Part 16

The gestation of this work was accompanied by a thousand miseries. The committee of the Société des Gens de Lettres incessantly demanded the "Balzac"; they were dumfounded before the extraordinary figure that was shown to them, before this white phantom the conception of which was so utterly the reverse of all current ideas. Not knowing what to say, they insisted that it should be modified and urged haste upon Rodin, whose extraordinary dexterity became slowness itself when it was a question of putting the final touches upon a great work. The press began to take note of the affair. He himself became troubled and nervous. With what transports would he have left it, fled, gone away to rest and to dream of something else for a few weeks! The time of the Salon was approaching. Quite suddenly he made his decision, gave the clay to be cast, and ordered an enlargement. The statue was brought back to him at the Dépôt des Marbres, in the rue de l'Université; it was twice as large as the original model. It was placed in the garden that stretched out in front of the studio. He examined it as it rose against the depths of the open sky and the bright spring light. It was as if he had never seen it, and suddenly his mind was illuminated. The work was grand, simple, strong; the essential modeling was there, and the details they had exhorted him to add would only have diminished its unsurpassable unity.

Rodin had made up his mind. He sent his "Balzac" to the Salon.

Immediately there was war. The press, worked upon by the committee of the Société des Gens de Lettres, was unfavorable in advance. On the day of the opening of the Salon the word was passed around, and the official art world _s'esclaffe_. There was a crowd at the foot of the lofty image, near which Rodin took up his position, calm according to his wont, and talked quietly with his friends. Some, a very few, told him how they admired this work so proudly offered, so strange in its banal surroundings.

The next day the press broke forth. What an uproar! Everything went off at once: the heavy artillery of the great newspapers scolded solemnly, the light artillery crackled in the political sheets, and the grape-shot of the minor papers spat their rage, only too happy for so rich a prey to cut to pieces. The Institute, as might have been foreseen, fanned the conflagration. The public, excited, in turn broke loose, in the fury of ignorance stirred up against knowledge.

It became a "case," an affair, the _affaire de Balzac_. The committee of the Société des Gens de Lettres mobilized; by a vote of eleven to four it declared that it "did not recognize the writer in the statue of M. Rodin." The president of the same society, the poet Jean Aicard, refused the chance of immortality which this stupidity was to confer upon his colleagues and flung his resignation in their faces. A group of members of the municipal council of Paris decreed that it would be ridiculous to accord "this block" a place in one of the squares of the city. For two months music-halls and café-concerts vented every evening the wit of the gutter on the scandalous statue and its sculptor; peddlers sold caricatures of it in plaster, Balzac being represented as a heap of snow or as a seal. In short, such was the event that it required nothing but the pen of Aristophanes to note down the harmonies of this chorus of frogs. The health of Rodin suffered a reaction from his long effort and from this battle. Then, too, there are hours when the strongest are seized with nausea before the bad faith and the stupidity of people. Nervous, his mind aching, a prey to insomnia, the master offered a melancholy spectacle, that beautiful serenity of his destroyed and his working strength put in jeopardy.

"For all that," says M. Léon Riotor, who tells the story with eloquence, "Rodin had a wonderful awakening. All the young world of letters rose up to declare its sympathy with the vanquished in this new skirmish. A number of painters and sculptors joined in. And the protest that was circulated came back covered with signatures."

No, Rodin was not vanquished. He retired for a moment from the mêlée to recover and to meditate in peace, but without deviating by a single step from his line of conduct. A collector offered to buy the "Balzac." A group of intellectuals started a public subscription; funds flowed in. Although he was not yet wealthy, Rodin courteously declined these offers, and, declaring that "an artist, like a woman, has to guard his honor," decided to withdraw his monument from the Salon and not have it erected anywhere.

The epic statue was transported to Meudon, and placed in the garden of the villa. In its loftiness it imposes itself against the sky, against the hills, against the trees that surround it, with the quality of nature herself. Like a gigantic pole it triumphs in the open air. It is specially on clear nights that its disturbing authority strikes the soul. The great phantom appears then formidable in the extreme simplicity of its planes, which, as in strong architecture, distribute over large spaces the masses of shadow and light. The American painter Steichen has passed nights in this enchanted garden in order to take of the "Balzac" photographs that are more beautiful than engravings. Haughty, with a ferocious majesty in the moonlight, the master of the "Comédie Humaine" brings his soul face to face with nature; he listens to its silence, he sounds its mysteries, he questions it in mute dialogue, the like of which has not been heard since the colloquy of _Hamlet_ with the shade of his father. For it is of _Hamlet_, of the most profound symbolization of the human spirit wrestling with the unknown, that one dreams before this meditating Balzac, alone, under the nocturnal light. This is what Rodin has known how to make out of that short, thick-set man who was the author of the "Etudes Philosophiques"; this is how he has lighted the fires of the intelligence on the mask of genius.

