It is with profound regret that one must name as one of the founders of this school an artist of real power, who has produced much admirable work—­Auguste Rodin.  At the age of thirty-seven he attained a sudden and resounding notoriety, and from that time he has been the most talked-of artist in Europe.  He was a consummate modeller, a magnificent workman, but he had always grave faults and striking mannerisms.  These faults and mannerisms he has latterly pushed to greater and greater extremes while neglecting his great gift, each work being more chaotic and fragmentary in composition, more hideous in type, more affected and emptier in execution, until he has produced marvels of mushiness and incoherence hitherto undreamed of and has set up as public monuments fantastically mutilated figures with broken legs or heads knocked off.  Now, in his old age, he is producing shoals of drawings the most extraordinary of which few are permitted to see.  Some selected specimens of them hang in a long row in the Metropolitan Museum, and I assure you, upon my word as a lifelong student of drawing, they are quite as ugly and as silly as they look.  There is not a touch in them that has any truth to nature, not a line that has real beauty or expressiveness.  They represent the human figure with the structure of a jellyfish and the movement of a Dutch doll; the human face with an expression I prefer not to characterize.  If they be not the symptoms of mental decay, they can be nothing but the means of a gigantic mystification.

With Henri Matisse we have not to deplore the deliquescence of a great talent, for we have no reason to suppose he ever had any.  It is true that his admirers will assure you he could once draw and paint as everybody does; what he could not do was to paint enough better than everybody does to make his mark in the world; and he was a quite undistinguished person until he found a way to produce some effect upon his grandmother the public by shocking her into attention.  His method is to choose the ugliest models to be found; to put them into the most grotesque and indecent postures imaginable; to draw them in the manner of a savage, or a depraved child, or a worse manner if that be possible; to surround his figures with blue outlines half an inch wide; and to paint them in crude and staring colors, brutally laid on in flat masses.  Then, when his grandmother begins to “sit up,” she is told with a grave face that this is a reaction from naturalism, a revival of abstract line and color, a subjective art which is not the representation of nature but the expression of the artist’s soul.  No wonder she gasps and stares!