Part 3

In 1889 Rodin and Claude Monet together held, in the George Petit gallery, an exhibition which has remained famous and which united our two greatest artists. Rodin sent to it the _Women Damned_, the _Beheaded St. John_, some _Fauns_ and _Bacchantes_, _Bastien-Lepage,_ in all some thirty works, among which was _The Burghers of Calais_, shown complete for the first time. The sensation produced was immense. Rodin now tasted unmistakable fame, and his reputation spread all over the world. This fame, however, did not disarm the official circle, and not until the last three or four years have the critics been unanimous in their praise of the great French sculptor, whose every important work has given occasion to a battle, because its beauty arose from principles opposed to the whole system taught in the schools.

The five following years were marked by various works which did not, however, interfere with the threefold parallel continuation of the _Victor Hugo, The Burghers of Calais,_ and _The Gate of Hell_, which were exhibited in various states in the Salon. Rodin considers it his duty, indeed, to submit to the public the phases of his work, rough attempts, clay, marbles, or bronzes, before the final completion; and understanding very well that his style is, or seems to be difficult, he thus explains himself to the public in the exhibitions, and allows people to follow the stages through which his thought passes. In addition to these works may be noted, for the year 1890, the bust of a young woman, in silver, _Brother and Sister_, bronze, and the _Torso_ of St. John the Baptist. In 1891, _The Caryatid_, a marble figure of a young woman with a stone upon her shoulder, the group of _The Young Mother_ (first bronze and then marble), and _A Nymph._ In 1892, the busts of _Rochefort_ and of _Puvis de Chavannes,_ which, with those of _Dalou, Jean Paul Laurens_, _Hugo_, and _Falguière,_ form an incomparable series from Rodin's hand of portraits that surpass all modern French sculpture, and are admirable alike in execution and expression. The _Puvis de Chavannes_ is perhaps the finest; it is a work that does not pall even beside Donatello himself. In 1892 the _Burghers_ and the _Claude Lorraine_ were completed. The _Burghers_ waited three years for their setting up, but the monument to Lorraine was inaugurated immediately, thanks to the devoted efforts of that great art-worker in glass, Émile Gallé, and of Roger Marx, who by his writings and his incessant activity has had a most noble effect upon modern French art. These two eminent men, both natives of Nancy, enforced the acceptance of the work. The monument consists of a statue of Lorraine, standing, palette in hand, his head raised eagerly towards the east, and of a pedestal from which Apollo and his rearing horses stand out in splendid high-relief. Thus did Rodin seek to pay homage to the master-painter who adored movement in light, by acclaiming both these in his turn. Fault has been found with the importance of the pedestal in comparison with the statue, the objectors failing to understand that this allegory of Apollo incarnated the very soul of the great artist whose effigy towered over the whole work, and that this whole could not be dissevered. The idea animating this composition was criticised by the authorities. Here, once more, Rodin with his symbolic vision, his tendency to bold simplifications of the general, synthetic idea, was found disturbing. He was asked for the _sculptured portrait_ of a man, and he preferred to give prominence to a symbol that expressed the dream and the essential genius of that man, the sun-painter--an idea which was logical, but which ran counter to the received prejudice as to portrait statues. The propagandist persistence of Gallé and Roger Marx, however, convinced the people of Nancy, who are now very proud of their monument. The horses and the Apollo are the most living, palpitating, and lyrical things that Rodin has produced.

In 1893 Rodin made the bust of Madame _Séverine,_ the medallion of _César Franck,_ and several works in marble; _Galatea, The Death of Adonis, The Education of Achilles,_ and _The Wave._ From 1894 date the _Eternal Spring,_ one of his tenderest and purest works, besides an _Orpheus and Eurydice,_ an _Adonis and Venus,_ and finally _Christ and the Magdalen._ For, by degrees, he was returning to religious and mythological subjects, after having expressed only general symbols or pieces of pure realism; and I shall have to call attention at a later point to the original manner in which Rodin was bold enough to interpret these subjects which the academic classicism seemed to have worn out and left insipid for ever.

The year 1895 at last beheld the inauguration, on the 3rd of June, of _The Burghers of Calais_ at Calais. To the same year belongs another fine work in marble: _Illusion, the Daughter of Icarus,_ besides a vigorous bronze, _The Crouching Man,_ a medallion of _Octave Mirbeau,_ and--at this early date--some nude studies for the _Balzac,_ for the _Balzac_ was studied minutely in the nude, a point of which many people know nothing, before appearing draped in the famous dressing-gown which was destined, in 1898, to arouse so much clamour.

