I
THE STUDY OF THE CATHEDRALS--INFLUENCE OF THE GOTHIC ON THE ART OF
RODIN--"SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST" (1880)--"THE GATE OF HELL"
In 1877 Rodin visited our most illustrious cathedrals, Rheims, Amiens,
Chartres, Soissons, Noyon. During his youth, the choir of Beauvais
and Notre Dame de Paris appealed more to his imagination than to his
taste, and it required many years of travel and comparison to enable
him to grasp the splendors of that Gothic art which he was to admire
thenceforth at least as much as the antique. As a splendidly gifted,
but inexperienced young man, he shared the error of his epoch: the
eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century had despised the
Roman and the Gothic; they had ridiculed them and called them barbaric;
the nineteenth century, while flattering itself that it appreciated
them, did still worse--it restored them.
The romantic writers of the Schools of Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo
had exalted the art of the Middle Ages, but chiefly because of their
hatred of the classic and without understanding its true worth. What
struck them, especially, was the immensity and the picturesqueness of
the buildings, the luxuriousness of this stone vegetation, but not the
unique character of their architecture and sculpture.
Victor Hugo was perhaps one of the few to discover the precise
explanation of this beauty: relief and modeling. This all-powerful
writer, this architect of words who constructed poems like cathedrals,
understood the plastic intelligence of the master masons because he
himself possessed the _sense of mass_. One is convinced of this not only
in reading his descriptions of cities and monuments, but in studying
those astonishing pen-and-ink drawings which he multiplied in idle
moments.
If the romanticists have failed fully to explain medieval art to us,
let us still be grateful to them: they gave our cathedrals back to us,
they denounced ignorance and scourged the stupidity that would have
ended by tearing down those sublime piles. Finally if the writers and
art critics of this epoch have not given them superlative praise, if on
their behalf they have not burned with apostolic zeal, it is because it
was necessary for this prophecy of art to come from a man of the craft,
a man dominated, captivated, himself, by the craft, a man who understood
stone and adored it because he had married it in spirit with all its
difficulties and its dazzling possibilities.
That man was to be Rodin. Although he has been listened to by the
ignorant and superficial multitude, it has not been chiefly because of
the authority of his genius, of the general renown that he has enjoyed.
He has truly thrown a new light over the mystery of Gothic construction.
Thanks to him, we understand in a measure, for tangible reasons, the
reasons of an actual carver, this "world in little" that constitutes the
Gothic cathedrals. What study, what researches are necessary in order to
comprehend the art of stonework! Does any one suppose that Rodin himself
has attained this in a day? By no means. That lover of perfection in
detail does not possess the instantly penetrating glance that is often
the property of genius: to the task of deciphering our monuments he
brought that slow-minded, customary patience of his, together with
his energy. He had first of all to rid himself of the false current
ideas. After that thirty years of observation were necessary for him to
reach conclusions that satisfied his artistic conscience. Even to-day
he is far from affirming that he has understood everything, that he
has grasped the full significance of the Gothics. Read his book, "The
Cathedrals of France," published in 1914; observe the carefullness of
his judgments, the gropings of his thought, the constant retracing of
his steps. He makes attempts, ventures; he never proclaims his opinion
in the peremptory tone dear to specialists in criticism, but endeavors
to approach respectfully, as closely as possible, to the spirit of
the masters. Sometimes a flash of genius springs from his brain and
illumines to the depths of its mysteries the Gothic universe; but
nothing is suggested that does not spring from a prolonged observation,
and when at last he speaks it is in the tone of a man who mistrusts
himself. It must be confessed that in this work, "The Cathedrals of
France," something is lacking, even though it is prefaced by a long and
very learned introduction by one of our good writers, Charles Morice. It
lacks the magnificent lesson that the reader will find in these pages,
signed with Rodin's name. This lesson constitutes really a vital page
that is, as it were, the key and the summary of the whole work; but the
master, having given me the first rights in it, had scruples, as had
Charles Morice, about including it in his own book.
