Part 5

"The man who awakens to nature," said Rodin, in the presence of his statue. Indeed the body bends over, as if under the exquisite caress of the breezes of spring. The hand rests itself upon the head, flung back as if to hold in the somewhat mournful splendor of some too beautiful vision. The whole torso is gently stirred by the emotion springing up from the depths of the flesh to die out upon the surface of the imperceptibly agitated muscles. He leans lightly backward, bending like a bow and at the same time like a traveler walking toward the dawn; he is drawn on by the desire to renew this inner emotion that swells his human heart almost to the bursting-point. By this double movement reconstituting life, the action does not interrupt itself. It evokes the past and the future; the obscure shadows out of which this soul is endeavoring to emerge and the bright regions toward which it advances.

Auguste Rodin was at this time thirty-five years old. In the career of the artist, this admirable figure has a special significance, that of something symbolic. It marks one of the happiest phases of the sculptor's life, the period of revelation through which he had just been living during his sojourn by the forest of Groenendael. He, too, had awakened to Nature in the heart of the sacred wood; he, too, had come to know the somewhat dazzling torment of a being fully awake to the beauty of the world. This beauty he had at last penetrated; he felt it with all the strength of a ripened heart, he adored it; he made it his religion.

Such is the inner history of this statue. There is another, a history of the anecdotal sort, which is well known to-day, but which it is proper to recall in a complete biography of the master.

The adventure of "The Age of Bronze" was the first resounding battle that Rodin fought in his struggle for the cause of art. It was a victory, but only after great combats.

The plaster model appeared in the Salon of 1877. Before this proud and spirited figure a number of visitors paused, ravished by a sensation that was absolutely new. In itself there was nothing clamorous, no attempt to attract attention by extravagance of gesture or exaggerated expression--quite the contrary; the fragrance of a shy beauty, an idyllic freshness, mingled with the passionate poetry of a virile, artistic conscience, an exquisite sense of measure, a delightful elegance characteristically French, of the north of France, grave and restrained, and with a something hitherto unseen, a vigor till then unknown diffused through this adolescent flesh, irradiating it with tenderness, with a noble charm, a caressing sadness.

Immediately the rumor began to circulate, welcomed here, spurned there, by the world of professionals, amateurs, and journalists: the anatomy of the new work was too exact, its modeling too precise for it to be an interpretation of the model; it was a cast from nature, and the sculptor who gave out as the result of his own labor this mechanical copy of a human body was nothing but an impostor.

What does it matter? thought the public in its up-and-down common sense. There are plenty of fine casts from nature; so much the better for the name of Rodin if he has been particularly successful in this line.

But Rodin was indignant. This nude, so obstinately worked over, a cast! That he should have committed such a deception, he the scrupulous molder of clay! Oh, he knew well enough that most of the great modern sculptors do not burden themselves with so many scruples and lend themselves too often to the hasty method of taking casts; he condemned it with all the force of his own probity. He knew well that in this very Salon of 1877 more than fifty pieces of sculpture about which nothing was said owed their existence to this malpractice of which he was accused and of which he would never be guilty, because he considered it the very negation of art. For of course taking casts is nothing but the reproduction of nature in its immobility. By means of it one is able to take the impression of forms, but one cannot grasp movement or expression. It is possible to take the mold of an arm, a leg, an inert body; one can take a good cast of the stiffened mask of the dead; one cannot calculate through the medium of the plaster the attitude and the modifications of form of a man walking or falling or the eloquence of a face lighted up by the reflection of the inner mind. This transcription of the whole is the exclusive privilege of the artist. He alone seizes and fixes the general impression; for it is made up not only of the immediate movement, but of that which precedes and that which follows. His eye alone registers the rapid succession, and his skill reproduces it. While the cast, like the photograph, only constitutes a unity detached from the whole, sculpture from nature reëstablishes the whole itself and represents the uninterrupted vibration which is life.

That explains how there happen to be, on the one hand, so many hard figures, weak and cold images, turned out hastily by lazy and conscienceless sculptors, and, on the other, those works that possess a charm that is mysterious to those who know nothing of its source, who are unaware of this method of observation and labor which a supreme effort veils in the easy grace and the apparent facility that enchants us in the things of nature.

The accusation brought against Rodin became more definite. There was a veritable upheaval of opinion in the world of the Salons. He protested, with the firmness of an artist resolved to suffer no blot upon his honor. He insisted upon receiving justice. Unknown, without means of support, without fortune, he might well have waited a long time for it. He turned toward Belgium, seeking defenders in the country where he had made "The Age of Bronze"; but the academic virus did not spare him; the official sculptors remained deaf to the appeal of their confrère. For that matter, where did he come from, this ambitious stone-cutter who claimed the title of sculptor without waiting on the good pleasure of the pontiffs?

