Rodin deserves well of our young century, the old did so incontinently batter him. The anguish of his own "Hell's Portal" he endured before he molded its clay between his thick clairvoyant fingers. Misunderstood, therefore misrepresented, he with his pride and obstinacy aroused--the one buttressing the other--was not to be budged from his formulas or the practice of his sculpture. Then the art world swung unamiably, unwillingly, toward him, perhaps more from curiosity than conviction. He became famous. And he is more misunderstood than ever. He has been called _rusé_, even a fraud, while the wholesale denunciation of his work as erotic is unluckily still green in our memory. The sculptor, who in 1877 was accused of "faking" his lifelike "Age of Bronze"--now in the Luxembourg--by taking a mold from the living model, also experienced the discomfiture of being assured some years later that, not understanding the art of modeling, his statue of Balzac was only an evasion of difficulties. And this to a man who in the interim had wrought so many masterpieces. A year or two ago, after his magnificent offer to the city of Paris of his works, there was much malevolent criticism from certain quarters. Rodin takes all this philosophically. He points out that the artist is the only one to-day who creates in joy. Mankind as a majority hates its work. Workmen no longer consider their various avocations with proper pride--this was a favorite thesis of Ruskin, William Morris, and Renoir. Furthermore, argues Rodin, the artist is indispensable. He reveals the beauty and meaning of life to his fellows. He struggles against the false, the conventional, and the used-up; but the French sculptor slyly adds: "No one may benefit mankind with impunity." He considers himself as having a religious nature; all artists are temperamentally religious, he contends, though his religion is not precisely of the kind that would appeal to the orthodox. To give Rodin his due he stands prosperity not quite as well as poverty. In every great artist there is a large area of self-esteem; it is the reservoir from which he must, during years of drought or defeat, draw upon to keep fresh the soul. Without the consoling fluid of egotism genius would soon perish in the dust of despair. But fill this source to the brim, accelerate the speed of its current, and artistic deterioration may ensue. Rodin has been fatuously called a second Michael Angelo--as if there could ever be a replica of any human. He has been hailed as a modern Praxiteles; which is nonsense. And he is often damned as a myopic decadent whose insensibility to the pure line and lack of architectonic have been elevated by his admirers into sorry virtues. Nevertheless, is Rodin justly appraised? Do his friends not over-glorify him? Nothing so stales a demigod's image as the perfumes burned before it by worshipers; the denser the smoke the sooner crumbles the feet of their idol.