Part 3
The acknowledgment and recognition by Paris of her great son has not come too late. In spite of the fact that he has been for forty years an object of intense, displayed hatred (“so keen a hate,” he says, “that if Paris had been Italy in the time of the Borgia, I should have been poisoned”), in spite of the enmity of artists and populace, this tardy reception finds him unembittered, his temper warm and human, and with hand quick and outstretched to the tardy greeting. The man himself is so simple, so great, that he is even touched by the long-denied meed of praise.
Standing before the head of “L’Homme au Nez Cassé” (curiously enough the milestone of his first defeat, refused by the Salon in 1864), his masterpieces all around him, in the mellow light of the autumn sun falling on exquisite marble or dark bronze, Rodin said: “It is good to be alive. I find existence marvellous, glorious. These effigies of human pain” (and he indicated a bronze representing an emaciated poet dying on the knees of the Muse) “no longer make me suffer as they used. I am happy. To me nature is so beautiful, the truths of humanity are so thrilling, that I have grown to adore life and the world. _Je trouve que la vie est tellement belle!_” His face was fairly luminous. This apotheosis of _bien-être_ that the sculptor has reached in late middle age is perhaps Nature’s gift, her reward to him who, in spite of discouragement and the world’s scorn, has for forty years been her faithful, adoring disciple. France is true to her traditions in her treatment of her celebrated men. She has slaughtered a king, dethroned an emperor, sold a deliverer (Jeanne d’Arc), and to her immortal artists offers as a stirrup-cup at starting such draughts of bitterness that if the very divinity within them did not preserve them for posterity’s good, who can tell whether Carpeaux, Delacroix, Manet, Rude, Berlioz, Garnier, Baryé, Puvis de Chavannes, and Rodin would not have fallen by the way?--and all the names are not here! Prejudice and schools in every country and age have their scores to level. (Shades of Shelley, Keats, Chatterton, will bid England hold her peace.) Puvis de Chavannes (Rodin’s mighty brother amongst France’s great artists) stretched toward his laurels in old age a hand that stiffened in
death before it could hold the wreaths of fame. One and all of the illustrious ones were misapprehended; and Auguste Rodin, when he made his first appeal to public judgment, stepped into this rank, and awakened “the idiot risibles of a gaping stupidity,” instead of the grave appreciation that was his due.
Rodin is of the people, and was born in Paris in 1840. His parents were poor, and during the long years--apparently fruitless, and heaping disappointment on disappointment--urged him to take to a trade which would bring him immediate results. “I have no history,” he says; “my life is simply the story of constant struggle and unchanged poverty. I was poor, but I was strong; and in the moments when I was not bitterly discouraged I felt a certain stimulus in setting myself against the world. Over by the École de Médecine, in Paris, is the little school where I went as a boy, and where I first took simple lessons in drawing.”
He acknowledges the influence of no directed instruction on his art. In his young manhood he was a workman in the _atelier_ of Baryé, and the models of twisted cobras, lithe tigers, crouching panthers, maddened lions--their graceful contours and curves, the attitude of savage grace--may have impressed their images on the keen memory of the young journeyman. At all events, in his types of the animal triumphant in man, in the pose and gesture of _abandon_, there is much that suggests kinship between the human being and the uncivilised beast--the barbarous grace and beauty of both. But Rodin is not conscious of the effect of any school: in the _ateliers_ of both Baryé or Carrier-Belleuse he sold his skill for his daily bread.
In 1864 he sent the head of “The Man with the Broken Nose” to the Salon. This mask, perfectly modelled, worthy the seal of antiquity, was refused “because of its originality.” The refusal was a bitter blow to Rodin; and whether or not the verdict appeared to him just, it had the effect of intimidating him, and he waited thirteen years before again appearing before his adverse jury.
