It is time, however, to pause in this path and to return simply to the question of sculpture. Nor was it my purpose to tire the reader by these abstractions when I began to say a few words about Rodin's opinions concerning the antique. It must be understood, then, that the Balzac and even the Hugo, as well as some figures, were the result of all these preceding reflections. "When I saw my Balzac brought into the yard from the storehouse of the statues in order to go to the Salon," says Rodin, "I had it purposely placed beside The Kiss, which had been finished rather earlier. I was not dissatisfied with the simplified vigour of that group, to which I had already applied these experiments. But I saw that it looked slack, that it did not hold its place beside the Balzac as Michael Angelo's torso does beside a fine antique, and then I understood that I was in the right path. I have had hesitations, you know, pangs that I do not speak of. And then, little by little, as I looked at nature, as I came to understand it better and to throw aside my prejudices more frankly, I took courage. It seemed to me that I was doing better. When I began I did skilful things, things that were smartly done, but they were thin and dry, but I felt there was something beyond, and that something is amplification. I only ventured on it when I was over fifty years old, but do you not think I have a right now to disregard the objections of the mob and the newspapers? I have taken time to know why I was doing as I did. The essential things of my modelling are there, and they would be there in less degree if I 'finished' more. As to polishing or repolishing a toe or a curl, I find no interest in it; it impairs the large line, the soul of what I desired to do, and I have nothing more to say to the public on that point. There the line of demarcation comes between the confidence that the public ought to have in me and the concessions that I ought not to make to the public." To this firm and discreet resolution Rodin has kept in all the works wrought out by him since 1898.

"In the first place, the Antique is Life itself. Nothing is more alive, and no style in the world has rendered life as it has. The ancients were the greatest, most serious, and most admirable observers of nature who have ever existed. The antique was able to render life because the ancients saw the essential thing in it—large blocks. They confined themselves to the large shadows cast by these large blocks, and as truth itself lies in that, their figures being so made could never be feeble. Moreover, the antique is simple, and that gives it astonishing energy. And then there is much more study in it than appears; that was brought home to me once. When I had finished my Age of Brass, I went to Italy and I found an Apollo whose leg was in exactly the same position as one in The Age of Brass that had taken me six months' work. Then I saw that though on the surface everything seems to be done at a stroke, in reality all the muscles are built up and one sees the details come to light one by one. That is because the ancients studied everything in its successive profiles, because in any figure and every part of a figure no profile is like another; when each has been studied separately the whole appears simple and alive.

"The great error of the neo-Greek school is really this: it is not type that is antique, but modelling. For want of having understood that, the neo-Greek school has produced nothing but papier-mâché. It is bad to put the antique before beginners; one should end, not begin with it. If you wanted to teach someone to eat, you would give him fresh food, that he might learn to chew; it would never occur to you to give him food already triturated to exercise his teeth upon. Well, when you want to teach sculpture to anyone, set him face to face with nature, and when he has gained plenty of power to deal with nature, then say to him: 'Now, here is what the antique has done.' And that will give him a new source of energy. Whereas if you give the antique to the beginner who has never struggled with nature, he does not understand anything about it, and loses his individuality over it. You make a plagiarist of him, and instead of making his own prayer to nature he will repeat the prayer of the antique without understanding the words of it. He will die an old pupil; he will not die a man.

"To teach the antique at the outset of a man's studies is to render the antique incomprehensible. In the first place, no one can teach the antique, it is not possible; that art of truth and simplicity cannot be taught. The sculptor works from nature, and afterwards he goes to look, in the galleries, and see how the antique rendered what he has been trying for from the life. But if he goes straight to the antique, shutting his eyes to nature, as the antique has always been done from nature, our sculptor will only be able to carry that vision into his own work in a factitious way; he will be neither antique nor modern, but bad.

"A man may do antique work in our day, not in the false sense of producing the antique type, but in the true sense of modelling like the antique. Such a man (painter, etcher, or sculptor) will take nature, and if he has the power of the antique he will produce antique work, which will entirely disagree with what is taught as such, but will agree with that in the museums. The 'École' begins at the end; when a man begins with nature, he may go on to the most improbable inventions; the antiques themselves show that. Do you know of anything more impossible than the centaur? But is there anything finer in Olympia? The ancients knew nature so well that they became her fellow-workers and created, not phantoms, but beings that were alive in spite of physical impossibilities. To my mind it would be better not to study the antique than to study it wrong. It is not the artist's alphabet, but the reward of his work. The command which it gives us is not to copy it, but to do like it.

