bronze Rodin's "Balzac" will arouse less wrath from the unimaginative; in plaster it produces the effect of a snowy surging monolith. As a portraitist Rodin is the unique master of characters. His women are gracious delicate masks; his men cover octaves in virility and variety. That he is extremely short-sighted has not been dealt with in proportion to the significance of the fact. It accounts for his love of exaggerated surfaces, his formless extravagance, his indefiniteness in structural design; perhaps, too, for his inability, or let us say, his lack of sympathy, for the monumental. He is a sculptor of intimate emotions. And while we think of him as a Cyclops destructively wielding a huge hammer, he is more ardent in his search for the supersubtle nuance. But there is always the feeling of breadth, even when he models an eyelid. We are confronted by the paradox of an artist as torrential as Rubens or Wagner, carving in a wholly charming style a segment of a child's back, before which we are forced to exclaim: Donatello come to life! His myopic vision, then, may have been his artistic salvation; he seems to rely as much on his delicate tactile sense as on his eyes. His fingers are as sensitive as a violinist's. At times he seems to model both tone and color. A poet, a precise, sober workman of art, with a peasant strain in him, he is like Millet, and, like Millet, near to the soil. A natural man, yet crossed by nature with a perverse strain; the possessor of a sensibility exalted and dolorous; morbid, sick-nerved, and as introspective as Heine; a visionary and a lover of life, close to the periphery of things; an interpreter of Baudelaire; Dante's _alter ego_ in his grasp of the wheel of eternity, in his passionate fling at nature; withal a sculptor, profound and tortured, transposing rhythm into the terms of his art, Rodin is a statuary who, while having affinities with classic and romantic schools, is the most startling apparition of his century. And to the century which he has summed up so plastically and emotionally he has propounded questions that only unborn years may answer. He has a hundred faults to which he opposes one imperious excellence--a genius, sombre, magical and overwhelming. II