to make any estimate of his art. He, it is
related, always becomes enraged at the word "inspiration," enraged at
the common notion that fire descends from heaven upon the head of the
favoured neophyte of art. Rodin believes in but one
inspiration--nature. He swears he does not invent, but copies nature.
He despises improvisation, has contemptuous words for "fatal
facility," and, being a slow-moving, slow-thinking man, he admits to
his councils those who have conquered art, not by assault, but by
stealth and after years of hard work. He sympathises with Flaubert's
patient toiling days, he praises Holland because after Paris it seemed
slow. "Slowness is a beauty," he declared. In a word, Rodin has
evolved a theory and practice of his art that is the outcome--like all
theories, all techniques--of his own temperament. And that temperament
is giant-like, massive, ironic, grave, strangely perverse at times;
and it is the temperament of a magician doubled by that of a
mathematician.

Books are written about him. De Maupassant describes him in Notre
Coeur with picturesque precision. He is tempting as a psychologic
study. He appeals to the literary, though he is not "literary." His
modelling arouses tempests, either of dispraise or idolatry. To see
him steadily, critically, after a visit to his studios in Paris or
Meudon, is difficult. If the master be there then you feel the impact
of a personality that is as cloudy as the clouds about the base of a
mountain and as impressive as the mountain. Yet a pleasant,
unassuming, sane man, interested in his clay--absolutely--that is,
unless you discover him to be more interested in humanity. If you
watch him well you may find yourself well watched; those peering eyes
possess a vision that plunges into your soul. And the soul this master
of marbles sees as nude as he sees the human body. It is the union of
artist and psychologist that places Rodin apart. These two arts he
practises in a medium that has hitherto not betrayed potentialities
for such almost miraculous performances. Walter Pater is quite right
in maintaining that each art has its separate subject-matter;
nevertheless, in the debatable province of Rodin's sculpture we find
strange emotional power, hints of the art of painting and a rare
musical suggestiveness. But this is not playing the game according to
the rules of Lessing and his Laocooen.

Let us drop this old aesthetic rule of thumb and confess that during
the last c