Such excellences
have assuredly their place. When the motive is conventional or otherwise
insipid, or even when its character is distinctly light without being
trivial, they are legitimately enough agreeable. And because, in our
day, sculptural motives have generally been of this order we have become
accustomed to look for such excellences, and, very justly, to miss them
when they are absent. Grace of pose, suavity of outline, pleasing
disposition of mass, smooth, round deltoids and osseous articulations,
and perpetually changing planes of flesh and free play of muscular
movement, are excellences which, in the best of academic French
sculpture, are sensuously delightful in a high degree. But they
invariably rivet our attention on the successful way in which the
sculptor has used his bronze or marble to decorative ends, and when they
are accentuated so as to dominate the idea they invariably enfeeble its
expression. With M. Rodin one does not think of his material at all; one
does not reflect whether he used it well or ill, caused it to lose
weight and immobility to the eye or not, because all his superficial
modelling appears as an inevitable deduction from the way in which he
has conceived his larger subject, and not as "handling" at all.
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