We others, we moderns, are carried away by the restlessness of the epoch; we are superficial, we only regard things cursorily, and we have concluded from this sublime simplicity that Greek art is cold. To us indeed it seems very cold. It is really warm. To it alone belongs in this respect the quality of life, reality in forms, and precision in movement. It is through this that it attains perfect equilibrium. But that is beyond our little spirit of detail. We seek nothing but detail; the Greek, for his part, saw nothing but the whole; that is to say, the equilibrium, the harmony.
THE RICHNESS OF THE ANTIQUE LIES IN MODELING
The value of the antique springs from ronde-bosse. It possesses in a supreme degree the art of relief. How can the critics and the professors explain this, being what they are? They do not belong to the trade. Art should not be taught except by those who practise it.
Observe any fragments of Greek sculpture: a piece of an arm, a hand. What you call the idea, the subject, no longer exists here, but is not all this debris none the less admirably beautiful? In what does this beauty consist? Solely in the modeling. Observe it closely, touch it; do you not feel the precision of this modeling, firm yet elastic, in flux like life itself? It is full, it is like a fruit. All the eloquence of this sculpture comes from that.
What is modeling? The very principle of creation. It is the juxtaposition of the innumerable reliefs and depressions that constitute every fragment of matter, inert or animated. Modeling creates the essential texture, supple, living, embracing every plante. It fills, coördinates, and harmonizes them. It penetrates everything, it animates everything, as well the depths as the surfaces. It comprises the minute as well as the immense. Mountain, horse, flower, woman, insect equally owe to it their form. When God created the world, it is of modeling He must have thought first of all. If you consider a hand, you notice its contours and the character of the whole. But the eye of the artist, that eye, sees more: it sees the infinite assemblage of projections and depressions forming a texture more closely knit, more exactly blended than the most perfect mosaic. It is this that he seeks to render; this that he translates, if he is a sculptor, by the science of depression and relief, if he is a draughtsman or painter by that of light and shadow. For light serves, in conformity with depressions and reliefs, to give the eye the same sensation that the hand receives from touch: Titian is just as great a modeler as Donatello.
To-day the sense of ronde-bosse is completely lost, not only in Europe, but among the peoples of the Orient. It is the age of the flat. No one knows anything about it. Men love what they do themselves, until they are made to see that it is not beautiful; but it takes years and years for this to penetrate into their consciousness. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries China and Japan still produced charming works. In ancient times their art was very great; it approached the Greek. At the exposition of 1900, we were enabled to see antique Japanese statues, superb nudes nearly as fine as those of Greece. In our time the pest of flatness has contaminated the Asiatic races as well as the European: decadence is universal.
We are so far removed from antique beauty that when we photograph the works of the ancients we take them in the spirit of our own taste, which is that of low-relief; we take from them that flower of beautiful modeling, their richness, their crowning grace. When I say low-relief, I do not use this term exactly; it is only that I know no other means of expressing the modern evil of uniformity; but I know that good low-relief is as full and as fruit-like as sculpture in the round, that it is sculpture in the round itself, as in the friezes of the Parthenon, as in our buildings of the Renaissance and of the seventeenth century.
The great concern of my life is the struggle I have maintained to escape from the general flatness. All the success of my sculpture comes from that. Although it has little enough taste, the public, despite all, is tired to death of this flatness. The charm of ronde-bosse is so great that it captivates the ignorant even without their knowing it.
RONDE-BOSSE AND CHIAROSCURO
Observe this little torso of a woman; it is a little Venus. It is broken; it has no longer a head, arms, legs, yet I never weary of contemplating it; each day, each hour for me adds to this masterpiece because I only understand it better. What could it say to our indifferent glance? For me it has the ineffable voluptuousness of softly maturing flesh. The effect lies in no part and in every part. It is perfection. This little childish body, has it not all the charm of woman? It does not catch the light, the light catches it, glancing over it lightly; without any effect of roughness, any dark shadow. Here shadow can no longer be called shadow but only the decline of light. She does not become dark, she grows pale in imperceptible depressions, in delicious undulations. She is indivisible; she is whole or incomplete, but her unity is not disturbed. And this passage that joins the abdomen to the thighs, this little declivity of graces, this valley of love! Everything is full of the calm, the lightness, the serenity of pure beauty in the perfect confidence of nature. The ideal that you imagine you find in a gesture, in a momentary attitude, is here; it is here because of the infinite love of the flesh, of the human fruit. What you call the ideal is nothing but the perfume of beautiful modeling. What more could you ask?
