“No, I tell you.” “But tell me, do you not think that the beauty of the antique much surpassed that of our day, and that modern women are far from equalling those who posed for Phidias?” “Not at all.” “Yet the perfection of the Greek Venuses—” “The artists in those days had eyes to see, while those of to-day are blind; that is all the difference. The Greek women were beautiful, but their beauty lived above all in the minds of the sculptors who carved them. “To-day there are women just like them. They are principally in the South of Europe. The modern Italians, for example, belong to the same Mediterranean type as the models of Phidias. This type has for its special characteristic the equal width of shoulders and hips.” “But did not the invasion of the barbarians by a mixture of race alter the standard of antique beauty?” [Illustration: PYGMALION AND GALATEA By Rodin Photograph reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art ] “No. Even if we suppose that the barbarians were less beautiful, less well-proportioned than the Mediterranean race, which is possible, time has effectually wiped out any stains produced by a mixed blood, and has again produced the harmony of the ancient type. In a union of the beautiful and the ugly, it is always the beautiful which triumphs in the end. Nature, by a Divine law, tends constantly towards the best, tends ceaselessly towards perfection. Besides the Mediterranean type, there exists a Northern type, to which many Frenchwomen, as well as the women of the Germanic and Slavic races, belong. In this type the hips are strongly developed and the shoulders are narrower; it is this structure that you observe, for example, in the nymphs of Jean Goujon, in the Venus of the _Judgment of Paris_ by Watteau, and in the _Diana_ by Houdon. In this type, too, the chest is generally high, while in the antique and Mediterranean types the thorax is, on the contrary, straight. To tell the truth, every human type, every race, has its beauty. The thing is to discover it. I have drawn with infinite pleasure the little Cambodian dancers who lately came to Paris with their sovereign. The fine, small gestures of their graceful limbs had a strange and marvellous beauty. “I have made studies of the Japanese actress Hanako. Her muscles stand out as prominently as those of a fox-terrier; her sinews are so developed that the joints to which they are attached have a thickness equal to the members themselves. She is so strong that she can rest as long as she pleases on one leg, the other raised at right angles in front of her. She looks as if rooted in the ground, like a tree. Her anatomy is quite different from that of a European, but, nevertheless, very beautiful in its singular power.” [Illustration: STUDY OF HANAKO, THE JAPANESE ACTRESS By Rodin Photograph reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art ] [Illustration: STUDY OF THE NUDE By Rodin