Perhaps no modern artist has produced work more nearly approaching the sculpture of Greece in spirit. In Flaxman’s best known work, the “Michael and Satan,” we can trace a severe restraint which is foreign to the more florid styles of Canova and Thorvaldsen and which brings the Englishman far closer to the masters of the Hellenic school whom he sought to follow. He equalled either Canova or Thorvaldsen in fertility and purity of design, particularly in bas-relief. But Flaxman also suffered as they had done from a too close adherence to the eclectic influences derived from Winckelmann. When Flaxman sought to portray the intense passions, his borrowed style betrayed him. If intensity of emotion was of little moment in sculpture, Flaxman would rank among the immortals. As a fact, we know that it constitutes its very life. Consequently, one can only regret that it was not given to the first great English sculptor to emulate the achievements of Gainsborough and Reynolds, and evolve a style capable of expressing the manifold energies of his age in marble, as truly as they did on canvas. As it was, the genius of Flaxman only served to perpetuate a false ideal. His English followers made no effort to rid themselves of the methods which had marred even the finest work of the earlier masters of their school. Truth to tell, Flaxman’s reputation depends much more upon his non-sculptural work than it does upon his marbles—upon his Homeric illustrations, upon his drawings, with their mysterious reminiscences of Blake, for instance. Flaxman’s facility in design was so tremendous that it alone made him stand out far above his fellow sculptors. Added to this, there is a certain natural austerity in his sculptures which distinguishes them from the conventional theatricalities of the earlier eighteenth-century artists and the Georgian and early Victorian sentimentalities which followed. But it would be untrue to suggest that as a sculptor he rose superior to his age. Weighed in the scale of European art, ancient and modern, the life-work of Flaxman contains the same lesson as that of Canova and Thorvaldsen. It stands as a perpetual memorial of the eternal law, that no living art can be built upon a borrowed style—even though that style be Greek. CHAPTER XIV THE MODERN FRENCH SCHOOL (AFTER 1848) We are now approaching the end of our task. It only remains to gather together the various strands of our argument, with a view to the solution of the final problem—the position of sculpture in our own times. Though we shall first deal with the art of France and then turn to that of England, the sequence of events will be found to be practically the same in both countries. A single super-title—“The Renascence of Individualism”—might properly characterize both chapters.