Part 18
Rodin has overstepped, in his Balzac Memorial, which he first exhibited in 1898, the very extensive limits within which his silly aberrations might have been borne. Master Shallow, who tolerates much, could not tolerate this work, and broke down under its crushing exaction. When the public saw this provocative monstrosity, it broke out into that uncontrollable laughter, whereby the outraged intelligence of mankind revenges itself with primitive force for restraints that it has long suffered in silence. In the face of this result, the Committee of the French Union of Authors, which had commissioned the Balzac Memorial, resolved unanimously to decline it. In vain the Condottieri, who had usurped supremacy in art criticism by the most unscrupulous methods of conspiracy, violence, and oppression, made desperate efforts to maintain themselves. They were powerless against the armed rising of sensible people who had at last come to themselves. Their tyranny was vanquished, and they were swept away. They might still talk all sorts of twaddle about the stupidity of the masses, and, in impotent rage, hiss at the victors the well-known shibboleths, “Philistine,” “provincial,” etc., but this final, faint-hearted nagging sank unheard in the unanimous cry of scorn from public opinion.
Rodin has represented Balzac as, jumping out of bed in the morning, he wraps himself unclad in his monk-like dressing-gown, without even putting his arms in the sleeves, irresistibly impelled to hurry to his writing-table in order to fix the thoughts of which his creative brain is full to bursting. Agreed: that, again, is the intention which Rodin might, perhaps, have secretly put into the figure. What the eye really sees is a sort of tree-trunk, hewn in the roughest manner by a woodman with an axe, which is surmounted by a hideously swollen tadpole head on a goitred neck. Malicious Parisian wit has exhausted all the droll comparisons that this monstrosity can suggest to flouting humour. People have called Rodin’s work a meal-sack, a carved potato, a snowman made by a cheeky schoolboy, an unpacked statue, a stalactite, etc. The work is all that, for it is nothing at all; but it is pre-eminently the conclusive refutation of Rodin’s æsthetics. For it is the highest expression, and, on that account, the unintentional parody, of his impressionist technique and of his third mistake, viz., ignorance of the limitations of his art.
Rodin worked at this wretched piece of work for ten whole years. First he read all Balzac’s works; then he made a journey to Touraine and spent months there, so as to absorb the human environment from which Balzac took so many of his models, and to become permeated with the feelings and impressions with which Balzac may have satiated himself when composing—all this to make a human figure which was to be the likeness of a man whom many people now living have known in the flesh. After these preliminary studies, Rodin finally proceeded to form his Balzac. His head was to be “a synthesis of his works,” his physiognomy was to be summed up “in an eye that looks on the _Comédie humaine_ and in an upper lip that is curled in contempt for humanity.” So said Rodin himself in several interviews which were published at the time when his statue was exhibited. He was then merely repeating what the twaddlers of Montmartre had chattered to him. It would be easy to make jests about this inflammation of the brain, but it is not worth even cheap raillery. It is quite enough to establish, soberly and drily, that Rodin, like a child or an idiot, aimed at something impossible. Sculpture cannot furnish any “synthesis of Balzac’s works.” Nature herself cannot, in the sense that Balzac himself, when he was alive, did not synthetise his works, in his externals, in his physiognomy. He had perhaps the head of a man of mark, but there was assuredly nothing in his face to show that he had written the “Physiology of Marriage,” and not written “La Chartreuse de Parme” (Stendhal). Rodin imagined that a portrait-statue could quite alone, merely by its own means, supply the place of a biography and a psychological and literary characterisation of the person represented. This patent lunacy was necessarily bound to end, as it has ended, in a mad caricature.
“The Thinker,” a colossal statue which was exhibited in 1904, is almost as bad an aberration as Balzac. It is a gigantic enlargement of a little sketch that one saw many years ago over Rodin’s “Gate of Dante’s Hell,” in the confused and scarcely indicated unborn _foetus_ lines of which confident devotion might imagine all possible promises of future splendour.
The promises are realised in “The Thinker.” He who still wishes to shudder with foreboding in the presence of the finished work will be at liberty to do so. It will be the same sort of man who grew enthusiastic over the “Balzac,” before which every criticism of intelligent—not “intellectual”—men dissolved into unextinguishable laughter. “The Thinker” is brother of the “Balzac,” only it is not so comic, for it is not dressed in a meal-sack, but is naked, and the bared human body, when misshapen, excites in a spectator of unvitiated taste, not cheerfulness, but discomfort, which may even rise to loathing.
