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It is only when surfaces, perfectly flat and well polished, are placed in contact, that the particles approach in sufficient number, and closely enough, to produce a sensible degree of cohesive attraction. Here are two plates of polished metal, I press their flat surfaces together, having previously interposed a few drops of oil, to fill up every little porous vacancy. Now try to separate them.

There are some other modifications of attraction peculiar to certain bodies; namely, that of magnetism, of electricity, and of affinity, or chemical attraction; but we shall confine our attention merely to the attraction of cohesion and of gravity; the examination of the latter we shall resume at our next meeting.

Questions

ON THE ATTRACTION OF GRAVITY.

ATTRACTION OF GRAVITATION, CONTINUED. OF WEIGHT. OF THE FALL OF BODIES. OF THE RESISTANCE OF THE AIR. OF THE ASCENT OF LIGHT BODIES.

EMILY.

I have related to my sister Caroline all that you have taught me of natural philosophy, and she has been so much delighted by it, that she hopes you will have the goodness to admit her to your lessons.

The resistance which the air opposes to the fall of bodies is proportioned to their surface, not to their weight; the air being inert, cannot exert a greater force to support the weight of a cannon ball, than it does to support the weight of a ball made of leather; but the cannon ball will overcome this resistance more easily, and fall to the ground, consequently, quicker than the leather ball.

The heaviest bodies may be made to float awhile in the air, by making the extent of their surface counterbalance their weight. Here is some gold, which is one of the most dense bodies we are acquainted with; but it has been beaten into a very thin leaf, and offers so great an extent of surface in proportion to its weight, that its fall, you see, is still more retarded by the resistance of the air, than that of the sheet of paper.

But, Mrs. B., if the air is a real body, is it not also subjected to the laws of gravity?

Thus you see that it is not the different degrees of gravity, but the resistance of the air, which prevents bodies of different weight from falling with equal velocities; if the air did not bear up the feather, it would reach the ground as soon as the marble.

Questions

ON THE LAWS OF MOTION.

OF MOTION. OF THE INERTIA OF BODIES. OF FORCE TO PRODUCE MOTION. DIRECTION OF MOTION. VELOCITY, ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE. UNIFORM MOTION. RETARDED MOTION. ACCELERATED MOTION. VELOCITY OF FALLING BODIES. MOMENTUM. ACTION AND REACTION EQUAL. ELASTICITY OF BODIES. POROSITY OF BODIES. REFLECTED MOTION. ANGLES OF INCIDENCE AND REFLECTION.

MRS. B.

The science of mechanics is founded on the laws of motion; it will therefore be necessary to make you acquainted with these laws before we examine the mechanical powers. Tell me, Caroline, what do you understand by the word motion?

The motion of a body acted upon by a single force, is always in a straight line, and in the direction in which it received the impulse.

Accelerated motion is produced when the force which put a body in motion, continues to act upon it during its motion, so that its velocity is continually increased. When a stone falls from a height, the impulse which it receives from gravitation in the first instant of its fall, would be sufficient to bring it to the ground with a uniform velocity: for, as we have observed, a body having been once acted upon by a force, will continue to move with a uniform velocity; but the stone is not acted upon by gravity merely at the first instant of its fall; this power continues to impel it during the whole time of its descent, and it is this continued impulse which accelerates its motion.

"I do not deny that there is exaltation in my works; but that exaltation existed not in me, but in nature, in movement. The divine work is naturally exalted. As for me, all I do is to be true; my temperament is not 'exalted'; it is patient. I am not a dreamer, but a mathematician; and if my sculpture is good it is because it is geometrical."

"To teach the antique at the outset of a man's studies is to render the antique incomprehensible. In the first place, no one can teach the antique, it is not possible; that art of truth and simplicity cannot be taught. The sculptor works from nature, and afterwards he goes to look, in the galleries, and see how the antique rendered what he has been trying for from the life. But if he goes straight to the antique, shutting his eyes to nature, as the antique has always been done from nature, our sculptor will only be able to carry that vision into his own work in a factitious way; he will be neither antique nor modern, but bad.

