Rodin presented himself at an examination for entrance into the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts. He was rejected. He presented himself a second time, but
with the same result. What was the reason for it? Neither he nor his
fellow-students could discover. They used to form a circle about him
when he worked. They admired the keenness and precision of his glance,
the already astonishing skill of his hand. They told him that he would
be accepted. He failed a third time. Finally a fellow-student who was
shrewder than the others gave the solution of the enigma. It requires a
somewhat long explanation.
The great school is under the direction of the members of the Academy
of Fine Arts. These professors correct the work of the students, set
the examinations, and award the prizes. They are recruited from members
of the society, are, in short, the representatives of official, or
conservative, art. Official art is a product of the Revolution of 1789.
Up to that time there were not two kinds of art in France. At the most,
until the time of Louis XIV only one secession disported itself under
the influence of Lebrun, painter to the king. Art was a unit, and its
divine florescence spread from France over all Europe. The church,
the kings, and their court of great lords and cultivated ladies were
the protectors and, indeed, the inspirers, of that flowering of beauty
that had grown from the time of the first Capets, indeed from the time
of the Merovingians, down to the end of the eighteenth century. The
First Empire marked in effect the beginning of the artistic decadence
of Europe and, one may say, of the world. Artists at that time divided
themselves into two camps, the conservatives, with, at their head,
David and his school, who pictured an art of convention and approved
formulas, and the independents, who continued, although in a somewhat
revolutionary and extravagant spirit, the true traditions of French art.
Among those fine rebellious men of talent of the first order were Rude,
Barye, and Carpeaux in sculpture, and Baron Gros, Eugène Delacroix,
Courbet, and Manet in painting.
[Illustration: PSYCHE.]
By a singular contradiction, Louis David was as baneful a theorist as
he was a great painter and, above all, an excellent draftsman. That
explains itself. The quality of his drawing he owed to the eighteenth
century, in which he had appeared and a pupil of which he was; but he
derived his esthetic doctrine from the Revolution, which made use of
the same sectarian zeal to obtain the triumph of certain false ideas
that it used to advance the right principles that were its glory.
Through one, David produced works of great worth and some admirable
portraits; through the other, he wrought great havoc among artists.
The world was, moreover, well disposed to submit to these principles.
When art restricts itself to repeating attitudes, gestures, approved
receipts, without having studied or observed them in nature in her
constant changes, it means decadence. If David was able to have his
theories accepted, it was because the time was ripe to receive them, to
be contented with them; and to say that the time was ripe is only to say
that it was a degenerate time, satisfied to be relieved of the task of
reflecting, of discovering for itself the laws of beauty, or, in short,
of working from the foundation.
Official painter of the Revolution and the Empire, Louis David
proclaimed his doctrine with the authority of a pontiff. He made a set
of narrow rules which advocated a superficial imitation of the antique,
a copying of the works of Greece and Rome, not in spirit, but in letter;
not in that accurate knowledge of construction and of the model, which
made up their supreme worth, but in their conventional attitudes and
expressions.
Even from beyond the grave David continued to rule the academy of
the Beaux-Arts in the name of the artificial idealism which he had
proclaimed, and whoever rejected his sorry instruction saw himself
without mercy shown to the door of the national schools arid academies.
They had shown the door to Rude, the author of the masterpiece of the
Arc de Triomphe, "The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792." They had
shown it to the unhappy Carpeaux, treated all his life as a heretic and
persecuted by the official class, defenders of the so-called heroic
achievements and stereotyped forms. They went to every extreme in
their contest with free and determined genius. As a last resort they
employed every weapon of treachery against the undisciplined great,
those fallen angels of the false paradise of the Institute--weapons that
later they did not scruple to use against Rodin. They accused Carpeaux
of indecency, and in order to strengthen the miserable falsehood, a
perverse idiot flung a can of ink on the adorable group of "The Dance,"
that song of the nymphs, clamorous with youth, laughter, and music.
This digression in the story of Rodin's life explains his whole life. By
his manly independence, his persistent refusal to follow the dictates
of the school, he naturally found himself placed at the head of those
who antagonized the official class. Against an opponent of his strength
and obstinacy the struggle naturally took on new energy. It recalled
to mind the violence of the famous intellectual quarrels of other days
--the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, and that of the Classicists and the Romanticists
in 1830.
When Rodin presented himself at the great school, how, in his
inexperience, could he foresee the war of wild beasts that rages in
the thickets of art? It needed indeed a better-informed comrade to
disclose the situation to him. Then his eyes were opened. He understood
then that he would only be wasting his time in striving to force the
bronze doors that are closed against the influences of great nature and
her triumphant light, the implacable denouncer of the false in art.
Perceiving it at last, he renounced the thought of entering the school.
Later he gloried, in the fact that he had done so. Possibly he saw
the danger that he would have run of parching his spirit and chilling
his eye. "Ah," his friend, the sculptor Dalou, exclaimed long after,
"Rodin had the luck not to have been at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts!" Dalou
himself had not had that luck, and despite beautiful gifts and love for
the eighteenth century, he had not recovered from the false teaching.
Rodin, then, without knowing it, had fought his first battle, the slight
skirmish to the incessant fight that was to open. After that time the
name Institute, by which he understood the group of protagonists of a
bad form of art, took in his speech a formidable meaning. When he says,
"The Institute," he seems to call up some mythological monster, the
hydra of a hundred heads, from the malignant wounds of which the brave
usually die slowly. For him the Institute has come to mean a company of
able men who substitute dexterity for conscience, who, for long toil in
obscurity and poverty, substitute a premature eagerness for all that it
may bring--profitable relations, orders from the state, fortune, and
honors. In his opinion all that ought to come slowly in order not to
distract the artist from the study that alone can give him strength.
