One
may easily like his "Gambetta" less. But for years Rodin's only eminent
fellow sculptor was Dalou. Perhaps his protestantism has been less
pronounced than M. Rodin's. It was certainly long more successful in
winning both the connoisseur and the public. The state itself, which is
now and then even more conservative than the Institute, has charged him
with important works, and the Salon has given him its highest medal. And
he was thus recognized long before M. Rodin's works had risen out of the
turmoil of critical contention to their present envied if not cordially
approved eminence. But for being less energetic, less absorbed, less
intense than M. Rodin's, M. Dalou's enthusiasm for nature involves a
scarcely less uncompromising dislike of convention. He had no success at
the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Unlike Rodin, he entered those precincts and
worked long within them, but never sympathetically or felicitously. The
rigor of academic precept was from the first excessively distasteful to
his essentially and eminently romantic nature. He chafed incessantly.
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