, round deltoids and osseous articulations,
and perpetually changing planes of flesh and free play of muscular
movement, are excellences which, in the best of academic French
sculpture, are sensuously delightful in a high degree. But they
invariably rivet our attention on the successful way in which the
sculptor has used his bronze or marble to decorative ends, and when they
are accentuated so as to dominate the idea they invariably enfeeble its
expression. With M. Rodin one does not think of his material at all; one
does not reflect whether he used it well or ill, caused it to lose
weight and immobility to the eye or not, because all his superficial
modelling appears as an inevitable deduction from the way in which he
has conceived his larger subject, and not as "handling" at all. In
reality, of course, it is the acme of sensitive handling. The point is a
nice one. His practice is a dangerous one. It would be fatal to a less
strenuous temperament. To leave, in a manner and so far as obvious
insistence on it goes, "handling" to take care of itself, is to incur
the peril of careless, clumsy, and even brutal, modelling, which, so far
from dissembling its existence behind the prominence of the idea, really
emphasizes itself unduly because of its imperfect and undeveloped
character. Detail that is neglected really acquires a greater prominence
than detail that is carried too far, because it is sensuously
disagreeable. But when an artist like M. Rodin conceives his spiritual
subject so largely and with so much intensity that mere sensuous
agreeableness seems too insignificant to him even to be treated with
contempt, he treats his detail solely with reference to its centripetal
and organic value, which immediately becomes immensely enhanced, and the
detail itself, dropping thus into its proper place, takes on a beauty
wholly transcending the ordinary agreeable aspect of sculptural detail.
And the _ensemble_, of course, is in this way enforced as it can be in
no other, and we get an idea of Victor Hugo or St. John Baptist so
powerfully and yet so subtly suggested, that the abstraction seems
actually all that we see in looking at the concrete bust or statue.
Objections to M. Rodin's "handling" as eccentric or capricious, appear
to the sympathetic beholder of one of his majestic works the very acme
of misappreciation, and their real excuse--which is, as I have said, the
fact that such "handling" is as unfamiliar as the motives it