Part 2

We need to recall the graceful, effeminate, and conventional statuary of the generation from 1865 to 1875 in order to comprehend fully what _The Age of Brass_ and _St. John the Baptist_ brought into the exhibitions when they made their appearance there. Rough truth, a sense of movement, an intense realism, an absolute scorn of the pleasing, a lofty style, a deep feeling of organic life, power due to the eager love of form, of muscular formation and physical activity; all these things inevitably shocked the gentle sculptors who were enamoured of the academic style and of mythology. Moreover, Rodin was unknown; he had no claim, knew nobody, had never asked for anything, and was a son of the people. That Carrier-Belleuse's former workman should take upon himself to make statues all by himself aroused scorn. His technical skill was so great that there could be no possibility of denying it. Therefore, in spite, the accusation of casting from the life was invented. The accusers did not reflect upon the splendid testimonial that would be given to the artist if he should succeed in proving that his skill alone had created this perfection. The amusing thing is that the same people who declared this skill too great to be anything but a reproduction, accused Rodin, twenty years later, over his _Balzac_, of not knowing his craft! Apart from this question of fact, and these professional jealousies, the style of these works could not fail to displease. In them there was already a sort of symbolic and savage beauty, which has become a characteristic of Rodin's art. The pained, awakening movement of the man in _The Age of Brass_, the gesture of _St. John the Baptist_, and still more his wild face with its open mouth, were so much outside the usual conventions as to make everybody feel that here was an artist resolved to take no account of the "École" and its principles. These two splendid studies of the nude already contained a very special thought. Rodin, therefore, was hated in the first place as a man who would be revolutionary. He was hated because he was powerful, because he emerged suddenly from obscurity, and because he was felt to possess an obstinate individuality. It was also for these very reasons that warm sympathies went out to Rodin from among artists opposed to the spirit of the "École," and from independent writers who divined in him a man capable of expressing in his art thoughts and emotions that had ceased to be found in art.

[1] This unknown student was called Constant Simon. Rodin remembers him as a remarkable man.

[2] The hanging committee of the Salon is called a "jury."--TRANS.

II

RODIN'S STUDIO--HIS WORKS FROM 1880 TO 1889--"EVE"; SOME BUSTS; THE MONUMENT TO VICTOR HUGO--"THE GATE OF HELL"--"THE DANAID"--THE "THOUGHT"--THE EXHIBITION OF CLAUDE MONET AND RODIN, IN 1889--THE MONUMENT TO CLAUDE LORRAINE AT NANCY (1892)--"THE BURGHERS OF CALAIS" (1888-1895)

Rodin's previous works, from 1881 to 1889, had been produced in modest abodes in the Rue des Fourneaux and the Boulevard de Vaugirard, and later, in a little studio, granted by the Government, at the Dépôt des Marbres, in the Rue de l'Université, where a certain number of studios are given to sculptors. From 1889 onwards the Government granted Rodin two larger studios there, which he still occupies. At a later date he also had, at his own expense, a studio in an odd corner of the Boulevard d'Italie, at a place called the Clos Payen, besides a house at Sèvres, and eventually one at Meudon, in which he still lives and of which I shall speak again. Among these were distributed his studies and his finished works: _The Gate of Hell_ was sketched in at the Rue de l'Université, and there, too, Rodin's assistants are at work upon his present groups.

From 1879 Rodin worked at Sèvres, having been introduced by Carrier-Belleuse, and a vase decorated by him may be seen there. In 1880 he made a fine competitive design for the _Monument to the Defenders of the Nation,_ which was not accepted. In 1881 he made a figure of _Adam_, which he destroyed, and an _Eve,_ which must be reckoned among his noblest creations--an _Eve_ ashamed of her faults, bowed down by terror, vaguely tormented less by remorse for her sin than by the idea of having created beings for future sorrow. This _Eve_ is a bronze of formidable appearance and all Rodin breathes in it. As in the _St. John the Baptist,_ we feel the effect of a definite conception of sculpture, but here the design is more spiritual and the scheme of modelling simpler and larger. From that time onward we shall find the artist producing regularly, putting forth a peaceful power, and working in complete possession of himself, not free certainly from doubts and searchings, but allowing nothing of the sort to be seen. Rodin's way of working is very peculiar; he does not begin one piece of work, carry it to its conclusion, and then devote himself to another. He has had from the outset a certain number of thoughts that correspond to forms, and although he has only shown his works one after another, he has nevertheless elaborated them side by side, working at them simultaneously and modifying them one by another. Thus _The Gate of Hell_ has been made and remade for more than twenty years; thus the monument to Hugo, not yet handed over, goes back, by the sketches for it, to 1886; while the studies for _The Burghers of Calais_ date from 1888, though the monument was only completed in 1895; thus, too, among the little groups on which Rodin is still at work, are many that have grown out of rough sketches made fifteen years ago. Rodin has a store of ideas and emotions dear to him, upon which he has patiently meditated, which he has promised himself to execute, and which he brings to ripeness in silence, remaining throughout long years without appearing to concern himself with them. "Strength and patience" might be his characteristic motto. Like all great artists, he thought out the essential lines of his work at once, lines that I shall define at the end of this book. His is a synthetic and generalising mind, which can only begin its active course after slow meditation, and conceives no isolated thing; spontaneous and at the same time prudent. He had that time of meditation at Brussels, not hastening to produce, not permitting himself to express an idea until he had prepared in detail the technical expression, the necessities of the craftsman.

