neates
passion as a psychologist; and while we think of him as a cyclops
wielding a huge hammer destructively, he is often ardent in his search
of subtle nuance. But there is breadth even when he models an eyelid.
Size is only relative. We are confronted by the paradox of an artist
as torrential, as apocalyptic as Rubens and Wagner, carving with a
style wholly charming a segment of a baby's back so that you exclaim,
"Donatello come to life!" His slow, defective vision, then, may have
been his salvation; he seems to rely as much on his delicate tactile
sense as on his eyes. His fingers are as sensitive as a violinist's.
At times he seems to model tone and colour. A marvellous poet, a
precise sober workman of art, with a peasant strain in him like
Millet, and, like Millet, very near to the soil; a natural man, yet
crossed by nature with a perverse strain; the possessor of a
sensibility exalted, and dolorous; morbid, sick-nerved, and as
introspective as Heine; a visionary and a lover of life, very close to
the periphery of things; an interpreter of Baudelaire; Dante's alter
ego in his vast grasp of the wheel of eternity, in his passionate
fling at nature; withal a sculptor, always profound and tortured,
translating rhythm and motion into the terms of sculpture. Rodin is a
statuary who, while having affinities with both the classic and
romantic schools, is the most startling artistic apparition of his
century. And to the century he has summed up so plastically and
emotionally he has also propounded questions that only the unborn
years may answer. He has a hundred faults to which he opposes one
imperious excellence--a genius, sombre, magical, and overwhelming.

V. EUGENE CARRIERE

Death has consecrated the genius of three great painters happily
neglected and persecuted during their lifetime--Manet, Monticelli, and
Carriere. Though furiously opposed, Manet was admitted to the
Luxembourg by the conditions of the Caillebotte legacy. There that
ironic masterpiece, Olympe--otherwise known as the Cat and
Cocotte--has hung for the edification of intelligent amateurs, though
it was only a bequest of triumphant hatred in official eyes. And now
the lady with her cat and negress is in the Louvre, in which
sacrosanct region she, with her meagre, subtle figure, competes among
the masterpieces. Yet there were few dissenting voices. Despite its
temperamental oscillations France is at bottom sound in the matter of
art. Genius m