It is at the Musée Rodin that we shall rediscover this statue. Time will have progressed, and ideas also. When they see it anew, how many people will be astounded at having formerly scoffed at the work and offended the master, struck dumb and secretly humiliated at having thus contributed to the writing of the hundred thousandth chapter of that endless book, the book of human stupidity.

THE EXPOSITION OF 1900--THE BAS-RELIEFS OF EVIAN--RODIN AND THE WAR

In 1899, Rodin exhibited a large part of his work at Brussels and in Holland. The effect produced upon artists and upon the cultivated portion of the public was such that he resolved to repeat this experiment at the Universal Exposition of Paris.

It was foreordained that nothing should be easy for the great toiler, that it would be necessary for him to conquer everything through effort and struggle.

The administration of the Exposition, which had granted innumerable requests for space addressed to it by the industrialists and business men of the whole world, by bar-keepers, itinerant booth-holders, and managers of café-concerts, raised a thousand difficulties when it was a question of according a few feet of ground to the greatest of living sculptors. It required all the insistence of his most devoted and powerful friends to gain his point. Rodin finally received the authorization to construct a pavilion not in the Exposition itself, but outside the grounds in the place de l'Alma.

Once again, so much the better. How much finer for a man of the élite to stand aside from the rout!

According to the master's plan, there was erected a hall simple in appearance, elegant, reservedly in the Louis XVI style, a veritable repose for the eye strained by the strident architecture of the great fair of 1900. There were assembled the people of his sculpture.

Once more Rodin experienced an hour of trial, a formidable hour. If for the last dozen years he had left poverty behind, he had not yet achieved wealth, and it was a great risk to assume the expenses of his exhibition. If these expenses were not covered by the entrance-fees and the sale of his sculpture, how would he come out? He would be forced to a kind of transaction that he had always spurned, he would have to turn over all or part of his work to the art dealers. These groups, these busts, so painstakingly cast, or cut in the most beautiful marble by excellent workmen, and often by renowned sculptors, once the dealers had acquired rights in them, would they not be duplicated in a quantity of replicas of mediocre workmanship or, worse, reproduced by undiscriminating stone-cutters, who would disfigure the modeling and the character? The idea was odious to the scrupulous sculptor. He had reached the age of sixty, and if he did not show it, thanks to the vigor of his temperament and the persistent youth that goes with great minds, it was not less painful for him to put his apprehensions to the test. Too dignified, too proud, to give way to vain lamentations, he made only the most reserved references to his ordeal.

The success of the exhibition remained uncertain during the first weeks: many people hoped it would be a failure. At the end of a month or two, visitors from abroad, to whom thanks be given, began to pour in; the principal museums of Europe wished to possess some important figure of Rodin's. Soon the number of purchasers increased day by day, and I do not have to mention here how many art-lovers from the United States decided to enrich their collections with some rare piece signed by the master. In short, during the latter months Rodin had the joy of perceiving that he could remain the sole possessor of his work, that nothing could now separate him from his dear family of bronze and marble. It was happiness for him; it signalized also the great glory that comes with outstretched wing, bringing fortune with it.

The pretty pavilion in the place de l'Alma was transported and reërected in the garden at Meudon, and he filled it with masterpieces. Since then the whole world of art and literature and that portion of the political world that esteems art has passed through it. The French aristocracy and that of England, the most eminent personages of the two Americas, have been eager to visit it. One receives in it an impression at once grand and touching, giving one the highest idea of the supremacy of intellectual valor above the other goods of this world when one perceives the contrast of these artistic treasures with the altogether modest little house, almost bare, attended by a single servant, where Rodin continues, in the midst of the luxury of an epoch intoxicated with pleasures, to maintain the simplicity of his life in the sober company of his old single-spirited, faithful-hearted wife. This impression I never felt more vividly than on the occasion of the visit of the late King of England. Edward VII, like others, had conceived the desire to render this homage to French art. The day before, when I encountered the master in Paris, he said to me, without further explanation, "Come and have a look at the studio."

It was a beautiful afternoon in May. When I entered the pavilion, I could not restrain a cry of admiration. Marbles, nothing but marbles, of a dazzling whiteness! He had brought together all that he possessed, all those that his friends and the purchasers of his work had consented to lend him for the occasion, and one would have said that it was these groups of young, enlaced bodies, these busts of women, with their transparent, rosy flesh, that gave forth the light with which the apartment was filled. It was a unique vision, a vision which, in its purity and its unity, surpassed in delicate splendor that of the most celebrated collections, with all their accumulation of pictures, tapestries, bronze, and jewels. I wondered in silence; I wondered at the sure taste of the artist, but I wondered also at his will: everything of him was there. Who can deny that it was necessary for him to put pressure on himself to decide on such a choice, to sacrifice the bronzes, the sketches, the terra cottas, and many charming pieces? Nothing but marble, the kingdom of marble, but also that of life; for the sumptuous material trembled and palpitated under the play of the light that entered through the bay-windows of the atelier, bringing with it the soft brilliance of the season.

