perfection; why Phidias, Praxiteles, Donatello, Michael Angelo (not to go outside of our subject), had no successors.  Once a thing is done it is done for all time, and the study of perfection itself avails only as a stimulus to perfection in other combinations.  In fact, the more nearly perfect the model the greater the necessity for an absolute break with it in order to secure anything like an equivalent in living force; in its direction at least everything vital has been done.  So its lack of original force, its over-carefulness for style, its inevitable sensitiveness to the criticism that is based on convention, make the weak side of the French academic sculpture of the present day, fine and triumphant as it is.  That the national thought and feeling are not a little conventional, and have the academic rather than a spontaneous inspiration, has, however, lately been distinctly felt as a misfortune and a limitation by a few sculptors whose work may be called the beginning of a new movement out of which, whatever may be its own limitations, nothing but good can come to French sculpture and of which the protagonists are Auguste Rodin and Jules Dalou.

VI

THE NEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPTURE

I

Side by side with the academic current in French art has moved of recent years a naturalist and romantic impulse whose manifestations have been always vigorous though occasionally exaggerated.  In any of the great departments of activity nationally pursued—­as art has been pursued in France since Francis I.—­there are always these rival currents, of which now one and now the other constantly affects the ebb and flow of the tide of thought and feeling.  The classic and romantic duel of 1830, the rise of the naturalist opposition to Hugo and romanticism in our own day, are familiar instances of this phenomenon in literature.  The revolt of Gericault and Delacroix against David and Ingres are equally well known in the field of painting.  Of recent years the foundation of the periodical L’Art and its rivalry with the conservative Gazette des Beaux Arts mark with the same definiteness, and an articulate precision, the same conflict between truth, as new eyes see it, and tradition.  Never, perhaps, since the early Renaissance, however, has nature asserted her supremacy over convention in such unmistakable, such insistent, and, one may say, I think, such intolerant fashion as she is doing at the present moment.  Sculpture, in virtue of the defiant palpability of its material, is the most impalpable of the plastic arts, and therefore it feels less quickly than the rest, perhaps, the impress of the influences of the epoch and their classifying canons.  Natural imitation shows first in sculpture, and subsists in it longest.  But convention once its conqueror, the return to nature is here most tardy, because, owing to the impalpable, the elusive quality