Steinbock, emulating
these emasculated but charming men, grew every day more averse to hard
work. As soon as he began a thing, he was conscious of all its
difficulties, and the discouragement that came over him enervated his
will. Inspiration, the frenzy of intellectual procreation, flew
swiftly away at the sight of this effete lover.
Sculpture--like dramatic art--is at once the most difficult and the
easiest of all arts. You have but to copy a model, and the task is
done; but to give it a soul, to make it typical by creating a man or a
woman--this is the sin of Prometheus. Such triumphs in the annals of
sculpture may be counted, as we may count the few poets among men.
Michael Angelo, Michel Columb, Jean Goujon, Phidias, Praxiteles,
Polycletes, Puget, Canova, Albert Durer, are the brothers of Milton,
Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Tasso, Homer, and Moliere. And such an
achievement is so stupendous that a single statue is enough to make a
man immortal, as Figaro, Lovelace, and Manon Lescaut have immortalized
Beaumarchais, Richardson, and the Abbe Prevost.
Superficial thinkers--and there are many in the artist world--have
asserted that sculpture lives only by the nude, that it died with the
Greeks, and that modern vesture makes it impossible.
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