fallen on one knee and is lifting his great lyre towards the gods whom
he has just implored. Above him, almost on his back, suspended in a
way that would appear to contradict the laws of equilibrium and the
material conditions of sculpture, soars Eurydice, compassionate and
almost vaporous, truly an immaterial shade, with a smile of despair.
I regret that the unfinished condition of this model does not allow
me to publish a photograph of it, for nothing would give a clearer
impression of Rodin's originality in the matter of contour and in the
mutual relation of figures. The extreme freedom of his attitudes and
his caprices of balance are, indeed, the newest features that he has
brought into his art and are not to be found in anyone else in any
country or time. In these is his true signature, and by them his work
might be recognised among a hundred statues of all periods. As to the
expressive beauty of the faces and bodies, that is supreme. No one has
better comprehended than Rodin all that can be rendered by the naked
human body and all the intellectual significations that it can hide.
The nude is to Rodin a whole language.
In his latest spiritualised works there is something Correggio-like
in the vibration of light upon the softened forms and amplified
surfaces. They suggest the _Antiope,_ at once soft and muscular, and
Rodin often speaks of "morbidezza" as a quality which he no longer
distrusts, whereas he formerly banished it from his ascetic, sinewy,
and dry figures. He gives his women the pulpy flesh of fruits. The
lines of landscape seem to him to correspond to the planes of the body;
he lately said to me that since he has lived at Meudon, opposite the
flowing Seine, the wooded hills and the fields, he has found useful
resemblances between the modelling of the body and that of a horizon. I
have even once suggested to him the title of "The Hill" for the body of
a young man reclining, the outline of which did in truth resemble the
undulations of a hill, and he retained the name and the analogy, for he
delights in everything that binds the human being to the earth, and,
like a true metaphysician, conceives of nothing isolated or distinct in
nature.
I come now to Rodin's drawings, drawings which were not made to be
shown, but which, having nevertheless become known, have surprised
and puzzled people. Rodin's drawings, like some other drawings by
sculptors, are not themselves works of art; they are thoughts noted
down, and are not comprehensible unless they are seen with the statues
of which they indicate the first idea, or some variation.
Rodin has published some of his sketches; and has produced some
dry-points (in particular the _Ronde_,[1] _Antonin Proust_, the three
portraits of Henry Becque, full face and two profiles upon the same
sheet, and two heads of Hugo), some drawings for books by M. Mirbeau
and M. Bergerat, and a complete set of illustrations of the _Fleurs
du Mal,_ in the form of marginal drawings for a unique copy belonging
to M. Gallimard. Many drawings in black or colour have been published
(by the clever lithographer Clot), and M. Fenaille has superintended
an admirable _edition de luxe_ of 142 drawings by Rodin.[2]
Notwithstanding this partial publicity, these works must be considered
as _standing apart;_ and to consider them by themselves would actually
be to injure Rodin with the public at large, since they form an
integral part of his statues. For this reason I have not chosen to
reproduce any of them here, studies so purely professional not seeming
to fall within the scope of a work intended to give a general idea of
an artist's work.
Having said so much, I wish to dwell upon the great beauty of these
drawings--a special and terrible beauty. Many deal with Dante. Rodin
did some painting under Lecoq de Boisbaudron, landscapes, a portrait
of his father, and sketches after Rubens; but there has never been
any danger of painting intruding upon his vocation, and his sketches
rapidly became nothing but notes for sculpture. The objective reality
of his Dantesque figures is vague, if their subjective reality is
intense. Rodin, anxious to note down his impressions, and not to
_illustrate_, made his sketches into a sort of passionate writing, only
devoting himself to the scheme and to the contrasts of black and white,
and neglecting every detail. In these violent washes, these pencillings
and pen-scribbles, the spectator who is not forewarned sees nothing,
but the lover of art, who knows beforehand what to seek, follows the
creative thought. Nothing can be less like what is generally known as
"a drawing." After the regular drawings, the "painter's drawings" of
his first period, which have but a restricted interest, and which are
no longer known, those of his second manner are confusions of light and
shadow, and show fantastically. I will quote at this point a passage
from an essay by M. Clément Jasmin, a discerning critic, whose noisy
rivals do not give him his due place, and who has described these works
excellently.
