The Project Gutenberg eBook of Auguste Rodin, by Camille Mauclair.

In this manner was that admirable bust completed, which (with the two etchings here reproduced) was the only material of which Rodin could make use for the Hugo with the bowed head of his future monument, the commission for which was given him by the Government after the death of the national poet in 1883, and which is on the eve of completion.

The next year (1886) Rodin exhibited the scheme of the monument itself, which has since undergone several variations, but of which the central theme is always as follows: Hugo, naked and half-draped, like a god, is seated on a rock at the edge of the sea. With his outstretched left arm he makes a silencing gesture towards the sea and the Nereids, and thus begs them to let him listen to the Muse of his Inner Voice, who rises, pensively, behind him, and to the Muse of Anger, who, crouched on a rock above his head, seems ready to fly up into the sky. This Muse may also be interpreted as an Ins, the messenger of the voices of the elements, and the Muse of the Inner Voice is also called Meditation. She is of the greatest beauty; hers is one of the figures in which, before the Balzac, Rodin indicates his new method of amplifying the relief and systematically altering the proportions, in order—according to an idea which I shall analyse in detail in the next chapter—to secure a decorative effect. Nothing can be more expressive and more supernatural than the harmonious sadness of this great drooping shape; it is really a soul incarnated in a movement of modesty and secret contemplation that disturbs and moves us as we gaze. The Hugo himself is truly Olympian in the majesty of his gesture, the vastness of his heroic nudity, and the magic of the shadow that bathes his face bowed partly down over his breast; and the monument as a whole is of magnificent decorative unity. There are to be two monuments to Victor Hugo, one for the Pantheon, the other for the Luxembourg Gardens, and they are to have slight variations, not in the attitude of Hugo himself, but in the significance and style of the adjacent figures. These two monuments, however, have not been accepted without great difficulties caused by the very nature of Rodin's conception; and the fact that they are accepted has not prevented the Place Victor Hugo from being disfigured by a hideous and gigantic monument, the work of Barrias, which fills the place of those that Rodin had not completed. Rodin's slowness, which arises from the scrupulous circumspection of his mind—never satisfied with itself—and from his habit of working simultaneously at several subjects, has always contributed towards driving away official commissions from him; while the jealousy of his fellows and the exceptional character of his work have further helped to bring about strained relations between him and the official circle. Rodin does not care about pleasing or about being understood by everybody, and he has no idea of concessions. Thus almost all his important works have given rise to incidents likely to disturb his peace and hinder his work.

Together with the sketch of the Hugo monument, a bust of Henry Becque, and a curious etching made from it, Rodin exhibited in 1886 the first drawings belonging to The Gate of Hell, or at least to the work which people have agreed to call by that title. I have already related the origin of that Government commission. In the beginning Rodin had been asked to make a door in high-relief, intended for the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. But the sculptor's imagination, beset by ideas of Dante, soon deviated from the original scheme. The door really exists in the studio of the Rue de l'Université, under the aspect of a vast rough model in plaster and beams, in the very simple shape of a two-leaved door 19 ½ feet high, with a frieze, a tympanum, and two lateral capitals. It was, at first, to have been surmounted by the two figures of Adam and Eve, but Rodin gave them up. He now seems determined to place the Shades, here reproduced, in the highest plane.[2] On the uppermost beam The Thinker is to be seated. In the panels of the door and upon the wide uprights are enshrined figures—to the number of over a hundred—detached in high-relief, exactly as upon the gates of the Baptistery in Florence, which Rodin has, quite simply, taken as his model. These figures were, at first, direct interpretations from Dante, in particular Paolo and Francesca da Rimini and divers inhabitants of the Inferno. Then Rodin intermingled figures due solely to his inspirations from Baudelaire and to his own sharp perception of tragic perversity. He enlarged Dante's conception as he modernised it, and has ended by making this door into what he smilingly calls "my Noah's Ark." That means that he is continually putting in little figures which replace others; there, plastered into the niches left by unfinished figures, he places everything that he improvises, everything that seems to him to correspond in character and subject with that vast confusion of human passions. The size of these figures is greatly restricted; the largest scarcely exceed thirty-nine inches in height. The dimensions of the final rendering, however, still remain to be fixed. The splendid figure called The Thinker is carried out in bronze larger than life, and Rodin is credited with an intention of bringing up all the other figures to the same dimensions, which would represent an unheard-of outlay and a gate nearly a hundred feet high—a Cyclopean work indeed! The Thinker, who has been so called on account of the likeness between his attitude and that of Michael Angelo's Pensieroso, is much more truly an image, with his stunted body and a primitive man's face, of the cave-dweller, the prognathous savage beholding the crimes and passions of his progeny unroll themselves below him. Immediately beneath him may be seen the most celebrated characters of the Dante cycle, notably the lovers of Rimini entwined and falling into hell.[3] Then as we descend towards the ground the figures become more independent of the subject, more personally invented by the artist, and at the foot we find "women damned," such as Baudelaire conceived, amid characters from heathen mythology.

