Part 7

Gradually, beneath Rodin's essential simplicity, one discovers features that were at first hidden; he is ironical, sensuous, nervous, proud. He contains as possibilities all the passions that he expresses with so vibrating a magnificence, and one begins to perceive the secret links between this calm, almost cheerful man and the art that he reveals. At certain moments his clear and rather vague eyes become full of phosphorescent points, the face grows sardonic and almost faunlike; at others it saddens and discloses a sickness for infinity. This man is the comrade of his dumb white creatures; he loves them, follows their abstract life, has moral obligations towards them. Fundamentally the one thing with which Rodin is really concerned is the life of permanent forms. Of late celebrity, age, and experience have disposed him to become an adviser, a master, and he has begun to talk aesthetics. But his ideas and opinions are restricted. He perceives human beings only very summarily, his cordiality is a way of fulfilling his social duties hastily. He has, if I may venture the expression, very fine moral antennae, and they serve to recognise the persons whom he will like. Very capable of friendship, Rodin reduces friendship to tacit agreements upon the essential subjects of thought, and it is only if one meets him upon one of these points that one takes a place in his remembrance or his liking. He does not put his faith in individuals, but in general ideas. He loves nothing but his work, and endures everything else with civil boredom. He has a horror of debates and disturbances. I have never heard him speak ill of bad artists; he neglects, but does not criticise. He has a silent humour which leads him to make busts of official and mediocre sculptors, with an amusing good grace. Uncompromising in everything that touches his art, Rodin has throughout his whole career endured severe struggles and grave injustices, and, too proud to dispute, has never shown his secret revolts. At the time when the _Balzac_ was refused all Rodin's friends said to him: "Resist, force your work upon them; you ought, for the work's sake, and a court would surely decide for you, for your agreement is definitely in your favour." He listened and thanked them, always good-tempered, and then withdrew his statue without saying anything.

It is not weakness, for Rodin has had an excessively hard life and is strong and patient; it is dignity of the inner life and profound indifference for the life about him. Rodin is a high dignitary of the Legion of Honour, a president of the judges of sculpture of an important society of artists (the Société Nationale), he is honoured all over Europe, has been received in England as a genius, and has succeeded Whistler as the head of a chosen band of artists; but he remains the man that he was when he was unknown and poor in his solitude at Brussels.

He likes few things, but likes those thoroughly. He reads little, but what he reads strikes home to him as to no one else; Baudelaire and Rousseau, in whom he delights, are instances. He is passionately fond of music, especially of Gluck, but seldom speaks of it. He simplifies everything, sees only the main lines in morality as in art, lives by two or three principles, and has an aversion for everything that is not essential.

When one knows Rodin well one ceases to be able to separate him from his work. He can no longer think otherwise than symbolically by slow deposits of accumulated sensation which work on in the deep strata of his consciousness and suddenly blossom and take a name. His statues are states of the soul. He is himself a representative being, surprised at his own immanence, and his intelligence is outdone by his instinct. That is how it comes about that he does not always know how to name the beings that he has discovered, as we discover, by means of pain, corners of our consciousness that we had not suspected. In the same way that Rodin seems to break away the fragments of a block from around an already existing statue hidden in it, he is himself a sort of rock concealing shapes within it and embracing in its secret recesses immense crystallised arborescences. With a simple enough personal psychology he expresses infinite shades and inflexions of emotion. His thought is like the monad of Leibnitz; it seems, when one sees the man, to have no window to the outer world.

Rodin's opinions upon social life are vague. He contents himself with repeating that work lovingly done is the secret of all order and all happiness. To love life and natural forms, and to attempt nothing disobedient to Nature or her aims, that is his whole morality.