When I look at this marble in the evening by candle-light, how the wonder deepens! If those who have been telling us for a hundred years that Greek art is cold studied it with care, could they for one hour maintain this absurdity? This sculpture, on the contrary, is of an extraordinary living complexity, which the flame reveals; the whole surface is nothing but depressions and reliefs, but united, melted together in the great, harmonious force of the ensemble. I turn the little torso about under the caressing rays of the light. There is not a fault, not a weakness, not a dead spot; it is the very continuity of life, its intoxicating voluptuousness hidden in the bosom of the molecule.
Why should such artists have sought to create an abstract Beauty by the idealization of forms? These men of genius loved Nature too well to presume to correct her. They knew well that despite their genius, they still remained beneath her. Nothing can surpass the marvel of creation. The conception of an idealistic art comes from the Academy. Before the purity of the antique forms people used to believe that the beauty lay solely in the exterior profiles. It is really beautiful because of the interior modeling. And still we make this distinction between the profiles and the modeling, thanks to our mania for dividing things; but we know that the one is inseparable from the other; the surfaces are nothing but the extremities of volumes, the boundaries of the mass.
All the sculpture of the period of Louis-Philippe was imitated from the antique, but only by means of the exterior profiles. If it had been practised by true modelers, by geometrical minds, it would have been as beautiful as its original. What pleased people in that epoch, what pleases people in ours, is not at all the antique; it is the fashion in which we see it. It was the Renaissance that really understood the Greek. It created works exactly the same in feeling, though somewhat different in arrangement and general color. For color does not exist in painting alone. Its rôle is equally great in sculpture. To-day this color is bad; it fails to obtain the chiaroscuro which derives from ronde-bosse. Good sculpture owes to chiaroscuro clarity, unity, charm, even, I might say, the voluptuousness of breathing flesh. Shadow, at once luminous and mysterious, models the fulness of the body in the exuberance of health; it makes one understand abundance, solidity. In the art of the Renaissance and the eighteenth century shadow is always supple and warm as in Greek art; it has the tender coloring of the vegetation of our country, the sweetness of which our great artists have captured. The chiaroscuro of the antique consists of the density and depth of light falling over the entire modeling. Chiaroscuro penetrates to every plane and renders the reality of them; it is reality itself. This is because the antique and nature are part and parcel of the same mystery, the infinitely harmonious mystery of force in suspense. The great artists compose as nature itself operates.
Undoubtedly the Greeks possessed certain methods which they handed down from master to pupil, as has been the case in all artistic epochs. They had celebrated ateliers, schools, where they taught their principles. By the fifth century they had established a canon of the human body; but they never made use of it without consulting the model. As for us, we have imagined that we could use it like a magic formula. It is not the formula that makes the art; it is the experience of the artist that creates the formula. If we abandon nature for a rule, if we do not constantly vivify the one by means of the other, we soon speak a language that means nothing.
One cannot repeat this enough: the ancients are realists; they work in ronde-bosse. This explanation seems commonplace and even vulgar; it is the whole truth. It can be understood by the humblest artisan, provided only that he knows his trade. But it is as difficult to get it into the heads of people to-day as it is to restore faith in a man who has lost it.
ROME AND ROMAN ART
What I have said of Greek art applies equally well to Roman. Another opinion has been adopted by critics and the world in general: the Roman is less beautiful than the Greek. It is less beautiful perhaps, by a certain shade, a shade which those who speak of it are incapable of appreciating. It is a little less substantial, but it is superb. It is Greek, with a different character, a certain ruggedness, and more! The Maison Carrée at Nîmes, that little temple, the flower of austerity, the smile of the race as sweet as the smile of Greece; the Pont du Gard, that heroic masterpiece, that giant which bestrides the country, which imposes the power of Rome on the peaceful landscape, these are what they criticize!
