self for a few years at least, if not for the remainder of his life, by the little game which Mr. Huneker has (if we remember correctly) called "exploding firecrackers on the steps of the institute." If he doesn't do this, it means (to use the conventional argument against art schools) that in the realization of academical ideals whatever originality the pupil may have had at the outset-has been, if not entirely eliminated, at any rate irrevocably diluted. Lachaise's personality profoundly negates the possibility of self-advertising. As for the instinctive art thesis, his work makes this answer: that the man who by the gods has been fated to express himself will succeed in expressing himself in spite of all schools; that the greatest artist is the man whom no school can kill.
Even if Lachaise could have enjoyed making chumps of his teachers for the pure fun of the thing, it is safe to say that he would never have done so, any more than his genius would ever have made the mistake which Rodin made, of accepting the technique which it had so easily conquered and with that as a basis proceeding to surpass conventional standards, thereby creating another academy. For a Lachaise, as for a Cézanne, academies hold nothing beyond a knowledge of tools. For this reason both men are intrinsically great geniuses. The significance of their production lies in the fact that it goes not beyond but under conventional art.
Frequent allusions having been made to "Lachaise's work," it is high time that we become specific. Last Spring at Penguin Lachaise had on show, in addition to a bust and. an alabaster bas-relief, a thing seventeen inches long which he called The Mountain. It is not the slightest exaggeration to say that, to any one genuinely either cognizant or ignorant of Art As She Is Taught, this thing was a distinct shock. Surrounded by a gurly sea of interesting chromatic trash it lay, in colossal isolation: a new and sensual island. Merely to contemplate its perfectly knit enormousness was to admit that analysis of, or conscious thinking on our part about, a supreme aesthetic triumph, is a very pitiful substitute for that sensation which is impossibly the equivalent of what the work itself thinks of us. It is difficult to conceive any finer tribute to The Mountain than the absence of "criticism" which it created. Bust and bas-relief came in for their customary meagre share, but, so far as can be discovered, The Mountain was never once mentioned: which fact may partially, at any rate, excuse the sentences which follow.
