malicious game that at no point of his career has he been without the
company of envy, chagrin, and slander. Often, when he had attained a
summit, he would find himself thrust down into a deeper valley. He has
mounted to triumphs and fallen to humiliations, but his spirit has
never been quelled, and if each acclivity he scales is steeper, the
air atop has grown purer, more stimulating, and the landscape spreads
wider before him. He can say with Dante: "La montagna che drizza voi
che il mondo fece torti." Rodin's mountain has always straightened in
him what the world made crooked. The name of his mountain is Art. A
born non-conformist, Rodin makes the fourth of that group of
nineteenth-century artists--Richard Wagner, Henrik Ibsen, and Edouard
Manet--who taught a deaf and blind world to hear and see and think and
feel.

Is it not dangerous to say of a genius that his work alone should
count, that his life is negligible? Though Rodin has followed
Flaubert's advice to artists to lead ascetic lives that their art
might be the more violent, nevertheless his career, colourless as it
may seem to those who better love stage players and the watery
comedies of society--this laborious life of a poor sculptor--is not to
be passed over if we are to make any estimate of his art. He, it is
related, always becomes enraged at the word "inspiration," enraged at
the common notion that fire descends from heaven upon the head of the
favoured neophyte of art. Rodin believes in but one
inspiration--nature. He swears he does not invent, but copies nature.
He despises improvisation, has contemptuous words for "fatal
facility," and, being a slow-moving, slow-thinking man, he admits to
his councils those who have conquered art, not by assault, but by
stealth and after years of hard work. He sympathises with Flaubert's
patient toiling days, he praises Holland because after Paris it seemed