after the manner of howling dervishes, dance and rave round Rodin, were
to induce men to take a violent part against this very man. Justice,
however, demands that people should suppress their natural tendency
to make him responsible for the ear-piercing din of his drummers and
trumpeters. After all, he cannot help a horde of swindlers and silly
people making a vulgar disturbance about him and his works. If we
are to judge him, we must try to forget that critical offenders, by
invoking his name, continually outrage the sense of æsthetic decorum
and artistic conscience. Rodin is, in fact, not the originator of
this shameless proceeding, but the victim of the æsthetic Catiline
conspirators who have got possession of him, and are pushing him on
before them, so that it looks from a distance as if he was their
leader. Rodin is not the least _cabotin_. He is of a modest, homely
nature, but no strong character; and he has not been able to stand
against the suggestions of those whose interest it is to eulogise
him, who have for so long chattered his poor head full of their most
brain-firing, æsthetic doctrines, and most profound interpretations
of his alleged purposes, until he has lost his own personality, and
makes the most desperate efforts to become like the picture which his
critical Corybantes present of him to the open-mouthed gapers.
What has raised Rodin to an article of faith among the degenerates
is three peculiarities. First, the choice of his materials, which
appeal to the mysticism and sensual psychopathy of his body-guard of
degenerates; secondly, his technique, which deviates from tradition
in childish, would-be-original whims; and thirdly, his mistaking the
natural limitations of his art, which he wants to make say things for
which sculpture possesses no means of expression. These traits are
proved by a short review of his principal works.
The production which first brought him the custom of the decadents is
a composition which was devised for the gate of Dante’s _Inferno_. He
had worked at it for decades. After a few fragments, which were to be
seen in 1889 in the Universal Exhibition at Paris, he showed the whole
in a plaster model at his private exhibition of 1900. It is inspired
unmistakably by Ghiberti’s door of the Baptistery at Florence, but
stands in intentional contrast to it. The great Quattrocentist depicts
life in Paradise; Rodin’s intention is to show existence in Hell. The
framing and articulation of the work, and nearly all its details, were
rendered with organic necessity from this starting-point. The door
is cut up into panels, which are not divided by stiff, geometrical
lines, but, just as in the case of Ghiberti, are at the same time
immediately separated, and again indirectly connected into a higher
unity, by a feature of the picture itself, _e.g._, a cliff, a man’s
figure, a piece of building. In every panel an act from the _Inferno_
is played. The parts, in the majority of cases indicated only in a
sketchy way, betray strong, indeed mainly perversely directed, erotic
imagination, and the gift of exhibiting human bodies in the movements
of passion. Of course, Rodin, too, has not dropped down from heaven,
but is the descendant of easily demonstrable spiritual forefathers.
This sculpture of violent action, a particular development of French
art, and in no way connected with the Laocoon, as one might easily make
the mistake of assuming, has its first master in Rude, whose power is
revealed most grandly in the “Marseillaise” on the Triumphal Arch at
Paris. Rude’s successor and continuer is the incomparable Carpeaux,
who, as is most clear from his group “The Dance” at the Grand Opera,
in place of the wild heroes of his model and master, substituted wild
Bacchantes; who celebrated, instead of self-oblivious joy in sacrifice
in the service of rugged duty, self-oblivious intoxication in a debauch
of sensuality, but represented a life of excitement no less sublimely
and no less ravishingly than the former. Rodin is closely connected
with Rude and Carpeaux. With him passion descends a step lower still
to the uncivilised and dissolute. Heroic with Rude, voluptuous with
Carpeaux, it is Satanic with Rodin. The “Gate of Hell” exhibits rows
of naked women in all the situations and occupations of the witches’
Sabbath, when it is most devilish. Fits of hysteria shake and twist
these bodies, every motion of which betrays shocking aberration and
eager Sadism. The patients of the Salpetrière or the Atlas of Pictures
edited in this _clinique_ (_Iconographie de la Salpetrière_) evidently
served him for models. And from him, be it incidentally observed,
Alexander appears to have drawn his inspirations with the aggravating
circumstance that he clothes Rodin’s naked women in rich, modern
toilettes, and by this artful means makes them even more obscene. The
feminine genius of tragedy in Rude is inspired by Tyrtæan war-songs.