"To say that the antiques, which portray the plain marvel of life, are beautiful is a superficial sort of praise. Beauty is not the starting-point, but the point of arrival; a thing can only be beautiful if it is true. Truth itself is only a complete harmony, and harmony is finally only a bundle of utilities. The miracle of life could not be perpetuated but for the constant renewal of universal balance. The ancients felt that vast rhythm, and their art, being modelled upon it, appears to us as a natural and sublime expression of beauty.... One of the ancients made a statue. How did he set about it? It is useless to bring in rules that only grew up in the brains of commentators dissecting a series of works, centuries afterwards. The antique remains uncomprehended because we have not a simple enough spirit. It is not by studying the antique that we shall learn its secret; in order to understand, not its nomenclature, but its spirit, we must begin by studying nature. Rembrandt cannot be understood by copying him at the Louvre, he can only be understood when we travel through nature to him. Well, nature is always there, waiting patiently for antiques to be made afresh; the model is there waiting for someone to come at last, no matter whence. For it is an error to think the antique comes from the south: it comes from everywhere. The antique can be produced from a Dutch woman or an American woman; the type is nothing, the modelling is everything.

"There is in the antiques an astonishing mystery of life which causes all idea of dimension to disappear. A figure an inch or two high might just as well be life-size; when a thing is well organised, the greatness is in the modelling and not in the size. If one were to photograph a Tanagra figure and the Eiffel Tower, and were to show the two photographs to some person unacquainted with either object, I am sure he would declare the Tanagra figure to be larger than the tower. A pear or an apple, from the point of view of modelling, is as large as the celestial sphere. Thus the splendour of truth is such that finding no word to render it, we have called it 'Ideal.'"

A recent example in Paris is the double statue of the chemists who invented quinine. When will people understand that a discovery of this kind, however honourable, is nevertheless quite incapable of being associated with any plastic idea? The same thing is true of the statues of Chappe and Lavoisier, flanked by instruments of telegraphy and chemistry. These are ridiculous signboards, melancholy compliments translated by a tradesman's art that renders our streets hideous.

I find myself underlining-: it is not Rodin whose voice makes this emphasis. But I am attempting to mark out in this way the formulas which spring up in his conversation, and which, collected together, will give the public an idea of his instinctive synthesis, deduced from life.

Lo?e Fuller has obtained, by means of stuffs not wetted, the effects that the '?cole' loves, because her plastic dance is logically derived from nature.

WORKS SINCE THE "BALZAC"--SMALL WORKS IN MARBLE--PLAN OF THE MONUMENT TO LABOUR--DRAWINGS AND ETCHINGS

The monument to Puvis de Chavannes was entrusted to his friend Rodin, and is already finished. Rodin conceived it in an original and charming way. Instead of making the customary statue, he considered the purely Greek quality of Puvis' genius and chose to pay homage to him in a form reproduced from the antique. The bust of the great painter is placed on a plain table, as the ancients placed those of their dead upon little domestic altars. A fine tree loaded with fruit bends over and shades the head. Leaning on the table behind the bust is a beautiful naked youth, who sits dreaming in a well-chosen supple attitude. The whole design is intimate, gentle, and pure. Placed on the ground in a garden this votive monument would show how much delicacy and caressing lightness sometimes lies in Rodin's sombre and pathetic thoughts.

I come now to Rodin's drawings, drawings which were not made to be shown, but which, having nevertheless become known, have surprised and puzzled people. Rodin's drawings, like some other drawings by sculptors, are not themselves works of art; they are thoughts noted down, and are not comprehensible unless they are seen with the statues of which they indicate the first idea, or some variation.

