element, but they are grand, and not disgusting. Donatello's Magdalene is pathetic, and not loathsome. And as to Millet's Angelus, or his Glaneuses, they are full of the most subtle and exquisite grace. The Peasant with the Hoe is a composition as full of dignity as of simplicity. Yes! Millet's work really transforms the plainest and rudest laborers into figures radiant with the glory of simple Nature. That is the magic of true art. But Rodin's coarse types remain ugly brutes. And his Old Strumpet is nothing but a naked hag.

Great as Rodin is as sculptor, he often in this book appears even as literary critic rather than artist, sometimes almost as poet. He says some fine, true, and useful things. But when he handles his clay and begins to put his ideas of Nature into form, the craze for the ugly, the grotesque, and the morbid seems to overpower his sense of beauty, and with all his genius, his power, and his superb technical gifts, he produces too often caricatures not masterpieces. No judge of art, whether he sits in the ranks of the "Knights" or of the Plebs in the pit, denies that an artist can make a beautiful work out of the plainest and the commonest themes. Murillo and Velazquez did, Millet did, Israels did. But he must issue in beautiful and noble works of art, not in facsimiles of what is repulsive and nauseous. Now the John the Baptist of Rodin is an over-trained and coarse-limbed boxer in an ungainly attitude. The feet and hands may be "true," but they are unsightly; the Prophet's head is fine, but sits oddly on a stark-naked athlete. The Burghers of Calais has some powerful figures, and from the literary point of view it is an original and telling conception. But one or two of the figures are in grotesque and ludicrous attitudes. Perhaps when they came before Edward the Third with halters

round their necks they did not look graceful. But we trust they did not look absurd. Rodin has exerted his powers of caricature in making them ungainly mummers fit to make a crowd laugh.

was

Rodin, the romancer à la Hugo, is constantly carrying away the imagination of Rodin the sculptor. Unnatural monstrosities, nightmares, and Zolaesque and Doré-esque fantasies crowd his fertile brain-for he is a real poet-and they seize his hand when he begins to model. Blake was like this-but Blake more the poet than the artist; Leonardo even had a love of grotesque. But there is nothing either laughable or disgusting in Leonardo or in Blake, whatever monstrosity crossed their brain; and they were painters, not sculptors. But Rodin's Female Centaur is monstrous, and ugly, and laughable all at once. His Faun and Nymph is coarse and absurd. Whatever of the monstrous, the unnatural, the morbid, is possible in literature, even in painting, this sculpture, with its definite solidity, its objective fixity, its tangible permanence, rejects from its sphere. We can imagine in poetry Satans, Apollyons, Minotaurs, Dragons, and Ghosts, and even may have them on canvas or in etchings, but they are impracticable and silly when fashioned in the objective solidity of marble. The bloody sockets of Oedipus or the snaky tresses of the Furies would not be tragic in stone. And even Rodin's genius could hardly convince us by making a statue of Banquo's ghost. It is a fatal snare when a man of genius in more than one domain loses all sense of the motives, limits, and conditions of the different arts.

The radical sophism on which much of Rodin's art is built is that which infects some things of Ibsen, Zola, Gorkhi, at times even of Tolstoi, and the small fry of the brutalizing Deca

dence. It is the dogma that there is nothing in Nature-nothing visible which is not a fitting subject for art, that when the artist presents in vivid words or form what he has seen, or can see, it is for the world to admire, and no one can complain. The most repulsive, unnatural, unmentionable act or sight, when represented with striking truth, becomes a work of art, and, according to Rodin, beautiful by its artistic power. This is an absurd sophism. Every hour of every day, in every street, or house, or room, with every man, woman, child, or animal, in every hospital, prison, mortuary, or battle-field, are infinite sights which cannot be shown in art. Of all the arts, that of sculpture is that which is least tolerant of that which is obscene or loathsome. A great poet in a lofty spirit of idealism can typify almost anything.

Michael Angelo and Correggio have in painting idealized the myths of Leda and of Ixion, and both experiments have been much doubted. But one may defy Rodin himself to make marble groups which should literally represent-say the last line of Canto XXI of the Inferno, or line 500 of the fourth book of Paradise Lost.

Anyone who tries to work it out can see that tens of thousands of things which in Nature are common, familiar, inevitable, and secret, cannot be expressed in permanent marble shape, and the nearer the sculptor gets to them, the nearer he is to that which disgusts. Rodin sometimes tried to get as close as he dare, and so do others of the decadent schools of literature and art. But he has not the courage of his convictions, and he has not yet literally carved any really bestial act or sight. Being a man, like Cellini, of brilliant literary power, he professes to be absolutely free of all conventions. But he is not free. He does not go far enough to practise his own theories. Feeling and very wisely

feeling-how lifeless a study is the model, rigidly posed upon a stand, he causes both male and female models to move about his studio in spontaneous action, so that he can observe them in continual movement. That is very well, and is the source of the vitality of so many of his studies. But it is not enough. If he could get his nude models to run, leap, wrestle in sunlight on an open sward, to play tennis, football, hockey, and a tug-of-war, as the Greeks did in the arena, M. Rodin would have incredible opportunities for study, and would be true to his own maxims. But unfortunately, modern conventions make all this practically impossible, and they bind Rodin as much as anyone.

