for his purposes a mere memorandum of a motion. A sculptor has
made these extraordinary drawings not a painter. It will be well to
observe the distinction. He is the most rhythmic sculptor of them all.
And rhythm is the codification of beauty. Because he has observed with
a vision quite virginal he insists that he has affiliations with the
Greeks. But if his vision is Greek his models are Parisian, while his
forms are more Gothic than the pseudo-Greek of the academy. As W.C.
Brownell wrote years ago: "Rodin reveals rather than constructs
beauty... no sculptor has carried expression further; and expression
means individual character completely exhibited rather than
conventionally suggested." Mr. Brownell was also the first critic to
point out that Rodin's art was more nearly related to Donatello than
to Michael Angelo. He is in the legitimate line of French sculpture,
the line of Goujon, Puget, Rude, Barye. Dalou did not hesitate to
assert that the Dante portal is "one of the most, if not the most,
original and astonishing pieces of sculpture of the nineteenth
century."

This Dante Gate, begun more than twenty years ago, not finished yet,
and probably never to be, is an astounding fugue, with death, the
devil, hell, and the passions as a horribly beautiful four-voiced
theme. I saw the composition a few years ago at the Rue de
l'Universite atelier. It is as terrifying a conception as the Last
Judgment; nor does it miss the sonorous and sorrowful grandeur of the
Medici Tombs. Yet how different, how feverish, how tragic! Like all
great men working in the grip of a unifying idea, Rodin modified the
old technique of sculpture so that it would serve him as plastically
as does sound a musical composer. A deep lover of music, his inner ear
may dictate the vibrating rhythms of his forms--his marbles are ever
musical; not "frozen music" as Goethe said of Gothic architecture, but
silent swooning music. This gate is a Frieze of Paris, as deeply
significant of modern aspiration and sorrow as the Parthenon Frieze is
the symbol of the great clear beauty of Hellas. Dante inspired this
monstrous and ennobled masterpiece, but Baudelaire filled many of its
chinks and crannies with writhing ignoble shapes; shapes of dusky fire
that, as they tremulously stand above the gulf of fears, wave
ineffectual desperate hands. Heine in his Deutschland asks:

Kennst du die Hoelle des Dante nicht,
Die schreckliche Terzetten?
Wen da