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 production really forced pedantry upon culture, and prevented any but the most strenuous personalities from being genuine, because of the immensely increased authoritativeness of what had become classic.

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,