by a few twisting folds, which give it the appearance from behind of
an upright sarcophagus. The size of the head, the abnormal largeness
of the chest and neck, which have aroused mockery, are historic. Apart
from these points, one honestly wonders what it is that can have
shocked people in this bold and sincere work. The face is admirable in
its pride, its strength of will, its haughty irony, and penetrating
power of thought. The modelling and the leading lines are masterly.
The rather ghostly look of the clay disappears in the bronze, as may
be seen from the little head in that material, of which the monument
was to be made. It is the freedom, the spontaneity, the life of the
statue, which, as in the case of the _Burghers,_ gave a shock to the
conventions of the official world and disturbed the ideas of the public
at large.
It is true, nevertheless, and is generally admitted even by its most
active adversaries that this great figure possesses a strange haunting
power; when one had seen it in the Salon one could see nothing else
after it, and could not succeed in getting away from it. People
returned to it, in order to attack it, but they did return to it
inevitably. The same official sculptors who in 1877 had accused _The
Age of Brass_ of being cast from life because the figure was so exact
did not shrink from accusing this same Rodin, matured by twenty years
of work, of "not knowing the figure" and hiding his Balzac under a
robe out of weakness. Besides these reproaches, which were made in
bad faith, reproaches arose which exclaimed at Rodin's madness or
hypocritically regretted that a man of so much talent should have made
so great a mistake. But one thing which the _Bahac_ never encountered
was indifference; what was the spell which compelled everybody to
regard it as an irritating puzzle, as a challenge, as a work out of the
ordinary run? Plenty of hostile faces were to be seen, but many of
them showed a secret fear of being in the wrong, of misunderstanding a
fine thing, a work which was a forerunner. This same fear might have
been read as early as 1867 upon the faces of the detractors who stood
in a ring around Manet's first works.
The spell lay in the extreme simplification, the reduction of the
elements to a powerful unity, according to a scheme with which Rodin
had made experiments in silence and which he now revealed. And at
this point I am led to a brief explanation of Rodin's ideas upon the
technical part of his art.
At the time of the _Balzac's_ appearance I gave an account of the way
by which Rodin had been led to a new conception of sculpture. This was
in an article[3] that has been reproduced more or less everywhere, and
that Rodin has been good enough to consider as the emanation and direct
expression of his artistic wishes. I cannot enter into all the details.
The scale of this book would not allow of that, but the following are
the principal points of that evolution.
Rodin's is above all a temperament inclined to the expression of
passionate and tragic character. Thence comes his constant study of
movement. As I said before, that study has led him to give unlooked-for
values to the general outline and to produce works which may be viewed
on all sides and which continually show a fresh and balanced aspect
that explains the other aspects: otherwise the daring gestures and the
bold combinations of the limbs would have given an air of absurdity
to the groups. Rodin is at the same time very reflective and very
instinctive. He matures a thought slowly, but he often passes by
chance from that thought to its realisation. This is the predominant
feature of his nature, and it explains his entire art. Rodin often
appears unconscious, astonished at what he had in him and at what he
has brought into existence, to such a degree that he explains it badly
enough. He sees his thought in the whole of nature and finds it there
again; that thought, indeed, is fed by general ideas, and is, if I may
say so, almost "elemental." From this point of view Rodin's _genius_
is independent of his _talent_ as a sculptor. It sometimes happens to
him to see a block of marble or a knob of wood, and the form of such an
object will show him what he will make and the movement of the figure.
He adapts to it one of the ideas which he always has in reserve: the
aspect of the wood or the marble determines the passage of the thought
to the material which will incarnate it. I said one day to Rodin: "One
would say that you knew there was a figure in that block, and that you
do nothing beyond breaking away the stone that hides it from us." He
answered that that was exactly his feeling as he worked. Upon the naked
figure Rodin has ideas that are peculiar to his nature as a mystic and
a realist. He considers the body with its four limbs as a cypher, of
which the combinations are infinite. That is an old idea that was held
by primitive theologians of the Eastern religions. And it is the fact
that Rodin has invented an immense series of attitudes and combinations
that one would not have thought possible: he attaches little groups to
the side of a block of marble with the freedom of a painter throwing
a figure upon a background. He makes his people light, he makes them
soar, he entwines them in surprising positions.
It was therefore absolutely essential that he should find means to
constitute a logical harmony _on every side_ of his works. Scholastic
statuary is opposed to this principle. Its tendency is to treat groups
as bas-reliefs. The spectator must stand in front, at a certain spot,
and whatever is behind is accessory: the decorative line produces its
effect only from that point. So true is this that statues are very
often so placed in public squares that people cannot pass round them.