To him the rewards are secondary; true happiness lies in untrammeled
and passionate toil, in the exercise of growing intelligence that is
determined not to be stopped on the road to discovery.
[Illustration: THE ADIEU.]
Although the struggle is less clamorous to-day, it has not ended,
and it never will be ended, despite the wide fame of the master, now
known throughout the world as the greatest living artist. This Rodin
understands. What the contestants now seek to conquer is the public,
some for the purpose of obtaining from it consideration and profit, and
others an appreciation of true art. One class strives to flatter its
taste, which is bad; the other seeks to inculcate a knowledge of true
art in its own work. At the outset the contest is frightfully unequal,
for the ignorance of the public is abysmal. Incapable of discerning true
beauty, it relies only on the labels placed by the Institute on its own
works and on those of its partizans. They say to a man, "This is the
sort of thing that should be admired," and straightway he admires it,
if one can apply this expression of the highest pleasure of the spirit
to the vapid and dull contemplation that the public accords to the works
marked for its approval. No, at best the public does not know how to
admire; it does not understand the language of beauty.
At eighteen or nineteen, Rodin, being wholly without fortune, could not
continue his studies without quickly finding some means of support. It
was therefore necessary for him to earn his own living, and at once
he bravely entered upon his work as an ornament-maker, and became a
journeyman at a few francs a week. We need not regret it. This son of
the people, by remaining in the ranks of the working-class, consolidated
in himself the virtues of the class--their courage and industry, which
are the strong qualities of the humble, and, in the aggregate, those
of the whole nation. And the curiosity of a superior man for all the
rewards of the exercise of his intelligence led him to cultivate himself
unceasingly. His limited studies as a school-boy had not been extensive
enough to surfeit him; he now brought to the study of letters a mind
keenly alert, and with a joy as alive as love itself he devoted himself
to a study of great minds. He read the poets and the historians; he
became acquainted with the Greece of Homer and Æschylus, the Italy
of Dante, the England of Shakspere, and the France of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau; but up to that time he had concerned himself with only one
thing--his trade. He worked as a real artisan, with no wider vision,
with no thought of formidable power. He saw only his model and his
clay; he thought only of these, he loved only these. Thus he had become
a journeyman ornament-worker in clay. That did not prevent him from
perfecting himself in sculpture. On the contrary, it aided him.
The art of ornamentation was then considered, as it is still to-day, an
inferior art. People said, still say, of the sculpture of architecture,
as of the frescos and mosaic work of a building, that it is only
decoration. They declare it in a tone of indulgence that finds an excuse
for any mediocrity.
All this is a profound mistake. Sculptured ornament springs naturally
from architecture; it is the flowering of its fundamental elements. It
is an inherent part of the whole, as the mass of flowers and foliage
that crowns a tree is in a way the culminating point of the whole
vegetable organism. Ornament demands the same qualities that the
fundamental architectural structure demands, and fully as much talent
and perhaps even more; because, as Rodin says, one sees in it more
clearly, without distracting features, the form of genius. If it is not
well done in itself, its function, which is rigorously subordinated
to the whole, and consists in molding the contours of the structure
by underlining and marking them off, is reversed. It is then only
an excrescence, an arbitrary addition. Only mediocre artisans, when
employed on a building or a jewel, use ornament capriciously, without
proportioning and subordinating it to the mass; they weary and disgust
the beholder.
Rodin and his companions did not content themselves with copying, and
more or less distorting, their Greek, Roman, and Renaissance models,
which were repeated to satiety in all the workshops of the world,
and done over and over again so many times, out of place and out
of proportion, that they had lost all significance. Their employer
possessed a beautiful, but neglected, garden, where a profusion of
plants ran riot. Here were models in abundance. Here, in reproducing
these, the young craftsmen refreshed their vocation; they copied their
ornaments from nature; they studied foliage and flowers from life.
To do new work, they had only to borrow from the vegetable world its
inexhaustible combinations of beauty.
Here Rodin, by his cleverness and rapidity, became without a peer among
them all, and drew to himself the admiration of his fellow-workers. It
was here that he met Constant Simon, his elder by many years, who was
the first man to teach him to model in profile. It was one of the great
epochs in his life. One may say that from that time the two great
laws that have given his sculpture its power--the study of nature and
the right method of modeling--passed into his blood, as it were. The
secret that Simon imparted to him was like a philter that inflamed his
soul with enthusiasm. He became intoxicated with the idea of seeing
clearly and of holding his hand strictly accountable to what his eyes
disclosed. And he possessed, too, both youth and an indefatigable vigor.
He sketched everything he could, wherever he could. One saw him making
sketches on the street, in the horse-market, jostled by the beasts,
repulsed by men, yet indifferent to all difficulties in his enchantment
in his discovered prize, at the Jardin des Plantes, where he passed
hours before the cages and in the parks, studying the poses of the deer
and the grace of the moving antelopes.
[Illustration: RODIN IN HIS STUDIO AT THE HOTEL BIRON.]
