Part 6

Various works have been produced by Rodin since the _Balzac,_ in addition to the _Monument of President Sarmiento,_ which shows an admirable bas-relief of a radiant Apollo. These works are nearly all in marble, and small. It is almost impossible to describe and classify them; a much larger book would be required, and my main purpose here has been to give a general idea of Rodin's art and an explanation of principles. I have spoken about some of his poems of the flesh, especially that _Eternal Idol_, which will be the glory of thought in modern sculpture. Rodin's recent works in marble have the same inspiration. Some demand special notice: _The Hand of God,_ a gigantic hand, between the fingers of which, and amid a handful of clay, two beings are tenderly embracing; _Icarus,_ falling from the sky to be crushed on the earth amid his whirling wings; several groups of lovers, entwined, and breathing immeasurable tenderness, the most celebrated of which is _Spring_ or _Love and Psyche._ Another _Psyche,_ alone, is discovering Love asleep, with extraordinary restrained emotion; and there are several attempts at _Poets and Muses,_ embracing or consoling one another, as well as a splendid sketch of the _Magdalen wiping Christ's Body with her Hair._ Rodin has thus sometimes touched religious subjects, but with an undogmatic symbolism, philosophic and wide. We may also enumerate another version in marble of the _Nereids_ of the Hugo monument, a winged _Inspiration_ coming to breathe upon the sleeping poet, and holding back the tips of her wings with one hand lest she should make a sound in closing them; a faun drawing towards him a nymph, who struggles in silent, fierce resistance; two high-reliefs of _Summer_ and _Autumn_ in stone; tall women with children, intended for the town of Evian, where Baron Vitta is accumulating treasures of modern art; _Pygmalion_ beholding his statue come to life, who, as soon as she feels herself live, turns from him with a surprising movement of coquetry and aversion. Such works as these cannot be described in words. In them Rodin has excelled to an unparalleled degree in rendering the profoundest psychological complexities, refined intentions, and the hesitations of feeling. I will further note a sketch of _Sappho_, seated at rest, with her arms leaning upon two little naked women, which is a work inspired equally by the Greeks and by the eighteenth century; it bears witness to the artist's wish of avoiding the massive, and making as many holes as possible within the general block, so as to give lightness and to allow a circulation of light, as the Greeks did in works that were meant to stand against a background of sea or of sky. Many studies of men and women crouching, or squatting, in curious attitudes, recall the art of the Japanese bronzes, which Rodin immensely admires. We must further note some groups of _Women Damned,_ in which Rodin's art attains the highest point of voluptuous tension, audacious suggestiveness, and tragic eagerness of the flesh aspiring to impossible delight. This whole world of figures is ruled by the same lyrical and poetic imagination, the same symbolism incarnated in impeccable forms. Everywhere we find the same nervous art, agitating, sad, and ardent in its voluptuous character, expressing the insatiability of human souls; the aspiration of a troubled time towards an ideality which would deliver it from the solicitations of pessimism; the hope of escape by the way of desire; and love sought for in the over-excitement of neurosis. Rodin, gloomy psychologist of passion, understands the disease of the age, and at the same time pities it; a true thinker, he extracts its mournful beauty without ceasing to retain faith, admiration, and affection for the human creature. Bending over life and over his work, he is himself his own _Thinker_, attentive and reverent before an unknown and terrible divinity. Never did any other sculptor attempt to vivify his art with such intellectual superiority and by such meditations, and Rodin is at once the most realistic and most metaphysical of poets in stone and bronze.

Two or three works of more important dimensions stand out from his recent productions; besides a nude female torso (in bronze) of startling truthfulness, and two plaster studies that astonished at the Salons, and besides _The Christian Martyr_, so masterly in its modelling, Rodin has continued to work at his _Ugolino,_ taken out of _The Gate of Hell_, and has put the finishing touch to two plans. One of these is the _Monument to Labour_, a grand conception, which one may dream of seeing carried out and rising up in some square of busy Paris, but which want of money will prevent from ever being realised. It is a column upon a vast rectangular base, with a crypt in it. Two colossal figures of _Night_ and _Day_ would stand at the entrance. In the crypt would be shown, in bas-relief, different subterranean works--mining, etc. Around the column would run a covered spiral staircase, and upon the column itself would be figured in bas-reliefs all the various manifestations of labour, so that as one ascended the stairs all the divers phases of human genius could be successively studied. On the top would hover the _Benedictions_, two--winged spirits, descended from heaven, which are already executed in marble on a small scale, and are among Rodin's finest conceptions. This colossal project was conceived as long ago as 1897. The rough model is in the studio at Meudon-Val-Fleury.