He was shortly to exhibit a work which was still more significant of the thoughts with which he was busy. For, though I have spoken at once of that famous Gate, which is the leit-motiv of Rodin's art, it must be remembered that in 1886 nothing was known of it but drawings. Only by degrees have groups and fragments of it been seen, and the work itself has never left the studio in the Rue de l'Université. It was The Burghers of Calais which revealed most clearly to the public Rodin's capabilities in the way of style and of composing a whole work, and I will speak of the Burghers in this chapter, although the work was not completed until 1892 and was not set up in Calais until 1895.

In 1889 Rodin and Claude Monet together held, in the George Petit gallery, an exhibition which has remained famous and which united our two greatest artists. Rodin sent to it the Women Damned, the Beheaded St. John, some Fauns and Bacchantes, Bastien-Lepage, in all some thirty works, among which was The Burghers of Calais, shown complete for the first time. The sensation produced was immense. Rodin now tasted unmistakable fame, and his reputation spread all over the world. This fame, however, did not disarm the official circle, and not until the last three or four years have the critics been unanimous in their praise of the great French sculptor, whose every important work has given occasion to a battle, because its beauty arose from principles opposed to the whole system taught in the schools.

The five following years were marked by various works which did not, however, interfere with the threefold parallel continuation of the Victor Hugo, The Burghers of Calais, and The Gate of Hell, which were exhibited in various states in the Salon. Rodin considers it his duty, indeed, to submit to the public the phases of his work, rough attempts, clay, marbles, or bronzes, before the final completion; and understanding very well that his style is, or seems to be difficult, he thus explains himself to the public in the exhibitions, and allows people to follow the stages through which his thought passes. In addition to these works may be noted, for the year 1890, the bust of a young woman, in silver, Brother and Sister, bronze, and the Torso of St. John the Baptist. In 1891, The Caryatid, a marble figure of a young woman with a stone upon her shoulder, the group of The Young Mother (first bronze and then marble), and A Nymph. In 1892, the busts of Rochefort and of Puvis de Chavannes, which, with those of Dalou, Jean Paul Laurens, Hugo, and Falguière, form an incomparable series from Rodin's hand of portraits that surpass all modern French sculpture, and are admirable alike in execution and expression. The Puvis de Chavannes is perhaps the finest; it is a work that does not pall even beside Donatello himself. In 1892 the Burghers and the Claude Lorraine were completed. The Burghers waited three years for their setting up, but the monument to Lorraine was inaugurated immediately, thanks to the devoted efforts of that great art-worker in glass, Émile Gallé, and of Roger Marx, who by his writings and his incessant activity has had a most noble effect upon modern French art. These two eminent men, both natives of Nancy, enforced the acceptance of the work. The monument consists of a statue of Lorraine, standing, palette in hand, his head raised eagerly towards the east, and of a pedestal from which Apollo and his rearing horses stand out in splendid high-relief. Thus did Rodin seek to pay homage to the master-painter who adored movement in light, by acclaiming both these in his turn. Fault has been found with the importance of the pedestal in comparison with the statue, the objectors failing to understand that this allegory of Apollo incarnated the very soul of the great artist whose effigy towered over the whole work, and that this whole could not be dissevered. The idea animating this composition was criticised by the authorities. Here, once more, Rodin with his symbolic vision, his tendency to bold simplifications of the general, synthetic idea, was found disturbing. He was asked for the sculptured portrait of a man, and he preferred to give prominence to a symbol that expressed the dream and the essential genius of that man, the sun-painter—an idea which was logical, but which ran counter to the received prejudice as to portrait statues. The propagandist persistence of Gallé and Roger Marx, however, convinced the people of Nancy, who are now very proud of their monument. The horses and the Apollo are the most living, palpitating, and lyrical things that Rodin has produced.