"These sketches are altogether the work of a sculptor, even in their colour, which seems to have sunk into plaster or clay, and especially in the firmness of their modelling, which is imparted by shaded touches of body-colour, on grey paper, or rendered by spaces left white. These blanks, these white spaces, are the extreme point of the modelling, the 'high light' of some projection, which lower down is wrapped in half-tints that carry the eye to the shadows of the inflections or the hollows. There is a constant relation between the contour and the interior modelling. A thrill is communicated by the fantastic lighting of some sketches. Rodin adds further strength to this dramatic distribution of lights and shadows by one or two tones that accentuate the impression or fix a plan. Often his ink will become blue or yellow, , in order to settle a value or intensify a feeling. Such is the case in the Fenaille publication, with the gloomy red in the face of the Ugolino, of the Dantesque Mahomet, whose entrails are hanging out, and of some other figures dashed in, in black, on a violet background. One plainly feels the material in which the work, of which the sketch is the first idea, will be executed. It is always a sculptor who is at work, even when he exchanges the chisel for the pen or the brush."

Painters would scorn these drawings. They commonly believe that sculptors cannot express upon a plane surface the mass and movement of a body. In reality a painter's sketch and a sculptor's sketch differ in intention and execution. Rodin's are translations of movements, in no way decorative and not attempting to express either modelling or detail, but, if we may say so, the abstract geometry, the thought that commands the movement. The use of coloured inks, which are solely meant to modify certain values that black or white would not express to Rodin's mind, has given rise to mistakes. These colours are not there to express real tints, as is the case in ordinary drawings thus touched up; inaccurate things have been said about these colourings, and about the fantastic and almost Japanese appearance of some of the plates. Rodin is certainly not thinking of prints in colour. He makes these notes instinctively, and displays not so much a deliberate thought as a natural faculty of transcription.

Rodin's drawings are "rough drafts" to be compared with those of a writer. Some are very impressive, and all constitute precious evidence of his psychological preoccupations and of his desire for simplification. But they remain on the margin of his work, and neither the public nor the critics have those rights over them that belong to biographers and friends. That is a point to be plainly specified, and I desire to repeat that that is the reason this book contains none of them.

This word may mean either a certain sort of dance, or the "round" of a patrol.--TRANS.

Album of 142 sketches, reproduced in heliogravure by M. Manzi and published by Goupil, 1897. These sketches in wash or colour have been selected according to the advice of M. Fenaille, their owner, who lent them, from the most imaginative of Rodin's drawings in his second manner.

RODIN'S PRIVATE LIFE--HIS PERSON, STUDIO, AND HOME--HIS INFLUENCE; SCULPTORS INSPIRED BY HIS IDEAS--RODIN'S PLACE IN THE FRENCH SCHOOL--HIS PRESENT POSITION IN RESPECT TO ACADEMIC SCULPTURE

Auguste Rodin is in person a man of middle height, with an enormous head upon a massive torso. At first sight one sees nothing of him but this leonine bust, the head with its strong nose, flowing grey beard, and small, keen, light-coloured eyes, slightly veiled by short sight and by a gentle irony. The impression of power is accentuated by the rolling gait, the rocky aspect of the troubled brow under the rough brush of hair, the bony thickness of the aquiline nose and the ample curls of beard. But the first impression is partly contradicted by the reticent line of the mouth, the quick look, penetrating, simple, and arch, , and especially by the voice, which is hollow, not easily modulated, with deep inflections and sudden returns to a dental pronunciation, and of which the meaning and intention are further modified by certain very expressive tossings of the head. He appears simple, precise, reserved, courteous, and cordial, without liveliness. Little by little his shyness gives place to a calm and remarkable tone of authority. He is neither emphatic nor awkward, and would seem rather dispirited than inspired. An immense energy breathes in his sober and measured gestures. The slowness and apparent embarrassment of his speech and the pauses in his conversation give especial significance to what he says; moreover, Rodin has acquired of late years a genuine case as a talker and even as a writer, which previously he did not possess. I was intimately acquainted with St?phane Mallarm?, who, measured by Rodin, was incomparably eloquent, and I often associate these two men in my thoughts. The voices were alike, and Rodin, too, with his improvised phrases, has the same veiled circumspect way of speech, hitting suddenly upon words that illuminate the idea.