At that period Barye taught at the Museum. Rodin had become acquainted
with the son of the celebrated sculptor. The two had discovered a corner
of the basement, a sort of cave, damp and gloomy, where they installed
some seats made of old boxes and delighted themselves in modeling
from clay. From the Museum they borrowed a few anatomical specimens,
fragments of the parts of animals, and these they carried to their
cavern and pored over in their efforts to copy them. Sometimes Barye
himself would come to cast his eye over their work and give them a word
of advice, and then would go away, buried in a silent reverie. He was
a man of simple habits, with the appearance of a college tutor, in his
well-worn coat, but giving an impressive suggestion of great force and
worth. His son and Rodin little understood him; they feared him somewhat
and only half profited by his suggestions. Later the author of "The
Burghers of Calais," kindled by the genius of the gloomy, severe man
whom he had misunderstood, felt a deep remorse at not having rendered to
Barye, while living, the homage of admiration which the master merited,
and which perhaps would have been sweet to his solitary heart.
Rodin has had only rarely the chance to model animals. He has never
received an order for an equestrian statue, and he has regretted it. We
have from him only one small rough model of a statue of General Lynch
on horseback, which was never executed, and the beautiful relief of the
chariot of Apollo which forms the pedestal of the monument of Claude
Lorrain at Nancy. But though he has not modeled animals, he has many
times sketched them, and he has studied profoundly their anatomy and
poses.
It is not so much in the powerful sketches that all his life he has
continued to make with the same daily care with which a pianist
practises his scales that Rodin shows the chief characteristic of his
nature, as it is in accumulating these that he has been enabled to
understand relationship between different forms, and to establish the
unity between the forms of man and the animals, between the mountains
and the vegetable world. It is by understanding this unity that he
can occasionally interpret with a scientific exactness this common
relationship. In modeling a centaur or the chimera or a spirit with
powerful wings, the mythological creature that appears from his hands
does not appear less a transcript from reality than each bust or each
statue that has been vigorously wrought from the living model. There is
no weakening in the points where the bust of the man or of the woman
attaches itself to the body of the animal, no doubt that the beautiful,
strong wings of the angels are as perfectly united to their bodies and
are as necessary as their arms or legs.
When about twenty-two or twenty-three Rodin entered the atelier of
Carrier-Belleuse. At that time the vogue of this charming artist was
great. He well represented the spirit and workmanship of the eighteenth
century in the knickknack art of the Second Empire. He was a Clodion
of the boulevard. Besides the spirited busts, some of which, like
those of Ernest Renan, Jules Simon, and the actress Marie Laurent,
were celebrated, he sent out from his atelier, in the rue de la Tour
d'Auvergne at Montmartre, hundreds of designs to be used in industrial
art: mantelpieces, centerpieces for tables, vases, ornamental clocks,
and decorative figures and groups. Rodin, then, applied himself to
executing for Carrier-Belleuse a variety of statuettes and figures.
There was in the task a great danger, for he saw the risk of limiting
himself to a facile use of his art that was both remunerative and
attractive; but his sturdy Northern temperament was able to protect him
against every danger, whether of success or poverty.
Carrier had an astonishing skill, and not only worked without a model,
but compelled his employees to work without one. His rough sketches were
admirable, but he weakened in working them out. Rodin never trifled with
his art. Before going to the atelier he always took care to study his
subject in the nude and to fix it in his memory as firmly as possible.
As soon as he reached his bench he transferred to the clay the result
of his remembered observations. On returning to his home in the evening
he consulted his model anew in order to correct his work of the day. It
was for him an excellent exercise of memory. The true workman is quick
to turn to advantage all the inconveniences of a situation. I have heard
Rodin relate that often in the course of a quarrel with a friend or a
relative he would completely forget the subject of the contention and
the anger of his opponent in his absorption, from the point of view of
a sculptor, in the play of the muscles and their influence on the
expression of the face of the angry speaker.
[Illustration: REPRESENTATION OF FRANCE--IN THE MONUMENT TO CHAMPLAIN.]
Rodin remained about five years with Carrier-Belleuse. What works his
active hands accomplished there in a day! One still finds them in the
shops of the sellers of bronzes, in the shops of the dealers of the
Marais and the Faubourg St. Antoine. Certainly hundreds of examples were
brought there, to the great profit of tradesmen, but to the injury of
the artist; for he drew from them only such wages as the least competent
workers are to-day content with.
One may see in the gallery of Mrs. ---- of New York certain little
terra-cotta busts which date from that period. They represent pretty
Parisian women in hats, whose wild locks veil glances full of spirit and
roguishness. Creatures of youth and frivolity, they are sisters of the
elegant ladies that Alfred Stevens drew with his delightful brush, and
which were the charm of Paris under Napoleon III. Who could believe that
they had sprung from the hands of Rodin, the austere creator of "The
Burghers of Calais" and of the "Victor Hugo"?
But before becoming the audaciously personal genius that he now is,
he was subjected to the most varied influences--influences that have
been felt by the modern sculptors with whom he has worked and those
that guided the old masters. He has none the less shielded himself
from the world. He declares indeed, with the authority that permits the
freedom, that originality signifies nothing; that that which counts is
the quality of the intrinsic sculpture; that if the temperament of the
artist is truly steadfast, he always finds himself after the necessary
study; and finally that it is of little importance whether a statue
bears the name of Praxiteles or that of one of his pupils. The essential
thing is that it is well done, that it appears in a great epoch.
Anonymous, it proclaims none the less to the eyes of the man of taste
the signature of genius.
In order to live Rodin applied himself to the most varied occupations;
thus he gained the liberty to labor at his own work for a few hours.
He chipped at stone and marble for the benefit of sculpture to-day
unknown, but then in vogue; he made sketches for trinkets for certain
fashionable jewelers, and fashioned objects of decorative art ordered of
him by manufacturers. Despite a considerable loss of time, he obtained
thus a true apprenticeship in art wholly like that which in earlier days
was obtained by Ghiberti, Donatello, and most of the great artists of,
the Renaissance, who were proud to be good artisans before they were
accounted great sculptors.
