Perhaps it is in accordance with this gift of spiritualisation that Carriès never worked with marble, rarely with bronze, but, as a rule, and preferably, with potter’s clay. Stone and metal, however painfully correctly they render, with every stroke of the thumb and impression of the finger, the clay model, seem to him too hard for the inexpressible tenderness which he wants to express. Only one material satisfies him—the one which possesses the softness of flesh and of nerve-plasm. He can knead only clay so that it retains his lightest vibrations. There is something about his busts of burnt clay that reminds me of phonographic cylinders. There is soul-melody inscribed in them in invisible lines, and, set in our mood, they again begin to give forth sounds, and to repeat the mood of him who composed them. The ability with trembling fingers to coax emotions into soft clay and to render them plastic seems to be something divine. It did not satisfy Carriès. Anybody else would have found the limits of his genius enviably wide; to him they appeared narrow, and he tried to pass beyond them. He wanted to create monumental pieces of sculpture, and he constructed his “Martyrdom of St Fidelis” and his astounding “Gate.” The “Martyrdom” is a group, composed of the kneeling martyr in monastic habit and the executioner behind him, raising his armed fist to deal the murderous blow. In the details the artist is here, too, distinctly Carriès, _i.e._, the executioner is of superb cruelty—a fine specimen of the family of brutalised legionaries or torturers who, in mediæval _relievi_ of the Way of the Cross, scourge Christ at the pillar and nail Him to the Cross. Taken as a whole, the master’s art is a failure; the group has no line. The drama cannot be seen from any side, that is, the gesture of the executioner, with its menace of death, and the countenance of the martyr who is awaiting his last trial, cannot be comprehended at once in a single glance.