"To say that the antiques, which portray the plain marvel of life, are beautiful is a superficial sort of praise. Beauty is not the starting-point, but the point of arrival; a thing can only be beautiful if it is true. Truth itself is only a complete harmony, and harmony is finally only a bundle of utilities. The miracle of life could not be perpetuated but for the constant renewal of universal balance. The ancients felt that vast rhythm, and their art, being modelled upon it, appears to us as a natural and sublime expression of beauty.... One of the ancients made a statue. How did he set about it? It is useless to bring in rules that only grew up in the brains of commentators dissecting a series of works, centuries afterwards. The antique remains uncomprehended because we have not a simple enough spirit. It is not by studying the antique that we shall learn its secret; in order to understand, not its nomenclature, but its spirit, we must begin by studying nature. Rembrandt cannot be understood by copying him at the Louvre, he can only be understood when we travel through nature to him. Well, nature is always there, waiting patiently for antiques to be made afresh; the model is there waiting for someone to come at last, no matter whence. For it is an error to think the antique comes from the south: it comes from everywhere. The antique can be produced from a Dutch woman or an American woman; the type is nothing, the modelling is everything.

"What makes the strength of the antique is the plan, the connection of all the profiles. The neo-Greeks say: 'The antiques are line, and their works, in which all the lines, except two, dance about, show their error. The antiques, we will say, are lines or rather plan. Look at an antique; you can guess the full face from the profile. The eye cannot grasp the shape on the opposite side to that which it beholds, but it deduces it from this side: walk round, and the study of the profiles will afford you an irrefragable proof by rule of three. The sculptor swells the half-tones by slight exaggerations, so as to heighten the light by a tone. The drapery lives; like the body that it hides, it receives life from that body without needing the subterfuge of wetted drapery.'[7]

"There is in the antiques an astonishing mystery of life which causes all idea of dimension to disappear. A figure an inch or two high might just as well be life-size; when a thing is well organised, the greatness is in the modelling and not in the size. If one were to photograph a Tanagra figure and the Eiffel Tower, and were to show the two photographs to some person unacquainted with either object, I am sure he would declare the Tanagra figure to be larger than the tower. A pear or an apple, from the point of view of modelling, is as large as the celestial sphere. Thus the splendour of truth is such that finding no word to render it, we have called it 'Ideal.'"

These quotations will suffice, I hope, to show Rodin's inmost thought. These judgments are implicit condemnations of the "École"; they are also definitions of his classical art, which is by no means "literary," and which is governed, even in its lyrical and tragic developments, by good sense, that is to say, by an inborn taste for balance in the midst of boldness. If I am anxious to insist so strongly upon Rodin's profound normality, this is, I repeat, in order to forewarn the public against the declamations of some of his untoward admirers, who reckon one of his merits to be an "originality" which they confound with that exaggeration, that emphasis and eccentricity that never mark the great artist. Whatever tragic or passionate subject a great artist may treat, to whatever height of strangeness his imagination may rise, beauty of form will, if he is, like Rodin, a master of technique, confer upon t him an exalted and permanent serenity. Rembrandt and Delacroix come from the depth of their vastly differing worlds to meet Raphael and Watteau in that conciliatory region where we admire the great masters—and Rodin is already placed in that region.

IV

WORKS SINCE THE "BALZAC"—SMALL WORKS IN MARBLE—PLAN OF THE MONUMENT TO LABOUR—DRAWINGS AND ETCHINGS

"I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.... Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist ... must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must inquire if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world."

