Man with the Broken Nose," was refused by the Salon jury is history. He designed for the Sèvres porcelain works. He executed portrait busts, architectural ornaments, caryatids; all styles that were huddled in the studios and yards of sculptors he essayed. No man knew his trade better, although it is said that with the chisel of the _practicien_ Rodin was never proficient; he could not, or would not, work at the marble _en bloc_. His sculptures to-day are in the museums of the world, and he is admitted to possess "talent" by academic men. Rivals he has none. His production is too personal. Like Richard Wagner he has proved a upas tree for lesser artists--he has deflected, or else absorbed them. His friend Eugene Carrière warned young sculptors not to study Rodin too curiously. Carrière was wise, yet his art of portraiture was influenced by Rodin; swimming in shadow his enigmatic heads have more the quality of Rodin's than the mortuary art of academic sculpture. A profound student of light and movement, Rodin by deliberate amplification of the surfaces of his statues, avoiding dryness and harshness of outline, secures a zone of radiancy, a luminosity which creates the illusion of reality. He handles values in clay as a painter does his tones. He gets the design of the outline by movement which continually modifies the anatomy; the secret of the Greeks, he believes. He studies his profiles successively in full light, obtaining volume--or planes--at once and together; successive views of one movement. The light plays with more freedom upon his amplified surfaces, intensified in the modeling by enlarging the lines. The edges of certain parts are amplified, deformed, falsified, and we enjoy light-swept effects, luminous emanations. This deformation, he declares, was always practised by the great sculptors to snare the undulating appearance of life. Sculpture, he asserts, is the "art of the hole and lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodeled figures." Finish kills vitality. Yet Rodin can chisel a smooth nymph, if he so wills, but her flesh will ripple and run in the sunlight. His art is one of accents. He works by profile in depth, not by surfaces. He swears by what he calls "cubic truth"; his pattern is a mathematical figure; the pivot of art is balance, i.e., the opposition of volumes produced by movement. Unity haunts him. He is a believer in the correspondence of things, of continuity in nature. He is mystic, as well as a geometrician. Yet such a realist is he that he quarrels with any artist who does not recognize "the latent heroic in every natural movement." Therefore he does not force the pose of his model, preferring attitudes or gestures voluntarily adopted. His sketch books, as vivid, as copious, as the drawings of Hokusai--he is studious of Japanese art--are swift memoranda of the human machine as it dispenses its normal muscular motions. Rodin, draughtsman, is as surprisingly original as the sculptor Rodin. He will study a human foot for months, not to copy it, but to master the secret of its rhythms. His drawings are the swift notations of a sculptor whose eye is never satisfied, whose desire to pin to paper the most evanescent vibrations of the human machine is almost a mania. The model may tumble down anywhere, in any contortion or relaxation he or she wishes. Practically instantaneous is the method of Rodin to register the fleeting attitudes, the first shivering surface. He rapidly draws with his eye on the model. It is often a mere scrawl, a silhouette, a few enveloping lines. But there is vitality in...