Constantly I hear: "What an ugly age! That woman is plain. That dog is horrible." It is neither the age nor the woman nor the dog which is ugly, but your eyes, which do not understand. One generally disparages the things that are above one's comprehension. Disparagement is the child of ignorance. As soon as you discover that, you enter into the circle of joy. [Illustration: RODIN'S HOUSE AND STUDIO AT MEUDON.] Man, animals, down to the smallest insects, down to the infinitesimal; the earth, the waters, the woods, the sky--all are marvelous. The firmament is the vastest landscape, the most profound, the most enchanting, with its variations, its effects of color and light, which delight the eye, astonish the thought, and subjugate the heart. And to say that artists--those who consider themselves such--attempt to represent all that simply as it appears to them, without having studied it, without having deciphered it, without having felt it! I pity them. They are prisoners, slaves of stupidity. I was like them in the first periods of my perverted youth, but I have delivered myself. I have regained the liberty to approach the things that I love by the pathway of true study. Who follows me on the road? Who can learn it from a study of sculpture and design in books? You who have caught a glimpse of the splendor of that tree, of that giant whose magnificent column has been denuded by autumn of its leafy capital, but which is perhaps more beautiful in the nudity of its members; you who admire the structure of its branches and twigs, etched in an infinitude of forms against the sky, where they resemble the lacework of the windows of our churches, would you not understand far better that beauty, would not your pleasure be far more complete, if you sketched that tree not only in the mass, but in the innumerable details of its framework? And to think that the schools recommend to pupils, painters, and sculptors research on the subject! The subject! The subject does not exist in that--the poor little arrangement that you, one and all, summon up while poring over the same anecdotes, the same conventional attitudes. The human imagination is narrow, and you do not see the hundred thousand motives of art that multiply themselves under your eye. I could pass my whole life in the garden where I walk without exhausting them. The subject is everywhere. Every manifestation of nature is a subject. Artists, pause here! Sketch these flowers; writers, describe them for me, not in the mass, as has always been done, but in minute detail, in the marvelous precision of their organs, in their characteristics, which are as varied as are those of animals and men. How beautiful to be in the same moment an artist and a botanist, to paint and model the plant at the same time that one studied it! Those great realists, the Japanese, understand this, and make the knowledge and cultivation of plants one of the bases of their education.