Part 17

This search for the envelopment of forms fruitful of new effects is the decisive point in the career of Rodin; it is the supreme thought, the end and aim of sixty years of toil and reflection. Therefore it is a very happy thing for French sculpture that Rodin has been able to live long enough to realize completely this definitive conception of his art. For from the summit attained by him other artists can spring forth afresh, to renew once more perhaps the manifestations of the national genius. The resources indicated by Rodin have hardly been used hitherto; to bring them fully into employment meanwhile there will perhaps be born a new school of sculpture.

What constitutes the originality of a great artist is that it is never isolated. It belongs at once to the past, to the present, and to the future; it is altogether a derivative and a root. It springs from the past through atavism, through study, and through admiration for the masters; it is of the present through contact with those of the artist's contemporaries who march at the same time with him along the road of discovery; finally, it influences the future by bequeathing to the generations that follow a new conception and new methods. To-day we see clearly the sources from which have come the ultimate aspect of the talent of Rodin. They are the art of Greece; they are also certain marvels of Gothic art in which miraculously reblossomed the Hellenic suppleness and sweetness, as if the springs of the Greek genius had mysteriously coursed under the earth from Athens to France, bursting forth at last in the walls of our cathedrals; then there are those unfinished marbles of Michelangelo from which Rodin derived the idea of vapor and flow in sculpture. But other artists have arrived, at about the same time, at the same end, or almost the same end, by different paths. Among these are two of our great painters, friends and comrades of Rodin, Renoir and Carrière. Does not this community of thought prove how profound is the vitality our country continues to possess in the domain of art? We are less struck by this phenomenon than when we verify its effects in the past, when we see them related and summed up in the history of art; because we are not in a position to disengage it from our present life, which is encumbered and complicated, and to draw a conclusion from it. And then, too, the present political régime does little to signalize the great artists, to muster them before the untutored admiration of the multitude, to give value to the intellectual wealth of the country. As a rule, when a man of genius receives the homage he deserves, it is when he is near his end, if it is not after his death. What public festivals have been given in France in this century to honor the glories of our artistic and scientific life, Victor Hugo excepted? When and how have we celebrated men like Puvis de Chavannes, Rodin, Renoir, Carrière, Claude Monet, Besnard, Odilon Redon, and Bartholomé, to mention only masters of the chisel and the brush? Occasionally they have been gratified by the boredom of an official banquet, where they have been assigned a rank considerably lower than that of the least important politician, and they are expected to be thankful when they have had bestowed upon them a few parchments and some bits of ribbon. Fortunately, their joys are in another sphere, whither no one who is not their equal can follow them.

In their ardent effort toward a similar end, then, it is necessary to associate Rodin, Renoir, and Carrière. All three, for that matter, have mutually admired and even influenced one another. Whether in the course of their work or in their conversations, one cannot deny that the attempt of the Impressionist School, which consists precisely in not separating the being or the object from its atmosphere, in prolonging its life in the life of that which envelopes it, really succeeds only in the work of these masters. They have, if not recreated, at least broadened the law of the distribution of shadow and of light in their intricate fusion. Certainly others had already manifested and realized similar ways of seeing things, according to their various temperaments, such men as Fantin-Latour and Henner in the study of the human figure and Claude Monet in landscape. But, except for Monet, no one affirms them with the authority of a Rodin, a Carrière, a Renoir. If Carrière, too early interrupted by a cruel death, is a tragic, a somber genius, a genius of the Gothic line, which in him does not exclude great sweetness, Renoir and Rodin, in their maturity, are happy geniuses, masters of young beauty and of a serenity which art has scarcely known since ancient Greece. A like sentiment of serenity, a like aspiration for harmonious unity, therefore a closer contact with nature, bring them together.

This serenity, this aspiration for unity, Rodin and Renoir have sought during their whole life, and it is in the radiant works of their old age that it triumphs. The genius of form and its union with the universal has been the master thought, the plastic ideal, which their fraternal minds have realized simultaneously by different methods.

"With Rodin a style begins," said Octave Mirbeau twenty years ago. The phrase stirred up a tempest. All the time that has passed since then has been required to make people admit its truth. The great writer might have said with more exactitude, but with less force, "With Rodin style itself has begun anew."

Will it continue? It has never entirely ceased to exist, even if it has no longer the force of expansion with which, from France and through her, it spread through all Europe. Will it begin again with its vigor as of old? The question touches those problems raised by the events that are to-day overturning the world and also the profound modifications which the war will bring.

The master gives us his opinion on this matter in a few words, circumspect and measured, as he himself always is. How could he be otherwise before the formidable unknown that still hides from us the next turn of destiny? It is fitting, then, to leave him the last word on this subject. Fortunately his word has the warm ring of hope.

