Another was Auguste Rodin. To mould the human figure has been an amusement for man since ever he carved wood or indented clay. It was left for the sculptors of Egypt and of Greece and of Italy to form human figures of stone, not as a mere symbol of the reality, but as a revelation of their own moods and visions of beauty or passion; and since then the amusement has fallen back into convention and symbol, although the plastic representation of the modern human body, etiolated and hidden, offers fewer difficulties than its representation in painting which Millet and Degas have in varying ways striven to achieve. Now even the great sculptors of old only suggest to us beauty or grace or strength that has become conventional; they reveal nothing. In this man’s work the form that is closest to us of all forms in the world, that we cling to from the day of birth, and that remains with us, half-seen or divined, until the day of death, has been revealed anew, just as new aspects of light have been revealed by Claude Monet. It is the ancient human way-worn and passion-used form, rendered with pathetic truth, and yet we feel that we have never truly seen the human body before. We marvel how expression can be carried so far without passing the bounds of nature and simplicity. It is far from the method of Michelangelo, Rodin’s immediate predecessor, with whom it has been the fashion to compare him. Michelangelo’s stupendous fantasy twisted the human body into the strange or lovely shapes of his own inverted dreams. In Rodin’s work, it is through a relentless love of nature that we are led to a new and intimate vision of the body. The quiet artist in his simple work-room has been building up through long years his great Gate of Hell; it is the gate of the joy and beauty and terror of life, expressed otherwise than those sober stories of the old world so charmingly told on that gate that was thought worthy of Heaven. But through this gate we are led to a new insight of that figure in the world which is closest to us and most precious, such an insight, it may well be, as Pheidias and Donatello brought to the men of their time.
Another personality that I desired to analyse, and perhaps the greatest, was Richard Wagner. The Leipzig youth, who hated the tawdry tinsel of the theatre, and was so little of a musical prodigy that he could never learn to play the piano, impelled by a strange instinct has yet wrought music and the stage to a poetic height never before approached. Just as our arts rise out of our industries, so the manifold art of Wagner--woven of music and poetry and drama--rises to something that is beyond art. Wagner has made the largest impersonal synthesis yet attainable of the personal influences that thrill our lives, and has built it on the broadest physiological basis of our senses, so that faith has here become sight. Such harmony is what we are accustomed to call Heaven, and such art--to the mere musician cacophony and confusion--is truly called religion. It will take some time yet before we understand its place in life as a new expression of the human soul. Generations must pass before it will be possible for a greater artist, by a still wider sensory appeal, to lift us to any higher Heaven.