discarded the brush, and standing before his canvas he squeezed his
tubes upon it, literally modelling his paint with his thumb until it
almost assumed the relief of sculpture. What a touch he had! What a
subtle prevision of modulations to be effected by the careless scratch
of his nail or the whip of a knife's edge! Remember, too, that
originally he had been an adept in the art of design; he could draw as
well as his peers. But he sacrificed form and observation and
psychology to sheer colour. He, a veritable discoverer of tones--aided
thereto by an abnormal vision--became the hasty improviser, who at the
last daubed his canvases with a pasty mixture, as hot and crazy as his
ruined soul. The end did not come too soon. A chromatic genius went
under, leaving but a tithe of the gleams that illuminated his brain.
Alas, poor Fada!




IV. RODIN



I

Rodin, the French sculptor, deserves well of our new century; the old
one did so incontinently batter him. The anguish of his own Hell's
Portal he endured before he moulded its clay between his thick
clairvoyant fingers. Misunderstood, therefore misrepresented, he with
his pride and obstinacy aroused--the one buttressing the other--was
not to be budged from his formulas and practice of sculpture. Then the
world of art swung unwillingly and unamiably toward him, perhaps more