Rodin, the French sculptor, deserves well of our new century; the old one did so incontinently batter him.  The anguish of his own Hell’s Portal he endured before he moulded its clay between his thick clairvoyant fingers.  Misunderstood, therefore misrepresented, he with his pride and obstinacy aroused—­the one buttressing the other—­was not to be budged from his formulas and practice of sculpture.  Then the world of art swung unwillingly and unamiably toward him, perhaps more from curiosity than conviction.  Rodin became famous.  And he is more misunderstood than ever.  His very name, with its memory of Eugene Sue’s romantic rancour—­you recall that impossible and diabolic Jesuit Rodin in The Mysteries of Paris?—­has been thrown in his teeth.  He has been called ruse, even a fraud; while the wholesale denunciation of his work as erotic is unluckily still green in our memory.  The sculptor, who in 1877 was accused of “faking” his life-like Age of Brass—­now at the Luxembourg—­by taking a mould from the living model, also experienced the discomfiture of being assured some years later that, not knowing the art of modelling, his statue of Balzac was only an evasion of difficulties.  And this to the man who had in the interim wrought so many masterpieces.

To give him his due he stands prosperity not quite as well as he did poverty.  In every great artist there is a large area of self-esteem; it is the reservoir which he must, during years of drought and defeat, draw upon to keep his soul fresh.  Without the consoling fluid of egoism, genius must perish in the dust of despair.  But fill this source to the brim, accelerate the speed of its current, and artistic deterioration may ensue.  Rodin has been called, fatuously, the second Michael Angelo—­as if there could ever be a replica of any human.  He has been hailed as a modern Praxiteles.  And he is often damned as a myopic decadent whose insensibility to pure line and deficiency in constructional power have been elevated by his admirers into sorry virtues.  Yet is Rodin justly appraised?  Do his friends not overdo their glorification, his critics their censure?  Nothing so stales a demigod’s image as the perfumes burned before it by his worshippers; the denser the smoke the sooner crumble the feet of their idol.

However, in the case of Rodin the fates have so contrived their malicious game that at no point of his career has he been without the company of envy, chagrin, and slander.  Often, when he had attained a summit, he would find himself thrust down into a deeper valley.  He has mounted to triumphs and fallen to humiliations, but his spirit has never been quelled, and if each acclivity he scales is steeper, the air atop has grown purer, more stimulating, and the landscape spreads wider before him.  He can say with Dante:  “La montagna che drizza voi che il mondo fece torti.”  Rodin’s mountain has always straightened in him what the world made crooked.  The name of his mountain is Art.  A born non-conformist, Rodin makes the fourth of that group of nineteenth-century artists—­Richard Wagner, Henrik Ibsen, and Edouard Manet—­who taught a deaf and blind world to hear and see and think and feel.