Like them, Rodin is also a man of the great theme, a personification of every sort of Passion, an artist expressing all the joys and tragedies of existence. His own sculpture court is a whole Population rising youths, happy or sad lovers, delightsome mistresses, sage citizens, seers, sufferers, worn old men and women, and a fleeting accompaniment of nymphs, sirens, bacchantes, centaurs acting out their classic roles. The realistic mingles with the symbolic in allegories of the awakening and corruption of flesh, of harsh seasons and the rebirth of spring. Rodin bas the grand manner that one associates above all with Michelangelo, in which all bodies are surrounded with the aura of some fateful mean­ing, and in which even the small are made to seem mighty. Everything in Rodin is large or appears to be; he is perhaps the last sculptor in history whose Works are described as "statues"; since Rodin, one speaks of "figures." His sense for the monumental was such that he planned as his ultimate achievement a portal of Renaissance proportions to be known as The Gates of Hell, based an themes from Dante's Inferno-a project never brought to completion, although Rodin spent much of his time for almost 40 years peopling it with nearly 200 figures, in­cluding the original of The Thinker.

Underneath Rodin's art lay the dedication of a volcanic, driven man, one at odds with the conformities and conventions of the middle-class world around him. To him, an artist worthy of the name had to speak truly of the human condition sometimes splendid, more often troubled and tragic-and he had to convey his awareness of that condition through every gesture and muscle of his work. Rodin had his religion: at was the human body, which he once described as "a temple that marches . . . a moving architecture." It’s every motion, inflection, even passing hint of expression, were embodiments of man's estate, crying out to be seen and fully felt. Moreover-and here is the heart of Rodin's feeling and thinking-every form itself was a Symbol, a paradigm, a shadow of w hat la}' within. "Lines and colours are only ... the Symbols of hidden re­alities," he said. "Our Byes plunge beneath the surface to the meaning of things, and when afterward we reproduce the form, we endow it with the spiritual meaning which it covers."

This idea, of course, was by no means original with Rodin The thought that visible things led to a revelation of the invisible had come down all the way from Plato. As Rodin saw it, a mere fragment-an arm, a leg, or a torso sculpted without either arms or legs, or even without a head -might serve to reveal a whole range of yearning or anguish or fu1fillment. And all that was true in nature was beautiful in art also: "There is nothing ugly in art, except that which is without character, that is to say, that which offers no outer or inner truth."

Rodin's decision to make sculpture the medium for the expression of these ideas came at a time when the art had fallen in large part into ar­idity. In his Young manhood the sculptor's world was generally confining, distinctly unpromising when compared to the exciting world of painting. While the Impressionists were breaking loose from formula, most sculptors were producing little more than effigies either a per­fectly posed Imitation of a classic or a bit of storytelling sentiment. The poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, whom Rodin much admired, reg­ularly inveighed against what seemed to him the preference of most sculptors of the era for drawing-room trivia, their lack both of high se­riousness and of Invention. Sculpture, once so great, Baudelaire wrote, had fallen into the hands of "vaudevillistes" and copyists who "make free with all periods and all genres." The art had, he charged, lost its relevance to humanity: "No one is cocking his ear to tomorrow's wind, and yet the heroism of modern life surrounds us and presses upon us." These thoughts were close to Rodin's own, though he was rarely as bru­tal as Baudelaire in voicing them. Once, however, when criticized by the judging committee for his first designs for The Burghers of Calais,. he retorted, "I am the enemy in Paris of this [prevailing] pompous and Scholastic kind of art. You want me to be a follower of people whose con­ventional style 1 despise."

The reasons for the staleness of sculpture, as against the new vivac­ity of painting, were many'. In centuries past, painting and sculpture had stood side by side as partners and equals, thanks to the munificence of the patrons of those times popes, kings and courtiers. The decline of noble patronage had an especially harmful effect on the sculptor. It was not particularly difficult for a painter to be left to his own re­sources; all he required, after all, was canvas, paint and brushes-and in due course he made full use of his independence. The sculptor, de­pendent on costlier materials like bronze and marble, found it far harder to adjust. To be sure, there were new-rich patrons for sculpture, hut in