Rodin’s place in present-day art is a peculiar one. Auguste Rodin has been raised to the dignity of a test for decadent ways of feeling. We admittedly call “tests” or proof-objects the objects (for the most part, the shell-armour of diatoms or the scales of butterflies’ wings) on which the magnifying power and exactness of analysis of microscopes is tested. By Rodin the fanatics and snobs of insane tendencies test the genuineness and power of symbolico-mystic sentiment. What do you think of Rodin? Do you admire him? Good: then you need further only adore Besnard and rave about Félicien Rops, and you can claim to be numbered with the newest, without respect to the colour of your hair or opportunist baldness. You do not admire Rodin? Then sneak whimpering from our league. You are no decadent. No beauty with her hair combed in the Botticelli style will love you; Mallarmé will not write poems, nor will Nietzsche philosophise for you. Nobody will invite you even to a Black Mass. Go to the Philistines; you belong to the narrow-minded community, which is a herd of ruminants. It would be intelligible if the provocations of the shriekers, who, after the manner of howling dervishes, dance and rave round Rodin, were to induce men to take a violent part against this very man. Justice, however, demands that people should suppress their natural tendency to make him responsible for the ear-piercing din of his drummers and trumpeters. After all, he cannot help a horde of swindlers and silly people making a vulgar disturbance about him and his works. If we are to judge him, we must try to forget that critical offenders, by invoking his name, continually outrage the sense of æsthetic decorum and artistic conscience. Rodin is, in fact, not the originator of this shameless proceeding, but the victim of the æsthetic Catiline conspirators who have got possession of him, and are pushing him on before them, so that it looks from a distance as if he was their leader. Rodin is not the least _cabotin_. He is of a modest, homely nature, but no strong character; and he has not been able to stand against the suggestions of those whose interest it is to eulogise him, who have for so long chattered his poor head full of their most brain-firing, æsthetic doctrines, and most profound interpretations of his alleged purposes, until he has lost his own personality, and makes the most desperate efforts to become like the picture which his critical Corybantes present of him to the open-mouthed gapers.