find it in Swinburne, he had it from the first. Few French poets know it. Like the "cold devils" of Félicien Rops, coiled in frozen ecstasy, the fiery blasts of hell about them, Charles Baudelaire boasted the dangerous gift. Poe and Heine felt ecstasy, and Liszt. Wagner was the master-adept of ecstasy: Tristan and Isolde! And in the music of Chopin ecstasy is pinioned within a bar, the soul rapt to heaven in a phrase. Richard Strauss has given us a variation on the theme of ecstasy; voluptuousness troubled by pain, the soul tormented pathologically. Rodin is of this tormented choir. He is revealer of its psychology. It may be decadence, as any art is in its decadence which stakes the part against the whole. The same was said of Beethoven by the followers of Haydn, and the successors of Richard Strauss--Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg--are abused quite as violently as the Wagnerites abused Richard Strauss, turning against him the same critical artillery that was formerly employed against Wagner. Nowadays, Rodin is looked on as superannuated, as a reactionary by the younger men, the Cubists and Futurists, who spoil marble with their iconoclastic chisels and canvas with their paint-tubes. That this ecstasy should be aroused by pictures of love and death, as in the case of Poe and Baudelaire, Wagner and Strauss and Rodin, is not to be judged an artistic crime. In the Far East they hypnotize neophytes with a bit of broken mirror, for in the kingdom of art there are many mansions. Possibly it was a relic of his early admiration for Baudelaire that set Wagner to extorting ecstasy from his orchestra by images of love and death. And no doubt the temperament which seeks such synthesis, a temperament commoner in medieval times than ours, was inherent in Wagner, as it is in Rodin. Both men play with the same counters: love and death. In Pisa we may see (attributed by Vasari) Orcagna's fresco of the Triumph of Death. The sting of the flesh and the way of all flesh are inextricably blended in Rodin's Gate of Hell. His principal reading for half a century has been Dante and Baudelaire; the Divine Comedy and "Les Fleurs du Mal" are the keynotes in the grandiose white symphony of the French sculptor. Love and life, and bitterness and death rule the themes of his marbles. Like Beethoven and Wagner, he breaks academic rules, for he is Auguste Rodin, and where he magnificently achieves, lesser men fail or fumble. His large, tumultuous music is alone for his chisel to ring out and to sing. CONTENTS THE CAREER OF RODIN RODIN AND THE BEAUX-ARTS Sojourn in Belgium--"The Man Who Awakens to Nature"--Realism and Plaster Casts. FLEMISH PAINTING--JOURNEYS IN ITALY AND FRANCE. RODIN'S NOTE-BOOK I ANCIENT WORKSHOPS AND MODERN SCHOOLS II SCATTERED THOUGHTS ON FLOWERS III PORTRAITS OF WOMEN IV AN ARTIST'S DAY V THE LINE AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE GOTHIC VI ART AND NATURE