At this period (1864-70), on the edge of his own doorstep, as it were, with no power to franchise the threshold, he worked, a paid daily labourer, for Baryé, Carrier-Belleuse, and in 1871-77 for Van Rasbourg in Brussels. “During the long time,” he says, “when I gave what power I possessed to others, my thoughts were keen and alive toward my own creations. On Sunday I was free, and that day I afforded a model for myself and worked in my little room from the life. I
tried to make the most of every expression, every turn, of my varying model,--for the human being changes constantly, and my time was infinitely precious and infinitely short. I was never able to bring to satisfactory termination very much during these _séances_. It was in the paid week, it was during the days of others, that I really produced. I permitted myself then a careful mental study of what Sunday had suggested and had failed to achieve. As I thus meditated, fleeting thoughts and inspirations came to me, and I would hold them, force them to remain, until at the following _séance_ with my model I could mould their likeness in clay. I consider that this training of my memory was of inestimable advantage.”
In 1877 “L’Age d’Airain” was sent to the Salon, and accepted. The extraordinary criticism it evoked is sufficient praise. It was said to be “too perfect,” and the sculptor was accused of having “cast the statue from life”! When these insulting suspicions had been disproved to the eminent jury’s satisfaction, Rodin’s statue--a strong, beautiful male form of Greek purity and classical simplicity of outline--received, in 1880, a third-class medal. This was bought by the State, and can be seen in the Luxembourg Gardens.
Thus, successively accused first of too great originality, second of too faithful realism, Rodin was received by his censors; but ridicule reached its dizzy height when at the Salon of 1898 was exhibited the statue of Balzac, ordered by the Société des Gens de Lettres, and refused by them.
Above the _éclat_ of that time, when Paris made rendezvous before the rejected monument to laugh and
immoderately jeer, it is hard even now to raise a reasonable voice.
The august Société, which claimed that it “failed to recognise Balzac in the statue,” should have been put to the blush by a commercial man, a Monsieur Pellerin, who pleaded to purchase the Balzac. The sculptor refused, and took the offending plaster back to his own workshop. “I was cruelly hurt and made ill,” Rodin said, “and it did me great harm.” A brilliant pamphlet was forthcoming, however, by Arsène Alexandre, which suggested to at least part of the intelligent spectators that “they may have laughed too soon.” The Balzac has held, during the Exposition, chief place in the Pavilion Rodin, where those who still seek it for its stimulus to laughter may find it, and where others may study it to calm advantage. France’s greatest novelist, the writer of the _Comédie Humaine_, as conceived and made to exist in sculptured form by a man like Rodin, is a combination in itself not without interest. There is in this work a tremendous, almost savage force, a virility and power, an abandonment to subject above form, characteristic of Rodin. Balzac is posed as a spectator, his arms folded across the chest under the flowing monk’s robe which the novelist assumed when at work. His body is rested on one backward-drawn foot, whilst the other, a little advanced, throws out the line of leg and knee. The head, superb and massive, is lifted and backward inclined; the lips are parted, the eyes, deep-set, caverns of thought under heavy brows, look out at the defile of humanity which the romancer so keenly studied to immortal results. This Balzac is _moqueur_, _rêveur_, student, analyst; and the genius which has--roughly if you will--mightily modelled the Titian of literature, has finely comprehended, with the kinship of greatness, the type of the immortal Parisian. The stupendous figure has nothing in common with the approved style of statues to great men that mark the public places and squares of our cities and towns, and there is everything in the _outrance_ of presentation, the novel, daring, crude handling, to bewilder the crowd who distrust what they fail to understand. But it is sufficient for the serious, unprejudiced observer to come once and look, to return and gaze, in order to recognise that he is before a masterpiece--the effigy of a human being appearing as in life from a flowing garment, symbol of the art of the romancer, the robe of imagination with which he enveloped his analyses. It becomes thus impossible not to feel the power of Rodin’s Balzac as one studies the gigantic head emerging from the
drapery as the author lifts his eyes on the comedy of life.