“The Thinker” is not only naked, but also flayed. Its anatomy is executed with obtrusive importance, without the covering epidermis with its vital warmth. The enormous exaggeration of the muscles, the impossible assertion of strength which is expressed by the extreme contraction of all the muscles, therefore also of the counteracting muscles, are well-known features of sculpture in its worst period of decline. There is still, however, a distinction between Rodin and the _rococo_ sculptors, who confused fleshy tumours over the whole surface of the bodies of their statues with the power of portraying artistically. At any rate, the latter had a correct knowledge of myology, or the subject of the muscles, whereas Rodin’s anatomy is shockingly inaccurate. I really do not think much of Lorenzo Matthielly’s groups at the Vienna Hofburg-gates; but in the face of Rodin’s monstrosity I apologise in my heart for all the objections I have ever made against them. At any rate, with Matthielly every muscle occupies its proper place. Rodin, however, invents muscles which do not exist, and never did exist. Two mighty ridges, ending below in sausage-tips, run down the “Thinker’s” back, which are perhaps intended for the two _longissimi dorsi_; in this case, however, they are howling blunders as regards their attachment, their whole course, and their form. The muscles of the forehead and temples are treated quite as arbitrarily as those of the back. Where nature only recognises thin cutaneous muscles and ligatures, there Rodin puts bumps which remind one of blood tumours after blows from a club, and impart to the face the appearance of evil _Verschlagenheit_; not, as Fritz Reuter says, in the sense of craftiness, but in that of receiving a sound cudgeling. As a record “The Thinker” stands on the same level as the anatomical plates in Japanese manuals of the healing art of the time of the Shoguns.
This, however, is not yet the worst; the intellectual element fares even worse than the bodily one with this oaf who calls himself so pretentiously “The Thinker.” The flayed man sits crouching, with a distinctly crooked hump, on a sharp-edged block of stone. His toes claw convulsively into the ground. He holds a clenched fist before his mouth, and seems to bite it fiercely. His bestial countenance, with its bloated, contracted forehead, gazes as threateningly dark as midnight. He who has to interpret the figure without the help of a title will, from a back view, conclude it is some one writhing in agony on the rack; and from a front view, a criminal meditating over some foul deed. Its mien and bearing would suggest a designation such as “The Fallen Titan,” “Lucifer’s Rebellion,” or “Cain before he murdered his Brother.” The last thing which one would think of would be to look for a mind working behind this bulgy forehead, or to imagine that thought was supreme in this body seized by a spasm of rigidity in all its muscles. The name given by Rodin to this wretched performance sounds like a scoff or a calumny, and it might be thought the misled artist, robbed by his fanatics of all self-criticism, had intended to make a malicious parody of Michael Angelo’s _Pensieroso_.
Rodin himself, by his portrait busts, makes it possible to gauge the whole insincerity of his pose as a profound thinker, and his genius-playing arrogance; for instance, by that of Octave Mirbeau, and, still more easily, by a female bust which was exhibited at the same time as “The Thinker” monstrosity. With the exception of the folly, which is, moreover, not too obtrusive, that a piece of the rough block was allowed to remain on both shoulders, there was not the faintest feature in the bust that could differentiate it from a severely classical, coldly correct work. Here he had to satisfy a lady client, and he was irreproachably smooth, executed all the details lovingly, and produced a soft, delicate flesh, to which the elegant Injalbert might sign his name. If one were desirous of making an objection to this pleasant bust, it would, at worst, be that it is too sweet. He becomes the destroyer of all form, the bungling sham-Titan, the inscrutable philosopher, dramatist, and lyric poet, whose eye rolls in a fine frenzy, and who, in the throes of his fever to create, confines himself to hurried indications—he becomes all this only when he works for his bodyguard of sympathetic sensitivism.
How future generations will laugh over all this buffoonery of “nerve art”! Only, indeed, when it comes to know the comments of contemporary “intellectuals” in addition to the artists’ silly bungling. For the former will show them in a way to excite sympathy and amusement what devastation the deafening babble of a band of gossips, dreadfully ignorant of art and innocent of any feeling for beauty, could produce in the taste and thought of a large majority, which honestly yearns after æsthetic education, but, on account of a lack of trustworthy traditions and adequate instruction in art, has not sufficient self-confidence to set up the promptings, however obscure, of their own feeling against the impudent dictates of presumptuous arbiters of taste.
Mysticism and sexual psychopathy in the choice of themes; Impressionism and incidental eccentricities in technique; overstepping the limitations of his art, have made Rodin the great man of the fellows who for some two decades have set the fashion in art and literature. By these three peculiarities, to which he owes his spurious celebrity, he will be ruined as an artist, whatever the success he owes to puffing may be. And that is lamentable, for Rodin is a genuinely gifted sculptor, who created beauty when he did not yet think himself bound to work out of gratitude to the “young” journals. Unfortunately, it is extremely improbable that he will now find his way back to that simplicity and naturalness in which salvation is alone attainable. There is no return from Montmartre, not, at any rate, for an old man who has climbed this height and accepted with passionate earnestness all what he saw and heard there in advanced years. Young people who are still capable of change, in many cases awake from the idle dream of Montmartre æstheticism. Nature does not vouchsafe to the old to begin a new life.
