from curiosity than conviction. Rodin became famous. And he is more
misunderstood than ever. His very name, with its memory of Eugène
Sue's romantic rancour--you recall that impossible and diabolic Jesuit
Rodin in The Mysteries of Paris?--has been thrown in his teeth. He has
been called _rusé_, even a fraud; while the wholesale denunciation of
his work as erotic is unluckily still green in our memory. The
sculptor, who in 1877 was accused of "faking" his life-like Age of
Brass--now at the Luxembourg--by taking a mould from the living model,
also experienced the discomfiture of being assured some years later
that, not knowing the art of modelling, his statue of Balzac was only
an evasion of difficulties. And this to the man who had in the interim
wrought so many masterpieces.

To give him his due he stands prosperity not quite as well as he did
poverty. In every great artist there is a large area of self-esteem;
it is the reservoir which he must, during years of drought and defeat,
draw upon to keep his soul fresh. Without the consoling fluid of
egoism, genius must perish in the dust of despair. But fill this
source to the brim, accelerate the speed of its current, and artistic
deterioration may ensue. Rodin has been called, fatuously, the second
Michael Angelo--as if there could ever be a replica of any human. He
has been hailed as a modern Praxiteles. And he is often damned as a
myopic decadent whose insensibility to pure line and deficiency in
constructional power have been elevated by his admirers into sorry
virtues. Yet is Rodin justly appraised? Do his friends not overdo
their glorification, his critics their censure? Nothing so stales a
demigod's image as the perfumes burned before it by his worshippers;
the denser the smoke the sooner crumble the feet of their idol.

However, in the case of Rodin the fates have so contrived their