Thus finally he was enabled to realize his first dream--to have an
atelier of his own. His atelier! It was a stable, at a rental of
twenty-four dollars a year, in the rue Lebrun, in the quarter of the
Gobelins, near which he was born. It was a cold hovel, a cave indeed,
with a well sunk in an angle of one wall that at every season exhaled
its chilling breath. It did not matter. The place was sufficiently
large and well lighted. The artist, young and strong, and as happy as
possible in his stable, felt his talent increasing. There he accumulated
a quantity of studies and works until the place was so crowded that he
could scarcely turn himself about; but being too poor to have them cast,
he lost the greater part of them. Every day he spent hours moistening
the cloths that enveloped them, yet not without suffering frightful
disasters. Sometimes the clay, through being too soft, would settle and
fall asunder; sometimes it would become dry, crack, and crumble. One
day, in moving, the great figure of a bacchante that had been tenderly
molded for months was seized by the rough hands of the furniture-movers,
and broke, crashing to the ground. What lost efforts! What destroyed
beauty! Even to-day when the artist speaks of it his heart bleeds anew.
At that time he carried about the ateliers of Paris a design to which he
gave the name of "The Man with the Broken Nose." Struck by the curious
face of an old shepherd, flat-nosed, with every appearance of a slave
that had been crushed under heel, Rodin made a bust of the man and
strove to portray the energy and imposing simplicity that had astonished
him in the antique busts and the statue of "The Knife-Grinder" that he
had seen in the galleries of the Louvre. The solidity of the design,
the patience shown in the composition, and the strength of the details
coöperated in producing an admirable whole. The wrinkles of the
forehead, the creased eyelids, the deep furrows of the face converged
toward the base of the broken nose in an expression of old age and
hardship, presenting an admirable head of a Thessalian shepherd. Alas!
one frosty day the clay contracted, and the skull of "The Man with
the Broken Nose" fell to the ground, leaving only the face. Rodin did
not make over the composition. Too honest to restore the skull by
approximation, he contented himself with modeling the face, to-day
become famous.
He cast it in plaster, and sent it to the Salon of 1864. There it
was rejected. Thus the opposition that had closed the door of the
Beaux-Arts against him was renewed at his first attempt to take rank
among contemporary artists. The reason was the same; it will always
and invariably be the same: this sculptor of the naked truth, this
fervent lover of nature, offends, shocks, and wounds the majority of
the followers of formulas, the imitators of the past, the makers of
smooth and pretty wares, things without conscience or significance. The
artist remains alone with his deception. The day has not yet come
when enlightened amateurs can understand in which school true talent
is to be found, when they are able to renounce the moldings on nature,
the theatrical postures, the irritating silliness of figures a thousand
times repeated.
[Illustration: THE MAN WITH THE BROKEN NOSE.]
They will some day learn to perceive truth, observation, strength, and
grace. When that day comes they will throw out of the window all the
trumpery art of which they will have become tired, in order to collect
that of Rude, Barye, Carpeaux, Rodin, Jules Desbois, Camille Claudel,
those glories of the nineteenth century.
The year of the Salon of 1864 may serve to close the first period of
Rodin's career. It is difficult, indeed impossible, to place between
fixed dates the events of a life that has been an example of uniform
continuity; but nevertheless it is permitted to one to say that the year
1864 marks the end of the first youth of the master. His preliminary
studies, those which one may call the studies of his mere profession,
were ended. He was then at the beginning of larger studies; he was
about to visit Belgium, Italy, and France; he was about to come face
to face with the most varied geniuses and examine their work. He was
about to question them rigorously, to demand of them their technical
methods. He was also about to exalt himself in the presence of these
immortal thoughts, to become intoxicated with the desire to equal them
in science and greatness. From that time on he approached them as a
disciple, as a man who had already thought much and comprehended much,
and who was worthy to study them and follow in their footsteps: in a
word, as an artist of their own lineage.
SOJOURN IN BELGIUM--"THE MAN WHO AWAKENS TO NATURE"--REALISM AND
PLASTER CASTS
Rodin worked under Carrier-Belleuse from 1865 to 1870. He remained
in Paris during the Franco-German War. What influence did this event
have upon him? He has said little about it. Although he has a strong
attachment for his native land, he has none of the extravagant
patriotism of a Rude, whose great soul was caught up in the flames of
the national epopee. Rodin has too contemplative a temperament; he is
too devoted to reflective work to allow himself to be long disturbed by
external facts, even the gravest.
At the signing of the peace, he went to Belgium, drawn by the promise of
work in decorative art. He remained there five years, staying first in
Brussels, then in Antwerp.
This period of his life left with him a delightful memory. He was poor
and unknown, but full of the vigor of youth, and free in how splendid a
freedom! He had all his time to himself, without any of those thousand
obligations that eat up the days of a celebrated man and break down his
ardor.
Life in Belgium was at that time simple, easy-going, family-like. Many
small pleasures made it attractive; the cleanliness of the streets and
the houses was a constant delight to the eye; the bread, the beer, the
coffee were excellent and cost almost nothing. On Sundays bands of
children, fair-haired, robust, healthy, dressed in aprons very white
and very well starched, ran about laughing and singing; the women went
to church; the men assembled in the sanded gardens of the public houses
to play at ball, sipping glasses of _faro_ and _lambic_. The whole
scene was full of the charm of intimacy and happiness which for the
artist served as a sort of frame, so to say, for the old pictures. The
works of the Flemish painters are so impressive in all their power,
in the splendor of their fresh coloring and their gem-like finish,
that Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, Mechlin seem to have been built
and decorated by the Brueghels, the Jan Steens, the Tenierses, whose
dazzling canvases strike one almost as if they had been the plans for
the construction of these queenly cities instead of being simply mirrors
of them. As for nature, its grandeur and its nobility are disconcerting
in such a little country.
