Several years have already gone by since the career of Rodin attained
its full growth. From now on, therefore, it can be envisaged as a whole,
and we can trace the formation and the unfolding of his complex talent
and disentangle the influences that have directed and sustained it.
In the course of the chapters that follow, Rodin, with the authority,
the calm strength, and the lucidity that characterize his thought, often
speaks himself of these influences, but rather in a casual, gossipy,
reminiscent vein, reflecting his personal observations. He does not
attempt to disengage the broad lines by which he has reached the summit
of art, or to map out, so to speak, that scheme of his intellectual
development which so naturally appertains to the man who has reached the
apogee of talent and which he contemplates with the satisfaction of a
strategist face to face with the plan of the battles he has won.
It is to living writers that he seems to address himself. Rodin to-day
can be studied like an old master, Donatello, Michelangelo, or Pierre
Puget. One perceives quite in its entirety the distinct, the rigorously
sustained plan that he has followed with unswerving will in order to
realize himself; and the witnesses, the historians of this heroic life
of the sculptor, have the advantage of being able to trace it with
exactitude, as they could not do in the case of a vanished artist. They
are able to interrogate the hero in person; they are able to consult
with Rodin himself, who is admirably intuitive and quite aware of what
he owes to certain favorable conditions of his life and above all to
his illustrious forerunners, those who have fought before him on the
battle-field of high art.
The study of nature, of the antique, Greek and Roman, of the art of
medieval France and that of the Renaissance--these are the springs at
which he has constantly refreshed one of the most irrefutable sculptural
talents that has ever been known. These are the expressions of the
beautiful among which his profound and searching thought has traveled
unceasingly, seeking to attain to a still larger vision, a more exact
understanding of that most magnificent of all the arts, sculpture.
The superior man is always the product of an exceptional gift and
of an energy peculiar to himself, which effectuates itself despite
circumstances. He is the highest incarnation of the spirit, of the
struggle for existence. In the case of an artist the struggle is all
the more severe, for he has nothing but himself to impose upon the
world and he has, as weapons of offense and defense, nothing but his
intelligence, the tiny substance of his brain. It is therefore only by
means of the history of his intellectual life that one can understand
him. External happenings only very slightly influence the obstinate
march of true genius toward the accomplishment of its destiny. At most
they delay it but a few hours. It forces its way through the most
difficult obstacles; it even makes use of these obstacles in order to
redouble its strength and confirm its superiority. Nothing impedes the
formidable will of those who are under the spell of beauty, those who
see truth and know it and desire to express what they see. They can no
more escape the fruition of their faculties than the giant can escape
the attainment of his full stature.
Rodin has been one of these. Certainly he has been assisted by
circumstances, but above everything how has he not compelled
circumstances to assist him?
What demands preëminent recognition in his case is the gift, a splendid,
a dazzling gift for the plastic arts, the realization of which has been
imposed upon him, as it were, by the command of destiny. Whence did it
come? From whom did he inherit it? From what ancestor, sensitive to the
enchantment of beauty, suffering, and in travail from the necessity of
proclaiming it, but imperfectly endowed and powerless to forge for
himself a talent in order to express the tremors of his soul? It is a
mystery. No one can tell, Rodin himself least of all. Science has not
yet taught us anything about those obscure combinations, those endless
preferences of the vital force, thanks to which a person possesses the
faculties of genius. In this, as in other things, we are unable to
divine the cause and can only marvel at the effect, the prodigy.
Discredited to-day are the theories of Lombroso and his school, once
so warmly welcomed by mediocre minds athirst for equality, in which
great men were considered as degenerates of a superior variety, and the
most sensitive spirits qualified as candidates for the madhouse! All
one can say is that nature abhors equality, that the indwelling will
delights in raising up lofty mountain masses above the uniformity of
the plains and the valor of the chosen few above the multitude. The
function of the man of genius is, precisely, to possess in a supreme
degree the sense of inequality and to transcribe its infinite nuances
in their ever-changing, ever-moving, ever-renewed variety. He alone
perceives the diversities whose play is the law of the universe itself,
and he grasps them equally in a fragment of inanimate matter and in
the vastest aspects of the world. Far from being half mad, this unique
being, this prodigious mirror of a million facets, achieves his aim only
because he possesses far more intelligence than the most brilliant of
his contemporaries, because he is in touch with a more profound order
of things and a more comprehensive method, because he combines the
qualities of continuity in sensation and of discernment which constitute
that supreme sensibility of all the senses acting together--taste. But
it does not please ordinary mortals to believe things of this kind,
and one can easily understand how the crowd, repudiating any such
humiliating notion, are all too willing to follow the lead of exotic
pseudo-scientists and look upon great men as lunatics, considering
themselves far more rational.
As to what Rodin himself thinks of this privilege that Providence has
conferred on him, there is no telling; he has never talked very much
about it. The fact is, he has such faith in the value of hard work and
will-power, he knows so well how extraordinarily much of these even the
most exceptional natures have to exert in order to accomplish anything,
that this privilege of divine right, otherwise just as authentic as
that which sovereigns in former times profited by, amounts to nothing
in the end but the account which he draws up in order to calculate the
sum of his efforts. "When I was quite young, as far back as I remember,
I drew," he says; "but the gift is nothing without the will to make it
worth while. The artist must have the patience of water that eats away
the rock drop by drop." Alas! will and work, Master, are also gifts;
but the supreme spirit maliciously amuses itself by leading us into
error, inspiring us with the illusion that it lies with us to acquire
them.
Rodin's case, then, is an example of absolute predestination, assisted
by a will of iron. One must add also the happy influence of the varied
environment in which his life has been placed and the excellent artistic
education he received in the schools where he studied, an education
that was fruitful, thanks to the preservation of the true traditions of
French art, kept alive in the schools since the eighteenth century.