Before obtaining this page, with what insistence did I have to question
Rodin not once, not twice, but twenty times, during the course of a
number of years. Every time he came back from one of his pilgrimages
to some old city of the provinces, to our churches, our town halls, I
renewed my questions without receiving any satisfactory answer. In my
heart I could not but honor this rigorous honesty which was unwilling to
venture anything lightly on so vast, so noble a subject.
In 1877, after having accomplished his first tour of France, he came
back filled with wonder. But the impression that he carried with him was
still confused; he did not know at what point to begin the analytical
study of French architecture, for in what concerned sculpture he
had immediately been struck with amazement and adoration before the
essential beauty of the status of Chartres, Amiens, and Rheims. He had
returned from Italy haunted by the antique and Michelangelo, and now
here he was haunted by the modeling and the rhythm of the Gothic figures.
But in order to understand them entirely he had to rediscover this
modeling and these movements in nature, he had to verify them in the
living model. Fortune favors those who seek greatly. When one is the
victim of an idea unexpected elements arise to nourish and develop it.
One day two Italians knocked at the door of his studio. One of them,
a professional model, had already posed for Rodin and he introduced
the other, his comrade. He was a peasant from the Abruzzi who had come
to seek his fortune in Paris. He was fresh from his native province.
His robust body, his fierce head, his bristling beard and hair, and
above all his expression of indomitable force charmed the artist. He
undressed, climbed upon the model's stand, planted himself firmly on
his legs, which were spread like a compass, the head well raised, and,
continuing to talk, advanced with a gesture full of ardor.
Rodin, struck by this wild energy, immediately set to work. He made the
man such as he saw him; he desired to capture this movement of the legs,
this brusk forward movement that complemented the movement of the arms,
the shining eyes, the open mouth. He surrendered himself to a great
study, without any preconceived idea, without any intention of treating
a _subject_. What he made was _a man walking_. The name has stuck to the
figure. The first study remains incomplete; Rodin has sculptured neither
the head nor the arms; what he sought eagerly, passionately, was the
equilibrium of the torso and of the legs cast forward into space. He
succeeded; he made a superb fragment, "The Man Walking." Thirty years
later it occurred to a group of his admirers to ask the state to acquire
this study and erect it in the court of the French embassy at Rome, in
the Farnese Palace; but the official architects up to the present time
have objected to the erection of this statue, and for the last seven or
eight years it has awaited, in some obscure shed, the good pleasure of
these gentlemen.
Rodin, in the presence of his Italian peasant, had rediscovered, to his
great joy as a seeker, the peculiar equipoise of the Gothic figures. In
the antique statues the plumb-line falls through one of the legs, while
the other, lightly raised, impresses on the different planes of the body
the graceful effect that has become classic. In Gothic statues, on the
contrary, the line of equilibrium passes through the middle of the body
and falls right between the two legs as they are planted on the earth.
In "The Age of Bronze" Rodin has adopted the balanced rhythm of Greek
sculpture; in his new figure he passed to the Gothic equipoise, with
a harmony that is less gracious, but with a reality stronger and more
living. What he did not abandon was the rigorous construction and the
strength of modeling which his study of the antique had given him. "The
Man Walking," as well as the greater part of his subsequent works, thus
exhibits the union of the two great principles of sculpture that have
governed the Occidental genius.
Rodin, strengthened by study, now made a complete statue with head and
arms. While he was working he discovered that his model was half a
savage, still close to the animal and its ferocious instincts. Sometimes
his eyes burned, his jaws, armed with powerful teeth, were thrust
forward as if to bite something; he resembled a wolf. At other times a
kind of strange passion inflamed him. His face radiated faith and will;
he spoke with such energy that he seemed to be haranguing a crowd; one
would have thought him a prophet of the primitive ages, a visionary
bursting forth from the desert to preach and to convert the people.
Rodin regarded him in amazement. It was no longer his model, but a man
from the Bible; surely it was a prophet that stood before him: it was
Saint John the Baptist brought back to life. The sculptor bowed before
the command of nature: his statue should bear the name of the forerunner.
[Illustration: EVE.]
