Part 11

Alas! we are not prepared to see and to feel. Our sorry education, far from cultivating in us the feeling for enthusiasm, makes us in our youth little pedants who without result overwhelm ourselves and others with our pretensions. Those who too late, by long efforts, escape this demon of folly arrive only after that education has fatally sapped their strength and has destroyed the flower of enthusiasm that God had planted in them as a sign of His paradise. People without enthusiasm are like men who carry their flags pointed down to the ground instead of proudly above their heads.

Constantly I hear: "What an ugly age! That woman is plain. That dog is horrible." It is neither the age nor the woman nor the dog which is ugly, but your eyes, which do not understand. One generally disparages the things that are above one's comprehension. Disparagement is the child of ignorance. As soon as you discover that, you enter into the circle of joy.

Man, animals, down to the smallest insects, down to the infinitesimal; the earth, the waters, the woods, the sky--all are marvelous. The firmament is the vastest landscape, the most profound, the most enchanting, with its variations, its effects of color and light, which delight the eye, astonish the thought, and subjugate the heart. And to say that artists--those who consider themselves such--attempt to represent all that simply as it appears to them, without having studied it, without having deciphered it, without having felt it! I pity them. They are prisoners, slaves of stupidity.

I was like them in the first periods of my perverted youth, but I have delivered myself. I have regained the liberty to approach the things that I love by the pathway of true study. Who follows me on the road? Who can learn it from a study of sculpture and design in books? You who have caught a glimpse of the splendor of that tree, of that giant whose magnificent column has been denuded by autumn of its leafy capital, but which is perhaps more beautiful in the nudity of its members; you who admire the structure of its branches and twigs, etched in an infinitude of forms against the sky, where they resemble the lacework of the windows of our churches, would you not understand far better that beauty, would not your pleasure be far more complete, if you sketched that tree not only in the mass, but in the innumerable details of its framework? And to think that the schools recommend to pupils, painters, and sculptors research on the subject! The subject! The subject does not exist in that--the poor little arrangement that you, one and all, summon up while poring over the same anecdotes, the same conventional attitudes. The human imagination is narrow, and you do not see the hundred thousand motives of art that multiply themselves under your eye. I could pass my whole life in the garden where I walk without exhausting them.

The subject is everywhere. Every manifestation of nature is a subject. Artists, pause here! Sketch these flowers; writers, describe them for me, not in the mass, as has always been done, but in minute detail, in the marvelous precision of their organs, in their characteristics, which are as varied as are those of animals and men. How beautiful to be in the same moment an artist and a botanist, to paint and model the plant at the same time that one studied it! Those great realists, the Japanese, understand this, and make the knowledge and cultivation of plants one of the bases of their education.

We place love and sensual pleasure in the same category. Undoubtedly it is nature herself who has led is astray in this by the instinct to perpetuate ourselves, in youth this instinct is like an overflowing river; it sweeps away everything, yet pleasure is everywhere about us. I imbibe it in the forms of the clouds that build their majestic architecture in the sky, in the rapture of this woman who holds her child in her arms, an attitude divine, so beautiful indeed, that the poet of the Gospels has deified it. It is the attitude of the Virgin. I imbibe it in the atmosphere which bathes me now, and will still continue to bless me, bringing me peace, rest, and health.

For that which is beautiful in a landscape is that which is beautiful in architecture--the air, space. No one in these days realizes its depth. It is this quality of depth that carries the soul where it wishes to go. In a well-constructed monument that which enraptures us is the science of its depths. The throngs in the churches attribute their emotion to mysticism, to the transport of the soul toward divinity. They are unaware that they owe their emotion to the exact knowledge of great planes possessed by the architects of former days. Even upon the most ignorant beholder they impose this. Man disregards that which he already has, and longs for something else. He longs for swiftness, to have wings like a bird. He does not know that he already enjoys this pleasure of moving through space. He rejoices in it in his soul, which takes wing and goes where it pleases, through the sky, on the waters, to the depths of the forests.

All the misfortune here below arises from a lack of comprehension. We classify our limited knowledge in narrow systems, like the card-systems of an office, and these pitiful conventions we take seriously. They teach us disconnected things, and we leave them disconnected. Those who have a little patience assemble these isolated facts; but such patient ones are rare, and nothing is so unbearable as that man who, not having it, speaks ill of him who has a sense of the truth. To see accurately is the secret of good design. Objects dart at one another, unite, and throw light on one another, explain themselves. That is life; a marvelous beauty covers all things like a garment, like an ægis.