The monument is one in which Rodin has deliberately departed from all the rules of official art. These require that the effect should be pursued primarily by a compact grouping, the same thought being translated by the same gesture from all the persons. Rodin, on the contrary, desired to leave their full individuality to his six burghers going in their shirts and with halters on their necks to surrender themselves to King Edward, and he has isolated them on their one base. These six men are walking, one behind the other, two by two, half naked and miserable, with their emaciated faces—men besieged, sacrificed. One devotion unites them in the name of their town's salvation, but their characters and their thoughts remain distinct, and in each may be read a different drama of the conscience. They have not the factitious enthusiasm and the declamatory gesture with which an ordinary sculptor would have thought well to furnish them; they are simply citizens who have resolved to fulfil a fatal duty, and are going to perform it without cowardice, but nevertheless were, yesterday, trades-people and family-men with no pretensions to the heroic. They bear with them their regrets, their inner heartbreak, and are not thinking of striking an attitude in the eyes of history. They are the unknown, obscure heroes of a fatality such as often arose in their rough times; and of how many dead men, devoted like them, has history forgotten the deeds and names! There is Eustace de St. Pierre, with his shaven magistrate's face, stiff and controlled, carrying the key of the town; behind him Andrieux d'Andres, with his hands clenched over his sobbing face, turns back, this last time, towards the city. Jean de Fiennes, with his rough beard and weak, old man's shoulders, is listening to Jean d'Aire, who, younger than he, is murmuring words that perhaps confide to him his horror of death, and entreat from the old man encouragement in renunciation. But in front of all the others the two brothers, Jacques and Pierre de Wissant, advance resolutely; and one turns back to hasten his friends, while one exhorts them, pointing with a restrained gesture towards heaven.

Technical skill assists this composition; we find the power of the St. John, but more simplification. Only the essential lines attract the eye, the details are subsidiary to the whole. Admirable bits of flesh modelling are only noticed after long examination; the substance is scarcely thought of, so much is the mind held at first by the intellectual drama, and this was what Rodin desired. These six beings, side by side, are august in their sorrow, and they move us by means of their simplicity and by the absence of any theatrical gesture. We feel the bodies under the shirts, for Rodin made six complete models in the nude before he threw upon them these rags of stuff and knotted ropes. The feet are strongly attached to the earth; we guess that their limbs are heavy, because, though their will bids them walk, every step leads towards death. The impression is extraordinary and such as perhaps no sculpture ever gave before. This is a reality of all time: the epic of the sacrifice of the humble. As for the style, it recalls the Gothic sculptors by the rugged power of the moulding, the asceticism of the heads, and the strength of the knotty limbs. We are compelled to think of the Flemish "primitives," and especially of those genial Burgundian sculptors and image-makers of genius who produced the immortal figures of Philippe Pot's tomb in the Louvre. There is the same desire for expression in sculpture, which seeks beauty solely in intensity of character, and finds style in the sincere study of reality—all these things concurring towards the greater synthesis of the work's general thought. Rodin there shows himself an essentially French and northern artist, alien from all that the academies, hypnotised by the Italianism of the second Renascence, have chosen to invent as dogmas of beauty. The Burghers of Calais is a work of the true French classic tradition—of the national classicality which has nothing in common with that classicality imported from Italy in 1550 by which our indigenous artists have so long been oppressed, thanks to the "École de Rome." Standing before such a creation we recognise this truth sharply—this truth which is the secret of Rodin's genius and of the enthusiasm that he aroused. Better than Rude, better than Barye, better even than Carpeaux, has he found the way to free himself, and to go back, by power of thought and mastery, to our true national lineage.

[1] It Is curious to recollect that the very fine equestrian statue of General Lynch and the monument to President Vicunha, sent to America by Rodin, were never paid for, and that, owing to revolutions, they actually disappeared, so that these works may be considered lost. Only the spoiled rough models and some photographs remain.

[2] These Shades are a symbolic representation of men who are just dead, and who are bending down with folded hands in misery and terror gazing at the hellish crowd into which they are about to fall.

[3] The final version of this group has been treated by Rodin separately, and is known by the name of The Kiss. The marble group is in the Museum of the Luxembourg.

