[Illustration: THE GAMBETTA STATUE, PARIS.
In the course of a conversation with the French sculptor, M. Jean Carries, that artist once defined to the writer the whole position of the French school of to-day.
"Its aim is life--animation--drama. To leave anything dormant is to leave the stone as you found it, and to acknowledge the futility of your genius. All the characteristics of life might be imparted to even a modern street costume.
"Only a tailor or a person deficient in culture would criticise the trousers of the Gambetta statue. Such a person would say, 'But I have never seen them in the Boulevards or in the Palais Bourbon.' Of course he has not; and what then? Did Raphael ever see an angel, or Michael Angelo a faun? No. A pair of widely-cut trousers with a single crease or fold might answer very well for a tailor's dummy; but it would not do at all for a chiselled human figure, which must express potential life."
"Idealism? Sense of the picturesque? Fiddlesticks!" declared Mr. George Wade, an exceptionally talented English sculptor, pausing in his work of modelling a full-length statue of a recently-deceased statesman. "Unless art in portraiture possess a rigid fidelity it is not, in my humble judgment, worth the cost of the stone or bronze necessary to evolve it. Idealism!--that is the cry of the sculptor who is deficient--who is dependent rather upon the resources of a departed school than of himself. Why should a sculptor seek to be otherwise than faithful, even to the buttons on the waistcoat of his subject? To cite an instance, some time ago Sir Charles Tupper, viewing my first model for the MacDonald statue, observed: 'I see you have buttoned only a single button of Sir John's coat. I never remember seeing my friend's coat not entirely buttoned. It was one of his characteristics.' When my visitor left I destroyed the old and commenced a new model.
[Illustration: SIR JOHN MACDONALD, BY G. E. WADE.
"If it is characteristic of the subject in hand to wear disreputable trousers--very good. I should so model them. If, on the contrary, they were worn faultlessly smooth, it would contribute nothing to my conception of the wearer's identity to invest them with bulges and creases which, if not absolutely and physically impossible, would only be so in Pongee silk and not in the heavy fabric usually employed in trousering. I am not aware that public personages clothe their limbs in Pongee silk. Were this the case it would be so much the better for us. In practice I do not believe in that picturesque ruggedness about the knees which seems so attractive to the average sculptor. I am told that Sir Edward Burne-Jones spent many hours in the course of a single day in the study and device of new complex folds and sinuosities in the most delicate textile stuffs, and that it seems not altogether irrational to believe is the employment of many English and French sculptors when they set about making a pair of trousers.