so that you exclaim, “Donatello come to life!” His slow, defective vision, then, may have been his salvation; he seems to rely as much on his delicate tactile sense as on his eyes.  His fingers are as sensitive as a violinist’s.  At times he seems to model tone and colour.  A marvellous poet, a precise sober workman of art, with a peasant strain in him like Millet, and, like Millet, very near to the soil; a natural man, yet crossed by nature with a perverse strain; the possessor of a sensibility exalted, and dolorous; morbid, sick-nerved, and as introspective as Heine; a visionary and a lover of life, very close to the periphery of things; an interpreter of Baudelaire; Dante’s alter ego in his vast grasp of the wheel of eternity, in his passionate fling at nature; withal a sculptor, always profound and tortured, translating rhythm and motion into the terms of sculpture.  Rodin is a statuary who, while having affinities with both the classic and romantic schools, is the most startling artistic apparition of his century.  And to the century he has summed up so plastically and emotionally he has also propounded questions that only the unborn years may answer.  He has a hundred faults to which he opposes one imperious excellence—­a genius, sombre, magical, and overwhelming.

V. EUGENE CARRIERE

Death has consecrated the genius of three great painters happily neglected and persecuted during their lifetime—­Manet, Monticelli, and Carriere.  Though furiously opposed, Manet was admitted to the Luxembourg by the conditions of the Caillebotte legacy.  There that ironic masterpiece, Olympe—­otherwise known as the Cat and Cocotte—­has hung for the edification of intelligent amateurs, though it was only a bequest of triumphant hatred in official eyes.  And now the lady with her cat and negress is in the Louvre, in which sacrosanct region she, with her meagre, subtle figure, competes among the masterpieces.  Yet there were few dissenting voices.  Despite its temperamental oscillations France is at bottom sound in the matter of art.  Genius may starve, but genius once recognised, the apotheosis is logically bound to follow.  No fear of halls of fame with a French Poe absent.

Eugene Carriere was more fortunate than his two famous predecessors.  He toiled and suffered hardship, but before his death he was officially acknowledged though never altogether approved by the Salon in which he exhibited; approved or understood.  He fought under no banner.  He was not an impressionist.  He was not a realist.  Certainly he could be claimed by neither the classics nor romantics.  A “solitary” they agreed to call him; but his is not the hermetic art of such a solitary as Gustave Moreau.  Carriere, on the contrary, was a man of marked social impulses, and when in 1889 he received the Legion of Honour, he was enabled to mingle with his equals—­he had been almost unknown until then.  He was the most progressive spirit among his brethren.  Nowadays he is classed as an Intimist, in which category and with such men as Simon Bussy, Menard, Henri le Sidaner, Emile Wery, Charles Cottet, Lucien Simon, Edouard Vuillard, the Griveaus, Lomont, Lobre, and others, he is still their master, still the possessor of a highly individualised style, and in portraiture the successor to such diverse painters as Prudhon, Ricard, and Whistler.