as are purely intuitive and indefinable.  In comparison with the Renaissance sculptors, the French academic sculptors of the present day are certainly too exclusive devotees of Buffon’s “order and movement,” and too little occupied with the thought itself—­too little individual.  In comparison with the antique, this is less apparent, but I fancy not less real.  We are so accustomed to think of the antique as the pure and simple embodiment of style, as a sublimation, so to speak of the individual into style itself, that in this respect we are scarcely fair judges of the antique.  In any case we know very little of it; we can hardly speak of it except by periods.  But it is plain that the Greek is so superior to any subsequent sculpture in this one respect of style that we rarely think of its other qualities.  Our judgment is inevitably a comparative one, and inevitably a comparative judgment fixes our attention on the Greek supremacy of style.  Indeed, in looking at the antique the thought itself is often alien to us, and the order and movement, being more nearly universal perhaps, are all that occupy us.  A family tombstone lying in the cemetery at Athens, and half buried in the dust which blows from the Piraeus roadway, has more style than M. Mercie’s “Quand-Meme” group for Belfort, which has been the subject of innumerable encomiums, and which has only style and no individuality whatever to commend it.  And the Athenian tombstone was probably furnished to order by the marble-cutting artist of the period, corresponding to those whose signs one sees at the entrances of our own large cemeteries.  Still we may be sure that the ordinary Athenian citizen who adjudged prizes between AEschylus and Sophocles, and to whom Pericles addressed the oration which only exceptional culture nowadays thoroughly appreciates, found plenty of individuality in the decoration of the Parthenon, and was perfectly conscious of the difference between Phidias and his pupils.  Even now, if one takes the pains to think of it, the difference between such works as the so-called “Genius” of the Vatican and the Athenian marbles, or between the Niobe group at Florence and the Venus torso at Naples, for example, seems markedly individual enough, though the element of style is still to our eyes the most prominent quality in each.  Indeed, if one really reflects upon the subject, it will not seem exaggeration to say that to anyone who has studied both with any thoroughness it would be more difficult to individualize the mass of modern French sculpture than even that of the best Greek epoch—­the epoch when style was most perfect, when its reign was, as it sometimes appears to us, most absolute.  And if we consider the Renaissance sculpture, its complexity is so great, its individuality is so pronounced, that one is apt to lose sight of the important part which style really plays in it.  In a work by Donatello we see first of all his thought; in a Madonna of Mino’s it is the idea that charms us; the Delia Robbia frieze at Pistoja is pure genre.