Kennst du die Hoelle des Dante nicht,
       Die schreckliche Terzetten? 
     Wen da der Dichter hineingesperrt
       Den kann kein Gott mehr retten.

And from the “singing flames” of Rodin there is no rescue.

But he is not all tragedy and hell fire.  Of singular delicacy, of exquisite proportions are his marbles of youth, of springtide, and the desire of life.  In 1900, at his special exhibition, Paris, Europe, and America awoke to these haunting visions.  Not since Keats or Swinburne has love been sung so sweetly, so romantically, so fiercely.  Though he disclaims understanding the Celtic spirit, one could say that there is Celtic magic, Celtic mystery in his work.  He pierces to the core the frenzy and joy of love and translates them in beautiful symbols.  Nature is for him the sole theme; his works are but variations on her promptings.  He knows the emerald route and all the semitones of sensuousness.  Fantasy, passion, even paroxysmal madness there are; yet what elemental power in his Adam as the gigantic first homo painfully heaves himself up from the earth to that posture which differentiates him from the beasts.  Here, indeed, the two natures are at strife.  And Mother Eve, her expression suggesting the sorrows and shames that are to be the lot of her seed; her very loins seem crushed by the ages that are hidden within them.  You may walk freely about the burghers of Calais, as did Rodin when he modelled them; that is one secret of the group’s vital quality.  About all his statues you may walk—­he is not a sculptor of one attitude, but a hewer of men and women.  Consider the Balzac.  It is not Balzac the writer of novels, but Balzac the prophet, the seer, the great natural force—­like Rodin himself.  That is why these kindred spirits converse across the years, as do the Alpine peaks in that striking parable of Turgenieff’s.  No doubt in bronze the Balzac will arouse less wrath from the unimaginative; in plaster it produces the effect of some surging monolith of snow.

As a portraitist of his contemporaries Rodin is the unique master of character.  His women are gracious, delicious masks; his men cover many octaves in virility and variety.  That he is extremely short-sighted has not been dealt with in proportion to the significance of this fact.  It accounts for his love of exaggerated surfaces, his formless extravagance, his indefiniteness in structural design; possibly, too, for his inability, or let us say lack of sympathy, for the monumental.  He is essentially a sculptor of the intimate emotions; he delineates passion as a psychologist; and while we think of him as a cyclops wielding a huge hammer destructively, he is often ardent in his search of subtle nuance.  But there is breadth even when he models an eyelid.  Size is only relative.  We are confronted by the paradox of an artist as torrential, as apocalyptic as Rubens and Wagner, carving with a style wholly charming a segment of a baby’s back