I quoted these high-minded words of Emerson's to Rodin at the time of the Balzac incident. "They are," I said to him, "the very epigraph of your whole life." Nor have they ceased to epitomise the man and the artist. From the time of the Balzac Rodin's work has proceeded very regularly and on the same principles. The Victor Hugo is being finished in marble, in its two versions, in the studio of the Rue de l'Université. The group in which Hugo, his extended arm commanding silence of the waves, sits surrounded by Muses is almost ready; the other, in which Hugo, dreamily listening to the counsels of Iris, stands on the edge of a rock washed by waves, amid which Nereids are entwined, is not quite so far advanced. The Gate of Hell is ready to receive its finally chosen and ordered figures. In the Salon of 1902 Rodin exhibited the three Shades from its summit, inspired by the celebrated Lasciate ogni speransa. In 1900 Rodin only showed two or three old productions at the Universal Exhibition, because his work was collected in a special pavilion at the Rond-point de l'Alma, the concession of which pavilion was made uncomfortable for him by his colleagues, so much so that the artist was obliged to remove on the very day of closing, with less delay and consideration allowed to him than to the most unimportant industrial exhibitor. This special exhibition was, nevertheless, a great international success for Rodin, and the amazing development of his fame may be said to date from it. Before 1900 Rodin stood in the position of an exceptional artist, celebrated but envied, isolated and challenged, whose relations with the Government were strained, whom a minority upheld, but on whom the official world looked coldly. Since that time his eminence is so firmly established that he now holds the rank that Puvis de Chavannes held in the estimation of all artists. His triumphant journey to Prague (1901-2), London's enthusiastic reception, and Rodin's recent election to be President of the Society over which Whistler presided, have finally given him the acknowledgment so long looked for. In 1903 his marble bust of Hugo aroused enthusiasm, and at the Salon of 1904 the colossal bronze Thinker had a most flattering reception, and disarmed the last of his former detractors.

A woman's bust accompanied The Thinker to the Salon. Rodin, who does portraits now and again, had previously made an admirable one of Mme. Fenaille, wife of the art-patron who had been of such great service to him; and he is attempting a curious variation of it. He has just finished a bust of a helmeted Minerva, as impressive as a Donatello, and this, too, is a portrait.

Various works have been produced by Rodin since the Balzac, in addition to the Monument of President Sarmiento, which shows an admirable bas-relief of a radiant Apollo. These works are nearly all in marble, and small. It is almost impossible to describe and classify them; a much larger book would be required, and my main purpose here has been to give a general idea of Rodin's art and an explanation of principles. I have spoken about some of his poems of the flesh, especially that Eternal Idol, which will be the glory of thought in modern sculpture. Rodin's recent works in marble have the same inspiration. Some demand special notice: The Hand of God, a gigantic hand, between the fingers of which, and amid a handful of clay, two beings are tenderly embracing; Icarus, falling from the sky to be crushed on the earth amid his whirling wings; several groups of lovers, entwined, and breathing immeasurable tenderness, the most celebrated of which is Spring or Love and Psyche. Another Psyche, alone, is discovering Love asleep, with extraordinary restrained emotion; and there are several attempts at Poets and Muses, embracing or consoling one another, as well as a splendid sketch of the Magdalen wiping Christ's Body with her Hair. Rodin has thus sometimes touched religious subjects, but with an undogmatic symbolism, philosophic and wide. We may also enumerate another version in marble of the Nereids of the Hugo monument, a winged Inspiration coming to breathe upon the sleeping poet, and holding back the tips of her wings with one hand lest she should make a sound in closing them; a faun drawing towards him a nymph, who struggles in silent, fierce resistance; two high-reliefs of Summer and Autumn in stone; tall women with children, intended for the town of Evian, where Baron Vitta is accumulating treasures of modern art; Pygmalion beholding his statue come to life, who, as soon as she feels herself live, turns from him with a surprising movement of coquetry and aversion. Such works as these cannot be described in words. In them Rodin has excelled to an unparalleled degree in rendering the profoundest psychological complexities, refined intentions, and the hesitations of feeling. I will further note a sketch of Sappho, seated at rest, with her arms leaning upon two little naked women, which is a work inspired equally by the Greeks and by the eighteenth century; it bears witness to the artist's wish of avoiding the massive, and making as many holes as possible within the general block, so as to give lightness and to allow a circulation of light, as the Greeks did in works that were meant to stand against a background of sea or of sky. Many studies of men and women crouching, or squatting, in curious attitudes, recall the art of the Japanese bronzes, which Rodin immensely admires. We must further note some groups of Women Damned, in which Rodin's art attains the highest point of voluptuous tension, audacious suggestiveness, and tragic eagerness of the flesh aspiring to impossible delight. This whole world of figures is ruled by the same lyrical and poetic imagination, the same symbolism incarnated in impeccable forms. Everywhere we find the same nervous art, agitating, sad, and ardent in its voluptuous character, expressing the insatiability of human souls; the aspiration of a troubled time towards an ideality which would deliver it from the solicitations of pessimism; the hope of escape by the way of desire; and love sought for in the over-excitement of neurosis. Rodin, gloomy psychologist of passion, understands the disease of the age, and at the same time pities it; a true thinker, he extracts its mournful beauty without ceasing to retain faith, admiration, and affection for the human creature. Bending over life and over his work, he is himself his own Thinker, attentive and reverent before an unknown and terrible divinity. Never did any other sculptor attempt to vivify his art with such intellectual superiority and by such meditations, and Rodin is at once the most realistic and most metaphysical of poets in stone and bronze.

