Let us drop this old aesthetic rule of thumb and confess that during the last century a new race of artists sprang up from some strange element and, like flying-fish, revealed to a wondering world their composite structures.  Thus we find Berlioz painting with his instrumentation; Franz Liszt, Tschaikowsky, and Richard Strauss filling their symphonic poems with drama and poetry, and Richard Wagner inventing an art which he believed to embrace the seven arts.  And there is Ibsen, who used the dramatic form as a vehicle for his anarchistic ideas; and Nietzsche, who was such a poet that he was able to sing a mad philosophy into life; and Rossetti, who painted poems and made poetry that is pictorial.  Sculpture was the only art that had resisted this universal disintegration, this imbroglio of the arts.  No sculptor before Rodin had dared to break the line, dared to shiver the syntax of stone.  For sculpture is a static, not a dynamic art—­is it not?  Let us observe the rules, though we preserve the chill spirit of the cemetery.  What Mallarme attempted to do with French poetry Rodin accomplished in clay.  His marbles do not represent but present emotion, are the evocation of emotion itself; as in music, form and substance coalesce.  If he does not, as did Mallarme, arouse “the silent thunder afloat in the leaves,” he can summon from the vasty deep the spirits of love, hate, pain, despair, sin, beauty, ecstasy; above all, ecstasy.  Now the primal gift of ecstasy is bestowed upon few.  In our age Keats had it, and Shelley; Byron, despite his passion, missed it, and so did Wordsworth.  We find it in Swinburne, he had it from the first; but few French poets have it.  Like the “cold devils” of Felicien Rops, coiled in frozen ecstasy, the blasts of hell about them, Charles Baudelaire can boast the dangerous attribute.  Poe and Heine knew ecstasy, and Liszt also; Wagner was the master adept of his century.  Tschaikowsky followed him close; and in the tiny piano scores of Chopin ecstasy is pinioned in a few bars, the soul often rapt to heaven in a phrase.  Richard Strauss has shown a rare variation on the theme of ecstasy; voluptuousness troubled by pain, the soul tormented by stranger nuances.

Rodin is of this tormented choir; he is master of its psychology.  It may be the decadence, as any art is in decadence which stakes the parts against the whole.  The same was said of Beethoven by the followers of Haydn, and the successors of Richard Strauss will be surely abused quite as violently as the Wagnerites abuse Strauss to-day—­employing against him the same critical artillery employed against Wagner.  That this ecstasy should be aroused by pictures of love and death, as in the case of Poe and Baudelaire, Wagner and Strauss, must not be adjudged as a black crime.  In the Far East they hypnotise neophytes with a bit of broken mirror, for in the kingdom of art, as in the Kingdom of Heaven, there are many mansions.  Possibly it was a relic of his early admiration and