Rodin has overstepped, in his Balzac Memorial, which he first exhibited in 1898, the very extensive limits within which his silly aberrations might have been borne. Master Shallow, who tolerates much, could not tolerate this work, and broke down under its crushing exaction. When the public saw this provocative monstrosity, it broke out into that uncontrollable laughter, whereby the outraged intelligence of mankind revenges itself with primitive force for restraints that it has long suffered in silence. In the face of this result, the Committee of the French Union of Authors, which had commissioned the Balzac Memorial, resolved unanimously to decline it. In vain the Condottieri, who had usurped supremacy in art criticism by the most unscrupulous methods of conspiracy, violence, and oppression, made desperate efforts to maintain themselves. They were powerless against the armed rising of sensible people who had at last come to themselves. Their tyranny was vanquished, and they were swept away. They might still talk all sorts of twaddle about the stupidity of the masses, and, in impotent rage, hiss at the victors the well-known shibboleths, “Philistine,” “provincial,” etc., but this final, faint-hearted nagging sank unheard in the unanimous cry of scorn from public opinion. Rodin has represented Balzac as, jumping out of bed in the morning, he wraps himself unclad in his monk-like dressing-gown, without even putting his arms in the sleeves, irresistibly impelled to hurry to his writing-table in order to fix the thoughts of which his creative brain is full to bursting. Agreed: that, again, is the intention which Rodin might, perhaps, have secretly put into the figure. What the eye really sees is a sort of tree-trunk, hewn in the roughest manner by a woodman with an axe, which is surmounted by a hideously swollen tadpole head on a goitred neck. Malicious Parisian wit has exhausted all the droll comparisons that this monstrosity can suggest to flouting humour. People have called Rodin’s work a meal-sack, a carved potato, a snowman made by a cheeky schoolboy, an unpacked statue, a stalactite, etc. The work is all that, for it is nothing at all; but it is pre-eminently the conclusive refutation of Rodin’s æsthetics. For it is the highest expression, and, on that account, the unintentional parody, of his impressionist technique and of his third mistake, viz., ignorance of the limitations of his art.