Part 4

Rodin remained about five years with Carrier-Belleuse. What works his active hands accomplished there in a day! One still finds them in the shops of the sellers of bronzes, in the shops of the dealers of the Marais and the Faubourg St. Antoine. Certainly hundreds of examples were brought there, to the great profit of tradesmen, but to the injury of the artist; for he drew from them only such wages as the least competent workers are to-day content with.

One may see in the gallery of Mrs. ---- of New York certain little terra-cotta busts which date from that period. They represent pretty Parisian women in hats, whose wild locks veil glances full of spirit and roguishness. Creatures of youth and frivolity, they are sisters of the elegant ladies that Alfred Stevens drew with his delightful brush, and which were the charm of Paris under Napoleon III. Who could believe that they had sprung from the hands of Rodin, the austere creator of "The Burghers of Calais" and of the "Victor Hugo"?

But before becoming the audaciously personal genius that he now is, he was subjected to the most varied influences--influences that have been felt by the modern sculptors with whom he has worked and those that guided the old masters. He has none the less shielded himself from the world. He declares indeed, with the authority that permits the freedom, that originality signifies nothing; that that which counts is the quality of the intrinsic sculpture; that if the temperament of the artist is truly steadfast, he always finds himself after the necessary study; and finally that it is of little importance whether a statue bears the name of Praxiteles or that of one of his pupils. The essential thing is that it is well done, that it appears in a great epoch. Anonymous, it proclaims none the less to the eyes of the man of taste the signature of genius.

In order to live Rodin applied himself to the most varied occupations; thus he gained the liberty to labor at his own work for a few hours. He chipped at stone and marble for the benefit of sculpture to-day unknown, but then in vogue; he made sketches for trinkets for certain fashionable jewelers, and fashioned objects of decorative art ordered of him by manufacturers. Despite a considerable loss of time, he obtained thus a true apprenticeship in art wholly like that which in earlier days was obtained by Ghiberti, Donatello, and most of the great artists of, the Renaissance, who were proud to be good artisans before they were accounted great sculptors.

Thus finally he was enabled to realize his first dream--to have an atelier of his own. His atelier! It was a stable, at a rental of twenty-four dollars a year, in the rue Lebrun, in the quarter of the Gobelins, near which he was born. It was a cold hovel, a cave indeed, with a well sunk in an angle of one wall that at every season exhaled its chilling breath. It did not matter. The place was sufficiently large and well lighted. The artist, young and strong, and as happy as possible in his stable, felt his talent increasing. There he accumulated a quantity of studies and works until the place was so crowded that he could scarcely turn himself about; but being too poor to have them cast, he lost the greater part of them. Every day he spent hours moistening the cloths that enveloped them, yet not without suffering frightful disasters. Sometimes the clay, through being too soft, would settle and fall asunder; sometimes it would become dry, crack, and crumble. One day, in moving, the great figure of a bacchante that had been tenderly molded for months was seized by the rough hands of the furniture-movers, and broke, crashing to the ground. What lost efforts! What destroyed beauty! Even to-day when the artist speaks of it his heart bleeds anew.

At that time he carried about the ateliers of Paris a design to which he gave the name of "The Man with the Broken Nose." Struck by the curious face of an old shepherd, flat-nosed, with every appearance of a slave that had been crushed under heel, Rodin made a bust of the man and strove to portray the energy and imposing simplicity that had astonished him in the antique busts and the statue of "The Knife-Grinder" that he had seen in the galleries of the Louvre. The solidity of the design, the patience shown in the composition, and the strength of the details coöperated in producing an admirable whole. The wrinkles of the forehead, the creased eyelids, the deep furrows of the face converged toward the base of the broken nose in an expression of old age and hardship, presenting an admirable head of a Thessalian shepherd. Alas! one frosty day the clay contracted, and the skull of "The Man with the Broken Nose" fell to the ground, leaving only the face. Rodin did not make over the composition. Too honest to restore the skull by approximation, he contented himself with modeling the face, to-day become famous.

He cast it in plaster, and sent it to the Salon of 1864. There it was rejected. Thus the opposition that had closed the door of the Beaux-Arts against him was renewed at his first attempt to take rank among contemporary artists. The reason was the same; it will always and invariably be the same: this sculptor of the naked truth, this fervent lover of nature, offends, shocks, and wounds the majority of the followers of formulas, the imitators of the past, the makers of smooth and pretty wares, things without conscience or significance. The artist remains alone with his deception. The day has not yet come when enlightened amateurs can understand in which school true talent is to be found, when they are able to renounce the moldings on nature, the theatrical postures, the irritating silliness of figures a thousand times repeated.