The _Burghers_ were set up, by subscription, in a square in Calais.[4]

The monument is one in which Rodin has deliberately departed from all the rules of official art. These require that the effect should be pursued primarily by a compact grouping, the same thought being translated by the same gesture from all the persons. Rodin, on the contrary, desired to leave their full individuality to his six burghers going in their shirts and with halters on their necks to surrender themselves to King Edward, and he has isolated them on their one base. These six men are walking, one behind the other, two by two, half naked and miserable, with their emaciated faces--men besieged, sacrificed. One devotion unites them in the name of their town's salvation, but their characters and their thoughts remain distinct, and in each may be read a different drama of the conscience. They have not the factitious enthusiasm and the declamatory gesture with which an ordinary sculptor would have thought well to furnish them; they are simply citizens who have resolved to fulfil a fatal duty, and are going to perform it without cowardice, but nevertheless were, yesterday, trades-people and family-men with no pretensions to the heroic. They bear with them their regrets, their inner heartbreak, and are not thinking of striking an attitude in the eyes of history. They are the unknown, obscure heroes of a fatality such as often arose in their rough times; and of how many dead men, devoted like them, has history forgotten the deeds and names! There is Eustace de St. Pierre, with his shaven magistrate's face, stiff and controlled, carrying the key of the town; behind him Andrieux d'Andres, with his hands clenched over his sobbing face, turns back, this last time, towards the city. Jean de Fiennes, with his rough beard and weak, old man's shoulders, is listening to Jean d'Aire, who, younger than he, is murmuring words that perhaps confide to him his horror of death, and entreat from the old man encouragement in renunciation. But in front of all the others the two brothers, Jacques and Pierre de Wissant, advance resolutely; and one turns back to hasten his friends, while one exhorts them, pointing with a restrained gesture towards heaven.

The entire reality of these figures is no less striking than their ideality, just as is the case in the beautiful creations of the "Primitives." These are men whose absolutely real nakedness reveals itself beneath the coarse sacks that clothe them, a nakedness not harmonised into any style, but shown in all its veracity by an artist who has chosen models suitable to his characters without any care to arrange them or to give them that pretended _beauty_ which would be merely a falsehood and an enfeeblement. These are six wretched men, shivering with cold and anguish. The scene is as close as possible to history, and the faces are real--ugly or ordinary. But an idea transfigures them. The tragedy of their sacrifice gives them a strange greatness, and they become fine because their soul is fine. We guess the gradation of their reflections: none faces his fate just like another, and the reason is that, though what they will is one, what they leave is different for each, and everything in them speaks, from their faces down to the least attitude of their limbs. Their expression is sober; a heavy silence enwraps them; we follow them with our eyes as the dwellers in Calais must have done from the heights of their walls; and they are so grouped that from every point we see them separately, presenting a distinct aspect, and yet the one base unites and uplifts them. This is a marvel of psychological composition.

Technical skill assists this composition; we find the power of the _St. John_, but more simplification. Only the essential lines attract the eye, the details are subsidiary to the whole. Admirable bits of flesh modelling are only noticed after long examination; the substance is scarcely thought of, so much is the mind held at first by the intellectual drama, and this was what Rodin desired. These six beings, side by side, are august in their sorrow, and they move us by means of their simplicity and by the absence of any theatrical gesture. We feel the bodies under the shirts, for Rodin made six complete models in the nude before he threw upon them these rags of stuff and knotted ropes. The feet are strongly attached to the earth; we guess that their limbs are heavy, because, though their will bids them walk, every step leads towards death. The impression is extraordinary and such as perhaps no sculpture ever gave before. This is a reality of all time: the epic of the sacrifice of the humble. As for the style, it recalls the Gothic sculptors by the rugged power of the moulding, the asceticism of the heads, and the strength of the knotty limbs. We are compelled to think of the Flemish "primitives," and especially of those genial Burgundian sculptors and image-makers of genius who produced the immortal figures of Philippe Pot's tomb in the Louvre. There is the same desire for expression in sculpture, which seeks beauty solely in intensity of character, and finds style in the sincere study of reality--all these things concurring towards the greater synthesis of the work's general thought. Rodin there shows himself an essentially French and northern artist, alien from all that the academies, hypnotised by the Italianism of the second Renascence, have chosen to invent as dogmas of beauty. _The Burghers of Calais_ is a work of the true French classic tradition--of the national classicality which has nothing in common with that classicality imported from Italy in 1550 by which our indigenous artists have so long been oppressed, thanks to the "École de Rome." Standing before such a creation we recognise this truth sharply--this truth which is the secret of Rodin's genius and of the enthusiasm that he aroused. Better than Rude, better than Barye, better even than Carpeaux, has he found the way to free himself, and to go back, by power of thought and mastery, to our true national lineage.

