the pleasing, as the aim of sculpture and the acceptance of expressiveness, character, and symbolical content as the ideal. It extends the range and shifts the emphasis. Rodin often discusses the place of ugliness, of expression, and thought in sculpture. A passage like the following begins with the problem of ugliness-La Vieille Heaulmière being under discussion-but widens out into all the others:

“‘Master,' I said to my host,' no one admires more than I do this astounding figure, but I hope you will not be angry if I tell you what effect it has on the visitors, especially the women visitors, at the Musée du Luxembourg.

"You will oblige me by telling me.'

"Well, the public in general turns away, exclaiming: "How ugly that is!" and I have often seen women cover their eyes in order to spare themselves that sight.' "Rodin began to laugh heartily.

"My work must be eloquent to call forth such lively impressions. Beyond doubt such persons fear basic truths when they are too harsh.

"But the only thing that matters is the opinion of men of taste. I have been delighted to gather their votes on my Vieille Heaulmière. I am like the Roman singer who answered the hisses of the crowd by saying, "I sing for the nobles," which means, the connoisseurs.

"The crowd likes to believe that what it judges to be ugly in actual life is not fit matter for art. It would like to forbid our picturing what it finds displeasing or offensive in nature.

"That is a serious error on its part. What is

commonly called ugliness in nature can in art become very beautiful. In the class of actual objects we call ugly what is misshapen, what is unhealthy, what suggests the idea of disease, weakness, suffering, what violates regularity-that sign and condition of health and strength: a cripple is ugly, a sabre is ugly, misery in rags is ugly. Ugly again are the soul and the actions of an immoral man, of a vicious and criminal man, of an abnormal man dangerous to society; ugly is the soul of the parricide, the traitor, the ambitious man without scruples.

"It is fit that beings and objects from which we can expect nothing but ill be marked by an odious epithet.

"When, however, a great artist or writer takes hold of one of these uglinesses he at once transfigures it, with a stroke of his magic wand he makes of it a thing of beauty. It is alchemy; it is witchery!

"When Velasquez paints Sebastian, the court fool of Philip IV, he gives him so moving a look that we read in it at once the sorrowful secret of this cripple, who in order to earn a living is forced to give up his dignity as a human being, to become a plaything, a living cap and bells. And the more poignant is the martyrdom of this consciousness lodged in a monstrous body, the more beautiful is the work of the artist.

"When François Millet pictures a poor peasant who stops for a breathing spell; leaning on his hoea sufferer broken by weariness, cooked by the sun, as brutish as a beast of burden raked with blowsall that is needed is to discover in the expression of this damned one resignation to torture decreed by

fate, and this creature of a nightmare becomes a magnificent symbol of humanity at large.

"When Baudelaire describes a foul carcass, slimy and eaten by worms, and when he pictures under this frightful image his adored mistress, nothing could equal in splendor this horrible opposition between beauty one would wish eternal and the fearful disintegration that awaits it.

And yet you will be like this filth, this horrible infection, Star of my eyes, Sun of my nature! O my angel and my passion!

Yes, such you will be, O queen of graces, after the last sacraments, when you shall go under the sod lush with blossoms, to rot among the bones,

Then, O my Beauty, tell the vermin that devour you with kisses that I have guarded the form and the divine essence of my decomposed loves.

"It is the same when Shakespeare paints Iago or Richard III, when Racine paints Nero and Narcissus: moral ugliness interpreted by minds so clear and penetrating becomes a marvellous theme of beauty. "In short, the beautiful in art is simply what has character.

""Character is the intense truth of any sight or scene of nature whether beautiful or ugly; it might even be called a double truth, for it is the truth within translated by that of without; it is the soul, feeling, idea, as they are expressed by the lines of a face, the gestures and acts of a human being, the tones of the sky or the line of an horizon.

"For the great artist everything in nature offers

character, for the incorruptible candor of his observation pushes to the hidden sense of everything. And what is thought of as ugly in nature often presents more character than what is styled beautiful, for in the contractions of a sickly face, in the smirk of a vicious mask, in every deformity and every blight, the inner truth bursts forth more easily than in regular and sound features.

666 And since it is simply the strength of character that makes the beautiful in art, it follows that often a thing is the more beautiful in art the uglier it is in nature. That alone is ugly in art which lacks character, that is to say, has no outer or inner truth. Ugly in art is what is false or artificial, what seeks to be pretty or beautiful instead of being expressive; what is clownish or affected, what smiles without motive, what is handled without reason, what bends or straightens itself without cause: everything that is without soul and without truth, everything that is a parading of beauty or grace, everything that lies.

"When an artist for the purpose of embellishing nature adds green to the springtime, rose to the dawn, red to young lips, he creates ugliness, because he lies.

"When he softens the grimace of pain, the flabbiness of old age, the hideousness of the perverse, when he arranges Nature, when he veils her, disguises her, when he softens her in order to please an ignorant public, he creates ugliness because he is afraid of the truth.

"For an artist worthy of the name everything in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, accepting boldly every outer truth, read therein without pain and as in an open book every inner truth.

"He need only look at a human countenance in order to decipher a soul; not a single trait deceives him; hypocrisy is to him as transparent as sincerity; the angle of a forehead, the least knitting of the eyebrows, a passing glance, reveal to him the secrets of a heart.

"He examines the spirit folded up in an animal. He sees in the look and the movements of an animal its whole moral life-that rough sketch of feelings and thoughts, a heavy intelligence and the rudiments of tenderness. In the same way he is the confidant of inanimate nature!"

This passage should be supplemented by one of the several in which Rodin discusses the sense of mystery and the nature of symbolism. In one of the later conversations with Gsell he defines religion as the sense of mystery, as "the push of our consciousness toward the infinite, the eternal, toward a knowledge and a love without limits." This sense of mystery every great artist has. He then continues:

"If religion did not exist I should have to invent it. True artists are in short the most religious of men. "It is commonly believed that we artists live only by our senses, and that the world of appearances satisfies us. We are thought to be children who are drunk with brilliant colors and who amuse themselves with shapes as with dolls. We are not well understood. Lines and tints are for us only signs of hidden realities. Our eyes plunge beyond the surfaces to the spirit. When we present contours we enrich them with a spiritual content which they are to envelop.