destiny wearing his label.) Ecce Cossakus! Bad Latin, but reality. The Tartars are coming. Anarchs all. And ecstasy! It is not an eminently modern quality in the Seven Arts. Sculpture did for a time resist the universal disintegration, this imbroglio of all the arts. Before Rodin no sculptor had so greatly dared to break the line, had dared to shiver the syntax of stone. Sculpture is a static, not a dynamic, art; therefore, let us observe the rules, preserve the chill spirit of the cemetery! What Mallarmé attempted in poetry Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles do not represent, but present emotion, are the evocation of emotion; as in music, form and substance coalesce. If he does not, as did Mallarmé, arouse “the silent thunder afloat in the leaves,” he summons from the vasty deep the spirits of beauty, love, hate, pain, joy, sin, ecstasy, above all, ecstasy. The primal and danger-breeding gift of ecstasy is bestowed upon few. Keats had it, and Shelley; despite his passion, Byron missed it, as did the austere Wordsworth--who had, perhaps, loftier compensations. Swinburne had it from the first. Not Tennyson, and Browning only in occasional exaltation. Like the “cold devils” of Félicien Rops, coiled in frozen ecstasy, the winds of hell booming about them, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire is ecstatic. Poe and Heine knew ecstasy, and Liszt too; but Wagner, ill-tempered like all martyrs, was the master adept of his century. Tchaikovsky closely follows him, and in the tiny piano pieces of Chopin ecstasy is pinioned in a few bars, the soul rapt to heaven in a phrase. Richard Strauss has shown us a variation on the theme: voluptuousness troubled by pain, the soul tortured by the very ecstasy of ecstasy. Like Yeats, he is “Master of the Still Stars and of the Flaming Door.” William Blake and his figures rushing down the secret pathway of the mystic, which zigzags from the Fourth Dimension to the bottomless pit of materialism, was a creator of the darker nuances of pain and ecstasy. A sadistic strain in all this. [Illustration: _From a photograph copyrighted by Matzene_ MARY GARDEN AS SALOME]