And this, indeed, is what
makes his work so flawless in our eyes, so impeccable. It seems as if of
what he attempts he attains the type itself; everyone must recognize its
justness.
The reader will say at once here that I am cavilling at M. Dubois for
what I praised in Chapu. But let us distinguish. The two artists belong
to wholly different categories. Chapu's inspiration is the antique
spirit. M. Dubois, is, like all academic French sculptors, except Chapu
indeed, absolutely and integrally a romanticist, completely enamoured of
the Renaissance. The two are so distinct as to be contradictory. The
moment M. Dubois gives us the _type_ in a "Florentine Minstrel," to the
exclusion of the personal and the particular, he fails in
imaginativeness and falls back on the conventional. The _type_ of a
"Florentine Minstrel" is infallibly a convention. M. Dubois, not being
occupied directly with the ideal, is bound to carry his subject and its
idiosyncrasies much farther than the observer could have foreseen. To
rest content with expressing gracefully and powerfully the notion common
to all connoisseurs is to fall short of what one justly exacts of the
romantic artist.
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