He sees very few people and visits nobody. He would baffle visitors accustomed to elegant, literary, well-informed, brilliant artists. His studio in the Rue de l'Université, at the end of an old yard encumbered by blocks of marble and shaded by aged chestnut trees, is like the work-place of a poor beginner. Neither a carpet nor an ornament is to be seen; the stone floor, the bare walls, a few rush chairs, some modelling stands, some cloths, a shabby deal table loaded with papers, sketches piled up on shelves, blouses hanging on nails, a cast-iron stove--these and nothing more are found by the many foreign admirers who come to see Rodin, and whom he receives with invariable amiability amid his assistants at work upon the Hugo monument or upon some smaller piece of marble.

Setting aside his journeys to London and Prague and his travels in Germany and Italy, Rodin leads an extremely retired life in Paris, and is rarely to be met. He invariably lunches at his own house at Meudon, then goes to the Rue de L'Université to work, and goes home again to dinner. Formerly, before he had his house at Meudon, he used to lunch at a _café_ in the Place de L'Alma, where he was to be seen for twenty years, and to which people used to go to see him, rather as people go to see Ibsen in Christiania. The house, of a sixteenth-century style, that Rodin has inhabited at Meudon since 1900, is situated amid vineyards, and stands alone at the end of a sort of cliff, overlooking all Paris, the Seine, and the Bois de Boulogne, and facing the wooded heights of Saint Cloud and Bellevue. The site is open and fine; Rodin enjoys immense expanses of sky, sunsets, storms, and moonlight nights that delight him. The house is spacious, light, furnished with extreme simplicity, and adorned by a few pictures, the works of friends (in particular his portraits by Sargent and Legros). Rodin has added to it the pavilion in iron and glass, in which he exhibited all his work, at the Rond-point de l'Alma, in the exhibition of 1900. This pavilion, rebuilt and full of brilliant sunlight, contains all the artist's statuary. There are also several small studios, in which Rodin has his marble rough-hewn, keeps the casts of his statues or accumulates the collections of bronzes, marbles, antique or Gothic, and fragments which he is never tired of finding out and buying. In this place, which, after a life of difficulties and worries, Rodin has been able to purchase, he leads a life that fully suits his tastes, among beautiful trees and flowers, with a majestic landscape before him. It is touching to see the man, here, amid the enormous mass of his work, a whole world of statues, with which he lives and which sums up all his labours and all his existence. A photograph which I am able to add to the illustrations of this volume will give a partial idea of that surprising and imposing cohort of figures in clay, marble, and bronze--that impassioned or tragic throng. Rodin receives very few visitors at Meudon--hardly any but old friends, and he spends his mornings in his garden or in his light and cheerful studio drawing or superintending his workmen. It is chiefly at Meudon that he prepares his rough drafts, the main lines of his compositions; and in order to see an effect he will often hastily put together with clay some of the plaster limbs that he keeps in a number of glass cases--quite an anatomical museum in fact, filling a whole storey, and containing hundreds of pieces and of attitudes piled together.

