ntine
and Gothic times, but thoroughly conventional. Michael Angelo himself
certainly may be charged with lending the immense weight of his majestic
genius to perpetuate the conventional. It is not his distortion of
nature, as pre-Raphaelite limitedness glibly asserts, but his
carelessness of her prodigious potentialities, that marks one side of
his colossal accomplishment. Just as the lover of architecture as
architecture will protest that Michael Angelo's was meretricious,
however inspiring, so M. Rodin declares his sculpture unsatisfactory,
however poetically impressive. "He used to do a little anatomy
evenings," he said to me, "and used his chisel next day without a model.
He repeats endlessly his one type--the youth of the Sistine ceiling. Any
particular felicity of expression you are apt to find him borrowing from
Donatello--such as, for instance, the movement of the arm of the
'David,' which is borrowed from Donatello's 'St. John Baptist.'" Most
people to whom Michael Angelo's creations appear celestial in their
majesty at once and in their winningness would deny this. But it is
worth citing both because M. Rodin strikes so many crude apprehensions
as a French Michael Angelo, whereas he is so radically removed from him
in point of view and in practice that the unquestionable spiritual
analogy between them is rather like that between kindred spirits working
in different arts, and because, also, it shows not only what M. Rodin is
not, but what he is. The grandiose does not run away with him. His
imagination is occupied largely in following out nature's suggestions.
His sentiment does not so drench and saturate his work as to float it
bodily out of the realm of natural into that of supernal beauty, there
to crystallize in decorative and puissant visions appearing out of the
void and only superficially related to their corresponding natural
forms. Standing before the Medicean tombs the modern susceptibility
receives perhaps the most poignant, one may almost say the most
intolerable, impression to be obtained from any plastic work by the hand
of man; but it is a totally different impression from that left by the
sculptures of the Parthenon pediments, not only because the sentiment is
wholly different, but because in the great Florentine's work it is so
overwhelming as wholly to dominate purely natural expression, natural
character, natural beauty. In the Medici Chapel the soul is exalted; in
the British Museum the mind