it is even modish.  It illustrates not merely the abstract turn of conceiving a subject which Rude always shared with the great classicists of his art, but also the arbitrariness of treatment against which he always protested.  Without at all knowing it, he was in a very intimate sense an eclectic in many of his works.  He believed in forming a complete mental conception of every composition before even posing a model, as he used to tell his students, but in complicated compositions this was impossible, and he had small talent for artificial composition.  Furthermore, he often distrusted—­quite without reason, but after the fatal manner of the rustic—­his own intuitions.  But one mentions these qualifications of his genius and accomplishment only because both his genius and accomplishment are so distinguished as to make one wish they were more nearly perfect than they are.  It is really idle to wish that Rude had neglected the philosophy of his art, with which he was so much occupied, and had devoted himself exclusively to treating sculptural subjects in the manner of a nineteenth century successor of Sluters and Anthoniet.  He might have been a greater sculptor than he was, but he is sufficiently great as he is.  If his “Mercury” is an essay in conventional sculpture, his “Petit Pecheur” is frank and free sculptural handling of natural material.  His work at Lille and in Belgium, his reclining figure of Cavaignac in the cemetery of Montmartre, his noble figures of Gaspard Monge at Beaune, of Marshal Bertrand, and of Ney, are all cast in the heroic mould, full of character, and in no wise dependent on speculative theory.  Few sculptors have displayed anything like his variety and range, which extends, for example, from the “Baptism of Christ” to a statue of “Louis XIII. enfant,” and includes portraits, groups, compositions in relief, and heroic statues.  In all his successful work one cannot fail to note the force and fire of the man’s personality, and perhaps what one thinks of chiefly in connection with him is the misfortune which we owe to the vacillation of M. Thiers of having but one instead of four groups by him on the piers of the Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile.  Carpeaux used to say that he never passed the “Chant du Depart” without taking off his hat.  One can understand his feeling.  No one can have any appreciation of what sculpture is without perceiving that this magnificent group easily and serenely takes its rank among the masterpieces of sculpture of all time.  It is, in the first place, the incarnation of an abstraction, the spirit of patriotism roused to the highest pitch of warlike intensity and self-sacrifice, and in the second this abstract motive is expressed in the most elaborate and comprehensive completeness—­with a combined intricacy of detail and singleness of effect which must be the despair of any but a master in sculpture.

VI