Two or three works of more important dimensions stand out from his recent productions; besides a nude female torso (in bronze) of startling truthfulness, and two plaster studies that astonished at the Salons, and besides The Christian Martyr, so masterly in its modelling, Rodin has continued to work at his Ugolino, taken out of The Gate of Hell, and has put the finishing touch to two plans. One of these is the Monument to Labour, a grand conception, which one may dream of seeing carried out and rising up in some square of busy Paris, but which want of money will prevent from ever being realised. It is a column upon a vast rectangular base, with a crypt in it. Two colossal figures of Night and Day would stand at the entrance. In the crypt would be shown, in bas-relief, different subterranean works—mining, etc. Around the column would run a covered spiral staircase, and upon the column itself would be figured in bas-reliefs all the various manifestations of labour, so that as one ascended the stairs all the divers phases of human genius could be successively studied. On the top would hover the Benedictions, two—winged spirits, descended from heaven, which are already executed in marble on a small scale, and are among Rodin's finest conceptions. This colossal project was conceived as long ago as 1897. The rough model is in the studio at Meudon-Val-Fleury.

The monument to Puvis de Chavannes was entrusted to his friend Rodin, and is already finished. Rodin conceived it in an original and charming way. Instead of making the customary statue, he considered the purely Greek quality of Puvis' genius and chose to pay homage to him in a form reproduced from the antique. The bust of the great painter is placed on a plain table, as the ancients placed those of their dead upon little domestic altars. A fine tree loaded with fruit bends over and shades the head. Leaning on the table behind the bust is a beautiful naked youth, who sits dreaming in a well-chosen supple attitude. The whole design is intimate, gentle, and pure. Placed on the ground in a garden this votive monument would show how much delicacy and caressing lightness sometimes lies in Rodin's sombre and pathetic thoughts.

Another important group is that of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus has fallen on one knee and is lifting his great lyre towards the gods whom he has just implored. Above him, almost on his back, suspended in a way that would appear to contradict the laws of equilibrium and the material conditions of sculpture, soars Eurydice, compassionate and almost vaporous, truly an immaterial shade, with a smile of despair. I regret that the unfinished condition of this model does not allow me to publish a photograph of it, for nothing would give a clearer impression of Rodin's originality in the matter of contour and in the mutual relation of figures. The extreme freedom of his attitudes and his caprices of balance are, indeed, the newest features that he has brought into his art and are not to be found in anyone else in any country or time. In these is his true signature, and by them his work might be recognised among a hundred statues of all periods. As to the expressive beauty of the faces and bodies, that is supreme. No one has better comprehended than Rodin all that can be rendered by the naked human body and all the intellectual significations that it can hide. The nude is to Rodin a whole language.

In his latest spiritualised works there is something Correggio-like in the vibration of light upon the softened forms and amplified surfaces. They suggest the Antiope, at once soft and muscular, and Rodin often speaks of "morbidezza" as a quality which he no longer distrusts, whereas he formerly banished it from his ascetic, sinewy, and dry figures. He gives his women the pulpy flesh of fruits. The lines of landscape seem to him to correspond to the planes of the body; he lately said to me that since he has lived at Meudon, opposite the flowing Seine, the wooded hills and the fields, he has found useful resemblances between the modelling of the body and that of a horizon. I have even once suggested to him the title of "The Hill" for the body of a young man reclining, the outline of which did in truth resemble the undulations of a hill, and he retained the name and the analogy, for he delights in everything that binds the human being to the earth, and, like a true metaphysician, conceives of nothing isolated or distinct in nature.

I come now to Rodin's drawings, drawings which were not made to be shown, but which, having nevertheless become known, have surprised and puzzled people. Rodin's drawings, like some other drawings by sculptors, are not themselves works of art; they are thoughts noted down, and are not comprehensible unless they are seen with the statues of which they indicate the first idea, or some variation.

