. You must exaggerate your exaggerations
and out-Herod Herod, for others have learned how easy the game is to
play, and are at your heels. It is no longer a matter of
misunderstanding and being misunderstood by the public; it is a matter
of deliberately flouting and outraging the public--of assuming
incomprehensibility and antagonism to popular feeling as signs of
greatness. And so is founded what Frederic Harrison has called the
"shock-your-grandmother school."

It is with profound regret that one must name as one of the founders of
this school an artist of real power, who has produced much admirable
work--Auguste Rodin. At the age of thirty-seven he attained a sudden and
resounding notoriety, and from that time he has been the most talked-of
artist in Europe. He was a consummate modeller, a magnificent workman,
but he had always grave faults and striking mannerisms. These faults and
mannerisms he has latterly pushed to greater and greater extremes while
neglecting his great gift, each work being more chaotic and fragmentary
in composition, more hideous in type, more affected and emptier in
execution, until he has produced marvels of mushiness and incoherence
hitherto undreamed of and has set up as public monuments fantastically
mutilated figures with broken legs or heads knocked off. Now, in his
old age, he is producing shoals of drawings the most extraordinary of
which few are permitted to see. Some selected specimens of them hang in
a long row in the Metropolitan Museum, and I assure you, upon my word as
a lifelong student of drawing, they are quite as ugly and as silly as
they look. There is not a touch in them that has any truth to nature,
not a line that has real beauty or expressiveness. They represent the
human figure with the structure of a jellyfish and the movement of a
Dutch doll; the human face with an expression I prefer not to
characterize. If they be not the symptoms of mental decay, they can be
nothing but the means of a gigantic mystification.

With Henri Matisse we have not to deplore the deliquescence of a great
talent, for we have no reason to suppose he ever had any. It is true
that his admirers will assure you he could once draw and paint as
everybody does; what he could _not_ do was to paint enough better than
everybody does to make his mark in the world; and he was a quite
undistinguished person until he found a way to produce some effect upon
his grandmother the public by shocking her into at