Nature is for him the sole theme; his works are but variations on her
promptings. He knows the emerald route and all the semitones of
sensuousness. Fantasy, passion, even paroxysmal madness there are; yet
what elemental power in his Adam as the gigantic first _homo_
painfully heaves himself up from the earth to that posture which
differentiates him from the beasts. Here, indeed, the two natures are
at strife. And Mother Eve, her expression suggesting the sorrows and
shames that are to be the lot of her seed; her very loins seem crushed
by the ages that are hidden within them. You may walk freely about the
burghers of Calais, as did Rodin when he modelled them; that is one
secret of the group's vital quality. About all his statues you may
walk--he is not a sculptor of one attitude, but a hewer of men and
women. Consider the Balzac. It is not Balzac the writer of novels, but
Balzac the prophet, the seer, the great natural force--like Rodin
himself. That is why these kindred spirits converse across the years,
as do the Alpine peaks in that striking parable of Turgenieff's. No
doubt in bronze the Balzac will arouse less wrath from the
unimaginative; in plaster it produces the effect of some surging
monolith of snow.

As a portraitist of his contemporaries Rodin is the unique master of
character. His women are gracious, delicious masks; his men cover many
octaves in virility and variety. That he is extremely short-sighted
has not been dealt with in proportion to the significance of this
fact. It accounts for his love of exaggerated surfaces, his formless
extravagance, his indefiniteness in structural design; possibly, too,
for his inability, or let us say lack of sympathy, for the monumental.
He is essentially a sculptor of the intimate emotions; he delineates
passion as a psychologist; and while we think of him as a cyclops
wielding a huge hammer destructively, he is often ardent in his search