accompanies--singularly poor and feeble.

As for the common nature of these motives, the character of the
personality which appears in their varied presentments, it is almost
idle to speak in the absence of the work itself, so eloquent is this at
once and so untranslatable. But it may be said approximately that M.
Rodin's temperament is in the first place deeply romantic. Everything
the Institute likes repels him. He has the poetic conception of art and
its mission, and in poetry any authoritative and codifying consensus
seems to him paradoxical. Style, in his view, unless it is something
wholly uncharacterizable, is a vague and impalpable spirit breathing
through the work of some strongly marked individuality, or else it is
formalism. He delights in the fantasticality of the Gothic. The west
facade of Rouen inspires him more than all the formulae of Palladian
proportions. He detests systematization. He reads Shakespeare, Schiller,
Dante almost exclusively. He sees visions and dreams dreams. The awful
in the natural forces, moral and material, seems his element. He
believes in freedom, in the absolute emancipation of every faculty. As
for study, study nature. If then you fail in restraint and measure you
are a "mediocre artist," whom no artificial system devised to secure
measure and restraint could have rescued from essential insignificance.
No poet or landscape painter ever delighted more in the infinitely
varied suggestiveness and exuberance of nature, or ever felt the
formality of much that passes for art as more chill and drear. Hence in
all his works we have the sense, first of all, of an overmastering
sincerity; then of a prodigious wealth of fancy; then of a marvellous
acquaintance with his material. His imagination has all the vivacity and
tumultuousness of Rubens's, but its images, if not better understood,
which would perhaps be impossible, are more compact and their evolution
more orderly. And they are furthermore one and all vivified by a wholly
remarkable feeling for beauty. In spite of all his knowledge of the
external world, no artist of our time is more completely mastered by
sentiment. In the very circumstance of being free from such conventions
as the cameo relief, the picturesque costume details, the goldsmith's
work characteristic of the Renaissance, now so much in vogue, M. Rodin's
things acquire a certain largeness and loftiness as well as simplicity
and sincerity of sentiment. The same model pose