In 1882 appeared simultaneously “St. Jean préchant” (“St. John the Baptist preaching”) and “The Creation of Man”; and down till 1885 the busts of Jean Paul Laurens, Carrier-Belleuse, Victor Hugo, Antonin Proust, Dalou, were exhibited at the Champs de Mars. To subsequent exhibitions were sent busts of Puvis de Chavannes, “Le Cariatide,” “La Danaïde,” “La Pensée,” monument to Victor Hugo, the “Balzac,” “Le Baiser,” “L’Ève,” and the busts of Falguière and Rochefort.
In the Salon of 1889 was exhibited the group known as _Les Bourgeois de Calais_, ordered by Calais, and which, cast in bronze, stands to-day on the marketplace of that town. This piece, which has not its compeer, commemorates the heroism of six of the city’s citizens in the days when England was France’s conqueror. Froissart with characteristically simple pathos tells the story. Calais, taken by the English, was destined to destruction, but King Edward offered to spare the populace on the condition that six notable bourgeois should come forth to him bare-headed, bare-footed, ropes round their necks, and the city’s keys in their hands. “I shall do with them according to my good pleasure”--which good pleasure, as the world knows, was to grant pardon and safe _convoi_, at the plea of the gracious Queen Philippa. But they have no dream of pardon, these men, who one after another seem again to pursue their expiatory way for us across the ages. The grateful people of the town have bathed their naked feet with tears of adoration and farewell, and, devoted to probable death and to sure humiliation, they are before us. History has kept the names of four: Eustache de St. Pierre, Jean d’Aire, Jacques and Pierre de Wissant. On their faces are depicted all things save the sense of defeat. In the drawn visages, convulsed hands, in the bent and defiant attitude, are pride, hauteur, grief, resolution. The wasted forms bear the marks of siege, privation, hunger, and anxiety, but there is no trace of submission in the mediæval vicarious offering. Old age is here, passive in a moment of sublime renunciation; youth, rebellious at this demand of Fate; middle life, desperate in tense despair. These figures are real and human; this is modern realism with classic delineation. Verse or prose, brush or pencil, could not, line for line, have caught the story better and told it more expressively. The mass loves a work of art that tells a tale, and here
the layman and the most difficult symbolist may alike enjoy. A narrative is told, and Art, in the mode of recount, is elevated.
Rodin’s busts are strikingly _ressemblant_--not always flattering to the subject, but remarkable revelations of the character of the individuals themselves. His busts of Victor Hugo and Henri Rochefort and Jean Paul Laurens are especially fine.
“In making a portrait, for example,” Rodin says, “it requires several _séances_ for me to get into the spirit of my model. I am seeking always the distinguishing trait that makes this man or woman an individual different from the rest of his kind. When I discover this _trait marquant_ I dwell upon it, I insist on it--I caricature it, if you like--until my bust has likeness; then I know _that I know_ my model.”
The sculptor has been at work for fifteen years on the famous “Porte de l’Enfer” (“Door of Hades”), ordered by the Museum of Decorative Art in Paris. Of this stupendous undertaking, as yet incomplete, only the most inadequate idea can be given. The portal measures six mètres in height; the panels and borders are filled with countless figures in _bas_ and high relief. Above the doors is a nude male figure in a sitting posture, elbows on the knees, head sunk on the hands. This is _Dante_, dreamer, meditator, before whose eyes passes the vision of the condemned. The groups, couples, and single figures represent everything that a fertile talent can conceive of dread and grief; there are visible
Greed, Lust, Crime, Despair--in short, all the worst of the World, the Flesh, and the Triumphant Fiend. At the lower corners are masks of Pain, and around and about them Satyrs, Centaurs, Nymphs male and female, human forms of all ages and nations, run their terrible race. These remarkably modelled figures are entwined, interlaced, leaning the one on the other, seeking to escape, pursuing, haunting, and fleeing, repelling, clasping in eternal desire, eternal horror, eternal despair. Here are Paola and Francesca in their own forms, and their symbols in many another; here, even, are tiny bodies of infants, “who seek with sightless eyes to penetrate limbo and the shades.” No one but Rodin since the days of the Ghibellines could have ventured upon this subject, and of the tremendous result there has as yet been one general verdict of praise. It is Rodin’s _chef-d’œuvre_. The doors are to be cast in bronze, and are all but in the hands of the casters.