Rodin has published some of his sketches; and has produced some dry-points (in particular the Ronde,[1] Antonin Proust, the three portraits of Henry Becque, full face and two profiles upon the same sheet, and two heads of Hugo), some drawings for books by M. Mirbeau and M. Bergerat, and a complete set of illustrations of the Fleurs du Mal, in the form of marginal drawings for a unique copy belonging to M. Gallimard. Many drawings in black or colour have been published (by the clever lithographer Clot), and M. Fenaille has superintended an admirable edition de luxe of 142 drawings by Rodin.[2] Notwithstanding this partial publicity, these works must be considered as standing apart; and to consider them by themselves would actually be to injure Rodin with the public at large, since they form an integral part of his statues. For this reason I have not chosen to reproduce any of them here, studies so purely professional not seeming to fall within the scope of a work intended to give a general idea of an artist's work.

Having said so much, I wish to dwell upon the great beauty of these drawings—a special and terrible beauty. Many deal with Dante. Rodin did some painting under Lecoq de Boisbaudron, landscapes, a portrait of his father, and sketches after Rubens; but there has never been any danger of painting intruding upon his vocation, and his sketches rapidly became nothing but notes for sculpture. The objective reality of his Dantesque figures is vague, if their subjective reality is intense. Rodin, anxious to note down his impressions, and not to illustrate, made his sketches into a sort of passionate writing, only devoting himself to the scheme and to the contrasts of black and white, and neglecting every detail. In these violent washes, these pencillings and pen-scribbles, the spectator who is not forewarned sees nothing, but the lover of art, who knows beforehand what to seek, follows the creative thought. Nothing can be less like what is generally known as "a drawing." After the regular drawings, the "painter's drawings" of his first period, which have but a restricted interest, and which are no longer known, those of his second manner are confusions of light and shadow, and show fantastically. I will quote at this point a passage from an essay by M. Clément Jasmin, a discerning critic, whose noisy rivals do not give him his due place, and who has described these works excellently.

"These sketches are altogether the work of a sculptor, even in their colour, which seems to have sunk into plaster or clay, and especially in the firmness of their modelling, which is imparted by shaded touches of body-colour, on grey paper, or rendered by spaces left white. These blanks, these white spaces, are the extreme point of the modelling, the 'high light' of some projection, which lower down is wrapped in half-tints that carry the eye to the shadows of the inflections or the hollows. There is a constant relation between the contour and the interior modelling. A thrill is communicated by the fantastic lighting of some sketches. Rodin adds further strength to this dramatic distribution of lights and shadows by one or two tones that accentuate the impression or fix a plan. Often his ink will become blue or yellow, (water-colours, sepia, or coloured inks being employed), in order to settle a value or intensify a feeling. Such is the case in the Fenaille publication, with the gloomy red in the face of the Ugolino, of the Dantesque Mahomet, whose entrails are hanging out, and of some other figures dashed in, in black, on a violet background. One plainly feels the material in which the work, of which the sketch is the first idea, will be executed. It is always a sculptor who is at work, even when he exchanges the chisel for the pen or the brush."

Painters would scorn these drawings. They commonly believe that sculptors cannot express upon a plane surface the mass and movement of a body. In reality a painter's sketch and a sculptor's sketch differ in intention and execution. Rodin's are translations of movements, in no way decorative and not attempting to express either modelling or detail, but, if we may say so, the abstract geometry, the thought that commands the movement. The use of coloured inks, which are solely meant to modify certain values that black or white would not express to Rodin's mind, has given rise to mistakes. These colours are not there to express real tints, as is the case in ordinary drawings thus touched up; inaccurate things have been said about these colourings, and about the fantastic and almost Japanese appearance of some of the plates. Rodin is certainly not thinking of prints in colour. He makes these notes instinctively, and displays not so much a deliberate thought as a natural faculty of transcription.

