Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/433

Rh studied in his bronze girl swathed in clinging drapery. Her form is revealed by the garment she wears, yet the drapery is an indivisible part of the figure, and one can hardly tell where the flesh leaves off and the undulating cloth begins. Her face, too, is placid, yet firm; the hair is merely a mass; the planes of the face melt into each other, the arms, torso, and drapery unite to form an organic whole. The figure is indivisibly one.

Maillol's apprenticeship was served in the museums. He learned especially of the Greeks and the Egyptians the values of mass, of closely-related volumes. His later expression has been more original and shows a discipline, self-imposed, in simplicity. He has cared especially for figures of nudes, representing them sitting placidly with one arm gently raised, standing with arms raised to the head, kneeling, or crouching. In all of them the positions are obviously symmetrical ones; there is no apparent effort, not the least suggestion of agitation or strain. This is that continuity, that luminous serenity, sought in vain by Rodin.

If the faces seem stolid and not only unfeeling, but positively incapable of passion, turn to his work in bronze to see another expression of his rich nature. Monsieur M is a head charged with the rude vigour and dramatic intensity of that race of bronzed men, the natives of Provence. This face is one foursquare to all winds, with deep caverns of eyes in the swarthy cheeks, almost a diagrammatic scheme of blunt wrinkles, a mass of hair with only a few summary indications of separated masses. Maillol is not quiescent, even if his forms are ample and expansive. In him a deep fire smoulders. He has stored his serene shapes with vitality.

Perhaps the most definite impression one gets from Maillol's work is the sense of poise, of perfectly-adjusted balance. Of this the best figure is his delightful Seated Woman. It is a figure designed in a sequence of flowing curves which are perfectly related. See the indication of security in the right arm and the firmly-set left leg, the grace of the belly line reinforced by the left arm, the quiet repose of the pensive head. Regarded from different angles, this figure presents a constantly changing series of soothing contours, of epic rhythms. It avoids an extreme of which Maillol is sometimes guilty. Like so many of his contemporaries, he has often chosen fat models, pudgy, and positively ugly. This is true of his Pomone. The type has appealed in an unfortunate way to