theme of ecstasy; voluptuousness troubled by pain, the soul tormented
by stranger nuances.

Rodin is of this tormented choir; he is master of its psychology. It
may be the decadence, as any art is in decadence which stakes the
parts against the whole. The same was said of Beethoven by the
followers of Haydn, and the successors of Richard Strauss will be
surely abused quite as violently as the Wagnerites abuse Strauss
to-day--employing against him the same critical artillery employed
against Wagner. That this ecstasy should be aroused by pictures of
love and death, as in the case of Poe and Baudelaire, Wagner and
Strauss, must not be adjudged as a black crime. In the Far East they
hypnotise neophytes with a bit of broken mirror, for in the kingdom of
art, as in the Kingdom of Heaven, there are many mansions. Possibly it
was a relic of his early admiration and study of Baudelaire that set
Wagner to extorting ecstasy from his orchestra by images of death and
love; and no doubt the temperament which seeks such combinations--a
temperament commoner in mediæval days than ours--was inherent in
Wagner. He makes his Isolde sing mournfully and madly over a corpse
and, throwing herself upon the dead body of Tristan, die shaken by the
sweet cruel pains of love. Richard Strauss closely patterns after
Wagner in his Salome, there is the head of a dead man, and there is
the same dissolving ecstasy. Both men play with similar counters--love
and death, and death and love. And so Rodin. In Pisa we may see
(attributed by Vasari) Orcagna's fresco of the Triumph of Death. The
sting of the flesh and the way of all flesh are inextricably blended
in Rodin's Gate of Hell. His principal reading for forty years has
been Dante and Baudelaire. The Divine Comedy and Les Fleurs du Mal are
the key-notes in this white symphony of Auguste Rodin's. Love and life
and bitterness and death rule the themes of his marbles. Like