of treachery against the undisciplined great, those fallen angels of the false paradise of the Institute-weapons that later they did not scruple to use against Rodin. They accused him of indecency, and in order to strengthen the miserable falsehood, a perverse idiot flung a can of ink on the adorable group of "The Dance," that song of the nymphs, clamorous with youth, laughter, and music. This digression in the story of Rodin's life explains his whole life. By his manly independence, his persistent refusal to follow the dictates of the school, he naturally found himself placed at the head of those who antagonized the official class. Against an opponent of his strength and obstinacy the struggle naturally took on new energy. It recalled to mind the violence of the famous intellectual quarrels of other days-the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that of the Classicists and the Romanticists in 1830. When Rodin presented himself at the great school, how, in his inexperience, could he foresee the war of wild beasts that rages in the thickets of art? It needed indeed a better-informed comrade to disclose the situation to him. Then his eyes were opened. He understood then that he would only be wasting his time in striving to force the bronze doors that are closed against the influences of great nature and her triumphant light, the implacable denouncer of the false in art. Perceiving it at last, he renounced the thought of entering the school. Later he gloried in the fact that he had done so. Possibly he saw the danger that he would have run of parching his spirit and chilling his eye. "Ah," his friend, the sculptor Dalou, exclaimed long after, "Rodin had the luck of not having been at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts!" Dalou himself had not had that luck, and despite beautiful gifts and a love for the eighteenth century, he had not recovered from the false teaching. From a photograph by J. E. Bulloz "Eve" by Auguste Rodin Rodin, then, without knowing it, had fought his first battle, the slight skirmish to the incessant fight that it was to open. Since that time the name Institute, by which he understood the group of protagonists of a bad form of art, took in his speech a formidable meaning. When he says, "The Institute," he seems to call up some mythological monster, the hydra of hundred heads, from the malignant wounds of which the brave usually die slowly. For him the Institute has come to mean a company of able men who sub stitute dexterity for conscience, who for long toil in obscurity and poverty substitute a premature eagerness for all that it may bring-profitable relations, orders from the state, fortune, and honors. In his opinion all that ought to come slowly in order not to distract the artist from the study that alone can give him strength. To him the rewards are secondary; true happiness lies in untrammeled and passionate toil, in the exercise of growing intelligence that is determined not to be stopped on the road to discovery. Although the struggle is less clamorous to-day, it has not ended, and it never will be ended, despite the wide fame of the master, now known throughout the world as the greatest living artist. This Rodin understands. What the contestants now seek to conquer is the public, some for the purpose of obtaining from it consideration and profit, and others an appreciation of true art. One class strives to flatter its taste, which is bad; the other seeks to inculcate a knowledge of true art in their own work. At the outset the contest is frightfully unequal, for the ignorance of the public is abysmal. Incapable of discerning true beauty, it relies only on the labels placed by the Institute on its own works and on those of its partizans. They say to a man, "This is the sort of thing that should be admired," and straightway he admires it, if one can apply this expression of the highest pleasure of the spirit to the vapid and dull contemplation that the public accords to the works marked for its approval. No, at most the public does not know how to admire; it does not understand the language of beauty. At eighteen or nineteen, Rodin, being wholly without fortune, could not continue his studies without quickly finding some means of support. It was therefore necessary for him to earn his own living, and at once he bravely entered upon his work as an ornament-maker, and became a journeyman at a few francs a week. We need not regret it. This son of the people, by remaining in the ranks of the working-class, consolidated in himself the virtues of the class-their courage and industry, which are the strong qualities of the humble, and, in the aggregate, those of the whole nation. And the curiosity of a superior man for all the rewards of the exercise of his intelligence led him to cultivate himself unceasingly. His limited. studies as a school-boy had not been extensive enough to surfeit him; he now brought to the study of letters a mind keenly alert, and with a joy as alive as love itself he devoted himself to a study of great minds. He read the poets and the historians; he became acquainted with the Greece of Homer and Eschylus, the Italy of Dante, the England of Shakspere, and the France of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; but up to that time he had concerned himself with only one thing-his trade. He worked as a real artisan, with no wider vision, with no thought of formidable power. He saw only his model and his clay; he thought only of these, he loved