Rodin deserves well of our young century, the old did so incontinently
batter him. The anguish of his own "Hell's Portal" he endured before he
molded its clay between his thick clairvoyant fingers. Misunderstood,
therefore misrepresented, he with his pride and obstinacy aroused--the
one buttressing the other--was not to be budged from his formulas or
the practice of his sculpture. Then the art world swung unamiably,
unwillingly, toward him, perhaps more from curiosity than conviction.
He became famous. And he is more misunderstood than ever. He has been
called _rusé_, even a fraud, while the wholesale denunciation of his
work as erotic is unluckily still green in our memory. The sculptor,
who in 1877 was accused of "faking" his lifelike "Age of Bronze"--now
in the Luxembourg--by taking a mold from the living model, also
experienced the discomfiture of being assured some years later that,
not understanding the art of modeling, his statue of Balzac was only
an evasion of difficulties. And this to a man who in the interim had
wrought so many masterpieces. A year or two ago, after his magnificent
offer to the city of Paris of his works, there was much malevolent
criticism from certain quarters. Rodin takes all this philosophically.
He points out that the artist is the only one to-day who creates in
joy. Mankind as a majority hates its work. Workmen no longer consider
their various avocations with proper pride--this was a favorite thesis
of Ruskin, William Morris, and Renoir. Furthermore, argues Rodin, the
artist is indispensable. He reveals the beauty and meaning of life to
his fellows. He struggles against the false, the conventional, and the
used-up; but the French sculptor slyly adds: "No one may benefit mankind
with impunity." He considers himself as having a religious nature; all
artists are temperamentally religious, he contends, though his religion
is not precisely of the kind that would appeal to the orthodox.
To give Rodin his due he stands prosperity not quite as well as poverty.
In every great artist there is a large area of self-esteem; it is
the reservoir from which he must, during years of drought or defeat,
draw upon to keep fresh the soul. Without the consoling fluid of
egotism genius would soon perish in the dust of despair. But fill this
source to the brim, accelerate the speed of its current, and artistic
deterioration may ensue. Rodin has been fatuously called a second
Michael Angelo--as if there could ever be a replica of any human. He
has been hailed as a modern Praxiteles; which is nonsense. And he is
often damned as a myopic decadent whose insensibility to the pure line
and lack of architectonic have been elevated by his admirers into sorry
virtues. Nevertheless, is Rodin justly appraised? Do his friends not
over-glorify him? Nothing so stales a demigod's image as the perfumes
burned before it by worshipers; the denser the smoke the sooner crumbles
the feet of their idol.
However, in the case of Rodin the Fates have so contrived their
malicious game that at no point in his career has he been without the
company of envy and slander. Often when he had attained a summit he
would be thrust down into a deeper valley. He has mounted to triumphs
and fallen to humiliations; but his spirit has never been quelled;
and if each acclivity he scales is steeper, the air atop has grown
purer, more stimulating, and below the landscape spreads wider before
him. With Dante he can say: "La montagna ch'e drizza voi ch'e il
mondo fece torti." Rodin's mountain has always straightened in him
what the world made crooked. The name of his mountain is Art. A born
nonconformist, Rodin makes the fourth of that group of nineteenth
century artists--Richard Wagner, Henrik Ibsen, Edouard Manet--who taught
a deaf, dumb, and blind world to hear, see, think, and feel.
Is it not dangerous to say of a genius that his work alone should
count, that his personality is negligible? Though Rodin has followed
Flaubert's advice to artists to lead an ascetic life that their art
might be the more violent, nevertheless his career, colorless as
it may seem to those who love better stage players and the comedy
of society--this laborious life of a poor sculptor should not be
passed over. He always becomes enraged at the prevailing notion that
fire descends from heaven upon genius. Rodin believes in but one
inspiration--nature. Nature can do no wrong. He swears that he does not
invent, he copies nature. He despises improvisation, has contemptuous
words for "fatal facility," and, being a slow-thinking, slow-moving
man, he only admits to his councils those who have conquered art, not
by assault, but by stealth and after years of hard work. He sympathizes
with Flaubert's patient, toiling days. He praises Holland because after
Paris it seems slow. "Slowness is beauty," he declares. In a word, he
has evolved a theory and practice of his art that is the outcome--like
all theories, all techniques--of his own temperament. And that
temperament is giant-like, massive, ironic, grave, strangely perverse;
it is the temperament of a magician of art doubled by a mathematician's.