Rodin, in speaking of any work of his, has a way of explaining it that is very elliptical, but very clear, and which has caused some brilliant chatterers to say, because he did not offer a prolix commentary, that he did not know what he had done. In reality he utters the essential, and his gesture, which seems to model his thought in space, completes his words. He looks lovingly on his creations, and sometimes seems to meditate in astonishment at the idea of having created them; he speaks of them as though they existed apart from himself.

It is not weakness, for Rodin has had an excessively hard life and is strong and patient; it is dignity of the inner life and profound indifference for the life about him. Rodin is a high dignitary of the Legion of Honour, a president of the judges of sculpture of an important society of artists , he is honoured all over Europe, has been received in England as a genius, and has succeeded Whistler as the head of a chosen band of artists; but he remains the man that he was when he was unknown and poor in his solitude at Brussels.

He likes few things, but likes those thoroughly. He reads little, but what he reads strikes home to him as to no one else; Baudelaire and Rousseau, in whom he delights, are instances. He is passionately fond of music, especially of Gluck, but seldom speaks of it. He simplifies everything, sees only the main lines in morality as in art, lives by two or three principles, and has an aversion for everything that is not essential.

When one knows Rodin well one ceases to be able to separate him from his work. He can no longer think otherwise than symbolically by slow deposits of accumulated sensation which work on in the deep strata of his consciousness and suddenly blossom and take a name. His statues are states of the soul. He is himself a representative being, surprised at his own immanence, and his intelligence is outdone by his instinct. That is how it comes about that he does not always know how to name the beings that he has discovered, as we discover, by means of pain, corners of our consciousness that we had not suspected. In the same way that Rodin seems to break away the fragments of a block from around an already existing statue hidden in it, he is himself a sort of rock concealing shapes within it and embracing in its secret recesses immense crystallised arborescences. With a simple enough personal psychology he expresses infinite shades and inflexions of emotion. His thought is like the monad of Leibnitz; it seems, when one sees the man, to have no window to the outer world.

Rodin's opinions upon social life are vague. He contents himself with repeating that work lovingly done is the secret of all order and all happiness. To love life and natural forms, and to attempt nothing disobedient to Nature or her aims, that is his whole morality.

He sees very few people and visits nobody. He would baffle visitors accustomed to elegant, literary, well-informed, brilliant artists. His studio in the Rue de l'Universit?, at the end of an old yard encumbered by blocks of marble and shaded by aged chestnut trees, is like the work-place of a poor beginner. Neither a carpet nor an ornament is to be seen; the stone floor, the bare walls, a few rush chairs, some modelling stands, some cloths, a shabby deal table loaded with papers, sketches piled up on shelves, blouses hanging on nails, a cast-iron stove--these and nothing more are found by the many foreign admirers who come to see Rodin, and whom he receives with invariable amiability amid his assistants at work upon the Hugo monument or upon some smaller piece of marble.