He thought at first of emphasizing the disturbing impression: he placed
on the shoulders of Saint John a simple cross. But here was revealed the
all-powerful instinct of the sculptor, making the subject, the anecdote,
the literary connotation a matter of secondary importance. The cross,
the sublime symbol, would be here only an accessory, not really needed.
It would complicate the simplicity of line dictated by the laws of
sculpture, destroying the appositions of equilibrium of the great body
and distracting the attention from that speaking head.
So Rodin gave it up. He came at last to the decision that his work
should remain free from what was not of the very essence of art. He sent
it off in the form in which it appeared in the Salon of 1880, adding
also "The Age of Bronze."
The artists, the true artists, those whose enthusiasm was not poisoned
by envy and jealousy, applauded these two superb figures artistically
so different, but so similar in their sincerity; they acclaimed them
with the grave joy of generous souls who perceive the dawn of a great
talent. The name of Rodin became fixed forever in their memory.
As for the jury of this Salon, it considered it sufficient to award
the "Saint John the Baptist" and "The Age of Bronze" a medal _of the
third class_. Let us, in turn, give it our reward--the reward for its
insensitiveness--by not disclosing the names of the sages who composed
it.
"THE GATE OF HELL"
While finishing these works, which he was not even certain of being able
to sell, Rodin was still compelled to provide for his own subsistence
and that of his family; he had also to meet the expenses of his trade.
A costly trade! It requires a studio, models, large fires to keep them
warm, clay, tools of every kind. It was luck enough if the sculptor,
still unknown, was able to have plaster casts made of his work. But
this did not satisfy him; he dreamed of seeing them take on a new
aspect in the richness of marble and bronze. Alas! in many cases he
had to wait until middle age to have this dream realized. Rodin has
never complained of the slowness of fortune. He knows that in order to
attain the fullness of his productive power it is well for the artist
to be thwarted, exalted by difficulties, the desire to conquer. After a
five-years' stay in Belgium he had returned to Paris to take part in the
work of the World Exposition of 1878, and he had taken a position with
the ornament-worker Legrain, in whose workshop he met Jules Desbois,
the future great sculptor, to whom he became attached for life. What
innumerable decorations he executed at that time--decorations which
disappeared like the leaves and flowers of the season when the stucco
palaces of the exposition vanished! Only the masks ornamenting the
Palais du Trocadéro remained.
At the same time he accumulated busts, studies, large figures with
a fury of work which from then on was to resemble that of the most
powerfully productive minds, the fecundity of a Rubens, of a Balzac, of
a Michelet, of a Hugo. In the studios which he rented in the Faubourg
St. Jacques, from 1877 to 1883, besides the "Saint John the Baptist," he
executed the admirable little tough model of the "Monument Commemorating
the National Defense"; after his wife, whose characterful features and
naturally tragic countenance he had often reproduced, he made a helmeted
bust, a "Bellona." He exhibited three life-sized figures: "The Creation
of Man"; "Adam," since destroyed; and "Eve," the bronze of which did
not appear until the Salon of 1899. He did the busts of W.E. Henley;
the painter Jean-Paul Laurens (to mention some of the most beautiful),
Carrier-Belleuse, the etcher Alphonse Legros, all in the midst of
difficulties and injustices which did not in any way disturb the depths
of his serenity, the noble tranquillity of the artisan sure of attaining
his end by labor. Is it possible to-day to believe that the model of the
"Monument of the Defense" was not only refused, but was not even classed
among the thirty designs that were retained by the jury of 1880 after
the first choice had been made? This same jury, the composition of which
is also worthy of passing into history, decided on a solemn confection
by M. Barrias for the _prix de Rome_, the result of which was that four
years later its creator was elected a member of the Academy of Fine Arts.
I do not know whether many collectors contend for reproductions of M.
Barrias's monstrous design for a clock; but Rodin's group, a wounded
soldier entirely enveloped by the wings of a prodigious figure of a
warrior goddess crying out for aid, which was later renamed "The Genius
of the Defense" or "The Appeal to Arms," and which has acquired to-day
so pathetic a character of actuality, is coveted by most of the museums
and art collectors of Europe and America.