This hope he draws in a measure from himself, from his own strength, which is, he feels, a distinct outgrowth of the national strength, of the unconquerable soul of our ancestors; he draws it also from the consciousness of a task accomplished in the face of the hard blows of life; and finally from the promise of the artistic youth of the country, of that which belongs to his school. For if with two or three exceptions he has not directly formed pupils, his artistic principles, his faith in the virtue of character and labor, supported by the example of an unequaled body of work, have given him innumerable disciples. The lesson which he offers us and which will soon be offered to all at the museum in the Hôtel Biron, will endure for centuries. He says himself justly, with pride and modesty, that this museum will form a true home of education.

* * * * *

A few words more about this life which in the fecundity of its unexpected incidents remains for the attentive witness profoundly significant to the very end.

At the moment when the war of 1914 broke out, the master was in his villa at Meudon. When the German armies approached Paris, he thought of leaving his home. He had excited great admiration in the land of Schiller and Goethe, he had been urged to take part in numerous expositions there; but he had quite special reasons for knowing that his work, were it to fall into their hands, would not be spared by the soldiers from beyond the Rhine. Overwhelmed by the terrifying surprise of the invasion, he did not know where to go.

As he had many friends in England, I offered to guide him there. He therefore crossed the channel, accompanied by his wife, the companion of his good and evil days. It was without a word of bitterness that he set out, without expressing a regret for all that he was leaving behind him. Before the immensity of the national misfortune he seemed to have completely forgotten the menace that hung over the work of his whole life. In the train that carried us by night to one of the French ports, he said in his clear and always tranquil voice: "Yes, I am leaving much behind me. It is the work of an entire life that will disappear, perhaps." That was all. This attitude of an old exiled king inspired a respect free from all compassion.

The fate of his collection of antiques caused him more disquietude.

"If they take them, that is nothing; they will still exist. But if they break them! They will have destroyed what is irreplaceable."

He did not wish to remain in London. Too many relationships would have hindered him from collecting himself and from preserving that dignity of solitude, that reserve of a refugee which was proper to his situation. He preferred to accompany us to a small country town, where for six weeks he lived a modest life, very retired, interested only, but passionately interested, in the reading of English newspapers, which we translated for him.

When we apprised him of the burning of Rheims Cathedral, he replied with a laugh of incredulity. For two days he refused to believe it. It seemed to him an invention of the press designed to stir the public and increase recruiting. At last, convinced, he said, with inexpressible sadness: "The biblical times have come back again, the great invasions of the Medes and the Persians. Has the world, then, reached the point where it deserves to be punished for the egotistical epicureanism in which it has slumbered?" After this he became absorbed in his own thoughts.

The Battle of the Marne, in saving France and the world, saved also that little temple of art, the museum at Meudon. Rodin, on his return from England, found it intact.

He took up his work again, without a pause, with that unalterable patience of his--that patience of the peasant that turns him back to his field the moment the enemy has passed. He awaits there sadly the dawn of peace.

* * * * *

During the last months of the year 1916 the question of the Musée Rodin, broached five years ago, became again a living one; it was brought before the assembly. Certain of the master's adversaries who have not been calmed even by the events of the present affected a righteous indignation that the discussion of this question of art should at this moment have any place in the order of the day, and they tried to make people believe that it was he who had chosen this tragic hour for debates of this kind. Let us repeat that five years ago Rodin offered this gift to his country, and that the delay in settling the matter is imputable solely to the procrastination of public affairs.

On the day I write these lines the creation of the Musée Rodin has been determined upon. The two chambers have voted by a majority that proves that everything France contains in the way of cultivated intelligence desires to assure a home worthy of itself for the works of its greatest sculptor.

But before we have arrived there what other mishaps may not befall! It is too soon to write the history of the Musée Rodin. Its adventure is not less singular than all the others that have marked this long career, certain of which have been summed up in these pages. The more forceful the personality, the more it is in contradiction with the passions of the vulgar, the more are the incidents that spring up in the contact of these two opposite elements. It would require a whole volume to recount those that have punctuated the life of Rodin during these later years.

Despite the bitterness of the combat, the master has had nothing to complain of and does not complain. The outcome of his life-story is most beautiful, and if this beauty already strikes us, it is in the years to come that it will attain its full glory. For if the gesture with which Rodin offers to France his work and his dearest possessions is that of those who count in the annals of their country, no one perhaps has ever received such a homage as that which the country has bestowed upon him in the manner of accepting his gift. In the midst of war, in the very hour when the country is suffering unheard of evils, it has self-possession enough in the firmness of its indomitable soul to honor in a magnificent way the work of one of its sons--a work accomplished in time of peace. Turning its attention for an instant from the necessities of war, from the front where it struggles, suffers, and dies, it remains calm enough, sufficiently sure of itself, to offer to one of its heroes of toil, and of the thought which its soldiers defend, a testimony of its gratitude and admiration.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's Rodin: The Man and his Art, by Judith Cladel