God created the great laws of opposition, of equilibrium. Good and evil are brothers, but we desire the good, which pleases us, and not the evil, which seems to us error. When we consider matters from a distance, does not evil often seem good, and good, evil? That is only because we have judged without proper consideration. Just as white and black are necessary in a drawing, so good and evil are necessary in life. Sorrow ought not to be cast out. As long as we live it is as strong a part of life as radiant joy. Without it we would be very ill trained.

To comprehend nature it is of importance that we never substitute ourselves for it. The corrections that a man imposes upon himself are a mass of mistakes. The tiger has claws and teeth and uses them skilfully; man at times shows himself inferior. Possessing intelligence, too often he strives to turn to that. Animals respect everything and touch nothing. The dog loves his master, and has no thought of criticizing him. The average man does not care that his daughter should be beautiful. He has in his mind certain ideas of manner and instruction, and the beauty of his daughter does not enter into the program that he has made. But the daughter herself feels the influence of nature, and displays her modest and triumphant movements, which this blind one does not see, but which fascinate the artist.

The artist who tells us of his ideal commits the same error that this average man commits. His ideal is false, in the name of this ideal he pretends to rectify his model, retouching a profound organism which admirably combined laws regulate. Through his so-called corrections he destroys the ensemble; he composes a mosaic instead of creating a work of art; the faults of his model do not exist. If we correct that which we call a fault, we simply present something in the place of that which nature has presented. We destroy the equilibrium; the rectified part is always that which is necessary to the harmony of the whole. There is nothing paradoxical here, because a law that is all-powerful keeps the harmony of opposites. That is the law of life. Everything, therefore, is good, but we discover this only when our thought acquires power; that is to say, when it attaches itself indissolubly to nature, for then it becomes part of a great whole, a part of united and complex forces. Otherwise it is a miserable, debased, detached part contending with a whole that is formed of innumerable units.

Nature, therefore, is the only guide that it is necessary to follow. She gives us the truth of an impression because she gives us that of its forms, and if we copy this with sincerity, she points out the means of uniting these forms and expressing them.

Sincerity, conscience--these are the true bases of thought in the work of an artist; but whenever the artist attains to a certain facility of expression, too often he is wont to replace conscience with skill. The reign of skill is the ruin of art. It is organized falsehood. Sincerity with one fault, indeed with many faults, still preserves its integrity. The facility that believes that it has no faults has them all. The primitives, who ignored the laws of perspective, nevertheless created great works of art because they brought to them absolute sincerity. Look at this Persian miniature, the admirable reverence of this illuminator for the form of these plants and animals, and the attitudes of these persons which he has forced himself to render just as he saw them. How eagerly has he painted that, this man who loved it all! Do you tell me that his work is bad because he is ignorant of the laws of perspective? And the great French primitives and the Roman architects and sculptors! Has it not been repeatedly said that their style is a barbaric style? On the contrary, it has a formidable beauty. It breathes the sacred awe of those who have been impressed by the great works of nature herself. It offers us the strongest proof that these men had made themselves part of life and also a part of its mystery.

To express life it is necessary to desire to express it. The art of statuary is made up of conscience, precision, and will. If I had not had tenacity of purpose, I should not have produced my work. If I had ceased to make my researches, the book of nature would have been for me a dead letter, or at least it would have withheld from me its meaning. Now, on the contrary, it is a book that is constantly renewed, and I go to it, knowing well that I have only spelled out certain pages. In art to admit only that which one comprehends leads to impotence. Nature remains full of unknown forces.

As for me, I have certainly lost some time through the fault of my period. I should have been able to learn much more than I have grasped with so much slowness and circumlocution; but I should not have tasted less happiness through that highest form of loss; that is, work. And when my hour shall come, I shall dwell in nature, and shall regret nothing.

THE ANTIQUE--THE GREEKS

If the artists of antiquity are the greatest of all it is because they approached most closely to Nature.

They studied it with magnificent sincerity and copied it with all their intelligence. They never wasted their time in trying to invent something. To invent, to create, these are words that mean nothing. They contented themselves with rendering the adorable model that enchanted their eyes. This love and this respect for creation has never since their time been surpassed. They did not copy literally what they saw; to a certain degree they interpreted the character of forms. The aim of art is not to copy literally. It consists in slightly exaggerating the character of the model in order to make it salient; it consists also in reassembling in a single expression the successive expressions given by the same model. Art is the living synthesis.

This is what the ancients did, with what taste, what incomparable science! From this science that respected unity their works derived their calm, contained force, the sentiment of grand serenity, the atmosphere of peace that envelops them. The ignorant and the professors of esthetics who do not know the source of all this have named it Greek idealism. This is nothing but a word that serves to conceal a want of understanding. There is no idealism in the ancients; there is an exercise of choice, a marvelous taste; but it is by the most realistic means that they render human beauty.

