I
Of Auguste Rodin one thing may be said without fear of contradiction:
among his contemporaries to-day he is preëminently the master. Born
at Paris, 1840,--the natal year of his friends, Claude Monet and
Zola--in humble circumstances, without a liberal education, the young
Rodin had to fight from the beginning; fight for bread as well as
an art schooling. He was not even sure of his vocation. An accident
determined it. He became a workman in the atelier of the sculptor,
Carrier-Belleuse, though not until he had failed at the Beaux-Arts (a
stroke of luck for his genius), and after he had enjoyed some tentative
instruction under the animal sculptor, Barye (he was not a steady
pupil of Barye, nor did he care to remain with him) he went to Belgium
and "ghosted" for other sculptors; it was his privilege or misfortune
to have been the anonymous assistant of a half dozen sculptors. He
mastered the technique of his art by the sweat of his brow before he
began to make music upon his own instrument. How his first work, "The
Man with the Broken Nose," was refused by the Salon jury is history.
He designed for the Sèvres porcelain works. He executed portrait busts,
architectural ornaments, caryatids; all styles that were huddled in the
studios and yards of sculptors he essayed. No man knew his trade better,
although it is said that with the chisel of the _practicien_ Rodin was
never proficient; he could not, or would not, work at the marble _en
bloc_. His sculptures to-day are in the museums of the world, and he is
admitted to possess "talent" by academic men. Rivals he has none. His
production is too personal. Like Richard Wagner he has proved a upas
tree for lesser artists--he has deflected, or else absorbed them. His
friend Eugene Carrière warned young sculptors not to study Rodin too
curiously. Carrière was wise, yet his art of portraiture was influenced
by Rodin; swimming in shadow his enigmatic heads have more the quality
of Rodin's than the mortuary art of academic sculpture.
A profound student of light and movement, Rodin by deliberate
amplification of the surfaces of his statues, avoiding dryness and
harshness of outline, secures a zone of radiancy, a luminosity which
creates the illusion of reality. He handles values in clay as a
painter does his tones. He gets the design of the outline by movement
which continually modifies the anatomy; the secret of the Greeks,
he believes. He studies his profiles successively in full light,
obtaining volume--or planes--at once and together; successive views
of one movement. The light plays with more freedom upon his amplified
surfaces, intensified in the modeling by enlarging the lines. The edges
of certain parts are amplified, deformed, falsified, and we enjoy
light-swept effects, luminous emanations. This deformation, he declares,
was always practised by the great sculptors to snare the undulating
appearance of life. Sculpture, he asserts, is the "art of the hole and
lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodeled figures." Finish kills
vitality. Yet Rodin can chisel a smooth nymph, if he so wills, but her
flesh will ripple and run in the sunlight. His art is one of accents.
He works by profile in depth, not by surfaces. He swears by what he
calls "cubic truth"; his pattern is a mathematical figure; the pivot of
art is balance, i.e., the opposition of volumes produced by movement.
Unity haunts him. He is a believer in the correspondence of things, of
continuity in nature. He is mystic, as well as a geometrician. Yet such
a realist is he that he quarrels with any artist who does not recognize
"the latent heroic in every natural movement."
Therefore he does not force the pose of his model, preferring attitudes
or gestures voluntarily adopted. His sketch books, as vivid, as copious,
as the drawings of Hokusai--he is studious of Japanese art--are swift
memoranda of the human machine as it dispenses its normal muscular
motions. Rodin, draughtsman, is as surprisingly original as the sculptor
Rodin. He will study a human foot for months, not to copy it, but to
master the secret of its rhythms. His drawings are the swift notations
of a sculptor whose eye is never satisfied, whose desire to pin to paper
the most evanescent vibrations of the human machine is almost a mania.
The model may tumble down anywhere, in any contortion or relaxation
he or she wishes. Practically instantaneous is the method of Rodin
to register the fleeting attitudes, the first shivering surface. He
rapidly draws with his eye on the model. It is often a mere scrawl, a
silhouette, a few enveloping lines. But there is vitality in it all, and
for his purpose, a notation of a motion. But a sculptor has made these
extraordinary drawings, not a painter. It may be well to observe the
distinction. And he is the most rhythmic sculptor among the moderns.
Rhythm means for him the codification of beauty. Because, with a vision
quite virginal, he has observed, he insists that he has affiliations
with the Greeks. But if his vision is Greek his models are French, while
his forms are more Gothic than the pseudo-Greek of the academy.
As Mr. W.C. Brownell wrote: "Rodin reveals rather than constructs beauty
... no sculptor has carried expression further; and expression means
individual character completely exhibited rather than conventionally
suggested." Mr. Brownell was the first critic to point out that Rodin's
art was more nearly related to Donatello's than to Michael Angelo's.