Since the Exposition of 1900, Rodin's reputation has increased steadily in France and abroad. England and Italy have organized triumphal receptions for him of a sort reserved hitherto for the most illustrious men of state. The artists of London have acclaimed him, and have charged him, on the death of Whistler, with the presidency of the International Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers. Oxford University has given him a doctorate. The municipality of Rome has greeted him with special homage at the capitol; the court of Greece, having invited him, awaits his visit; at Prague, where he was received by the Society of Young Czech Artists, they accorded him royal honors, the public unharnessing the horses from his carriage and applauding at the same time the personal genius of this great Frenchman and the free ideas of his country.

Without altering in any way his life of labor, which these tributes have at times slightly interfered with, he has permitted himself only one luxury as the result of his fortune--a collection of antiques. This he has formed with passion. It is, once more, for purposes of study, and what a study, to possess a few of these sublime fragments, to feel them and handle them under all aspects of light! Rodin has placed a certain number of them in his garden, arranging them among the trees, among the shrubs; he has placed them on the fresh grass, where they seem to live in another and a happier way than in the rooms of museums. At a stroke the little garden at Meudon, with its pedestals, its statues, with its grove where a charming little marble, the "Sleeping Cupid," reposes, has become like the villa of a Roman citizen of the time of Augustus.

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The art of Rodin has in a certain measure shown the effect of these happy events. During these latter years he has grown calm; he displays a serenity of spirit and a self-possession that increases day by day. But if the struggle in his composition has been tranquilized, his workmanship has grown freer. The sculptor's effort concentrates itself now in the search for a modeling ever more ample and suppler, which with him constitutes a new and decisive manner. It is to this that we owe those exquisite marbles, "Psyche Bearing the Lamp," "Benedictions," "The Young Girl and the Two Genii," "Romeo and Juliet," "The Fall of Icarus." This has been the epoch also of the busts of Mrs. Simpson and the proud and handsome George Wyndham, the English statesman. It is the epoch, finally, of the "Monument to President Sarmiento," which offers at the same time, in happy opposition, the two most recent and most characteristic methods of Rodin. The bronze statue of the great Argentine statesman has an aspect at once romantic and realistic that recalls that of "The Burghers of Calais," and the marble pedestal that supports it, a vanquishing Apollo emerging from the clouds all luminous with youth and glory, belongs to the latest period. Of this monument, ordered by the city of Buenos Aires, France does not possess a replica, though the model has been preserved. The Musée Rodin will soon contain a duplicate.

From 1901 to 1906 there was an uninterrupted creation of figures and of portraits, among them the busts of Sir Howard Walden, Berthelot, Gustave Geffroy, Mme. Hunter, and Bernard Shaw.

One must add the myriad drawings that Rodin has never ceased to execute. The will to sustain his eye and his hand instead of permitting them to become weakened with age has become a passion with him. He draws as a writer thinks. He thinks pencil in hand; his drawings are aphorisms. Line-sketches, stump-drawings, water-colors in strange tints multiply themselves like the leaves of a tree and quite constitute alone a complete work. The master has sold and given away quantities of them, yet; nevertheless, the Musée will contain more than three thousand. I have been honored with the charge of counting them over and classifying them. After days of this work one has a sensation of dazzlement, as I have discovered, before this accumulation of toil and beauty.

The most precious of these drawings are the most recent. The study of light has been carried in these to the supreme nuances. More and more Rodin detests what is black, what is hard, what is dry. He adores, on the other hand, that which is supple, enveloped, drowned in the light mist of the atmosphere. He conceives everything through an almost imperceptible veil which softens the contours, and which he discerns with an eye that grows every day more sensitive. His sculpture has followed the same path. In the greater part of his marbles he has pursued the effects of mass and of the ensemble in what concerns the volumes and the effects of gradation, the study of the diminutions of light in what concerns the coloring. The color that obtains uniquely in the art of shadow and light is the charm of beautiful sculpture. Rodin thus captures the variations with a competence that ravishes our eyes, accustomed to the dryness of limits that are too distinct. It is in the reliefs entitled "The Seasons" that Rodin has attained the apogee of this science of luminous modeling.