Rome is magnificent. We say it, but we do not believe it; otherwise it would not be despoiled. No, in Rome itself, they have no idea of the beauty of Rome. Where are there artists great enough to appreciate you, severe genius, splendid city, daughter of the she-wolf? Your genius they pillage every day. They destroy its proportion, and that is to strike at the foundation of the master work. Proportion is the law of architecture. ... In the very midst of the ancient city they are setting up atrocious monuments, enormous or too petty.
In Rome, as in Athens, as in the France of Gothic art, the architect of old planned the monument in relation to the landscape; he harmonized it with the outline of the mountains, with the expanse of the surrounding country-side; he determined its proportions according to its environment.
The architect of to-day plans out his monument in his own study on a piece of paper and produces it ready-made. Whether this mass of stone obliterates the buildings that surround it or whether, on the other hand, it turns out a miserable little contrivance in the midst of great works of the past matters little to him: he does not see it.
The French Academy sends students to work in Rome. But they get nothing from Rome, they can get nothing; they come there with a spirit entirely opposed to it. At a time when I did not know the city I heard the bridge of Sant' Angelo spoken ill of and fun made of the contorted angels; but they are all very well in their place; they are needed there; there is enough repose elsewhere. Bernini, so often sneered at, is as beautiful as Michelangelo, although he is not so fine. It is he who made the Rome of the seventeenth century. They do not know that the Appian Way is sublime. It will disappear one of these days. These things are awaiting their condemnation. They are constructing quays like ours. If they do not put a stop to it, Rome will be destroyed. Those who have not seen cities such as this was in the nineteenth century will not understand anything. I have said as much to my Italian friends, who appeared greatly astonished; for nobody makes these reflections which come to me constantly in my studies. They consider me a gloomy fellow, a misanthrope. Gloomy, yes; for it is painful to live in a decadent epoch; but I have no parti-pris; I only wish to try to arrest the general massacre. In France, as everywhere, we commit exactly the same faults. We destroy our monuments by surrounding them with great open spaces; we have ruined the effect of Notre Dame, on the side of the parvis. At Brussels, in the Musée du Cinquantenaire, they have set up a model of the Parthenon; but they have placed it in the midst of enormous objects that annihilate it. We have come to that! We have killed the Parthenon! Barbarism could go no further. We live in a barbarous age. There is no doubt about that! People cry out that we must create schools for people to learn art; we bungle the most beautiful of all schools—the Museum.
FOR AMERICA
These things ought to be said again and again to the point of satiety, if we wish to save any remnants. Coming from me, whose opinions carry some weight, they are repeated when I am no longer on the spot. People feel the justice of them, the shaft goes home. A few who are more ardent than the rest propagate them and stir up a current of opinion that may lead to reform. There is no reason therefore to fear repeating them in America, where also people have fallen into the general error. American artists have followed our teaching, altogether in a bad sense. Notwithstanding that in taking their point of departure they could have escaped into the good epochs of art, they have saddled themselves with the poverty of modern taste.
Let them return to the school of the past; above all, let them return to nature; it is as beautiful with them as elsewhere. The mountains, the trees, the vegetation, the men and women of their own country—these should be their masters in architecture and sculpture. America is full of will. It desires to be a great nation. It stops at no expense in order to obtain instruction; it creates immense universities, libraries, museums. It pours into them streams of money. The favor with which my work has been received there is the sign of a movement toward truth in art; they are developing an affection for this naturalistic school which borrows from life its charm and its variety. But all this will be as nothing unless America creates work of its own; unless it breaks with the old errors of the nations of Europe in order to find the path of true science.
VII
THE GOTHIC GENIUS
To THE RENAISSANCE AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
NOTRE-DAME
NOTRE DAME—Notre Dame de Paris—more splendid than ever in the half-light of this winter day. The veils of the atmosphere redress the evils that modern restorations have done to this monument; the folds of the mist soften the sharpness of the retouched outlines: the elements are more respectful to this masterpiece than are men.
I come upon it at the turn of the bridge. At once I drop out of this industrial epoch of ours, so poor despite its love of money; my sculptor's soul escapes from its exile.
The Gothic sphinx rises before me. The strength of its beauty overwhelms me. I struggle against it and I am broken by it. Then it attracts me anew with its sweetness; it exalts me. My spirit makes the ascent of this sculptured mountain. What power in these motionless stones to create the sense of movement in the mind! What makes this possible? The mason of genius; the science of oppositions. That whole effect of power—he has put it in the thickness of the foundations, the enormous walls, the buttresses. They are as formidable as the tiers of a dike, as a breakwater planted in the sea. One would say that this church was built to combat the forces of nature: the temple of peace and love has the air of a fortress.