As if these works, which have since acquired such glory, were nothing
but fragments of secondary importance, Rodin attacked a great piece of
work, like those that used to be executed in the great ages of art: he
undertook the famous "Gate of Hell."
At the time of the affair of "The Age of Bronze" there was at the
head of the ministry of fine arts, an under-secretary of state named
Edmond Turquet. To him fell the task of deciding in the last resort the
case of Rodin. M. Edmond Turquet was a brilliant lawyer who had become
_procureur_ under the empire, which did not altogether qualify him for
the part of director of fine arts under the republic. In the field of
art he knew no more than any one else, Rodin says; but he was a very
fair-minded man, and his honesty had the effect of quickly straightening
out the affair of the sculptor. In his genuine desire to atone for the
wrong done to Rodin in the eyes of public opinion he not only offered
to obtain for him a position in the porcelain factory at Sèvres, in
order to assure him a regular livelihood, but ordered from him a great
ornamental piece, a door destined for the Palais des Arts Décoratifs.
In addition, by a special privilege created in favor of artists under
Louis XIV,--a privilege the traditions of which the French Government
has happily perpetuated,--M. Turquet granted Rodin a good studio in the
Dépôt des Marbres, so that he could execute his order.
"And what will you represent on that door?" enquired the under-secretary
of state.
"I am sure I don't know," replied the artist. "But I shall make a
quantity of little figures; then no one will say that they are casts
taken from the life."
Thus we find him at Sèvres, a ceramist; he has carried on so many
different trades that he succeeds marvelously with this one. It was his
task to decorate vases of delicate clay; he modeled light bas-reliefs,
representations of mythological scenes, idylls. Nymphs, cupids, fauns,
evoked by his miraculously delicate fingers, were born out of the milky,
transparent material, bringing back to life the flowery graces of the
drawing-room art of the eighteenth century, the dainty elegances of the
wax figures of Clodion, but with a graver sense of the mystery of nature
and of love.
Unfortunately, when these vases left the hand of the master they were
overladen with hideous ornaments in the style of Louis-Philippe.
Moreover, the officials at the head of the factory did not like them.
They were carried up to the attics, they were left lying about on the
floor, in the secret hope of seeing them broken by the feet of some
careless or ill-willed workman.
The feeling of being isolated and misunderstood at times threw a shadow
over the soul of the sculptor; but on the other hand he felt himself
so strong, so solidly based in his will, in his self-confidence, and
in the virtue of labor that these moments of depression passed away
quickly. Besides, he knew the secret of the poor, the secret of creating
happiness for oneself out of everything that the rich and powerful
despise: a simple life, health, regular work, the contemplation of
nature, and a few real friendships. Rodin earned at Sèvres only two or
three francs an hour and lost a great deal of time on the railroad. What
did it matter? He found pleasure and rest in these little journeys.
Every day he set out from Paris by train, and, the day over, winter and
summer, his wife came to meet him. They returned together on foot either
along the banks of the Seine, charming in their profusion of little
hills and islands, covered with meadows or fine trees, or through the
woods of Meudon and Clamart, with their vistas of Paris, its heights,
its buildings, its changing sky full of light and spirit.
At the end of four years of opposition and annoyance Rodin gave up
pottery in order to consecrate himself wholly to his own work. The
museum of the factory preserves a vase signed by him, and the future
Musée de l'Hôtel Biron can show a second example. What has become of the
others? What price would not be paid for them to-day by admirers of the
master?
These supplementary works did not turn him away from his essential task;
whatever were the technical means employed, his efforts tended toward
one unique end, the plastic quality, and he gave himself up desperately
to this search in executing his new order, the "Gate."
