the last century a new race of artists sprang up from some strange
element and, like flying-fish, revealed to a wondering world their
composite structures. Thus we find Berlioz painting with his
instrumentation; Franz Liszt, Tschaikowsky, and Richard Strauss
filling their symphonic poems with drama and poetry, and Richard
Wagner inventing an art which he believed to embrace the seven arts.
And there is Ibsen, who used the dramatic form as a vehicle for his
anarchistic ideas; and Nietzsche, who was such a poet that he was able
to sing a mad philosophy into life; and Rossetti, who painted poems
and made poetry that is pictorial. Sculpture was the only art that had
resisted this universal disintegration, this imbroglio of the arts. No
sculptor before Rodin had dared to break the line, dared to shiver the
syntax of stone. For sculpture is a static, not a dynamic art--is it
not? Let us observe the rules, though we preserve the chill spirit of
the cemetery. What Mallarmé attempted to do with French poetry Rodin
accomplished in clay. His marbles do not represent but present
emotion, are the evocation of emotion itself; as in music, form and
substance coalesce. If he does not, as did Mallarmé, arouse "the
silent thunder afloat in the leaves," he can summon from the vasty
deep the spirits of love, hate, pain, despair, sin, beauty, ecstasy;
above all, ecstasy. Now the primal gift of ecstasy is bestowed upon
few. In our age Keats had it, and Shelley; Byron, despite his passion,
missed it, and so did Wordsworth. We find it in Swinburne, he had it
from the first; but few French poets have it. Like the "cold devils"
of Félicien Rops, coiled in frozen ecstasy, the blasts of hell about
them, Charles Baudelaire can boast the dangerous attribute. Poe and
Heine knew ecstasy, and Liszt also; Wagner was the master adept of his
century. Tschaikowsky followed him close; and in the tiny piano scores
of Chopin ecstasy is pinioned in a few bars, the soul often rapt to
heaven in a phrase. Richard Strauss has shown a rare variation on the