The monument to Puvis de Chavannes was entrusted to his friend Rodin, and is already finished. Rodin conceived it in an original and charming way. Instead of making the customary statue, he considered the purely Greek quality of Puvis' genius and chose to pay homage to him in a form reproduced from the antique. The bust of the great painter is placed on a plain table, as the ancients placed those of their dead upon little domestic altars. A fine tree loaded with fruit bends over and shades the head. Leaning on the table behind the bust is a beautiful naked youth, who sits dreaming in a well-chosen supple attitude. The whole design is intimate, gentle, and pure. Placed on the ground in a garden this votive monument would show how much delicacy and caressing lightness sometimes lies in Rodin's sombre and pathetic thoughts.

Another important group is that of _Orpheus and Eurydice._ Orpheus has fallen on one knee and is lifting his great lyre towards the gods whom he has just implored. Above him, almost on his back, suspended in a way that would appear to contradict the laws of equilibrium and the material conditions of sculpture, soars Eurydice, compassionate and almost vaporous, truly an immaterial shade, with a smile of despair. I regret that the unfinished condition of this model does not allow me to publish a photograph of it, for nothing would give a clearer impression of Rodin's originality in the matter of contour and in the mutual relation of figures. The extreme freedom of his attitudes and his caprices of balance are, indeed, the newest features that he has brought into his art and are not to be found in anyone else in any country or time. In these is his true signature, and by them his work might be recognised among a hundred statues of all periods. As to the expressive beauty of the faces and bodies, that is supreme. No one has better comprehended than Rodin all that can be rendered by the naked human body and all the intellectual significations that it can hide. The nude is to Rodin a whole language.

In his latest spiritualised works there is something Correggio-like in the vibration of light upon the softened forms and amplified surfaces. They suggest the _Antiope,_ at once soft and muscular, and Rodin often speaks of "morbidezza" as a quality which he no longer distrusts, whereas he formerly banished it from his ascetic, sinewy, and dry figures. He gives his women the pulpy flesh of fruits. The lines of landscape seem to him to correspond to the planes of the body; he lately said to me that since he has lived at Meudon, opposite the flowing Seine, the wooded hills and the fields, he has found useful resemblances between the modelling of the body and that of a horizon. I have even once suggested to him the title of "The Hill" for the body of a young man reclining, the outline of which did in truth resemble the undulations of a hill, and he retained the name and the analogy, for he delights in everything that binds the human being to the earth, and, like a true metaphysician, conceives of nothing isolated or distinct in nature.

I come now to Rodin's drawings, drawings which were not made to be shown, but which, having nevertheless become known, have surprised and puzzled people. Rodin's drawings, like some other drawings by sculptors, are not themselves works of art; they are thoughts noted down, and are not comprehensible unless they are seen with the statues of which they indicate the first idea, or some variation.

Rodin has published some of his sketches; and has produced some dry-points (in particular the _Ronde_,[1] _Antonin Proust_, the three portraits of Henry Becque, full face and two profiles upon the same sheet, and two heads of Hugo), some drawings for books by M. Mirbeau and M. Bergerat, and a complete set of illustrations of the _Fleurs du Mal,_ in the form of marginal drawings for a unique copy belonging to M. Gallimard. Many drawings in black or colour have been published (by the clever lithographer Clot), and M. Fenaille has superintended an admirable _edition de luxe_ of 142 drawings by Rodin.[2] Notwithstanding this partial publicity, these works must be considered as _standing apart;_ and to consider them by themselves would actually be to injure Rodin with the public at large, since they form an integral part of his statues. For this reason I have not chosen to reproduce any of them here, studies so purely professional not seeming to fall within the scope of a work intended to give a general idea of an artist's work.

Having said so much, I wish to dwell upon the great beauty of these drawings--a special and terrible beauty. Many deal with Dante. Rodin did some painting under Lecoq de Boisbaudron, landscapes, a portrait of his father, and sketches after Rubens; but there has never been any danger of painting intruding upon his vocation, and his sketches rapidly became nothing but notes for sculpture. The objective reality of his Dantesque figures is vague, if their subjective reality is intense. Rodin, anxious to note down his impressions, and not to _illustrate_, made his sketches into a sort of passionate writing, only devoting himself to the scheme and to the contrasts of black and white, and neglecting every detail. In these violent washes, these pencillings and pen-scribbles, the spectator who is not forewarned sees nothing, but the lover of art, who knows beforehand what to seek, follows the creative thought. Nothing can be less like what is generally known as "a drawing." After the regular drawings, the "painter's drawings" of his first period, which have but a restricted interest, and which are no longer known, those of his second manner are confusions of light and shadow, and show fantastically. I will quote at this point a passage from an essay by M. Clément Jasmin, a discerning critic, whose noisy rivals do not give him his due place, and who has described these works excellently.