One's spirit is weighed down by the bareness of the stone, but stirred by the height of the structure and the towers; it soars toward them as toward a world that reassures it; the hard material has become humanized; the genius of man is at play there amid the lacework of stone. He has placed there angels, saints, animals, fruits, flowers, all the gifts of the seasons; it is life in its entirety such as the Creator in His infinite munificence has bestowed upon him. The Gothic artist knows that paradise is on earth; he has no need to invent another. The childish and monotonous heaven presented to us in our legends is nothing but a poor copy of the marvels of our life.
Let us enter. I tremble. The beauty is terrible. I am plunged into night, a living night in which I do not know what mysteries are being enacted—the cruel mysteries of the ancient religions? There are shimmering rays from the long windows, the rose windows. Hope enters my heart: there is light here, then? I am no longer alone.
My eyes grow accustomed to this populous obscurity. There is a world about me, a world of columns. It seems terrible, it is terrible because of its power, but this power has its raison d'être. It seems frightening to me but it is only necessary. It is distributed power; therefore it is beneficent. It holds the vault in the air, the prodigious weight of stone that it maintains aloft, above my head, as lightly as the canvas of a tent. Marvel of equilibrium, calculation of the intelligence, how is it possible not to adore you? It is you that one comes here to worship under the name of God.
The darkness grows lighter; it becomes chiaroscuro. We are in a picture by Rembrandt, that great Gothic of the sixteenth century. The forest of pillars divides the nave into spaces of shadow and light. It is the order of nature which knows nothing of disorder. This I rediscover with joy: the eye does not love chaos.
I familiarize myself with the people of the columns. I recognize them: they are Romans. It is the Roman, the Romance, hardly altered, that comes to receive the Gothic arch. The immense nave which I thought a forest full of hidden dangers I see, I understand, I read like a sacred book. The mystery is not that of cruelty; it is only that of beauty. It grows lighter gradually in order to allow the spirit to approach slowly the joy of a perfect interior. This solemnity of the nave, this immense void, is like the bed of a great river; the columns range themselves respectfully on each side in order to give free passage to the flood of human piety. It flows like a majestic river; it bears onward toward the tabernacle, about which it spreads itself like a lake of love under the rays of the thought of God. Amid the stones the architect has known how to play the part of the apostle: he has created faith. Art and religion are the same thing; they are love.
SAINT-EUSTACHE
It is the interior of this church that should be admired. Here I do not experience the same commotion of the spirit as in Notre Dame. I am bathed in the fine light of the sixteenth century. At Notre Dame it was the shadow of Rembrandt; here, it is the clear tonality of French painting, of a Clouët. Admirable is the élan of this Renaissance nave; it is as bold as, and even perhaps bolder than that of the Gothic buildings. It proceeds on the same plan. The skyward lift is only to be found in the Gothic; it is of the very spirit of the race. Are the vaults round and no longer pointed? What does it matter if they are equally elegant, if they have the same aërial grace as the ogive?
What I rediscover in Saint-Eustache, less austere than its grand sister of the Middle Age, but with a sweetness which is itself noble, is the determination of the architect to subordinate everything to the effect of simplicity, to the total effect. On each side of the nave the columns cutting the side wall are disposed fanwise in order to hide the light of the lateral windows. One sees nothing but the stone, and yet there is no effect of heaviness; one could not make anything lighter. This is because the color of the stone is admirably varied by the diversity of the flutings that line the columns. The main fluting marks the outline, and the others, less emphatic, shading off, give it a velvet-like quality. The light throws a golden haze between the great columns, among the deep gorges, and is, on the other hand, channeled, streaked by the little nerves that impel it upward toward the vaults. By this effect of lightness the building seems to rise; it is an assumption. It is no longer the forest of trees that one finds here, but the forest of creepers. These vertiginous columns are like fine, delicate vines. Above the altar the great lights of the windows, with their beautiful glass, harmonize well with the general color. The light, at once abundant and restrained, has the coolness which the Renaissance recaptured from Greece. This church welcomes one as with an immense smile; it has the sweetness of Christ holding out his hands: "Suffer the little children to come unto me." Intelligence has planned it, but it is the heart that has modeled it.
