that systematically and not spontaneously; the predominance of the painter’s personality is plain in every detail of his creation.  Chapu’s “Maid” is the ideal, more or less perfectly expressed; she is everybody’s “Maid,” more or less adequately embodied.  The statue is the antipodes of the conventional much more so, even, to our modern sense, than that of Rude; it suggests no competition with that at Versailles or the many other characterless conceptions that abound.  It is full of expression—­arrested just before it ceases to be suggestive; of individuality restrained on the hither side of peculiarity.  The “Maid” is hearing her “voices” as distinctly as Bastien-Lepage’s figure is, but the fact is not forced upon the sense, but is rather disclosed to the mind with great delicacy and the dignity becoming sculpture.  No one could, of course, mistake this work for an antique—­an error that might possibly be made, supposing the conditions favorable, in the case of Chapu’s “Mercury;” but it presents, nevertheless, an excellent illustration of a modern working naturally and freely in the antique spirit.  It is as affecting, as full of direct appeal, as a modern work essays to be; but its appeal is to the sense of beauty, to the imagination, and its effect is wrought in virtue of its art and not of its reality.  No, individuality is no more inconsistent with the antique spirit than it is with eccentricity, with the extravagances of personal expression.  Is there more individuality in a thirteenth-century grotesque than in the “Faun” of the Capitol?  For sculpture especially, art is eminently, as it has been termed, “the discipline of genius,” and it is only after the sculptor’s genius has submitted to the discipline of culture that it evinces an individuality which really counts, which is really thrown out in relief on the background of crude personality.  And if there be no question of perfection, but only of the artist’s attitude, one has but to ask himself the real meaning of the epithet Shakespearian to be assured of the harmony between individuality and the most impersonal practice.

Nevertheless, this attitude and this perfection, characteristic as they are of Chapu’s work, have their peril.  When the quickening impulse, of whose expression they are after all but conditions, fails, they suddenly appear so misplaced as to render insignificant what would otherwise have seemed “respectable” enough work.  Everywhere else of great distinction—­even in the execution of so perfunctory a task as a commission for a figure of “Mechanical Art” in the Tribunal de Commerce—­at the great Triennial Exposition of 1883 Chapu was simply insignificant.  There was never a more striking illustration of the necessity of constant renewal of inspiration, of the constant danger of lapse into the perfunctory and the hackneyed, which threatens an artist of precisely Chapu’s qualities.  Another of equal eminence escapes this peril; there is not the same interdependence