Rodin appears to stand alone in his own time; first, by his genius; and secondly, by the special character of his artistic conception. This solitude, however, is only apparent. Rodin's ideas, as opposed to the teaching of the "École," form a body of logical principles which are slowly attracting the adhesion of young artists. The long struggle of impressionism against academism has now entered upon its last phase: the return to the French tradition, to national affiliation in opposition to the Roman neo-classicism. That idea, which is the programme of all independent and interesting critical intelligence in our country, finds in Rodin its perfect demonstration, and the only one afforded by contemporary sculpture. Until now Rodin has preached only by example, and we know how slow the critics and the public are in extracting from a work the ideas that it contains. But the extraction is now begun, and Rodin himself speaks with undisputed authority. Since the exhibition of 1900 his moral position stands ten times higher. Youth greets him as a chieftain and his detractors are silent. While the synthetic and symbolic mind of Rodin arouses the enthusiasm and inspires the thoughts of writers, the theory of the amplification of the modelling is making its way in the studios of sculptors. "Rodin has opened a large window in the pale house of contemporary sculpture," declares Pierre Roche, the sculptor; "out of the timid and much impaired craft that was before his day he has shown that a bold art full of hope can be made." This opinion of one of the most delicate artists of our generation is precisely that of many independent sculptors. Among these we must quote Emile Bourdelle, Rodin's pupil and friend, an impassioned, vibrating, and generous artist, whose works are among those first looked for in each Salon. Others are the two brothers Gaston and Lucien Schnegg, the latter of whom exhibited in the Salon of 1904 so beautiful a head of Aphrodite, almost worthy in the mysterious and vaporous beauty of its planes, of the ancients, and of Rodin; Jules Desbois, of the first rank in technical skill and of a violently original temperament; Alexandre Charpentier, a former collaborator of Rodin's, whose success in applied art has not turned him aside from his expressive and vigorous work in statuary; Mlle. Camille Claudel, Rodin's pupil, who is the first woman sculptor of existing-art in France, and whose name has appeared upon admirable works; and finally, Pierre Roche, although his supple and decorative fancy denies itself the expression of the tragic. The Swiss sculptor Niederhausern-Rodo, George Minne, the sculptor of Ghent, who has a powerful creative genius, not understood, and the Italian sculptor Rosso, are also partisans of Rodin's art, and so is the Englishman Bartlett. In another direction it is very interesting to note the curious reciprocal influence of Auguste Rodin and Eugène Carrière, who are united by friendship and by the same aesthetic creed. Eugène Carrière, the most profound painter of the inner life existing in the French school of to-day, has great analogies with Rodin, both as a man and as an artist. He, too, reduces his art to essentials, to the main lines and the deliberate amplification of surfaces. Thus his figures, bathed in shadow, are akin to Rodin's statues, while the latter, bathed with dewy light, seem to be pictures by Carrière. The painter becomes massive and powerful, the sculptor becomes vaporous. Rodin seeks the bland, half-shadows of Correggio, and Carrière desires that his figures should have the powerful relief of bronze. The painter sacrifices colour to the sole study of values, and by his black-and-white comes back to sculpture. Very curious is this point of junction between two great artists. Rodin is beginning to explain himself with the pen; and Eugène Carrière has, for some years past, been writing--too rarely--passages upon art of which the style is admirable and the concentration of thought astonishing, passages which recall Mallarmé and Baudelaire, and leave far behind the commonplaces of journalistic criticism. Rodin and Carrière have their school, their circle of chosen admirers, and their double influence may soon be the most decisive, if not the most brilliant and the noisiest, in French art of to-day.

NUDE FIGURE (PHOTOGRAPHED IN THE OPEN AIR AT TWILIGHT IN THE GARDEN AT MEUDON)

The prevailing note of opinion about Rodin among his friends and his detractors is that he is like no one else, and that no statue can, in a manner, be looked at beside his, so individual is the conception from which they spring. By the mere fact that they exist, they compel us to choose between them and the others. Their silhouettes, their planes, the quality of their shadows, and their lights, make them technically works apart. If such a man understands sculpture thus, either he is right, against everybody, or he is totally mistaken; we cannot like him and also approve of ordinary statuary. His psychological and tragic genius conquers the admiration even of those who oppose his material execution. Rodin does not set himself up as a chief, nor recognise followers; yet he is a chief by his very work.

He is the greatest living French artist, and one of the most complex and powerful movers of thought in modern art. He does not found a school, but he influences the soul of a generation. He remains alone, not susceptible of imitation; but if he did not exist sculpture would be deprived of its greatest regenerator.[1] By inscribing passions in symbols, he touches the sensibilities of all, and is a master to poets as much as to sculptors, because his subjects are moral, affecting, never commanded by an anecdote, bathed in the universally lyric. Attempts have been made to blame him because of the admiration of writers; it has been said, with an inflexion of scorn (especially in the circles of his fellow-artists), "he is a _littéraire_." An injustice easily committed at a time when the intellect of painters and sculptors seems to blush at itself, and when they make it a sort of false merit to show that their eye and hand are separate from their brain. Rodin's splendid technical power annuls the reproach and retains the praise. Resting firmly upon nature, his symbols may rise high. Rodin delights poets because he makes the infinite emanate from the most finite of arts.

