It is not that he does
not possess charm, and charm in no mean proportion to his largeness and
nobility, but for the elevation of these into the realm of magic, into
the upper air of spontaneous spiritual activity, his imagination has,
for the romantic imagination which it is, a trifle too much
self-possession--too much sanity, if one chooses. He has the ambitions,
the faculties, of a lyric poet, and he gives us too frequently
recitative.
IV
It is agreeable in many ways to turn from the rounded and complete
impeccability of M. Dubois to the fancy of M. Saint-Marceaux. More than
any of his rivals, M. Saint-Marceaux possesses the charm of
unexpectedness. He is not perhaps to be called an original genius, and
his work will probably leave French sculpture very nearly where it found
it. Indeed, one readily perceives that he is not free from the trammels
of contemporary convention. But how easily he wears them, and if no
"severe pains and birth-throes" accompany the evolution of his
conceptions, how graceful these conceptions are! They are perhaps of the
Canova family; the "Harlequin," for instance, which has had such a
prodigious success, is essentially Milanese sculpture; essentially even
the "Genius Guarding the Secret of the Tomb" is a fantastic rather than
an original work.
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