"These sketches are altogether the work of a sculptor, even in their colour, which seems to have sunk into plaster or clay, and especially in the firmness of their modelling, which is imparted by shaded touches of body-colour, on grey paper, or rendered by spaces left white. These blanks, these white spaces, are the extreme point of the modelling, the 'high light' of some projection, which lower down is wrapped in half-tints that carry the eye to the shadows of the inflections or the hollows. There is a constant relation between the contour and the interior modelling. A thrill is communicated by the fantastic lighting of some sketches. Rodin adds further strength to this dramatic distribution of lights and shadows by one or two tones that accentuate the impression or fix a plan. Often his ink will become blue or yellow, (water-colours, sepia, or coloured inks being employed), in order to settle a value or intensify a feeling. Such is the case in the Fenaille publication, with the gloomy red in the face of the Ugolino, of the Dantesque Mahomet, whose entrails are hanging out, and of some other figures dashed in, in black, on a violet background. One plainly feels the material in which the work, of which the sketch is the first idea, will be executed. It is always a sculptor who is at work, even when he exchanges the chisel for the pen or the brush."

Painters would scorn these drawings. They commonly believe that sculptors cannot express upon a plane surface the mass and movement of a body. In reality a painter's sketch and a sculptor's sketch differ in intention and execution. Rodin's are translations of movements, in no way decorative and not attempting to express either modelling or detail, but, if we may say so, the abstract geometry, the thought that commands the movement. The use of coloured inks, which are solely meant to modify certain values that black or white would not express to Rodin's mind, has given rise to mistakes. These colours are not there to express real tints, as is the case in ordinary drawings thus touched up; inaccurate things have been said about these colourings, and about the fantastic and almost Japanese appearance of some of the plates. Rodin is certainly not thinking of prints in colour. He makes these notes instinctively, and displays not so much a deliberate thought as a natural faculty of transcription.

In his early drawings Rodin _refers to_--for I must insist upon the point that the drawings do not _represent_ things--many of Dante's persons and many fanciful animals, and later, to his statues. Now he does not draw at all from literary impressions, but solely from the living model. He uses ordinary cheap paper, a pencil or a pen; he makes his model take some transitory, absolutely free position, often in the rest between two sittings, and rapidly draws contour without taking his eyes from the model and without looking at his sketch. Sometimes the stroke will fall upon emptiness, the sheet of paper will be too small, a head or a limb will fail to find its place. Naturally this instantaneous sketch will be deformed in the most unexpected way; the proportions are false, but the scheme of the contour and the modelling of each piece are true. Often the hurrying pencil will miss the curve of a breast or a leg. Then the artist will return to that point with hasty, intermingled, impatient strokes that play around the true line. His only concern is to fix the first view, the absolutely living impression. Afterwards, in tracing his sketch, he rectifies, but his chief aim is to amplify the impression of the life, taken spontaneously, according to his principle of enlarging the form, in order to place it better in the atmosphere (about in the proportion of 5/4 instead of 4/4). Then he connects the contours and further enlarges the modelling, filling the outline with a wash of burnt-sienna, which gives the general value, or sometimes with blue or red water-colour. Rodin likes this practice in catching movements, and he has in his studio hundreds of drawings of this kind that differ from his early ones. Those aimed at the imaginative transcription of tragic and literary elements under strange illuminations, and were almost like the drawings of Odilon Redon; the later ones are merely graphic notes of movements, and are incapable of having any direct aim or meaning.