The _Burghers_ ought, according to Rodin's idea, to be placed in front of the old Hotel de Ville of Calais, facing the sea; and he wished the group to be placed on a very high pedestal, so that the figures should stand out against the open sky, or else, on the other hand, almost on the level, so that everyone could walk round them, live with them, almost elbow them. A bad site has been chosen and a pedestal of moderate height and ordinary appearance. The _Burghers_ are very fine all the same, and are certainly the most powerful piece of sculpture of the epoch. I have promised to be sober in my praises of Rodin, but I do not see why in speaking of such a work as this I should hide my convictions. Those who have seen it cannot fail to consider it, as I do, the work of a thinker and of an artist of genius.

[1] It Is curious to recollect that the very fine equestrian statue of General Lynch and the monument to President Vicunha, sent to America by Rodin, were never paid for, and that, owing to revolutions, they actually disappeared, so that these works may be considered lost. Only the spoiled rough models and some photographs remain.

[2] These _Shades_ are a symbolic representation of men who are just dead, and who are bending down with folded hands in misery and terror gazing at the hellish crowd into which they are about to fall.

[3] The final version of this group has been treated by Rodin separately, and is known by the name of _The Kiss_. The marble group is in the Museum of the Luxembourg.

[4] A statue of Eustace de St. Pierre had been asked for. Rodin sent the six effigies of burghers, and this gave rise to fresh difficulties with the authorities.

III

RODIN'S WORK FROM 1895 TO 1898--SMALL GROUPS--THE STATUE OF "BALZAC" --THE INCIDENT OF THE SOCIÉTÉ DES GENS DE LETTRES--THE "TECHNIQUE" OF THE "BALZAC"--RODIN'S IDEAS UPON MODELLING AND COMPOSITION--HIS OPINIONS ABOUT THE GREEKS, THE GOTHIC STYLE, CLASSICISM, AND MYTHOLOGICAL SUBJECTS--RODIN'S "ANTIQUE" PERIOD.

The year 1896 was occupied by the continuation of work for the Hugo monument. The _Muse of Anger_ and the _Muse of the Inna' Voice_ were brought to their full completion. In addition to these Rodin made a very fine head of _Minerva,_ in marble, with a silver helmet; a statue of a _Conqueror_, holding a statue of _Victory;_ and two groups--_The Poet and the Life of Contemplation_ (for M. Fenaille, the faithful admirer, who was, at a later date, to publish his sketches) and _The Eternal Idol,_ a marvel of inspiration. A young naked woman is in a half-sitting posture, her head bent, her gaze lost in a dream. A man kneeling before her, his arms behind him and his desire restrained, puts his head gently forward and kisses the idol beneath the left breast over the heart, with mute fervour, and with a mystic, amorous concentration of his whole being. Rarely does sculpture allow of so much pulsating life and so much psychological emotion united to plastic perfection and originality of arrangement.

From 1897 date the marble group of the _Women Bathing,_ the last studies for the _Balzac,_ and the studies for the _Monument to President Sarmiento_, a statue upon a pedestal in high-relief. Small groups in marble and in bronze are a form of which Rodin is fond. He has been led to devote himself largely to them on account of _The Gate of Hell,_ the dimensions of which necessitated small figures. Moreover, Rodin reserves this form of art for certain categories of works that have a character of passion and intimacy. It should be possible to pass easily round them, to lean over them, almost to touch them and move them about; one should be able to live with them, as one cannot do with large figures meant to be looked at from below. The happy form of the small sculptured block, which the eighteenth century had employed to so much advantage, allows this constant communion of the spectator and the work of art. Rodin, who executes his bigger figures in so large a style, reserves for these a style that is minute but never mannered. The outlines remain large, so much so, indeed, that the work would always bear an enlarged scale; but the modelling is wrought with an almost caressing touch and with a strange love of form. Here the rough sculptor, so Gothic in his austerity, fingers the marble with the care and the delicacy of a lover; he reveals himself as a fervent adorer of smooth, womanly flesh; he plays with the subtlest variations of light upon the inflexion of marble surfaces, and the man who is reproached with caring for nothing but "character" and with despising "beauty" creates arms, necks, knees, and bosoms of exquisite perfection. His favourite type of woman is the long, delicately made woman, with a small bust, largely curved hips, and a face full of will, the nervous, feline, voluptuous woman, of head rather than of heart, such as Baudelaire and Rops have imagined. The characteristic feature of Rodin's small groups is the seeking after new combinations of movement. I have said already that his essential idea was the production of _dynamic_ art; that is to say that, finding himself face to face with an academic school that had grown inert owing to its care for pseudo-harmony, he had determined to draw sculpture out of this blind alley and to show, before all things, how the expression of movement might lead to an entirely new conception of decorative outline. From this endeavour arose those little groups of lovers in which the attitudes are so infinitely varied, those curious presentments in which the arms and legs are placed as freely as in a painting. But the painting has the help of shadow, of backgrounds, and of values, which allow the light to be concentrated on a single point and the rest to be blurred. Rodin has attempted so to compose his most audacious movements that, in walking round, a new aspect of them is constantly presented, whereas ordinary sculpture, meant to be seen from a single point, does not allow the spectator to pass behind it. This difficulty and this main idea have led Rodin to treat modelling and composition in a way upon which I shall dwell more fully later on, and to invent a style of statuary which borrows some of the laws of painting.