XIV
RESURRECTION
BARTHOLOMÉ
I do not want to speak of Tolstoi’s novel, but of a work of art—great, at any rate, materially, as a statue—which every pilgrim to Paris will, I suppose, wish to see, viz., the monument which Bartholomé dedicated “To the Dead,” and which is to be seen in the cemetery of Père Lachaise.
It is interesting in so many aspects that one might devote to it a monograph as thick as a book, which would send out suckers over the whole domain of æsthetics and the history of art. Never do I feel so painfully the inadequacy of a short essay as when I proceed to handle a subject so rich in connections. It is impossible to exhaust it in this form, and it is painful to leave it as a fragment. One appears limited, whereas one is only restricted. We must satisfy ourselves with indications which will easily be looked upon as superficial, though they are merely terse. What is thought out as a proof takes the form of mere assertion, and in cases where we should like to convince, we must think ourselves successful, when we have incited the reader to kindly co-operation—which, however, goes for the most part its own way.
This pious ejaculation will make it easier for me to accommodate myself to the conditions which have been imposed on the short essay.
Works of sculpture in public places, which are neither monuments nor ornamental buildings, viz., such as are not intended to call to mind special events or particular individuals, are something novel in the development of high art. Antiquity knew only monumental creations which had their origin in patriotic sentiments. We have to bear in mind that religion in ancient communities constituted a part of patriotism, for there were no gods for mankind in general, but only gods for a particular people or a particular state. When Socrates had to drain the cup of hemlock, it was not because he had sinned against Olympus, but because he had given offence to Athens in the person of her tutelary divinities. The Battle of the Giants and the Frieze of the Parthenon, the Pallas Athene of the Acropolis and the Olympian Zeus, were felt, by those who gazed on them and for whom they had been wrought, as images from the past and present of their race. Even the “Laocoon” and the “Farnese Bull” were so regarded: a distinction between the legends of their race and accredited history, nay, between theology and politics, did not exist in the consciousness of the multitude at large, or even in that of the select few. The god made of ivory and gold was the public worship of a living being who was invested with high rank in the commonwealth, and the Olympian victor to whom a statue was erected entered into mythology as a comrade of Hercules, Theseus, and Perseus.
Religious art was the only public art known in the Middle Ages. If material political interests swayed the minds of communities in Pagan times, when the nations became Christian the supersensual, _i.e._, the salvation of the soul, became the great concern of the individual as of the community. Patriotism disappeared from the domain of emotion; what took its place—the pride of town, or class, or guild—was merely delight in material possession, or, if you like, a sort of vulgar dignity without any ideal background. Faith was their only sentiment, piety the artist’s sole impulse from which genuine creations could spring. It followed, therefore, that religious art—the only monumental art then in existence—attached itself to sacred places, and subordinated itself to them as really mere accessory decoration. Without resting on architecture, sculpture stood on its own feet only in the Stations of the Cross on Calvaries, but, even in this case, it had no object of its own, but served a definite purpose of worship. The beginnings of a public art which grew out of an abstract thought of the community—one not of a religious but of a temporal, of civic nature—are scanty and dim. As forerunners of such an art we can claim the Roland Pillars of the Free Towns—the symbol of their civil and criminal jurisdiction—with their indistinct, historical background of dim memories of Charlemagne as the legal source of municipal liberties, and perhaps also the Byzantine Lion of Brunswick.
