This is the most famous and the least known of Rodin's works. Newspaper
controversies have made it famous throughout the whole world; but it
has, nevertheless, made only one brief appearance in public, in 1898, at
the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts. It marks at the same
time a vital stage in the career of the master and the most poignant
period of his life as a fighter. It is the point of equilibrium in
the perpetual balancing of the art of Rodin between the several great
traditions. It was the object of a famous quarrel, in which the glory
of the sculptor, momentarily all but eclipsed by ridicule, recovered
itself, nevertheless, and rose higher than ever.
What strikes one in this statue, at first sight, is its strange
block-like aspect, its monolithic simplicity. People say quite rightly
that it looks like a stone _lovée_, a druidic monument. Ever since "The
Burghers of Calais," one of the figures of which at least, that of
the man with the key, already suggests the idea of a monolith, Rodin
had been going further and further in his stubborn search for the
simplification of planes, and here he finally achieved his object. In
order to obtain it, he went back all the way to the primitive Gothic
and even to the archaic Greek, which likewise preserves in the general
outline of its statues the rigid aspect of those statues of wood that
had preceded it. In all these early epochs of art one finds the form of
the tree trunk in which their sculpture was cut. One of the examples of
this art that had most forcibly impressed Rodin was the statue of Hera
of Samothrace in the Louvre. The beauty of this figure, denuded of all
foreign artifice in the exact research for masses, the public little
comprehends; but the sculptor perceives its justness, the power of its
relief and its modeling, disconcerting in these primitive artists,
qualities that are concealed under the extreme simplicity of its
appearance. In this magnificent Hera it is as if one saw the rotundities
of woman coming to birth and undergoing in the tree, the vegetal column,
one of those metamorphoses familiar in the fables of paganism. The
"Balzac," with its athletic body, veiled in a spread robe that envelopes
it, does not it also resemble a powerful tree trunk from the summit of
which looks down, like a solitary, monstrous flower, the head of the
inspired writer?
This statue had been ordered by the Société des Gens de Lettres, and was
intended for one of the public squares of Paris. After Victor Hugo,
Balzac. After the giant of modern poetry, the giant of the novel. What
a redoutable honor, but also what a homage to the talent of the great
sculptor! What joy for artists in the association of these two names,
Balzac and Rodin! On the other hand, how many adversaries rejoiced in
the hope of seeing Rodin come to grief with this task, fraught not
less with peril than with glory! He did not conceal from himself that
the statue of Balzac would be a severe problem to solve. We possess
no authentic bust of the creator of the "Comédie Humaine," not even
a death-mask giving the exact measure of the cranial bones and hence
the actual planes. We know through his contemporaries that the author
was fat and short. Fat and short--that is far from facilitating the
composition of a work of decorative art. But, more precious than
mediocre portraits, there is a famous page about him by Lamartine,
another great genius. "Balzac," he says, "was the figure of an element
... stout, thick-set, square at the base and at the shoulders, ample,
much as Mirabeau was; but not heavy in any way; he had so much soul that
it carried _him_ lightly."
[Illustration: STATUE OF BALZAC.]
It was this essence that he set out to render. A frank artist takes
no liberties with reality. It alone gives him force; the "majesty of
the true" is alone durable. Nature, which dowered Balzac with one
of the most prodigious intellects known to us, dowered him at the
same time, to support this intellect, with the physical breadth of a
colossus. To have altered anything that went to make up the harmony of
the structure would have been to commit a grave error; it would have
been to denaturalize the divine work. On the other hand, above this
mass of flesh it was necessary to make that marvelous spirit hover,
that sparkling spirit, that myriad-faceted spirit of the greatest of
novelists.
Rodin knows by experience that nature repeats herself. Has not a
humorist said: "It is useless to make a bust of you; it exists already.
You have only to look for it in the museums"?
He set out to find a man who resembled Balzac, going all the way to
Touraine, the writer's native province, a hundred times depicted by
him in his books. The family of Balzac was originally from Languedoc,
but that made no difference; the intuition of a great artist is always
rewarded. Rodin found at Tours the model he desired; he was a young
countryman, a carter, who resembled his hero to an almost miraculous
degree. Of him he made a very animated bust, in which one sees the full
face, the nose, concave and large at the end, but voluptuous and full
of spirit, the rounded chin, the vast shoulders of the master of the
"Comédie Humaine." There was lacking, however, the flame of thought that
spiritualized and rendered buoyant this mass of human substance. Rodin
modified the expression, illuminating the physiognomy with delicacy and
frank gaiety. It is Balzac at twenty-five, a peasant Balzac, breathing
at every pore youth, self-confidence, and the love of life. Not yet
is it the man tormented by fate, the tragic visionary of the "Comédie
Humaine," the slave of his work who in twenty years wrote fifty novels,
staged a thousand characters, and gave life to an entire society. It is
not the man who has suffered, thought, meditated, with all the power
of one of the most extraordinary organisms known to us; it has not the
appearance of a phenomenon.
After this Rodin skilfully altered these features; he gave them the
scars of the interior effort, he made them soft and hollowed them, he
made them old and grave. In a few weeks he did the work that nature
had taken years to accomplish. He finished by creating that Titan's
mask which we know, that head as round as a bullet and, like a bullet,
terrible in its concentrated force. Later he augmented this; that is
to say, he doubled its proportions: and this head, almost frightening
in its expression, recalls the masks which the Greek tragedians wore
when they played in the open air. Finally he modeled the body of the
colossus, making it entirely nude, with arms crossed, braced against
the earth with the tension of the whole will, evoking the idea of some
prodigious birth. Then he draped this heavy body in the monk's robe
in which the writer used to envelope himself for work and the straight
folds of which enwrapped him like the sheath of a mummy, offering to the
sight nothing but the tumultuous head--the head ravaged by intelligence
and savage energy.