Carpeaux’s two female dancers have drunk sparkling wine; Rodin’s
demoniac women have swallowed pills of Spanish-fly. Thus it is clear
that Rodin must be dear to all wanton schoolboys, impotent debauchees,
and incipient spinal sufferers.
If the “Gate of Hell” is an illustration of hystero-epilepsy and
feminine Sadism, so, too, is a marble group which he exhibited in 1898
of Masochism. A naked woman with horribly glacial, unmoved features
sits leaning against a wall of rock. A man, apparently growing out
of the earth, kneels before the merciless image, embraces its knees
with despairingly imploring gesture, and presses his head against its
body. This is supposed to show man in an ecstasy of desire, subjugated
by the sexual power of woman. I can only say that a copy of this
group would excellently suit as a frontispiece for an edition of the
collected works of Sacher-Masoch. Other smaller groups of Rodin,
which he exhibited in the Champs de Mars Salon, hint at other forms of
morbid sensuality on which I am reluctant to dwell. They all disclose
a sub-soil of corrupted sensuality in the artist’s soul. That secures
him influence on natures in harmony with his own. The degenerates who
revel with Baudelaire in love of corpses, and with Félicien Rops in
highly-spiced lewdness, find the same excitation in Rodin, and they
intoxicate themselves with his ecstatic lasciviousness just as with the
unnatural or madly exaggerated eroticism of their other fleshly poets
and painters.
So much for Rodin’s choice of themes. Now for his technique. One of his
singularities is that he loves to astonish people by a crude, external
contrast between a block of unworked marble and the most exquisitely
finished and sweetly polished sculpture of bodies. He takes a great
cube out of all proportion, which he leaves as the labourer hewed it as
it came out of the quarry; and he works a little corner of it into a
head and body polished with the utmost nicety. In this way, the figure
grows out of, or into, the natural stone. Looked at from three sides, a
lump of rock or stone is presented to the eye, only on the fourth side
the work of art is revealed, blooming, as it were, in the wilderness.
We may describe this manner as the sculptural form of mysticism. The
association of ideas which Rodin wishes to awaken by this device should
make the idea dawn on the consciousness that here, before our eyes, a
miracle of creation is being accomplished; that we surprise the very
incarnation of the stone; that we are witnesses of the birth of organic
form from the stiff, lifeless original matter, and may observe how the
figure, still half imprisoned in chaos, struggles painfully forth to
a form instinct with life. There are subjects for the representation
of which Rodin’s style would have been a happy invention: perhaps the
creation of Adam from a clod of earth, or the story of Deucalion and
Pyrrha, or a Promethean motive. But its uniform employment for all
possible subjects—on banal busts or groups which have no reference to
creation or genesis—causes the manner to be recognised for what it
is, a snatching at effect by means of eccentricity. Of course, this
striking and easily imitatable freak has founded a school. No American
or Scandinavian who wants to frighten the Philistines with “modernism”
neglects to exhibit a piece of, for the most part, wretched sculpture
as tiny as possible on a clump of unworked rock as Cyclopean as
possible. It cannot be said that the joke is cheap. The unhewn block of
marble often represents a pretty stiff value in hard cash, in any case
a higher one than the corner that has been chiselled. One can only say
that any idiot can succeed in using a ton weight of stone as a support
to a figure the size of a man’s hand.
Yet, in conclusion, it is a comparatively harmless folly which a
practitioner can remedy with a few strokes of the saw. It is sufficient
to cut the sculpture off, and give the rough block to a needy sculptor.
