Why is he so obviously great as well as so obviously extraordinary? one constantly asks himself in the presence of his bronzes. Perhaps because he expresses with such concreteness, such definiteness and vigor a motive so purely an abstraction. The illustration in intimate elaboration of elemental force, strength, passion, seems to have been his aim, and in everyone of his wonderfully varied groups he attains it superbly--not giving the beholder a symbol of it merely; in no degree depending upon association or convention, but exhibiting its very essence with a combined scientific explicitness and poetic energy to which antique art alone, one may almost say, has furnished a parallel. For this, fauna served him as well as the human figure, though, could he have studied man with the facility which the Jardin des Plantes afforded him of observing the lower animals, he might have used the medium of the human figure more frequently than he did. When he did, he was hardly less successful; and the four splendid groups that decorate the Pavillons Denon and Richelieu of the Louvre are in the very front rank of the heroic sculpture of the modern world. V ACADEMIC SCULPTURE I From Barye to the Institute is a long way. Nothing could be more interhostile than his sculpture and that of the professors at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. And in considering the French sculpture of the present day we may say that, aside from the great names already mentioned--Houdon, David d'Angers, Rude, Carpeaux, and Barye--and apart from the new movement represented by Rodin and Dalou, it is represented by the Institute, and that the Institute has reverted to the Italian inspiration. The influence of Canova and the example of Pradier and Etex were not lasting. Indeed, Greek sculpture has perished so completely that it sometimes seems to live only in its legend. With the modern French school, the academic school, it is quite supplanted by the sculpture of the Renaissance. And this is not unreasonable. The Renaissance sculpture is modern; its masters did finely and perfectly what since their time has been done imperfectly, but essentially its artistic spirit is the modern artistic spirit, full of personality, full of expression, careless of the type. Nowadays we patronize a little the ideal. You may hear very intelligent critics in Paris--who in Paris is not an intelligent critic?--speak disparagingly of the Greek want of expression; of the lack of passion, of vivid interest, of significance in a word, in Greek sculpture of the Periclean epoch. The conception of absolute beauty having been discovered to be an abstraction, the tradition of the purely ideal has gone with it. The caryatids of the Erechtheum, the horsemen of the Parthenon frieze, the reliefs of the Nike Apteros balustrade are admired certainly; but they are hardly sympathetically admired; there is a tendency to relegate them to the limbo of subjects for aesthetic lectures. And yet no one can have