Following Buffon’s idea of “order and movement,” we may say, perhaps, that style results from the preservation in every part of some sense of the form of the whole.  It implies a sense of relations as well as of statement.  It is not mere expression of a thought in a manner peculiar to the artist (in words, color, marble, what not), but it is such expression penetrated with both reminiscence and anticipation.  It is, indeed, on the contrary, very nearly the reverse of what we mean by expression, which is mainly a matter of personal energy.  Style means correctness, precision, that feeling for the ensemble on which an inharmonious detail jars.  Expression results from a sense of the value of the detail.  If Walt Whitman, for example, were what his admirers’ defective sense of style fancies him, he would be expressive.  If French academic art had as little expression as its censors assert, it would still illustrate style—­the quality which modifies the native and apposite form of the concrete individual thing with reference to what has preceded and what is to follow it; the quality, in a word, whose effort is to harmonize the object with its environment.  When this environment is heightened, and universal instead of logical and particular, we have the “grand style;” but we have the grand style generally in poetry, and to be sure of style at all prose—­such prose as Goujon’s, which in no wise emulates Michael Angelo’s poetry—­may justifiably neglect in some degree the specific personality that tends to make it poetic and individual.

IV

After Goujon, Clodion is the great name in French sculpture, until we come to Houdon, who may almost be assigned to the nineteenth century.  There were throughout the eighteenth century honorable artists, sculptors of distinction beyond contest.  But sculpture is such an abstract art itself that the sculpture which partook of the artificiality of the eighteenth century has less interest for us, less that is concrete and appealing than even the painting of the epoch.  It derived its canons and its practice from Puget—­the French Bernini, who with less grace and less dilettante extravagance than his Italian exemplar had more force and solidity.  With less cleverness, less charm—­for Bernini, spite of the disesteem in which his juxtaposition to Michael Angelo and his apparent unconsciousness of the attitude such juxtaposition should have imposed upon him, cause him to be held, has a great deal of charm and is extraordinarily clever—­he is more sincere, more thorough-going, more respectable.  Coysevox is chiefly Puget exaggerated, and his pupil, Coustou, who comes down to nearly the middle of the eighteenth century, contributed nothing to French sculptural tradition.