The Renaissance was the first to create a monumental art that was to serve no practical, religious, or dynastic purpose, but one purely æsthetic, from which people looked for no strengthening of ecclesiastical views, no increase of authority and, through that, of power in a prince or government, but looked, in fact, only for delight in beauty. Renaissance art, I admit, rich and free as its development was, also remained thoroughly under the influence of mediæval traditions, and knew no other range of themes than those derived from the Bible and Classic mythology. Even worldlings among the artists, who had outgrown religious ideas, drew at least their stories from the New and, even more commonly, from the Old Testament, or from pagan mythology, which was familiar only to the educated, and to the multitude at large was meaningless, and devoid of life. A scholastic pedantry hung about such works as Benvenuto Cellini’s “Perseus,” for instance, which prevented the masses from appreciating them fully. It was not, however, done from haughty disdain, for monumental art—the art of the streets and squares—appeals indeed to the masses. The modelling, on the one hand, of what is purely human, which appeals to feelings in every human heart, and is, therefore, understood by every man; on the other hand, of a subject, well-defined in time and place, which must be familiar, at any rate, to contemporaries and residents: this degree sculpture attained only gradually and late. The Goose-man of Nuremberg and the Brussels Mannikin are instances of local Realism; Tadda’s “Justice” at Florence and Michael Angelo’s “Pietà”—these in spite of their religious relations are examples of universal human Idealism. It is characteristic of the timidity of sculpture, even in its proud epoch of the Renaissance, that it dared not cast itself adrift from presenting what was of immediate utility. It thought it needed an excuse for stepping out into the market-place before all the people. It found it fairly in supplying towns with water. It created fountains. These are the first and, for a long time, the only monumental works which were suggested neither by religion nor by loyalty to some dynasty; which aim neither at immortalising the memory of a particular event, nor at refreshing the schoolboy knowledge of the more liberally educated, but embody, without any pre-possession, a purely artistic conception of form fulfilled and animated with subjective emotion. The stages of development of the monumental fountains, which pretend to be mere sports of untrammelled fancy on the artist’s past, extend to the present day, in the latest phase, in which the fountain is not really intended to distribute water, like Sluter’s “Fount of Moses” at Dijon, or Jean Goujon’s “Fontaine des Innocents” in Paris, but uses the water only as a decorative element, as Donner’s fountain in the market-place of Vienna, or Reinhold Begas’s Neptune fountain in the Berlin Schlossplatz.
We must come down to the last century to find at last a monumental art of universal feelings or thoughts, still, for the most part, modestly cringing under the protection of architecture, as groups on pediments of palaces, theatres, and exhibition-buildings, and taking possession of the public square in full independence only in the last decades. Historical works, even of an universal, impersonal sort, such as the numerous war-memorials in Germany and France, the _risorgimento_-monuments of Italy, the patriotic battle-memories in Switzerland—do not come under consideration here, but only abstract works such as Bartholdi’s “Freedom enlightening the World,” at New York, or Dalou’s “Republic as the Protector of Labour and Culture,” in the Place de la Nation, at Paris.
Even these works still continue to show a birthmark, which betrays their origin from the sculpture of purpose, for Bartholdi’s gigantic statue is a lighthouse, and Dalou’s “Triumph of the Republic” belongs to the fountain series.
On the other hand, Bartholomé’s “Memorial to the Dead” is as free from every idea of commonplace utility as any mouldings for the rooms of a house. It originated in the artist’s emotion, and had, at its birth, no other purpose than that of relieving its creator by the gratification of an impulse. What was to become of the work after it was finished is a question Bartholomé probably never asked himself at all. Perhaps he resigned himself to the thought that it would pass a pensioner’s existence in some museum or other. In any case, carelessness as to what use would be made of it left him entire freedom as to the form it should take. And now he had the unexpected happiness of the work being purchased by the city of Paris, and placed in Père Lachaise. This has been the first instance, as far as I know, of a purely subjective, monumental work capturing a public position without this being justified by a practical service to the community, without embellishing a building, without satisfying any religious need or patriotic feeling, without immortalising any historical reminiscence, without glorifying any event or individual, but basing its claim to the grateful attention of the people at large only on the grounds that it attempts to embody in beauty an elemental emotion alive in the masses, that is to say, a real, common interest of moral order. The work may become the starting-point of a new monumental art, which will set itself the hitherto unknown task of presenting, with the authority of great sculpture, moods and views of the world, viz., the spiritual conditions common to a people, of interpreting them to that people, and of fixing them for history.
With all its novelty, Bartholomé’s work is, notwithstanding, not without organic connection with the historical development of art. There is no virgin-birth in art. Every work has a pedigree. Bartholomé’s art is allied to the Campo Santo art of the Middle Ages, from which it borrows thoughts of consolation and promise. It nevertheless exhibits a daring progress when it has emancipated itself from the architecture of gateways, outer walls, chapels, etc., and forced its way in independent form, complete in itself.
The street of tombs opens at the main entrance of Père Lachaise, and leads to a gently rising hill, the declivity of which Bartholomé’s masterpiece occupies. It displays the irregular, decorated side of a two-storied stone building of ancient Egyptian architecture of the simplest lines. A high door opens in the middle of the upper story, into the shadowy depth of which a naked man has entered. Him follows hesitatingly, with her outstretched right hand grasping his shoulder and seeking support, a young woman, the lines of whose profile, from her mouth distorted with fear down to the soles of her feet that detach themselves reluctantly from the ground, express a horror in presence of the unknown.