Therefore he does not force the pose of his model, preferring attitudes or gestures voluntarily adopted.  His sketch-books, as copious, as vivid as the drawings of Hokusai—­he is very studious of Japanese art—­are swift memoranda of the human machine as it dispenses its normal muscular motions.  Rodin, draughtsman, is as surprising and original as Rodin, sculptor.  He will study a human foot for months, not to copy it, but to possess the secret of its rhythms.  His drawings are the swift notations of a sculptor whose eye is never satisfied, whose desire to pin on paper the most evanescent movements of the human machine is almost a mania.  The French sculptor avoids studied poses.  The model tumbles down anywhere, in any contortion or relaxation he or she wishes.  Practically instantaneous is the method adopted by Rodin to preserve the fleeting attitudes, the first shiver of surfaces.  He draws rapidly with his eye on the model.  It is a mere scrawl, a few enveloping lines, a silhouette.  But vitality is in it; and for his purposes a mere memorandum of a motion.  A sculptor has made these extraordinary drawings not a painter.  It will be well to observe the distinction.  He is the most rhythmic sculptor of them all.  And rhythm is the codification of beauty.  Because he has observed with a vision quite virginal he insists that he has affiliations with the Greeks.  But if his vision is Greek his models are Parisian, while his forms are more Gothic than the pseudo-Greek of the academy.  As W.C.  Brownell wrote years ago:  “Rodin reveals rather than constructs beauty... no sculptor has carried expression further; and expression means individual character completely exhibited rather than conventionally suggested.”  Mr. Brownell was also the first critic to point out that Rodin’s art was more nearly related to Donatello than to Michael Angelo.  He is in the legitimate line of French sculpture, the line of Goujon, Puget, Rude, Barye.  Dalou did not hesitate to assert that the Dante portal is “one of the most, if not the most, original and astonishing pieces of sculpture of the nineteenth century.”

This Dante Gate, begun more than twenty years ago, not finished yet, and probably never to be, is an astounding fugue, with death, the devil, hell, and the passions as a horribly beautiful four-voiced theme.  I saw the composition a few years ago at the Rue de l’Universite atelier.  It is as terrifying a conception as the Last Judgment; nor does it miss the sonorous and sorrowful grandeur of the Medici Tombs.  Yet how different, how feverish, how tragic!  Like all great men working in the grip of a unifying idea, Rodin modified the old technique of sculpture so that it would serve him as plastically as does sound a musical composer.  A deep lover of music, his inner ear may dictate the vibrating rhythms of his forms—­his marbles are ever musical; not “frozen music” as Goethe said of Gothic architecture, but silent swooning music.  This gate is a Frieze of Paris, as deeply significant of modern aspiration and sorrow as the Parthenon Frieze is the symbol of the great clear beauty of Hellas.  Dante inspired this monstrous and ennobled masterpiece, but Baudelaire filled many of its chinks and crannies with writhing ignoble shapes; shapes of dusky fire that, as they tremulously stand above the gulf of fears, wave ineffectual desperate hands.  Heine in his Deutschland asks: