Part 13

It may be that this slackening of taste and knowledge is necessary. Perhaps it is a period of transition, a fallow period required by the intelligence like that required by a soil that has been productive for too long. If ignorance is prolonged it will mean that the history of France is ended; it will mean the annihilation of the Celtic genius which has fertilized Europe for two thousand years. We shall become like Asia. Roman art declined for four or five centuries after Augustus. With us the decadence has only been going on for a hundred years. During the present war marvels have been destroyed. Formerly, even during the religious wars, the monuments were spared; it is for this reason that France is still so rich. When stone is no longer respected, it means decadence. The cannon turn up the earth like a plow, leveling everything. This war appears therefore like an explosion of barbarism; at bottom it indicates a latent state of soul which has been shaping itself since the beginning of the nineteenth century. During this period the world has ceased to obey the law of beauty and love; it has lived for nothing but business. What is the leading idea that has precipitated the nations against one another? Trade: the desire, the longing to make more money than one's neighbor. Trade is the anxious care of people who think of nothing but their own petty welfare; it is not the basis on which is founded the grandeur of peoples. It alone regulates at present the relations between things. The war is nothing but the consequence of such habits and their natural conclusion.

Do you ask me what will spring out of the conflict? I am not a prophet. I know only that without religion, without art, without the love of nature--these three words are for me synonymous--men will die of ennui. But nothing easily resigns itself to death. An outburst of courage has just transfigured the world. Can we preserve this courage during peace? The patience of the soldier, the patience of the trenches surpasses in sublimity the virtue of the ancients. Will it produce a rebirth of intelligence? Shall we have, in study, the force of soul that we have had in the great struggle? That is the question. Of course the stupid, the ignorant will not suffer any transformation through the war; but men of character will be reinvigorated by the hardships of the military life; we have recaptured patience and we have yet to learn what we can expect from this virtue. Genius is as much character as talent. If we have men of force in this country where taste is a natural gift, it seems to me impossible that this force will not quicken the gift and develop it and that we shall not have once more an era of beauty.

AUGUSTE RODIN.

THE WORK OF RODIN

I

THE STUDY OF THE CATHEDRALS--INFLUENCE OF THE GOTHIC ON THE ART OF RODIN--"SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST" (1880)--"THE GATE OF HELL"

In 1877 Rodin visited our most illustrious cathedrals, Rheims, Amiens, Chartres, Soissons, Noyon. During his youth, the choir of Beauvais and Notre Dame de Paris appealed more to his imagination than to his taste, and it required many years of travel and comparison to enable him to grasp the splendors of that Gothic art which he was to admire thenceforth at least as much as the antique. As a splendidly gifted, but inexperienced young man, he shared the error of his epoch: the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century had despised the Roman and the Gothic; they had ridiculed them and called them barbaric; the nineteenth century, while flattering itself that it appreciated them, did still worse--it restored them.

The romantic writers of the Schools of Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo had exalted the art of the Middle Ages, but chiefly because of their hatred of the classic and without understanding its true worth. What struck them, especially, was the immensity and the picturesqueness of the buildings, the luxuriousness of this stone vegetation, but not the unique character of their architecture and sculpture.

Victor Hugo was perhaps one of the few to discover the precise explanation of this beauty: relief and modeling. This all-powerful writer, this architect of words who constructed poems like cathedrals, understood the plastic intelligence of the master masons because he himself possessed the _sense of mass_. One is convinced of this not only in reading his descriptions of cities and monuments, but in studying those astonishing pen-and-ink drawings which he multiplied in idle moments.

If the romanticists have failed fully to explain medieval art to us, let us still be grateful to them: they gave our cathedrals back to us, they denounced ignorance and scourged the stupidity that would have ended by tearing down those sublime piles. Finally if the writers and art critics of this epoch have not given them superlative praise, if on their behalf they have not burned with apostolic zeal, it is because it was necessary for this prophecy of art to come from a man of the craft, a man dominated, captivated, himself, by the craft, a man who understood stone and adored it because he had married it in spirit with all its difficulties and its dazzling possibilities.