only these. Thus he had become a journeyman ornament-worker in clay. That did not prevent him from perfecting himself in sculpture. On the contrary, it aided him. The art of ornamentation was then considered, as it is still to-day, an inferior art. People said, and still say, of the sculpture of architecture, as of the frescos and mosaic work of a building, that it is only a decoration. They declare it in a tone of indulgence that finds an excuse for any mediocrity. All that is a profound mistake. Sculptured ornament springs naturally from architecture; it is the flowering of its fundamental elements. It is an inherent part of the whole, as the mass of flowers and foliage that crowns a tree is in a way the cumulating point of the whole vegetable organism. Ornament demands the same qualities that the fundamental architectural structure demands, and fully as much talent and perhaps even more; because, as Rodin says, one sees in it more clearly, without distracting features, the form of genius. If it is not well done in itself, its function, which is rigorously. subordinated to the whole, and consists in From a photograph by J. E. Bulloz Monument to Victor Hugo by Auguste Rodin molding the contours of the structure by underlining and marking them off, is reversed. It is then only an excrescence, an arbitrary addition. Only mediocre artisans, when employed on a building or a jewel, use ornament capriciously, without proportioning and subordinating it to the mass; they weary and disgust the beholder. Rodin and his companions did not content themselves with copying, and more or less distorting, their Greek, Roman, and Renaissance models, which were repeated to satiety in all the workshops of the Portrait bust of Victor Hugo by Auguste Rodin world, and done over and over again so many times, out of place, and out of proportion, that they had lost all significance. Their employer possessed a beautiful, but neglected, garden, where a profusion of plants ran riot. Here were models in abundance. Here, in reproducing these, the young craftsmen refreshed their calling; they copied their ornaments from nature; they studied foliage and flowers from life. To do new work, they had only to borrow from the vegetable world certain of its inexhaustible combinations of beauty. Here Rodin, by his cleverness and rapidity, became without a peer among them all, and drew to himself the admiration of his fellow-workers. It was here that he met the Constant Simon, his elder by many years, who was the first man to teach him to model in profile. It was one of the great epochs in his life. One may say that from that time the two great laws that have given his sculpture its power-the study of nature and the right method of modeling-passed into his blood, as it were. The secret that Simon imparted to him was like. a philter that inflamed his soul with enthusiasm. He became intoxicated with the idea of seeing clearly, and of holding his hand strictly accountable to what his eyes disclosed. And he possessed, too, both youth and an indefatigable vigor. He sketched everything he could, and wherever he could. One saw him making sketches on the street, in the horse-market, jostled by the beasts, repulsed by men, yet indifferent to all difficulties in his enchantment in his discovered prize; at the Jardin des Plantes, when he passed hours before the cages and in the parks, studying the poses of the deer and the grace of the moving antelopes. At that period Barye taught at the Museum. Rodin had become acquainted with the son of the celebrated sculptor. The two had discovered a corner of the basement, a eling from clay. sort of cave, damp and gloomy, where they installed some seats made of old boxes and delighted themselves in modeling from clay. From the Museum they borrowed a few anatomical specimens, fragments of the parts of animals, and these they carried to their cavern and pored over in their efforts to copy them. Sometimes Barye himself would come to cast his eye over their work and give them a word of advice, and then would go away, buried in a silent reverie. He was a man of simple habits, with the appearance of a college tutor, in his well-worn coat, but giving an impressive suggestion of great force and worth. His son and Rodin little understood him; they feared him somewhat, and only half profited by his suggestions. Later the author of the "Bourgeois de Calais," kindled by the genius of the gloomy, severe man whom he had misunderstood, felt a deep remorse at not having rendered to Barye while. living the homage of admiration which at Nancy. But though he has not modeled animals, he has many times sketched them, and he has studied deeply their anatomy and poses. the master merited, and which perhaps would have been sweet to his solitary heart. Rodin has had only rarely the chance to model animals. He has never received an order for an equestrian statue, and he has regretted it. We have from him only one small rough model of a statue of General Lynch on horseback, which was never executed, and the beautiful relief of the chariot of Apollo which forms the pedestal of the monument of Claude Lorrain It is not so much in the powerful sketches that all his life he has continued to make with the same daily care with which a pianist practises his scales that Rodin shows the chief characteristic of his nature, as it is in accumulating these that he has been enabled to understand relationship between different forms, and to establish the unity between the forms of |