In his early drawings Rodin refers to—for I must insist upon the point that the drawings do not represent things—many of Dante's persons and many fanciful animals, and later, to his statues. Now he does not draw at all from literary impressions, but solely from the living model. He uses ordinary cheap paper, a pencil or a pen; he makes his model take some transitory, absolutely free position, often in the rest between two sittings, and rapidly draws contour without taking his eyes from the model and without looking at his sketch. Sometimes the stroke will fall upon emptiness, the sheet of paper will be too small, a head or a limb will fail to find its place. Naturally this instantaneous sketch will be deformed in the most unexpected way; the proportions are false, but the scheme of the contour and the modelling of each piece are true. Often the hurrying pencil will miss the curve of a breast or a leg. Then the artist will return to that point with hasty, intermingled, impatient strokes that play around the true line. His only concern is to fix the first view, the absolutely living impression. Afterwards, in tracing his sketch, he rectifies, but his chief aim is to amplify the impression of the life, taken spontaneously, according to his principle of enlarging the form, in order to place it better in the atmosphere (about in the proportion of 5/4 instead of 4/4). Then he connects the contours and further enlarges the modelling, filling the outline with a wash of burnt-sienna, which gives the general value, or sometimes with blue or red water-colour. Rodin likes this practice in catching movements, and he has in his studio hundreds of drawings of this kind that differ from his early ones. Those aimed at the imaginative transcription of tragic and literary elements under strange illuminations, and were almost like the drawings of Odilon Redon; the later ones are merely graphic notes of movements, and are incapable of having any direct aim or meaning.

I must add a few words upon a delicate point of which I should not have spoken if others had not spoken mistakenly upon the subject. Rodin's drawings, especially those of the present time, have shocked some people who have seen them by their licentious character. Why should we assume embarrassment in explaining this? In all Rodin's work there is a profound and violent sense of the voluptuous, and the stern painter of the vices and damnations of hell does not need to think of prudery. The elevation and dramatic character of his conceptions clothe the most daring attitudes with the severe chastity of the beautiful. In his sketches, made for himself alone, and in the privacy of his studio, Rodin no more fears erotic positions than did Hokusai. Beneath the original animality he perceives nature; and feminine sexuality, its movements, and impulses interest him, because therein woman is psychologically revealed. Everything, in physical desire, that exalts, maddens, contorts, and fevers the human body is, for the sculptor, the object of an intensely interested study that he does not communicate to the general public; nor is he the only one among the great artists of form whom the erotic has interested from this point of view. Only mediocre minds and minds capable of low intentions see anything low in the movements of life. Rodin's studies from the model, naked and free, without spectators, in the serious presence of work, never sully his grand and melancholy inspiration; and his daring art is assuredly that which most leads away the beholder from erotic ideas, because it notes in every human being the melancholy of the insatiable, and makes the pleasure of the senses a suffering of the flesh and the spirit. By this point he touches the profound morality of art, and his consciousness is free from any equivocation. The recent drawings in which he catches the animal attitudes of the model are thus no more questionable, from the delicate point of view of which I am speaking, than anatomical plates, or the sad immodesties of a post-mortem examination. He adds to them the power of expressing passion with which he is endowed, but since he only shows these drawings to friends and artists in whom nudity does not arouse silly thoughts, this concerns no one else. A comparison cannot even be ventured between these drawings and the masterly etchings of Rops, which are deliberate illustrations of licentious subjects, relieved only by beauty of execution, and which should only be shown with express reservations. Rodin admires certain bronzes in the secret museum at Naples, and certain Japanese prints, because in these, too, art has done its work by expressing a secret and essential spring of the nervous and psychological life of humanity; a fierce and serious subject which only fools consider laughable or indecent, because their minds approach it with indecorum and ridicule. But I do not know that Rodin ever even yielded to the fancy of modelling one of these subjects for himself, as Rubens and many others did not forbid themselves to do. It is time, therefore, to have done with this question in regard to the great French sculptor. I do not know for whom he intends these recent drawings, a whole framed collection of which occupies one of the storerooms of his country house. Perhaps he will have them destroyed; in any case, they are but studies of movements and masses, and in no way direct representations of life.

Rodin's drawings are "rough drafts" to be compared with those of a writer. Some are very impressive, and all constitute precious evidence of his psychological preoccupations and of his desire for simplification. But they remain on the margin of his work, and neither the public nor the critics have those rights over them that belong to biographers and friends. That is a point to be plainly specified, and I desire to repeat that that is the reason this book contains none of them.

V.