I must add a few words upon a delicate point of which I should not have spoken if others had not spoken mistakenly upon the subject. Rodin's drawings, especially those of the present time, have shocked some people who have seen them by their licentious character. Why should we assume embarrassment in explaining this? In all Rodin's work there is a profound and violent sense of the voluptuous, and the stern painter of the vices and damnations of hell does not need to think of prudery. The elevation and dramatic character of his conceptions clothe the most daring attitudes with the severe chastity of the beautiful. In his sketches, made for himself alone, and in the privacy of his studio, Rodin no more fears erotic positions than did Hokusai. Beneath the original animality he perceives nature; and feminine sexuality, its movements, and impulses interest him, because therein woman is psychologically revealed. Everything, in physical desire, that exalts, maddens, contorts, and fevers the human body is, for the sculptor, the object of an intensely interested study that he does not communicate to the general public; nor is he the only one among the great artists of form whom the erotic has interested from this point of view. Only mediocre minds and minds capable of low intentions see anything low in the movements of life. Rodin's studies from the model, naked and free, without spectators, in the serious presence of work, never sully his grand and melancholy inspiration; and his daring art is assuredly that which most leads away the beholder from erotic ideas, because it notes in every human being the melancholy of the insatiable, and makes the pleasure of the senses a suffering of the flesh and the spirit. By this point he touches the profound morality of art, and his consciousness is free from any equivocation. The recent drawings in which he catches the animal attitudes of the model are thus no more questionable, from the delicate point of view of which I am speaking, than anatomical plates, or the sad immodesties of a post-mortem examination. He adds to them the power of expressing passion with which he is endowed, but since he only shows these drawings to friends and artists in whom nudity does not arouse silly thoughts, this concerns no one else. A comparison cannot even be ventured between these drawings and the masterly etchings of Rops, which are deliberate illustrations of licentious subjects, relieved only by beauty of execution, and which should only be shown with express reservations. Rodin admires certain bronzes in the secret museum at Naples, and certain Japanese prints, because in these, too, art has done its work by expressing a secret and essential spring of the nervous and psychological life of humanity; a fierce and serious subject which only fools consider laughable or indecent, because their minds approach it with indecorum and ridicule. But I do not know that Rodin ever even yielded to the fancy of modelling one of these subjects for himself, as Rubens and many others did not forbid themselves to do. It is time, therefore, to have done with this question in regard to the great French sculptor. I do not know for whom he intends these recent drawings, a whole framed collection of which occupies one of the storerooms of his country house. Perhaps he will have them destroyed; in any case, they are but studies of movements and masses, and in no way direct representations of life.

Rodin's drawings are "rough drafts" to be compared with those of a writer. Some are very impressive, and all constitute precious evidence of his psychological preoccupations and of his desire for simplification. But they remain on the margin of his work, and neither the public nor the critics have those rights over them that belong to biographers and friends. That is a point to be plainly specified, and I desire to repeat that that is the reason this book contains none of them.

[1] This word may mean either a certain sort of dance, or the "round" of a patrol.--TRANS.

[2] Album of 142 sketches, reproduced in heliogravure by M. Manzi and published by Goupil, 1897. These sketches in wash or colour have been selected according to the advice of M. Fenaille, their owner, who lent them, from the most imaginative of Rodin's drawings in his second manner.

V.

RODIN'S PRIVATE LIFE--HIS PERSON, STUDIO, AND HOME--HIS INFLUENCE; SCULPTORS INSPIRED BY HIS IDEAS--RODIN'S PLACE IN THE FRENCH SCHOOL--HIS PRESENT POSITION IN RESPECT TO ACADEMIC SCULPTURE

Auguste Rodin is in person a man of middle height, with an enormous head upon a massive torso. At first sight one sees nothing of him but this leonine bust, the head with its strong nose, flowing grey beard, and small, keen, light-coloured eyes, slightly veiled by short sight and by a gentle irony. The impression of power is accentuated by the rolling gait, the rocky aspect of the troubled brow under the rough brush of hair, the bony thickness of the aquiline nose and the ample curls of beard. But the first impression is partly contradicted by the reticent line of the mouth, the quick look, penetrating, simple, and arch, (one of the most composite glances I have ever seen), and especially by the voice, which is hollow, not easily modulated, with deep inflections and sudden returns to a dental pronunciation, and of which the meaning and intention are further modified by certain very expressive tossings of the head. He appears simple, precise, reserved, courteous, and cordial, without liveliness. Little by little his shyness gives place to a calm and remarkable tone of authority. He is neither emphatic nor awkward, and would seem rather dispirited than inspired. An immense energy breathes in his sober and measured gestures. The slowness and apparent embarrassment of his speech and the pauses in his conversation give especial significance to what he says; moreover, Rodin has acquired of late years a genuine case as a talker and even as a writer, which previously he did not possess. I was intimately acquainted with Stéphane Mallarmé, who, measured by Rodin, was incomparably eloquent, and I often associate these two men in my thoughts. The voices were alike, and Rodin, too, with his improvised phrases, has the same veiled circumspect way of speech, hitting suddenly upon words that illuminate the idea.

Rodin, in speaking of any work of his, has a way of explaining it that is very elliptical, but very clear, and which has caused some brilliant chatterers to say, because he did not offer a prolix commentary, that he did not know what he had done. In reality he utters the essential, and his gesture, which seems to model his thought in space, completes his words. He looks lovingly on his creations, and sometimes seems to meditate in astonishment at the idea of having created them; he speaks of them as though they existed apart from himself.