considered as tame and academic as Gérôme or Bouguereau. Yet many of us who carry a walking-stick for adornment rather than support can remember when Monet was an "issue." Where, too, are the "Wagnerites" of the later eighties, now that Götterdämmerung is fed to school-girls along with Little Women and a subscription to St. Nicholas? And today we are witnessing the easy assimilation of those once formidable Bolsheviki of contemporary letters, the Vers-librists, and their kindred in the domains of music and painting and sculpture, the fire-eating Futurists. As for Richard Strauss and his once blood-chilling Zarathustra and Heldenleben and Elektra-why, they have long since been taken to our bosoms along with Papa Haydn and Mozart, and tomorrow will be arranged for the farm-house phonograph, where they will contribute to the simple bucolic joys already enlarged by gasoline and neighborly telephone gossip. It need not, therefore, surprise us to know that before his death Auguste Rodin had come to be looked upon with tolerance by the young radicals of contemporary sculpture as antiquated, conventional, academic. Yet in his own day of dawning glory, how splendid an apparition was Rodin, as, in the early years of this century, his audacious and perturbing genius broke upon the art-world of Europe and America! When, in 1895, a monument of Victor Hugo was ordered from Rodin for the Panthéon, and Rodin responded with his great statue of the poet, seated, nude, on a rock under the partially concealing folds of a cloak, what an uproar arose! The administrative staff of the Department of Fine Arts were unspeakably shocked. They had expected, as Judith Cladel relates in her sympathetic Life of the sculptor, a solemn and respectable Victor Hugo in the frock-coat of an Academician. Why this semi-naked parody of a revered national figure? But today the once outrageous statue stands in the garden of the Palais Royal, and students and art-lovers make pious pilgrimages from afar to look upon it. And then, soon after, came the furious war over the amazing Balzac. It became a case "-the affaire de Balzac. For months the café-concerts and music-halls spilled their gutter wit upon the "scandalous" statue and its maker; peddlers sold ribald plaster replicas of it, caricaturing the strange brooding figure, cloaked in mysterious majesty, as a seal or a heap of snow. Today this work of profound and intrepid genius is acclaimed as one of the supreme projections of the creative imagination. Two years after the disclosure of the Balzac to the horrified public of Paris, Rodin's show at the Exposition of 1900 initiated the world-wide recognition that came to him swiftly thenceforth, and for more than a decade he knew what it was to be a Personage. He died last month one of the towering spiritual figures of his time, and the greatest sculptor since Michelangelo. He was not, of course, the isolated revolutionist that casual commentators have assumed him to be. He came of a long line of sculptors who had endeavored to relate their work more intimately to human life and emotion, who sought to make bronze and marble more richly expressive. Rodin owed much to Puget, Falconet, Rude, Barye, Carpeaux. He has been uncritically regarded as a wondrous "sport" (in the botanical sense); but he was far from that. He was the result of a natural and inevitable progression, an inspired son of his time. He was one of the stormy romanticists of the last century. Born a generation later than Wagner, he had much of the expressional intensity of that Promethean exponent of the romantic impulse. And he had Wagner's range, as well as his intensity, of expression. He could swing largely and easily from the violence and terror of the tremendous Gate of Hell to the lyric sweetness of Spring and Adolescence. His chief contribution to the art of sculpture was that he made it almost articulate. He conferred upon it not only an added eloquence, but a new kind of eloquence. He made it sing and rhapsodize and lament: he made it canorous, an instrument of lyric and tragical speech. He is as intimately akin to Wagner and Schubert, Blake and Rossetti and Whitman, as he is to Donatello and Michelangelo. He was a simple and sincere attendant upon the secret ways of Nature, a life-long disciple of classic art; yet he was able to exhibit to his time its restless, passionate soul. He is still (despite the supercilious Futurists) as modern as tomorrow's sunrise, and as immortal, probably, as sorrow and beauty. JERUSALEM THE GOLDEN Jerusalem the golden, With milk and honey blest, Beneath thy contemplation Sink heart and voice opprest. I know not, oh, I know