“Better far
  Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means
  Than a sublime art frivolously.”

Nothing could be more misleading than to fancy Barye a kind of modern Cellini.  Less than any sculptor of modern times is he a decorative artist.  The small scale of his works is in great part due to his lack of opportunity to produce larger ones.  Nowadays one does what one can, even the greatest artists; and Barye had no Lorenzo de’Medici for a patron, but, instead, a frowning Institute, which confined him to such work as, in the main, he did.  He did it con amore it need not be added, and thus lifted it at once out of the customary category of such work.  His bronzes were never articles de Paris, and their excellence transcends the function of teaching our sculptors and amateurs the lesson that “household” is as dignified a province as monumental, art.  His groups are not essentially “clock-tops,” and the work of perhaps the greatest artist, in the line from Jean Goujon to Carpeaux can hardly be used to point the moral that “clock-tops” ought to be good.  Cellini’s “Perseus” is really more of a “parlor ornament” than Barye’s smallest figure.

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