Gracchi group at the Luxembourg is alone enough to atone for a mass of productions of which the “Castalian Fount” of a recent Salon is the cold and correct representative.  Cavalier’s “Gluck,” destined for the Opera, is spirited, even if a trifle galvanic.  Millet’s “Apollo,” which crowns the main gable of the Opera, stands out among its author’s other works as a miracle of grace and rhythmic movement.  M. Falguiere’s admirers, and they are numerous, will object to the association here made.  Falguiere’s range has always been a wide one, and everything he has done has undoubtedly merited a generous portion of the prodigious encomiums it has invariably obtained.  Yet, estimating it in any other way than by energy, variety, and mass, it is impossible to praise it highly with precision.  It is too plainly the work of an artist who can do one thing as well as another, and of which cleverness is, after all, the spiritual standard.  Bartholdi, who also should not be forgotten in any sketch of French sculpture, would, I am sure, have acquitted himself more satisfactorily than Falguiere did in the colossal groups of the Trocadero and the Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile.  To acquit himself satisfactorily is Bartholdi’s specialty.  These two groups are the largest and most important that a sculptor can have to do.  The crowning of the Arc de Triomphe at least was a splendid opportunity.  Neither of them had any distinction of outline, of mass, of relation, or of idea.  Both were conventional to the last degree.  That on the Arc had even its ludicrous details, such as occur only from artistic absent-mindedness in a work conceived and executed in a fatigued and hackneyed spirit.  The “Saint Vincent de Paul” of the Pantheon, which justly passes for the sculptor’s chef-d’oeuvre is in idea a work of large humanity.  M. Falguiere is behind no one in ability to conceive a subject of this kind with propriety, and his subject here is inspiring if ever a subject was.  The “Petit Martyr” of the Luxembourg has a real charm, but it too is content with too little, as one finds out in seeing it often; and it is in no sense a large work, scarcely larger than the tiresomely popular “Running Boy” of the same museum, which nevertheless in its day marked an epoch in modelling.  Indeed, so slight is the spiritual hold that M. Falguiere has on one, that it really seems as if he were at his best in such a frankly carnal production as his since variously modified “Nymph Hunting” of the Triennial Exposition of 1883.  The idea is nothing or next to nothing, but the surface faire is superb.

M. Barrias, M. Delaplanche, and M. Le Feuvre have each of them quite as much spontaneity as M. Falguiere, though the work of neither is as important in mass and variety.  M. Delaplanche is always satisfactory, and beyond this there is something large about what he does that confers dignity even in the absence of quick interest.  His proportions are simple, his outline flowing, and the agreeable ease of his compositions