We others, we moderns, are carried away by the restlessness of the epoch; we are superficial, we only regard things cursorily, and we have concluded from this sublime simplicity that Greek art is cold. To us indeed it seems very cold. It is really warm. To it alone belongs in this respect the quality of life, reality in forms, and precision in movement. It is through this that it attains perfect equilibrium. But that is beyond our little spirit of detail. We seek nothing but detail; the Greek, for his part, saw nothing but the whole; that is to say, the equilibrium, the harmony.

THE RICHNESS OF THE ANTIQUE LIES IN MODELING

The value of the antique springs from _ronde-bosse_. It possesses in a supreme degree the art of relief. How can the critics and the professors explain this, being what they are? They do not belong to the trade. Art should not be taught except by those who practise it.

Observe any fragments of Greek sculpture: a piece of an arm, a hand. What you call the idea, the subject, no longer exists here, but is not all this debris none the less admirably beautiful? In what does this beauty consist? Solely in the modeling. Observe it closely, touch it; do you not feel the precision of this modeling, firm yet elastic, in flux like life itself? It is full, it is like a fruit. All the eloquence of this sculpture comes from that.

What is modeling? The very principle of creation. It is the juxtaposition of the innumerable reliefs and depressions that constitute every fragment of matter, inert or animated. Modeling creates the essential texture, supple, living, embracing every plante. It fills, coördinates, and harmonizes them. It penetrates everything, it animates everything, as well the depths as the surfaces. It comprises the minute as well as the immense. Mountain, horse, flower, woman, insect equally owe to it their form. When God created the world, it is of modeling He must have thought first of all. If you consider a hand, you notice its contours and the character of the whole. But the eye of the artist, that eye, sees more: it sees the infinite assemblage of projections and depressions forming a texture more closely knit, more exactly blended than the most perfect mosaic. It is this that he seeks to render; this that he translates, if he is a sculptor, by the science of depression and relief, if he is a draughtsman or painter by that of light and shadow. For light serves, in conformity with depressions and reliefs, to give the eye the same sensation that the hand receives from touch: Titian is just as great a modeler as Donatello.

To-day the sense of _ronde-bosse_ is completely lost, not only in Europe, but among the peoples of the Orient. It is the age of the _flat_. No one knows anything about it. Men love what they do themselves, until they are made to see that it is not beautiful; but it takes years and years for this to penetrate into their consciousness. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries China and Japan still produced charming works. In ancient times their art was very great; it approached the Greek. At the exposition of 1900, we were enabled to see antique Japanese statues, superb nudes nearly as fine as those of Greece. In our time the pest of flatness has contaminated the Asiatic races as well as the European: decadence is universal.

We are so far removed from antique beauty that when we photograph the works of the ancients we take them in the spirit of our own taste, which is that of low-relief; we take from them that flower of beautiful modeling, their richness, their crowning grace. When I say low-relief, I do not use this term exactly; it is only that I know no other means of expressing the modern evil of uniformity; but I know that good low-relief is as full and as fruit-like as sculpture in the round, that it is sculpture in the round itself, as in the friezes of the Parthenon, as in our buildings of the Renaissance and of the seventeenth century.

The great concern of my life is the struggle I have maintained to escape from the general flatness. All the success of my sculpture comes from that. Although it has little enough taste, the public, despite all, is tired to death of this flatness. The charm of _ronde-bosse_ is so great that it captivates the ignorant even without their knowing it.

RONDE-BOSSE AND CHIAROSCURO

Observe this little torso of a woman; it is a little Venus. It is broken; it has no longer a head, arms, legs, yet I never weary of contemplating it; each day, each hour for me adds to this masterpiece because I only understand it better. What could it say to our indifferent glance? For me it has the ineffable voluptuousness of softly maturing flesh. The effect lies in no part and in every part. It is perfection. This little childish body, has it not all the charm of woman? It does not catch the light, the light catches it, glancing over it lightly; without any effect of roughness, any dark shadow. Here shadow can no longer be called shadow but only the decline of light. She does not become dark, she grows pale in imperceptible depressions, in delicious undulations. She is indivisible; she is whole or incomplete, but her unity is not disturbed. And this passage that joins the abdomen to the thighs, this little declivity of graces, this valley of love! Everything is full of the calm, the lightness, the serenity of pure beauty in the perfect confidence of nature. The ideal that you imagine you find in a gesture, in a momentary attitude, is here; it is here because of the infinite love of the flesh, of the human fruit. What you call the ideal is nothing but the perfume of beautiful modeling. What more could you ask?