Rodin rented a modest room in the chaussée de Brendael, in one of
the quarters of the capital quite close to the Bois de la Cambre.
He worked there during the whole of the day; his young wife did the
housework, went out marketing, sewed beside him, posed for him,
helped him to moisten his clay, made herself, as she said proudly, his
_garçon d'atelier_. He modeled caryatids for the Palais de la Bourse at
Brussels; for the Palais des Académies he made a frieze representing
children and the attributes of the arts and sciences; he was charged
also with the execution of decorative pieces for different municipal
buildings of the city of Antwerp. Nowadays the Belgians display with
pride these works, in which, without flattering them, one can recognize
the touch of a future master.
Intent as he was upon his modeling work, Rodin did not abandon drawing;
he added to it landscape-painting in oils. The Brabant country-side
is one of the most beautiful in Europe. The Forest of Soigne, which
surrounds Brussels, is full of the lofty trees of the Northern
countries, splendid beeches, healthy as the bodies of athletes, reaching
up into the sky like columns of light bronze, planted in regular rows,
giving the impression of an immense and solemn temple. Narrow avenues,
alleys, pierce the long naves; one's soul seems to glide lingeringly
along these shadowy paths drawn on to the end by the far-away glimmer
like stained glass. The light that falls from above through the
tree-tops slips down the long green trunks, gray or silvery, bringing
with it a touch of the sky. There is no exuberant vegetation, none
of that undergrowth trembling with delicate little leaves, such as
that which makes the spiritual grace of the Ile-de-France, arranged
for the frolic of nymphs and fawns. This is the Gothic forest, the
tree-cathedral, a fitting place for the miracles of Christianity and
the devout walk of solitaries. Rodin fell in love with this forest. His
grave soul, his youth, which knew nothing of frivolity, found itself
here. His nature, so full of self-contained enthusiasm and the profound
and slowly moved spirit of admiration, not yet capable of expressing
itself, found its true element under the protection of these age-old
beeches. But one corner enchanted him, a verdurous hollow filled with
running water that breaks the austerity of the wood, the valley of
Groenendael. There the majestic colonnade of trunks opens out, with the
condescension of giants, before the caprices of an undulating glade. It
is covered with a down of grass, like an immense green cloud, always
pure, always fresh, which spring and autumn embroider with delicate
shoots of a multitude of flowers, like the tapestries of the Flemish
masters. Little ponds shyly spread out their mirrors, full of the sky,
full of reflections. An old low-built house, entirely white, speaks
of security, of calm shelter, of good nourishment, in the midst of
this verdurous solitude, where one hears only the song of the birds
and where squirrels cross in their flight like sudden flames. The
valley of Groenendael is far enough away from Brussels to be almost
always deserted and silent. It was the site the famous Brabançon
mystic, Ruysbroeck the Admirable, chose in the fourteenth century for
a monastery. At that time the Forest of Soigne sheltered no less than
eleven monastic houses in its fragrant, shadowy depths. At the north of
the valley the ground rises and the path leads one to the modest chapel
of Notre Dame de Bonne-Odeur.
At this period Rodin certainly knew nothing of the great contemplatives
of the fourteenth century or of this same Ruysbroeck whom later a
glorious compatriot, Maurice Maeterlinck, kinsman by election of the
hermit, was to translate and interpret; but in the peaceful glade, the
vallon vert, as under the vaults of the great forest, the soul of the
sculptor rejoined those of the old monks who perhaps still wander there
at times; it shared with them the religion of this beauty which their
dumb love of nature had come thither to seek.
At dawn he would start out, loaded down with his box of colors.
His companion followed him, proud to carry part of the artist's
paraphernalia. He was on his way to make sketches, to take notes of the
landscape, to jot down his impressions; but often the day passed without
his touching his brushes. It was not indifference or indolence on the
part of this great worker, but simply that he had not the strength to
interrupt his delightful contemplations. Time lost? In the case of
another, perhaps. Not for him. His excursion had no immediate result;
that was all: but how he would observe, how he would compare, how he
would reflect! He was initiating himself in the sense of proportion,
grandeur of style, and the nobility of simplicity. He was studying the
laws of the light and shade distributed by the columns the true work of
the architect. It was no longer school lessons that he was prosecuting
here; it was the mighty exercise of personal talent, the ripening of
his taste that was taking place, thanks to the technical knowledge he
already possessed. The sense of the eternal laws comes only to those who
can contrail them through long experience.
Later, when the time came for Rodin to visit the cathedrals, he was to
understand better than any other this art which has sprung from the
forests of France, engendered by their mysterious grandeur, once full of
terrors and marvels. The benefit which he derived immediately from his
acquaintance with Belgium was the experience of those intellectual joys
and that happiness which await any one who is serious, loyal, reverent
in the presence of the divine work that offers itself as an object of
study to the assiduous.