They will some day learn to perceive truth, observation, strength, and grace. When that day comes they will throw out of the window all the trumpery art of which they will have become tired, in order to collect that of Rude, Barye, Carpeaux, Rodin, Jules Desbois, Camille Claudel, those glories of the nineteenth century.

The year of the Salon of 1864 may serve to close the first period of Rodin's career. It is difficult, indeed impossible, to place between fixed dates the events of a life that has been an example of uniform continuity; but nevertheless it is permitted to one to say that the year 1864 marks the end of the first youth of the master. His preliminary studies, those which one may call the studies of his mere profession, were ended. He was then at the beginning of larger studies; he was about to visit Belgium, Italy, and France; he was about to come face to face with the most varied geniuses and examine their work. He was about to question them rigorously, to demand of them their technical methods. He was also about to exalt himself in the presence of these immortal thoughts, to become intoxicated with the desire to equal them in science and greatness. From that time on he approached them as a disciple, as a man who had already thought much and comprehended much, and who was worthy to study them and follow in their footsteps: in a word, as an artist of their own lineage.

SOJOURN IN BELGIUM--"THE MAN WHO AWAKENS TO NATURE"--REALISM AND PLASTER CASTS

Rodin worked under Carrier-Belleuse from 1865 to 1870. He remained in Paris during the Franco-German War. What influence did this event have upon him? He has said little about it. Although he has a strong attachment for his native land, he has none of the extravagant patriotism of a Rude, whose great soul was caught up in the flames of the national epopee. Rodin has too contemplative a temperament; he is too devoted to reflective work to allow himself to be long disturbed by external facts, even the gravest.

At the signing of the peace, he went to Belgium, drawn by the promise of work in decorative art. He remained there five years, staying first in Brussels, then in Antwerp.

This period of his life left with him a delightful memory. He was poor and unknown, but full of the vigor of youth, and free in how splendid a freedom! He had all his time to himself, without any of those thousand obligations that eat up the days of a celebrated man and break down his ardor.

Life in Belgium was at that time simple, easy-going, family-like. Many small pleasures made it attractive; the cleanliness of the streets and the houses was a constant delight to the eye; the bread, the beer, the coffee were excellent and cost almost nothing. On Sundays bands of children, fair-haired, robust, healthy, dressed in aprons very white and very well starched, ran about laughing and singing; the women went to church; the men assembled in the sanded gardens of the public houses to play at ball, sipping glasses of _faro_ and _lambic_. The whole scene was full of the charm of intimacy and happiness which for the artist served as a sort of frame, so to say, for the old pictures. The works of the Flemish painters are so impressive in all their power, in the splendor of their fresh coloring and their gem-like finish, that Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, Mechlin seem to have been built and decorated by the Brueghels, the Jan Steens, the Tenierses, whose dazzling canvases strike one almost as if they had been the plans for the construction of these queenly cities instead of being simply mirrors of them. As for nature, its grandeur and its nobility are disconcerting in such a little country.

Rodin rented a modest room in the chaussée de Brendael, in one of the quarters of the capital quite close to the Bois de la Cambre. He worked there during the whole of the day; his young wife did the housework, went out marketing, sewed beside him, posed for him, helped him to moisten his clay, made herself, as she said proudly, his _garçon d'atelier_. He modeled caryatids for the Palais de la Bourse at Brussels; for the Palais des Académies he made a frieze representing children and the attributes of the arts and sciences; he was charged also with the execution of decorative pieces for different municipal buildings of the city of Antwerp. Nowadays the Belgians display with pride these works, in which, without flattering them, one can recognize the touch of a future master.

