makes up to a degree for any lack of sympathetic sentiment or impressive significance:  witness his excellent “Maternal Instruction,” of the little park in front of Sainte Clothilde.  M. Le Feuvre’s qualities are very nearly the reverse of these:  he has a fondness for integrity quite hostile in his case to simplicity.  In his very frank appeal to one’s susceptibility he is a little careless of sculptural considerations, which he is prone to sacrifice to pictorial ends.  The result is a mannerism that in the end ceases to impress, and even becomes disagreeable.  As nearly as may be in a French sculptor it borders on sentimentality, and finally the swaying attitudes of his figures become limp, and the startled-fawn eyes of his maidens and youths appear less touching than lackadaisical.  But his being himself too conscious of it should not obscure the fact that he has a way of his own.  M. Barrias is an artist of considerably greater powers than either M. Le Feuvre or M. Delaplanche; but one has a vague perception that his powers are limited, and that to desire in his case what one so sincerely wishes in the case of M. Dubois, namely, that he would “let himself go,” would be unwise.  Happily, when he is at his best there is no temptation to form such a wish.  The “Premieres Funerailles” is a superb work—­“the chef-d’oeuvre of our modern sculpture,” a French critic enthusiastically terms it.  It is hardly that; it has hardly enough spiritual distinction—­not quite enough of either elegance or elevation—­to merit such sweeping praise.  But it may be justly termed, I think, the most completely representative of the masterpieces of that sculpture.  Its triumph over the prodigious difficulties of elaborate composition “in the round”—­difficulties to which M. Barrias succumbed in the “Spartacus” of the Tuileries Gardens—­and its success in subordinating the details of a group to the end of enforcing a single motive, preserving the while their individual interest, are complete.  Nothing superior in this respect has been done since John of Bologna’s “Rape of the Sabines.”

VII

M. Emmanuel Fremiet occupies a place by himself.  There have been but two modern sculptors who have shown an equally pronounced genius for representing animals—­namely, Barye, of course, and Barye’s clever but not great pupil, Cain.  The tigress in the Central Park, perhaps the best bronze there (the competition is not exacting), and the best also of the several variations of the theme of which, at one time, the sculptor apparently could not tire, familiarizes Americans with the talent of Cain.  In this association Rouillard, whose horse in the Trocadero Gardens is an animated and elegant work, ought to be mentioned, but it is hardly as good as the neighboring elephant of Fremiet as mere animal representation (the genre exists and has excellences and defects of its own), while in more purely artistic worth it