You may enjoy
or resent their classic and exemplary excellences, as you feel your
taste to have suffered from the lack or the superabundance of academic
influences; I cannot fancy an American insensitive to their charm. But
it is plain that their perfection is a very different thing from the
characteristics of a strenuous artistic personality seeking expression.
If these latter when encountered are seen to be evidently of an
extremely high order, contemporary criticism, at all events, should feel
at once the wisdom of beginning with the endeavor to appreciate, instead
of making the degree of its own familiarity with them the test of their
merit.
French aesthetic authority, which did this in the instances of Barye, of
Delacroix, of Millet, of Manet, of Puvis de Chavannes, did it also for
many years in the instance of M. Rodin. It owes its defeat in the
contest with him--for like the recalcitrants in the other contests, M.
Rodin has definitively triumphed--to the unwise attempt to define him in
terms heretofore applicable enough to sculptors, but wholly inapplicable
to him.
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