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.

So, too, is the famous Mirabeau relief, which is perhaps M. Dalou’s masterpiece, and which represents his national side as completely as the group for the Place des Nations does those of his qualities I have endeavored to indicate by calling them Venetian.  Observe the rare fidelity which has contributed its weight of sincerity to this admirable relief.  Every prominent head of the many members of the Assembly, who nevertheless rally behind Mirabeau with a fine pell-mell freedom of artistic effect, is a portrait.  The effect is like that of similar works designed and executed with the large leisure of an age very different from the competition and struggling hurry of our own.  In every respect this work is as French as it is individual.  It is penetrated with a sense of the dignity of French history.  It