Intent as he was upon his modeling work, Rodin did not abandon drawing; he added to it landscape-painting in oils. The Brabant country-side is one of the most beautiful in Europe. The Forest of Soigne, which surrounds Brussels, is full of the lofty trees of the Northern countries, splendid beeches, healthy as the bodies of athletes, reaching up into the sky like columns of light bronze, planted in regular rows, giving the impression of an immense and solemn temple. Narrow avenues, alleys, pierce the long naves; one's soul seems to glide lingeringly along these shadowy paths drawn on to the end by the far-away glimmer like stained glass. The light that falls from above through the tree-tops slips down the long green trunks, gray or silvery, bringing with it a touch of the sky. There is no exuberant vegetation, none of that undergrowth trembling with delicate little leaves, such as that which makes the spiritual grace of the Ile-de-France, arranged for the frolic of nymphs and fawns. This is the Gothic forest, the tree-cathedral, a fitting place for the miracles of Christianity and the devout walk of solitaries. Rodin fell in love with this forest. His grave soul, his youth, which knew nothing of frivolity, found itself here. His nature, so full of self-contained enthusiasm and the profound and slowly moved spirit of admiration, not yet capable of expressing itself, found its true element under the protection of these age-old beeches. But one corner enchanted him, a verdurous hollow filled with running water that breaks the austerity of the wood, the valley of Groenendael. There the majestic colonnade of trunks opens out, with the condescension of giants, before the caprices of an undulating glade. It is covered with a down of grass, like an immense green cloud, always pure, always fresh, which spring and autumn embroider with delicate shoots of a multitude of flowers, like the tapestries of the Flemish masters. Little ponds shyly spread out their mirrors, full of the sky, full of reflections. An old low-built house, entirely white, speaks of security, of calm shelter, of good nourishment, in the midst of this verdurous solitude, where one hears only the song of the birds and where squirrels cross in their flight like sudden flames. The valley of Groenendael is far enough away from Brussels to be almost always deserted and silent. It was the site the famous Brabançon mystic, Ruysbroeck the Admirable, chose in the fourteenth century for a monastery. At that time the Forest of Soigne sheltered no less than eleven monastic houses in its fragrant, shadowy depths. At the north of the valley the ground rises and the path leads one to the modest chapel of Notre Dame de Bonne-Odeur.

At this period Rodin certainly knew nothing of the great contemplatives of the fourteenth century or of this same Ruysbroeck whom later a glorious compatriot, Maurice Maeterlinck, kinsman by election of the hermit, was to translate and interpret; but in the peaceful glade, the vallon vert, as under the vaults of the great forest, the soul of the sculptor rejoined those of the old monks who perhaps still wander there at times; it shared with them the religion of this beauty which their dumb love of nature had come thither to seek.

At dawn he would start out, loaded down with his box of colors. His companion followed him, proud to carry part of the artist's paraphernalia. He was on his way to make sketches, to take notes of the landscape, to jot down his impressions; but often the day passed without his touching his brushes. It was not indifference or indolence on the part of this great worker, but simply that he had not the strength to interrupt his delightful contemplations. Time lost? In the case of another, perhaps. Not for him. His excursion had no immediate result; that was all: but how he would observe, how he would compare, how he would reflect! He was initiating himself in the sense of proportion, grandeur of style, and the nobility of simplicity. He was studying the laws of the light and shade distributed by the columns the true work of the architect. It was no longer school lessons that he was prosecuting here; it was the mighty exercise of personal talent, the ripening of his taste that was taking place, thanks to the technical knowledge he already possessed. The sense of the eternal laws comes only to those who can contrail them through long experience.

Later, when the time came for Rodin to visit the cathedrals, he was to understand better than any other this art which has sprung from the forests of France, engendered by their mysterious grandeur, once full of terrors and marvels. The benefit which he derived immediately from his acquaintance with Belgium was the experience of those intellectual joys and that happiness which await any one who is serious, loyal, reverent in the presence of the divine work that offers itself as an object of study to the assiduous.

Another besides himself had already received this teaching of nature in exactly this place. Rude, whom the Bourbons had exiled on their return to France because of his worship of Napoleon, passed several years in Brussels and executed there a number of works, among others the famous bas-reliefs of the Château de Tervueren, since destroyed by fire; "La Chasse de Méléagre," of which the authorities of the Belgian department of fine arts were fortunately able to take casts. On his way between Brussels and Tervueren, Rude went every day several leagues on foot, crossing the Forest of Soignes, where he, too, endeavored to forget the lessons of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, on the benches of which he had, according to his own confession, lost many years.

In addition to these works of decorative art, Rodin executed a number of busts and sketches. He even found time to make a large figure modeled after his wife, a figure draped like a Gothic statue, which he worked over lovingly. It had the same disastrous fate as that which befell the other one at Paris, and for the same reason; poverty prevented the artist from having a cast taken of his work in time: like the "Bacchante," it was completely destroyed. Despite this loss, the sculptor was not discouraged; work for him was a happiness which was begun anew each day; he at once began on another subject. This time he took for his model a young man whose acquaintance he had made and who willingly consented to pose for him.