not What joys await us there, What radiancy of glory, What bliss beyond compare. They stand, those halls of Sion, The pastures of the blessed Are deck'd in glorious sheen. There is the throng of David; And there, from care released, The shout of them that triumph, The song of them that feast; And they, who with their Leader Have conquer'd in the fight, For ever and for ever Are clad in robes of white. O sweet and blessed country, To that dear land of rest; Who art, with God the Father And Spirit, ever Blest. Amen. A ROUMANIAN DIARY BY LADY KENNARD [The following extracts from Lady Kennard's diary and letters which are to be published shortly in book form in this country present a vivid picture of Roumania's entrance into and participation in the war. Lady Kennard is the daughter of the British Minister to Roumania.] August, 1916.-War is really coming. Our street today looks quite martial; there is a remount office at the end of it, and streams of men go in and out there all the time. We have been warned that all the telegraph wires to Austria-Hungary will be cut tomorrow. Of this the enemy envoys, apparently, know nothing. There is to be a Crown Council tomorrow night to deal with final private affairs, though it is hoped that the Germans will regard it as the terrified result of a haughty ultimatum which they sent Roumania this week. The attack is planned for tomorrow. Things are getting exciting, but one still hesitates to credit that the moment has come at last. It is said that our first taste of warfare will be an aerial bombardment. I have ordered water to be kept in all the bathtubs from today forward, and am having a tap connection provided between the garden hose and the pantry. All the blankets are piled in the front hall. Perhaps in this manner we can ensure a slight protection against fire. The Roumanians are not over-confident. In fact, they don't expect to begin by winning. They say there will be reverses, losses near the Danube towns; this because the Russians have not yet arrived and may come rather late. Later.-Hurrah! the die is cast. All the telephone wires have been cut, the enemy envoys are to be packed off this evening, and mobilization for active service begins at midnight. We have already been declared "under martial law." War will be declared in Vienna, a little bit late, by the Roumanian minister. I met the German minister here walking towards his Legation this morning, and wanted to make a face at him. That is the way one feels. Later.-Well! the passes are half taken, wounded are coming in, also prisoners. It is really war, and I am really in it!!! Bucarest is quite calm. Orders have come round to extinguish all the lights in view of the Zeppelin raids which have actually begun. I had only one little green light burning in my house last night when the first one was signalled, and the police came and told me to put it out. I was so snubbed that I did not attempt a candle, and sat through the raid in the dark. All the church bells rang wildly when the signal came through, and the guns were infernal, popping like mad. I counted twelve searchlights and tried to believe in the actuality of the happening, but honestly, if I had not hurt myself by bumping into a tin trunk in the dark, I should feel today as if I had dreamt the whole thing. One thing, however, struck me forcibly, and will remain as a humorous recollection until I die: in this quiet town, lying peacefully under a starlit heaven with no sound of traffic to spoil the silence, the sound that deafened us was not the shooting, but the dogs!! September, 1916.-All is still safe and quiet; so far we have not even had food difficulties. Zepps crossed the Danube last night and were signalled here, but there was too much wind for them, presumably, for they never arrived. I have fallen into regular hospital routine, and have been given charge of one of the pavilions into which our own institution is divided. Everybody is in the highest spirits; the Roumanian advance is almost brilliant, and one can hardly credit the communiqués that come in, they are so splendid. Later. It has been a wild twenty-four hours! Today, at three o'clock on a sunny afternoon, I drove back to my hospital. In the open market-place, which is the half-way house, I noticed all the people looking up and gesticulating, and then for half an hour I was really in the war, for there were six Taubes overhead all dropping bombs. As we neared the hospital shrapnel began to fall. The bombs, of course, fell all round. I picked up one man wounded and unconscious and took him on with me in the car. A woman was killed at the gate of the hospital and |