The academic sculptors treat a piece of sculpture like a picture; it
has a right side and a wrong side. Rodin, shocked at this method, began
by working in quite a different way. He made successive sketches of all
the faces of his works, going constantly round them so as to obtain a
series of views connected in a ring. Travels in Italy had led him to
think that the ancients proceeded in this manner and that their great
endeavour was to get the design of the outline by means of movement,
which continually modifies the anatomy. Anatomy, indispensable to
the artist, becomes the source of all the academic errors if once
we forget that it is but inertia, the state of non-action, and
consequently incapable of expressly teaching us about life and about
the modifications that thought imposes upon flesh. The real value of
a living figure is given by profiles studied successively in a full
light. Rodin was delighted by this way of working. But his pictorial
inclinations, his ideas about the possible formation of a _background_
in sculpture as in painting, were not satisfied.
When the academic school wishes to make use of a background to a figure
it confines itself to a hollow or a relief. Rodin desired that a statue
should stand free and should bear looking at from any point, but he
desired nevertheless that it should remain in relation with light and
with the surrounding atmosphere. He was struck by the hard, cut-out
aspect of ordinary statues, and asked himself how an atmosphere might
be given to them. Painting has two means to this end: of which the
first is _values. Values_ are independent of colour. Values, an element
common to both arts, are in painting and sculpture _the relations as
to opacity or transparence of an object and the background against
which it is seen._ They may be dark on a light ground, light on a dark
ground, or light upon a ground that is likewise light; but they are
always the very life of the outline, and the important point is to fix
that outline first of all. When we see a person placed between the
sun and ourselves, against the light, we do not at first perceive the
details within the outline, but we do see the general mass of the body,
and that mass is filled with more or less intense colour, in which we
presently distinguish details. Our perception at the moment is as much
sculptural as pictorial. Rodin, struck by the importance of this idea,
devoted himself to obtaining, _at once and together,_ the _volume;_
that is to say, the equivalent in sculpture of the _value,_ and the
design of _successive views of one movement._
But the second means in painting is the employment of intermediate
tones encircling the figure and combining with the background. How
could an equivalent be found for that? Logic led Rodin on to a step
which alarmed him: he made experiments after examining the antiques
very closely. He took fragments of his statues and began to raise them
in certain places by layers of clay, intensifying the modelling and
enlarging the lines. He observed that the light now played better upon
these enlarged lines; the refraction of light upon these amplified
surfaces was softer, the hardness of the cut-out outline vanished,
and a radiant zone shaped itself around his figures and united them
gradually with the atmosphere. In this way, therefore, by means of
this systematic accentuation of the outlines, an intermediate tone, _a
radiancy of the forms,_ was produced.
Rodin understood at once that he had found his way to the deepest
secret of his art; that is to say, to the ideal limit where through its
hidden laws a plastic art touches the other arts in a negation of all
that is merely materialistic. The intermediate tones in painting, the
radiating surfaces in sculpture, are the same principle as the nervous
radiations noted in photographing a hand, where it may be seen that
the fingers are prolonged by emanations. Nothing is fixed, limited,
or finished in nature, and the radiating state is the only real one.
But this was a dangerous discovery for a sculptor, since people would
immediately exclaim upon the _deformation_ _of what was seen_, the
alteration of the fact, the falsification of anatomy. Therefore Rodin
proceeded in silence and with very great prudence. The point was not,
of course, _to enlarge_ _all surfaces equally_, for that would have
produced only an increase of scale. The thing was _to amplify_, with
tact, _certain parts of the modelling_, the edges of which were swept
by the light, so as to give a halo to the outline. At the same time,
Rodin experimented in a series of drawings made on purpose, forbidding
himself to give any detail, tracing only the outlines of bodies filled
in with one wash of water-colour that gave the _value._ I shall return
to these sketches. They cannot be understood without a knowledge of
their original purpose.
This theory, to which Rodin approved of my giving the name of
_deliberate amplification of surfaces_, is simply the critical
principle of Greek sculpture, which has been entirely misunderstood
by the academic school. That school, which is supposed to honour the
Greeks, is really false to their spirit and their teaching. Moreover,
this principle, which belongs to all the primitive statuary that
was made for the open air, is to be found among the Egyptians and
the Assyrians. It calls in question the academic tradition whereby
_exactitude_ is confounded with _truth._ In reality it may be said
to be a profoundly classic principle which has been denied by the
academic school. Here, as in painting, classicism is opposed to the
academic. Hence it should be concluded that in reality Rodin is by
no means an _innovator_ opposing himself to a school that retains
classic traditions, but, speaking precisely, a classic, returning to
nature, replacing himself in the state of mind of a Greek before his
model, and opposing himself to a school that has overloaded art with
methods, formulas, and expedients that change the character of antique
and Gothic art. Rodin has a horror of what is called "originality,"
and an even greater horror of what is called "inspiration." He only
trusts completely to work and to minute, sincere observation of nature.