Rodin felt almost frightened by his own work.
He kept it a long time before turning it over to the cast-makers. He had
worked it out in his atelier, but it was destined for the open air. How
would it appear in broad daylight?
The gestation of this work was accompanied by a thousand miseries. The
committee of the Société des Gens de Lettres incessantly demanded the
"Balzac"; they were dumfounded before the extraordinary figure that was
shown to them, before this white phantom the conception of which was so
utterly the reverse of all current ideas. Not knowing what to say, they
insisted that it should be modified and urged haste upon Rodin, whose
extraordinary dexterity became slowness itself when it was a question
of putting the final touches upon a great work. The press began to
take note of the affair. He himself became troubled and nervous. With
what transports would he have left it, fled, gone away to rest and to
dream of something else for a few weeks! The time of the Salon was
approaching. Quite suddenly he made his decision, gave the clay to be
cast, and ordered an enlargement. The statue was brought back to him at
the Dépôt des Marbres, in the rue de l'Université; it was twice as large
as the original model. It was placed in the garden that stretched out
in front of the studio. He examined it as it rose against the depths of
the open sky and the bright spring light. It was as if he had never seen
it, and suddenly his mind was illuminated. The work was grand, simple,
strong; the essential modeling was there, and the details they had
exhorted him to add would only have diminished its unsurpassable unity.
Rodin had made up his mind. He sent his "Balzac" to the Salon.
Immediately there was war. The press, worked upon by the committee of
the Société des Gens de Lettres, was unfavorable in advance. On the day
of the opening of the Salon the word was passed around, and the official
art world _s'esclaffe_. There was a crowd at the foot of the lofty
image, near which Rodin took up his position, calm according to his
wont, and talked quietly with his friends. Some, a very few, told him
how they admired this work so proudly offered, so strange in its banal
surroundings.
The next day the press broke forth. What an uproar! Everything went off
at once: the heavy artillery of the great newspapers scolded solemnly,
the light artillery crackled in the political sheets, and the grape-shot
of the minor papers spat their rage, only too happy for so rich a prey
to cut to pieces. The Institute, as might have been foreseen, fanned the
conflagration. The public, excited, in turn broke loose, in the fury of
ignorance stirred up against knowledge.
[Illustration: THE HEAD OF BALZAC.]
It became a "case," an affair, the _affaire de Balzac_. The committee of
the Société des Gens de Lettres mobilized; by a vote of eleven to four
it declared that it "did not recognize the writer in the statue of M.
Rodin." The president of the same society, the poet Jean Aicard, refused
the chance of immortality which this stupidity was to confer upon his
colleagues and flung his resignation in their faces. A group of members
of the municipal council of Paris decreed that it would be ridiculous
to accord "this block" a place in one of the squares of the city. For
two months music-halls and café-concerts vented every evening the wit
of the gutter on the scandalous statue and its sculptor; peddlers sold
caricatures of it in plaster, Balzac being represented as a heap of snow
or as a seal. In short, such was the event that it required nothing
but the pen of Aristophanes to note down the harmonies of this chorus
of frogs. The health of Rodin suffered a reaction from his long effort
and from this battle. Then, too, there are hours when the strongest are
seized with nausea before the bad faith and the stupidity of people.
Nervous, his mind aching, a prey to insomnia, the master offered a
melancholy spectacle, that beautiful serenity of his destroyed and his
working strength put in jeopardy.
"For all that," says M. Léon Riotor, who tells the story with eloquence,
"Rodin had a wonderful awakening. All the young world of letters rose
up to declare its sympathy with the vanquished in this new skirmish. A
number of painters and sculptors joined in. And the protest that was
circulated came back covered with signatures."
No, Rodin was not vanquished. He retired for a moment from the mêlée
to recover and to meditate in peace, but without deviating by a single
step from his line of conduct. A collector offered to buy the "Balzac."
A group of intellectuals started a public subscription; funds flowed
in. Although he was not yet wealthy, Rodin courteously declined these
offers, and, declaring that "an artist, like a woman, has to guard his
honor," decided to withdraw his monument from the Salon and not have it
erected anywhere.
The epic statue was transported to Meudon, and placed in the garden of
the villa. In its loftiness it imposes itself against the sky, against
the hills, against the trees that surround it, with the quality of
nature herself. Like a gigantic pole it triumphs in the open air. It
is specially on clear nights that its disturbing authority strikes
the soul. The great phantom appears then formidable in the extreme
simplicity of its planes, which, as in strong architecture, distribute
over large spaces the masses of shadow and light. The American painter
Steichen has passed nights in this enchanted garden in order to take
of the "Balzac" photographs that are more beautiful than engravings.
Haughty, with a ferocious majesty in the moonlight, the master of
the "Comédie Humaine" brings his soul face to face with nature; he
listens to its silence, he sounds its mysteries, he questions it in
mute dialogue, the like of which has not been heard since the colloquy
of _Hamlet_ with the shade of his father. For it is of _Hamlet_, of
the most profound symbolization of the human spirit wrestling with the
unknown, that one dreams before this meditating Balzac, alone, under the
nocturnal light. This is what Rodin has known how to make out of that
short, thick-set man who was the author of the "Etudes Philosophiques";
this is how he has lighted the fires of the intelligence on the mask of
genius.
It is at the Musée Rodin that we shall rediscover this statue. Time
will have progressed, and ideas also. When they see it anew, how many
people will be astounded at having formerly scoffed at the work and
offended the master, struck dumb and secretly humiliated at having thus
contributed to the writing of the hundred thousandth chapter of that
endless book, the book of human stupidity.