French aesthetic authority, which did this in the instances of Barye, of Delacroix, of Millet, of Manet, of Puvis de Chavannes, did it also for many years in the instance of M. Rodin.  It owes its defeat in the contest with him—­for like the recalcitrants in the other contests, M. Rodin has definitively triumphed—­to the unwise attempt to define him in terms heretofore applicable enough to sculptors, but wholly inapplicable to him.  It failed to see that the thing to define in his work was the man himself, his temperament, his genius.  Taken by themselves and considered as characteristics of the Institute sculptors, the obvious traits of this work might, that is to say, be adjudged eccentric and empty.  Fancy Professor Guillaume suddenly subordinating academic disposition of line and mass to true structural expression!  One would simply feel the loss of his accustomed style and harmony.  With M. Rodin, who deals with nature directly, through the immediate force of his own powerful temperament, to feel the absence of the Institute training and traditions is absurd.  The question in his case is simply whether or no he is a great artistic personality, an extraordinary and powerful temperament, or whether he is merely a turbulent and capricious protestant against the measure and taste of the Institute.  But this is really no longer a question, however it may have been a few years ago; and when his Dante portal for the new Palais des Arts Decoratifs shall have been finished, and the public had an opportunity to see what the sculptor’s friend and only serious rival, M. Dalou, calls “one of the most, if not the most original and astonishing pieces of sculpture of the nineteenth century,” it will be recognized that M. Rodin, so far from being amenable to the current canon, has brought the canon itself to judgment.

How and why, people will perceive in proportion to their receptivity.  Candor and intelligence will suffice to appreciate that the secret of M. Rodin’s art is structural expression, and that it is this and not any superficial eccentricity of execution that definitely distinguishes him from the Institute.  Just as his imagination, his temperament, his spiritual energy and ardor individualize the positive originality of his motive, so the expressiveness of his treatment sets him aside from all as well as from each of the Institute sculptors in what may be broadly called technical attitude.  No sculptor has ever carried expression further.  The sculpture of the present day has certainly not occupied itself much with it.  The Institute is perhaps a little afraid of it.  It abhors the baroque rightly enough, but very likely it fails to see that the expression of such sculpture as M. Rodin’s no more resembles the contortions of the Dresden Museum giants than it does the composure of M. Delaplanche.  The baroque is only violent instead of placid commonplace, and is as conventional as any professor of sculpture could desire.  Expression means individual character