If we enter Saint-Eustache at nightfall, we could almost believe ourselves in a Gothic building. The Renaissance did not bring about such profound transformations in architecture as people think. There is a heavy Italian Renaissance element that is altogether alien to us; but in the true French Renaissance the Celtic taste was not betrayed: it was modified with a certain grace and elegance. Grace is an aspect of strength. A nation no more escapes from its racial quality than a man from his temperament. The Celtic mingled with the Roman produced the Romance, out of which the Gothic sprang directly—the Romance, that is to say, the Roman which has passed through the spirit of the Franks. It has the severity, the Roman qualities, united with the imagination of the Barbarians, since we have agreed so to call them. The Romance of the second epoch has already sprung forth; it rises during the eleventh and twelfth centuries and goes to make the Gothic. The Gothic elevates and magnifies the Romance. It detaches the buttresses, even to the point of separating them from the walls, in order to carry them further out to sustain the height of the nave.
As for the Renaissance, it continues the Gothic. We could not have a more striking example of this than just here in Saint-Eustache. Here are the same lines, the same idea, with a different ornamentation. It is the same body, clothed in a new way. It is another age of the Gothic; sweeter, less powerful, the final florescence of the French genius, which, despite the adorable eighteenth century, follows a descending path down to the first restoration. Contrary to what has been thought and taught for so long, the Renaissance already marks a stage of decadence. The most beautiful epoch in architecture and sculpture is the Middle Age, an age as beautiful as, perhaps more beautiful than, the great age of Greece, and almost universally despised by our nineteenth century, the century of criticism and pretension, the century of ignorance. Yes, with the Renaissance things begin to give way. And yet to say that is almost a sacrilege! It is as if one struck one's father! Our ravishing Gothic of the sixteenth century has charmed France with its masterpieces; it has made artists cherish a whole country, the sweet country of the Loire. Despite its misalliance with the Italian Renaissance, it stood firm, it did not bend; it remained the grand French style. Witness the Louvre with its high pavilions; that sprang, that too, from the Gothic vein; the sculptors of the Renaissance decorated it less severely, but the general aspect remains the same.
The Gothic under different names has been the main path of our genius during five hundred years. It has been the blessing of France; it was its active principle down to 1820. If we wish to return to art it will only be through comparative study—the comparison with nature of our national style. The beautiful lines are eternal. Why are they used so little?
CONCERNING COLOR IN SCULPTURE
The true difference between the Gothic and the Renaissance does not lie in the structure of the building but in the quality of the sculpture and in its color.
What is meant by color in sculpture and in architecture? It is the law of light and shade, the great law of oppositions which constitutes the charm of nature, the beauty of a landscape at dawn, its splendor at sunset. The color springs from the quality of the modeling; it is the relief which gives the light tones and, by contrast, the dark, in the parts that do not stand out. The ensemble of the intermediary diminutions of light and shade produces the general coloring, whose nuances can be infinitely varied according to the skill of the artist. Modeling is the only way in which to express life; and there is only one thing that counts in sculpture and in architecture—the expression of life. A beautiful statue, a well-made monument, live like living beings; they seem different according to the day and the hour. How beautiful it is to give to stone, through nothing but the values of planes, through the handling of shadow and light, the same charm of color as that of living nature, of the flesh of a woman. In the plastic arts, the color betrays the quality of the planes as a beautiful complexion reveals health in a human being.
The antique has shorter planes than the Gothic; it lacks therefore those deep shadows that give to the Gothic such a tormented and tragic aspect. The Greek balances the framework of the human body on four planes, the Gothic on two only. The latter produces a stronger effect, a more hollowed effect, that effet de console which is essentially Gothic. Nevertheless, the shadow that results from it is more sustained than in the antique and nothing could be softer or more full of nuances.
The Roman presents an abundance of dark shadows which, in turn, create an effect of heaviness and density. The Greek puts in just enough of them to quicken the general coloring. The Roman gives a flatter effect, which shows nevertheless a magnificent vigor. As for us, we copy these styles endlessly without understanding them, for if we did understand them we should do quite otherwise. We abuse the black, the powerful lines, we put them everywhere; we do not know how to shade light. That is why our sculpture is so poor, why our monuments appear so hard, so dry. The Bourse, the Corps Législatif, might be made of iron with their columns set against a uniform background which prevents the light and air from circulating about them and enveloping them and destroys the atmosphere. This is what people call a simple style. It is not simple, it is cold. The simple is the perfect, coldness is impotence.
