Auguste Rodin is the son of a Norman father and a Lorrainese mother.
Each of these two French provinces, Normandy and Lorraine, produces a
race eminently realistic, but realistic in quite different ways.
The Lorrainer, opinionated and courageous, hardy in character, and
vigorous like his country itself, sees things clearly and precisely in
the light of a spirit that has been fashioned by the age-old struggle
between Teuton and Gaul on our eastern frontier. The things that
surround him, the aspects of his native soil, like the sullen obstinacy
of the enemy that seeks in vain to drag him away, present themselves
to his eye as a reality stripped of illusions. When one has to fight
there is no time to dream, and one must be able to estimate with
precision what one is fighting for. When the man of Lorraine utters his
feeling about the things he loves and defends, it is with a loyalty
rather dry in expression and impression, but also with a force of
consciousness that is imposing.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG GIRL. A WORK OF RODIN'S YOUTH.]
As for the Norman, like his country he overflows with an abundance of
life from which he derives a passionate need for the pleasures of sense.
Far from stifling in him the love of the beautiful, this appetite for
triumphant realities engenders, on the contrary, an exaltation of the
senses that leads to the most exquisite taste in the production of art.
Compounded of sensuality and mysticism, the twin characteristics of
these rich spirits, very like those of Belgium, to whom, by virtue of
ancient migrations, they are closely allied, the artists of Normandy
necessarily respond to the manifold requirements of their temperament.
We know with what a profusion of monuments, robust and imposing in
structure and miraculously clothed in the most delicate lacework of
stone, the Gothic architects of Normandy have covered not only the soil
of their province, but also, beyond the sea, that of the Two Sicilies,
strewn even to this day with beautiful cloisters and sumptuous churches
of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which the Norman Conquest
carried there.
The child of Normandy and Lorraine was born in Paris, November 14,
1840. His father was a simple employee. He dwelt in one of the oldest
and most curious quarters of the great city, the Quartier Saint-Victor
in the fifth _arrondissement_. Rodin saw the light in the rue de
l'Arbalète. It is a little, hilly street, quite provincial in its
aspect and its quietness, that winds among the rows of old houses, some
low, as if crouched down, others narrow and high, as if they wished to
look over their shoulders at what passes below, very like a crowd of
living people. Its name, the rue de l'Arbalète, is full of suggestion
of the Middle Ages, like that of the rue des Patriarches, in which
it comes to an end, and that of the rue des Lyonnais and the rue de
l'Epée-de-Bois, which are its neighbors. It crosses the famous rue
Mouffetard near the little church of St. Médard on the last slopes of
the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, which has been, since the thirteenth
century, the seat of the university and the schools; below is the plain
of the Gobelins, where once the river Bièvre ran exposed.
Even to the present day this corner of the city has not suffered
too much from the destructive changes of modernity. At the time of
the childhood of Rodin it was still virtually untouched. Crowded,
picturesque, and in certain parts dirty and squalid, like an Oriental
city, with its little interlacing streets, its countless shops, its
swarms of people given over to a thousand familiar trades carried on in
public,--open-air kitchens, fruit-stands, grocery shops, clothing shops,
and shops of ironmongers, coal-venders, and, wine-sellers,--it is an
almost perfect fragment, a human fragment, of the old Gothic Paris.
Truly Rodin was fortunate: he was born in a chapter of Victor Hugo's
"Notre Dame de Paris." Destiny preserved the first glances of his
artist's eyes from the disenchanting banality of our modern streets. It
placed before them, as if to give them a hatred of uniformity, as if
to disgust him forever with the misdeeds of the straight line, adopted
the world over by the rank and file of contemporary architects,--those
congenitally blind and mutilated souls,--a population of houses having
a physiognomy and a soul of their own, which, with their sloping roofs,
their irregular gables, etch their amusing profiles against the sky
and seem to gossip with the birds and the clouds, putting to shame the
few regular buildings that have intruded and lost themselves amid this
congregation so touched with spirituality.
All this Rodin saw; with a child's innocent eye, he absorbed all this
fantasy of past ages; he studied the little shops with their low
ceilings dating from the period of the gilds; he noted through the
tiny panes of their windows the Rembrandtesque effects of shadow and
golden light, in which the humblest objects live a life that is full of
intimate mystery and familiar charm. About them he saw a people full of
life, alert, awake, always in action, always in dispute, unconsciously
falling into a thousand beautiful, simple attitudes, the eternal
attitudes associated with drinking, eating, sleeping, working, and
loving.