The _Ugolino_, a cast, of which Rodin exhibited the first sketch in 1882, is the first sign of that preoccupation with Dante, which was to be shown in all his later work. He has read comparatively few things, and that designedly; he attaches himself strongly to a few great and profound works, and meditates upon them indefatigably. His whole symbolic imagination has been fed by Dante and his whole sensuous imagination by Baudelaire. These two gloomy poets have impressed him, and it may be said that he has absorbed them. Almost all Rodin's great symbolic figures refer to the _Inferno_, and all his little groups of lovers have the neurotic subtlety, the refined, homesick melancholy of the _Fleurs du Mal._ He has a constant need to evolve from realism to general ideas, from thought to delight or sorrow, and the ideal of Dante or of Baudelaire is strangely mingled in him with love of the antique and worship of mythology. It is, indeed, this quite individual fusion that forms the basis of his personality. The _Ugolino_, which was exhibited, first alone and then with his dying children, over whom he is crouching, haggard and already almost like a wild beast, is a tragic and powerful work. The same year Rodin produced the bust of Alphonse Legros, which has taken so high a place in England in the opinion of the best judges, and in that of the lamented W. E. Henley, whose penetrating criticism paid homage from the first to our sculptor's art.

_The Genius of War,_ the _Monument to General Lynch_, and the very curious _Bellona,_ date from 1883; the _President Vicunha_[1] and a _Bust of a Young Woman_, from 1884. This was rather a period of groping than of production; Rodin was continuing his studies, and becoming more confirmed in his technical methods. We must go on to the year 1885 to reach the revelation of three of his finest sculptures--the three busts of _Dalou_, _Victor Hugo,_ and _Antonin Proust_, which powerfully declare his personality. These are works that are not disputable, that cannot be accused of having a "literary" intention, mere bits of sculpture giving evidence of mastery and showing surfaces, planes, and high lights worthy of the very finest busts of the French school. As time goes by, the ideas, the philosophy, the symbolism, the "dramatisation" of Rodin's compositions may come to be disputed, or exact comprehension of them may be lost; but works like these will always, by their mere professional worth, bear witness for him. Life, thought, strength, and character are carried as far as is possible. The bust of Hugo was the outcome of some few studies that the artist was able to make from the life. Hugo declared David of Angers to have made so good a bust of him that he considered it unnecessary ever to sit again. Rodin wished to obtain sittings, but failed; the poet admitted him to his table, and merely said to him, "Come when you like, observe me ... and do what you can." At table Rodin took sketches of Hugo in cigarette-paper books; he had a stand and some clay in the ante-room, and from time to time he would run in to note down anything that had just struck him.

VICTOR HUGO. (DRY POINT)

VICTOR HUGO. (DRY-POINT)

In this manner was that admirable bust completed, which (with the two etchings here reproduced) was the only material of which Rodin could make use for the Hugo with the bowed head of his future monument, the commission for which was given him by the Government after the death of the national poet in 1883, and which is on the eve of completion.

The next year (1886) Rodin exhibited the scheme of the monument itself, which has since undergone several variations, but of which the central theme is always as follows: Hugo, naked and half-draped, like a god, is seated on a rock at the edge of the sea. With his outstretched left arm he makes a silencing gesture towards the sea and the Nereids, and thus begs them to let him listen to the Muse of his Inner Voice, who rises, pensively, behind him, and to the Muse of Anger, who, crouched on a rock above his head, seems ready to fly up into the sky. This Muse may also be interpreted as an Ins, the messenger of the voices of the elements, and the Muse of the Inner Voice is also called Meditation. She is of the greatest beauty; hers is one of the figures in which, before the _Balzac_, Rodin indicates his new method of amplifying the relief and systematically altering the proportions, in order--according to an idea which I shall analyse in detail in the next chapter--to secure a decorative effect. Nothing can be more expressive and more supernatural than the harmonious sadness of this great drooping shape; it is really a soul incarnated in a movement of modesty and secret contemplation that disturbs and moves us as we gaze. The Hugo himself is truly Olympian in the majesty of his gesture, the vastness of his heroic nudity, and the magic of the shadow that bathes his face bowed partly down over his breast; and the monument as a whole is of magnificent decorative unity. There are to be two monuments to Victor Hugo, one for the Pantheon, the other for the Luxembourg Gardens, and they are to have slight variations, not in the attitude of Hugo himself, but in the significance and style of the adjacent figures. These two monuments, however, have not been accepted without great difficulties caused by the very nature of Rodin's conception; and the fact that they are accepted has not prevented the Place Victor Hugo from being disfigured by a hideous and gigantic monument, the work of Barrias, which fills the place of those that Rodin had not completed. Rodin's slowness, which arises from the scrupulous circumspection of his mind--never satisfied with itself--and from his habit of working simultaneously at several subjects, has always contributed towards driving away official commissions from him; while the jealousy of his fellows and the exceptional character of his work have further helped to bring about strained relations between him and the official circle. Rodin does not care about pleasing or about being understood by everybody, and he has no idea of concessions. Thus almost all his important works have given rise to incidents likely to disturb his peace and hinder his work.