That man was to be Rodin. Although he has been listened to by the ignorant and superficial multitude, it has not been chiefly because of the authority of his genius, of the general renown that he has enjoyed. He has truly thrown a new light over the mystery of Gothic construction. Thanks to him, we understand in a measure, for tangible reasons, the reasons of an actual carver, this "world in little" that constitutes the Gothic cathedrals. What study, what researches are necessary in order to comprehend the art of stonework! Does any one suppose that Rodin himself has attained this in a day? By no means. That lover of perfection in detail does not possess the instantly penetrating glance that is often the property of genius: to the task of deciphering our monuments he brought that slow-minded, customary patience of his, together with his energy. He had first of all to rid himself of the false current ideas. After that thirty years of observation were necessary for him to reach conclusions that satisfied his artistic conscience. Even to-day he is far from affirming that he has understood everything, that he has grasped the full significance of the Gothics. Read his book, "The Cathedrals of France," published in 1914; observe the carefullness of his judgments, the gropings of his thought, the constant retracing of his steps. He makes attempts, ventures; he never proclaims his opinion in the peremptory tone dear to specialists in criticism, but endeavors to approach respectfully, as closely as possible, to the spirit of the masters. Sometimes a flash of genius springs from his brain and illumines to the depths of its mysteries the Gothic universe; but nothing is suggested that does not spring from a prolonged observation, and when at last he speaks it is in the tone of a man who mistrusts himself. It must be confessed that in this work, "The Cathedrals of France," something is lacking, even though it is prefaced by a long and very learned introduction by one of our good writers, Charles Morice. It lacks the magnificent lesson that the reader will find in these pages, signed with Rodin's name. This lesson constitutes really a vital page that is, as it were, the key and the summary of the whole work; but the master, having given me the first rights in it, had scruples, as had Charles Morice, about including it in his own book.

Before obtaining this page, with what insistence did I have to question Rodin not once, not twice, but twenty times, during the course of a number of years. Every time he came back from one of his pilgrimages to some old city of the provinces, to our churches, our town halls, I renewed my questions without receiving any satisfactory answer. In my heart I could not but honor this rigorous honesty which was unwilling to venture anything lightly on so vast, so noble a subject.

In 1877, after having accomplished his first tour of France, he came back filled with wonder. But the impression that he carried with him was still confused; he did not know at what point to begin the analytical study of French architecture, for in what concerned sculpture he had immediately been struck with amazement and adoration before the essential beauty of the status of Chartres, Amiens, and Rheims. He had returned from Italy haunted by the antique and Michelangelo, and now here he was haunted by the modeling and the rhythm of the Gothic figures.

But in order to understand them entirely he had to rediscover this modeling and these movements in nature, he had to verify them in the living model. Fortune favors those who seek greatly. When one is the victim of an idea unexpected elements arise to nourish and develop it. One day two Italians knocked at the door of his studio. One of them, a professional model, had already posed for Rodin and he introduced the other, his comrade. He was a peasant from the Abruzzi who had come to seek his fortune in Paris. He was fresh from his native province. His robust body, his fierce head, his bristling beard and hair, and above all his expression of indomitable force charmed the artist. He undressed, climbed upon the model's stand, planted himself firmly on his legs, which were spread like a compass, the head well raised, and, continuing to talk, advanced with a gesture full of ardor.

Rodin, struck by this wild energy, immediately set to work. He made the man such as he saw him; he desired to capture this movement of the legs, this brusk forward movement that complemented the movement of the arms, the shining eyes, the open mouth. He surrendered himself to a great study, without any preconceived idea, without any intention of treating a _subject_. What he made was _a man walking_. The name has stuck to the figure. The first study remains incomplete; Rodin has sculptured neither the head nor the arms; what he sought eagerly, passionately, was the equilibrium of the torso and of the legs cast forward into space. He succeeded; he made a superb fragment, "The Man Walking." Thirty years later it occurred to a group of his admirers to ask the state to acquire this study and erect it in the court of the French embassy at Rome, in the Farnese Palace; but the official architects up to the present time have objected to the erection of this statue, and for the last seven or eight years it has awaited, in some obscure shed, the good pleasure of these gentlemen.

Rodin, in the presence of his Italian peasant, had rediscovered, to his great joy as a seeker, the peculiar equipoise of the Gothic figures. In the antique statues the plumb-line falls through one of the legs, while the other, lightly raised, impresses on the different planes of the body the graceful effect that has become classic. In Gothic statues, on the contrary, the line of equilibrium passes through the middle of the body and falls right between the two legs as they are planted on the earth.

In "The Age of Bronze" Rodin has adopted the balanced rhythm of Greek sculpture; in his new figure he passed to the Gothic equipoise, with a harmony that is less gracious, but with a reality stronger and more living. What he did not abandon was the rigorous construction and the strength of modeling which his study of the antique had given him. "The Man Walking," as well as the greater part of his subsequent works, thus exhibits the union of the two great principles of sculpture that have governed the Occidental genius.

Rodin, strengthened by study, now made a complete statue with head and arms. While he was working he discovered that his model was half a savage, still close to the animal and its ferocious instincts. Sometimes his eyes burned, his jaws, armed with powerful teeth, were thrust forward as if to bite something; he resembled a wolf. At other times a kind of strange passion inflamed him. His face radiated faith and will; he spoke with such energy that he seemed to be haranguing a crowd; one would have thought him a prophet of the primitive ages, a visionary bursting forth from the desert to preach and to convert the people. Rodin regarded him in amazement. It was no longer his model, but a man from the Bible; surely it was a prophet that stood before him: it was Saint John the Baptist brought back to life. The sculptor bowed before the command of nature: his statue should bear the name of the forerunner.