"These sketches are altogether the work of a sculptor, even in their
colour, which seems to have sunk into plaster or clay, and especially
in the firmness of their modelling, which is imparted by shaded touches
of body-colour, on grey paper, or rendered by spaces left white. These
blanks, these white spaces, are the extreme point of the modelling,
the 'high light' of some projection, which lower down is wrapped in
half-tints that carry the eye to the shadows of the inflections or
the hollows. There is a constant relation between the contour and
the interior modelling. A thrill is communicated by the fantastic
lighting of some sketches. Rodin adds further strength to this dramatic
distribution of lights and shadows by one or two tones that accentuate
the impression or fix a plan. Often his ink will become blue or yellow,
(water-colours, sepia, or coloured inks being employed), in order to
settle a value or intensify a feeling. Such is the case in the Fenaille
publication, with the gloomy red in the face of the Ugolino, of the
Dantesque Mahomet, whose entrails are hanging out, and of some other
figures dashed in, in black, on a violet background. One plainly feels
the material in which the work, of which the sketch is the first idea,
will be executed. It is always a sculptor who is at work, even when he
exchanges the chisel for the pen or the brush."
Painters would scorn these drawings. They commonly believe that
sculptors cannot express upon a plane surface the mass and movement of
a body. In reality a painter's sketch and a sculptor's sketch differ
in intention and execution. Rodin's are translations of movements,
in no way decorative and not attempting to express either modelling
or detail, but, if we may say so, the abstract geometry, the thought
that commands the movement. The use of coloured inks, which are solely
meant to modify certain values that black or white would not express to
Rodin's mind, has given rise to mistakes. These colours are not there
to express real tints, as is the case in ordinary drawings thus touched
up; inaccurate things have been said about these colourings, and about
the fantastic and almost Japanese appearance of some of the plates.
Rodin is certainly not thinking of prints in colour. He makes these
notes instinctively, and displays not so much a deliberate thought as a
natural faculty of transcription.
In his early drawings Rodin _refers to_--for I must insist upon the
point that the drawings do not _represent_ things--many of Dante's
persons and many fanciful animals, and later, to his statues. Now he
does not draw at all from literary impressions, but solely from the
living model. He uses ordinary cheap paper, a pencil or a pen; he
makes his model take some transitory, absolutely free position, often
in the rest between two sittings, and rapidly draws contour without
taking his eyes from the model and without looking at his sketch.
Sometimes the stroke will fall upon emptiness, the sheet of paper will
be too small, a head or a limb will fail to find its place. Naturally
this instantaneous sketch will be deformed in the most unexpected
way; the proportions are false, but the scheme of the contour and the
modelling of each piece are true. Often the hurrying pencil will miss
the curve of a breast or a leg. Then the artist will return to that
point with hasty, intermingled, impatient strokes that play around the
true line. His only concern is to fix the first view, the absolutely
living impression. Afterwards, in tracing his sketch, he rectifies,
but his chief aim is to amplify the impression of the life, taken
spontaneously, according to his principle of enlarging the form, in
order to place it better in the atmosphere (about in the proportion of
5/4 instead of 4/4). Then he connects the contours and further enlarges
the modelling, filling the outline with a wash of burnt-sienna, which
gives the general value, or sometimes with blue or red water-colour.
Rodin likes this practice in catching movements, and he has in his
studio hundreds of drawings of this kind that differ from his early
ones. Those aimed at the imaginative transcription of tragic and
literary elements under strange illuminations, and were almost like the
drawings of Odilon Redon; the later ones are merely graphic notes of
movements, and are incapable of having any direct aim or meaning.
I must add a few words upon a delicate point of which I should not
have spoken if others had not spoken mistakenly upon the subject.
Rodin's drawings, especially those of the present time, have shocked
some people who have seen them by their licentious character. Why
should we assume embarrassment in explaining this? In all Rodin's work
there is a profound and violent sense of the voluptuous, and the stern
painter of the vices and damnations of hell does not need to think of
prudery. The elevation and dramatic character of his conceptions clothe
the most daring attitudes with the severe chastity of the beautiful.