Rodin's model alone, the young soldier of Brussels, became indignant at the affront to his sculptor. He wanted to hasten to Paris and exhibit himself naked before the eye of the jury of honor which had just been constituted and cry out to them that he had posed nearly two years for the artist who had been so unjustly attacked. But nothing is simple. He had posed, thanks to the special good will of the captain commanding the company to which he belonged, and in defiance of military regulations. To reveal this fact would be to compromise the officer, and so he had to remain silent.

Rodin had photographs and casts taken from his model and sent them to the experts. All this was costly and uncertain. It was only after months of waiting that they were examined. On the jury were several art critics, including Charles Iriarte, a learned writer and distinguished mind, and Paul de Saint-Victor, author of the "Deux-Masques," the sumptuous writer of so much brilliant prose. Alas! the most insignificant sculptor, provided he had only been sincere, could have settled Rodin's case a hundred times better. A man of his own trade, possessing the elements of justice, would have immediately decided the question according to the facts, while the critics and writers relied wholly upon personal impressions, and, to the great bitterness of the sculptor, when they delivered an opinion they did not altogether reject the accusation that he had taken casts, allowing doubt to rest upon the honesty of Rodin. He himself did not know what to do next. Chance was more favorable to him than men.

At that time he was executing for a great decorator some ornamental motives destined for one of the buildings of the Universal Exposition of 1878. The sculptor, Alfred Boucher, a pupil of Paul Dubois, came one day on a business errand to see the decorator. In the studios he noticed Rodin at work on the model of a group of children intended for a cartouche. Boucher, who knew about the accusation that hung over him, observed him with the liveliest interest. He witnessed the rapid, skilful, amazingly dexterous execution producing under his very eye a tender efflorescence of childish flesh on the firm and perfectly constructed little bodies. _And Rodin was working without models!_ Alfred Boucher was a product of the Ecole; he had taken the _grand prix de Rome_; he was ten years younger than Rodin; but he was an honest man; he hastened to relate to his master, Paul Dubois, what he had seen. The creator of the "Florentine Singer" and "Charity" in his turn wished to see things for himself. With Claude Chapu he went to the decorator's and both of them decided then and there that the hand that molded so skilfully from memory the figures of the cherubs was certainly capable, in its extraordinary knowledge of human anatomy, of having executed that of "The Age of Bronze." Thereupon they convinced their confrères and decided to write the under-secretary of state a solemn letter in which all of them, answering for the good faith of Rodin, declared that he had made a beautiful statue and that he would become a great sculptor. The letter was signed by Carrier-Belleuse, Paul Dubois, Chapu, Thomas Delaplanche, Chaplin Falguière.

This tempered considerably the rancor of the artist.

It is a strange fact that for years he underrated this statue. In 1899 he gave his first great exhibition of all his work. It was to the Maison d'Art of Brussels that the honor of this project was due, and it was carried out in a style and with a good taste which no later exhibition of the master has surpassed, or even attained.

As he had charged me with the supervision of the sending off of his works, to the number of fifty, I begged him to include among them "The Age of Bronze." I hoped that the public, and especially the artists of Belgium, might be able to study the evolution of his technique through his typical works, executed at different periods of his career. Nothing could induce him to consent to it. He declared that in twenty years his modeling had undergone a complete transformation, that it had become more spacious and more supple, and that the exhibition of this statue could serve no purpose and be of good to nobody. I urged him to go and look at it again. The bronze, sent to the Salon of 1880, with the plaster figure of "St. John the Baptist in Prayer," awarded, oh splendor of official miserliness! a medal of the third class, had been bought by the state a few years later and set up in a corner of the Luxembourg Gardens, an out-of-the-way corner, but one that the light shadows of the young trees made charming. The master refused. Two or three years afterward, one morning while we were talking, I led him unsuspecting toward this little grove. Thinking of something else he lifted his Head, casting an indifferent glance at the solitary bronze. Surprised, he examined it, while a happy emotion lighted up his face; then he walked slowly around it. Finally he admitted quietly that he had been mistaken, that the statue seemed to him really beautiful, well constructed, and carefully sculptured. In order to comprehend it he had had to forget it, to see it again suddenly, and to judge it as if it had been the work of another hand.

After this readoption, his affection for it was restored; he had several copies cast in bronze and cut in stone, and it has become perhaps one of his most popular and most sought-after works. Museums of Europe and America, lovers of art in both hemispheres, consider it an honor to possess replicas.

