"M. Dalou ... has declared that when the century goes out it will remember the aforesaid doors" (i.e. The Gate of Hell) "as its heroic achievement in sculpture. And if that be true—as I believe it to be true—then where, between himself and Michael Angelo, is there so lofty a head as Rodin's?... His busts alone were enough to place him in the future, the style of them is so complete, the treatment so large and so distinguished, the effect so personal, yet so absolute in art.... Here, if you will, are a thousand hints of the possibilities of human passion: from Paolo and Francesca melting into each other:
"'La bocca mi bacio tutta tremante'
as no man and woman have done in sculpture since sculpture began.... Here is sculpture in its essence.... You may read into it as much literature as you please, or as you can; but the interpolation is not Rodin's, but your own.... It is not literature in relief, nor literature in the round; it is sculpture pure and simple.... Passion is with him wholly a matter of form and surface and line, and exists not apart from these.... He is our Michael Angelo; and if he had not been that, he might have been our Donatello. And with Phidias and Lysippus all these some-and-twenty centuries afar, what more is left to say of the man of genius whose art is theirs?"
We see that Henley's admiration returns to the comparison of Michael Angelo and Rodin. I persist in thinking that the resemblance rather lies in moral identity, in conception than in technicalities. The muscular enlargement of the Italian hero is not Rodin's amplification nor his expressiveness, which is altogether nervous. It is none the less true that these two men are the only ones who have imagined and realised a sculpturesque conception of so vast a reach. Not even Puget and Rude, who came between them, ventured such wholes as The Tomb of the Medici or The Gate of Hell.
MUSEUMS
Rodin has in the Luxembourg Museum (Paris) the following works:—
The Age of Brass, originally placed in the Luxembourg Gardens near the School of Mines.
The Danaid (marble).