This digression in the story of Rodin's life explains his whole life. By his manly independence, his persistent refusal to follow the dictates of the school, he naturally found himself placed at the head of those who antagonized the official class. Against an opponent of his strength and obstinacy the struggle naturally took on new energy. It recalled to mind the violence of the famous intellectual quarrels of other days --the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that of the Classicists and the Romanticists in 1830. When Rodin presented himself at the great school, how, in his inexperience, could he foresee the war of wild beasts that rages in the thickets of art? It needed indeed a better-informed comrade to disclose the situation to him. Then his eyes were opened. He understood then that he would only be wasting his time in striving to force the bronze doors that are closed against the influences of great nature and her triumphant light, the implacable denouncer of the false in art. Perceiving it at last, he renounced the thought of entering the school. Later he gloried, in the fact that he had done so. Possibly he saw the danger that he would have run of parching his spirit and chilling his eye. "Ah," his friend, the sculptor Dalou, exclaimed long after, "Rodin had the luck not to have been at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts!" Dalou himself had not had that luck, and despite beautiful gifts and love for the eighteenth century, he had not recovered from the false teaching. Rodin, then, without knowing it, had fought his first battle, the slight skirmish to the incessant fight that was to open. After that time the name Institute, by which he understood the group of protagonists of a bad form of art, took in his speech a formidable meaning. When he says, "The Institute," he seems to call up some mythological monster, the hydra of a hundred heads, from the malignant wounds of which the brave usually die slowly. For him the Institute has come to mean a company of able men who substitute dexterity for conscience, who, for long toil in obscurity and poverty, substitute a premature eagerness for all that it may bring--profitable relations, orders from the state, fortune, and honors. In his opinion all that ought to come slowly in order not to distract the artist from the study that alone can give him strength. To him the rewards are secondary; true happiness lies in untrammeled and passionate toil, in the exercise of growing intelligence that is determined not to be stopped on the road to discovery. [Illustration: THE ADIEU.]