Far worse, because it is incurable, is the æsthetic principle to
which Rodin pays homage in the technique of his more important works
especially. He is, to wit, an Impressionist. A line of motion in an
individuality or group interests him. He seizes it, shapes it with
convincing truth, with an emphasis exaggerated—certainly purposely—to
the point of caricature, and neglects everything that does not serve
to illustrate this line of motion. Sculpture, however, is an art
which does not allow any Impressionism. It demands, according to its
nature, a perfectly accurate formation of the whole figure, and simple
honesty in reproducing the phenomenon. This can be proved by a theory
of perception. Sculpture fills space and is of three dimensions; it
addresses itself, in the first place, certainly to the eye, but also
to the sense of touch. It calls for stereoscopic vision, and is, at
least in theory, capable of further proof by a second sense. Now just
this theoretic possibility of further proof, by means of the sense of
touch, has the prohibitive effect, that fancy feels no inclination
to supplement the image provided by the sense of sight. In works of
painting we add in our mind much which is not optically given in the
picture. In plastic works we have not this psychical habit, because
a testing with the hands is opposed to the free, inventive power of
the imagination, and makes us at once recognise what has been given
in space, and what has been added by our imagination. On this ground,
there is no place in sculpture for intentions or hints. That is enough
for a rough plan, but not for the finished work. Rodin, however, stops
at a stage of completion, which may, at best, pass for a promise, but
never, in any case, for an achievement. He deliberately breaks up the
frame of artistic form. He would fain work with the habits of the
painter’s eye and the painter’s hand, and he applies this treatment to
the statute, standing free and exposed to examination from all sides.
The confused lines which represent the draughtsman’s first sketch
(_ébauche_) have their special charm and meaning on the surface to be
painted. If, however, you translate them into three dimensions, if
every careless movement of the artist’s hand, either still feeling
its way or hurrying on, is finally fixed in clay or bronze, something
inadmissible results, which has no right to proclaim itself a work of
art.
Such a seeking after the right expression, such a stammering in metal
is Rodin’s monument at Calais, which represents the burgesses of Calais
with the rope round their necks, standing before Edward III., who had
successfully besieged that city, and asking for mercy. The crushed
spirit which Rodin tried to express is actually visible in the group;
but the figures which express this emotion are formless from head
to foot. The limbs are rugged boughs; the bodies violate the laws
of anatomy; the whole group is on the stage of technical perfection
reached by the idols hewn from wood by the South Sea Islanders, and
is far inferior to many a pre-historic picture on mammoth’s teeth and
stag’s horn, which may be seen, for instance, in the Museum of St
Germain. Rodin’s domestic trumpeters promptly proclaimed this for a
work of lofty genius. The Corporation of the town of Calais, who had
ordered it, dared not reject it. The decadents’ reign of terror—it was
in the year 1895—was then in all its fury. The whole Paris Press was
in the power of the dictators of the Chat Noir, and the poor Calais
burgesses, clever men of business, but very uncertain in questions of
art, feared to be jeered at as wise men of Gotham, if they rebelled
against the æsthetic edicts of the tyrants of Paris criticism. But
they blush for shame and anger whenever they pass by the memorial, and
now, when the reign of terror of decadent criticism is over, it will
probably not be long before the Calais people pluck up courage enough
to have Rodin’s bronze abomination carted off from the public square,
and withdrawn, in a store-room in the Town Hall, from the scornful eyes
of strangers.
A counterpart of the Calais group is the design for the Victor Hugo
Memorial, which was for the first time exhibited in 1897, and again
five years later, when it was somewhat further advanced. This design
also showed nothing but intentions. The poet is sitting naked by the
seashore. The last shallow wave washes gently up to his feet. Two
female tutelary figures—perhaps History and Legend, or Poetry and
Philosophy—are flying to him horizontally at the level of his head and
whispering secrets in his ear. As a mere intention, the composition
might be allowed to pass; but nothing of execution, practically, was
yet to be seen. Victor Hugo’s body was not modelled; the flying female
figures could not be distinguished, either from a distance or on close
inspection, from cloud packs, or the fantastic animal figures of
Gothic gargoyles. Nevertheless, Rodin disarmed intelligent criticism
by declaring that the work was a mere sketch. Of course, he could no
longer be fairly reproached with its shapelessness, and people had to
content themselves with waiting for its completion, which has not come
to pass up to now.
Rodin has overstepped, in his Balzac Memorial, which he first exhibited
in 1898, the very extensive limits within which his silly aberrations
might have been borne. Master Shallow, who tolerates much, could not
tolerate this work, and broke down under its crushing exaction. When
the public saw this provocative monstrosity, it broke out into that
uncontrollable laughter, whereby the outraged intelligence of mankind
revenges itself with primitive force for restraints that it has long
suffered in silence. In the face of this result, the Committee of the
French Union of Authors, which had commissioned the Balzac Memorial,
resolved unanimously to decline it. In vain the Condottieri, who had
usurped supremacy in art criticism by the most unscrupulous methods
of conspiracy, violence, and oppression, made desperate efforts to
maintain themselves. They were powerless against the armed rising of
sensible people who had at last come to themselves. Their tyranny
was vanquished, and they were swept away. They might still talk all
sorts of twaddle about the stupidity of the masses, and, in impotent
rage, hiss at the victors the well-known shibboleths, “Philistine,”
“provincial,” etc., but this final, faint-hearted nagging sank unheard
in the unanimous cry of scorn from public opinion.