It was the first of Rodin's great statues, or, rather, the first that has been preserved. Several other works of capital importance serve as landmarks in the progress of his talent. Around them are grouped fragments, busts, innumerable delightful little compositions, all treated with the same care and equally reflecting the result of his studies; but, as ever, it is the major works that mark most visibly the points of departure and arrival of the different periods of his artistic development. These works are: "The Age of Bronze" (1877); "Saint John the Baptist" (1880); "The Gate of Hell" (1880-19--, not finished); "The Creation of Man" (1881); "The Burghers of Calais" (1889); "Victor Hugo" (1896); "Balzac" (1898); "The Seasons" (pediments of stone, 1905); "Ariadne" (in course of execution).

These works will be described and characterized, in the course of this book, at the dates of their appearance.

FLEMISH PAINTING--JOURNEYS IN ITALY AND FRANCE

During his stay in Belgium, Rodin studied the Flemish painters. Free from the prejudices of the schools, unaware of the theories of the critics, sensitive to the beautiful in every form, following only his personal taste supported by the study of the masters, he ranged over the vast domain of art through regions the most dissimilar and superficially the most opposed. Of course he had his preferences; he returned unceasingly to the antique and the Gothic; but his preferences did not blind him. His admiration passed rapidly from the splendors of Greek and Roman architecture to the voluptuous graces of the seventeenth century. His love for Donatello and Michelangelo did not prevent him from appreciating Bernini.

Attracted first by the marvelous Flemish Gothic artists, Memling, Massys, the Van Eycks, he was later delighted with the homely scenes of Jan Steen, of Brueghel, of Teniers; he enjoyed them as an artist and as a simple man who knew the value of domestic joys. Then he was haunted by the sensual pomp of Jordaens and above all Rubens.

The triumphant brush of Rubens sculptured as much as it painted. The science of foreshortening and that of ceiling painting, his way of modeling forms in the light and by means of light--all this brought his art into the realm of sculpture; and when Rodin came to seek effects of light and shadow that were new to sculpture, he remembered the lessons of the Antwerp master. From that time on Rubens was for him a splendid subject for study and would have fortified him, had that been necessary, in the love of drawing; for beautiful drawing leads, to everything, to _color_, in sculpture as well as in painting.

Flemish art was not enough to satisfy this thirst for understanding that devoured the soul of the artist now in the full swing of the fermenting force of his faculties. He wished to see Italy or at least to catch a glimpse of it. His resources were so slender indeed that his journey could not have been long. It did not matter. He would form an idea of the immensity of its treasure and confirm in himself the desire to return. He wished also to see France, as alluring to him as Greece, and whose cathedrals are perhaps not less beautiful than the Parthenon.

He started for Italy in 1875, and he accomplished his first tour of France in 1877. He set forth. He was young and strong; he made the pass of Mont Cenis on foot. He was unknown and without connections. What did it matter? In the midst of these scenes so radiant with memories of history and art, did he not feel an intoxication such as the soldiers of Bonaparte alone must have experienced, catching sight of the plains of Lombardy, where they were to forget the hardships of the campaign?

For Rodin, Italy meant the antique; it meant Donatello and Michelangelo. The antique he had already to a considerable extent studied in the Louvre. Donatello and Michelangelo conquered him at the first glance--a tumultuous conquest. The severity of Donatello's style impassioned him; the rigid honesty of his realism, the desire of this younger brother of Dante to see things grandly, the equal desire to see things simply, this Gothic genius deeply moved "in the mid-way of this our mortal life" by pagan beauty and touched by the breath of the Renaissance, impressed the French artist and became a dominating memory. From that time on in the most beautiful of his busts, those of Jean-Paul Laurens, Puvis de Chavannes, Lord Wyndham, Lord Horace Walden, Mr. Ryan, he was to appear as a disciple of the Florentine master, not by a literal imitation of his methods, which he thoroughly grasped, but by similar qualities of observation and synthesis. Still, this was not until after he had made other studies, while Michelangelo took hold upon him immediately and completely and became an actual obsession that might have proved dangerous to a sculptor less severe with himself, less determined to discover his own path.

The dazzling richness of modeling, the majesty of the great figures of the prodigious Florentine, and their fullness of movement--for their immobility is charged with movement--the somber melancholy of his thought, his flaming and shadowy soul, his literary romanticism, a romanticism like that of Shakspere, overwhelmed Rodin with that formidable sense of an almost sorrowful admiration that all experience who visit the Medici tombs in the new sacristy.

He studied also the later marbles of Michelangelo, which stood at that time in the gardens of the Pitti Palace and have since been removed to the Municipal Museum of Florence.

