Twenty times a day I walk in front of this little torso. I bring all my friends to see it, for Greek sculpture is the very source of beauty. Why am I surprised whenever I look upon this torso? I think it is because nature, which is behind this work of art, always calls forth new, unlooked-for sensations. Venus, glorious Venus, model of all women, your purity survives even after two thousand years. Your charm charms me--me who have admirers for my own sculpture. Before you they remain cold; but I, with a spirit that sees further--I admit my defeat as an artist, my poor ability vanishes before your grace. Form, as I used to express it, seems a mere illusion before the harmonious strength of your lines, which embody the very truth of life. Divine fragment, I shall live by you! What days you recall to me! Perhaps the last moments of the soul of Greek sculpture, ever-increasingly my Muse. This torso shows the suppleness and strength of the joints. It is a summing-up of former masterpieces of the artist. Those endless studies that grow into experience and all the qualities of balance are here concealed beneath the beauty and the gracious inspiration of the figure. The inspired sculptor has just discovered all these qualities, and in appreciation has given expression to them with his very soul. An antique piece of sculpture cannot be imitated. This torso seems to have a soul. Are not the shadows trembling on it there? One can see them move. What a progress toward truth we find in the advance from Assyrian and Egyptian to Greek art! Antique things, if we knew how to look at them, would bring about a new renaissance for us, we who stagnate in the Parisian spirit. The Parisian spirit, young though it is, is already too old to serve us. It is like those pretentious monuments, those constructions in plaster, which are hollow and horrible under their crumbling stucco. Greece was the land of sculpture beyond all others. The subject of their sculpture was life. The people concealed it under names and symbols,--Jupiter, Apollo, Venus, the fauns,--but behind all these was the eternal truth of life. This torso on my table looks as though it had been washed to the shore by the loving waves, as boats are stranded on the beach at low tide. What more beautiful offering could be made to men and gods? For is this fragment not an eternal prayer?