What demands preëminent recognition in his case is the gift, a splendid, a dazzling gift for the plastic arts, the realization of which has been imposed upon him, as it were, by the command of destiny. Whence did it come? From whom did he inherit it? From what ancestor, sensitive to the enchantment of beauty, suffering, and in travail from the necessity of proclaiming it, but imperfectly endowed and powerless to forge for himself a talent in order to express the tremors of his soul? It is a mystery. No one can tell, Rodin himself least of all. Science has not yet taught us anything about those obscure combinations, those endless preferences of the vital force, thanks to which a person possesses the faculties of genius. In this, as in other things, we are unable to divine the cause and can only marvel at the effect, the prodigy. Discredited to-day are the theories of Lombroso and his school, once so warmly welcomed by mediocre minds athirst for equality, in which great men were considered as degenerates of a superior variety, and the most sensitive spirits qualified as candidates for the madhouse! All one can say is that nature abhors equality, that the indwelling will delights in raising up lofty mountain masses above the uniformity of the plains and the valor of the chosen few above the multitude. The function of the man of genius is, precisely, to possess in a supreme degree the sense of inequality and to transcribe its infinite nuances in their ever-changing, ever-moving, ever-renewed variety. He alone perceives the diversities whose play is the law of the universe itself, and he grasps them equally in a fragment of inanimate matter and in the vastest aspects of the world. Far from being half mad, this unique being, this prodigious mirror of a million facets, achieves his aim only because he possesses far more intelligence than the most brilliant of his contemporaries, because he is in touch with a more profound order of things and a more comprehensive method, because he combines the qualities of continuity in sensation and of discernment which constitute that supreme sensibility of all the senses acting together--taste. But it does not please ordinary mortals to believe things of this kind, and one can easily understand how the crowd, repudiating any such humiliating notion, are all too willing to follow the lead of exotic pseudo-scientists and look upon great men as lunatics, considering themselves far more rational.