interpretative Artist's imagination and originality. It is not an easy thing to do, but it is not more difficult than the artist's task of combining idealization and imitation. The path from emotional resonance to such more and more indirect self-expression means a richer and a truer philosophy.

But what of art and the resulting complications in its field? The thought-strain is beyond a doubt strongly present in much of modern art: there is an intellectual undercurrent in our architecture and our music, and a great deal of intellectual symbolism in our sculpture and painting. But it appears most plainly in the novel and the drama. Rolland's Jean Christophe, the novels of Wells and Galsworthy, those of Hardy or Anatole France, flash with intellectual cross-lights of all colors. And what shall be said of the problem play, from Ibsen to Brieux, Shaw, Zangwill, Hauptmann and Bernstein? There is everything there: social theories; social criticism; intellectual fads and fancies; bits of biology and metaphysics; a criss-cross analysis of character. One feels constantly a tugging at the universe and its problems. The question of the artistic value of such developments is not one lightly to be settled. A poem like Rabbi ben Ezra gains immensely through its intellectual vigor; so does a play like Ghosts, but artistic disintegration can be seen in Damaged Goods, The Link, and The Doctor's Dilemma, and the collapse of a thought-riddled art can be imagined. On

the other hand an intellectual freshening would do our love poets and court poets and war poets no harm. The true value of thought for art seems to me to depend on its indirectness and emotional suggestiveness. This is the rôle it plays in Rodin and in Maeterlinck. They make you feel the thrust of the universe. Back of the artist's earnestness there must be a certain freedom or playfulness, just as there must be a certain earnestness back of the playfulness of the philosopher. Downrightness and eagerness to solve problems have spoiled many a play and novel.

Such are a few of the relations between Thinker and Artist. To follow the problem further lies aside from my purpose, which is rather to consider a few individual artists and thinkers, to get some understanding of their working beliefs, and to trace the intellectual and artistic motifs which are an important, even if at times hidden, part of their art and their philosophy.

II

RODIN

Lines and colors are for us only signs of hidden realities. Our eyes plunge beyond the surfaces to the spirit.-RODIN.

It is perhaps too early for a final estimate of Rodin's work. Time has done much in the way of giving the necessary perspective, but with so startling, so revolutionary an artist it must do much more. Certain prejudices have been cleared away; and to-day at the age of seventy-four Rodin has taken his place at the head of French sculptors as a man of ripe achievement. This recognition he owes largely to himself. He remained unshaken by the ridicule of the press, and was utterly indifferent to the adverse comments of the critics. He took his time; worked in his own way; refused to modify his designs; kept to his ideals and his technique; and routed the scoffers and faultfinders by sheer force of artistic purpose. It is easy to be too severe with these critics. After all there is some excuse for their hostility; they had a right to distrust a sculptor who offered as his début The Man with the Broken Nose, and who, when commissioned to design a statue of

Balzac, submitted as his sketch jagged, grotesquely sensual features and a huge mass of body wrapped in a formless dressing gown. It was but human to attack a man whose attitude of cheerful independence seemed insulting and whose work could not be made to square with their pet theories. They have had their say, and time has unsaid it. We credit ourselves with greater insight, but it would, I think, be rash of us to deny that we are too near to judge completely and surely, and that much remains for Time, the sifter and shifter of values.

But this much may be said even now of Rodin's sculpture, that it shows a technique which is forceful and resourceful as well as radical, dramatic quality, nervous strength; and that it is intense, imaginative, and intellectually stimulating. Such things are rare in modern sculpture, which at its best is too often simply smooth, graceful or piquant, and at its worst theatrical and lifeless. It gives the impression of being a thing without resource or vitality. Modern music and poetry are vibrant with the spirit of the times; why should sculpture alone of all the arts fail to give something of the passionateness and richness of modern life? Rodin has proved once for all that the fault lies not with sculpture itself, that it, too, can be made responsive and vital; he has broken new ground and shown sculpture to be still very much alive.

His art is not his only answer to the critics. He

has defended his ideals and his technique, has done it brilliantly and incidentally, as only a Frenchman can; he has jotted down his thoughts on art in, notebooks; and allowed himself to be interviewed freely. There is hardly a critical study of Rodin in which abundant use has not been made of this material. Perhaps the completest and most suggestive collections published are those of Gsell and Judith Cladel. Some allowance must, of course be made for partisanship, but enough remains. All these sayings of Rodin's give the same impression: of a critic who is unaffected, earnest, and appreciative of fine points; of an artist who takes his art very seriously, reflects on its trend and its sources of inspiration, and refuses to be classed as merely a maker. They are the credo of a reflective artist; they are not afterthoughts; and they are anything but academic. In them may be found the verve, the imaginative boldness, and the intellectual quality so characteristic of Rodin's sculpture. When there is such a parallelism it is worth while to trace it by getting independently the marking qualities of the man's work and then passing on to the sayings, which are the self-expression of the Artist and the Thinker in one.

As a worker in marble and bronze, Rodin is not a believer in smooth, highly polished surfaces, and in the large, monotonous planes of groups in repose. Occasionally he aims very successfully at smoothness