward which the academic French school
employs the labels of the Renaissance as conventionally as its
predecessor at the beginning of the century employed those of the
antique. "Formerly we used to do Greek," says M. Rodin, with no small
justice; "now we do Italian. That is all the difference there is." And I
cannot better conclude this imperfect notice of the work of a great
master, in characterizing which such epithets as majestic, Miltonic,
grandiose suggest themselves first of all, than by calling attention to
the range which it covers, and to the fact that, even into the domain
which one would have called consecrate to the imitators of the antique
and the Renaissance, M. Rodin's informing sentiment and sense of beauty
penetrate with their habitual distinction; and that the little child's
head entitled "Alsace," that considerable portion of his work
represented by "The Wave and the Shore," for example, and a small ideal
female figure, which the manufacturer might covet for reproduction, but
which, as Bastien-Lepage said to me, is "a definition of the essence of
art," are really as noble as his more majestic works are beautiful.

II