Rising at four in the morning, as he had done in his youth, he studied
the plans and the details of this great work. He had announced a series
of little figures. How was he to group them? What visions surged in the
sculptor's imagination? Of what legendary theme, what theme of history
or poetry, should he make use in order to realize his program? He had
never ceased to be a passionate reader. He read especially the Greek
poets and dramatists, the Roman historians, the old French chronicles,
Dante, Shakspere, Victor Hugo, and Baudelaire. He did not wish to draw
the subject of his future work from Homer, Æschylus or Sophocles;
the School of the Beaux-Arts had so abused the theme of the antique,
already immortalized by Greek sculptors, that it had entirely lost its
freshness. The moderns attracted him less, but he was obsessed by the
work of the great poet of the Renaissance, by the "Divine Comedy" of
Dante. He had read and reread it and made a sort of commentary in the
form of innumerable sketches which he jotted down mornings and evenings
at table, while walking, stopping by the wayside to dash off attitudes
and gestures on the leaves of his note-book. He rediscovered in the
poem of Dante the fateful grandeur of the Greek dramas, but with an
atmosphere more modern, closer to ourselves, more mournfully familiar to
our anguishes and our torments. The idea took shape in his imagination,
"that imagination ceaselessly rumbling and groaning like a forge"; it
exalted his bold spirit. Genius joins to the richness of the intellect
the simplicity of heart that creates faith. Genius _believes_ ever more
than it _thinks_. It has the strength which succeeds in anything, and
it possesses also that supreme gift, the ingenuousness of the child who
doubts nothing. Rodin believed the poem of Dante as if he had lived it,
as Dante himself believed in Vergil. What a magnificent homage great men
render to one another in this credulity of genius toward genius!
[Illustration: RODIN AT WORK ON THE MARBLE.]
The subject chosen by Rodin for his decorative panels, then, was
hell--hell as Dante conceived it in a vision that lends itself, for
that matter, marvelously to a plastic realization. The "Gate" would
be a poem, an immense sculptured poem; that is to say, a résumé of
the attitudes and gestures of life called forth by the release of the
passions, a strange catalogue of the expressions of the human body under
the shock of sorrow and of joy. If the imagination of Rodin caught
fire like that of a visionary, he remained beyond everything and above
everything the sculptor, and he plunged immediately into the search for
the general scheme of the work.
The truth of the movements, the poetry of the evocations, his models
would give him; he could feel at ease as to that: the resources that
nature would offer him were inexhaustible. But the plan, that he
must find himself; he must do the work of the builder, almost of the
geometrician. There could be no self-deception as to that. The fuller
the ornamentation was to be of figures and movements, the more solid
must be the frame of the immense picture, the more vigorous and compact
must be the general plan of the work.
Rodin's mind wavered between two great schools, that of the Renaissance
and that of the Middle Ages, that which had produced the doors of the
baptistry at Florence and that to which we owe the portals of the Gothic
cathedrals.
The celebrated gates of Florence are a series of bas-reliefs arranged
symmetrically in a regular framework; they present a series of separate
pictures having no common bond except their subject. The execution
is admirable, and it is perhaps impossible to surpass it. Lorenzo
Ghiberti has done there the work of an incomparable modeler, actually
a goldsmith; but he has in no way troubled himself with regard to
architecture. Now, architecture is the great French point of view. The
Roman and the Gothic have placed in their monument (the church) that
other monument (the portal). The portal is complete in itself; the
art of the sculptor and that of the architect have united and become
indistinguishable here in order to realize an absolute beauty.
Rodin, profoundly French, inheriting the instinct and taste of his
ancestors the master-masons, having to compose a door, was fated to
conceive a portal. On the other hand, he could not escape the influence
of the antique, the result of his early studies. This was the entirely
different element which in the course of the work he had undertaken was
to mingle with the Gothic element.
It was not the first time that the mingling of these two great
conceptions of art had occurred in France. From it had sprung our
Renaissance sculpture; in that epoch the sculpture of the Greeks united
itself with the Gothic architecture, the Hellenic sunlight brought to
blossom the majesty of our monuments. Does not Rodin himself, with his
vast outlook over the whole field of art, call this period of national
art, the sixteenth century, the French Gothic?