RODIN'S PRIVATE LIFE—HIS PERSON, STUDIO, AND HOME—HIS INFLUENCE; SCULPTORS INSPIRED BY HIS IDEAS—RODIN'S PLACE IN THE FRENCH SCHOOL—HIS PRESENT POSITION IN RESPECT TO ACADEMIC SCULPTURE

Auguste Rodin is in person a man of middle height, with an enormous head upon a massive torso. At first sight one sees nothing of him but this leonine bust, the head with its strong nose, flowing grey beard, and small, keen, light-coloured eyes, slightly veiled by short sight and by a gentle irony. The impression of power is accentuated by the rolling gait, the rocky aspect of the troubled brow under the rough brush of hair, the bony thickness of the aquiline nose and the ample curls of beard. But the first impression is partly contradicted by the reticent line of the mouth, the quick look, penetrating, simple, and arch, (one of the most composite glances I have ever seen), and especially by the voice, which is hollow, not easily modulated, with deep inflections and sudden returns to a dental pronunciation, and of which the meaning and intention are further modified by certain very expressive tossings of the head. He appears simple, precise, reserved, courteous, and cordial, without liveliness. Little by little his shyness gives place to a calm and remarkable tone of authority. He is neither emphatic nor awkward, and would seem rather dispirited than inspired. An immense energy breathes in his sober and measured gestures. The slowness and apparent embarrassment of his speech and the pauses in his conversation give especial significance to what he says; moreover, Rodin has acquired of late years a genuine case as a talker and even as a writer, which previously he did not possess. I was intimately acquainted with Stéphane Mallarmé, who, measured by Rodin, was incomparably eloquent, and I often associate these two men in my thoughts. The voices were alike, and Rodin, too, with his improvised phrases, has the same veiled circumspect way of speech, hitting suddenly upon words that illuminate the idea.

Rodin, in speaking of any work of his, has a way of explaining it that is very elliptical, but very clear, and which has caused some brilliant chatterers to say, because he did not offer a prolix commentary, that he did not know what he had done. In reality he utters the essential, and his gesture, which seems to model his thought in space, completes his words. He looks lovingly on his creations, and sometimes seems to meditate in astonishment at the idea of having created them; he speaks of them as though they existed apart from himself.

Gradually, beneath Rodin's essential simplicity, one discovers features that were at first hidden; he is ironical, sensuous, nervous, proud. He contains as possibilities all the passions that he expresses with so vibrating a magnificence, and one begins to perceive the secret links between this calm, almost cheerful man and the art that he reveals. At certain moments his clear and rather vague eyes become full of phosphorescent points, the face grows sardonic and almost faunlike; at others it saddens and discloses a sickness for infinity. This man is the comrade of his dumb white creatures; he loves them, follows their abstract life, has moral obligations towards them. Fundamentally the one thing with which Rodin is really concerned is the life of permanent forms. Of late celebrity, age, and experience have disposed him to become an adviser, a master, and he has begun to talk æsthetics. But his ideas and opinions are restricted. He perceives human beings only very summarily, his cordiality is a way of fulfilling his social duties hastily. He has, if I may venture the expression, very fine moral antennae, and they serve to recognise the persons whom he will like. Very capable of friendship, Rodin reduces friendship to tacit agreements upon the essential subjects of thought, and it is only if one meets him upon one of these points that one takes a place in his remembrance or his liking. He does not put his faith in individuals, but in general ideas. He loves nothing but his work, and endures everything else with civil boredom. He has a horror of debates and disturbances. I have never heard him speak ill of bad artists; he neglects, but does not criticise. He has a silent humour which leads him to make busts of official and mediocre sculptors, with an amusing good grace. Uncompromising in everything that touches his art, Rodin has throughout his whole career endured severe struggles and grave injustices, and, too proud to dispute, has never shown his secret revolts. At the time when the Balzac was refused all Rodin's friends said to him: "Resist, force your work upon them; you ought, for the work's sake, and a court would surely decide for you, for your agreement is definitely in your favour." He listened and thanked them, always good-tempered, and then withdrew his statue without saying anything.

It is not weakness, for Rodin has had an excessively hard life and is strong and patient; it is dignity of the inner life and profound indifference for the life about him. Rodin is a high dignitary of the Legion of Honour, a president of the judges of sculpture of an important society of artists (the Société Nationale), he is honoured all over Europe, has been received in England as a genius, and has succeeded Whistler as the head of a chosen band of artists; but he remains the man that he was when he was unknown and poor in his solitude at Brussels.

He likes few things, but likes those thoroughly. He reads little, but what he reads strikes home to him as to no one else; Baudelaire and Rousseau, in whom he delights, are instances. He is passionately fond of music, especially of Gluck, but seldom speaks of it. He simplifies everything, sees only the main lines in morality as in art, lives by two or three principles, and has an aversion for everything that is not essential.