The things written about Rodin have been mainly literary compositions, admiring and lyrical passages, to which his favourite subjects have served as texts. Much less has been heard about his personal ideas upon the technical principles of sculpture, or about his methods of work. The reason of this is primarily a fear of fatiguing the public, to whom the technicalities of an art--which involve dry explanations--are less interesting than the results. Moreover, it must be owned that few writers understand these questions. In painting, as in sculpture, persons who do not practise these arts, or who are not sufficiently familiar with the brush and the chisel to understand the secrets of works of art, even if not to produce them, generally prefer to avoid these dangerous aspects and keep to literary eulogy. A work is proclaimed great, and the reader is adjured to believe it so, but it is infinitely more difficult to give him a clear, technical explanation of why that work is great. Towards that quarter, therefore, I have chosen to turn, expecting to find there things to say that cannot be read elsewhere. Rodin has not merely created beautiful statues. He is an innovator, (or rather a renovator), in his methods of sculpture, and that fact has called down severe criticism on his head. A long-standing friendship, which I reckon as an honour, has allowed me to have numerous conversations with him upon the very basis of his art, upon the manner in which he practises it, and upon his ideas in relation to his own work and to ancient and modern sculpture. To these ideas the synthetic mind of Rodin imparts so much vigour that they are the motives of his work and cannot be separated from it. My desire has been to present them; and instead of giving the public my own opinions, in passages of more or less brilliancy, I wished to give those--so infinitely more interesting--which have been uttered by the artist himself. Often, in the course of this book, I shall be merely the transcriber while he speaks, and I think my readers will be grateful to me for that. Furthermore, in regard to technical points and to the way in which Rodin conceives composition and modelling, I may--and even, in order to inspire a just and necessary confidence, I should--say that when Rodin exhibited his _Balzac_ his first innovation in his present manner, he had so much faith in my friendship and in my critical powers that he entrusted to me the duty of explaining these delicate points in the French reviews,[1] and in a later lecture given at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, in the pavilion where he was exhibiting the whole of his works. These explanations, in their main lines, I have rewritten here. In that portion I have endeavoured to do original critical work, after having satisfied the biographical demands of the reader. I have avoided discussions of too abstract an æstheticism; I believe that everything can be said simply and in simple forms; I believe also that even in the