How his first work, The Man With the Broken Nose, was refused by the Salon jury is history.  He designed for the Sevres porcelain works; he made portrait busts, architectural ornaments for sculptors, caryatides; all styles that are huddled in the yards and studios of sculptors he had essayed and conquered.  No man knew his trade better, although we are informed that with the chisel of the practicien Rodin was never proficient—­he could not or would not work at the marble en bloc.  His works to-day are in the leading museums of the world and he is admitted to have “talent” by the academic men.  Rivals he has none, nor will he have successors.  His production is too personal.  Like Richard Wagner, Rodin has proved a Upas tree for many lesser men—­he has reflected or else absorbed them.  His closest friend, the late Eugene Carriere, warned young sculptors not to study Rodin too curiously.  Carriere was wise, but his own art of portraiture was influenced by Rodin; swimming in shadow, his enigmatic heads have a suspicion of the quality of sculpture—­Rodin’s—­not the mortuary art of so much academic sculpture.

A profound student of light and of movement, Rodin, by deliberate amplification of the surfaces of his statues, avoiding dryness and harshness of outline, secures a zone of radiancy, a luminosity, which creates the illusion of reality.  He handles values in clay as a painter does his tones.  He gets the design of the outline by movement which continually modifies the anatomy—­the secret, he believes, of the Greeks.  He studies his profiles successively in full light, obtaining volume—­or planes—­at once and together; successive views of one movement.  The light plays with more freedom upon his amplified surfaces—­intensified in the modelling by enlarging the lines.  The edges of certain parts are amplified, deformed, falsified, and we see that light-swept effect, that appearance as if of luminous emanations.  This deformation, he declares, was practised by the great sculptors to snare the undulating appearance of life.  Sculpture, he asserts, is the “art of the hole and the lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures.”  Finish kills vitality.  Yet Rodin can chisel a smooth nymph for you if he so wills, but her flesh will ripple and run in the sunlight.  His art is one of accents.  He works by profile in depth, not by surfaces.  He swears by what he calls “cubic truth”; his pattern is a mathematical figure; the pivot of art is balance, i.e., the oppositions of volume produced by movement.  Unity haunts him.  He is a believer in the correspondences of things, of the continuity in nature; a mystic as well as a geometrician.  Yet such a realist is he that he quarrels with any artist who does not see “the latent heroic in every natural movement.”