Its artistic function in his eyes is to aid in expressing fully and completely the whole of which it forms a part, not to constitute a harmonious detail merely agreeable to the easily satisfied eye.  But then the whole will look anatomical rather than artistic.  There is the point exactly.  Will it?  I remember speculating about this in conversation with M. Rodin himself.  “Isn’t there danger,” I said, “of getting too fond of nature, of dissecting with so much enthusiasm that the pleasure of discovery may obscure one’s feeling for pure beauty, of losing the artistic in the purely scientific interest, of becoming pedantic, of imitating rather than constructing, of missing art in avoiding the artificial?” I had some difficulty in making myself understood; this perpetual see-saw of nature and art which enshrouds aesthetic dialectics as in a Scotch mist seems curiously factitious to the truly imaginative mind.  But I shall always remember his reply, when he finally made me out, as one of the finest severings conceivable of a Gordian knot of this kind.  “Oh, yes,” said he; “there is, no doubt, such a danger for a mediocre artist.”

M. Rodin is, whatever one may think of him, certainly not a mediocre artist.  The instinct of self-preservation may incline the Institute to assert that he obtrudes his anatomy.  But prejudice itself can blind no one of intelligence to his immense imaginative power, to his poetic “possession.”  His work precisely illustrates what I take to have been, at the best epochs, the relations of nature to such art as is loosely to be called imitative art—­what assuredly were those relations in the mind of the Greek artist.  Nature supplies the parts and suggests their cardinal relations.  Insufficient study of her leaves these superficial and insipid.  Inartistic absorption in her leaves them lifeless.  The imagination which has itself conceived the whole, the idea, fuses them in its own heat into a new creation which is “imitative” only in the sense that its elements are not inventions.  The art of sculpture has retraced its steps far enough to make pure invention, as of Gothic griffins and Romanesque symbology, unsatisfactory to everyone.  But, save in M. Rodin’s sculpture, it has not fully renewed the old alliance with nature on the old terms—­Donatello’s terms; the terms which exact the most tribute from nature, which insist on her according her completest significance, her closest secrets, her faculty of expressing character as well as of suggesting sentiment.  Very beautiful works are produced without her aid to this extent.  We may be sure of this without asking M. Rodin to admit it.  He would not do his own work so well were he prepared to; as Millet pointed out when asked to write a criticism of some other painter’s canvas, in estimating the production of his fellows an artist is inevitably handicapped by the feeling that he would have done it very differently himself.  It is easy not to share M. Rodin’s gloomy vaticinations as to French sculpture based