principles there; he refers to the modelling of the Venus dei Medici and the rush and sweep of the Victory of Samothrace. Still there is hardly anything at all like his principle of progressive movement in Greek sculpture; and Greek modelling seems much less given to uneven, jagged or furrowed surfaces. The truth must lie deeper; in certain thoroughly modern artistic demands and ideals expressed in Rodin's art and shadowed forth imperfectly in his reflection. No one would deny extreme individuality to his work. And no one with the vagaries of our younger painters and poets in mind would deny that the demand for individuality is very strong in our latter-day art. It dominates conception and technique. In sculpture individuality of technique is so difficult a matter that artists of the stature of Canova and Thorvaldsen failed to achieve it. Rodin seeks to gain it by the breaking up of surfaces, by projections and indentations, by accentuating and deepening; and, in spite of what he says, he is not a disciple of the Greeks in this. Letting the light of a lamp glide over the surface of the Venus dei Medici is hardly a fair test, for the headlights of an automobile will make the smoothest asphalt road appear as badly dented as a battered piece of tin. Rather is it the modern demand for a perfectly individualized surface and a modern restive technique that make themselves felt. /Again, such a principle as that of progressive movement in sculpture is simply one instance more

of the psychological factor in modern art. The essentially unstable, fluid, transforming character of processes of attention and perception is recognized here as well as in impressionistic painting and in the incessant transmutations of Wagnerian music.

Rodin's emphasis on movement touches still another demand; a demand that goes beyond questions of technique to the fundamental question: "What is sculpture to portray?" Life as movement, Rodin answers. Of the artist he says that for him "/life is an infinite enjoyment, a constant ecstasy, a distracted intoxication." This breaks at once with the traditional view of sculpture as a self-contained, placid art, creator of gleaming marbles at rest, and asks for a dynamic and restless sculpture to parallel life in its restlessness and energy. In this sense Rodin's art is thoroughly modern. Everywhere, from the most surprising quarters, and in various forms, comes the demand for an interpretation of life as movement. Philosophy and art alike show this drift of the modern consciousness. It is seen in Bergson's élan vital; in the Futurist's stress on youth and the Futurist ideal of an art out of breath. It appears, at once more vigorous and saner, in the artistic ideals of Rodin.

This demand for an art which is to reflect movement and cosmic struggle carries us into the very heart of Rodin's artistic beliefs. It implies the rejection of beauty, in the sense of the regular, the harmonious,

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.

66 6

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.

66 6 '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