The creation of "The Burghers of Calais" marks the middle of a period
of truly prodigious fecundity. From 1889 to 1896, monuments, busts,
statues, and groups of every kind issue without interruption from the
ateliers of Rodin, and the more numerous the works his hand models,
the more it grasps the contexture of the work, the more it refines the
execution. Orders for portraits pour in; collectors hold it an honor to
possess a marble, a bronze, signed with a name which every day increases
in celebrity. In 1888 comes that jewel of marble, the bust of Madame
Morla Vicuñha, and the monument to Claude Vicuñha, president of the
Republic of Chile; in 1889, the bronze portrait of Dalou, the statue of
Bastien-Lepage, that admirable head "La Pensée," acquired by the Musée
du Luxembourg.
In 1890 comes the portrait of Mme. Russell, a bust in silver, of
noble simplicity, which one would say was the head of a Roman matron,
with the luminous veil upon her thoughtful forehead and the flower of
good-will blossoming upon her delicately swelling mouth. Then there is
"The Danaïd," "La vielle Heaulmière," and a great study, a long woman's
torso, "La Terre."
In 1892, not to mention delightful minor works like "The Young Mother"
and "Brother and Sister," appear two masterpieces: the bust of Puvis
de Chavannes and that of Henri Rochefort, magnificent contrasts in
construction and execution. The painter-gentleman carries his haughty
head like an old leaguer chief, and the pamphleteer bends over the
destinies of France, which for fifty years he has defended day in, day
out, with his flaming pen, an enormous brow--a brow like a spherical
vault that seems to contain a world.
"You have made it grander, you have made it more beautiful than nature,"
some one said to Rodin one day.
"One can never do anything so beautiful as nature," he replied.
In this same year, 1892, he exhibited the charming monument to Claude
Lorrain, in which he recaptured the spirit of the eighteenth century. It
was the town of Nancy that ordered this figure of its painter and has
placed it in its vast park.
One cannot mention everything. Forms and attitudes renew themselves,
but not the terms that express them. To measure the abundance of this
work one should read the catalogue, till now incomplete,--for it has
been impossible to compile one that was not so,--of the master's
works; only so can we realize how almost dizzily his productiveness
became accelerated with the epoch of his maturity. Mythological
subjects dominate it, but are always treated with a profoundly human
understanding of the poetry and the grace of the form in which they
achieve an aspect delightfully new.
Such titles as "Venus and Adonis," "The Education of Achilles," "The
Death of Alcestis," "Cupid and Psyche," "The Faun and the Fountain,"
"Pygmalion and Galatea," Rodin inscribed only as an afterthought on
the pedestals of his groups. They are not the result of a necessary
preliminary conception; it is his figures themselves that breathe them,
his models unconsciously repeated the combinations of movement and
gesture through which are translated the eternal sentiments immortalized
by the legends of paganism. So true is this that Rodin obtained his
charming groups by assembling in harmony with his researches the
animated little figures that encumbered the windows of his ateliers.
He amused himself by uniting them, by marrying their attitudes; with
these little figures, these puppets of genius, he composed actual little
intimate dramas or idylls revived from the antique. In the hollow of
a Greek bowl he places a little nude body, and one would say that it
is the soul of the wave that conceals itself against the side of the
vase. He enlaces three feminine figures, upright, beside the body of a
recumbent youth: they are the Graces, who come to bend over the dying
poet. Thus he perpetuates the fantasy of things through that of his own
taste; he eternalizes the most delicious caprices of nature.
* * * * *
We come now to the year 1896 and the appearance of the "Monument to
Victor Hugo."
This monument had been ordered for the Panthéon. Rodin, who had modeled
in 1885 the bust of the singer of the "Légende des Siècles," was
doubly, on this account, entitled to the order. In the midst of what
difficulties had he achieved that bust! It required all his patience,
all the tenacity of a Lorrainese peasant, to accomplish it. When he
had begged the honor of reproducing those illustrious features, the
poet, already nearing his end, tired out with having posed for mediocre
plaster-daubers and unaware of the superiority of his new sculptor,
consented to pose only for two hours. All the same, he authorized Rodin
to come as often as necessary and make as many sketches as he needed
while he, Hugo, worked or received his friends.
Rodin accepted these difficult conditions. Was it not Victor Hugo with
whom he was dealing, the father of modern poetry? And then what a
spectacle for his artist's eyes, that of the great man bending over his
papers that Jupiter-like head of his in which thought, in gestation,
swelled the sublime brow with a tumult of ideas! When he talked, what
majesty in "this face of a lion in repose"!
[Illustration: PORTRAIT BUST OF VICTOR HUGO.]
The sculptor placed a stool, some clay, some tools in the corner of
a gallery; it was there that he worked out the general form of the
bust. Then, studying his wonderful model for months, he made hundreds
of sketches of him, under every aspect; at times, having used up the
pages of his note-books, he even covered entire blocks of cigarette
paper with rapid notes and jottings. Then he transferred this record
of observations to his clay. Working in this manner, it took him three
months to finish his bust. He exhibited it, in bronze, at the Salon of
1884. One cannot fail to admire the volumes, the beautiful mass of the
whole, even though it does not show that brilliant touch of genius which
strikes us before the bust of Jean-Paul Laurens or that of Rochefort;
but later, relying upon this document and upon his own special memory
of forms in action, Rodin was to restore for us this moving head in his
monument of the poet, which was to be one of his very loftiest works.
