than studies in light and shade and in line. But of what remains the symbolism is one of moral ideas. Often this moral significance is so pointed and oppressive that it runs danger of lessening the artistic excellence, but in many of the etchings it is at once general and compelling, much to the gain of art. Of such gain Human Wreckage and The Absinthe Drinker are splendid examples, but even here there is a wide difference between the symbolism of Rops and that of Rodin. Rops's art is fin de siècle in its pessimism, its irony, and in a certain raffinement of the sensuous. With biting satire and in a spirit of bitter mockery it gives a world broken on the wheel of its own folly and vice. A merciless light beats down on whatever is diseased, perverse, morally rotten in modern life. The symbolism is one of moral values.

Not so with Rodin. There is neither mockery nor satire in his work, but there is a very primitive and very direct joy of life, and a very sharp sense of the dramatic and dynamic; at the heart of his symbolism are such simple ideas as: movement, unrest, passion, lust, work, play, man's early struggle with nature, thought, melancholy, bitterness. He feels all these and their elemental conflicts to the full, but his rugged optimism finds them bracing. He avoids the bourgeois symbolism of a Hogarth with its moral picture book series, and the great but too strongly moral symbolism of a Rops. Artistically the symbolism of

Mors Syphilitica is inferior to that of La Vieille Heaulmière; the idea of the ravages of a particular disease is inferior in range and power to the idea of the silent, inevitable passing from youth to old age. In contrast to a symbolism that crystallizes, Rodin's is fluid. It expresses his view that life is movement and struggle; something as unrestful and intensely dramatic in its quiet changes as in its explosive moments. It is a symbolism of life-forces in their flow and at full pressure.

This fluid, natural symbolism Rodin joins to a strong and accurate technique. He knows the anatomy and geometry of his art, and gets full plastic value out of his marble. In his best work the form is made to respond so thoroughly and readily to a symbolic idea which in turn seems to grow out of it that the impression is one of an art of stronger dramatic quality and of greater imaginative and intellectual range and wealth than was thought possible in sculpture. Rodin as a thinker on art has the insight and the courage to see the value of what made him great as an artist. He demands an unflinching observation, accuracy, individuality, skill, forceful workmanship-all at the service of an artistic purpose that catches the very breath and pulse-beat of life.

III

MAETERLINCK

Nothing in the whole world is so athirst for beauty as the soul, nor is there anything to which beauty clings so readily.

-MAETERLINCK.

MAETERLINCK's æsthetic essays might be counted on the fingers of one hand. Two-The Inner Beauty and The Tragical in Daily Life—are to be found in The Treasure of the Humble; one The Modern Drama-in The Double Garden; and one-King Lear -in The Measure of the Hours. To these must be added the fine preface to the collected plays. Then there are, of course, many incidental remarks on art and beauty.

His interest everywhere seems to lie in two problems: he attempts a new interpretation of the tragic, and he sees in beauty the self-expression of a strong and responsive soul. He ignores the social and cultural relations of art, and affords in this respect a sharp contrast to men like Hegel, Wagner, Nietzsche, Ruskin, and Tolstoy; and it is owing to this, I think, that his art and philosophy

alike lack the gritty admixture which is found in much of their work. The artistic works in few men with such purity. There is no problem or question of the day, however matter of fact or grim and urgent-war, suffrage, justice, gambling, automobiling which he fails to dissolve into a play of colors or a fantastic dance of possibilities, drawing near and receding in the dusk. His essays on gambling and the duel, The Temple of Chance and In Praise of the Sword, are good samples. One gets wonderfully vivid images, of yellow counters and blue notes and clinking gold, of the tiny ivory ball spinning and hopping "like an angry insect"; and of the flash and glint of the rapier. But one gets more than that: an ever-changing outlook and play of suggestions. The sword becomes a symbol of man's intelligence, of his high sense of honor, and of his emergence from an early state of brute force and of brutal ways of settling scores; it is likened to "a fairy bridge swung over the abyss of darkness." Such intellectual and imaginative festooning is thoroughly characteristic of Maeterlinck; it marks both the good and the bad in his art and philosophy. At its worst it suggests the spun-sugar creations of a confectioner's shop; at its best it gives a wealth of overtones, a veiled aliveness, and a constantly shifting enterprise in a world of shadowy limits.

The best starting-point for any study of Maeterlinck's personality as an artist and a thinker is a

passage in the preface to his collected plays. It was written in 1908. In it he analyzes the beauty of a work of art as follows: "First the beauty of language, then the impassioned view and portrayal of what exists about us and in us, that is, nature and our sentiments, and lastly, enveloping the whole work and forming its atmosphere, the idea formed by the poet of the unknown in which the beings and things he calls forth are drifting, and of the mystery which rules and judges them and presides over their destiny."

Of surface beauty, made up of the first and the second, there is much in Maeterlinck. He is unobtrusive, direct, and delicate in his appreciation of beautiful things. There is something Flemish in his delight in precious stones and in rich, old stuffs; something of French mediævalism at its best in his backgrounds with their castles and moats, their parks with old trees and sleepy pools, their forests and grottoes and cliffs.

He is a decorative artist of the first rank, and very original in his effects. It matters little what he is. giving: a woodcutter's hut; a convent; the gardens of Silanus with their orange-trees, cypresses, and oleanders, and their outlook on "the anemones streaming down the slopes of Bethany " and the dull green of the olive trees; the tent of Prinzivalle and its Renaissance virility and luxury; a beautiful woman*;

*SILANUS: She was clad in a raiment that seemed woven of pearls and dew, in a cloak of Tyrian purple with sapphire ornaments, and