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308 repeated effort of the same muscular agents. He cursed the workshops that were creating monsters, the manufactories, the blast furnaces, the coal mines in which hordes of young men were defaced, injured, spoiled. And he cherished the idea of an Utopia, dreamed of a new and frankly pagan rebirth in which the cult of the nude, free and absolute, would flower again, the adoration of expressive bodies and unveiled flesh. Why could he not surround himself with those who had been freed from labor, with a court of plastic human figures? Instead of statues and pictures, he would have collected, or rather selected, human masterpieces. And in his enthusiasm for physical beauty, he blasphemed these words of Genesis: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." Moral leprosy and physical deformity had no other origin. The law of Darwin was confirming that of Jehovah.

Then, by a strange contradiction, he began to acknowledge the imperious and tragic charm of these days. His contemporaries offered a beauty that was characteristic and psychic, and, if not as regular, at least more infinitely picturesque and less sculptural than that of bygone generations. He reconciled the two kinds of beauty, associated the nude of the past and the costume of the present, modernized the antique, created Antinous in the knitted vest of a bargeman, Venuses togged out like cigar-girls, Bacchantes as coffee-sorters and crossing-sweepers, Hercules' as butcher's boys and market-porters. Mercury incarnated himself in a runner with a finely formed back and tapering calves like those of the bronze statue of Giovanni da Bologna; Apollo put on the uniform of a fugleman; Bacchus the giver of wine had as his double an incorrigible drinker. A gang of navvies at work, a