Dubois, it is not of this that one
thinks so much as of a certain individual character with which M.
Saint-Marceaux always contrives to endue it. This is not always in its
nature sculptural, it must be admitted, and it approaches perhaps too
near the character of _genre_ to have the enduring interest that purely
sculptural qualities possess. But it is always individual, piquant, and
charming, and in it consists M. Saint-Marceaux's claim upon us as an
artist. No one else, even given his powers of workmanship, that is to
say as perfectly equipped as he, could have treated so thoroughly
conventional a _genre_ subject as the "Harlequin" as he has treated it.
The mask is certainly one of the stock properties of the subject, but
notice how it is used to confer upon the whole work a character of
mysterious witchery. It is as a whole, if you choose, an _article de
Paris_, with the distinction of being seriously treated; the modelling
and the movement admirable as far as they go, but well within the bounds
of that anatomically artistic expression which is the _raison d'etre_ of
sculpture and its choice of the human form as its material.
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