The Renaissance recaptured the antique measure and imposed its generous color upon the Gothic plane. It used less shadow than our sculptors of the Middle Ages; it diminished the reliefs. The effect in consequence was lighter. This was because the Renaissance was enchanted by all the Greek statues that were discovered at this period; and in its enthusiasm it recreated Greek art, not by copying it, but by copying nature according to antique principles. It is perhaps a little less beautiful but it has quite the same feeling of gentle strength, of delicacy. One feels the joy of the artist who throws himself against the problem of the nude in the open air. Till then statues had been draped, but under the draperies was concealed a carefully studied nude. In the Renaissance the drapery was dropped: the nymphs of Jean Goujon, of Germain Pilon—I recognize them; these long bodies of women, these undulating bodies, are Gothic statues unclothed and set in another light. Our whole sixteenth century is a song of grace rising from the Gothic heart to the art of the Parthenon.
But nowhere than in the country of the Loire is there Renaissance art more gentle and amply luminous. This is the Greek part of France. The tranquil river touched the heart of our architects and bestowed on them some of its calm and smiling majesty. From it, from the air impregnated with its vapors, came those châteaux so happy in their beauty and those lovable cottages; for the artist worked as beautifully for peasants as for kings. Before Ussé, before Chenonceaux, Blois, Azay-le-Rideau, I am not in the presence of dead things but of a living spirit, the spirit of divine beauty that animated equally the antique and the Gothic. Charming sixteenth century France, it is you who have forced me to the study of chiaroscuro. Formerly I tried my best to understand your motives, your thousand nerves, but the general law escaped me. I did not see your soul, which consists entirely in the voluptuous shadings of light; I did not perceive your principle, the modeling which impressed movement upon everything and gave the movement life.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The eighteenth century is the exaggeration of the sixteenth. Our elegant houses, our houses in the style of Louis XV and Louis XVI have always the Gothic line with its proud, graceful air. Without moldings, without ornaments, their beauty lies in their very lack of ornaments, in their nudity. But what proportions they have! The finest of the fine!
The eighteenth century is considered too frail, too affected. It is, on the contrary, full of life and strength. It possesses admirable sculptors: Pigalle, creator of that immortal masterpiece, the tomb of Marshal Saxe; Houdon, whose busts to-day are bought for their weight in gold without even then bringing their proper price. There were thousands then, the whole rank and file of the trade, who created marvels, with a sureness of hand accustomed to every difficulty. The outline of a table, of a chest, was as much considered as that of a statue. For that matter, what difference did the dimensions of a work make? It was the modeling that counted. The peasant himself sat down in a well-made chair. Artists and artisans had a taste, an alert grace, and a dexterity sufficient to fit out the whole world; but their dexterity was based on a foundation of intelligence as an ornament is based upon a building. The dexterity we possess nowadays is nothing but mockery, a kind of banter that touches everything without discernment; it kills force.
The Louis XV and Louis XVI styles possessed grandeur. We call it the art of the boudoir, but the boudoir of that period had a nobility like that of those white and gold salons where the seats are disposed with dignity like persons of quality. The music had the same character; the dances also, the dances, those charming scenes in which men and women with the natural spirit of play threw themselves into the cadence, translating it with the eloquence of youth. The dance—that was architecture brought to life.
The eighteenth century was a century which designed; in this lay its genius. Nowadays people are searching for a new style and do not find it. Style comes unawares through the concurrence of many elements; but can we achieve it without design? To-day we design no longer and our art, which is altogether industrial, is bad. The central matter in art is the nude, and this we no longer understand. How can we be expected to have art when we do not understand its central principle? The minor arts are the rays that go out from the center. When I draw the body of a woman I rediscover the form of the beautiful Greek vases. Through design alone we arrive at a knowledge of the shading of forms. The forms that delight us in the art of past centuries are nothing but those presented by living nature, those of human beings, animals, verdure, interpreted by men of supreme taste. The art that people are struggling to discover to-day might be deduced from my sculpture and my drawings, for I have always drawn with passion. The quality of my drawing I owe in large measure to the eighteenth century. I am nothing but a link in the great chain of artists, but I maintain the connection with those of the past. At the Petite Ecole they made us copy the red chalks of Boucher and the models of flowers, animals, and ornaments. They were Louis XVI models, very well executed; they certainly gave me a little of the warmth of the artists of that period. In my youth I made drawings by the hundreds, by the thousands. At the Petite Ecole we were badly placed, badly lighted by poor candles; when we touched them we made them sticky with the clay with which our fingers were covered so that they were worse than ever afterwards. It did not matter; we were working according to the right principles.