"The Gate of Hell," then, took on in its general structure a Renaissance
aspect. It preserves the graceful line of the Gothic portal and has the
luminous whiteness inspired by Greek sculpture. This singular work has
touched all contemporary artists. Most of our writers have described it,
and, after them, the critics of other countries. This living multitude,
this suffering, groaning multitude that covers the two panels with a
thousand passionate movements, has drawn into its magic whirlpool the
world of literature, which has been able to liberate itself only by
means of innumerable printed pages. The poem of Dante has come forth as
it were revivified from the hands of Rodin. Fresh tears, one would say,
have bathed the most poignant passages; the pity of a man of to-day,
of one like ourselves, our brother, has enveloped the terrible work of
the Florentine poet, that man of the Middle Ages, with an atmosphere of
tenderness and compassion which seems the emotion of Christianity at its
purest, its original source. In order to become our own, it has passed
through the great soul of Rodin. It is not surprising, then, that the
sensibility of our artists, reanimated by this new spectacle, should be
touched to so voluminous an expression by this haunting work.
But what has not been sufficiently remarked is that the "Gate" is, above
everything, a piece of architecture of the highest order.
When we see it we are at once struck with an impression of majesty, of
calm strength and plenitude. It seems even longer than it actually is.
It is a rectangle six meters high and two and a half meters wide, but
the source of the illusion is the justness of the proportions and the
value of the masses.
The powerful frame is furrowed with deep depressions. It rests on the
ground upon a strong base from which rise the two door-posts, as robust
as pillars and mounting together toward the summit. A pediment in the
shape of an entablature overhangs the entire monument, casting over
it a deep shadow full of nuances; and it is this shadow, skilfully
graduated, that gives to the work its rich, soft color. The body of
the portal is divided into two panels; a vast tympanum surmounts them
transversally. This tympanum, surmounted by a large cornice, dominates
the work. Without weighing it down, it gives it its mass, it attracts,
it obsesses, the eye; it is the soul of the edifice, its intellect. No
word can more justly describe it than the word brow, for it is magnetic,
haunting, mysterious, like the forehead of a man of genius.
The panels sink deep into a shadow that is heavy, but not harsh, while
in the foreground the pillars advance into the light; the delicate
bas-reliefs that cover them keep them in a silvery atmosphere, the
source of the great softness which envelopes this work, otherwise severe
and tragic, the source of the fugitive lightness of the lines, which
strike up from the earth toward the somber and tormented upper regions.
Carried away by this marvelous technic, the spirit of the visitor
succumbs; it follows this ascending movement of the door-posts, to lose
itself in the sorrowful dream sculptured on the tympanum.
On the panel writhe the clusters of human figures, the eddies of the
multitude of damned souls pursued by the rage of the elements, by
the devouring tongues of the infernal fire, by the frozen waters, by
the wind that tears them and stings them. "It is," says the eminent
art critic Gustave Jeffroy, in the most beautiful pages that have
been consecrated to a description of this work, "the dizzy whirl, the
falling through space, the groveling on the face of the earth of a
whole wretched humanity obstinately persisting in living and suffering,
bruised and wounded in its flesh, saddened in its soul, crying aloud
its griefs, harshly laughing through its tears, chanting its breathless
fears, its sickly joys, its ecstatic sorrows."
The genius of Rodin became intoxicated with all the resources of his
art. Master of a technic of the first order, he delighted in every kind
of effect, arranging them as a great symphonist arranges the instruments
of an immense orchestra. Low-relief, half-relief, high-relief, and
sculpture in the round, he omitted none. He did not yield to the
literary temptation. At the height of his fever of invention he was
circumspect, measured, guided by his knowledge as a modeler. The poet
thinks, but the carver speaks; he speaks justly, he speaks admirably,
because he uses only his own true and personal language, which he knows
from the ground up. That is the whole secret of the way in which this
man inflames our soul and subjugates our imagination.
Two principal notes, two motives form, above the whirlwind of the
infernal fires, a resting-place for the eye troubled by so much
vehemence: one, in the midst of the tympanum, is the figure of Dante. It
is Dante, but it is even more the eternal poet. Seated, leaning over the
abyss of suffering, thrilled with anguish, he seems to seek in the very
depths of the pit itself the word of infinite pity that will deliver
this sorrowful humanity.
