An illustration of M. Rodin’s affinity with the antique is an incident which he related to me of his work upon his superb “Age d’Airain.”  He was in Naples; he saw nature in freer inadvertence than she allows elsewhere; he had the best of models.  Under these favoring circumstances he spent three months on a leg of his statue; “which is equivalent to saying that I had at last absolutely mastered it,” said he.  One day in the Museo Nazionale he noticed in an antique the result of all his study and research.  Nature, in other words, is M. Rodin’s material in the same special sense in which it was the antique material, and in which, since Michael Angelo and the high Renaissance, it has been for the most part only the sculptor’s means.  It need not be said that the personality of the artist may be as strenuous in the one case as in the other; unless, indeed, we maintain, as perhaps we may, that individuality is more apt to atrophy in the latter instance; for as one gets farther and farther away from nature he is in more danger from conventionality than from caprice.  And this is in fact what has happened since the high Renaissance, the long line of conventionalities being continued, sometimes punctuated here and there as by Clodion or Houdon, David, Rude, or Barye, sometimes rising into great dignity and refinement of style and intelligence, as in the contemporary sculpture of the Institute, but in general almost purely decorative or sentimental, and, so far as natural expression is concerned, confining itself to psychological rather than physical character.

What is it, for instance, that distinguishes a group like M. Dubois’s “Charity” from the genre sentiment or incident of some German or Italian “professor?” Qualities of style, of refined taste, of elegance, of true intelligence.  Its artistic interest is purely decorative and sentimental.  Really what its average admirer sees in it is the same moral appeal that delights the simple admirers of German or Italian treatment of a similar theme.  It is simply infinitely higher bred.  Its character is developed no further.  Its significance as form is not insisted on.  The parts are not impressively differentiated, and their mysterious mutual relations and correspondences are not dwelt on.  The physical character, with its beauties, its salient traits of every kind, appealing so strongly to the sculptor to whom nature appears plastic as well as suggestive, is wholly neglected in favor of the psychological suggestion.  And the individual character, the cachet of the whole, the artistic essence and ensemble, that is to say, M. Dubois has, after the manner of most modern sculpture, conveyed in a language of convention, which since the time of the Siennese fountain, at all events, has been classical.