MYSTERY IN ART
One morning, when I arrived at Rodin’s house at Meudon I found the
master in his dressing-gown, his hair in disorder, his feet in slippers,
sitting before a good wood fire, for it was November.
“It is the time of the year,” he said, “when I allow myself to be ill.
All the rest of the time I have so much work, so many occupations, so
many cares, that I have not a single instant to breathe. But fatigue
accumulates, and though I fight stubbornly to conquer it, yet towards
the end of the year I am obliged to stop work for a few days.”
Even as I listened to his words my eyes rested upon a great cross on the
wall, on which hung the Christ, a figure three-quarters life-size. It
was a very fine painted carving of most painful realism. The body
hanging from the tree looked so dead that it could never come to
life—the most complete consummation of the mysterious sacrifice.
“You admire my crucifix!” Rodin said, following my glance. “It is
amazing, is it not? Its realism recalls that one in the Chapel del
Santisimo Christo in Burgos—that image so moving, so terrifying, yes—so
horrible—that it looks like a real human corpse. This figure of the
Christ is much less brutal. See how pure and harmonious are the lines of
the body and arms!”
Seeing my host lost in contemplation, I ventured to ask him if he was
religious.
“It is according to the meaning that you give to the word,” he answered.
“If you mean by religious the man who follows certain practices, who
bows before certain dogmas, I am evidently not religious.
[Illustration:
THE HAND OF GOD
By Rodin
Photograph reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
]
“But, to me, religion is more than the mumbling of a creed. It is the
meaning of all that is unexplained and doubtless inexplicable in the
world. It is the adoration of the unknown force which maintains the
universal laws and which preserves the types of all beings; it is the
surmise of all that in nature which does not fall within the domain of
sense, of all that immense realm of things which neither the eyes of our
body, nor even those of our spirit can see; it is the impulse of our
conscience towards the infinite, towards eternity, towards unlimited
knowledge and love—promises perhaps illusory, but which in this life
give wings to our thoughts. In this sense I am religious.” Rodin
followed the rapid flickering flames of the fire for a moment, and then
continued: “If religion did not exist, I should have had to invent it.
In short, true artists are the most religious of men.
“It is a general belief that we live only through our senses, and that
the world of appearances suffices us. We are taken for children who,
intoxicated with changing colors, amuse themselves with the shapes of
things as with dolls. We are misunderstood. Lines and colors are only to
us the symbols of hidden realities. Our eyes plunge beneath the surface
to the meaning of things, and when afterwards we reproduce the form, we
endow it with the spiritual meaning which it covers.
“An artist worthy of the name should express all the truth of nature,
not only the exterior truth, but also, and above all, the inner truth.
“When a good sculptor models a torso, he not only represents the
muscles, but the life which animates them—more than the life, the force
that fashioned them and communicated to them, it may be, grace or
strength, or amorous charm, or indomitable will.
“In the works of Michael Angelo, the creative force seems to rumble; in
those of Luca della Robbia it smiles divinely. So each sculptor,
following his temperament, lends to nature a soul either terrible or
gentle.
[Illustration:
THE STATUE OF BALZAC
By Rodin
]
“The landscape painter, perhaps, goes even further. It is not only in
living beings that he sees the reflection of the universal soul; it is
in the trees, the bushes, the valleys, the hills. What to other men is
only wood and earth appears to the great landscapist like the face of a
great being. Corot saw kindness abroad in the trunks of the trees, in
the grass of the fields, in the mirroring water of the lakes. But there
Millet read suffering and resignation.
“Everywhere the great artist hears spirit answer to his spirit. Where,
then, can you find a more religious man?
“Does not the sculptor perform his act of adoration when he perceives
the majestic character of the forms that he studies?—when, from the
midst of fleeting lines, he knows how to extricate the eternal type of
each being?—when he seems to discern in the very breast of the divinity
the immutable models on which all living creatures are moulded? Study,
for example, the masterpieces of the Egyptian sculptors, either human or
animal figures, and tell me if the accentuation of the essential lines
does not produce the effect of a sacred hymn. Every artist who has the
gift of generalizing forms, that is to say, of accenting their logic
without depriving them of their living reality, provokes the same
religious emotion; for he communicates to us the thrill he himself felt
before the immortal verities.”
“Something,” I said, “like the trembling of Faust when he visited that
strange Kingdom of the Mothers, where he talked with the imperishable
heroines of the great poets and beheld all the generative ideas of
terrestrial realities.”
“What a magnificent scene!” Rodin cried, “and what a breadth of vision
Goethe had!” He continued: “Mystery is, moreover, like a kind of
atmosphere which bathes the greatest works of the masters.
“They express, indeed, all that genius feels in the presence of Nature;
they represent Nature with all the clearness, with all the magnificence
which a human being can discover in her; but they also fling themselves
against that immense Unknown which everywhere envelops our little world
of the known. For, after all, we only feel and conceive those things
which are patent to us and which impress our minds and our senses. But
all the rest is plunged in infinite obscurity. Even a thousand things
which should be clear to us are hidden because we are not organized to
seize them.”
Rodin stopped, and I recalled the following lines of Victor Hugo, which
I repeated:
“Nous ne voyons jamais qu’un seul côté des choses;
L’autre plonge en la nuit d’un mystère effrayant;
L’homme subit l’effêt sans connaître les causes;
Tout ce qu’il voit est court, inutile et fuyant.”[5]
Footnote 5:
See page 251.