Together with the sketch of the Hugo monument, a bust of Henry Becque, and a curious etching made from it, Rodin exhibited in 1886 the first drawings belonging to _The Gate of Hell_, or at least to the work which people have agreed to call by that title. I have already related the origin of that Government commission. In the beginning Rodin had been asked to make a door in high-relief, intended for the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. But the sculptor's imagination, beset by ideas of Dante, soon deviated from the original scheme. The door really exists in the studio of the Rue de l'Université, under the aspect of a vast rough model in plaster and beams, in the very simple shape of a two-leaved door 19 ½ feet high, with a frieze, a tympanum, and two lateral capitals. It was, at first, to have been surmounted by the two figures of Adam and Eve, but Rodin gave them up. He now seems determined to place the _Shades_, here reproduced, in the highest plane.[2] On the uppermost beam _The Thinker_ is to be seated. In the panels of the door and upon the wide uprights are enshrined figures--to the number of over a hundred--detached in high-relief, exactly as upon the gates of the Baptistery in Florence, which Rodin has, quite simply, taken as his model. These figures were, at first, direct interpretations from Dante, in particular Paolo and Francesca da Rimini and divers inhabitants of the Inferno. Then Rodin intermingled figures due solely to his inspirations from Baudelaire and to his own sharp perception of tragic perversity. He enlarged Dante's conception as he modernised it, and has ended by making this door into what he smilingly calls "my Noah's Ark." That means that he is continually putting in little figures which replace others; there, plastered into the niches left by unfinished figures, he places everything that he improvises, everything that seems to him to correspond in character and subject with that vast confusion of human passions. The size of these figures is greatly restricted; the largest scarcely exceed thirty-nine inches in height. The dimensions of the final rendering, however, still remain to be fixed. The splendid figure called _The Thinker_ is carried out in bronze larger than life, and Rodin is credited with an intention of bringing up all the other figures to the same dimensions, which would represent an unheard-of outlay and a gate nearly a hundred feet high--a Cyclopean work indeed! _The Thinker_, who has been so called on account of the likeness between his attitude and that of Michael Angelo's _Pensieroso_, is much more truly an image, with his stunted body and a primitive man's face, of the cave-dweller, the prognathous savage beholding the crimes and passions of his progeny unroll themselves below him. Immediately beneath him may be seen the most celebrated characters of the Dante cycle, notably the lovers of Rimini entwined and falling into hell.[3] Then as we descend towards the ground the figures become more independent of the subject, more personally invented by the artist, and at the foot we find "women damned," such as Baudelaire conceived, amid characters from heathen mythology.

It may thus be said that, although, perhaps, the celebrated doorway may never be finished, it is a storehouse of Rodin's creations. It stands by him as a theme for inspirations, and he brings into it a whole category of thoughts and works, never troubling himself about the architecture or the actual scheme. He will be for ever improvising some little figure, shaping the notation of some feeling, idea, or form, and this he plants in his door, studies it against the other figures, then takes it out again, and if need be, breaks it up and uses the fragments for other attempts. Many of these little figures have developed into important separate groups. Rodin is ruled primarily by the need to create and to satisfy an irresistible vocation; he cares little what may be the ultimate transformation of his inventions, and his sculpture is, furthermore, so conceived that it may be executed on a large scale or a small; this is indeed so much the case that it is often impossible to judge from a photograph what are the dimensions.

