Puslapio vaizdai
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hurriedly, overburdened by official duties and all sorts of work; weighed down by perfunctory obligations, they correct the students' papers hastily, and hurriedly return to their regular occupation.

As to the students, twenty or thirty work from a single model, which is some distance from them and around which they can hardly turn. They ignore all those inevitable laws which are learned in the course of work, and which escape the attention of an artist working alone. They attend courses, or read books on esthetics written in technical language with obscure, abstract terms, lacking all connection with concrete reality-books in which the same mistakes are repeated because frequently they are copied from one another.

What sort of students can develop under such disastrous conditions? If one among them is seriously desirous of learning, he breaks loose from his destructive surroundings, is obliged to lose several years first in ridding himself of a poor method, and then in searching for a method which formerly one had mastered on leaving the atelier.

That is the method which I preach to-day as emphatically as I can, calling attention to the numerous benefits and advantages of taking up a variety of handicrafts. Aside from sculpture and drawing, I have worked at all sorts of things, ornamentation, ceramics, jewelry. I have learned my lesson from matter itself, and have adapted myself accordingly. Only

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in being faithful to this principle can one understand and know how to work. I am an artisan.

Will my experience be of benefit to others? I hope so. At all events, we have a bit to relearn. It will take years of patience and application to rise from the abyss of ignorance into which we have fallen. However, I believe in a renaissance. A number of our artists have already seen the light-the light of intellectual truth. Acts of barbarism against masterpieces cannot be committed any more without arousing the indignation of cultivated people. That in itself is an inestimable gain, for those works of art are the relics of our traditions, and if we have the strength to become an artistic people again, to reincarnate an era of beauty, then those are the works of art which will serve as our models, expressions of a national conscience that will be the mile-stones on our path.

JUDGED by his work, Auguste Rodin is the most modern of artists; judged by his

life and character, he is unquestionably a man of bygone days. As a sculptor, he is such as were Phidias, Praxiteles, and the master architects of the Middle Ages; that is to say, he is of all times. One single idea guides his thoughts, one single aim arouses his energies-art, art through the study of nature.

It is by the concentration of his unusual mind on a single purpose that he attains his remarkable understanding of man, physical and moral, his contemporary, and of the spirit of our age. In the lifelike features of his statues he inscribes the history of the day. They seem to live, and the potency of their life enters into us and dominates us. For the moment we are only a silent spring, merely reflecting their authority.

Through this secret of genius, his statues and groups have an individual charm. They have taken their place in the history of sculpture. There is the charm of the antique, the charm of the Gothic, and the charm of Michelangelo. There is also the charm of Rodin.

THE BIRTH OF THE GOD OF WAR

BY MARÍA CRISTINA MENA

Author of "The Education of Popo," "John of God, the Water-Carrier," etc.

"Remember Huitzilopochtli!" is still a potent battle-cry of the Mexicans.

WITH A PICTURE BY F. LUIS MORA

WH

HEN I had been attentive and obliging, my grandmother would tell me stories of our pristine ancestors. She had many cuentos by heart, which she told in flowery and rhythmic prose that she never varied by a word; and those epic narrations, often repeated, engraved a network of permanent channels in the memory-stuff of one small child. Indeed, the tales of_mamagrande were so precious to me that I would pray for afternoons of shade, which were the propitious ones, and I almost hated the sun, because when it baked our patio my grandmother would not occupy her favorite hammock, nor I my perch near by, on the margin of the blue-tiled fountain. And I invented a plan by which I could earn a reward.

Her cigarettes, which were very special, came from the coast once a month, packed in a cane box. Tapering at one end and large at the other, in wrappings of cornhusk, they were fastened together in coneshaped bundles of twenty-five, and tied at apex and base with corn-husk ribbon. Now, I knew that mamagrande disliked to untie knots (she had often called me to unknot the waxed thread of her embroidering), so I would privately overhaul her stock of cigarettes, making five very tight knots at each end of each cone; and then at the golden hour I would watch from behind the flower-pots on the upper gallery for her tall figure in spreading black silk, with her fan in her hand and her little gold cigarette-pincers hanging at her waist. When she appeared, I would wait breathlessly for the business of her getting settled in her hammock, and suddenly calling me in a sweet, troubled voice to release a cone of cigarettes; whereupon I would run down to her and untie those bad little knots with such honeyed affability that she would proceed to

recompense me from her store of Aztec mythology.

It was not mythology to me; no, indeed. I knew that mamagrande was marvelously old, -almost as old as the world, perhaps,—and although she denied, doubtless from excessive modesty, having enjoyed the personal acquaintance of any gods or heroes, I had a dim feeling that her intimate knowledge of the facts connected with such unusual events as, for instance, the birth of Huitzilopochtli, was in its origin more or less neighborly and reminiscent.

Huitzilopochtli was the god of war. More honored anciently in sacrificial blood than any other deity ever set up by man, I loved him once for his mother's sake, for his gallant and wonder-stirring birth, and for the eagle light in the black eyes of my grandmother as she pronounced his name.

It is not so difficult to pronounce as might be thought. might be thought. "Weet-zee-lo-potchtlee," spoken quickly and clearly with the accent on the "potch," will come somewhere near it, though it lack the relishing curl of my grandmother's square-cut lips. And the god's sweet mother Coatlicue may safely be called "Kwaht-lee-quay," with the accent on the "lee." But I had better begin at the beginning, as my grandmother always did, after lighting her first cigarette, and while adjusting the gold pincers in a hand like a dried leaf.

"The forests have their mysteries, which are sung in their own language by the waters, the breezes, the birds."

Thus mamagrande would begin in a hushed voice, with a wave of the hand that would make the blue smoke of her cigarette flicker in the air like a line of handwriting.

"Nature weeps and laughs, sings and

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