These works, executed for La Sapinière, the estate of Baron Vitta at Evian, comprise three high-reliefs fashioned on a gate and two fountain basins, or monumental garden urns. They are cut in the stone of the Estaillade, a white stone the richness of grain and delicate golden tone of which make it unsurpassable for the interpretation of the human body. They were exhibited for a short time in February, 1905, at the Musée du Luxembourg, on the initiative of M. Léon Bénédite, the very accomplished curator and critic of art, who arranged them with perfect taste. But far from being embraced and vindicated, as he would be now by the present administration of fine arts, Rodin was still regarded as a revolutionist whose example could neither be followed nor trusted.

This was made quite plain to the audacious curator who decided quite by himself to exhibit the latest works of the master before their departure for Evian. After this _coup d'état_ he was for several years the victim of attacks from academic circles, and underwent, on the part of the Government, a sort of disgrace. Since then he has been brilliantly compensated, and to-day he has been placed in charge of the installation of the Musée Rodin at the Hôtel Biron, a great work in which I have the happiness to be his collaborator.

The decorative designs of the villa of Evian adorn the vestibule of the home of Baron Vitta. "Their subject," says M. Bénédite, in an excellent notice which served as a catalogue for the Exhibition of 1905, "if one wishes to speak of the motive that serves as their pretext, is the most banal in the world. One would find it difficult to count the number of times that it has served artists since antiquity. So true it is that the commonest, the most general, the most seemingly worn-out themes are those in which the great artists find themselves the most at home. Without difficulty they renew them, and stamp them unforgettably with their own peculiar mark. Rodin has calmly returned to the four seasons, confident that they would bear without effort the impress of his personality and his time and that they would suffice to express his whole conception of beauty and of life."

Rodin has figured "The Seasons" under the aspect of four sleeping women. Their beautiful forms model themselves in the warm-tinted stone, which itself seems animated with the reflections of the living flesh. Their mysterious sleep evokes the successive phases of the year. Now it marks the quietude of the earth, full of the joy of yielding up her flowers and her fruits under the caresses of the sun, now it is death revealing itself through a nature tormented with the heavy travail of generation. In the "Spring" it is a young body that lies voluptuously under a rose-bush the fragrant petals of which are mingled with her own flesh, enveloping her in the dream of their perfume. In the "Autumn," the sleeper crouches close to the ground under the fruits and the vine-leaves, oppressed by the intoxicating aroma. The "Winter" presses her chilled limbs closely against the cavities of the denuded earth, while above her the roots of the trees enlace themselves intricately, like sacred serpents charged with protecting her slumber. The "Summer" is a siesta upon the bosom of a Nature _en fête_, lulled by the golden sounds of harvest balanced on the breeze and the murmur of a spring that pours forth freshness and quietude.

But in what, you ask, resides the originality of these decorative commonplaces, their brilliant, unquestionable originality? In the deliberate simplicity, in the spirit of sobriety that has presided over their composition, and, above all, in their execution. It is through their execution that the sculptures of Evian occupy a place apart in the work of Rodin. Since the beautiful Greek epoch, stone has perhaps never assumed such a living sweetness under any human hand. One might believe that it had not been touched by the steel of the chisel, but caressed by a touch as delicate as it is firm, molded like wax under the warmth of that hand. These mellow figures do not detach themselves from the living framework in which they are set; they stand out, thanks to an insensible transition which leaves them enveloped, in the reflections of the fair material; they mass themselves under a sifted light, among the flowers and the clusters of grapes. With all this there is no insipidity. Under the skin one feels the plenitude of bodies rich with health, harmonious organisms: it is a force that has found its equilibrium, a force relaxing in sweetness. Strangely enough, when one seeks for antecedents to which it is possible to relate the reliefs of Evian, it is not in the domain of sculpture, but in that of painting, that one finds the terms of comparison. The intense power, carefully measured as it is, of this vibrant modeling and this color drenched in sunlight we find again among the tenderest creations of Correggio, of Rubens, and, closer to ourselves, of Renoir.

The two jardinières which complete this unique series represent groups of children mad with joy and with liberty; in the one case playing and jostling one another in a field of wheat, in the midst of the moving sea of spears, and in the other, spread out on the green summer grass, rapturously holding up in their little arms, already robust, the grapes heavy with wine. They are exquisite fantasies of movement, of grace, of mad life just beginning. Here, too, the flesh of these little laughing gods, melting in the mass of ripe corn and tottering vines, seems bathed in the clearness of a beautiful day, full of air and of light.

These five works of the old age of the master might be entitled the "Poem of Youth." It is the privilege of genius to return, in its decline, to its point of departure, to remount to the sources of life, which remain ever the most intoxicating. The sensations of infancy and adolescence solicit him with all their unforgettable seductiveness, and he surrenders himself lovingly to the sweetness of this lost dream; but it has cost him his entire, existence to acquire the gift of translating it.