What admirable, powerful precepts this teaching, without effort, without
professors, without pedantry, thus forever imposed upon the memory of
the future sculptor! Yes, Rodin there enjoyed a priceless good fortune.
As child and young man, his walks and his duties took him incessantly
past Notre Dame, the queen of cathedrals, appearing, from the heights
of Ste. Geneviève, magnificently seated on the bank of the Seine that
devotedly kisses its feet; in front of it, Ste. Etienne-du-Mont,
surrounded by convents, with its nave, that treasure of grace bequeathed
to us by the Renaissance. There also is the ancient little Roman church
of St. Julien-le-Pauvre; and St. Séverin, that sweet relic of Gothic
art, about which lies unrolled the old _quartier des truands_, with the
rues Galande de la Huchette and de la Parcheminerie, which the pick-axes
of the housebreakers are now giving over to the universal ugliness.
The Panthéon and the buildings that surround it taught the young Rodin
that the public monuments of the style of Louis XV, although colder
and stiffer, still offer a certain grandeur by virtue of their beauty
of proportion and character. Close beside the somewhat formal solemnity
of these buildings, the Gardens of the Luxembourg that invite the
passer-by with all their tender, smiling charm, the exquisite parterre,
the elegant little pilastered palace, the Medici fountain, whose
charming statues pour out their water that murmurs beneath the branches
of the trees spread out above like a tent of lacework, taught him the
enchantment of the architectural harmonies of the Renaissance, harmonies
of chiseled stone, noble shadows, and carpeting flowers.
Like all artists, Rodin adores the Luxembourg. More than this, he would
not for anything in the world see those statues of the queens of France
banished, those enormous stone dolls of a quality, as regards sculpture,
little calculated to satisfy lovers of rich modeling. No matter, he
loves the gray mass they make under the fragrant summits of the limes
and the hawthorns; they are part of the scenery of his youth; he remains
faithful to them as to old playthings. Was it not these that he sketched
in those first attempts of his?
His aptitude quickly revealed itself. This man, whom ignorant critics
were to reproach one day with not knowing how to draw, handled the
pencil from his earliest childhood.
His mother bought her provisions from a grocer in the neighborhood. The
grocer wrapped up his rice, vermicelli, and dried prunes in bags made
from cut-up illustrated papers and engravings that had been thrown away.
Rodin got hold of these bags, and they were his first models. He copied
these wretched images passionately.
Toward the age of twelve, he was sent to Beauvais, to the house of
an uncle who undertook to bring him up. Beauvais and its unfinished
cathedral was another silent lesson, never to be forgotten--that
cathedral which is nothing but a choir, but how marvelous a choir!
Of course at the time he did not appreciate its splendor. With the
indifference of his age, he studied its architecture and its sculpture,
which, for that matter, all his contemporaries, even the cultivated,
despised from the depth of their ignorance. That was the time when
art critics and professors of esthetics denied Gothic art without
comprehending it, the Roman school being in the ascendant in the
admiration of the public. Nevertheless, the jewel in stone did not fail
to speak in the language of beauty and truth to this predestined young
man. His sensibility registered its impressions, noted down those points
of comparison which he was to find later in the depths of his memory and
which were to enable him to judge and appreciate. Under the vault of the
majestic nave he listened to the mass, he took part in the grand, sacred
drama, whose phrases touched his imagination profoundly, sometimes
exalting it to the point of mysticism and impregnating it with the
nobility of the symbols and of the Catholic ritual tempered by eighteen
centuries of usage.
Rodin was placed in a boarding-school. He found the scholar's life
dreary and dull; his comrades seemed to him noisy young barbarians,
absorbed in brutal and too often vicious pastimes. Certain studies were
repugnant to him, mathematics and _solfeggio_. Near-sighted, without
being aware of it, he could not make out the figures and the notes the
masters wrote on the blackboard; he understood nothing and was almost
bored to death.
This myopia was destined to have the most vital influence on his art.
Because of his difficulty in perceiving total effects, his instinct has
only rarely led him to the composition of monuments on a very large
scale, in which the architectural construction is of nearly as great
importance as the sculpture proper. The most considerable that we owe
to him is that of "The Burghers of Calais"; and there is also "The Gate
of Hell," which, almost inexplicably, remained incomplete even in the
very hour when it was given over as finished. The great sculptor, at
the time when he turned it over to the founders, perhaps unconsciously
experienced a lapse of vision, an insurmountable fatigue of the eyes,
over-strained by the prolonged effort to grasp the ensemble of the
edifice and the harmony of the countless details of this superb
composition.