"Slowness is a beauty," he often says. He has the greatest antipathy
for "sculpture with literary meanings," and has often been galled,
without saying so, by certain praises, in which writers, reeling off
pages of description about his works, have thought to please him by
dwelling on the idea and not on the execution. "I invent nothing,"
he says; "I rediscover. And the thing seems new because people have
generally lost sight of the aim and the means of art; they take
that for an innovation which is nothing but a return to the laws of
the great sculpture of long ago. Obviously, I think; I like certain
symbols, I see things in a synthetic way, but it is nature that gives
me all that. I do not imitate the Greeks; I try to put myself in the
spiritual state of the men who have left us the antique statues. The
'École' copies their works; the thing that signifies is to _recover
their method._ I began by showing close studies from nature like _The
Age of Brass._ Afterwards I came to understand that art required a
little more largeness, a little exaggeration, and my whole aim, from
the time of the _Burghers_, was to find a method of exaggerating
logically: that method consists in the deliberate amplification of the
modelling. It consists also in the constant reduction of the figure to
a geometrical figure, and in the determination to sacrifice any part of
a figure to the synthesis of its aspect. See what the Gothic sculptors
did. Look at the cathedral of Chartres; one of the towers is massive
and without ornament: they sacrificed it to give value to the exquisite
delicacy of the other tower.
"In sculpture the projection of the muscular _fasciculi_ must be
accentuated, the foreshortening forced, the hollows deepened; sculpture
is the art of the hole and the lump, not of clear, well-smoothed,
unmodelled figures. Ignorant people, when they see close-knitted true
surfaces, say that 'it is not finished.' No notion is falser than that
of _finish_ unless it be that of _elegance_; by means of these two
ideas people would kill our art. The way to obtain solidity and life is
by work carried out to the fullest, not in the direction of achievement
and of copying details, but in that of truth in the successive
schemes. The public, perverted by academic prejudices, confounds art
with neatness. The simplicity of the 'École' is a painted cardboard
ideal. A cast from life is a copy, the exactest possible copy, and
yet it has neither motion nor eloquence. Art intervenes to exaggerate
certain surfaces, and also to fine down others. In sculpture everything
depends upon the way in which the modelling is carried out with a
constant thought of the main line of the scheme, upon the rendering of
the hollows, of the projections and of their connections; thus it is
that one may get fine lights, and especially fine shadows that are not
opaque. Everything should be emphasised according to the accent that
it is desired to render, and the degree of amplification is personal,
according to the tact and the temperament of each sculptor; and for
this reason there is no transmissible process, no studio recipe, but
only a true law. I see it in the antique and in Michael Angelo. To work
by the profiles, in depth not by surfaces, always thinking of the few
geometrical forms from which all nature proceeds, and to make these
eternal forms perceptible in the individual case of the object studied,
that is my criterion. That is not idealism, it is a part of the
handicraft. My ideas have nothing to do with it but for that method; my
Danaids and my Dante figures would be weak, bad things. From the large
design that I get your mind deduces ideas."
Rodin, then, is convinced that he is classical, and rebels against the
"École" which claims to be so. He has the greatest admiration for the
Renascence, but declares that he does not so clearly understand the
genius of the Gothic sculptors. He admires it, but has not thoroughly
penetrated it. "I feel it, but I cannot express it," he says. "I cannot
analyse the Celtic genius to my own satisfaction. In the Middle Ages
art came from groups, not from individuals. It was anonymous; the
sculptors of cathedrals no more put their names to their works than
our workmen put theirs on the pavement that they lay. Ah! what an
admirable scorn of notoriety! The signature is what destroys us. We do
portraits, but what we do is not so great. These kings and queens, on
the cathedrals, were not portraits. The fellow-workers stood for one
another, and they interpreted; they did not copy. They made clothed
figures; the nude and portraiture only date from the Renascence. And
then those fellows cut with the tool's end into the block, that is why
they were called sculptors. As for us, we are modellers. And what a
disgraceful thing that casting from life is, which so many well-known
sculptors do not blush to use! It is a mere swindling in art. Art was
a vital function to the image-makers of the thirteenth century; they
would have laughed at the idea of signing what they did, and never
dreamed of honours and titles. When once their work was finished,
they said no more about it, or else they talked among themselves.
