Books are written about him. With picturesque precision De Maupassant described him in "Notre Coeur." Rodin is tempting as a psychologic study. He appeals to the literary critic, though his art is not "literary." His modeling arouses tempests, either of dispraise or idolatry. To see him steadily after a visit to his studios at Paris or Meudon is difficult. If the master be present then one feels the impact of a personality that is misty as the clouds about the base of a mountain, and as impressive as the bulk of the mountain. Yet a sane, pleasant, unassuming man interested in his clay--that is, unless you happen to discover him interested in humanity. If you watch him well you may in turn find yourself watched; those peering eyes possess a vision that plunges into the depths of your soul. And this master of marble sees the soul as nude as he sees the body. It is the union in him of sculptor and psychologist that places Rodin apart from other artists. These two arts (psychology is the art of divination) he practises in a medium that hitherto did not betray potentialities for such performances. Walter Pater is right in maintaining that each art has its separate subject matter; still, in the debatable province of Rodin's sculpture we find strange emotional power, hints of the pictorial, and a rare suggestion of music. This, obviously, is not playing the game according to the rules of Lessing and his Laocoön. Let us drop the old aesthetic rule of thumb and confess that during the last century a new race of artists sprang up and in their novel element they, like flying-fishes, revealed to a wondering world their composite structure. Thus we find Berlioz painting with his instrumentation; Franz Liszt, Tschaikowsky, and Richard Strauss filling their symphonic poems with drama and poetry; while Richard Wagner invented an art which he believed embraced all the others. And there was Ibsen who employed the dramatic form as a vehicle for his anarchistic ideas; and Nietzsche, who was such a poet that he was able to sing a mad philosophy into life; not to forget Rossetti, who painted poems and made poetry of his pictures. Sculpture was the only art that resisted this universal disintegration, this imbroglio of the seven arts. No sculptor before Rodin had dared to shiver the syntax of stone. For sculpture is a static, not a dynamic art--is it not? Let us observe the rules though we call up the chill spirit of the cemetery. What Mallarmé attempted with French poetry Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles do not represent, but present, emotion; they are the evocation of emotion itself; as in music, form and substance coalesce. If he does not, as does Mallarmé, arouse "the silent thunder afloat in the leaves," he can summon from the vasty deep the spirits of love, hate, pain, sin, despair, beauty, ecstasy; above all, ecstasy. Now, the primal gift of ecstasy is bestowed upon few artists. Keats had it, and Shelley; Byron, despite his passion, missed it. We