But if he has been turned aside, by his physical constitution, from
monumental art, it has only served to concentrate him with all the
more ardor upon the minute work of modeling, for which, by a sort of
compensation, he is endowed with an eye whose penetration has had no
equal since the time of the Renaissance.
At the age of fourteen he returned to Paris. His parents judged that the
moment had come for him to choose a career. Observing his astonishing
gifts, they decided to let him take up drawing, but, having small means,
they were unable to provide him with special masters. They entered him
at the School of Decorative Arts, another piece of good fortune.
This school, called by abbreviation the Petite Ecole, in distinction
from the great school, that of the Beaux-Arts, is situated in the old
rue de l'Ecole de Médecine, close to the Faculté de Médecine and the
Sorbonne. It was founded in 1765, under the name of the Free School
of Design, by the painter Jean-Jacques Bachelier, a clever artist and
student of styles in art no longer practised or little known, who had
been well thought of by Madame de Pompadour, the favorite of Louis XV,
the charming and virtually official minister of fine arts during the
reign of that monarch. It was she who placed Bachelier in charge of the
_ateliers de décoration_ at the Sèvres manufactory. In creating the
Petite Ecole, the painter seemed to be following out, after the death of
his gracious protectress, the impulse she had communicated to French art
during her lifetime.
[Illustration: LA PUCELLE.]
Thus we see Rodin at the school of the Marquise de Pompadour, placed
once more in a _milieu_ full of originality and life. He found himself
there surrounded by a little world of beginners in every line, budding
artists; almost everybody of his generation has passed through this
course. They came there to learn to draw, paint, and model.
In the evening the halls were filled with amateurs who, after their
day's work was over, sought to acquire a certain artistic skill as
tapestry-workers, ornament-makers, workers in iron, marble, etc. They
were energetic, turbulent, poor. Rodin, like them, was energetic and
poor, but silent, laborious, and pertinacious. He applied himself to the
copying of models of all sorts, most frequently red chalks by Boucher
and plaster casts of animals, plants, and flowers.
The school had possessed these things since the eighteenth century and,
like almost everything that was created in that bountiful epoch, they
were very well done, composed after nature, their elegance full of warm
truth; they were models in bold _ronde-bosse_. That is to say, they
presented that quality of relief to which drawing, like sculpture, owes
its rich oppositions of light and shadow. To those who copied them they
communicated the science of relief, the fundamental basis of art, and
the living suppleness of the best periods, which has almost entirely
disappeared to-day.
One day Rodin entered the modeling class. He worked there after the
antique. He had his first experience of working in clay; it was a
revelation, an enchantment. He fell in love with this _métier_, which
seemed to him the most seductive of all; he became obsessed with the
desire to mold this soft material himself, to search in it for the form
of things.
His first attempts overjoyed him; he was not fifteen years old and he
had found his path!
We see him executing a fragment; he models the head, the hands, the
arms, the legs, the feet; then he sets about the whole figure; there
is no deception; there are no insurmountable difficulties for him; he
understands at once the structure of the human body; in the phrase of
the atelier, "ses bonshommes tiennent"; the arms and the legs adjust
themselves naturally to the body: he is a born sculptor.
Every day he arrives at the class at eight o'clock in the morning; he
works without faltering till noon, in company with five or six pupils.
At that hour they stop work; they are happy; they leave their seats and
take a turn about the model. In the evening things are different; from
seven to nine, the class is over-full; one can study the model then
only from a distance; a superficial, wretched method that is practised
on a large scale at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and against which Rodin has
protested all his life.
Thus we find him entered on his artistic career not as a dilettante,
as an amateur, as happens too often, but as a veritable workman. Like
General Kléber, he could long say, "My poverty has served me well; I
am attached to it." It placed him, from his childhood, in the presence
of realities. It steeped him in life itself. It safeguarded him from
the artificial education that debilitates the young middle-class
Frenchman and destroys in him the spirit of initiative and personality.
It deprived him luckily of the pleasures that rich young men too
easily offer themselves, the abuse of which renders them unsteady,
capricious, and indifferent. Rigorously held to his path by necessity,
he consecrated all his time and all his energies to study. He became
diligent, serious, and prudent.
