olor, if one may trench on the
jargon of the studios. It has the sumptuousness of Titian and Paul
Veronese. Its motives are cast in the same ample mould. Many of his
figures breathe the same air of high-born ease and well-being, of serene
and not too intellectual composure. There is an aristocratic tincture
even in his peasants--a kind of native distinction inseparable from his
touch. And in his women there is a certain gracious sweetness, a certain
exquisite and elusive refinement elsewhere caught only by Tintoretto,
but illustrated by Tintoretto with such penetrating intensity as to
leave perhaps the most nearly indelible impression that the sensitive
amateur carries away with him from Venice. The female figures in the
colossal group which should have been placed in the Place de la
Republique, but was relegated by official stupidity to the Place des
Nations, are examples of this patrician charm in carriage, in form, in
feature, in expression. They have not the witchery, the touch of
Bohemian sprightliness that make such figures as Carpeaux's "Flora" so
enchanting, but they are at once sweeter and more distinguished. The
sense for the exquisite which this betrays excludes all dross from M.
Dalou's rich magnificence. Even the "Silenus" group illustrates
exuberance without excess: I spoke of it just now as Rubens-like, but it
is only because it recalls Rubens's superb strength and riotous fancy;
it is in reality a Rubens-like motive purged in the execution of all
Flemish grossness. There is even in Dalou's fantasticality of this sort
a measure and distinction which temper animation into resemblance to
such delicate blitheness as is illustrated by the Bargello "Bacchus" of
Jacopo Sansovino. Sansovino afterward, by the way, amid the
artificiality of Venice, whither he went, wholly lost his individual
force, as M. Dalou, owing to his love of nature, is less likely to do.
But his sketch for a monument to Victor Hugo, and perhaps still more his
memorial of Delacroix in the Luxembourg Gardens, point warningly in this
direction, and it would perhaps be easier than he supposes to permit his
extraordinary decorative facility to lead him on to execute works
unpenetrated by personal feeling, and recalling less the acme of the
Renaissance than the period just afterward, when original effort had
exhausted itself and the movement of art was due mainly to
momentum--when, as in France at the present moment, the enormous mass of
artistic