The literary artist does not proceed in this way.  He does not content himself with telling us, for example, that one of his characters is a good man or a bad man, an able, a selfish, a tall, a blonde, or a stupid man, as the case may be.  He takes every means to express his character, and to do it, according to M. Taine’s definition of a work of art, more completely than it appears in nature.  He recognizes its complexity and enforces the sense of reality by a thousand expedients of what one may almost call contrasting masses, derivative movements, and balancing planes.  He distinguishes every possible detail that plays any structural part, and, in short, instead of giving us the mere symbol of the Sunday-school books, shows us a concrete organism at once characteristic and complex.  Judged with this strictness, which in literary art is elementary, how much of the best modern sculpture is abstract, symbolic, purely typical.  What insipid fragments most of the really eminent Institute statues would make were their heads knocked off by some band of modern barbarian invaders.  In the event of such an irruption, would there be any torsos left from which future Poussins could learn all they should know of the human form?  Would there be any disjecta membra from which skilled anatomists could reconstruct the lost ensemble, or at any rate make a shrewd guess at it?  Would anything survive mutilation with the serene confidence in its fragmentary but everywhere penetrating interest which seems to pervade the most fractured fraction of a Greek relief on the Athenian acropolis?  Yes, there would be the debris of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture.

In our day the human figure has never been so well understood.  Back of such expressive modelling as we note in the “Saint Jean,” in the “Adam” and “Eve,” in the “Calaisiens,” in a dozen figures of the Dante doors, is a knowledge of anatomy such as even in the purely scientific profession of surgery can proceed only from an immense fondness for nature, an insatiable curiosity as to her secrets, an inexhaustible delight in her manifestations.  From the point of view of such knowledge and such handling of it, it is no wonder that the representations of nature which issue from the Institute seem superficial.  One can understand that from this point of view very delightful sculpture, very refined, very graceful, very perfectly understood within its limits, may appear like baudruche—­inflated gold-beater’s skin, that is to say, of which toy animals are made in France, and which has thus passed into studio argot as the figure for whatever lacks structure and substance.  Ask M. Rodin the explanation of a movement, an attitude, in one of his works which strikes your convention-steeped sense as strange, and he will account for it just as an anatomical demonstrator would—­pointing out its necessary derivation from some disposition of another part of the figure, and not at all dwelling on its grace or its other purely decorative felicity.