To-day the Petite Ecole is entirely in the power of the larger school, that of the Beaux-Arts. Far from learning one gets spoiled there for the rest of one's life. One copies the antique, but one copies it badly.
I am speaking with the experience of a genuine artistic life. There was a time when I never talked; to-day I hold forth! If I am understood it will not have been in vain. But how much effort it will take to reestablish truths which are so self-evident, so obvious, so fundamental that one is ashamed to repeat them so many times! Nevertheless they are essential. The public is a thousand miles away from them, the public, by which I mean the general taste. If it does not become enlightened, art will disappear. Observe its attitude before the works of the new school, before the pictures of those who call themselves cubists: sarcasm, anger. These artists show us squares, cubes, geometrical figures colored according to their own ideas. They name them: Portrait of Mme. X. or Landscape. This exasperates the public. What does it matter? Is it good? That is the whole point. Is the ornament well treated? That is the capital question, the only one that is not discussed. Their canvases are combinations of color recalling mosaic or even stained glass. We have accepted many other things; we have accepted the green or rather the violet women of our later salons, and women with wooden heads, but we do not wish to admit the squares of the cubists. Why? They are not portraits, we say. They are not landscapes. So much the better! They are something else. What does it matter if the artist has deceived himself knowingly or wilfully on a matter so insignificant as the subject? It is ornamental, that is enough. They are curious, these quarrels that break out, these sects that are created for reasons like this—for a sock put on inside out! Ignorance inflames the passions. There are struggles whose aim is great; others that appear useless have their use perhaps.
It may be that this slackening of taste and knowledge is necessary. Perhaps it is a period of transition, a fallow period required by the intelligence like that required by a soil that has been productive for too long. If ignorance is prolonged it will mean that the history of France is ended; it will mean the annihilation of the Celtic genius which has fertilized Europe for two thousand years. We shall become like Asia. Roman art declined for four or five centuries after Augustus. With us the decadence has only been going on for a hundred years. During the present war marvels have been destroyed. Formerly, even during the religious wars, the monuments were spared; it is for this reason that France is still so rich. When stone is no longer respected, it means decadence. The cannon turn up the earth like a plow, leveling everything. This war appears therefore like an explosion of barbarism; at bottom it indicates a latent state of soul which has been shaping itself since the beginning of the nineteenth century. During this period the world has ceased to obey the law of beauty and love; it has lived for nothing but business. What is the leading idea that has precipitated the nations against one another? Trade: the desire, the longing to make more money than one's neighbor. Trade is the anxious care of people who think of nothing but their own petty welfare; it is not the basis on which is founded the grandeur of peoples. It alone regulates at present the relations between things. The war is nothing but the consequence of such habits and their natural conclusion.
Do you ask me what will spring out of the conflict? I am not a prophet. I know only that without religion, without art, without the love of nature—these three words are for me synonymous—men will die of ennui. But nothing easily resigns itself to death. An outburst of courage has just transfigured the world. Can we preserve this courage during peace? The patience of the soldier, the patience of the trenches surpasses in sublimity the virtue of the ancients. Will it produce a rebirth of intelligence? Shall we have, in study, the force of soul that we have had in the great struggle? That is the question. Of course the stupid, the ignorant will not suffer any transformation through the war; but men of character will be reinvigorated by the hardships of the military life; we have recaptured patience and we have yet to learn what we can expect from this virtue. Genius is as much character as talent. If we have men of force in this country where taste is a natural gift, it seems to me impossible that this force will not quicken the gift and develop it and that we shall not have once more an era of beauty.
AUGUSTE RODIN.
THE WORK OF RODIN
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.