Another besides himself had already received this teaching of nature in
exactly this place. Rude, whom the Bourbons had exiled on their return
to France because of his worship of Napoleon, passed several years in
Brussels and executed there a number of works, among others the famous
bas-reliefs of the Château de Tervueren, since destroyed by fire; "La
Chasse de Méléagre," of which the authorities of the Belgian department
of fine arts were fortunately able to take casts. On his way between
Brussels and Tervueren, Rude went every day several leagues on foot,
crossing the Forest of Soignes, where he, too, endeavored to forget the
lessons of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, on the benches of which he had,
according to his own confession, lost many years.
[Illustration: CARYATID--TAKEN AT MEUDON IN RODIN'S GARDEN.]
In addition to these works of decorative art, Rodin executed a number
of busts and sketches. He even found time to make a large figure
modeled after his wife, a figure draped like a Gothic statue, which
he worked over lovingly. It had the same disastrous fate as that
which befell the other one at Paris, and for the same reason; poverty
prevented the artist from having a cast taken of his work in time: like
the "Bacchante," it was completely destroyed. Despite this loss, the
sculptor was not discouraged; work for him was a happiness which was
begun anew each day; he at once began on another subject. This time he
took for his model a young man whose acquaintance he had made and who
willingly consented to pose for him.
This young man was not a model by trade, spoiled by the conventional
attitudes which the Parisian sculptors impose on professionals. He
was a soldier, living in barracks near Rodin's house. As soon as the
sculptor saw, disengaging itself from the clothes, the graceful figure
of this boy of twenty-five who was not aware of his beauty and did
quite simply whatever his companion asked him, he promised himself
not to abandon this work before he had carried it as far as his skill
permitted him to go. His model disposed himself in simple attitudes,
which were not vitiated by any pretentious forethoughts. One day he came
toward him, his arms upraised, his head thrown back, with an air of
youthfully voluptuous lassitude that filled the artist with enthusiasm.
One would have said that he was a young hero staggering under the
shock of a wound. And Rodin set himself to execute the statue of the
wounded hero. But nature lends itself to infinite interpretations.
The sense of an attitude that is well rendered creates of itself more
comprehensive ideas. When we contemplate one who is wounded or ill,
obscure impressions agitate our spirit, impelling it toward ideas
higher than those of wounds and illness. It skirts the frontiers of
death, the enigma of annihilation or of the world to come, and all
those unformulated sentiments, which in their confused flight haunt
the profound regions of the soul. Before his beautiful model Rodin
experienced these emotions and transcribed them upon his sculpture. In
its unblemished nudity, it bears the sign of no one epoch; it is the
eternal man touched in his innermost sensibility by something of which
he knows not the cause. Is it his soul, is it his flesh that trembles?
One does not know. No knowledge comes without suffering. Rodin, aware
immediately of this effect of transposition, in the delicious surprise
of the artist who sometimes sees himself surpassed by his own work,
christened the statue, "The Man of the Age of Bronze," that is to say,
one who is passing from the unconsciousness of primitive man into the
age of understanding and of love. A few years later he gave it this
still happier final name, "The Man who Awakens to Nature."
He worked over it eighteen months. There is no part of this harmonious
figure that has not been passionately thought out. He had to render,
beneath the supple covering of the skin, those firm, fine muscles which
possess the elasticity of youth and its sobriety. In giving the sense
of the presence of these things, one creates the illusion of their
activity. This is the secret of great sculpture and of all the arts, to
evoke that which we do not see by the quality of that which we do see.
"Carefully examine the Venus de Medici," Rude used to advise his pupils,
"and under the polish of the skin you will see the whole muscular system
appear."
Rodin did not spare either his own strength or that of his model. An
implacable goddess led him on, his conscience. He did not content
himself with rendering only the masses that his direct vision gave him.
In this way he would have possessed only two dimensions, the length and
width of the human body. He needed the exact relief of masses, which
is the basis of _ronde-bosse_, of "cubic sculpture." He studied his
profiles not only from below, but from above. He mounted a painting
ladder and looked down over his model; he measured the surface of the
skull, which, seen from above, has an ovoid form; he took and compared
with his clay model the dimensions of the shoulders, the chest, the
hips, the feet as they appeared with the floor as a background. He
observed the points where the arm muscles were inserted, and those of
the thighs and the legs. How, after such a rigorously minute process
of noting his masses, could his work be flat? That became impossible.
But the geometric labor, the taking of measurements, was not all. The
next question was to reassemble the different profiles by careful
transcription. There is an entire school of conscientious sculptors who
believe that they can obtain reality by the simple method of making
identical points correspond. They multiply the measurements taken from
the model with the aid of a plumb-line and a compass; it is only a
mechanical process which does not even give good practical effects. To
unify the manifold surface of the human body, to endow the whole with
the suppleness of life, with its harmonious continuity and poise,
the personal judgment of the artist must unceasingly intervene. His
own special taste is supremely what adjusts the elements which are
waiting to be unified by him in order to take on animation and to live
one beside another. It is during this last effort that the expression,
summoned up by the truth of the ensemble, comes almost of itself to
the fingers of the sculptor. If the preceding principles have not been
scrupulously observed, it seems to refuse to come; it is the reward
only of conscience joined with intelligence; it is the fruit of this
indissoluble union that works in the spirit of the true artist. The true
expression is that to which we give the indefinable name of poetry.
[Illustration: MAN AWAKENING TO NATURE.]
Since the creation of "The Man who Awakens to Nature," in which during
two years he had eagerly sought it, this became the characteristic
of Rodin's talent. He had conquered it for all time; and so while
his insatiable will applies itself with no less energy to other
researches, that of movement, of character, of lighting, and sometimes
over-emphasizes them, the work that comes from his hand may appear
strange, excessive; it will never be mediocre, never indifferent.
