unpretentious.  Perhaps the Maid as M. Fremiet represents her could never have accomplished legend-producing deeds.  Certainly she is the Maid neither of Chapu, nor of Bastien-Lepage, nor of the current convention.  She is, rather, pretty, sympathetically childlike, mignonne; but M. Fremiet’s conception is an original and a gracious one, and even the critic addicted to formulae has only to forget its title to become thoroughly in love with it; beside this merit a priori shortcomings count very little.  But the other two works just mentioned are open to no objection of this kind or of any other, and in the category to which they belong they are splendid works.  Since Donatello and Verrocchio nothing of the kind has been done which surpasses them; and it is only M. Fremiet’s penchant for animal sculpture, and his fondness for exercising his lighter fancy in comparatively trivial objets de vertu, that obscure in any degree his fine talent for illustrating the grand style with natural ease and large simplicity.

VIII

I have already mentioned the most representative among those who have “arrived” of the school of academic French sculpture as it exists to-day, though it would be easy to extend the list with Antonin Carles, whose “Jeunesse” of the World’s Fair of 1889 is a very graceful embodiment of adolescence; Suchetet, whose “Byblis” of the same exhibition caused his early death to be deplored; Adrien Gaudez, Etcheto, Idrac, and, of course, many others of distinction.  There is no looseness in characterizing this as a “school;” it has its own qualities and its corresponding defects.  It stands by itself—­apart from the Greek sculpture and from its inspiration, the Renaissance, and from the more recent traditions of Houdon, or of Rude and Carpeaux.  It is a thoroughly legitimate and unaffected expression of national thought and feeling at the present time, at once splendid and simple.  The moment of triumph in any intellectual movement is, however, always a dangerous one.  A slack-water period of intellectual slothfulness nearly always ensues.  Ideas which have previously been struggling to get a hearing have become accepted ideas that have almost the force of axioms; no one thinks of their justification, of their basis in real truth and fact; they take their place in the great category of conventions.  The mind feels no longer the exhilaration of discovery, the stimulus of fresh perception; the sense becomes jaded, enthusiasm impossible.  Dealing with the same material and guided by the same principles, its production becomes inevitably hackneyed, artificial, lifeless; the Zeit-Geist, the Time-Spirit, is really a kind of Sisyphus, and the essence of life is movement.  This law of perpetual renewal, of the periodical quickening of the human spirit, explains the barrenness of the inheritance of the greatest men; shows why originality is a necessary element of