Rodin will be perhaps always misunderstood. He is a pagan, and in his art has been so varied as to make it difficult to judge him by a standard or to compare him wisely with his forerunners or his contemporaries. The same hand that has perfectly carved the lovely woman’s head in “La Pensée,” rounded the limbs in the delicacy of “The Eternal Idol,” the same hand tears forth from clay and stone sinister, terrible conceptions, mighty symbols of desolation as on “La Porte de l’Enfer,” the inevitable misery in the retribution. From a block of marble he causes a woman to blossom forth like a flower, until rough block and figure appear of different materials--the one a cold, pulseless background, a sheath for a form so instinct with life that the stone has the texture of flesh, and seems to bloom and glow. Take, for example, the figure of Psyche holding back the draperies of night that she may see Eros. Rodin is an absolute expression of his times, a modern with the subtlety of idea, the suggestive conception that is the distinguishing mark of nineteenth-century talent, part of the spirit that has created the schools of symbolism, that has coined the term “degenerate”; and to this trend of mind, which no civilisation hitherto could have produced, has been added robust physical strength and an order of genius akin to that of the ancients, before whose immortal works Rodin is a humble and devout worshipper, and from whom, in his modesty, he thinks himself infinitely removed, and to whom he is in reality divinely allied. PAUL ALBERT BESNARD [Illustration: PAUL ALBERT BESNARD IN HIS STUDIO] Paul Albert Besnard bears no relation to any school. “I have never formed part of a group,” he says; and in revenge or despair no group has formed itself around the master. There is, properly speaking, no Sargent school and no Whistler school, and may these men not be taken to be masters of the present time? It is a distinguishing peculiarity of modern art that schools do not form as they did in the old days. Possibly an explanation of the fact why there is little discipleship is that we are in the age of individualism and not of intense and imitative study. Each man and woman intends to be an _arriviste_ without being a plodder and scholar. There is great pressure toward ultimate success; desire for originality. Imitation of methods and technique is not sympathetic. Above all there is a marked absence of the genius which carries men to the pinnacle Besnard has reached. Apprenticeship is not to the taste of the modern student! Of people who put paint on canvas there are legion--of painters few--and in France, _Degas_ and _Besnard_ head the list.