He thought at first of emphasizing the disturbing impression: he placed on the shoulders of Saint John a simple cross. But here was revealed the all-powerful instinct of the sculptor, making the subject, the anecdote, the literary connotation a matter of secondary importance. The cross, the sublime symbol, would be here only an accessory, not really needed. It would complicate the simplicity of line dictated by the laws of sculpture, destroying the appositions of equilibrium of the great body and distracting the attention from that speaking head.

So Rodin gave it up. He came at last to the decision that his work should remain free from what was not of the very essence of art. He sent it off in the form in which it appeared in the Salon of 1880, adding also "The Age of Bronze."

The artists, the true artists, those whose enthusiasm was not poisoned by envy and jealousy, applauded these two superb figures artistically so different, but so similar in their sincerity; they acclaimed them with the grave joy of generous souls who perceive the dawn of a great talent. The name of Rodin became fixed forever in their memory.

As for the jury of this Salon, it considered it sufficient to award the "Saint John the Baptist" and "The Age of Bronze" a medal _of the third class_. Let us, in turn, give it our reward--the reward for its insensitiveness--by not disclosing the names of the sages who composed it.

"THE GATE OF HELL"

While finishing these works, which he was not even certain of being able to sell, Rodin was still compelled to provide for his own subsistence and that of his family; he had also to meet the expenses of his trade. A costly trade! It requires a studio, models, large fires to keep them warm, clay, tools of every kind. It was luck enough if the sculptor, still unknown, was able to have plaster casts made of his work. But this did not satisfy him; he dreamed of seeing them take on a new aspect in the richness of marble and bronze. Alas! in many cases he had to wait until middle age to have this dream realized. Rodin has never complained of the slowness of fortune. He knows that in order to attain the fullness of his productive power it is well for the artist to be thwarted, exalted by difficulties, the desire to conquer. After a five-years' stay in Belgium he had returned to Paris to take part in the work of the World Exposition of 1878, and he had taken a position with the ornament-worker Legrain, in whose workshop he met Jules Desbois, the future great sculptor, to whom he became attached for life. What innumerable decorations he executed at that time--decorations which disappeared like the leaves and flowers of the season when the stucco palaces of the exposition vanished! Only the masks ornamenting the Palais du Trocadéro remained.

At the same time he accumulated busts, studies, large figures with a fury of work which from then on was to resemble that of the most powerfully productive minds, the fecundity of a Rubens, of a Balzac, of a Michelet, of a Hugo. In the studios which he rented in the Faubourg St. Jacques, from 1877 to 1883, besides the "Saint John the Baptist," he executed the admirable little tough model of the "Monument Commemorating the National Defense"; after his wife, whose characterful features and naturally tragic countenance he had often reproduced, he made a helmeted bust, a "Bellona." He exhibited three life-sized figures: "The Creation of Man"; "Adam," since destroyed; and "Eve," the bronze of which did not appear until the Salon of 1899. He did the busts of W.E. Henley; the painter Jean-Paul Laurens (to mention some of the most beautiful), Carrier-Belleuse, the etcher Alphonse Legros, all in the midst of difficulties and injustices which did not in any way disturb the depths of his serenity, the noble tranquillity of the artisan sure of attaining his end by labor. Is it possible to-day to believe that the model of the "Monument of the Defense" was not only refused, but was not even classed among the thirty designs that were retained by the jury of 1880 after the first choice had been made? This same jury, the composition of which is also worthy of passing into history, decided on a solemn confection by M. Barrias for the _prix de Rome_, the result of which was that four years later its creator was elected a member of the Academy of Fine Arts.

I do not know whether many collectors contend for reproductions of M. Barrias's monstrous design for a clock; but Rodin's group, a wounded soldier entirely enveloped by the wings of a prodigious figure of a warrior goddess crying out for aid, which was later renamed "The Genius of the Defense" or "The Appeal to Arms," and which has acquired to-day so pathetic a character of actuality, is coveted by most of the museums and art collectors of Europe and America.

As if these works, which have since acquired such glory, were nothing but fragments of secondary importance, Rodin attacked a great piece of work, like those that used to be executed in the great ages of art: he undertook the famous "Gate of Hell."

