Is it not dangerous to say of a genius that his work alone should count, that his life is negligible?  Though Rodin has followed Flaubert’s advice to artists to lead ascetic lives that their art might be the more violent, nevertheless his career, colourless as it may seem to those who better love stage players and the watery comedies of society—­this laborious life of a poor sculptor—­is not to be passed over if we are 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.