his head so as to let the water run out of his
locks. His broad chest was parted by a stubby growth of hair that
extended between his powerful muscles. It heaved with the exertion of
swimming and imparted an even motion to his flat abdomen, which was as
smooth as ivory where it joined the hips. His muscular thighs were set
above slender knees and fine legs ending in arched feet, with short
heels and spread toes. He walked slowly over the beach.

How beautiful is the human form when it appears in its original freedom,
as it was created in the first day of the world! But where are we to
find it, masked as it is and condemned never to reappear. That great
word, Nature, which humanity has repeated sometimes with idolatry and
sometimes with fear, which philosophers have sounded and poets have
sung, how it is being lost and forgotten! If there are still here and
there in the world, far from the pushing crowd, some hearts which are
tormented by the constant search of beauty, and forever feeling the
hopeless need of expressing what cannot be expressed and doing what can
only be dreamed, it is to Nature, as to the home of the ideal, that they
must turn. But how can they? By what magic will they be able to do so?
Man has cut down the forests, has conquered the seas, and the clouds
that hover over the cities are produced by the smoke that rises from the
chimneys. But, say others, do not his mission and his glory consist in
going forward and attacking the work of God, and encroaching upon it?
Man denies His work, he ruins it, crushes it, even in his own body, of
which he is ashamed and which he conceals like a crime.

Man having thus become the rarest and most difficult thing in the world
to know (I am not speaking of his heart, O moralists!), it follows that
the artist ignores his shape as well as the qualities that render it
beautiful. Where is the poet, nowadays, even amongst the most brilliant,
who knows what a woman is like? Where could the poor fellow ever have
seen any? What has he ever been able to learn about them in the salons;
could he see through the corset and the crinoline?

Better than all the rhetoric in the world, the plastic art teaches those
who study it the gradation of proportions, the fusion of planes, in a
word, harmony. The ancient races, through the very fact of their
existence, left the mark of their noble attitudes and pure blood on the
works of the masters. In Juvenal, I can hear confusedly the death-r