This same bust of Victor Hugo was to rupture the friendship between
Rodin and Jules Dalou--Dalou of whom he sent to the same Salon of 1884,
by a curious coincidence, an incomparable bust that puts one in mind of
those of Donatello.
The family of Victor Hugo did not like Rodin's portrait of the master.
When the poet died (1885), it was Dalou whom they called to execute a
death-mask of the features of the great poet. Filled with ambition and
eager for official glory, Dalou had the weakness to accept, forgetting
what he owed to Rodin, not even informing him, in fact. Deeply hurt, the
latter withdrew his affection for his old friend. My father, saddened by
this occurrence, which destroyed so rare and noble a friendship, brought
the two friends together at his table in the hope of reconciling them;
but nothing could melt the wall of ice that had fallen between these
dissevered hearts.
Ten years afterward a magnificent compensation was offered to Rodin.
From him was ordered the monument of the poet for the Panthéon. He
represented him nude, under the folds of a vast cloak, and seated on
a rock, as if by the seashore, with his wonderful head bowed in an
attitude of meditation, just as Rodin had often contemplated it in
priceless hours.
This manner of representing a great man, quite simply revived from the
Renaissance and the eighteenth century, shocked to the last degree the
administrative staff of the department of fine arts. Why this nude
personage, instead of a quite respectable Victor Hugo in the frock-coat
of an academician? Why not one of those statues that peacefully occupy
some corner of a public square without attracting any one's attention,
one of those statues that are not made to be looked at? As for this
poet, who resembled a Homer, a hero or a demigod, this grand body,
outrageously beautiful and simple, is it not scandalous in the midst of
the conformity of bourgeois civilization, enslaved by the ugliness of
fashion, whose perverted taste can no longer recognize the beauty of the
nude? The painter David used to say of his epoch, in which, however, the
mode of dress was less displeasing than it is to-day, "What misery to be
obliged to spend one's life in fashioning coats and shoes!" Rodin, like
David, and like Phidias, preferred the trade of the sculptor to that of
the tailor.
Such an uproar arose that he had to withdraw the model of his monument
and promise another. But everything comes with time, even the best: the
fortunes of politics brought to the ministry of fine arts an intelligent
and cultivated director, the dramatic critic Gustave Larroumet.
Delighted with Rodin's scheme, the magnificent symbolization of French
poetry, he confirmed the order for the audacious monument, no longer for
the Panthéon, but for the Luxembourg Gardens; and, not satisfied with
this reparation, charged the master with the additional execution of
another monument destined for the Panthéon. One can imagine the anger in
certain circles--two orders on the same subject to the same sculptor!
What an aberration! What madness! But the decision was made and well
made.
Rodin took six years to perfect his first "Victor Hugo"; the marble
was not exhibited until 1901. The vigor of the work and the sovereign
gesture by which the bard of contemplation seems to impose silence upon
the voice of nature in order that the voices struggling within himself,
in the depths of his genius, may be the better heard, the suppleness of
the material, of this Carrara marble, with its warm reflections, as if
melted under the pressure of a fiery hand, obstinately make one think of
Michelangelo; one has the disturbing sensation, not of an imitation, but
of a resurrection of the plastic power reincarnated out of nature, of a
new spring of sap from the same vein of genius.
The original plan allowed, in addition, for two allegorical figures,
"The Inner Voice" and "The Tragic Muse," which, placed beside the poet,
should breathe into him thought and inspiration. But, very beautiful
in themselves, they gave to the monument, once they were executed and
placed, an anecdotal quality that diminished its force; they weakened
the grandeur of the Olympian gesture and destroyed that feeling of
solitude inseparable from such a personality as that of the great man:
an island in the midst of the flood of the human multitude, genius
itself is aware of its own splendid isolation.
[Illustration: MONUMENT TO VICTOR HUGO.]
This is what I ventured to express one day to the master, not without
hesitation. Nothing equals the simplicity of Rodin face to face with
what he knows is sincere and animated by a true love of art. He
listened, gazed at his work, and, turning toward me, gave me a joyous
glance.
"You are right," he replied, with a spontaneity that put my sense of
responsibility on its mettle. "I sacrificed to the mania of the age,
which is to overload things. My modeling is there, the eloquence of the
gesture also. The rest would only spoil the essential things. It is a
stroke of genius. I am going to write to the under-secretary of state
that my monument is ready."
In lieu of the two figures that were to have accompanied the statue of
Victor Hugo, to indemnify the Government Rodin gave to the Musée du
Luxembourg a series of his most beautiful busts in bronze, including the
head of the poet.
As for the marble, it was in the garden of the Palais Royal that it
was finally erected; but this site is not of the happiest: a large
lawn separates the spectator from the monument; one sees it from the
wrong angle, and this destroys the equilibrium of its planes. Moreover,
in our damp climate marble quickly loses the charm of its purity and
transparency; streaks of brown already stain and deface that of the
"Victor Hugo." Let us hope that the organizers of the Musée Rodin
will find it possible to place it in one of the rooms of the future
museum, substituting for it a bronze upon which the inclemencies of the
atmosphere will serve to produce a beautiful patina.