Carpeaux, Rude, Chapu, have given to France splendid monuments. The sculpture of these men is powerful, virile, telling,--their technique that of the schools, their expression at once comprehensible. This art, picturesque, decorative, ends with the production, and suggests as a whole nothing beyond that which is before the eyes. Rodin’s art, by reason of his more complex, subtle temperament, his more artistic sympathy and profounder insight into nature and humanity, has been a renaissance to modern sculpture, and is to plastic art what Puvis de Chavannes was to decorative painting. He calls himself a student of human life, a disciple of nature, from which he inspires himself, and in an original, individual manner expresses in tangible form his conceptions of the mysteries of life. He has caught the ineffable moment of passion, and dared to transfix the embrace of love in stone. He has dared to portray by his art that which poet, musician, painter, have not waited to confess is an inspiration to all creation; and is it not possible that those who are so hasty to malign and criticise Rodin do not understand him? At all events in his latest productions he shows no sign of temporising, and chooses unflinchingly to be an expositor in stone of the passions, the sensations, and crises of humanity as he apprehends them.
Alongside of the high spirituality reached in the apotheosis of renunciation in the group of “Les Bourgeois de Calais,” alongside of the intellectuality of the “Victor Hugo,” are examples of the grossly material. Here is the exquisite roundness of youth in “Brother and
Sister” (“Frère et Sœur”), a group of charming, innocent loveliness. Touching it is the lankness of shrivelled age (Statue of an Old Woman). Here are expressed the violence of all sensation, the legitimate happiness of love, the languor of satiety, the wantonness of riot, the solemnity of death, the hopeless horror of the damned (“La Porte de l’Enfer”).
Rodin the man is unassuming, and his manners are almost naïve. In his _accueil_ he is courteous and charming, extending a gracious reception to the world he generously permits to freely seek him. Below medium height, strongly, powerfully built, his head lionesque, his eyes keen, deep-set, and very brilliant, we see him when at work in the white long blouse he wears in his _atelier_, Rue de l’Université. The vast room is filled with groups completed and others in different stages of advancement, chiefly innumerable casts for the “Porte de l’Enfer.” Around Rodin are his stone-cutters, achieving from blocks of marble the contours of the models in clay before their eyes. A fine, clinking sound, a “tin-tin,” fills the place to echo as the penetrating instruments tap the hard surface. Rodin’s hands are covered with wet and drying clay; the metallic sound is an accompaniment to his thoughts. “My _métier_ is to express my ideas in plastic form; and, curiously, it is of form I think the least.” (His enemies will find here a _point d’appui_ and fresh impetus to mirth!) “To me all expression should be subordinate to the
idea; and for the elusive, fleeting ideals I am on an eternal search. I may imagine that under my hands, as I mould a faun possibly, or a satyr, I have caught the ineffable conception fast at last; when, under my very touch, I see the being change. My inspiration becomes another, and lo! the clay is a faun no longer, but a Sappho--head thrown back, lips parted, plunging into a sea!”
