Rodin knows that he is neither a contemporary of Phidias nor Donatello. He rightly refuses to confine himself to forms which the Athenians and the Florentines happened to find most suitable for the expression of their experience. This is the simple justification for much that is regarded as iconoclastic in his artistic creed. When he cries: “Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump, not of the clean, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures,” Rodin merely asserts a closer kinship with the Gothic than the Greek ideal. Whether Phidias, Scopas, and Praxiteles are right and Rodin wrong, matters little. The all-important question is whether Rodin’s reliance upon the ridges which express spiritual tension, and his willingness to utilize tortuous poses which a Greek would have rejected, have enabled him to sound a new note of passion in sculpture. We hold that they have. It is too early to judge of the value of this new note. A hundred years hence the world will be able to give a decision. A contemporary can only see a man who expresses what he feels, strongly and fearlessly. CHAPTER XV THE MODERN BRITISH SCHOOL THE NINETEENTH CENTURY This is an English book. It is written for men and women who look upon the world from the distinctive standpoint arising from the use of a common language. At the head of a chapter devoted to sculpture in modern England, let it be said, definitely and defiantly, that _there is an English school_. The proposition is by no means as sure of general acceptance as it should be. There are many critics who appear to doubt the existence of English sculpture. They seem to regard Paris as the only source of modern work and the English school as a mere branch of the French. The real truth is that, apart from technique, the English sculptor has little to learn from his Continental neighbour. We are not writing of clay-thumbers or marble-chippers, who work for the promise of a measure of material prosperity. We have in mind earnest craftsmen who turn to sculpture naturally—joying in an art which enables them to give form to the thoughts and feelings astir around them. Great Britain has no cause to fear a comparison between the number of such men working in England and France. Owing to the lack of a gallery like the Luxembourg and the absence of the magnificent facilities offered by the Salons, the quality and the quantity of the work produced by the English school is hard to gauge. Nevertheless, it exists. When the English National Gallery is rebuilt according to Barry’s design and the two glazed loggie, flanking the main entrance and each running for 300 feet by 15 along the face of the building, are filled with British sculpture, doubt will be impossible.