[4] A statue of Eustace de St. Pierre had been asked for. Rodin sent the six effigies of burghers, and this gave rise to fresh difficulties with the authorities.

III

RODIN'S WORK FROM 1895 TO 1898—SMALL GROUPS—THE STATUE OF "BALZAC" —THE INCIDENT OF THE SOCIÉTÉ DES GENS DE LETTRES—THE "TECHNIQUE" OF THE "BALZAC"—RODIN'S IDEAS UPON MODELLING AND COMPOSITION—HIS OPINIONS ABOUT THE GREEKS, THE GOTHIC STYLE, CLASSICISM, AND MYTHOLOGICAL SUBJECTS—RODIN'S "ANTIQUE" PERIOD.

The year 1896 was occupied by the continuation of work for the Hugo monument. The Muse of Anger and the Muse of the Inna' Voice were brought to their full completion. In addition to these Rodin made a very fine head of Minerva, in marble, with a silver helmet; a statue of a Conqueror, holding a statue of Victory; and two groups—The Poet and the Life of Contemplation (for M. Fenaille, the faithful admirer, who was, at a later date, to publish his sketches) and The Eternal Idol, a marvel of inspiration. A young naked woman is in a half-sitting posture, her head bent, her gaze lost in a dream. A man kneeling before her, his arms behind him and his desire restrained, puts his head gently forward and kisses the idol beneath the left breast over the heart, with mute fervour, and with a mystic, amorous concentration of his whole being. Rarely does sculpture allow of so much pulsating life and so much psychological emotion united to plastic perfection and originality of arrangement.

From 1897 date the marble group of the Women Bathing, the last studies for the Balzac, and the studies for the Monument to President Sarmiento, a statue upon a pedestal in high-relief. Small groups in marble and in bronze are a form of which Rodin is fond. He has been led to devote himself largely to them on account of The Gate of Hell, the dimensions of which necessitated small figures. Moreover, Rodin reserves this form of art for certain categories of works that have a character of passion and intimacy. It should be possible to pass easily round them, to lean over them, almost to touch them and move them about; one should be able to live with them, as one cannot do with large figures meant to be looked at from below. The happy form of the small sculptured block, which the eighteenth century had employed to so much advantage, allows this constant communion of the spectator and the work of art. Rodin, who executes his bigger figures in so large a style, reserves for these a style that is minute but never mannered. The outlines remain large, so much so, indeed, that the work would always bear an enlarged scale; but the modelling is wrought with an almost caressing touch and with a strange love of form. Here the rough sculptor, so Gothic in his austerity, fingers the marble with the care and the delicacy of a lover; he reveals himself as a fervent adorer of smooth, womanly flesh; he plays with the subtlest variations of light upon the inflexion of marble surfaces, and the man who is reproached with caring for nothing but "character" and with despising "beauty" creates arms, necks, knees, and bosoms of exquisite perfection. His favourite type of woman is the long, delicately made woman, with a small bust, largely curved hips, and a face full of will, the nervous, feline, voluptuous woman, of head rather than of heart, such as Baudelaire and Rops have imagined. The characteristic feature of Rodin's small groups is the seeking after new combinations of movement. I have said already that his essential idea was the production of dynamic art; that is to say that, finding himself face to face with an academic school that had grown inert owing to its care for pseudo-harmony, he had determined to draw sculpture out of this blind alley and to show, before all things, how the expression of movement might lead to an entirely new conception of decorative outline. From this endeavour arose those little groups of lovers in which the attitudes are so infinitely varied, those curious presentments in which the arms and legs are placed as freely as in a painting. But the painting has the help of shadow, of backgrounds, and of values, which allow the light to be concentrated on a single point and the rest to be blurred. Rodin has attempted so to compose his most audacious movements that, in walking round, a new aspect of them is constantly presented, whereas ordinary sculpture, meant to be seen from a single point, does not allow the spectator to pass behind it. This difficulty and this main idea have led Rodin to treat modelling and composition in a way upon which I shall dwell more fully later on, and to invent a style of statuary which borrows some of the laws of painting.

