f nature, of dissecting with so much
enthusiasm that the pleasure of discovery may obscure one's feeling for
pure beauty, of losing the artistic in the purely scientific interest,
of becoming pedantic, of imitating rather than constructing, of missing
art in avoiding the artificial?" I had some difficulty in making myself
understood; this perpetual see-saw of nature and art which enshrouds
aesthetic dialectics as in a Scotch mist seems curiously factitious to
the truly imaginative mind. But I shall always remember his reply, when
he finally made me out, as one of the finest severings conceivable of a
Gordian knot of this kind. "Oh, yes," said he; "there is, no doubt, such
a danger for a mediocre artist."

M. Rodin is, whatever one may think of him, certainly not a mediocre
artist. The instinct of self-preservation may incline the Institute to
assert that he obtrudes his anatomy. But prejudice itself can blind no
one of intelligence to his immense imaginative power, to his poetic
"possession." His work precisely illustrates what I take to have been,
at the best epochs, the relations of nature to such art as is loosely
to be called imitative art--what assuredly were those relations in the
mind of the Greek artist. Nature supplies the parts and suggests their
cardinal relations. Insufficient study of her leaves these superficial
and insipid. Inartistic absorption in her leaves them lifeless. The
imagination which has itself conceived the whole, the idea, fuses them
in its own heat into a new creation which is "imitative" only in the
sense that its elements are not inventions. The art of sculpture has
retraced its steps far enough to make pure invention, as of Gothic
griffins and Romanesque symbology, unsatisfactory to everyone. But, save
in M. Rodin's sculpture, it has not fully renewed the old alliance with
nature on the old terms--Donatello's terms; the terms which exact the
most tribute from nature, which insist on her according her completest
significance, her closest secrets, her faculty of expressing character
as well as of suggesting sentiment. Very beautiful works are produced
without her aid to this extent. We may be sure of this without asking M.
Rodin to admit it. He would not do his own work so well were he prepared
to; as Millet pointed out when asked to write a criticism of some other
painter's canvas, in estimating the production of his fellows an artist
is inevitably handicapped by the feeling that he would