This young man was not a model by trade, spoiled by the conventional attitudes which the Parisian sculptors impose on professionals. He was a soldier, living in barracks near Rodin's house. As soon as the sculptor saw, disengaging itself from the clothes, the graceful figure of this boy of twenty-five who was not aware of his beauty and did quite simply whatever his companion asked him, he promised himself not to abandon this work before he had carried it as far as his skill permitted him to go. His model disposed himself in simple attitudes, which were not vitiated by any pretentious forethoughts. One day he came toward him, his arms upraised, his head thrown back, with an air of youthfully voluptuous lassitude that filled the artist with enthusiasm. One would have said that he was a young hero staggering under the shock of a wound. And Rodin set himself to execute the statue of the wounded hero. But nature lends itself to infinite interpretations. The sense of an attitude that is well rendered creates of itself more comprehensive ideas. When we contemplate one who is wounded or ill, obscure impressions agitate our spirit, impelling it toward ideas higher than those of wounds and illness. It skirts the frontiers of death, the enigma of annihilation or of the world to come, and all those unformulated sentiments, which in their confused flight haunt the profound regions of the soul. Before his beautiful model Rodin experienced these emotions and transcribed them upon his sculpture. In its unblemished nudity, it bears the sign of no one epoch; it is the eternal man touched in his innermost sensibility by something of which he knows not the cause. Is it his soul, is it his flesh that trembles? One does not know. No knowledge comes without suffering. Rodin, aware immediately of this effect of transposition, in the delicious surprise of the artist who sometimes sees himself surpassed by his own work, christened the statue, "The Man of the Age of Bronze," that is to say, one who is passing from the unconsciousness of primitive man into the age of understanding and of love. A few years later he gave it this still happier final name, "The Man who Awakens to Nature."

He worked over it eighteen months. There is no part of this harmonious figure that has not been passionately thought out. He had to render, beneath the supple covering of the skin, those firm, fine muscles which possess the elasticity of youth and its sobriety. In giving the sense of the presence of these things, one creates the illusion of their activity. This is the secret of great sculpture and of all the arts, to evoke that which we do not see by the quality of that which we do see. "Carefully examine the Venus de Medici," Rude used to advise his pupils, "and under the polish of the skin you will see the whole muscular system appear."

Rodin did not spare either his own strength or that of his model. An implacable goddess led him on, his conscience. He did not content himself with rendering only the masses that his direct vision gave him. In this way he would have possessed only two dimensions, the length and width of the human body. He needed the exact relief of masses, which is the basis of _ronde-bosse_, of "cubic sculpture." He studied his profiles not only from below, but from above. He mounted a painting ladder and looked down over his model; he measured the surface of the skull, which, seen from above, has an ovoid form; he took and compared with his clay model the dimensions of the shoulders, the chest, the hips, the feet as they appeared with the floor as a background. He observed the points where the arm muscles were inserted, and those of the thighs and the legs. How, after such a rigorously minute process of noting his masses, could his work be flat? That became impossible. But the geometric labor, the taking of measurements, was not all. The next question was to reassemble the different profiles by careful transcription. There is an entire school of conscientious sculptors who believe that they can obtain reality by the simple method of making identical points correspond. They multiply the measurements taken from the model with the aid of a plumb-line and a compass; it is only a mechanical process which does not even give good practical effects. To unify the manifold surface of the human body, to endow the whole with the suppleness of life, with its harmonious continuity and poise, the personal judgment of the artist must unceasingly intervene. His own special taste is supremely what adjusts the elements which are waiting to be unified by him in order to take on animation and to live one beside another. It is during this last effort that the expression, summoned up by the truth of the ensemble, comes almost of itself to the fingers of the sculptor. If the preceding principles have not been scrupulously observed, it seems to refuse to come; it is the reward only of conscience joined with intelligence; it is the fruit of this indissoluble union that works in the spirit of the true artist. The true expression is that to which we give the indefinable name of poetry.

Since the creation of "The Man who Awakens to Nature," in which during two years he had eagerly sought it, this became the characteristic of Rodin's talent. He had conquered it for all time; and so while his insatiable will applies itself with no less energy to other researches, that of movement, of character, of lighting, and sometimes over-emphasizes them, the work that comes from his hand may appear strange, excessive; it will never be mediocre, never indifferent.

And now let us glance at the image of this young man, this proud, unblemished human plant. All we have just been saying is forgotten in the force of our impression. The most powerful impression, first of all, is indolence. It is absorbed in itself; it exhausts like a great draught of life the veins of those who respond to it. Hence the silence, the long, dumb contemplation, the sense of incertitude one experiences in the presence of its beauty. It is not to our spirit that it first addresses itself. Its voluptuousness, whencesoever come, enchants our senses; then the intellect demands an explanation, studies it, traces back the sensation to its sources through one of those rapid and manifold changes which are the law of such natural phenomena as light, sound, electricity.