How curious it would have been to hear them, to be present at their
gatherings, where they must have discussed in amusing phrases, and with
simple, deep ideas!... Whenever the cathedrals disappear civilisation
will go down one step. And even now we no longer understand them, we
no longer know how to read their silent language. _We need to make
excavations not in the earth, but towards heaven._..." An admirable
saying that Rodin has often repeated to me and that I have never heard
without deep emotion! He has the secret of these true formulas, and
his words, which are not eloquent, but, rather, obscure, are suddenly
lighted up by them. His speech, like his sculpture, is born from
sincere contact with the essence of nature. In regard to the Renascence
and Michael Angelo, he reports that he received no decisive lesson
from either until after a journey to Italy in 1875. "I believed before
that," he says, "that movement was the whole secret of this art, and
I put my models into positions like those of Michael Angelo. But
as I went on observing the free attitudes of my models I perceived
that they possessed these _naturally_, and that Michael Angelo had
not preconceived them, but merely transcribed them according to the
personal inspiration of human beings moved by the need of action. I
went to Rome to look for what may be found everywhere: _the latent
heroic in every natural movement._ [4]
"Then I gathered the elements of what people call my symbolism. I do
not understand anything about long words and theories. But I am willing
to be a symbolist, if that defines the ideas that Michael Angelo gave
me, namely that the essence of sculpture is the modelling, the general
scheme which alone enables us to render the intensity, the supple
variety of movement and character. If we can imagine the thought of
God in creating the world, He thought first of the construction, which
is the sole principle of nature, of living things and perhaps of the
planets. Michael Angelo seems to me rather to derive from Donatello
than from the ancients; Raphael proceeds from them. He understood that
an architecture can be built up with the human body, and that, in
order to possess volume and harmony, a statue or a group ought to be
contained in a cube, a pyramid; or some simple figure. Let us look at a
Dutch interior and at an interior painted by an artist of the present
day. The latter no longer touches us, because it does not possess the
qualities of depth and volume, the science of distances. The artist who
paints it does not know how to reproduce a cube. An interior by Van
der Meer is a cubic painting. The atmosphere is in it and the exact
volume of the objects; the place of these objects has been respected,
the modern painter places them, arranges them as models. The Dutchmen
did not touch them, but set themselves to render the distances that
separated them, that is, the depth. And then, if I go so far as to say
that _cubic truth, not appearance, is the mistress of things,_ if I
add that the sight of the plains and woods and country views gives me
the principle of the plans that I employ on my statues, that I feel
cubic truth everywhere, and that plan and volume appear to me as laws
of all life and all beauty, will it be said that I am a symbolist, that
I generalise, that I am a metaphysician? It seems to me that I have
remained a sculptor and a realist. Unity oppresses and haunts me."
"What," says Rodin again, "is the principle of my figures, and
what is it that people like in them? It is the very pivot of art,
it is balance; that is to say, the oppositions of volume produced
by movement. That is the striking, material fact in art, with all
due deference to those persons who conceive art as distinct from
'brutal' reality. Art is like love. For many people it is a dream, a
psychological complication, a palace, a perfume, a stage scene; but
nothing of the sort! The essential of love is the pairing; all the
rest is only detail, charming, and full of passion, but detail. It is
the same in art: people come and praise my symbols and my expressions
to me; but I know that the plans are the essential thing. Respect the
plan, make it exact from every point; movement intervenes, displaces
these volumes and creates a fresh balance. The human body is like a
_walking temple,_ and like a temple it has a central point around which
the volumes place and spread themselves. When one understands that,
one has everything. It is simple, but it must be seen, and academism
refuses to see it. Instead of recognising that that is the key to my
method they prefer to say that I am a poet. That expression signifies
that people feel, confusedly, the difference between an art resting
on conventions and one derived from truth; only they think that the
'poetic' art is the conventional one. They call that _inspiration._
That is the belief that has led to the theory of genius being madness.
But men of genius are just those _who, by their trade-skill, carry the
essential thing to perfection._ People say that my sculpture _is that
of an 'exalté.'[5]_
"I do not deny that there is exaltation in my works; but that
exaltation existed not in me, but in nature, in movement. The divine
work is naturally exalted. As for me, all I do is to be true; my
temperament is not 'exalted'; it is patient. I am not a dreamer,
but a mathematician; and if my sculpture is good it is because it is
geometrical."