You must exaggerate your exaggerations
and out-Herod Herod, for others have learned how easy the game is to
play, and are at your heels. It is no longer a matter of
misunderstanding and being misunderstood by the public; it is a matter
of deliberately flouting and outraging the public--of assuming
incomprehensibility and antagonism to popular feeling as signs of
greatness. And so is founded what Frederic Harrison has called the
"shock-your-grandmother school."
It is with profound regret that one must name as one of the founders of
this school an artist of real power, who has produced much admirable
work--Auguste Rodin. At the age of thirty-seven he attained a sudden and
resounding notoriety, and from that time he has been the most talked-of
artist in Europe. He was a consummate modeller, a magnificent workman,
but he had always grave faults and striking mannerisms. These faults and
mannerisms he has latterly pushed to greater and greater extremes while
neglecting his great gift, each work being more chaotic and fragmentary
in composition, more hideous in type, more affected and emptier in
execution, until he has produced marvels of mushiness and incoherence
hitherto undreamed of and has set up as public monuments fantastically
mutilated figures with broken legs or heads knocked off.
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