In his sketches, made for himself alone, and in the privacy of his
studio, Rodin no more fears erotic positions than did Hokusai. Beneath
the original animality he perceives nature; and feminine sexuality,
its movements, and impulses interest him, because therein woman is
psychologically revealed. Everything, in physical desire, that exalts,
maddens, contorts, and fevers the human body is, for the sculptor, the
object of an intensely interested study that he does not communicate
to the general public; nor is he the only one among the great artists
of form whom the erotic has interested from this point of view. Only
mediocre minds and minds capable of low intentions see anything low in
the movements of life. Rodin's studies from the model, naked and free,
without spectators, in the serious presence of work, never sully his
grand and melancholy inspiration; and his daring art is assuredly that
which most leads away the beholder from erotic ideas, because it notes
in every human being the melancholy of the insatiable, and makes the
pleasure of the senses a suffering of the flesh and the spirit. By this
point he touches the profound morality of art, and his consciousness is
free from any equivocation. The recent drawings in which he catches the
animal attitudes of the model are thus no more questionable, from the
delicate point of view of which I am speaking, than anatomical plates,
or the sad immodesties of a post-mortem examination. He adds to them
the power of expressing passion with which he is endowed, but since he
only shows these drawings to friends and artists in whom nudity does
not arouse silly thoughts, this concerns no one else. A comparison
cannot even be ventured between these drawings and the masterly
etchings of Rops, which are deliberate illustrations of licentious
subjects, relieved only by beauty of execution, and which should only
be shown with express reservations. Rodin admires certain bronzes in
the secret museum at Naples, and certain Japanese prints, because in
these, too, art has done its work by expressing a secret and essential
spring of the nervous and psychological life of humanity; a fierce
and serious subject which only fools consider laughable or indecent,
because their minds approach it with indecorum and ridicule. But I
do not know that Rodin ever even yielded to the fancy of modelling
one of these subjects for himself, as Rubens and many others did not
forbid themselves to do. It is time, therefore, to have done with this
question in regard to the great French sculptor. I do not know for whom
he intends these recent drawings, a whole framed collection of which
occupies one of the storerooms of his country house. Perhaps he will
have them destroyed; in any case, they are but studies of movements and
masses, and in no way direct representations of life.
Rodin's drawings are "rough drafts" to be compared with those of
a writer. Some are very impressive, and all constitute precious
evidence of his psychological preoccupations and of his desire for
simplification. But they remain on the margin of his work, and neither
the public nor the critics have those rights over them that belong to
biographers and friends. That is a point to be plainly specified, and
I desire to repeat that that is the reason this book contains none of
them.
[1] This word may mean either a certain sort of dance, or the "round"
of a patrol.--TRANS.
[2] Album of 142 sketches, reproduced in heliogravure by M. Manzi and
published by Goupil, 1897. These sketches in wash or colour have been
selected according to the advice of M. Fenaille, their owner, who lent
them, from the most imaginative of Rodin's drawings in his second
manner.
V.
RODIN'S PRIVATE LIFE--HIS PERSON, STUDIO, AND HOME--HIS INFLUENCE;
SCULPTORS INSPIRED BY HIS IDEAS--RODIN'S PLACE IN THE FRENCH
SCHOOL--HIS PRESENT POSITION IN RESPECT TO ACADEMIC SCULPTURE
Auguste Rodin is in person a man of middle height, with an enormous
head upon a massive torso. At first sight one sees nothing of him but
this leonine bust, the head with its strong nose, flowing grey beard,
and small, keen, light-coloured eyes, slightly veiled by short sight
and by a gentle irony. The impression of power is accentuated by the
rolling gait, the rocky aspect of the troubled brow under the rough
brush of hair, the bony thickness of the aquiline nose and the ample
curls of beard. But the first impression is partly contradicted by
the reticent line of the mouth, the quick look, penetrating, simple,
and arch, (one of the most composite glances I have ever seen), and
especially by the voice, which is hollow, not easily modulated, with
deep inflections and sudden returns to a dental pronunciation, and
of which the meaning and intention are further modified by certain
very expressive tossings of the head. He appears simple, precise,
reserved, courteous, and cordial, without liveliness. Little by little
his shyness gives place to a calm and remarkable tone of authority.
He is neither emphatic nor awkward, and would seem rather dispirited
than inspired. An immense energy breathes in his sober and measured
gestures. The slowness and apparent embarrassment of his speech and
the pauses in his conversation give especial significance to what he
says; moreover, Rodin has acquired of late years a genuine case as a
talker and even as a writer, which previously he did not possess. I was
intimately acquainted with Stéphane Mallarmé, who, measured by Rodin,
was incomparably eloquent, and I often associate these two men in my
thoughts. The voices were alike, and Rodin, too, with his improvised
phrases, has the same veiled circumspect way of speech, hitting
suddenly upon words that illuminate the idea.
[Illustration: AUGUSTE RODIN]
Rodin, in speaking of any work of his, has a way of explaining it that
is very elliptical, but very clear, and which has caused some brilliant
chatterers to say, because he did not offer a prolix commentary, that
he did not know what he had done. In reality he utters the essential,
and his gesture, which seems to model his thought in space, completes
his words. He looks lovingly on his creations, and sometimes seems to
meditate in astonishment at the idea of having created them; he speaks
of them as though they existed apart from himself.
Gradually, beneath Rodin's essential simplicity, one discovers features
that were at first hidden; he is ironical, sensuous, nervous, proud.