And now let us glance at the image of this young man, this proud,
unblemished human plant. All we have just been saying is forgotten in
the force of our impression. The most powerful impression, first of
all, is indolence. It is absorbed in itself; it exhausts like a great
draught of life the veins of those who respond to it. Hence the silence,
the long, dumb contemplation, the sense of incertitude one experiences
in the presence of its beauty. It is not to our spirit that it first
addresses itself. Its voluptuousness, whencesoever come, enchants our
senses; then the intellect demands an explanation, studies it, traces
back the sensation to its sources through one of those rapid and
manifold changes which are the law of such natural phenomena as light,
sound, electricity.
"The man who awakens to nature," said Rodin, in the presence of his
statue. Indeed the body bends over, as if under the exquisite caress of
the breezes of spring. The hand rests itself upon the head, flung back
as if to hold in the somewhat mournful splendor of some too beautiful
vision. The whole torso is gently stirred by the emotion springing
up from the depths of the flesh to die out upon the surface of the
imperceptibly agitated muscles. He leans lightly backward, bending like
a bow and at the same time like a traveler walking toward the dawn;
he is drawn on by the desire to renew this inner emotion that swells
his human heart almost to the bursting-point. By this double movement
reconstituting life, the action does not interrupt itself. It evokes
the past and the future; the obscure shadows out of which this soul is
endeavoring to emerge and the bright regions toward which it advances.
Auguste Rodin was at this time thirty-five years old. In the career
of the artist, this admirable figure has a special significance, that
of something symbolic. It marks one of the happiest phases of the
sculptor's life, the period of revelation through which he had just been
living during his sojourn by the forest of Groenendael. He, too, had
awakened to Nature in the heart of the sacred wood; he, too, had come to
know the somewhat dazzling torment of a being fully awake to the beauty
of the world. This beauty he had at last penetrated; he felt it with all
the strength of a ripened heart, he adored it; he made it his religion.
Such is the inner history of this statue. There is another, a history of
the anecdotal sort, which is well known to-day, but which it is proper
to recall in a complete biography of the master.
The adventure of "The Age of Bronze" was the first resounding battle
that Rodin fought in his struggle for the cause of art. It was a
victory, but only after great combats.
The plaster model appeared in the Salon of 1877. Before this proud and
spirited figure a number of visitors paused, ravished by a sensation
that was absolutely new. In itself there was nothing clamorous, no
attempt to attract attention by extravagance of gesture or exaggerated
expression--quite the contrary; the fragrance of a shy beauty, an
idyllic freshness, mingled with the passionate poetry of a virile,
artistic conscience, an exquisite sense of measure, a delightful
elegance characteristically French, of the north of France, grave and
restrained, and with a something hitherto unseen, a vigor till then
unknown diffused through this adolescent flesh, irradiating it with
tenderness, with a noble charm, a caressing sadness.
Immediately the rumor began to circulate, welcomed here, spurned there,
by the world of professionals, amateurs, and journalists: the anatomy
of the new work was too exact, its modeling too precise for it to be an
interpretation of the model; it was a cast from nature, and the sculptor
who gave out as the result of his own labor this mechanical copy of a
human body was nothing but an impostor.
What does it matter? thought the public in its up-and-down common sense.
There are plenty of fine casts from nature; so much the better for the
name of Rodin if he has been particularly successful in this line.
But Rodin was indignant. This nude, so obstinately worked over, a cast!
That he should have committed such a deception, he the scrupulous molder
of clay! Oh, he knew well enough that most of the great modern sculptors
do not burden themselves with so many scruples and lend themselves too
often to the hasty method of taking casts; he condemned it with all the
force of his own probity. He knew well that in this very Salon of 1877
more than fifty pieces of sculpture about which nothing was said owed
their existence to this malpractice of which he was accused and of which
he would never be guilty, because he considered it the very negation
of art. For of course taking casts is nothing but the reproduction
of nature in its immobility. By means of it one is able to take the
impression of forms, but one cannot grasp movement or expression. It
is possible to take the mold of an arm, a leg, an inert body; one can
take a good cast of the stiffened mask of the dead; one cannot calculate
through the medium of the plaster the attitude and the modifications of
form of a man walking or falling or the eloquence of a face lighted up
by the reflection of the inner mind. This transcription of the whole
is the exclusive privilege of the artist. He alone seizes and fixes
the general impression; for it is made up not only of the immediate
movement, but of that which precedes and that which follows. His eye
alone registers the rapid succession, and his skill reproduces it. While
the cast, like the photograph, only constitutes a unity detached from
the whole, sculpture from nature reëstablishes the whole itself and
represents the uninterrupted vibration which is life.
That explains how there happen to be, on the one hand, so many
hard figures, weak and cold images, turned out hastily by lazy and
conscienceless sculptors, and, on the other, those works that possess a
charm that is mysterious to those who know nothing of its source, who
are unaware of this method of observation and labor which a supreme
effort veils in the easy grace and the apparent facility that enchants
us in the things of nature.
The accusation brought against Rodin became more definite. There was a
veritable upheaval of opinion in the world of the Salons. He protested,
with the firmness of an artist resolved to suffer no blot upon his
honor. He insisted upon receiving justice. Unknown, without means of
support, without fortune, he might well have waited a long time for it.
He turned toward Belgium, seeking defenders in the country where he had
made "The Age of Bronze"; but the academic virus did not spare him; the
official sculptors remained deaf to the appeal of their confrère. For
that matter, where did he come from, this ambitious stone-cutter who
claimed the title of sculptor without waiting on the good pleasure of
the pontiffs?