These thoughts had long been ripening in Rodin when at last he resolved to apply them to his Balzac, which was really not his first attempt in this direction, but the first that was seen in public. When this statue appeared in the Salon of 1898, it created such a commotion that for a week the public forgot, over it, the events of that vast serial story, the Dreyfus affair. The clamour was extraordinary; some people raged at what they considered a scandalous practical joke, others warmly defended the new work. The Société des Gens de Lettres, already irritated by Rodin's delays in finishing the statue, declared plainly that it refused the Balzac, a decision which led to the resignation of the committee. Rodin might have brought an action and won it, for, strictly speaking, his agreement required the society to accept the work such as he delivered it. He preferred to withdraw his work without claiming its price or discussing the matter. Once again his art encountered violent opposition from the official camp—but to struggle is repugnant to his temper. Inflexible in his will as a producer, he is timid and proud in his attitude towards contradictions. Opportunity, moreover, offered him a roguish and witty revenge. Falguière was commissioned to make a Balzac. This put Falguière in a very awkward position; after all the fuss made about Rodin's statue, he must needs produce something finer, or at the very least equally interesting. He was certain of a bad reception at the hands of Rodin's admirers and he was bound to please the others. Falguière only succeeded in producing a mediocre work. The Balzac that may be seen at the present time in the Avenue de Friedland is nothing but a half-hearted imitation of Rodin's; it is Rodin's Balzac seated, and without character or interest. This work appeared in 1900, at a time when opinion was already beginning to recognise the injustice done to Rodin, and it pleased nobody. Then Rodin, to show that the incident had in no way altered his friendly relations with Falguière,[1] made an admirable bust of his fellow-worker, which was as fine as the second Balzac was poor, and thus gave to Falguière and to the public, also, a silent and ironical lesson.

What, then, was this Balzac which was so much detested, and about which the most abusive and extraordinary things were written? Merely the image of the great writer, draped in a dressing-gown, with empty, hanging sleeves; he has risen in the night and is walking up and down, disturbed and sleepless, pursuing an idea that has suddenly presented itself. He is bent forward, his head thrown back, the eyes deep-set, and the mouth contracted in a smile of challenge. The powerful neck—the neck indeed of a bull—emerges from the open wrapper. Rodin made use of various daguerreotypes, and especially of a celebrated portrait of Balzac, that shows him in shirt-sleeves with one brace, and folded arms. The enormous proportions of the head, the amazing strength of the thorax, the monstrous and leonine character of the face are all exact. "His was the countenance of an element," said Lamartine of Balzac, "with a torso that was joined to the head by an enormous neck, short legs, and short arms." These words absolutely justify the statue. Rodin had made studies for it in the nude (there are some fine clay models of the subject in his studio), then he clothed it with a gown (or to be more exact, with a bath-wrap, for that is what Balzac's famous monk's robe was), and proceeded to simplify the folds until he had left only the two or three essential ones. The result thus obtained, with the disproportion of body and legs, led Rodin to hide the short, ugly, useless arms under the drapery, and the figure thus assumed pretty much the appearance of a mummy, of a sort of monolith, from which nothing stood out but the one point of interest, the savage and magnificent animality of the head, with its darkened gaze and the bitterly curved mouth, of which Rodin had made a separate small study in bronze. A great heave of the shoulders throws the body slightly backward, causing it to rest upon one leg, which is apparently bent, while the other is moved forward to walk.

The Balzac, then, presents the aspect of a sheath of stone pushed out by a few twisting folds, which give it the appearance from behind of an upright sarcophagus. The size of the head, the abnormal largeness of the chest and neck, which have aroused mockery, are historic. Apart from these points, one honestly wonders what it is that can have shocked people in this bold and sincere work. The face is admirable in its pride, its strength of will, its haughty irony, and penetrating power of thought. The modelling and the leading lines are masterly. The rather ghostly look of the clay disappears in the bronze, as may be seen from the little head in that material, of which the monument was to be made. It is the freedom, the spontaneity, the life of the statue, which, as in the case of the Burghers, gave a shock to the conventions of the official world and disturbed the ideas of the public at large.

It is true, nevertheless, and is generally admitted even by its most active adversaries that this great figure possesses a strange haunting power; when one had seen it in the Salon one could see nothing else after it, and could not succeed in getting away from it. People returned to it, in order to attack it, but they did return to it inevitably. The same official sculptors who in 1877 had accused The Age of Brass of being cast from life because the figure was so exact did not shrink from accusing this same Rodin, matured by twenty years of work, of "not knowing the figure" and hiding his Balzac under a robe out of weakness. Besides these reproaches, which were made in bad faith, reproaches arose which exclaimed at Rodin's madness or hypocritically regretted that a man of so much talent should have made so great a mistake. But one thing which the Bahac never encountered was indifference; what was the spell which compelled everybody to regard it as an irritating puzzle, as a challenge, as a work out of the ordinary run? Plenty of hostile faces were to be seen, but many of them showed a secret fear of being in the wrong, of misunderstanding a fine thing, a work which was a forerunner. This same fear might have been read as early as 1867 upon the faces of the detractors who stood in a ring around Manet's first works.

