"THE BURGHERS OF CALAIS" (1889)--RODIN AND VICTOR HUGO--THE STATUE OF
BALZAC (1898)
At the time the plaster model of "The Burghers of Calais" was first
offered to the judgment of the public, in 1889, nearly seven years had
gone by since Rodin had originally undertaken the group.
This is the period of my own childish memories of the master. He was a
frequent visitor at the home of my father, who lived in Sèvres, on the
outskirts of Paris.
Rodin, with his silent nature, apparently so full of calm and
meditation, delighted in the ardor, the patriotic enthusiasm, the
ferment of character, the brilliant conversation of that powerful,
original writer, my father; he loved his books, too, spirited and
passionate like himself, and possessing a vigor of expression that was
new to French letters.
Léon Cladel received his friends on Sundays. In winter they gathered in
the drawing-room, in summer on a terrace shaded by great chestnuts and
limes, where thousands of birds twittered and chattered so energetically
that at dusk they ended by drowning the voices of the visitors. Among
the latter were writers, painters, and sculptors, several of whom have
since become famous. Among them were Auguste Rodin and his colleague,
his dear comrade, Jules Dalou, creator of many fine works, notably the
monument to Eugène Delacroix which stands in the Luxembourg Gardens.
The sculptor of "The Burghers of Calais" was then barely fifty. He was
far from possessing the immense fame that is his to-day, but artists
already regarded him as a master. Of medium height, robust, with large
shoulders and heavy limbs, placid and deliberate in appearance, never
gesticulating, he himself resembled a block of stone; but above this
heavy base his countenance, with its broadly designed features and its
gray-blue eyes, expressed an extraordinarily keen intelligence and
finesse. Despite my youth I was struck by this physiognomy, so singular
and so penetrating, and also by the remarkable shyness that made the
sculptor blush whenever he was addressed. Since then innumerable
portraits have familiarized people with these features, which with age
have settled into an expression of authority and firm will; his strange
timidity has disappeared with time, with the consciousness of his
strength, with his having become accustomed to glory. Moreover, Rodin
has become a ready talker. Of old he listened intently, but always
held his peace; at most a few words, spoken in a soft, clear voice,
escaped from the waves of his long beard. He would at once relapse into
silence, while with a slow movement giving his beard an instinctive
caress with his large, square, irresistible hand, the true hand of a
builder. But when he raised his eyelids, almost always lowered, the
transparent eye, that limpid gray-blue eye, betrayed a perspicacity
that was almost malicious, almost cunning: one felt that he penetrated
through the forms of people to their very souls; and this he fixed so
skilfully in the clay of his busts that his models were not always
pleased with it. Many of Rodin's portraits have been refused by sitters
offended by their pitiless realism.
[Illustration: STATUE OF BASTIEN-LEPAGE.]
Sometimes my father kept Rodin and Jules Dalou to dinner. The two
sculptors were devoted to each other. They were comrades from of old who
had traveled together the hard road of beginners; since their student
days at the Petite Ecole they had many times reëncountered each other
in the same workshops, where they had received the same contemptuous
wages for their long days of labor. They felt a profound esteem for each
other's talent, different as these talents were, altogether opposed, in
fact, as were their natures; and it was a fine, a lovely thing to see
them bring forward each other's respective merits. Alas! I shall have
to tell later how an artistic rivalry came one day to destroy this noble
friendship.
The appearance of "The Burghers of Calais" aroused a flood of enthusiasm
in the world of art. I remember it well. At that time I was only a
young school-girl, and my father was unwilling to allow me to "miss
my classes" in order to accompany him to the opening of the Rodin
Exhibition. After all, the lessons I received that day, following them
quite absent-mindedly, were they worth the lesson I should have received
from the contemplation of that masterpiece, even if my age would have
prevented me from quite understanding it? Beauty is always the most
fertilizing teacher.
A rich art-lover, acting with the municipal authorities of Calais, had
ordered from Rodin the statue of Eustache de Saint-Pierre, the Calais
hero whose devotion had in the fourteenth century, during the Hundred
Years' War, saved the city when it was besieged by King Edward III of
England.
Rodin, true to his principles, sought as ever to approach his subject
from the quick of reality. He consulted history. He read the old
chronicles of France, above all those of Jean Froissart, who was
contemporaneous with the event and almost a witness of it. Froissart was
a man of the fourteenth century, a man of the age of the cathedrals,
and therefore himself a Gothic. His narrative has the force, the
savor, the naïveté, the simple and profound art of the masters of that
marvelous epoch. What a source of emotion for Rodin, a Gothic likewise
in his faith and his artistic rectitude! He caught fire at the recital
of the old master as at the voice of a brother-in-arms. He read, he
learned that Edward III would not consent to spare the city of Calais
from pillage and destruction unless six of her richest citizens would
come out to him dressed only in their shirts, barefoot, with ropes about
their necks, bringing him the keys of the city and their own heads to be
cut off. In response to this terrible message, Eustache de Saint-Pierre
and five of his fellow-citizens, taking counsel with the notables
of the place, at once rose to go to the king's camp. They set forth
immediately, escorted on their way by the hunger-stricken multitude,
weeping and groaning over their sacrifice and "adoring them with pity."
This was the vision which from that time on took possession of Rodin,
dominating him and never leaving him. But it was not an isolated person
detached from his environment that he saw: it was the six martyrs just
as they appeared in history, just as they were in life. In his thought
he followed this band of heroes marching to the sacrifice in the midst
of the weeping city. He could not bring himself to separate them either
from their whole number or from their tragic surroundings. Therefore,
in accordance with the genius of his theme, that is to say, with
historic truth, he would make all six of them, and he would insist that
they should be set up in the midst of the city, among the old houses,
where they would continue to live their sublime life in the heart of the
very town that they had saved.