Rodin appears to stand alone in his own time; first, by his genius; and secondly, by the special character of his artistic conception. This solitude, however, is only apparent. Rodin's ideas, as opposed to the teaching of the "?cole," form a body of logical principles which are slowly attracting the adhesion of young artists. The long struggle of impressionism against academism has now entered upon its last phase: the return to the French tradition, to national affiliation in opposition to the Roman neo-classicism. That idea, which is the programme of all independent and interesting critical intelligence in our country, finds in Rodin its perfect demonstration, and the only one afforded by contemporary sculpture. Until now Rodin has preached only by example, and we know how slow the critics and the public are in extracting from a work the ideas that it contains. But the extraction is now begun, and Rodin himself speaks with undisputed authority. Since the exhibition of 1900 his moral position stands ten times higher. Youth greets him as a chieftain and his detractors are silent. While the synthetic and symbolic mind of Rodin arouses the enthusiasm and inspires the thoughts of writers, the theory of the amplification of the modelling is making its way in the studios of sculptors. "Rodin has opened a large window in the pale house of contemporary sculpture," declares Pierre Roche, the sculptor; "out of the timid and much impaired craft that was before his day he has shown that a bold art full of hope can be made." This opinion of one of the most delicate artists of our generation is precisely that of many independent sculptors. Among these we must quote Emile Bourdelle, Rodin's pupil and friend, an impassioned, vibrating, and generous artist, whose works are among those first looked for in each Salon. Others are the two brothers Gaston and Lucien Schnegg, the latter of whom exhibited in the Salon of 1904 so beautiful a head of Aphrodite, almost worthy in the mysterious and vaporous beauty of its planes, of the ancients, and of Rodin; Jules Desbois, of the first rank in technical skill and of a violently original temperament; Alexandre Charpentier, a former collaborator of Rodin's, whose success in applied art has not turned him aside from his expressive and vigorous work in statuary; Mlle. Camille Claudel, Rodin's pupil, who is the first woman sculptor of existing-art in France, and whose name has appeared upon admirable works; and finally, Pierre Roche, although his supple and decorative fancy denies itself the expression of the tragic. The Swiss sculptor Niederhausern-Rodo, George Minne, the sculptor of Ghent, who has a powerful creative genius, not understood, and the Italian sculptor Rosso, are also partisans of Rodin's art, and so is the Englishman Bartlett. In another direction it is very interesting to note the curious reciprocal influence of Auguste Rodin and Eug?ne Carri?re, who are united by friendship and by the same aesthetic creed. Eug?ne Carri?re, the most profound painter of the inner life existing in the French school of to-day, has great analogies with Rodin, both as a man and as an artist. He, too, reduces his art to essentials, to the main lines and the deliberate amplification of surfaces. Thus his figures, bathed in shadow, are akin to Rodin's statues, while the latter, bathed with dewy light, seem to be pictures by Carri?re. The painter becomes massive and powerful, the sculptor becomes vaporous. Rodin seeks the bland, half-shadows of Correggio, and Carri?re desires that his figures should have the powerful relief of bronze. The painter sacrifices colour to the sole study of values, and by his black-and-white comes back to sculpture. Very curious is this point of junction between two great artists. Rodin is beginning to explain himself with the pen; and Eug?ne Carri?re has, for some years past, been writing--too rarely--passages upon art of which the style is admirable and the concentration of thought astonishing, passages which recall Mallarm? and Baudelaire, and leave far behind the commonplaces of journalistic criticism. Rodin and Carri?re have their school, their circle of chosen admirers, and their double influence may soon be the most decisive, if not the most brilliant and the noisiest, in French art of to-day.

NUDE FIGURE

A whole order of curious and fundamental relations between nervous sensibility and thought has arisen out of his work. Rodin's personality is specially representative in the line of French sculptors. He goes back, as I have said, to the Egyptians and the Greeks in the matter of technical ideas. In his tragic feeling he proceeds directly from the Gothic artists. It is from them that he descends, and especially from the sculptors of the French Renascence, in particular Germain Pilon; and he blends his Greek remembrances, passed through an Italian influence, with a conception altogether national, vigorous, and decorative. Rodin's actual part is to take up sculpture exactly at the moment of the French evolution. Since that time we have had some great masters; native genius has been triumphantly upheld, in opposition to the false school that came from the Alps, by Coysevox, Houdon, Puget, Pajou, Pigalle, Clodion, Falconet, Couston, Rude, Carpeaux, and Barye, a line of splendid inventors of shapes, all of whom, in contradistinction to the official school, have represented the inmost qualities of their race. All these men Rodin emulates by the importance of his work; perhaps the future may regard him as the magnificent outcome of their efforts carried on through three centuries. In this succession of artists, Puget, Rude, and Barye are those with whom his technical relations are closest. But he has been less decorative than Puget and less hampered by the themes imposed upon him; he has gone further than the great Rude in the expression of inward emotion, and he surpasses even Barye in power of modelling and boldness of silhouette. He has created a world which is fully his own, a feeling and a pathos not to be found elsewhere, which are the very soul of his time.