_The Gate of Hell_ might therefore better be called "the Pandemonium," or some quite other name. If it were to be carried out it could not contain all the figures destined for it by the artist. There they stand, innumerable, ranged on shelves beside the rough model of the door, representing the entire evolution of Rodin's inspiration, and forming what I call, with his consent, "the diary of his life as a sculptor." To enumerate these figures and groups would take too long; suffice to say that the larger part of Rodin's small marbles and bronzes are but completions of these sketches, and that on account of the essentially decorative character of the outlines and the intense originality of the proportion and balance of the figures, they can be conceived either as statuettes or as lifesized works. Such as it is, _The Gate of Hell_ is the plan of a piece of work unique in the sculpture of modern days, a plan slowly elaborated, and of which every detail has been foreseen and analysed for years. No one has dared to undertake so audacious an assemblage of figures upon such a scheme, and the scheme is present to Rodin in its entirety. He by no means forgets the decorative effect nor the harmonious aspects, the concords that the gate should have, and if ever Government should require him to deliver his work he would be able to do so without delay. Twenty years in the studio have matured it in his mind. The work that Dante inspired has assumed a more general significance. Low-relief, high-relief, figures standing free, groups, single figures, all the styles of sculpture are gathered into the symphony of a throng, lost amid whirling mists of hell and converging towards the figure of the Thinker. The conception embraces centuries. Ugolino is there, and so are centaurs, female fauns, satyrs, and creatures dreamed of by Baudelaire, abstract personifications of vices--in particular, there is the extraordinary group of the miser dying of hunger over his treasure beside a prostitute _(Avarice and Lewdness)._ The Thinker, in his austere nudity and pensive strength, is at one and the same time the alarmed Adam, the implacable Dante, and the compassionate Virgil of this frightful unrestrained humanity, but he is, above all, the ancestor, the first man, simple and unconscious, looking down on what he has begotten. The symbolism and philosophy of the artist are independent of any religious doctrine; his spiritual ardour excels in setting free the symbols of the various creeds, and he is supported mainly by deep and incessant consultation of nature, and by his exceptional sense of expression in movements. He attains the decorative harmony of his work not by additions, but by systematic suppressions, as the Gothic artists and those of the Renascence did.

_The Gate of Hell_ is the outcome of studies made by Rodin from the Gothic sculptors, during his stay in Brussels. In this, and in _The Burghers of Calais_, he resumes the deep influence that he there underwent. As to the influence that the antique had upon him, that only showed itself later, in his smaller works in marble, and especially in the _Balzac_ and recent productions. The _Gate_ corresponds to the period in which Rodin's great aim was to create, through intensity of movement and originality of attitude and outline, a _new system of the dramatic_ in his art, which the taste of the day had frozen into a false "neo-Greek nobility," obtained by immobility, by inertia of outline, and by a fear of seeing too living a movement break the general harmony. To seek a fresh harmony in the very study of movement, to create, side by side with _static_ art, a _dynamic_ art, such, in a brief formula, was Rodin's idea.

He was shortly to exhibit a work which was still more significant of the thoughts with which he was busy. For, though I have spoken at once of that famous _Gate,_ which is the _leit-motiv_ of Rodin's art, it must be remembered that in 1886 nothing was known of it but drawings. Only by degrees have groups and fragments of it been seen, and the work itself has never left the studio in the Rue de l'Université. It was _The Burghers of Calais_ which revealed most clearly to the public Rodin's capabilities in the way of style and of composing a whole work, and I will speak of the _Burghers_ in this chapter, although the work was not completed until 1892 and was not set up in Calais until 1895.

In 1887 we may note _Perseus and the Gorgon_, and a marble _Head of the beheaded St. John_, which belongs to the Marchioness of Carcano. In 1888 was exhibited the exquisite _Danaid,_ one of the most tender female figures that were ever lovingly moulded by this sculptor of the energetic, and one which has a subtle delicacy of soul that seems strangely placed between two works of power. At the same time a naked figure was also shown at the Exposition des Beaux Arts, in Brussels--a _Man Walking_, which was no other than one of the _Burghers,_ and of which the robust execution made an impression. The year 1889 marked an increase of the artist's activity. He was busy upon preparatory work for the monument of Claude Lorraine, which he had been commissioned to make for Nancy. He was going on with _The Gate of Hell._ He completed a statue of Bastien-Lepage for the cemetery of Damvilliers. He began upon the busts of the art critics, Octave Mirbeau and Roger Marx, finished an admirable little _Dream-Group_ in marble, in which a young man is lying back and trying to hold fast a sphinx-woman who takes flight, wild and fateful. An impressionist sketch of _Hecuba_, crouching down and shrieking, and _Thought_, in marble, completed the record of this well-filled year. _Thought,_ a proud, sweet head rising from a block, is one of Rodin's best known works and the very symbol of his art. It occupies a place in the Museum of the Luxembourg, where it is in company with _The Danaid,_ the _St. John, The Kiss,_ a masterly female bust, and a bronze statuette. _The Fair Helmet-Maker,_ from Villon's poem, is a work on a very small scale, but containing the depth and strength of tragedy--the whole drama of a human body's ruin.