When I look at this marble in the evening by candle-light, how the wonder deepens! If those who have been telling us for a hundred years that Greek art is cold studied it with care, could they for one hour maintain this absurdity? This sculpture, on the contrary, is of an extraordinary living complexity, which the flame reveals; the whole surface is nothing but depressions and reliefs, but united, melted together in the great, harmonious force of the _ensemble_. I turn the little torso about under the caressing rays of the light. There is not a fault, not a weakness, not a dead spot; it is the very continuity of life, its intoxicating voluptuousness hidden in the bosom of the molecule.

Why should such artists have sought to create an abstract Beauty by the idealization of forms? These men of genius loved Nature too well to presume to correct her. They knew well that despite their genius, they still remained beneath her. Nothing can surpass the marvel of creation. The conception of an idealistic art comes from the Academy. Before the purity of the antique forms people used to believe that the beauty lay solely in the exterior profiles. It is really beautiful because of the interior modeling. And still we make this distinction between the profiles and the modeling, thanks to our mania for dividing things; but we know that the one is inseparable from the other; the surfaces are nothing but the extremities of volumes, the boundaries of the mass.

All the sculpture of the period of Louis-Philippe was imitated from the antique, but only by means of the exterior profiles. If it had been practised by true modelers, by geometrical minds, it would have been as beautiful as its original. What pleased people in that epoch, what pleases people in ours, is not at all the antique; it is the fashion in which we see it. It was the Renaissance that really understood the Greek. It created works exactly the same in feeling, though somewhat different in arrangement and general color. For color does not exist in painting alone. Its rôle is equally great in sculpture. To-day this color is bad; it fails to obtain the chiaroscuro which derives from _ronde-bosse_. Good sculpture owes to chiaroscuro clarity, unity, charm, even, I might say, the voluptuousness of breathing flesh. Shadow, at once luminous and mysterious, models the fulness of the body in the exuberance of health; it makes one understand abundance, solidity. In the art of the Renaissance and the eighteenth century shadow is always supple and warm as in Greek art; it has the tender coloring of the vegetation of our country, the sweetness of which our great artists have captured. The chiaroscuro of the antique consists of the density and depth of light falling over the entire modeling. Chiaroscuro penetrates to every plane and renders the reality of them; it is reality itself. This is because the antique and nature are part and parcel of the same mystery, the infinitely harmonious mystery of force in suspense. The great artists compose as nature itself operates.

Undoubtedly the Greeks possessed certain methods which they handed down from master to pupil, as has been the case in all artistic epochs. They had celebrated ateliers, schools, where they taught their principles. By the fifth century they had established a canon of the human body; but they never made use of it without consulting the model. As for us, we have imagined that we could use it like a magic formula. It is not the formula that makes the art; it is the experience of the artist that creates the formula. If we abandon nature for a rule, if we do not constantly vivify the one by means of the other, we soon speak a language that means nothing.

One cannot repeat this enough: the ancients are realists; they work in _ronde-bosse_. This explanation seems commonplace and even vulgar; it is the whole truth. It can be understood by the humblest artisan, provided only that he knows his trade. But it is as difficult to get it into the heads of people to-day as it is to restore faith in a man who has lost it.

ROME AND ROMAN ART

What I have said of Greek art applies equally well to Roman. Another opinion has been adopted by critics and the world in general: the Roman is less beautiful than the Greek. It is less beautiful perhaps, by a certain shade, a shade which those who speak of it are incapable of appreciating. It is a little less substantial, but it is superb. It is Greek, with a different character, a certain ruggedness, and more! The Maison Carrée at Nîmes, that little temple, the flower of austerity, the smile of the race as sweet as the smile of Greece; the Pont du Gard, that heroic masterpiece, that giant which bestrides the country, which imposes the power of Rome on the peaceful landscape, these are what they criticize!

Rome is magnificent. We say it, but we do not believe it; otherwise it would not be despoiled. No, in Rome itself, they have no idea of the beauty of Rome. Where are there artists great enough to appreciate you, severe genius, splendid city, daughter of the she-wolf? Your genius they pillage every day. They destroy its proportion, and that is to strike at the foundation of the master work. Proportion is the law of architecture. ... In the very midst of the ancient city they are setting up atrocious monuments, enormous or too petty.

In Rome, as in Athens, as in the France of Gothic art, the architect of old planned the monument in relation to the landscape; he harmonized it with the outline of the mountains, with the expanse of the surrounding country-side; he determined its proportions according to its environment.