We are being slowly socialized even to our way of regarding genius; and this has been until now the last unchallenged stronghold of individualism. We perWe perceive that even here individualism must not longer be allowed to have it all its own way. After a century we are beginning to realize that the truth was in our first socially minded English poet when he sang:

Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine

In one another's being mingle.

To-day we have in library, museum, gallery, and cathedral tangible records of the creativeness of the world's masters. Soon I think we are to possess, thanks to Edison and the kinematographters, intangible records, or at least suggestions, of the modest creativeness of our masters by proxy. Soon every son with this inspiring kind of mother will have as complete means as science and his purse afford of perpetuating her voice, her changing look, her walk, her tender smile. Thus he may keep at least a transient gleam of her essential creativeness always at hand for help in the hour of need.

I would give almost anything if I could have in a storage-battery beside me now some of the electric current that was forever flowing out of my own mother or out of a certain great editor I once knew, or、 out of Hayd Sampson, a glorious old "inglorious Milton" of a master by proxy who works in a small livery-stable in Minnesota. My faith is firm that some such miracle will one day be performed. And in our irreverent Yankee way we may perhaps call the captured product of the master by proxy "canned virtue." In that event the twenty-first centurion will no more think of setting out on a difficult task or for a God-forsaken environment without a supply of canned virtue than of starting for one of the poles equipped with only a pocketful of pemmican.

There is a grievous amount of latent

master-making talent being spoiled to-day for want of development. Many a one feels creative energy crying aloud within himself for vicarious spiritual expression. He would be a master by proxy, yet is at a loss how to learn. Him I would recommend to try learning the easiest form of the art. Let him resolve to become a creative listener to music. Once he is able to influence reproducers of art like pianists and singers, he can then begin groping by analogy toward the more difficult art of directly influencing the world's cre

ators.

I do not know if in the history of the planet this mighty force which resides in the masters by proxy has ever been systematically used. I am sure that it has never been systematically conserved, and that it is one of the least understood and least developed of earth's natural resources. One of our next long steps forward should be along this line of the conservation of "virtue." The last physical frontier has virtually been passed. Now let us turn to the undiscovered continents of soul which have long been awaiting their Columbuses and Daniel Boones, their country life commissions and conferences of governors.

Why, I am convinced that if the hundredth part of you possible masters by proxy who read this page should grow aware of your gift, and in return for this awareness should turn your creativeness, as per proviso, through the channel of a writer no more gifted than the writer of these lines, and through him suddenly flash out upon the world a tithe of your busheled brilliance, there would be witnessed the sudden record-smashing vault of a scribe of low degree into the seats of the mighty.

This arrangement would have its reciprocal advantages, too. For the vaulter would take up so little room in his new situation that there would be plenty of room beside him for the more gifted masters by proxy.

Try it, my masters!

RODIN

ODIN'S busts of women are perhaps most charming part of his work. But to say this is almost a sacrilege, an affront to the grace of the small groups that, in this giant's work, swarm about the superior figures. But we need not search too far into this or yield to the pedantic mania for classifying to death. Let us rather look at them without transforming the joy of admiration into the labor of cataloguing, and give ourselves up wholly to the pleasure of seeing and understanding.

Yes, these portraits of women are the graceful aspect of this work of power. They are the achievements of a force which knows its own strength, and here relaxes in caresses. If some among them disturb the spirit, most of them shed upon us a calm enjoyment, the delightful security that one breathes among all-powerful beings that wish to be gracious. They allay the sense of unrest aroused in us by those dramas in marble and bronze which a powerful intellect has conceived-that mind from which sprang the "Burghers of Calais," the two monuments to Victor Hugo, the "Tower of Labor," that imagination, glowing like a forge, which produced the "Gate of Hell," the monument Sarmiento, the statue of Balzac.

ture.

Here Rodin's art extends to the utmost confines of grace. He has contrived to discover the most delicate secrets of naHe models the petals of the lips just as nature curls the frail substance of the rose-leaf. By imperceptible gradations he attaches the delicate membranes of the eyelids to the angle of the temples just as nature in springtime attaches the leaves to the rough bark of trees.

Great thinkers never cease to be moved by the charm of weakness. The "eternal feminine" is just that, the power of grace over the manly soul. The strongest feel

this attraction most, are most possessed with the desire of expressing it. I am thinking of Homer, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakspere, Balzac, Wagner, and Rodin in saying this. They have created a feminine world, the figures of which, lovingly copied from living models, become models in turn. They haunt thousands of souls, fashion them in their image. In her complicated ways, Nature avails herself of the artist to modify the human type.

We have some terra-cotta figures of Rodin, modeled when he was between twenty-five and thirty, while working at the manufactory at Sèvres, in the studio of Carrier-Belleuse, that accomplished sculptor. They are charming little busts, with the perfume of the eighteenth century breathing from them, treated a little in the manner of Carpeaux, with the velvety shadow of their black eyes on their sparkling faces. One of them, now in a private gallery in New York, has a hat on its head, coquettish, tender, innocently provocative; it is full of Parisian allurement because it is characteristically French. One can find its kindred among certain Renaissance figures, and even among the mischievous faces of Gothic angels. With all this there is that ephemeral prettiness. which is called "the fashion," that caprice of styles which does for the adornment of cities what the flowers of the field do for the country.

made the religion of progress his own by reflective study. Progress is for him the chief condition of happiness. Present-day philosophies commonly put it in doubt; but if happiness exists, it is surely in the soul of the artist. But it is recognized with difficulty because it is called by an equivocal name, the ideal.

Let us look at the "Portrait of the Artist's Wife." Here, in this noble effigy, this severe image with its lowered eyelids, the artist passes beyond the promise of his

first period. The face, rather wide at the cheek-bones, lengthens toward the chin, where the sorrowful mouth reigns. It expresses melancholy, gravity, dignity, Christian charity. It is rather masculine, and seems less youthful than the original was at the time. It is as if the artist had sought to bring out the character by conscientious modeling, without any softening; all the features are underlined, as on a face that has attained a ripe age. He had not yet discovered the art of soften