In any case it was high time he should appear; he has been as useful as was Manet by his intervention in French art. In spite of Dalou, sculpture had fallen very low after the death of Carpeaux and Barye; the deplorable school of the Second Empire had brought it into degeneracy, and we could reckon no one in sculpture to correspond to the great impressionists. Such men as Dujalbert, Chapu, Merci?, Fr?miet, Saint Marceaux, and Falgui?re, are but sham great sculptors, nothing of whose work will last; the "?cole" group, from Paul Dubois to Barrias, Aube and Guillaume, is a mere example of pretentious insignificance. The few vigorous temperaments, or workers of genuine technical merit, like Denys Puech, Jean Dampt, Gardet, Camille Lef?vre, Devillez, and Jean Bassier, did not know how to put together their efforts in such a way as to found a real school. They produced without attaining a cohesion of thought capable of guiding a fresh generation. Bartholom?, thoughtful, pure, dreamy, and proud, stands apart. Mme. Besnard and M. Th?odore Rivi?re are charming, but without influence. I have spoken of the group that has spontaneously placed itself around Rodin. Amid this interesting, unequal, and scattered sculpture he appeared with the authority of a master and a prophet; his work set the question upon its true basis again, showing whence we came, what was to be avoided, and whither we were to go; and all this with such clearness of evidence that the appearance of Rodin becomes, in like degree with that of Goujon and that of Puget, a capital date in the history of the French school, I declared in the Preface my intention to avoid any extravagant eulogy of Rodin, and have uttered my dislike of the idolatry by which some people think it necessary publicly to emphasise their admiration, with its snobbish accretions. But I should fall into the opposite fault if I did not declare the truth and the importance of what such an artist brings to his art, and did not mark his exact place in the line of his country's sculpture. Henley has called Rodin the Michael Angelo of the modern world. That opinion of a foreign critic, a critic justly esteemed one of the most upright in contemporary literature, France may justly make her own, far from extravagant and puerile praises, and in the face of the work accomplished. I shall be but too happy if I have contributed to make clearer to the public certain secret reasons, certain inner frameworks, of that logical and beautiful work.

A vehement but indiscriminating critic, M. Octave Mirbeau, has seen good to write, by way of affirming that Rodin's art moved him strongly: "A style takes rise from him." I have neither the space nor the wish to recriminate; but it would be dangerous to let such artistic heresies pass without protest. Rodin is an admirable example, but to say that a style arises from him is to say that he may become the creator of a perishable formula, and to understand nothing about his art.

Some surprise may be felt at my having failed to insist upon the name of Michael Angelo. Everybody has hit upon the obvious comparison. It is the exceeding obviousness that leads me to distrust it. Rodin is much nearer to Puget than to Michael Angelo, who is muscular strength carried to heroic proportions. Rodin, like Puget, and more than Puget, is nervous strength. Rodin appears much more akin to Michael Angelo than he really is. Careful study causes us more and more to leave behind that preliminary likeness which has sufficed so many critics.

We might perhaps say the same in regard to the great Carpeaux, too, who carried the art of movement and expression to so high a degree, and who did the same liberal work against the "?cole" as Rodin was to do at a later time. But their visions, aims, and minds differ profoundly.

Chronological catalogue of Rodin's works is almost impossible to draw up. I do not think Rodin himself could do it. It must be remembered that before 1877 he made a quantity of studies which he destroyed, and such a producer as he is willing to neglect things of which others would keep count. In his poor and wandering days Rodin must have abandoned many things. How would it be possible to recount the figures that were retouched or even executed at Carrier-Belleuse's, the earliest independent works, the characters executed by him at Brussels, the statues that were planned and left unfinished for lack of money, those that were broken or that failed--all the immense store of work accomplished in the course of twenty years by a man who worked every day? How would it be possible even to enumerate the sketches and varied renderings of different subjects piled up in the studio at Meudon, in the Clos Payen, in the Rue des Fourneaux, and at Vaugirard? It is a whole world. I will confine myself, therefore, to a statement of known and exhibited works: and these, indeed, are what is essential.

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