Rodin has represented Balzac as, jumping out of bed in the morning,
he wraps himself unclad in his monk-like dressing-gown, without even
putting his arms in the sleeves, irresistibly impelled to hurry to
his writing-table in order to fix the thoughts of which his creative
brain is full to bursting. Agreed: that, again, is the intention which
Rodin might, perhaps, have secretly put into the figure. What the eye
really sees is a sort of tree-trunk, hewn in the roughest manner by a
woodman with an axe, which is surmounted by a hideously swollen tadpole
head on a goitred neck. Malicious Parisian wit has exhausted all the
droll comparisons that this monstrosity can suggest to flouting humour.
People have called Rodin’s work a meal-sack, a carved potato, a snowman
made by a cheeky schoolboy, an unpacked statue, a stalactite, etc. The
work is all that, for it is nothing at all; but it is pre-eminently
the conclusive refutation of Rodin’s æsthetics. For it is the highest
expression, and, on that account, the unintentional parody, of his
impressionist technique and of his third mistake, viz., ignorance of
the limitations of his art.
Rodin worked at this wretched piece of work for ten whole years. First
he read all Balzac’s works; then he made a journey to Touraine and
spent months there, so as to absorb the human environment from which
Balzac took so many of his models, and to become permeated with the
feelings and impressions with which Balzac may have satiated himself
when composing—all this to make a human figure which was to be the
likeness of a man whom many people now living have known in the flesh.
After these preliminary studies, Rodin finally proceeded to form his
Balzac. His head was to be “a synthesis of his works,” his physiognomy
was to be summed up “in an eye that looks on the _Comédie humaine_
and in an upper lip that is curled in contempt for humanity.” So said
Rodin himself in several interviews which were published at the time
when his statue was exhibited. He was then merely repeating what the
twaddlers of Montmartre had chattered to him. It would be easy to make
jests about this inflammation of the brain, but it is not worth even
cheap raillery. It is quite enough to establish, soberly and drily,
that Rodin, like a child or an idiot, aimed at something impossible.
Sculpture cannot furnish any “synthesis of Balzac’s works.” Nature
herself cannot, in the sense that Balzac himself, when he was alive,
did not synthetise his works, in his externals, in his physiognomy.
He had perhaps the head of a man of mark, but there was assuredly
nothing in his face to show that he had written the “Physiology of
Marriage,” and not written “La Chartreuse de Parme” (Stendhal). Rodin
imagined that a portrait-statue could quite alone, merely by its own
means, supply the place of a biography and a psychological and literary
characterisation of the person represented. This patent lunacy was
necessarily bound to end, as it has ended, in a mad caricature.
“The Thinker,” a colossal statue which was exhibited in 1904, is almost
as bad an aberration as Balzac. It is a gigantic enlargement of a
little sketch that one saw many years ago over Rodin’s “Gate of Dante’s
Hell,” in the confused and scarcely indicated unborn _foetus_ lines of
which confident devotion might imagine all possible promises of future
splendour.
The promises are realised in “The Thinker.” He who still wishes to
shudder with foreboding in the presence of the finished work will be at
liberty to do so. It will be the same sort of man who grew enthusiastic
over the “Balzac,” before which every criticism of intelligent—not
“intellectual”—men dissolved into unextinguishable laughter. “The
Thinker” is brother of the “Balzac,” only it is not so comic, for
it is not dressed in a meal-sack, but is naked, and the bared human
body, when misshapen, excites in a spectator of unvitiated taste, not
cheerfulness, but discomfort, which may even rise to loathing.