The spell lay in the extreme simplification, the reduction of the elements to a powerful unity, according to a scheme with which Rodin had made experiments in silence and which he now revealed. And at this point I am led to a brief explanation of Rodin's ideas upon the technical part of his art.

At the time of the Balzac's appearance I gave an account of the way by which Rodin had been led to a new conception of sculpture. This was in an article [3] that has been reproduced more or less everywhere, and that Rodin has been good enough to consider as the emanation and direct expression of his artistic wishes. I cannot enter into all the details. The scale of this book would not allow of that, but the following are the principal points of that evolution.

Rodin's is above all a temperament inclined to the expression of passionate and tragic character. Thence comes his constant study of movement. As I said before, that study has led him to give unlooked-for values to the general outline and to produce works which may be viewed on all sides and which continually show a fresh and balanced aspect that explains the other aspects: otherwise the daring gestures and the bold combinations of the limbs would have given an air of absurdity to the groups. Rodin is at the same time very reflective and very instinctive. He matures a thought slowly, but he often passes by chance from that thought to its realisation. This is the predominant feature of his nature, and it explains his entire art. Rodin often appears unconscious, astonished at what he had in him and at what he has brought into existence, to such a degree that he explains it badly enough. He sees his thought in the whole of nature and finds it there again; that thought, indeed, is fed by general ideas, and is, if I may say so, almost "elemental." From this point of view Rodin's genius is independent of his talent as a sculptor. It sometimes happens to him to see a block of marble or a knob of wood, and the form of such an object will show him what he will make and the movement of the figure. He adapts to it one of the ideas which he always has in reserve: the aspect of the wood or the marble determines the passage of the thought to the material which will incarnate it. I said one day to Rodin: "One would say that you knew there was a figure in that block, and that you do nothing beyond breaking away the stone that hides it from us." He answered that that was exactly his feeling as he worked. Upon the naked figure Rodin has ideas that are peculiar to his nature as a mystic and a realist. He considers the body with its four limbs as a cypher, of which the combinations are infinite. That is an old idea that was held by primitive theologians of the Eastern religions. And it is the fact that Rodin has invented an immense series of attitudes and combinations that one would not have thought possible: he attaches little groups to the side of a block of marble with the freedom of a painter throwing a figure upon a background. He makes his people light, he makes them soar, he entwines them in surprising positions.

It was therefore absolutely essential that he should find means to constitute a logical harmony on every side of his works. Scholastic statuary is opposed to this principle. Its tendency is to treat groups as bas-reliefs. The spectator must stand in front, at a certain spot, and whatever is behind is accessory: the decorative line produces its effect only from that point. So true is this that statues are very often so placed in public squares that people cannot pass round them. The academic sculptors treat a piece of sculpture like a picture; it has a right side and a wrong side. Rodin, shocked at this method, began by working in quite a different way. He made successive sketches of all the faces of his works, going constantly round them so as to obtain a series of views connected in a ring. Travels in Italy had led him to think that the ancients proceeded in this manner and that their great endeavour was to get the design of the outline by means of movement, which continually modifies the anatomy. Anatomy, indispensable to the artist, becomes the source of all the academic errors if once we forget that it is but inertia, the state of non-action, and consequently incapable of expressly teaching us about life and about the modifications that thought imposes upon flesh. The real value of a living figure is given by profiles studied successively in a full light. Rodin was delighted by this way of working. But his pictorial inclinations, his ideas about the possible formation of a background in sculpture as in painting, were not satisfied.