These thoughts had long been ripening in Rodin when at last he resolved to apply them to his _Balzac_, which was really not his first attempt in this direction, but the first that was seen in public. When this statue appeared in the Salon of 1898, it created such a commotion that for a week the public forgot, over it, the events of that vast serial story, the Dreyfus affair. The clamour was extraordinary; some people raged at what they considered a scandalous practical joke, others warmly defended the new work. The Société des Gens de Lettres, already irritated by Rodin's delays in finishing the statue, declared plainly that it refused the _Balzac_, a decision which led to the resignation of the committee. Rodin might have brought an action and won it, for, strictly speaking, his agreement required the society to accept the work such as he delivered it. He preferred to withdraw his work without claiming its price or discussing the matter. Once again his art encountered violent opposition from the official camp--but to struggle is repugnant to his temper. Inflexible in his will as a producer, he is timid and proud in his attitude towards contradictions. Opportunity, moreover, offered him a roguish and witty revenge. Falguière was commissioned to make a _Balzac._ This put Falguière in a very awkward position; after all the fuss made about Rodin's statue, he must needs produce something finer, or at the very least equally interesting. He was certain of a bad reception at the hands of Rodin's admirers and he was bound to please the others. Falguière only succeeded in producing a mediocre work. The _Balzac_ that may be seen at the present time in the Avenue de Friedland is nothing but a half-hearted imitation of Rodin's; it is Rodin's _Balzac_ seated, and without character or interest. This work appeared in 1900, at a time when opinion was already beginning to recognise the injustice done to Rodin, and it pleased nobody. Then Rodin, to show that the incident had in no way altered his friendly relations with Falguière,[1] made an admirable bust of his fellow-worker, which was as fine as the second _Balzac_ was poor, and thus gave to Falguière and to the public, also, a silent and ironical lesson.

What, then, was this _Balzac_ which was so much detested, and about which the most abusive and extraordinary things were written? Merely the image of the great writer, draped in a dressing-gown, with empty, hanging sleeves; he has risen in the night and is walking up and down, disturbed and sleepless, pursuing an idea that has suddenly presented itself. He is bent forward, his head thrown back, the eyes deep-set, and the mouth contracted in a smile of challenge. The powerful neck--the neck indeed of a bull--emerges from the open wrapper. Rodin made use of various daguerreotypes, and especially of a celebrated portrait of Balzac, that shows him in shirt-sleeves with one brace, and folded arms. The enormous proportions of the head, the amazing strength of the thorax, the monstrous and leonine character of the face are all exact. "His was the countenance of an element," said Lamartine of Balzac, "with a torso that was joined to the head by an enormous neck, short legs, and short arms." These words absolutely justify the statue. Rodin had made studies for it in the nude (there are some fine clay models of the subject in his studio), then he clothed it with a gown (or to be more exact, with a bath-wrap, for that is what Balzac's famous monk's robe was), and proceeded to simplify the folds until he had left only the two or three essential ones. The result thus obtained, with the disproportion of body and legs, led Rodin to hide the short, ugly, useless arms under the drapery, and the figure thus assumed pretty much the appearance of a mummy, of a sort of monolith, from which nothing stood out but the one point of interest, the savage and magnificent animality of the head, with its darkened gaze and the bitterly curved mouth, of which Rodin had made a separate small study in bronze. A great heave of the shoulders throws the body slightly backward, causing it to rest upon one leg, which is apparently bent, while the other is moved forward to walk.