Rodin's model alone, the young soldier of Brussels, became indignant at
the affront to his sculptor. He wanted to hasten to Paris and exhibit
himself naked before the eye of the jury of honor which had just been
constituted and cry out to them that he had posed nearly two years for
the artist who had been so unjustly attacked. But nothing is simple. He
had posed, thanks to the special good will of the captain commanding the
company to which he belonged, and in defiance of military regulations.
To reveal this fact would be to compromise the officer, and so he had to
remain silent.
Rodin had photographs and casts taken from his model and sent them
to the experts. All this was costly and uncertain. It was only after
months of waiting that they were examined. On the jury were several art
critics, including Charles Iriarte, a learned writer and distinguished
mind, and Paul de Saint-Victor, author of the "Deux-Masques,"
the sumptuous writer of so much brilliant prose. Alas! the most
insignificant sculptor, provided he had only been sincere, could have
settled Rodin's case a hundred times better. A man of his own trade,
possessing the elements of justice, would have immediately decided the
question according to the facts, while the critics and writers relied
wholly upon personal impressions, and, to the great bitterness of the
sculptor, when they delivered an opinion they did not altogether reject
the accusation that he had taken casts, allowing doubt to rest upon the
honesty of Rodin. He himself did not know what to do next. Chance was
more favorable to him than men.
At that time he was executing for a great decorator some ornamental
motives destined for one of the buildings of the Universal Exposition
of 1878. The sculptor, Alfred Boucher, a pupil of Paul Dubois, came
one day on a business errand to see the decorator. In the studios he
noticed Rodin at work on the model of a group of children intended for
a cartouche. Boucher, who knew about the accusation that hung over
him, observed him with the liveliest interest. He witnessed the rapid,
skilful, amazingly dexterous execution producing under his very eye
a tender efflorescence of childish flesh on the firm and perfectly
constructed little bodies. _And Rodin was working without models!_
Alfred Boucher was a product of the Ecole; he had taken the _grand prix
de Rome_; he was ten years younger than Rodin; but he was an honest man;
he hastened to relate to his master, Paul Dubois, what he had seen. The
creator of the "Florentine Singer" and "Charity" in his turn wished to
see things for himself. With Claude Chapu he went to the decorator's
and both of them decided then and there that the hand that molded so
skilfully from memory the figures of the cherubs was certainly capable,
in its extraordinary knowledge of human anatomy, of having executed that
of "The Age of Bronze." Thereupon they convinced their confrères and
decided to write the under-secretary of state a solemn letter in which
all of them, answering for the good faith of Rodin, declared that he
had made a beautiful statue and that he would become a great sculptor.
The letter was signed by Carrier-Belleuse, Paul Dubois, Chapu, Thomas
Delaplanche, Chaplin Falguière.
[Illustration: BUST OF THE COUNTESS OF W----.]
This tempered considerably the rancor of the artist.
It is a strange fact that for years he underrated this statue. In 1899
he gave his first great exhibition of all his work. It was to the Maison
d'Art of Brussels that the honor of this project was due, and it was
carried out in a style and with a good taste which no later exhibition
of the master has surpassed, or even attained.
As he had charged me with the supervision of the sending off of his
works, to the number of fifty, I begged him to include among them "The
Age of Bronze." I hoped that the public, and especially the artists of
Belgium, might be able to study the evolution of his technique through
his typical works, executed at different periods of his career. Nothing
could induce him to consent to it. He declared that in twenty years
his modeling had undergone a complete transformation, that it had
become more spacious and more supple, and that the exhibition of this
statue could serve no purpose and be of good to nobody. I urged him to
go and look at it again. The bronze, sent to the Salon of 1880, with
the plaster figure of "St. John the Baptist in Prayer," awarded, oh
splendor of official miserliness! a medal of the third class, had been
bought by the state a few years later and set up in a corner of the
Luxembourg Gardens, an out-of-the-way corner, but one that the light
shadows of the young trees made charming. The master refused. Two or
three years afterward, one morning while we were talking, I led him
unsuspecting toward this little grove. Thinking of something else he
lifted his Head, casting an indifferent glance at the solitary bronze.
Surprised, he examined it, while a happy emotion lighted up his face;
then he walked slowly around it. Finally he admitted quietly that he
had been mistaken, that the statue seemed to him really beautiful, well
constructed, and carefully sculptured. In order to comprehend it he had
had to forget it, to see it again suddenly, and to judge it as if it had
been the work of another hand.
After this readoption, his affection for it was restored; he had several
copies cast in bronze and cut in stone, and it has become perhaps one
of his most popular and most sought-after works. Museums of Europe and
America, lovers of art in both hemispheres, consider it an honor to
possess replicas.
It was the first of Rodin's great statues, or, rather, the first that
has been preserved. Several other works of capital importance serve
as landmarks in the progress of his talent. Around them are grouped
fragments, busts, innumerable delightful little compositions, all
treated with the same care and equally reflecting the result of his
studies; but, as ever, it is the major works that mark most visibly the
points of departure and arrival of the different periods of his artistic
development. These works are: "The Age of Bronze" (1877); "Saint John
the Baptist" (1880); "The Gate of Hell" (1880-19--, not finished); "The
Creation of Man" (1881); "The Burghers of Calais" (1889); "Victor Hugo"
(1896); "Balzac" (1898); "The Seasons" (pediments of stone, 1905);
"Ariadne" (in course of execution).
These works will be described and characterized, in the course of this
book, at the dates of their appearance.