When the academic school wishes to make use of a background to a figure it confines itself to a hollow or a relief. Rodin desired that a statue should stand free and should bear looking at from any point, but he desired nevertheless that it should remain in relation with light and with the surrounding atmosphere. He was struck by the hard, cut-out aspect of ordinary statues, and asked himself how an atmosphere might be given to them. Painting has two means to this end: of which the first is values. Values are independent of colour. Values, an element common to both arts, are in painting and sculpture the relations as to opacity or transparence of an object and the background against which it is seen. They may be dark on a light ground, light on a dark ground, or light upon a ground that is likewise light; but they are always the very life of the outline, and the important point is to fix that outline first of all. When we see a person placed between the sun and ourselves, against the light, we do not at first perceive the details within the outline, but we do see the general mass of the body, and that mass is filled with more or less intense colour, in which we presently distinguish details. Our perception at the moment is as much sculptural as pictorial. Rodin, struck by the importance of this idea, devoted himself to obtaining, at once and together, the volume; that is to say, the equivalent in sculpture of the value, and the design of successive views of one movement.

But the second means in painting is the employment of intermediate tones encircling the figure and combining with the background. How could an equivalent be found for that? Logic led Rodin on to a step which alarmed him: he made experiments after examining the antiques very closely. He took fragments of his statues and began to raise them in certain places by layers of clay, intensifying the modelling and enlarging the lines. He observed that the light now played better upon these enlarged lines; the refraction of light upon these amplified surfaces was softer, the hardness of the cut-out outline vanished, and a radiant zone shaped itself around his figures and united them gradually with the atmosphere. In this way, therefore, by means of this systematic accentuation of the outlines, an intermediate tone, a radiancy of the forms, was produced.

Rodin understood at once that he had found his way to the deepest secret of his art; that is to say, to the ideal limit where through its hidden laws a plastic art touches the other arts in a negation of all that is merely materialistic. The intermediate tones in painting, the radiating surfaces in sculpture, are the same principle as the nervous radiations noted in photographing a hand, where it may be seen that the fingers are prolonged by emanations. Nothing is fixed, limited, or finished in nature, and the radiating state is the only real one. But this was a dangerous discovery for a sculptor, since people would immediately exclaim upon the deformation of what was seen, the alteration of the fact, the falsification of anatomy. Therefore Rodin proceeded in silence and with very great prudence. The point was not, of course, to enlarge all surfaces equally, for that would have produced only an increase of scale. The thing was to amplify, with tact, certain parts of the modelling, the edges of which were swept by the light, so as to give a halo to the outline. At the same time, Rodin experimented in a series of drawings made on purpose, forbidding himself to give any detail, tracing only the outlines of bodies filled in with one wash of water-colour that gave the value. I shall return to these sketches. They cannot be understood without a knowledge of their original purpose.

This theory, to which Rodin approved of my giving the name of deliberate amplification of surfaces, is simply the critical principle of Greek sculpture, which has been entirely misunderstood by the academic school. That school, which is supposed to honour the Greeks, is really false to their spirit and their teaching. Moreover, this principle, which belongs to all the primitive statuary that was made for the open air, is to be found among the Egyptians and the Assyrians. It calls in question the academic tradition whereby exactitude is confounded with truth. In reality it may be said to be a profoundly classic principle which has been denied by the academic school. Here, as in painting, classicism is opposed to the academic. Hence it should be concluded that in reality Rodin is by no means an innovator opposing himself to a school that retains classic traditions, but, speaking precisely, a classic, returning to nature, replacing himself in the state of mind of a Greek before his model, and opposing himself to a school that has overloaded art with methods, formulas, and expedients that change the character of antique and Gothic art. Rodin has a horror of what is called "originality," and an even greater horror of what is called "inspiration." He only trusts completely to work and to minute, sincere observation of nature. "Slowness is a beauty," he often says. He has the greatest antipathy for "sculpture with literary meanings," and has often been galled, without saying so, by certain praises, in which writers, reeling off pages of description about his works, have thought to please him by dwelling on the idea and not on the execution. "I invent nothing," he says; "I rediscover. And the thing seems new because people have generally lost sight of the aim and the means of art; they take that for an innovation which is nothing but a return to the laws of the great sculpture of long ago. Obviously, I think; I like certain symbols, I see things in a synthetic way, but it is nature that gives me all that. I do not imitate the Greeks; I try to put myself in the spiritual state of the men who have left us the antique statues. The 'École' copies their works; the thing that signifies is to recover their method. I began by showing close studies from nature like The Age of Brass. Afterwards I came to understand that art required a little more largeness, a little exaggeration, and my whole aim, from the time of the Burghers, was to find a method of exaggerating logically: that method consists in the deliberate amplification of the modelling. It consists also in the constant reduction of the figure to a geometrical figure, and in the determination to sacrifice any part of a figure to the synthesis of its aspect. See what the Gothic sculptors did. Look at the cathedral of Chartres; one of the towers is massive and without ornament: they sacrificed it to give value to the exquisite delicacy of the other tower.

