him in this respect with one of the masters of etching -Felicien Rops. Both men are bold and forceful in technique-the one truthful and resourceful in modelling, the other sure and finished in line. Both are masters in the portrayal of the sensuous charm of woman's beauty, and with both this beauty is of a type at once robust and subtle. Eve and The Bather are matched by Rops's Flemish women with their full-bodied beauty and strong grace. Neither artist is simply graceful or simply elegant; both in aiming at ideal significance admit the ugly to the fullest extent. Quite as extreme as La Vieille Heaulmière is Rops's Mors Syphilitica. The Absinthe Drinker is mercilessly and repellently true at the utter sacrifice of all formal beauty. Skeleton and cloven foottwo devices considered obsolete Rops uses again and again, sometimes with a view to the sinister and the tragic, often with a view to the grotesque. Of the former, Dancing Death and Death at the Masked Ball are good samples; of the latter, Satan Sowing Weeds is the best. The background of this sketch is a study in black-torn bands of cloud and a struggling moon; in the lower foreground are the shadows of a great city. Flung across this scene and in the act of taking one huge stride is Satan, a skeleton, focussed from below, with grotesquely lengthened shankbones, sabots on his feet, and a sack-like cloth flung loosely across middle and shoulder, and with a head that is haunting by its sheer unlikeness to anything

but a bat in the winglike extensions and the blackringed brightness of the eyes. Satan is sowing weeds-tiny cupids that are sent tumbling toward the dark shadows of the city. Almost as grotesque and more repulsive in its ugliness is Happiness in Crime.

If Rops rivals Rodin in the use of the ugly, he outrivals him in the symbolism of his art. The dominant note of this symbolism is one of unrelieved pessimism. The Mirror of Coquetry and Shamelessness are variants of the same theme: the reflection of a simian shape is thrown across a mirror as a sardonic comment on the vanity and pride of man. Skull and cloven foot are used as symbols of the transitory, useless, and wicked thing called life. Theft and Prostitution Rule the World is the title of one of Rops's etchings; in another, The Love-Market, an old hag is motioning purchasers to the sale of a young girl. Rops's absolute mastery of sensuous form marks his symbolism all the more strongly. Much of his work is dominated by the figure of woman. Sure of her power, triumphant with the triumph of an unconscious and cruel animalism, she brings unrest, misery, and idle amusementthe Devil's own gifts; but change and death threaten this splendor of the flesh.

It would be a serious mistake to regard all of Rops's work from this point of view, for much of it is simply diablerie; some of his best drawings, the Rembrandtesque faces of old women, are nothing more

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

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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'Ss 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