Certainly M. Dalou is far more nearly in the current of contemporary art than his friend Rodin, who stands with his master Barye rather defiantly apart from the regular evolution of French sculpture, whereas one can easily trace the derivation of M. Dalou and his relations to the present and the immediate past of his art in his country. His work certainly has its Fragonard, its Clodion, its Carpeaux side. Like every temperament that is strongly attracted by the decorative as well as the significant and the expressive, pure style in and for itself has its fascinations, its temptations for him. Of course it does not succeed in getting the complete possession of him that it has of the Institute. And there is, as I have suggested, an important difference, disclosed in the fact that M. Dalou uses his faculty for style in a personal rather than in the conventional way. His decoration is distinctly Dalou, and not arrangements after classic formulae. It is full of zest, of ardor, of audacity. So that if his work has what one may call its national side, it is because the author's temperament is thoroughly national at bottom, and not because this temperament is feeble or has been academically repressed. But the manifest fitness with which it takes its place in the category of French sculpture shows the moral difference between it and the work of M. Rodin. Morally speaking, it is mainly--not altogether, but mainly--rhetorical, whereas M. Rodin's is distinctly poetic. It is delightful rhetoric and it has many poetic strains--such as the charm of penetrating distinction I have mentioned. But with the passions in their simplest and last analysis he hardly occupies himself at all. Such a work as "La Republique," the magnificent bas-relief of the Hotel de Ville in Paris, is a triumph of allegorical rhetoric, very noble, not a little moving, prodigious in its wealth of imaginative material, composed from the centre and not arranged with artificial felicity, full of suggestiveness, full of power, abounding in definite sculptural qualities, both moral and technical; it again is Rubens-like in its exuberance, but of firmer texture, more closely condensed. But anything approaching the _kind_ of impressiveness of the Dante portal it certainly does not essay. It is in quite a different sphere. Its exaltation is, if not deliberate, admirably self-possessed. To find it theatrical would be simply a mark of our absurd Anglo-Saxon preference for reserve and repression in circumstances naturally suggesting expansion and elation--a preference surely born of timorousness and essentially very subtly theatrical itself. It is simply not deeply, intensely poetic, but, rather, a splendid piece of rhetoric, as I say.