f 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, he believes, of
the Greeks. 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 modelling by enlarging the lines. The
edges of certain parts are amplified, deformed, falsified, and we see
that light-swept effect, that appearance as if of luminous emanations.
This deformation, he declares, was practised by the great sculptors to
snare the undulating appearance of life. Sculpture, he asserts, is the
"art of the hole and the lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodelled
figures." Finish kills vitality. Yet Rodin can chisel a smooth nymph
for you 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
oppositions of volume produced by movement. Unity haunts him. He is a
believer in the correspondences of things, of the continuity in
nature; a mystic as well as a geometrician. Yet such a realist is he
that he quarrels with any artist who does not see "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
copious, as vivid as the drawings of Hokusai--he is very studious of
Japanese art--are swift memoranda of the human machine as it dispenses
its normal muscular motions. Rodin, draughtsman, is as surprising and
original as Rodin, sculptor. He will study a human foot for months,
not to copy it, but to possess the secret of its rhythms. His drawings
are the swift notations of a sculptor whose eye is never satisfied,
whose desire to pin on paper the most evanescent movements of the
human machine is almost a mania. The French sculptor avoids studied
poses. The model tumbles down anywhere, in any contortion or
relaxation he or she wishes. Practically instantaneous is the method
adopted by Rodin to preserve the fleeting attitudes, the first shiver
of surfaces. He draws rapidly with his eye on the model. It is a mere
scrawl, a few enveloping lines, a silhouette. But vitality is in it;
and