Books are written about him. With picturesque precision De Maupassant
described him in "Notre Coeur." Rodin is tempting as a psychologic
study. He appeals to the literary critic, though his art is not
"literary." His modeling arouses tempests, either of dispraise or
idolatry. To see him steadily after a visit to his studios at Paris
or Meudon is difficult. If the master be present then one feels the
impact of a personality that is misty as the clouds about the base of
a mountain, and as impressive as the bulk of the mountain. Yet a sane,
pleasant, unassuming man interested in his clay--that is, unless you
happen to discover him interested in humanity. If you watch him well you
may in turn find yourself watched; those peering eyes possess a vision
that plunges into the depths of your soul. And this master of marble
sees the soul as nude as he sees the body. It is the union in him of
sculptor and psychologist that places Rodin apart from other artists.
These two arts (psychology is the art of divination) he practises
in a medium that hitherto did not betray potentialities for such
performances. Walter Pater is right in maintaining that each art has its
separate subject matter; still, in the debatable province of Rodin's
sculpture we find strange emotional power, hints of the pictorial, and
a rare suggestion of music. This, obviously, is not playing the game
according to the rules of Lessing and his Laocoön.
Let us drop the old aesthetic rule of thumb and confess that during the
last century a new race of artists sprang up and in their novel element
they, like flying-fishes, revealed to a wondering world their composite
structure. Thus we find Berlioz painting with his instrumentation; Franz
Liszt, Tschaikowsky, and Richard Strauss filling their symphonic poems
with drama and poetry; while Richard Wagner invented an art which he
believed embraced all the others. And there was Ibsen who employed the
dramatic form as a vehicle for his anarchistic ideas; and Nietzsche, who
was such a poet that he was able to sing a mad philosophy into life; not
to forget Rossetti, who painted poems and made poetry of his pictures.
Sculpture was the only art that resisted this universal disintegration,
this imbroglio of the seven arts. No sculptor before Rodin had dared to
shiver the syntax of stone. For sculpture is a static, not a dynamic
art--is it not? Let us observe the rules though we call up the chill
spirit of the cemetery. What Mallarmé attempted with French poetry
Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles do not represent, but present,
emotion; they are the evocation of emotion itself; as in music, form and
substance coalesce. If he does not, as does Mallarmé, arouse "the silent
thunder afloat in the leaves," he can summon from the vasty deep the
spirits of love, hate, pain, sin, despair, beauty, ecstasy; above all,
ecstasy. Now, the primal gift of ecstasy is bestowed upon few artists.
Keats had it, and Shelley; Byron, despite his passion, missed it. We
find it in Swinburne, he had it from the first. Few French poets know
it. Like the "cold devils" of Félicien Rops, coiled in frozen ecstasy,
the fiery blasts of hell about them, Charles Baudelaire boasted the
dangerous gift. Poe and Heine felt ecstasy, and Liszt. Wagner was the
master-adept of ecstasy: Tristan and Isolde! And in the music of Chopin
ecstasy is pinioned within a bar, the soul rapt to heaven in a phrase.
Richard Strauss has given us a variation on the theme of ecstasy;
voluptuousness troubled by pain, the soul tormented pathologically.
Rodin is of this tormented choir. He is revealer of its psychology.
It may be decadence, as any art is in its decadence which stakes the
part against the whole. The same was said of Beethoven by the followers
of Haydn, and the successors of Richard Strauss--Debussy, Stravinsky,
and Schoenberg--are abused quite as violently as the Wagnerites abused
Richard Strauss, turning against him the same critical artillery that
was formerly employed against Wagner. Nowadays, Rodin is looked on as
superannuated, as a reactionary by the younger men, the Cubists and
Futurists, who spoil marble with their iconoclastic chisels and canvas
with their paint-tubes.
That this ecstasy should be aroused by pictures of love and death, as
in the case of Poe and Baudelaire, Wagner and Strauss and Rodin, is not
to be judged an artistic crime. In the Far East they hypnotize neophytes
with a bit of broken mirror, for in the kingdom of art there are many
mansions. Possibly it was a relic of his early admiration for Baudelaire
that set Wagner to extorting ecstasy from his orchestra by images of
love and death. And no doubt the temperament which seeks such synthesis,
a temperament commoner in medieval times than ours, was inherent in
Wagner, as it is in Rodin. Both men play with the same counters: love
and death. In Pisa we may see (attributed by Vasari) Orcagna's fresco of
the Triumph of Death. The sting of the flesh and the way of all flesh
are inextricably blended in Rodin's Gate of Hell. His principal reading
for half a century has been Dante and Baudelaire; the Divine Comedy and
"Les Fleurs du Mal" are the keynotes in the grandiose white symphony of
the French sculptor. Love and life, and bitterness and death rule the
themes of his marbles. Like Beethoven and Wagner, he breaks academic
rules, for he is Auguste Rodin, and where he magnificently achieves,
lesser men fail or fumble. His large, tumultuous music is alone for his
chisel to ring out and to sing.