type—­the youth of the Sistine ceiling.  Any particular felicity of expression you are apt to find him borrowing from Donatello—­such as, for instance, the movement of the arm of the ‘David,’ which is borrowed from Donatello’s ‘St. John Baptist.’” Most people to whom Michael Angelo’s creations appear celestial in their majesty at once and in their winningness would deny this.  But it is worth citing both because M. Rodin strikes so many crude apprehensions as a French Michael Angelo, whereas he is so radically removed from him in point of view and in practice that the unquestionable spiritual analogy between them is rather like that between kindred spirits working in different arts, and because, also, it shows not only what M. Rodin is not, but what he is.  The grandiose does not run away with him.  His imagination is occupied largely in following out nature’s suggestions.  His sentiment does not so drench and saturate his work as to float it bodily out of the realm of natural into that of supernal beauty, there to crystallize in decorative and puissant visions appearing out of the void and only superficially related to their corresponding natural forms.  Standing before the Medicean tombs the modern susceptibility receives perhaps the most poignant, one may almost say the most intolerable, impression to be obtained from any plastic work by the hand of man; but it is a totally different impression from that left by the sculptures of the Parthenon pediments, not only because the sentiment is wholly different, but because in the great Florentine’s work it is so overwhelming as wholly to dominate purely natural expression, natural character, natural beauty.  In the Medici Chapel the soul is exalted; in the British Museum the mind is enraptured.  The object itself seems to disappear in the one case, and to reveal itself in the other.

I do not mean to compare M. Rodin with the Greeks—­from whom in sentiment and imagination he is, of course, as totally removed as what is intensely modern must be from the antique—­any more than I mean to contrast him with Michael Angelo, except for the purposes of clearer understanding of his general aesthetic attitude.  Association of anything contemporary with what is classic, and especially with what is greatest in the classic, is always a perilous proceeding.  Very little time is apt to play havoc with such classification.  I mean only to indicate that the resemblance to Michael Angelo, found by so many persons in such works as the Dante doors, is only of the loosest kind—­as one might, through their common lusciousness, compare peaches with pomegranates—­and that to the discerning eye, or the eye at all experienced in observing sculpture, M. Rodin’s sculpture is far more closely related to that of Donatello and the Greeks.  It, too, reveals rather than constructs beauty, and by the expression of character rather than by the suggestion of sentiment.