He had the opportunity of seeing his modeling corrected by Carpeaux. The
great sculptor, in fact, taught at the Petite Ecole. Upon his return
from Rome, he had asked for a modest post as an assistant master that
would help to assure his equally modest existence; they had granted his
request, but without seeking to give him anything more! His young pupils
scarcely understood his high worth, the substantial and delicate grace
of his talent, his voluptuous elegance, inherited from the eighteenth
century and united with a certain nervous seductiveness that was
altogether modern, a certain palpitating quality of the soul and of the
flesh that had not been known before, manifesting itself through the
ductility of his modeling. But instinctively they admired him; they
marveled, among other things, at the precision and the rapidity of the
corrections the master executed under their eyes. Later, when experience
had come to him, Rodin greatly honored Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux; he was
one of those for whom the appearance of the famous group "The Dance,"
in the parvis of the Opéra, was a veritable event. At that moment he
discovered again in himself the influence of this beautiful spirit which
had been slumbering in him since he left the Petite Ecole; then he
became almost the disciple of Carpeaux. I know a figure of a bacchante
of Rodin's, a marble that is almost unknown, the flesh of which is so
supple and so light that one would say it was molded of wheat and honey
and the work of the sculptor of "The Dance." There floats also in its
countenance that spirituality, that expression as of a sort of angelic
malice which Carpeaux seems to have borrowed occasionally from the
figures of Leonardo da Vinci.
[Illustration: MINERVA.]
When the clocks of the Sorbonne quarter struck noon, Rodin left the
Petite Ecole; he walked to the Louvre, eating, as he went, a roll
and a cake of chocolate which was all he had for lunch. He sketched
the antiques. From there he went on to the Galerie des Estampes at
the Bibliothèque Nationale, where they loaned out, without any too
much good will, misplaced as that is with students, the albums of
plates after Michelangelo and Raphael and the great illustrated work,
"L'Histoire de Costume Romain." Because of this miserliness of theirs,
he did not always obtain the volumes he wished for, which were reserved
for habitués who were better known. This did not prevent him from
becoming initiated into the science of draperies. He executed hundreds
of sketches from memory, at last developing in himself the faculty of
remembering forms. From the rue de Richelieu, always on foot, he would
repair to the Gobelin manufactory. There each day, from five to eight
o'clock, he followed the course in design. Placed before nature itself,
before the nude, he absorbed more excellent principles. The teaching of
the eighteenth century was practised there also, and his work became
permanently impregnated by it.
In the morning, at daybreak, before going to the Petite Ecole, he found
the time to walk to an old painter's he knew, where he kept a number of
canvases going. In the evening he made careful copies of the sketches
he had jotted down at noon in the galleries of the Louvre and the
Bibliothèque. He drew far into the night; he drew even during supper,
at the frugal board of his family, surrounded by his father, his mother,
and his young sister, bending over his paper utterly regardless of his
health, a course of things that soon brought on gastric disorders from
which he suffered cruelly. In short, he toiled incessantly, ardent and
patient, obstinate, and full of self-confidence.
Assuredly he never in the world imagined that he was to become in time
one of the most illustrious representatives of the French art of the
nineteenth century, that he was to be the equal in renown of celebrities
like Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, or Michelet whom he saw occasionally
in the Luxembourg Gardens, without even daring to bow to them; but he
possessed a fixed and a precise idea of what was required to be a good
sculptor and the resolution to realize it. Little did he care how long
it would take, how tardy success might prove, how slow fortune might be
in coming; little did he care for obstacles, even for misery. He was
going the right way, unhesitating, untroubled, not compromising with
himself or with anybody. He possessed the irresistible will of a force.
I have had occasion to examine one of the note-books of Rodin's youth.
It is quite filled with sketches after engravings from the antique,
animals or human figures. The drawing is strangely compact, wilful,
for the boy of sixteen or seventeen that he was then. Already, in its
accumulation of strokes and hatchings which, during an entire period
of his artistic development, render the drawing of Rodin restless and
personal like a piece of writing, it exhibits an obstinate search for
relief, it speaks to us like hieroglyphics, revealing the power of his
grasp. His progress was rapid. At seventeen, he finished his first
studies. The moment came for him to pass from the school of decorative
arts to that of the Beaux-Arts and to prepare himself, like his
companions, for the examinations and for the competition for the _prix
de Rome_, the famous _prix de Rome_ that seemed to Rodin, inexperienced
student as he was, the crown of the most rigorous artistic studies.