Higher yet, above his bowed head, rising suddenly from the frame and
splayed in a large protuberance, a group of three entwined figures
crowns and completes the brow. With the same despairing gesture they
point to the multitude of the damned. One does not know what these
shuddering beings are, but they have the sweetness of angels; at once
we seem to hear their lips murmur the words of the grand Florentine,
"_Lasciate ogni speranza_"; but across their forms, their compassionate
forms, their fraternal forms, one feels passing a tremor of love and
pity. Far from condemning, their clasped hands offer to the sad wreckage
of fatality that writhes at their feet a sign, a unique sign, the sign
of good-will of pity.
* * * * *
"The Gate of Hell" was shown only once to the public. This was at the
Universal Exposition of 1900. Although it was nearly finished, it was
seen then only in an incomplete state.
The day of the opening arrived before the master had been able to have
placed on the _fronton_ and on the panels of his monument the hundreds
of great and small figures destined for their ornamentation. People saw
the "Gate," then in the nudity of its construction, grandiose assuredly,
but despoiled of its extraordinary raiment of sculpture.
That day was a sad one for the true friends of art and of Rodin. A band
of snobs, full of their own importance, crowded about the great man.
Having considered the work with the hasty and casual glance of men of
the world of the sort that are concerned above all to get themselves
noticed, they remarked to Rodin, in a tone of augury, "Your doorway is
much more beautiful like that; in no circumstances do anything more to
it."
This absurd advice befell at an evil moment: the artist felt worn out
from overwork and anxieties of all kinds and, moreover, was troubled
over the fate of his exhibit the failure of which might in truth have
ruined him completely. In these circumstances he did not have the
freedom of spirit necessary to judge correctly the value of his own
work. And besides he had seen it too much during the twenty years in
which it had been before his eyes. He was tired of it, weary of it.
[Illustration: PERISTYLE OP THE STUDIO AT MEUDON.]
Thus everything combined to make him lend an ear to the unfavorable
opinions of the Parisian aviary. Had he been in better health, more
the master of himself physically and morally, he would have replied to
the prattling of these excited paroquets and guinea-hens:
"Take more room, examine my 'Gate' from a little farther off, and you
will see once more the effect of the whole--the effect of unity which
charms you when it is deprived of its ornamentation. You must understand
that my sculpture is so calculated as to melt into the principal masses.
For that matter, it completes them by modeling them into the light.
The essential designs are there: it is possible that in the course
of the final work I may find it necessary to diminish such or such a
projection, to fill out such or such a pool of shadow; nevertheless,
leave this difficulty to my fifty years of artisanship and experience,
and you may be sure that quite by myself I shall find the best way of
finishing my work."
But the master was silent. Later, carried away by the abundance of his
conceptions, by his ever-deepening researches, he lost all interest in
the "Gate" and has never taken the trouble to have it entirely mounted.
Fortunately, casts of it have been carefully preserved. It would be
only an affair of a few months to reconstruct the work in its original
integrity. Since the Universal Exposition time has rolled forward, and
events also. Auguste Rodin has entered into the great serenity which
age brings with it. He composes less, he corrects his work, he judges
himself, and he does not deny his "Gate," one of the most exceptional of
his works.
At last the creation of the Musée Rodin has been decided upon by the
state. "The Gate of Hell" will be one of its important pieces; we shall
be able to contemplate it then in all its majesty; it will not then
simply be molded in plaster, but cast in bronze and cut in marble.
It will offer a noble example of what work can accomplish when it is
served by that supreme gift, will; for it will testify as much to
resistance against the powerful enemies of the life of thought as to the
intelligence of the man who created it. It forces upon us not only a
formidable impression of strength, labor, talent, but also an impression
no less lofty of method, order, and inner harmony. The multitude, who
through their profound instincts approach much closer than one might
suppose to the man of genius, will exclaim in contemplating this work,
this true monument which undoubtedly the sculptor has raised through his
own force of character, "Whoever erected this beautiful thing with his
indefatigable hands was truly a man."