events of 1870-71 (so lightly considered by those who only see the theatric side of French character) could treat.  Its general interest, too, is hardly inferior; there is something generally ennobling in the celebration of the virtues of the brave defeated that surpasses the commonplace of paeans.  M. Mercie was, in this sense, more fortunate than the sculptor to whom the Berlinese owe the bronze commemoration of their victory.  Perhaps to call his treatment entirely worthy of the theme, is to forget the import of such works as the tombs of the Medici Chapel at Florence.  There is a region into whose precincts the dramatic quality penetrates only to play an insufficient part.  But in modern art to do more than merely to keep such truths in mind, to insist on satisfactory plastic illustrations of them, is not only to prepare disappointment for one’s self, but to risk misjudging admirable and elevated effort; and to regret the fact that France had only M. Mercie and not Michael Angelo to celebrate her “Gloria Victis” is to commit both of these errors.  After all, the subjects are different, and the events of 1870-71 had compensations for France which the downfall of Florentine liberty was without; so that, indeed, a note of unmixed melancholy, however lofty its strain, would have been a discord which M. Mercie has certainly avoided.  He has avoided it in rather a marked way, it is true.  His monument is dramatic and stirring rather than inwardly moving.  It is rhetorical rather than truly poetic; and the admirable quality of its rhetoric, its complete freedom from vulgar or sentimental alloy—­its immense superiority to Anglo-Saxon rhetoric, in fine—­does not conceal the truth that it is rhetoric, that it is prose and not poetry after all.  Mercie’s “Gloria Victis” is very fine; I know nothing so fine in modern sculpture outside of France.  But then there is not very much that is fine at all in modern sculpture outside of France; and modern French sculpture, and M. Mercie along with it as one of its most eminent ornaments, have made it impossible to speak of them in a relative way.  The antique and the Renaissance sculpture alone furnish their fit association, and like the Renaissance and the antique sculpture they demand a positive and absolute, and not a comparative criticism.

V

Well, then, speaking thus absolutely and positively, the cardinal defect of the Institute sculpture—­and the refined and distinguished work of M. Mercie better perhaps than almost any other assists us to see this—­is its over-carefulness for style.  This is indeed the explanation of what I mentioned at the outset as the chief characteristic of this sculpture, the academic inelasticity, namely, with which it essays to reproduce the Renaissance romanticism.  But for the fondness for style integral in the French mind and character, it would perceive the contradiction between this romanticism and any canons except such