The reader will say at once here that I am cavilling at M. Dubois for what I praised in Chapu.  But let us distinguish.  The two artists belong to wholly different categories.  Chapu’s inspiration is the antique spirit.  M. Dubois, is, like all academic French sculptors, except Chapu indeed, absolutely and integrally a romanticist, completely enamoured of the Renaissance.  The two are so distinct as to be contradictory.  The moment M. Dubois gives us the type in a “Florentine Minstrel,” to the exclusion of the personal and the particular, he fails in imaginativeness and falls back on the conventional.  The type of a “Florentine Minstrel” is infallibly a convention.  M. Dubois, not being occupied directly with the ideal, is bound to carry his subject and its idiosyncrasies much farther than the observer could have foreseen.  To rest content with expressing gracefully and powerfully the notion common to all connoisseurs is to fall short of what one justly exacts of the romantic artist.  Indeed, in exchange for this one would accept very faulty work in this category with resignation.  Whatever we may say or think, however we may admire or approve, in romantic art the quality that charms, that fascinates, is not adequacy but unexpectedness.  In addition to the understanding, the instinct demands satisfaction.  The virtues of “Charity” and “Faith” and the ideas of “Military Courage” and “Meditation” could not be more adequately illustrated than by the figures which guard the solemn dignity of General Lamoriciere’s sleep.  There is a certain force, a breadth of view in the general conception, something in the way in which the sculptor has taken his task, closely allied to real grandeur.  The confident and even careless dependence upon the unaided value of its motive, making hardly any appeal to the fancy on the one hand, and seeking no poignant effect on the other, endues the work with the poise and purity of effortless strength.  It conveys to the mind a clear impression of manliness, of qualities morally refreshing.

But such work educates us so inexorably, teaches us to be so exacting!  After enjoying it to its and our utmost, we demand still something else, something more moving, more stirring, something more directly appealing to our impulse and instinct.  Even in his free and charming little “St. John Baptist” of the Luxembourg, and his admirable bust of Baudry one feels like asking for more freedom still, for more “swing.”  Dubois certainly is the last artist who needs to be on his guard against “letting himself go.”  Why is it that in varying so agreeably Renaissance themes—­compare the “Military Courage” and Michael Angelo’s “Pensiero,” or the “Charity” and the same group in Della Quercia’s fountain at Sienna—­it is restraint, rather than audacity, that governs him?  Is it caution or perversity?  In a word, imaginativeness is what permanently interests and attaches, the imaginativeness to which in sculpture the ordinary conventions of