Auguste Rodin's career has passed through the inevitable phases. He, who has been so generally discussed and attacked, is to-day the most regarded of all artists. He likes to talk of his art; for he knows that his observations have a priceless value, that of experience--the experience of sixty years of uninterrupted work--and of a conscience perhaps even more exacting to-day than at the time of his impetuous youth. He says, "My principles are the laws of experience." The combination of these principles embodies his greatest precept; namely, that of thinking and executing a thing simultaneously. We must listen to Rodin as we would listen to Michelangelo or Rembrandt if they were living. For his method may be the starting-point of an artistic renaissance in Europe, perhaps throughout the whole world. Definite signs of a decided resurrection in taste are already manifesting themselves, and it is a splendid satisfaction for the illustrious sculptor to receive such acknowledgment in his glorious old age. For, like every great genius, he has a profound love for the race from which he springs, and feels a strong instinctive confidence in it. Indeed, how should this be otherwise? In the course of centuries, has not this wonderful Celtic race on various occasions reconstructed its understanding and interpretation of beauty? Auguste Rodin expresses himself by preference on subjects from which he can draw an actual lesson. He is no theorist; he has an eminently positive mind, one might even say a practical mind. His teachings, unlike the abstract teachings of books, can be characterized by two words, observation and deduction. His are not more or less arbitrary meditations in which personal imagination plays the principal part; they are rather the account of a sagacious, truthful traveler, of a soldier who relates the story of his campaigns, or of a scholar who records the result of an analysis. Reality is his only basis, and with justice to himself he can say, "I am not a rhetorician, but a man of action." We hear him chat, it may be in his atelier about some piece of antique sculpture which has just come into his possession or about a work he has in hand, or during his rambles through his garden, which is situated in the most delightful country in the suburbs of the capital, or on a walk through the museums, or through the old quarter of Paris. For in his opinion "the streets of Paris, with their shops of old furniture, etchings, and works of art, are a veritable museum, far less tiring than official museums, and from which one imbibes just as much as one can." * * * * *