Rodin worked at this wretched piece of work for ten whole years. First he read all Balzac’s works; then he made a journey to Touraine and spent months there, so as to absorb the human environment from which Balzac took so many of his models, and to become permeated with the feelings and impressions with which Balzac may have satiated himself when composing—all this to make a human figure which was to be the likeness of a man whom many people now living have known in the flesh. After these preliminary studies, Rodin finally proceeded to form his Balzac. His head was to be “a synthesis of his works,” his physiognomy was to be summed up “in an eye that looks on the _Comédie humaine_ and in an upper lip that is curled in contempt for humanity.” So said Rodin himself in several interviews which were published at the time when his statue was exhibited. He was then merely repeating what the twaddlers of Montmartre had chattered to him. It would be easy to make jests about this inflammation of the brain, but it is not worth even cheap raillery. It is quite enough to establish, soberly and drily, that Rodin, like a child or an idiot, aimed at something impossible. Sculpture cannot furnish any “synthesis of Balzac’s works.” Nature herself cannot, in the sense that Balzac himself, when he was alive, did not synthetise his works, in his externals, in his physiognomy. He had perhaps the head of a man of mark, but there was assuredly nothing in his face to show that he had written the “Physiology of Marriage,” and not written “La Chartreuse de Parme” (Stendhal). Rodin imagined that a portrait-statue could quite alone, merely by its own means, supply the place of a biography and a psychological and literary characterisation of the person represented. This patent lunacy was necessarily bound to end, as it has ended, in a mad caricature. “The Thinker,” a colossal statue which was exhibited in 1904, is almost as bad an aberration as Balzac. It is a gigantic enlargement of a little sketch that one saw many years ago over Rodin’s “Gate of Dante’s Hell,” in the confused and scarcely indicated unborn _foetus_ lines of which confident devotion might imagine all possible promises of future splendour. The promises are realised in “The Thinker.” He who still wishes to shudder with foreboding in the presence of the finished work will be at liberty to do so. It will be the same sort of man who grew enthusiastic over the “Balzac,” before which every criticism of intelligent—not “intellectual”—men dissolved into unextinguishable laughter. “The Thinker” is brother of the “Balzac,” only it is not so comic, for it is not dressed in a meal-sack, but is naked, and the bared human body, when misshapen, excites in a spectator of unvitiated taste, not cheerfulness, but discomfort, which may even rise to loathing.