form are mere conditions, and the ordinary conventions of idea mere material.  One can hardly apply generalities of the kind to M. Dubois without saying too much, but it is nevertheless true that one may illustrate the grand style and yet fail of being intimately and acutely sympathetic; and M. Dubois, to whose largeness of treatment and nobility of conception no one will deny something truly suggestive of the grand style, does thus fail.  It is not that he does not possess charm, and charm in no mean proportion to his largeness and nobility, but for the elevation of these into the realm of magic, into the upper air of spontaneous spiritual activity, his imagination has, for the romantic imagination which it is, a trifle too much self-possession—­too much sanity, if one chooses.  He has the ambitions, the faculties, of a lyric poet, and he gives us too frequently recitative.

IV

It is agreeable in many ways to turn from the rounded and complete impeccability of M. Dubois to the fancy of M. Saint-Marceaux.  More than any of his rivals, M. Saint-Marceaux possesses the charm of unexpectedness.  He is not perhaps to be called an original genius, and his work will probably leave French sculpture very nearly where it found it.  Indeed, one readily perceives that he is not free from the trammels of contemporary convention.  But how easily he wears them, and if no “severe pains and birth-throes” accompany the evolution of his conceptions, how graceful these conceptions are!  They are perhaps of the Canova family; the “Harlequin,” for instance, which has had such a prodigious success, is essentially Milanese sculpture; essentially even the “Genius Guarding the Secret of the Tomb” is a fantastic rather than an original work.  But how the manner, the treatment, triumphs over the Canova insipidity!  It is not only Milanese sculpture better done, the execution beautifully sapient and truthful instead of cheaply imitative, the idea broadly enforced by the details instead of frittered away among them; it is Milanese sculpture essentially elevated and dignified.  Loosely speaking, the mere article de vertu becomes a true work of art.  And this transformation, or rather this development of a germ of not too great intrinsic importance, is brought about in the work of Saint-Marceaux by the presence of an element utterly foreign to the Canova sculpture and its succession—­the element of character.  If to the clever workmanship of the Italians he merely opposed workmanship of a superior kind as well as quality—­thoroughly artistic workmanship, that is to say—­his sculpture would be far less interesting than it is.  He does, indeed, noticeably do this; there is a felicity entirely delightful, almost magical, in every detail of his work.  But when one compares it with the sculpture of M. Dubois, it is not of this that one thinks so much as of a certain individual character with which M. Saint-Marceaux always contrives to endue