And the _ensemble_, of course, is in this way enforced as it can be in
no other, and we get an idea of Victor Hugo or St. John Baptist so
powerfully and yet so subtly suggested, that the abstraction seems
actually all that we see in looking at the concrete bust or statue.
Objections to M. Rodin's "handling" as eccentric or capricious, appear
to the sympathetic beholder of one of his majestic works the very acme
of misappreciation, and their real excuse--which is, as I have said, the
fact that such "handling" is as unfamiliar as the motives it
accompanies--singularly poor and feeble.
As for the common nature of these motives, the character of the
personality which appears in their varied presentments, it is almost
idle to speak in the absence of the work itself, so eloquent is this at
once and so untranslatable. But it may be said approximately that M.
Rodin's temperament is in the first place deeply romantic. Everything
the Institute likes repels him. He has the poetic conception of art and
its mission, and in poetry any authoritative and codifying consensus
seems to him paradoxical.
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