At the time of the affair of "The Age of Bronze" there was at the head of the ministry of fine arts, an under-secretary of state named Edmond Turquet. To him fell the task of deciding in the last resort the case of Rodin. M. Edmond Turquet was a brilliant lawyer who had become _procureur_ under the empire, which did not altogether qualify him for the part of director of fine arts under the republic. In the field of art he knew no more than any one else, Rodin says; but he was a very fair-minded man, and his honesty had the effect of quickly straightening out the affair of the sculptor. In his genuine desire to atone for the wrong done to Rodin in the eyes of public opinion he not only offered to obtain for him a position in the porcelain factory at Sèvres, in order to assure him a regular livelihood, but ordered from him a great ornamental piece, a door destined for the Palais des Arts Décoratifs. In addition, by a special privilege created in favor of artists under Louis XIV,--a privilege the traditions of which the French Government has happily perpetuated,--M. Turquet granted Rodin a good studio in the Dépôt des Marbres, so that he could execute his order.

"And what will you represent on that door?" enquired the under-secretary of state.

"I am sure I don't know," replied the artist. "But I shall make a quantity of little figures; then no one will say that they are casts taken from the life."

Thus we find him at Sèvres, a ceramist; he has carried on so many different trades that he succeeds marvelously with this one. It was his task to decorate vases of delicate clay; he modeled light bas-reliefs, representations of mythological scenes, idylls. Nymphs, cupids, fauns, evoked by his miraculously delicate fingers, were born out of the milky, transparent material, bringing back to life the flowery graces of the drawing-room art of the eighteenth century, the dainty elegances of the wax figures of Clodion, but with a graver sense of the mystery of nature and of love.

Unfortunately, when these vases left the hand of the master they were overladen with hideous ornaments in the style of Louis-Philippe. Moreover, the officials at the head of the factory did not like them. They were carried up to the attics, they were left lying about on the floor, in the secret hope of seeing them broken by the feet of some careless or ill-willed workman.

The feeling of being isolated and misunderstood at times threw a shadow over the soul of the sculptor; but on the other hand he felt himself so strong, so solidly based in his will, in his self-confidence, and in the virtue of labor that these moments of depression passed away quickly. Besides, he knew the secret of the poor, the secret of creating happiness for oneself out of everything that the rich and powerful despise: a simple life, health, regular work, the contemplation of nature, and a few real friendships. Rodin earned at Sèvres only two or three francs an hour and lost a great deal of time on the railroad. What did it matter? He found pleasure and rest in these little journeys. Every day he set out from Paris by train, and, the day over, winter and summer, his wife came to meet him. They returned together on foot either along the banks of the Seine, charming in their profusion of little hills and islands, covered with meadows or fine trees, or through the woods of Meudon and Clamart, with their vistas of Paris, its heights, its buildings, its changing sky full of light and spirit.

At the end of four years of opposition and annoyance Rodin gave up pottery in order to consecrate himself wholly to his own work. The museum of the factory preserves a vase signed by him, and the future Musée de l'Hôtel Biron can show a second example. What has become of the others? What price would not be paid for them to-day by admirers of the master?

These supplementary works did not turn him away from his essential task; whatever were the technical means employed, his efforts tended toward one unique end, the plastic quality, and he gave himself up desperately to this search in executing his new order, the "Gate."

Rising at four in the morning, as he had done in his youth, he studied the plans and the details of this great work. He had announced a series of little figures. How was he to group them? What visions surged in the sculptor's imagination? Of what legendary theme, what theme of history or poetry, should he make use in order to realize his program? He had never ceased to be a passionate reader. He read especially the Greek poets and dramatists, the Roman historians, the old French chronicles, Dante, Shakspere, Victor Hugo, and Baudelaire. He did not wish to draw the subject of his future work from Homer, Æschylus or Sophocles; the School of the Beaux-Arts had so abused the theme of the antique, already immortalized by Greek sculptors, that it had entirely lost its freshness. The moderns attracted him less, but he was obsessed by the work of the great poet of the Renaissance, by the "Divine Comedy" of Dante. He had read and reread it and made a sort of commentary in the form of innumerable sketches which he jotted down mornings and evenings at table, while walking, stopping by the wayside to dash off attitudes and gestures on the leaves of his note-book. He rediscovered in the poem of Dante the fateful grandeur of the Greek dramas, but with an atmosphere more modern, closer to ourselves, more mournfully familiar to our anguishes and our torments. The idea took shape in his imagination, "that imagination ceaselessly rumbling and groaning like a forge"; it exalted his bold spirit. Genius joins to the richness of the intellect the simplicity of heart that creates faith. Genius _believes_ ever more than it _thinks_. It has the strength which succeeds in anything, and it possesses also that supreme gift, the ingenuousness of the child who doubts nothing. Rodin believed the poem of Dante as if he had lived it, as Dante himself believed in Vergil. What a magnificent homage great men render to one another in this credulity of genius toward genius!