Everything has been patiently meditated by him. He dares, but is never overbold; his balance and his taste are those of a classic, despite the uncomprehending astonishment of the academic sculptors, hypnotised by the sophistry of _finish_ and _elegance_, and confusing the _exact_ with the _true._ There is a synthesized form, that corresponds to reality synthesized in symbols, a _second truth;_ and that proportion is observed by very few artists. Most of them, contenting themselves with an immediate, momentary, anecdotic truth, translate it by picturesque observation, or by minutely detailed copying. This attempt of a sterile cleverness to transcribe the instantaneous is the very contrary of art, the first character of which is to display the laws of vital permanence underlying fugitive aspects. Herein lies the reason why sculptors become uneasy over Rodin, while writers, more familiar with general ideas, become enthusiastic. The impressionist crisis--the study, that is to say, of instantaneous lights and actions--hardly got over, he brings in this _second truth,_ the transcription of general and permanent feelings into a form that speaks as much to the mind as to the senses. Such a man dominates impressionism as much as he does academism.

A whole order of curious and fundamental relations between nervous sensibility and thought has arisen out of his work. Rodin's personality is specially representative in the line of French sculptors. He goes back, as I have said, to the Egyptians and the Greeks in the matter of technical ideas. In his tragic feeling he proceeds directly from the Gothic artists. It is from them that he descends, and especially from the sculptors of the French Renascence, in particular Germain Pilon; and he blends his Greek remembrances, passed through an Italian influence, with a conception altogether national, vigorous, and decorative. Rodin's actual part is to take up sculpture exactly at the moment of the French evolution.[2] Since that time we have had some great masters; native genius has been triumphantly upheld, in opposition to the false school that came from the Alps, by Coysevox, Houdon, Puget, Pajou, Pigalle, Clodion, Falconet, Couston, Rude, Carpeaux, and Barye, a line of splendid inventors of shapes, all of whom, in contradistinction to the official school, have represented the inmost qualities of their race. All these men Rodin emulates by the importance of his work; perhaps the future may regard him as the magnificent outcome of their efforts carried on through three centuries. In this succession of artists, Puget, Rude, and Barye are those with whom his technical relations are closest.[3] But he has been less decorative than Puget and less hampered by the themes imposed upon him; he has gone further than the great Rude in the expression of inward emotion, and he surpasses even Barye in power of modelling and boldness of silhouette. He has created a world which is fully his own, a feeling and a pathos not to be found elsewhere, which are the very soul of his time.

Rodin, then, can be set only beside Puget and Rude. Like Puget, he is overflowing with vitality and with passionate frenzy; he worships power and heroic beings; but his are sad, and nearer to Gothic asceticism and to the nervous derangement of Baudelaire than to the resplendent pomp of the seventeenth century, into which Puget transposed his heroes of Rome and of Corneille. Like Rude, he is attracted by deep things, by soul tragedies; but he is more abstract than the creator of the _Napoleon Awakening to Immortality_, the _Joan of Arc,_ or the _Marseillaise._ Rodin is more general, more synthetic; he turns his mind to permanent symbols, outside of ages and races. Taking up, as if in challenge, the mythological subjects that the "École" had most spoiled, he has shown how a great mind can renew all things and impress upon them the magic of its vision. He is the most symbolic of our men of genius; and if the modelling of the Greeks, Gothic austerity, the strength of Puget and of Rude, have helped Rodin to make up his personality, the fusion of these elements and the addition of a personal imagination and an extraordinary contemplative faculty have enabled him, like Wagner, who descended from Bach, Beethoven, and Liszt, to create, after and apart from all of them, work that resumes them and forgets them, to become in its turn an initiator. The point in which Rodin is inimitable is the expression of the voluptuous with all its latent woes; and this point strongly recalls to memory _Tristan and Isolde_, which is such a paroxysm as might touch the most perilous region of exceptional art; but Rodin is kept within the bounds of the normal, and protected from the audacities of his strange and troubled imagination, by his imperturbable technical certainty and by his admiration for some few masters. As was the case with Baudelaire and with Poe, his purity and grandeur of form save him; like Dante, this lover of gloomy beauty hangs over the verge of passion's hell without falling into it.