He is in the legitimate line of Gallic sculpture, the line of Goujon,
Puget, Rude, Barye. Dalou, the celebrated sculptor, did not hesitate
to assert that the Dante portal is "one of the most, if not the most,
original and astonishing pieces of sculpture of the nineteenth century."
This Dante gate, begun thirty years ago, not finished yet--and probably
never to be--is an astoundingly plastic fugue, with death, the devil,
hell, and human passions, for a complicated four-voiced theme. I
first saw the composition at the Rue de l'Université atelier. It is
as terrifying a conception as the Last Judgment. Nor does it miss the
sonorous and sorrowful grandeur of the Medici Tombs. Yet how different.
How feverish, how tragic. Like all great men working in the grip of a
unifying idea, Rodin modified the technique of sculpture so that it
would serve him as sound does a musical composer. A lover of music his
inner ear may dictate the vibrating rhythms of his forms; his marbles
are ever musical, ever in modulation, not "frozen music," as Goethe
said of Gothic architecture, but silent, swooning music. This Gate is
a Frieze of Paris, as deeply significant of modern inspiration and
sorrow as the Parthenon Frieze is the symbol of the great clear beauty
of Hellas. Dante inspired this monstrous yet ennobled masterpiece, and
Baudelaire's poetry filled many of its chinks and crannies with ignoble
writhing shapes; shapes of dusky fire that, as they tremulously stand
above the gulf of fear, wave ineffectual and desperate hands as if
imploring destiny.
But Rodin is not all hell-fire and tragedy. Of singular delicacy and
exquisite proportion are his marbles of youth, of springtide, of the joy
and desire of life. At Paris, 1900, in his special exhibition Salle,
Europe and America awoke to the beauty of these haunting visions. Not
since Keats and Wagner and Swinburne has love been voiced so sweetly, so
romantically, so fiercely. Though he disclaims understanding the Celtic
spirit one might say that there is Celtic magic, Celtic mystery in his
lyrical work. He pierces to the core the frenzy of love, and translates
it into lovely symbols. For him nature is the sole mistress--his
sculptures are but variations on her themes. He knows the emerald route,
and all the semitones of sensuousness. Fantasy, passion, paroxysmal
madness are there, yet what elemental power is in his "Adam," as the
gigantic first man painfully heaves himself up from the earth to the
posture that differentiates him forever from the beast. Here, indeed,
two natures are at strife. And "Mother Eve" suggests the sorrows and
shames that are to be the lot of her seed; her very loins crushed by the
future generations hidden within them. One may freely walk about the
"Burghers of Calais" as Rodin did when he modeled them; a reason for
the vital quality of the group. Around all his statues we may walk; he
is not a sculptor of a single attitude but a hewer of humans. Consider
the "Balzac." It is not Balzac the writer, but Balzac the prophet, the
seer, the enormous natural force that was Balzac. Rodin is himself a
seer. That is why these two spirits converse across the years, as do the
Alpine peaks in a certain striking parable of Turgenev's. Doubtless in
bronze Rodin's "Balzac" will arouse less wrath from the unimaginative;
in plaster it produces the effect of a snowy surging monolith.
As a portraitist Rodin is the unique master of characters. His women are
gracious delicate masks; his men cover octaves in virility and variety.
That he is extremely short-sighted has not been dealt with in proportion
to the significance of the fact. It accounts for his love of exaggerated
surfaces, his formless extravagance, his indefiniteness in structural
design; perhaps, too, for his inability, or let us say, his lack of
sympathy, for the monumental. He is a sculptor of intimate emotions.
And while we think of him as a Cyclops destructively wielding a huge
hammer, he is more ardent in his search for the supersubtle nuance. But
there is always the feeling of breadth, even when he models an eyelid.
We are confronted by the paradox of an artist as torrential as Rubens
or Wagner, carving in a wholly charming style a segment of a child's
back, before which we are forced to exclaim: Donatello come to life! His
myopic vision, then, may have been his artistic salvation; he seems to
rely as much on his delicate tactile sense as on his eyes. His fingers
are as sensitive as a violinist's. At times he seems to model both tone
and color.
A poet, a precise, sober workman of art, with a peasant strain in
him, he is like Millet, and, like Millet, near to the soil. A natural
man, yet crossed by nature with a perverse strain; the possessor
of a sensibility exalted and dolorous; morbid, sick-nerved, and as
introspective as Heine; a visionary and a lover of life, close to the
periphery of things; an interpreter of Baudelaire; Dante's _alter ego_
in his grasp of the wheel of eternity, in his passionate fling at
nature; withal a sculptor, profound and tortured, transposing rhythm
into the terms of his art, Rodin is a statuary who, while having
affinities with classic and romantic schools, is the most startling
apparition of his century. And to the century which he has summed up so
plastically and emotionally he has propounded questions that only unborn
years may answer. He has a hundred faults to which he opposes one
imperious excellence--a genius, sombre, magical and overwhelming.