Rodin's is above all a temperament inclined to the expression of passionate and tragic character. Thence comes his constant study of movement. As I said before, that study has led him to give unlooked-for values to the general outline and to produce works which may be viewed on all sides and which continually show a fresh and balanced aspect that explains the other aspects: otherwise the daring gestures and the bold combinations of the limbs would have given an air of absurdity to the groups. Rodin is at the same time very reflective and very instinctive. He matures a thought slowly, but he often passes by chance from that thought to its realisation. This is the predominant feature of his nature, and it explains his entire art. Rodin often appears unconscious, astonished at what he had in him and at what he has brought into existence, to such a degree that he explains it badly enough. He sees his thought in the whole of nature and finds it there again; that thought, indeed, is fed by general ideas, and is, if I may say so, almost "elemental." From this point of view Rodin's _genius_ is independent of his _talent_ as a sculptor. It sometimes happens to him to see a block of marble or a knob of wood, and the form of such an object will show him what he will make and the movement of the figure. He adapts to it one of the ideas which he always has in reserve: the aspect of the wood or the marble determines the passage of the thought to the material which will incarnate it. I said one day to Rodin: "One would say that you knew there was a figure in that block, and that you do nothing beyond breaking away the stone that hides it from us." He answered that that was exactly his feeling as he worked. Upon the naked figure Rodin has ideas that are peculiar to his nature as a mystic and a realist. He considers the body with its four limbs as a cypher, of which the combinations are infinite. That is an old idea that was held by primitive theologians of the Eastern religions. And it is the fact that Rodin has invented an immense series of attitudes and combinations that one would not have thought possible: he attaches little groups to the side of a block of marble with the freedom of a painter throwing a figure upon a background. He makes his people light, he makes them soar, he entwines them in surprising positions.