is enraptured. The object itself seems to
disappear in the one case, and to reveal itself in the other.

I do not mean to compare M. Rodin with the Greeks--from whom in
sentiment and imagination he is, of course, as totally removed as what
is intensely modern must be from the antique--any more than I mean to
contrast him with Michael Angelo, except for the purposes of clearer
understanding of his general aesthetic attitude. Association of anything
contemporary with what is classic, and especially with what is greatest
in the classic, is always a perilous proceeding. Very little time is apt
to play havoc with such classification. I mean only to indicate that the
resemblance to Michael Angelo, found by so many persons in such works as
the Dante doors, is only of the loosest kind--as one might, through
their common lusciousness, compare peaches with pomegranates--and that
to the discerning eye, or the eye at all experienced in observing
sculpture, M. Rodin's sculpture is far more closely related to that of
Donatello and the Greeks. It, too, reveals rather than constructs
beauty, and by the expression of character rather than by the suggestion
of sentiment.

An illustration of M. Rodin's affinity with the antique is an incident
which he related to me of his work upon his superb "Age d'Airain." He
was in Naples; he saw nature in freer inadvertence than she allows
elsewhere; he had the best of models. Under these favoring circumstances
he spent three months on a leg of his statue; "which is equivalent to
saying that I had at last absolutely mastered it," said he. One day in
the Museo Nazionale he noticed in an antique the result of all his study
and research. Nature, in other words, is M. Rodin's _material_ in the
same special sense in which it was the antique material, and in which,
since Michael Angelo and the high Renaissance, it has been for the most
part only the sculptor's _means_. It need not be said that the
personality of the artist may be as strenuous in the one case as in the
other; unless, indeed, we maintain, as perhaps we may, that
individuality is more apt to atrophy in the latter instance; for as one
gets farther and farther away from nature he is in more danger from
conventionality than from caprice. And this is in fact what has happened
since the high Renaissance, the long line of conventionalities being
continued, sometimes punctuated here and there as by Clodion or Houdon,
David, Rude, or Barye, sometime