Rodin's art is healthy because it feeds upon natural truth and general logic. He is the supreme painter of man bowed by intense, melancholic, feverish, constricting thought; but also, with a candid tenderness unknown to Wagner, he is the caressing creator of women in love, the poet of youth, embracing and radiant. Only a genius can have the diversity of mind that produces _The Burghers of Calais_, ascetic and mediæval, the spasmodic _Hell_, the almost abstract _Balzac_, the bronze busts worthy of Donatello, and the images of women carved in the radiant and golden marble of Attica by a sensuous and subtle enthusiast who has rediscovered the soul of Hellenic beauty. This union of technical skill, evolved according to the secrets of the antique with a power of expressing all human sentiments from gentleness to lewdness, from the mystic to the pathetic, from nervous disorganisation to carnal frankness, this union of contraries and this universality are not to be found in any of our forerunners. Not Puget, nor Rude, nor any of our masters has had such intellectual ubiquity, such strength of condensation; in these points it is allowable, even in our own day, to acknowledge Rodin as supreme in the rich French school, and thus to anticipate the judgment of the future, in whose eyes he will loom yet larger.

In any case it was high time he should appear; he has been as useful as was Manet by his intervention in French art. In spite of Dalou, sculpture had fallen very low after the death of Carpeaux and Barye; the deplorable school of the Second Empire had brought it into degeneracy, and we could reckon no one in sculpture to correspond to the great impressionists. Such men as Dujalbert, Chapu, Mercié, Frémiet, Saint Marceaux, and Falguière, are but sham great sculptors, nothing of whose work will last; the "École" group, from Paul Dubois to Barrias, Aube and Guillaume, is a mere example of pretentious insignificance. The few vigorous temperaments, or workers of genuine technical merit, like Denys Puech, Jean Dampt, Gardet, Camille Lefèvre, Devillez, and Jean Bassier, did not know how to put together their efforts in such a way as to found a real school. They produced without attaining a cohesion of thought capable of guiding a fresh generation. Bartholomé, thoughtful, pure, dreamy, and proud, stands apart. Mme. Besnard and M. Théodore Rivière are charming, but without influence. I have spoken of the group that has spontaneously placed itself around Rodin. Amid this interesting, unequal, and scattered sculpture he appeared with the authority of a master and a prophet; his work set the question upon its true basis again, showing whence we came, what was to be avoided, and whither we were to go; and all this with such clearness of evidence that the appearance of Rodin becomes, in like degree with that of Goujon and that of Puget, a capital date in the history of the French school, I declared in the Preface my intention to avoid any extravagant eulogy of Rodin, and have uttered my dislike of the idolatry by which some people think it necessary publicly to emphasise their admiration, with its snobbish accretions. But I should fall into the opposite fault if I did not declare the truth and the importance of what such an artist brings to his art, and did not mark his exact place in the line of his country's sculpture. Henley has called Rodin the Michael Angelo of the modern world. That opinion of a foreign critic, a critic justly esteemed one of the most upright in contemporary literature, France may justly make her own, far from extravagant and puerile praises, and in the face of the work accomplished. I shall be but too happy if I have contributed to make clearer to the public certain secret reasons, certain inner frameworks, of that logical and beautiful work.