And to this man, the eternal search is for beauty, which, according to his creed, exists in everything that lives, moves, or has its being. “Nothing is ugly that has life,” Rodin says. “Age has its own loveliness, as youth has its especial charm. Whatever suggests human emotion, whether of grief or pain, goodness or anger, hate or love, has its individual seal of beauty. Therefore,” he exclaims, “since I hold all existence to be beautiful, and all beauty to be truth, _on a bien le droit de choisir parmi les choses vraies_” (one has the right to choose amongst truths). And although to Rodin has been attributed mastery in all arts save that in which he is absolutely _maître_, of his drawings, his designs, his ceramics, bear the touch of genius,--he is _par excellence_ the sculptor. No critic can observe certain groups without conceding mastery to him in his art. It is claimed that there exist in antiquity no more perfect examples of the human form than “L’Age d’Airain,” “Le Printemps,” and “Le Baiser.” Had these marbles been unearthed at Samothrace or disinterred at Athens, antiquarians (if puzzled to trace the Grecian spirit) would scarcely have hesitated to assign these figures their places amongst the remnants of the dust and ashes of the Golden Age. But between Phidias and Rodin, between pure Greek and the complex modern, there is a great gulf fixed. The times demand, crave, insist upon and generate, another spirit. The ancients portrayed divinity in the mystic ideal clothed in ideal form; this modern portrays humanity, with its warring desires, its breath, span, happiness of love.
Rodin will be perhaps always misunderstood. He is a pagan, and in his art has been so varied as to make it difficult to judge him by a standard or to compare him wisely with his forerunners or his contemporaries. The same hand that has perfectly carved the lovely woman’s head in “La Pensée,” rounded the limbs in the delicacy of “The Eternal Idol,” the same hand tears forth from clay and stone sinister, terrible conceptions, mighty symbols of desolation as on “La Porte de l’Enfer,” the inevitable misery in the retribution. From a block of marble he causes a woman to blossom forth like a flower, until rough block and figure appear of different materials--the one a cold, pulseless background, a sheath for a form so instinct with life that the stone has the texture of flesh, and seems to bloom and glow. Take, for example, the figure of Psyche holding back the draperies of night that she may see Eros. Rodin is an absolute expression of his times, a modern with the subtlety of idea, the suggestive conception that is the distinguishing mark of nineteenth-century talent, part of the spirit that has created the schools of symbolism, that has coined the term “degenerate”; and to this trend of mind, which no civilisation hitherto could have produced, has been added robust physical strength and an order of genius akin to that of the ancients, before whose immortal works Rodin is a humble and devout worshipper, and from whom, in his modesty, he thinks himself infinitely removed, and to whom he is in reality divinely allied.
PAUL ALBERT BESNARD
Paul Albert Besnard bears no relation to any school. “I have never formed part of a group,” he says; and in revenge or despair no group has formed itself around the master. There is, properly speaking, no Sargent school and no Whistler school, and may these men not be taken to be masters of the present time? It is a distinguishing peculiarity of modern art that schools do not form as they did in the old days. Possibly an explanation of the fact why there is little discipleship is that we are in the age of individualism and not of intense and imitative study. Each man and woman intends to be an _arriviste_ without being a plodder and scholar. There is great pressure toward ultimate success; desire for originality. Imitation of methods and technique is not sympathetic. Above all there is a marked absence of the genius which carries men to the pinnacle Besnard has reached. Apprenticeship is not to the taste of the modern student! Of people who put paint on canvas there are legion--of painters few--and in France, _Degas_ and _Besnard_ head the list.
Nothing would be more mistaken than to call Besnard an Impressionist, or to confound him with that school of art. The word has been too freely used and misapplied. Besnard’s art, in as far as possible, is the complete embodiment of his conception; the canvas when it leaves his hand--in as far as the painter is able to completely transmit his thought--is finished. Besnard does not pretend to flitting and intangible effects--to suggestive impressionism--he claims by his work to have expressed his idea, and does not trust to the public to interpret him or his inspiration--he has masterfully done so for himself.
The provinces, the Midi and the North have given to France most of her famous men; it is unusual for a Parisian born and bred to win distinction in his own city. It often seems to be a fact that the genius of the individual demands uprooting from his native soil--and that transplanting is salutary for development and success. Puvis de Chavannes was a Lyonnais, Ingres came from Montaubon, Rodin and Besnard are Parisians. This last named prophet found instantaneous