For the price of one statue, therefore, Rodin set out to execute six.
He rented a vast atelier in the rue des Fourneaux, in the Vaugirard
Quarter. He worked unceasingly. To keep this enormous group in good
condition, to maintain the proper temperature, he moistened the clay
morning and evening, having as his _garçon d'atelier_ no one but his
devoted wife, who had become thoroughly experienced in these matters.
Despite all, accidents would happen: the clay would give way, an
arm, modeled with his habitual exactitude, would fall and have to be
laboriously repaired; but the fervent modeler never hesitated in his
work, and on the day when he exhibited "The Burghers of Calais" at the
house of Georges Petit the praise and the homage that sprang forth from
the soul of all true artists recompensed him magnificently, bringing
him the intoxicating caress of dawning glory. They spoke, in connection
with the "Burghers," of the image-makers of our cathedrals; they spoke
of the statues of Claus Sluters, of the famous statues of the "Well of
Moses" at Dijon. Really, in the Calais monument Rodin is more than ever
under the Gothic influence in subject, in thought, and in execution.
The equilibrium of the figures composing the group is the same as that
of the "Saint John the Baptist." The long shifts that cover the naked
bodies of his heroes recall those draperies in vertical folds dear to
the Middle Ages. The very modeling of the figures and of the faces
increases this effect of elongation caused by the fall of the fabric;
the modeling in large planes, the vigorous accents, the simple and
pathetic movements are certainly those of the sort that out-of-door
sculpture calls for. In twenty years Rodin had made innumerable visits
to the Gothic monuments. Here was the result of his tours of France. He
had made them in order to recapture the traditions of art from the hands
of our wonderful old stone-cutters, and his heart must have throbbed
with joy when he was told that in his own hands that tradition had
suffered no loss.
Naturally, the appearance of "The Burghers of Calais," even that,
could not fail to have its share of comic anecdote, that bitter and
painful humor that marks the adventures of genius in its struggle with
vulgarity. Let us not complain too much. The contrast between these
adventures and the proud way of life of a great man, the regularity
of his hours of toil--it is this that creates opposition, movement,
life. The elect soul feels a savage joy in these blows which shake it
like a tree tormented by brutal hands, a tree aware of the vigor of its
resistance and its ever-increasing tenacity.
The municipality of Calais, hearing that there were to be six statues
instead of the one that had been ordered, took umbrage, and deliberated
for two years. The heroic group waited, and, as it encumbered Rodin's
atelier, where other works were going forward, it was placed in a
stable. At last the worthy town authorities decided to assign it a
site. Naturally, the site in question was exactly opposed to the ideas
of the master--ideas that had been thought out and that were perfectly
logical, based on the laws of decorative art and still more determined
by that infallible criterion, taste. Rodin desired that his monument
should be in the center of the town; they placed it on the edge of
the sea. He counted on emphasizing the tall stature of his figures
by enshrining it in the narrow frame of the houses; they placed it
against a horizon without limits. He requested that the group should be
placed very low, almost on the ground, or else very high on an elevated
pedestal, like the "Colleoni" at Venice or the "Gattamelata" at Padua;
they placed it at a middle height, thus diminishing the effect of its
imposing proportions. The lesson had to come from foreign lands. The
city of Antwerp has erected, in front of its museum of fine arts,
two of the statues of the celebrated group, and England, which does
things splendidly when it is a question of embellishing its cities or
of rendering homage to the valor of its adversaries, has erected the
effigies of the six heroes of Calais on one of the most beautiful sites
in London, before the Palace of Westminster.
* * * * *
By this time the reader is sufficiently familiar with the technic of
Rodin for it to be unnecessary to analyze here in detail this well-known
work. What must not be forgotten is that the sculptor had first modeled
these six powerful bodies entirely in the nude. This is his invariable
method when he executes draped figures. One realizes this, even without
knowing it, before these arms, these hands, these legs, and these feet
constructed with that rigorous conscience which, with the true artist,
is at once a necessity and a delight; one divines the slope of the
torsos bent with grief or rigid in the pride of sacrifice.
"Yes, they are beautiful," the master said to me one day when I was
talking with him. "The shirt, the blouse are garments the folds of
which yield simple planes and effects that, rightly rendered, are those
of true sculpture. But there is something better still, and that is
sackcloth. If I had clothed my 'Burghers of Calais' in sackcloth, they
would certainly be more beautiful. I did not dare to. Some one else will
do this and will succeed. It is sufficient to express an idea and leave
it to its destiny."
We ought to love in Rodin this intellectual vigor that skirts the
borders of the impossible. In our age, consumed with indecision, it is a
priceless aid, a resting-place, a _point d'appui_ from which one starts
forth afresh, fortified, one's nerves recharged with vitality, to the
conquest of one's share of knowledge or of talent. This accounts in part
for the irresistible influence which for thirty years the illustrious
sculptor has exercised over the minds of artists. One feels that this
fount of strength condensed in his virile soul comes from something
deeper than his personality alone; it comes from the very depths of
the national reserves. The conviction, the energy of Rodin are those
of the workman who knows his trade, of the laborer impassioned by the
culture of his own soil. This endurance is the foundation of the French
temperament; the events happening now have proved it. When a country
possesses such individualities through the course of history, the roads
of the future open out before it brilliant with hope despite passing
shadows, and promise the highest surprises.
[Illustration: DANAIADE.]