Every one knows these powerful blocks, these vast human forms, only half disengaged from the marble, from which they seem to be endeavoring to escape in order to give birth to themselves by a rending effort that is characteristic with all the force of a symbol of the tragic genius of Buonarroti. "Unfinished works"; it is thus the catalogues designate them. Unfinished works, indeed, but why? Was it age that stilled, before the end, the hand of the giant of sculpture? Or was it not rather that he judged them too strangely beautiful in their incompleteness, that they seemed to him more powerful thus, still captive to the material that bound them groaning, as it were, in their tremulous flesh?

The public pays little attention to these sublime masses because it is told that they are not _finished_. Not finished? Or infinite? That is the question. Far from weighing them down, the marble that envelops them throws about them the charm of the indeterminate and by means of this unites them with the atmosphere. The parts that are wholly disengaged enable one to divine those that remain hidden; they are veiled without being obliterated, like mountain-tops among the clouds; and this half-mystery, instead of diminishing, increases the harmony of the bodies trembling with life under their mantle of stone. In the presence of an effect so marvelous, so calculated, one cannot cease from asking if it was really death or if it was not rather the sovereign taste of the workman that arrested the chisel. While he was fashioning his statues out of the marble itself, with that fury that has passed into legend, did he not find himself, face to face with these unexpected effects which the material offered him of itself, in the midst of one of those happy situations by which the talent of the masters alone enables them to profit?

However that may be, Rodin was struck as if by a revelation. What the progress of his work had tardily disclosed to Michelangelo was soon to become for his disciple a principle of decorative art. Instead of disengaging his figures entirely, he was to leave them half submerged in the transparent marble. This method, which has become famous to-day, seemed an unheard-of thing to those who were unfamiliar with the Florentine blocks; but Rodin has never failed to acknowledge the paternity of the sculptor of "The Thinker." Following in his steps, many artists have employed this method at random, without possessing the essential qualities that enable one to control these effects, and under their powerless chisels the enchanting device no longer possesses any meaning.

Rodin himself waited until he possessed a thorough knowledge of marble and the manner of treating it; it was a stroke of fate by which he rediscovered the phenomena of envelopment that had so transported him in the Municipal Museum. He had by that time the wisdom to guard himself from doing anything inconsistent with his material. He followed out the suggestions it gave him, and developed an infinite variety in the methods of handling it.

On his return from Italy he continued to be haunted by the unsurpassable vigor of Michelangelo's workmanship. He sought to discover what was the outstanding gift that conferred upon him this power and this mysterious empire over the spirit. Until then, with the majority of artists of the modern school, he had believed that the chief quality of sculpture lay in seizing the _character_ of the model; but he came to see how many works concerned only with expressing character fail of real significance. Since 1830 how many romanticists have sacrificed to character without leaving any works that are lasting!

After his journey Rodin decided that the strength of Michelangelo lay undoubtedly in his _movement_. Returning to his studio, he executed a quantity of sketches and even large figures like "The Creation of Man," the title of which, although he had not been to Rome, is a souvenir of the frescos of the Sistine Chapel; he made busts like that of Bellona, after having directed his models to assume Michelangelesque poses. For all this, he did not attain to the grandeur, the soul-disturbing authority of the Florentine master.

Without becoming discouraged, he went on observing ceaselessly. Far from imposing upon his model positions thought out in advance, he left him free to wander about the studio at the pleasure of his own caprice, ready to arrest him at a word when a beautiful movement passed before his eyes. Then, six months after his return from Italy, he found that the model assumed of his own accord the very poses of which Michelangelo alone had seemed to him to possess the secret; he realized that the sublime sculptor had taken them direct from nature, from the rhythm of the human body in action, and that he had done nothing but seize and immortalize them.

"Michelangelo," he says, "revealed me to myself, revealed to me the truth of forms. I went to Florence to find what I possessed in Paris and elsewhere, but it is he who taught me this."

This does not prevent certain critics from asserting out of the depth of their incompetence that he has never felt the influence of this master and that he has never even given his work serious consideration. Those who know Rodin well know that, on the contrary, he never fails to give serious consideration to anything which is worth considering at all and that his power of observation is the basis of his genius. Always seeking a final method, he came back to the idea with which his earliest education had already inspired him and which his self-communings had only confirmed: that the value of sculpture lies entirely in the _modeling_. This is the secret of Michelangelo; it is also that of the ancients and of all the great artists of the past and of modern times. For the rest, through his spacious movements, his balancing of equal masses, the sculptor of the tombs taught him that the supreme quality consists in seeking in the modeling the _living, determining line of the scheme_, the supple axis of the human body.

He himself held this principle of the ancients, of whom he was a disciple, as far as modeling is concerned, while in his composition and his handling of light he is a Gothic.