“The poet has put it better than I,” Rodin said, smiling, and he
continued: “Great works of art, which are the highest proof of human
intelligence and sincerity, say all that can be said on man and on the
world, and, besides, they teach that there is something more that cannot
be known.
“Every great work has this quality of mystery. You always find a little
‘fine frenzy.’ Recall the note of interrogation which hovers over all of
Leonardo da Vinci’s pictures. But I am wrong to choose that great mystic
as an example, for he proves my thesis too easily. Let us rather take
the _Concert Champêtre_ by Giorgione. Here is all the sweet joy of life,
but added to that there is a kind of melancholy intoxication. What is
human joy? Whence comes it? Where does it go? The puzzle of existence!
“Again, let us take, if you will, _The Gleaners_, by Millet. One of
these women who toil so hard beneath the blazing sun rises and looks
away to the horizon. And we feel that in that head a question has
flashed from the submerged mind: What is the meaning of it all?
[Illustration:
THE GLEANERS
By Millet
]
“That is the mystery that floats over all great work. What is the
meaning of the law which chains these creatures to existence only to
make them suffer? What is the meaning of this eternal enticement which
makes them love life, however sad it is? Oh, agonizing problem!
“Yet it is not only the masterpieces of Christian civilization which
produced this impression of mystery. It is felt before the masterpieces
of antique art, before the _Three Fates_ of the Parthenon, for example.
I call them the Fates because it is the accepted name, though in the
opinion of many students they are other goddesses; it makes little
difference either way! They are only three women seated, but their pose
is so serene, so august, that they seem to be taking part in something
of enormous import that we do not see. Over them reigns the great
mystery, the immaterial, eternal Reason whom all nature obeys, and of
whom they are themselves the celestial servants.
“So, all the masters advance to the barrier which parts us from the
Unknowable. Certain among them have cruelly wounded their brows against
it; others, whose imagination is more cheerful, imagine that they hear
through that wall the melodious songs of the birds which people the
secret orchard.”
I listened attentively to my host, who was giving me his most precious
thoughts on his art. It seemed that the fatigue which had condemned his
body to rest before that hearth where the flames were leaping had left
his spirit, on the contrary, more free, and had tempted it to fling
itself passionately into dreams. I led the talk to his own works.
“Master,” I said, “you speak of other artists, but you are silent about
yourself. Yet you are one of those who have put into their art most
mystery. The torment of the invisible and of the inexplicable is seen in
even the least of your sculptures.”
[Illustration:
THE THREE FATES
From the Parthenon
]
“Ah! my dear Gsell,” he said, throwing me a glance of irony, “if I have
expressed certain feelings in my works, it is utterly useless for me to
try to put them into words, for I am not a poet, but a sculptor, and
they ought to be easily read in my statues; if not, I might as well not
have experienced the feelings.”
“You are right; it is for the public to discover them. So I am going to
tell you all the mystery that I have found in your inspiration. You will
tell me if I have seen rightly. It seems to me that what has especially
interested you in humanity is that strange uneasiness of the soul bound
to the body.
“In all your statues there is the same impulse of the spirit towards the
ideal, in spite of the weight and the cowardice of the flesh.
“In your _Saint John the Baptist_, a heavy, almost gross body is
strained, uplifted by a divine mission which outruns all earthly limits.
In your _Bourgeois de Calais_, the soul enamoured of immortality drags
the hesitant body to its martyrdom, while it seems to cry the words,
‘Thou tremblest, vile flesh!’
“In your _Penseur_, meditation, in its terrible effort to embrace the
absolute, contracts the athletic body, bends it, crushes it. In your
_Baiser_, the bodies tremble as though they felt, in advance, the
impossibility of realizing that indissoluble union desired by their
souls. In your _Balzac_, genius, haunted by gigantic visions, shakes the
sick body, dooms it to insomnia, and condemns it to the labor of a
galley-slave. Am I right, master?”
“I do not contradict you,” Rodin answered, stroking his long beard
thoughtfully.
“And in your busts, even more perhaps, you have shown this impatience of
the spirit against the chains of matter. Almost all recall the lines of
the poet:
“‘Ainsi qu’en s’envolant l’oiseau courbe la branche,
Son âme avait brisé son corps!’[6]
Footnote 6:
See page 251.
“You have represented all the writers with the head bent, as if beneath
the weight of their thoughts. As for your artists, they gaze straight at
nature, but they are haggard because their reverie draws them far beyond
what they see, far beyond all they can express.
[Illustration:
THE KISS
By Rodin
]
“That bust of a woman at the Musée du Luxembourg, perhaps the most
beautiful that you have carved, bows and vacillates as if the soul were
seized with giddiness upon plunging into the abyss of dreams.
“To sum it up, your busts often recall Rembrandt’s portraits, for the
Dutch master has also made plain this call of the infinite, by lighting
the brow of his personages by a light which falls from above.”
“To compare me with Rembrandt, what sacrilege!” Rodin cried quickly. “To
Rembrandt, the Colossus of art! Think of it, my friend! Let us bow
before Rembrandt, and never set any one beside him!
“But you have concluded justly in observing in my works the stirrings of
the soul towards that kingdom, perhaps chimerical, of unlimited truth
and liberty. There, indeed, is the mystery that moves me.” A moment
later he asked: “Are you convinced now that art is a kind of religion?”
“Yes,” I answered.
Then he added, with some malice: “It is very necessary to remember,
however, that the first commandment of this religion, for those who wish
to practise it, is to know how to model a torso, an arm, or a leg!”
[Illustration:
BUST OF MADAME MORLA VICUNA
By Rodin
]