such epithets as majestic, Miltonic, grandiose suggest themselves first of all, than by calling attention to the range which it covers, and to the fact that, even into the domain which one would have called consecrate to the imitators of the antique and the Renaissance, M. Rodin’s informing sentiment and sense of beauty penetrate with their habitual distinction; and that the little child’s head entitled “Alsace,” that considerable portion of his work represented by “The Wave and the Shore,” for example, and a small ideal female figure, which the manufacturer might covet for reproduction, but which, as Bastien-Lepage said to me, is “a definition of the essence of art,” are really as noble as his more majestic works are beautiful.

II

Aube is another sculptor of acknowledged eminence who ranges himself with M. Rodin in his opposition to the Institute.  His figures of “Bailly” and “Dante” are very fine, full of a most impressive dignity in the ensemble, and marked by the most vigorous kind of modelling.  One may easily like his “Gambetta” less.  But for years Rodin’s only eminent fellow sculptor was Dalou.  Perhaps his protestantism has been less pronounced than M. Rodin’s.  It was certainly long more successful in winning both the connoisseur and the public.  The state itself, which is now and then even more conservative than the Institute, has charged him with important works, and the Salon has given him its highest medal.  And he was thus recognized long before M. Rodin’s works had risen out of the turmoil of critical contention to their present envied if not cordially approved eminence.  But for being less energetic, less absorbed, less intense than M. Rodin’s, M. Dalou’s enthusiasm for nature involves a scarcely less uncompromising dislike of convention.  He had no success at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.  Unlike Rodin, he entered those precincts and worked long within them, but never sympathetically or felicitously.  The rigor of academic precept was from the first excessively distasteful to his essentially and eminently romantic nature.  He chafed incessantly.  The training doubtless stood him in good stead when he found himself driven by hard necessity into commercial sculpture, into that class of work which is on a very high plane for its kind in Paris, but for which the manufacturer rather than the designer receives the credit.  But he probably felt no gratitude to it for this, persuaded that but for its despotic prevalence there would have been a clearer field for his spontaneous and agreeable effort to win distinction in.  He greatly preferred at this time the artistic anarchy of England, whither he betook himself after the Commune—­not altogether upon compulsion, but by prudence perhaps; for like Rodin, his birth, his training, his disposition, his ideas, have always been as liberal and popular in politics as in art, and in France a man of any sincerity and dignity of character has profound political