What has raised Rodin to an article of faith among the degenerates is three peculiarities. First, the choice of his materials, which appeal to the mysticism and sensual psychopathy of his body-guard of degenerates; secondly, his technique, which deviates from tradition in childish, would-be-original whims; and thirdly, his mistaking the natural limitations of his art, which he wants to make say things for which sculpture possesses no means of expression. These traits are proved by a short review of his principal works. The production which first brought him the custom of the decadents is a composition which was devised for the gate of Dante’s _Inferno_. He had worked at it for decades. After a few fragments, which were to be seen in 1889 in the Universal Exhibition at Paris, he showed the whole in a plaster model at his private exhibition of 1900. It is inspired unmistakably by Ghiberti’s door of the Baptistery at Florence, but stands in intentional contrast to it. The great Quattrocentist depicts life in Paradise; Rodin’s intention is to show existence in Hell. The framing and articulation of the work, and nearly all its details, were rendered with organic necessity from this starting-point. The door is cut up into panels, which are not divided by stiff, geometrical lines, but, just as in the case of Ghiberti, are at the same time immediately separated, and again indirectly connected into a higher unity, by a feature of the picture itself, _e.g._, a cliff, a man’s figure, a piece of building. In every panel an act from the _Inferno_ is played. The parts, in the majority of cases indicated only in a sketchy way, betray strong, indeed mainly perversely directed, erotic imagination, and the gift of exhibiting human bodies in the movements of passion. Of course, Rodin, too, has not dropped down from heaven, but is the descendant of easily demonstrable spiritual forefathers. This sculpture of violent action, a particular development of French art, and in no way connected with the Laocoon, as one might easily make the mistake of assuming, has its first master in Rude, whose power is revealed most grandly in the “Marseillaise” on the Triumphal Arch at Paris. Rude’s successor and continuer is the incomparable Carpeaux, who, as is most clear from his group “The Dance” at the Grand Opera, in place of the wild heroes of his model and master, substituted wild Bacchantes; who celebrated, instead of self-oblivious joy in sacrifice in the service of rugged duty, self-oblivious intoxication in a debauch of sensuality, but represented a life of excitement no less sublimely and no less ravishingly than the former. Rodin is closely connected with Rude and Carpeaux. With him passion descends a step lower still to the uncivilised and dissolute. Heroic with Rude, voluptuous with Carpeaux, it is Satanic with Rodin. The “Gate of Hell” exhibits rows of naked women in all the situations and occupations of the witches’ Sabbath, when it is most devilish.