He contains as possibilities all the passions that he expresses with
so vibrating a magnificence, and one begins to perceive the secret
links between this calm, almost cheerful man and the art that he
reveals. At certain moments his clear and rather vague eyes become
full of phosphorescent points, the face grows sardonic and almost
faunlike; at others it saddens and discloses a sickness for infinity.
This man is the comrade of his dumb white creatures; he loves them,
follows their abstract life, has moral obligations towards them.
Fundamentally the one thing with which Rodin is really concerned is
the life of permanent forms. Of late celebrity, age, and experience
have disposed him to become an adviser, a master, and he has begun
to talk aesthetics. But his ideas and opinions are restricted. He
perceives human beings only very summarily, his cordiality is a way
of fulfilling his social duties hastily. He has, if I may venture the
expression, very fine moral antennae, and they serve to recognise the
persons whom he will like. Very capable of friendship, Rodin reduces
friendship to tacit agreements upon the essential subjects of thought,
and it is only if one meets him upon one of these points that one
takes a place in his remembrance or his liking. He does not put his
faith in individuals, but in general ideas. He loves nothing but his
work, and endures everything else with civil boredom. He has a horror
of debates and disturbances. I have never heard him speak ill of bad
artists; he neglects, but does not criticise. He has a silent humour
which leads him to make busts of official and mediocre sculptors, with
an amusing good grace. Uncompromising in everything that touches his
art, Rodin has throughout his whole career endured severe struggles
and grave injustices, and, too proud to dispute, has never shown his
secret revolts. At the time when the _Balzac_ was refused all Rodin's
friends said to him: "Resist, force your work upon them; you ought,
for the work's sake, and a court would surely decide for you, for your
agreement is definitely in your favour." He listened and thanked them,
always good-tempered, and then withdrew his statue without saying
anything.
It is not weakness, for Rodin has had an excessively hard life and
is strong and patient; it is dignity of the inner life and profound
indifference for the life about him. Rodin is a high dignitary of
the Legion of Honour, a president of the judges of sculpture of an
important society of artists (the Société Nationale), he is honoured
all over Europe, has been received in England as a genius, and has
succeeded Whistler as the head of a chosen band of artists; but he
remains the man that he was when he was unknown and poor in his
solitude at Brussels.
He likes few things, but likes those thoroughly. He reads little, but
what he reads strikes home to him as to no one else; Baudelaire and
Rousseau, in whom he delights, are instances. He is passionately fond
of music, especially of Gluck, but seldom speaks of it. He simplifies
everything, sees only the main lines in morality as in art, lives by
two or three principles, and has an aversion for everything that is
not essential.
[Illustration: A CORNER OF RODIN'S STUDIO AT MEUDON]
When one knows Rodin well one ceases to be able to separate him from
his work. He can no longer think otherwise than symbolically by slow
deposits of accumulated sensation which work on in the deep strata of
his consciousness and suddenly blossom and take a name. His statues are
states of the soul. He is himself a representative being, surprised at
his own immanence, and his intelligence is outdone by his instinct.
That is how it comes about that he does not always know how to name
the beings that he has discovered, as we discover, by means of pain,
corners of our consciousness that we had not suspected. In the same way
that Rodin seems to break away the fragments of a block from around
an already existing statue hidden in it, he is himself a sort of rock
concealing shapes within it and embracing in its secret recesses
immense crystallised arborescences. With a simple enough personal
psychology he expresses infinite shades and inflexions of emotion. His
thought is like the monad of Leibnitz; it seems, when one sees the man,
to have no window to the outer world.
Rodin's opinions upon social life are vague. He contents himself with
repeating that work lovingly done is the secret of all order and all
happiness. To love life and natural forms, and to attempt nothing
disobedient to Nature or her aims, that is his whole morality.
He sees very few people and visits nobody. He would baffle visitors
accustomed to elegant, literary, well-informed, brilliant artists. His
studio in the Rue de l'Université, at the end of an old yard encumbered
by blocks of marble and shaded by aged chestnut trees, is like the
work-place of a poor beginner. Neither a carpet nor an ornament is
to be seen; the stone floor, the bare walls, a few rush chairs, some
modelling stands, some cloths, a shabby deal table loaded with papers,
sketches piled up on shelves, blouses hanging on nails, a cast-iron
stove--these and nothing more are found by the many foreign admirers
who come to see Rodin, and whom he receives with invariable amiability
amid his assistants at work upon the Hugo monument or upon some smaller
piece of marble.
[Illustration: A CORNER OF RODIN'S STUDIO AT MEUDON]