And in art everything depends upon
the attitude of mind. It is this which prevents Ingres from being truly
Raphaelesque, and Pradier from being really classical. If, therefore, it
can justly be said of modern French sculpture that its sympathy for the
Renaissance sculpture obscures its vision of the ideal, it is clearly to
be charged with the same absence of individual significance with which
its thick-and-thin partisans reproach the antique. The circumstance
that, like the Renaissance sculpture, it deals far more largely in
pictorial expression than the antique does, is, if it deals in them
after the Renaissance fashion and not after a fashion of its own, quite
beside the essential fact. There is really nothing in common between an
academic French sculptor of the present day and an Italian sculptor of
the fifteenth century, except the possession of what is called the
modern spirit. But the modern spirit manifests itself in an enormous
gamut, and the differences of its manifestations are as great in their
way, and so far as our interest in them is concerned, as the difference
between their inspiration and the mediaeval or the antique inspiration.
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