It is not weakness, for Rodin has had an excessively hard life and is strong and patient; it is dignity of the inner life and profound indifference for the life about him. Rodin is a high dignitary of the Legion of Honour, a president of the judges of sculpture of an important society of artists (the Société Nationale), he is honoured all over Europe, has been received in England as a genius, and has succeeded Whistler as the head of a chosen band of artists; but he remains the man that he was when he was unknown and poor in his solitude at Brussels.
He likes few things, but likes those thoroughly. He reads little, but what he reads strikes home to him as to no one else; Baudelaire and Rousseau, in whom he delights, are instances. He is passionately fond of music, especially of Gluck, but seldom speaks of it. He simplifies everything, sees only the main lines in morality as in art, lives by two or three principles, and has an aversion for everything that is not essential.
A CORNER OF RODIN'S STUDIO AT MEUDON
When one knows Rodin well one ceases to be able to separate him from his work. He can no longer think otherwise than symbolically by slow deposits of accumulated sensation which work on in the deep strata of his consciousness and suddenly blossom and take a name. His statues are states of the soul. He is himself a representative being, surprised at his own immanence, and his intelligence is outdone by his instinct. That is how it comes about that he does not always know how to name the beings that he has discovered, as we discover, by means of pain, corners of our consciousness that we had not suspected. In the same way that Rodin seems to break away the fragments of a block from around an already existing statue hidden in it, he is himself a sort of rock concealing shapes within it and embracing in its secret recesses immense crystallised arborescences. With a simple enough personal psychology he expresses infinite shades and inflexions of emotion. His thought is like the monad of Leibnitz; it seems, when one sees the man, to have no window to the outer world.
Rodin's opinions upon social life are vague. He contents himself with repeating that work lovingly done is the secret of all order and all happiness. To love life and natural forms, and to attempt nothing disobedient to Nature or her aims, that is his whole morality.