study of Baudelaire that set Wagner to extorting ecstasy from his orchestra by images of death and love; and no doubt the temperament which seeks such combinations—­a temperament commoner in mediaeval days than ours—­was inherent in Wagner.  He makes his Isolde sing mournfully and madly over a corpse and, throwing herself upon the dead body of Tristan, die shaken by the sweet cruel pains of love.  Richard Strauss closely patterns after Wagner in his Salome, there is the head of a dead man, and there is the same dissolving ecstasy.  Both men play with similar counters—­love and death, and death and love.  And so Rodin.  In Pisa we may see (attributed by Vasari) Orcagna’s fresco of the Triumph of Death.  The sting of the flesh and the way of all flesh are inextricably blended in Rodin’s Gate of Hell.  His principal reading for forty years has been Dante and Baudelaire.  The Divine Comedy and Les Fleurs du Mal are the key-notes in this white symphony of Auguste Rodin’s.  Love and life and bitterness and death rule the themes of his marbles.  Like Beethoven and Wagner he breaks the academic laws of his art, but then he is Rodin, and where he achieves magnificently lesser men would miserably perish.  His large tumultuous music is for his chisel alone to ring out and sing.

II

The first and still the best study of Rodin as man and thinker is to be found in a book by Judith Cladel, the daughter of the novelist (author of Mes Paysans).  She named it Auguste Rodin, pris sur la vie, and her pages are filled with surprisingly vital sketches of the workaday Rodin.  His conversations are recorded; altogether this little picture has much charm and proves what Rodin asserts—­that women understand him better than men.  There is a fluid, feminine, disturbing side to his art and nature very appealing to emotional women.  Mlle. Cladel’s book has also been treasure-trove for the anecdote hunters; all have visited her pages.  Camille Mauclair admits his indebtedness; so does Frederick Lawton, whose big volume is the most complete life (probably official) that has thus far appeared, either in French or English.  It is written on the side of Rodin, like Mauclair’s more subtle study, and like the masterly criticism of Roger Marx.  Born at Paris in 1840—­the natal year of his friends Claude Monet and Zola—­and in humble circumstances, not enjoying a liberal education, the young Rodin had to fight from the beginning, fight for bread as well as an art schooling.  He was not even sure of a vocation.  An accident determined it.  He became a workman in the atelier of Carrier-Belleuse, the sculptor, but not until he had failed at the Beaux-Arts (which was a stroke of luck for his genius) and after he had enjoyed some tentative instruction under the great animal sculptor, Barye.  He was never a steady pupil of Barye, nor did he long remain with him.  He went to Belgium and “ghosted” for other sculptors; indeed, it was a privilege, or misfortune, to have been the “ghost”—­anonymous assistant—­for half a dozen sculptors.  He learned his technique by the sweat of his brow before he began to make music upon his own instrument.