“The Thinker” is not only naked, but also flayed. Its anatomy is
executed with obtrusive importance, without the covering epidermis
with its vital warmth. The enormous exaggeration of the muscles, the
impossible assertion of strength which is expressed by the extreme
contraction of all the muscles, therefore also of the counteracting
muscles, are well-known features of sculpture in its worst period of
decline. There is still, however, a distinction between Rodin and
the _rococo_ sculptors, who confused fleshy tumours over the whole
surface of the bodies of their statues with the power of portraying
artistically. At any rate, the latter had a correct knowledge of
myology, or the subject of the muscles, whereas Rodin’s anatomy
is shockingly inaccurate. I really do not think much of Lorenzo
Matthielly’s groups at the Vienna Hofburg-gates; but in the face of
Rodin’s monstrosity I apologise in my heart for all the objections I
have ever made against them. At any rate, with Matthielly every muscle
occupies its proper place. Rodin, however, invents muscles which do
not exist, and never did exist. Two mighty ridges, ending below in
sausage-tips, run down the “Thinker’s” back, which are perhaps intended
for the two _longissimi dorsi_; in this case, however, they are howling
blunders as regards their attachment, their whole course, and their
form. The muscles of the forehead and temples are treated quite as
arbitrarily as those of the back. Where nature only recognises thin
cutaneous muscles and ligatures, there Rodin puts bumps which remind
one of blood tumours after blows from a club, and impart to the face
the appearance of evil _Verschlagenheit_; not, as Fritz Reuter says, in
the sense of craftiness, but in that of receiving a sound cudgeling.
As a record “The Thinker” stands on the same level as the anatomical
plates in Japanese manuals of the healing art of the time of the
Shoguns.
This, however, is not yet the worst; the intellectual element fares
even worse than the bodily one with this oaf who calls himself so
pretentiously “The Thinker.” The flayed man sits crouching, with a
distinctly crooked hump, on a sharp-edged block of stone. His toes
claw convulsively into the ground. He holds a clenched fist before his
mouth, and seems to bite it fiercely. His bestial countenance, with its
bloated, contracted forehead, gazes as threateningly dark as midnight.
He who has to interpret the figure without the help of a title will,
from a back view, conclude it is some one writhing in agony on the
rack; and from a front view, a criminal meditating over some foul
deed. Its mien and bearing would suggest a designation such as “The
Fallen Titan,” “Lucifer’s Rebellion,” or “Cain before he murdered his
Brother.” The last thing which one would think of would be to look for
a mind working behind this bulgy forehead, or to imagine that thought
was supreme in this body seized by a spasm of rigidity in all its
muscles. The name given by Rodin to this wretched performance sounds
like a scoff or a calumny, and it might be thought the misled artist,
robbed by his fanatics of all self-criticism, had intended to make a
malicious parody of Michael Angelo’s _Pensieroso_.
Rodin himself, by his portrait busts, makes it possible to gauge
the whole insincerity of his pose as a profound thinker, and his
genius-playing arrogance; for instance, by that of Octave Mirbeau, and,
still more easily, by a female bust which was exhibited at the same
time as “The Thinker” monstrosity. With the exception of the folly,
which is, moreover, not too obtrusive, that a piece of the rough block
was allowed to remain on both shoulders, there was not the faintest
feature in the bust that could differentiate it from a severely
classical, coldly correct work. Here he had to satisfy a lady client,
and he was irreproachably smooth, executed all the details lovingly,
and produced a soft, delicate flesh, to which the elegant Injalbert
might sign his name. If one were desirous of making an objection to
this pleasant bust, it would, at worst, be that it is too sweet.
He becomes the destroyer of all form, the bungling sham-Titan, the
inscrutable philosopher, dramatist, and lyric poet, whose eye rolls in
a fine frenzy, and who, in the throes of his fever to create, confines
himself to hurried indications—he becomes all this only when he works
for his bodyguard of sympathetic sensitivism.
How future generations will laugh over all this buffoonery of “nerve
art”! Only, indeed, when it comes to know the comments of contemporary
“intellectuals” in addition to the artists’ silly bungling. For the
former will show them in a way to excite sympathy and amusement what
devastation the deafening babble of a band of gossips, dreadfully
ignorant of art and innocent of any feeling for beauty, could produce
in the taste and thought of a large majority, which honestly yearns
after æsthetic education, but, on account of a lack of trustworthy
traditions and adequate instruction in art, has not sufficient
self-confidence to set up the promptings, however obscure, of their own
feeling against the impudent dictates of presumptuous arbiters of taste.