If M. Rodin had less imagination, not such a flow of literary and poetic originality, he would be a greater sculptor. He would restrain his exuberant fancy within the inevitable limits of his own special art. He insists that what he can imagine, or dream, or recall in memory, he can carve in stone. He will not obey the maxim-segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem-things we can bear to read of in words cannot be borne face to face fixed in cold and solid stone. Milton can create a Satan; Shakespeare a Caliban; Shelley a Prometheus-but Satan, Caliban, or Prometheus would be grotesque in marble. Rodin seems to live in a dreamland, and not always the sane dreamland, for his dreams are often nightmares, and ghoulish abominations. But since dreams are vague, shadowy, evanescent, they can only be put into plastic form by being blurred, half-shown, sketched in the rough, as if just begun. The objective, tangible definiteness of statuary makes any attempt to carve a dream a foolish paradox. You might as well try to keep a verse of poetry ringing in your ears for hours together. Dreams and marble statues

are incommensurable-not in pari ma/teria. You might as well try to put a sonata of Beethoven in a glass case for exhibition, or carve one of Tur ner's sunsets in stone.

M.

And then the portraits-diabolically clever, but rank caricatures. Rodin's way to make the portrait of a famous man is to twist his features up into a look which seems to suggest the character he attributes to his sitter. He knows perfectly well that the unlucky victim of his joke never did, or could, look like that. But it symbolizes the inner nature of the man; or, like a nickname, it suggests the trait of character that is imputed to him. That is pure caricature; it is what Sir Francis Gould does with us, and what Caran d'Ache did in France. Having got the clay bust into a general resemblance of the features, the cheeks are pinched up and puffed out as if after a prize-fight, and gobbets are stuck on to the forehead and nose to represent scars, seams, wrinkles, and varicose veins. The sitter may have some such marks in his face, but these the sculptor magnifies to double or treble. They "give character"-and are caricature. Where clothes are shown they have to be carved as if they were sackcloth daubed with tar. Naturally, Puvis de Chavannes did not like his bust; and the Balzac Committee repudiated the Guy-Fawkes mannikin which was offered to them. One hopes that Dalou, Falguière, and Laurens took it meekly. The Nineteenth Century and After.

When Rodin began on a sitter, he likened him to some animal, and impressed on him that type. Falguière was "a little bull with an eruptive character, a grumbling moustache, and a visage seamed with furrows." So his bust appears in the photograph; but the illustrious sculptor looks like a boxer. Rodin seems to associate intellect with pugilism. His famous Penseur is the gladiator of the Municipal Museum of Rome; and the Victor Hugo is a sort of Hercules preparing to overthrow Antaeus. All this is excellent caricature, but it is not high truth.

Morbid exaggeration is the unerring mark of decadence, just as the Pergamenian or Rhodian schools of Hellenistic art exaggerated the athletic type of Lysippus. The example of this is the Farnese Hercules at Naples, which is now recognized as false art, in spite of its anatomical science. And Rodin pushes the decadence of the Hellenistic sculpture till it becomes grotesque.

Augustin Rodin is a man of rare genius, of original imagination, a poet, an orator, a critic-a great sculptor. He has done some grand, some beautiful things, many stimulating things. But with all his audacity and his powers, he has a morbid love for that which is either repulsive or impossible. And he must exert a fatal influence on those who are carried away by his genius and seek to imitate his brilliant gifts. Frederic Harrison.

During the course of the last four months, the attention of the world in general has been largely, and somewhat unexpectedly, centred upon Italy. That this attention has not been altogether of a benevolent nature on the part of a section of the English pub

lic, and that certain organs of the English Press have shown little discrimination in their readiness to give publicity to unfounded charges against the honor and humanity of a nation which had every right to expect more generous and more loyal treatment from

Englishmen, is not a matter which need be dwelt upon at any length in these pages. These charges have now been fully and authoritativly disproved. The only thing left to deplore is that they should ever have found an echo in English journals, or have been accepted as possible by any portion of the English public. That this should have been the case may be forgiven by Italians; but it will certainly not be forgotten. To say that public attention has of late been centred upon Italy, however, is by no means to say that it has been centred upon the Italians. Now, English sentiment towards Italy has always been supposed to be one of traditional and, indeed, of hereditary friendship; and I fear that I am giving myself but a thankless task in seeking to show that this friendship has been based on the unstable foundations of a misconception. Nevertheless, a very long, and, as my Italian friends are good enough to tell me, intimate study of modern Italian life has convinced me that, although Italy has been made the object of a sentimental and æsthetic regard on the part of my compatriots for many generations, they have made no effort to include the Italians in their affections. And in this conclusion, I may add, I find myself supported by all Italians who are in a competent positon to gauge the true value of the traditional friendship existing between the two countries.

