II

Chapu, who died a year or two ago, is perhaps the only eminent sculptor of the time whose inspiration is clearly the antique, and when I add that his work appears to me for this reason none the less original, it will be immediately perceived that I share imperfectly the French objection to the antique.  Indeed, nowadays to have the antique inspiration is to be original ex vi termini; nothing is farther removed from contemporary conventions.  But this is true in a much more integral sense.  The pre-eminent fact of Greek sculpture, for example, is, from one point of view, the directness with which it concerns itself with the ideal—­the slight temporary or personal element with which it is alloyed.  When one calls an artist or a work Greek, this is what is really meant; it is the sense in which Raphael is Greek.  Chapu is Greek in this way, and thus individualized among his contemporaries, not only by having a different inspiration from them, but by depending for his interest on no convention fixed or fleeting and on no indirect support of accentuated personal characteristics.  Perhaps the antiquary of a thousand years from now, to whom the traits which to us distinguish so clearly the work of certain sculptors who seem to have nothing in common will betray only their common inspiration, will be even less at a loss than ourselves to find traces of a common origin in such apparently different works as Chapu’s “Mercury” and his “Jeunesse” of the Regnault monument.  He will by no means confound these with the classical productions of M. Millet or M. Cavelier, we may be sure.  And this, I repeat, because their purely Greek spirit, the subordination in their conception and execution of the personal element, the direct way in which the sculptor looks at the ideal, the type, not only distinguish them among contemporary works, which are so largely personal expressions, but give them an eminent individuality as well.  Like the Greek sculpture, they are plainly the production of culture, which in restraining wilfulness, however happily inspired, and imposing measure and poise, nevertheless acutely stimulates and develops the faculties themselves.  The skeptic who may very plausibly inquire the distinction between that vague entity, “the ideal,” and the personal idea of the artist concerned with it, can be shown this distinction better than it can be expressed in words.  He will appreciate it very readily, to return to Chapu, by contrasting the “Jeanne d’Arc” at the Luxembourg Gallery with such different treatment of the same theme as M. Bastien-Lepage’s picture, now in the New York Metropolitan Museum, illustrates.  Contrary to his almost invariable practice of neglecting even design in favor of impersonal natural representation, Bastien-Lepage’s “Jeanne d’Arc” is the creature of wilful originality, a sort of embodied protest against conventionalism in historical painting; she is the illustration of a theory, she is this and