it.  This is not always in its nature sculptural, it must be admitted, and it approaches perhaps too near the character of genre to have the enduring interest that purely sculptural qualities possess.  But it is always individual, piquant, and charming, and in it consists M. Saint-Marceaux’s claim upon us as an artist.  No one else, even given his powers of workmanship, that is to say as perfectly equipped as he, could have treated so thoroughly conventional a genre subject as the “Harlequin” as he has treated it.  The mask is certainly one of the stock properties of the subject, but notice how it is used to confer upon the whole work a character of mysterious witchery.  It is as a whole, if you choose, an article de Paris, with the distinction of being seriously treated; the modelling and the movement admirable as far as they go, but well within the bounds of that anatomically artistic expression which is the raison d’etre of sculpture and its choice of the human form as its material.  But the character saves it from this category; what one may almost call its psychological interest redeems its superficial triviality.

M. Saint-Marceaux is always successful in this way.  One has only to look at the eyes of his figures to be convinced how subtle is his art of expressing character.  Here he swings quite clear of all convention and manifests his genius positively and directly.  The unfathomable secret of the tomb is in the spiritual expression of the guarding genius, and the elaborately complex movement concentrated upon the urn and directly inspired by the ephebes of the Sistine ceiling is a mere blind.  The same is true of the portrait heads which within his range M. Saint Marceaux does better than almost anyone.  M. Renan’s “Confessions” hardly convey as distinct a notion of character as his bust exhibited at the Triennial of 1883.  Many of the sculptors’ anonymous heads, so to speak, are hardly less remarkable.  Long after the sharp edge of one’s interest in the striking pose of his “Harlequin” and the fine movement and bizarre features of his “Genius” has worn away, their curious spiritual interest, the individual cachet of their character, will sustain them.  And so integrally true is this of all the productions of M. Saint-Marceaux’s talent, that it is quite as perceptible in works where it is not accentuated and emphasized as it is in those of which I have been speaking; it is a quality that will bear refining, that is even better indeed in its more subtle manifestations.  The figure of the Luxembourg Gallery, the young Dante reading Virgil, is an example; a girl’s head, the forehead swathed in a turban, first exhibited some years ago, is another.  The charm of these is more penetrating, though they are by no means either as popular or as “important” works as the “Genius of the Tomb” or the “Harlequin.”  In the time to come M. Saint-Marceaux will probably rely more and more on their quality of grave and yet alert distinction, and less on striking and eccentric variations of themes from Michael Angelo like the “Genius,” and illustrations like the “Harlequin” of the artistic potentialities of the Canova sculpture.