Promenades of an Impressionist

his thick clairvoyant fingers. Misunderstood, therefore misrepresented, he with his pride and obstinacy aroused-the one buttressing the other-was not to be budged from his formulas and pract

sale denunciation of his work as erotic is unluckily still green in our memory. The sculptor, who in 1877 was accused of "faking" his life-like Age of Brass-now at the Luxembourg-by taking a mould from the living model, also exp

source to the brim, accelerate the speed of its current, and artistic deterioration may ensue. Rodin has been called, fatuously, the second Michael Angelo-as if there could ever be a replica of any human. He has been hailed as a modern Praxiteles. And he is often damned as a myopic decadent whose insensibility to pure line and deficien

fallen to humiliations, but his spirit has never been quelled, and if each acclivity he scales is steeper, the air atop has grown purer, more stimulating, and the landscape spreads wider before him. He can say with Dante: "La montagna che drizza voi che il mondo fece torti." Rodin's mountain has

d, always becomes enraged at the word "inspiration," enraged at the common notion that fire descends from heaven upon the head of the favoured neophyte of art. Rodin believes in but one inspiration-nature. He swears he does not invent, but copies nature. He despises improvisation, has contemptuous words for "fatal facility," and, being a slow-moving, slow-thinking man, he admits to his councils those who have conquered art, not by assault, but by stealth and after

he base of a mountain and as impressive as the mountain. Yet a pleasant, unassuming, sane man, interested in his clay-absolutely-that is, unless you discover him to be more interested in humanity. If you watch him well you may find yourself well watched; those peering eyes possess a vision that plunges into your soul. And the soul this master of marbles sees as nude as he sees the human body. It is the union of artist and psychologist that places Rodin apar

had resisted this universal disintegration, this imbroglio of the arts. No sculptor before Rodin had dared to break the line, dared to shiver the syntax of stone. For sculpture is a static, not a dynamic art-is it not? Let us observe the rules, though we preserve the chill spirit of the cemetery. What Mallarmé attempted to do with French poetry Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles do not represent but present emotion, are the evocation of emotion itself; as in music, form and substance coalesce. If he does not, as did Mallarmé, arouse "the silent thunder afloat in the leaves," he can summon from the vasty deep the spirits of love, hate, pain, despair, sin, beauty, ecstasy; above all, ecstasy. Now the primal gift of ecsta

ingdom of Heaven, there are many mansions. Possibly it was a relic of his early admiration and study of Baudelaire that set Wagner to extorting ecstasy from his orchestra by images of death and love; and no doubt the temperament which seeks such combinations-a temperament commoner in medi?val days than ours-was inherent in Wagner. He makes his Isolde sing mournfully and madly over a corpse and, throwing herself upon the dead body of Tristan, die shaken by the sweet cruel pains of love. Richard Strauss closely patterns after Wagner in his Salome, there is the head of a dead man, and there is the same dissolving ecstasy. Both men play with similar counters-love and death, and