This Dante gate, begun thirty years ago, not finished yet--and probably never to be--is an astoundingly plastic fugue, with death, the devil, hell, and human passions, for a complicated four-voiced theme. I first saw the composition at the Rue de l'Université atelier. It is as terrifying a conception as the Last Judgment. Nor does it miss the sonorous and sorrowful grandeur of the Medici Tombs. Yet how different. How feverish, how tragic. Like all great men working in the grip of a unifying idea, Rodin modified the technique of sculpture so that it would serve him as sound does a musical composer. A lover of music his inner ear may dictate the vibrating rhythms of his forms; his marbles are ever musical, ever in modulation, not "frozen music," as Goethe said of Gothic architecture, but silent, swooning music. This Gate is a Frieze of Paris, as deeply significant of modern inspiration and sorrow as the Parthenon Frieze is the symbol of the great clear beauty of Hellas. Dante inspired this monstrous yet ennobled masterpiece, and Baudelaire's poetry filled many of its chinks and crannies with ignoble writhing shapes; shapes of dusky fire that, as they tremulously stand above the gulf of fear, wave ineffectual and desperate hands as if imploring destiny. But Rodin is not all hell-fire and tragedy. Of singular delicacy and exquisite proportion are his marbles of youth, of springtide, of the joy and desire of life. At Paris, 1900, in his special exhibition Salle, Europe and America awoke to the beauty of these haunting visions. Not since Keats and Wagner and Swinburne has love been voiced so sweetly, so romantically, so fiercely. Though he disclaims understanding the Celtic spirit one might say that there is Celtic magic, Celtic mystery in his lyrical work. He pierces to the core the frenzy of love, and translates it into lovely symbols. For him nature is the sole mistress--his sculptures are but variations on her themes. He knows the emerald route, and all the semitones of sensuousness. Fantasy, passion, paroxysmal madness are there, yet what elemental power is in his "Adam," as the gigantic first man painfully heaves himself up from the earth to the posture that differentiates him forever from the beast. Here, indeed, two natures are at strife. And "Mother Eve" suggests the sorrows and shames that are to be the lot of her seed; her very loins crushed by the future generations hidden within them. One may freely walk about the "Burghers of Calais" as Rodin did when he modeled them; a reason for the vital quality of the group. Around all his statues we may walk; he is not a sculptor of a single attitude but a hewer of humans. Consider the "Balzac." It is not Balzac the writer, but Balzac the prophet, the seer, the enormous natural force that was Balzac. Rodin is himself a seer. That is why these two spirits converse across the years, as do the Alpine peaks in a certain striking parable of Turgenev's. Doubtless in