There is no nation in Europe, excepting, perhaps, the German, which occupies itself so largely and so continuously with Italian matters as our own: and yet at the same time there is no nation which so systematically and so obstinately declines to recognize the fact that Italy was made for the Italians, and not for foreigners. The yearly output of English books dealing with what are, after all, Italian possessions-things artistic, literary, architectural, topographical, social, and what

not-is, as we all know, enormous; while the yearly output of English people who spend a few weeks or months in the chief cities of Italy probably exceeds that of any other nation. It might reasonably be supposed that this immense interest displayed by English admirers of Italy would have contributed to a real and intimate understanding between the two peoples; or, at any rate, to a genuine acquaintanceship on the part of our compatriots with Italians-since these last have comparatively little opportunity of studying the English in England. I am not in the least afraid of being contradicted by any possible Italian reader of these pages when I affirm that not only does it contribute to nothing of the kind, but that, on the whole, it produces a very reverse effect. We may, I think, leave aside the impression of English friendship produced on the Italians by English visitors to Italy, since with by far the greater number of these travellers in their country Italians are not brought into anything but the most superficial contact. The Italians, therefore, have to judge of this friendship by what they read in English books, or see quoted from English newspapers and reviews. Now, these English works on Italy, it is perfectly true, are very often admirable of their kind. They overflow with knowledge -artistic, historical, political, and also topographical. They are works which, in many cases, cultivated Italians study both with pleasure and with profit, and which they frankly confess to be superior in technical value to the majority of books published in Italy dealing with similar subjects. This being so, it may well be asked why these works. should almost invariably have an irritating rather than an agreeable effect upon Italian susceptibilities. Το such a question I can only give the answer that very many Italians have given me; and I must confess that I

have lived long enough among them thoroughly to realize the justice of that

answer.

These books, my Italian friends say, are very admirable in so far as they Ideal with our external attributes, our history, our art, our climate and scenery, our monuments, and our past: but, in so far as they deal with ourselves, which is for the most part very little, they are very often insults. There is a subdominant note of patronage audible whenever your English writers condescend to speak of other things than those we have mentioned-and we are a little weary of being told about our past. And if your writers speak of our present, it is as likely as not in order to rebuke us for being unworthy of our heritage, to discourse of and to us as though we were children; or, at the best, as though we were an unstable, excitable, and unreliable people. ignore, or deny to us altogether, those qualities which we know ourselves to possess as a nation, and which we are convinced will not fail us in the hour of need.

They

I believe, as I have said before, this answer to be both just and logical. The truth is that, to the Italian of the prescut day, English friendship represents merely an æsthetic sentiment for the Italy of the past, for such present external attributes as climate and scenery, and for survivals of medieval popular customs which are none the less pernicious to social progress because they happen to be picturesque. The modern Italian has little use for such a friendship. He is not sentimental, and sentimentality does not appeal to him. While fully recognizing the profound knowledge of the Italy of yesterday that a large number of Eng. lish admirers of his country possess, he resents the equally profound ignorance they exhibit concerning the Italy of to-day; the disdainful lack of appreciation, and the strange misconceptions

of his national character which these admirers are so apt to display not only in their writings, but in their general attitude. He very naturally dislikes to be lectured on his moral, social, and artistic shortcomings, by those of a different blood and race from his own, who are completely unable to realize that the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon mind do not always see things from the same point of view. Above all, and more especially, I fear, of recent weeks, he weighs English friendship in the balance as an asset, and finds it wanting-not in æsthetic sentimentality for Italy, but in human sympathy with and understanding of Italians.

That this lack of sympathy and understanding should have been SO markedly displayed at the commencement of the struggle in which the Italians are now engaged, is, as I think, especially to be deplored; and this for no reasons having any connection with sentiment. That English attention has not been in reality centred upon the Italians during the last four months, but merely upon an Italy which belongs largely to the past, is conclusively proved by the fact that scarcely any allusion is made by the English Press, or by individuals whose criticisms of the policy of Italy have certainly not been subdued in their tone, to the remarkable transformation which the Italian people is undergoing at the present moment-or, as it would be more accurate to say, has already undergone.

I am convinced, however, that had the majority of my compatriots possessed the slightest idea as to the deep significance of the "psychological moment" which the Italian nation is now experiencing, or any suspicion that such a moment were imminent, their criticisms would have been of a different nature. A real understanding of the character of the people which