chnique, fabulous and feverish, expended itself on
flowers that were explosions of colours, on seductive marines, on
landscapes of a rhythmic, haunting beauty--the Italian temperament had
become unleashed. Fire, gold, and purple flickered and echoed in
Monticelli's canvases. Irony, like an insinuating serpent, began to
creep into this paradise of melting hues. The masterful gradations of
tone became bewildered. Poison was eating the man's nerves. He
discarded the brush, and standing before his canvas he squeezed his
tubes upon it, literally modelling his paint with his thumb until it
almost assumed the relief of sculpture. What a touch he had! What a
subtle prevision of modulations to be effected by the careless scratch
of his nail or the whip of a knife's edge! Remember, too, that
originally he had been an adept in the art of design; he could draw as
well as his peers. But he sacrificed form and observation and
psychology to sheer colour. He, a veritable discoverer of tones--aided
thereto by an abnormal vision--became the hasty improviser, who at the
last daubed his canvases with a pasty mixture, as hot and crazy as his
ruined soul. The end did not come too soon. A chromatic genius went
under, leaving but a tithe of the gleams that illuminated his brain.
Alas, poor Fada!

IV. RODIN

I

Rodin, the French sculptor, deserves well of our new century; the old
one did so incontinently batter him. The anguish of his own Hell's
Portal he endured before he moulded its clay between his thick
clairvoyant fingers. Misunderstood, therefore misrepresented, he with
his pride and obstinacy aroused--the one buttressing the other--was
not to be budged from his formulas and practice of sculpture. Then the
world of art swung unwillingly and unamiably toward him, perhaps more
from curiosity than conviction. Rodin became famous. And he is more
misunderstood than ever. His very name, with its memory of Eugene
Sue's romantic rancour--you recall that impossible and diabolic Jesuit
Rodin in The Mysteries of Paris?--has been thrown in his teeth. He has
been called _ruse_, even a fraud; while the wholesale denunciation of
his work as erotic is unluckily still green in our memory. The
sculptor, who in 1877 was accused of "faking" his life-like Age of
Brass--now at the Luxembourg--by taking a mould from the living model,
also experienced the discomfiture of being assured some years later
that, not knowing the art of modelling, his sta