his superficial modelling appears as an inevitable deduction from the way in which he has conceived his larger subject, and not as “handling” at all.  In reality, of course, it is the acme of sensitive handling.  The point is a nice one.  His practice is a dangerous one.  It would be fatal to a less strenuous temperament.  To leave, in a manner and so far as obvious insistence on it goes, “handling” to take care of itself, is to incur the peril of careless, clumsy, and even brutal, modelling, which, so far from dissembling its existence behind the prominence of the idea, really emphasizes itself unduly because of its imperfect and undeveloped character.  Detail that is neglected really acquires a greater prominence than detail that is carried too far, because it is sensuously disagreeable.  But when an artist like M. Rodin conceives his spiritual subject so largely and with so much intensity that mere sensuous agreeableness seems too insignificant to him even to be treated with contempt, he treats his detail solely with reference to its centripetal and organic value, which immediately becomes immensely enhanced, and the detail itself, dropping thus into its proper place, takes on a beauty wholly transcending the ordinary agreeable aspect of sculptural detail.  And the ensemble, of course, is in this way enforced as it can be in no other, and we get an idea of Victor Hugo or St. John Baptist so powerfully and yet so subtly suggested, that the abstraction seems actually all that we see in looking at the concrete bust or statue.  Objections to M. Rodin’s “handling” as eccentric or capricious, appear to the sympathetic beholder of one of his majestic works the very acme of misappreciation, and their real excuse—­which is, as I have said, the fact that such “handling” is as unfamiliar as the motives it accompanies—­singularly poor and feeble.

As for the common nature of these motives, the character of the personality which appears in their varied presentments, it is almost idle to speak in the absence of the work itself, so eloquent is this at once and so untranslatable.  But it may be said approximately that M. Rodin’s temperament is in the first place deeply romantic.  Everything the Institute likes repels him.  He has the poetic conception of art and its mission, and in poetry any authoritative and codifying consensus seems to him paradoxical.  Style, in his view, unless it is something wholly uncharacterizable, is a vague and impalpable spirit breathing through the work of some strongly marked individuality, or else it is formalism.  He delights in the fantasticality of the Gothic.  The west facade of Rouen inspires him more than all the formulae of Palladian proportions.  He detests systematization.  He reads Shakespeare, Schiller, Dante almost exclusively.  He sees visions and dreams dreams.  The awful in the natural forces, moral and material, seems his element.  He believes in freedom, in the absolute emancipation of every faculty.