"In sculpture the projection of the muscular fasciculi must be accentuated, the foreshortening forced, the hollows deepened; sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures. Ignorant people, when they see close-knitted true surfaces, say that 'it is not finished.' No notion is falser than that of finish unless it be that of elegance; by means of these two ideas people would kill our art. The way to obtain solidity and life is by work carried out to the fullest, not in the direction of achievement and of copying details, but in that of truth in the successive schemes. The public, perverted by academic prejudices, confounds art with neatness. The simplicity of the 'École' is a painted cardboard ideal. A cast from life is a copy, the exactest possible copy, and yet it has neither motion nor eloquence. Art intervenes to exaggerate certain surfaces, and also to fine down others. In sculpture everything depends upon the way in which the modelling is carried out with a constant thought of the main line of the scheme, upon the rendering of the hollows, of the projections and of their connections; thus it is that one may get fine lights, and especially fine shadows that are not opaque. Everything should be emphasised according to the accent that it is desired to render, and the degree of amplification is personal, according to the tact and the temperament of each sculptor; and for this reason there is no transmissible process, no studio recipe, but only a true law. I see it in the antique and in Michael Angelo. To work by the profiles, in depth not by surfaces, always thinking of the few geometrical forms from which all nature proceeds, and to make these eternal forms perceptible in the individual case of the object studied, that is my criterion. That is not idealism, it is a part of the handicraft. My ideas have nothing to do with it but for that method; my Danaids and my Dante figures would be weak, bad things. From the large design that I get your mind deduces ideas."

Rodin, then, is convinced that he is classical, and rebels against the "École" which claims to be so. He has the greatest admiration for the Renascence, but declares that he does not so clearly understand the genius of the Gothic sculptors. He admires it, but has not thoroughly penetrated it. "I feel it, but I cannot express it," he says. "I cannot analyse the Celtic genius to my own satisfaction. In the Middle Ages art came from groups, not from individuals. It was anonymous; the sculptors of cathedrals no more put their names to their works than our workmen put theirs on the pavement that they lay. Ah! what an admirable scorn of notoriety! The signature is what destroys us. We do portraits, but what we do is not so great. These kings and queens, on the cathedrals, were not portraits. The fellow-workers stood for one another, and they interpreted; they did not copy. They made clothed figures; the nude and portraiture only date from the Renascence. And then those fellows cut with the tool's end into the block, that is why they were called sculptors. As for us, we are modellers. And what a disgraceful thing that casting from life is, which so many well-known sculptors do not blush to use! It is a mere swindling in art. Art was a vital function to the image-makers of the thirteenth century; they would have laughed at the idea of signing what they did, and never dreamed of honours and titles. When once their work was finished, they said no more about it, or else they talked among themselves. How curious it would have been to hear them, to be present at their gatherings, where they must have discussed in amusing phrases, and with simple, deep ideas!... Whenever the cathedrals disappear civilisation will go down one step. And even now we no longer understand them, we no longer know how to read their silent language. We need to make excavations not in the earth, but towards heaven...." An admirable saying that Rodin has often repeated to me and that I have never heard without deep emotion! He has the secret of these true formulas, and his words, which are not eloquent, but, rather, obscure, are suddenly lighted up by them. His speech, like his sculpture, is born from sincere contact with the essence of nature. In regard to the Renascence and Michael Angelo, he reports that he received no decisive lesson from either until after a journey to Italy in 1875. "I believed before that," he says, "that movement was the whole secret of this art, and I put my models into positions like those of Michael Angelo. But as I went on observing the free attitudes of my models I perceived that they possessed these naturally, and that Michael Angelo had not preconceived them, but merely transcribed them according to the personal inspiration of human beings moved by the need of action. I went to Rome to look for what may be found everywhere: the latent heroic in every natural movement. [4]

"Then I gathered the elements of what people call my symbolism. I do not understand anything about long words and theories. But I am willing to be a symbolist, if that defines the ideas that Michael Angelo gave me, namely that the essence of sculpture is the modelling, the general scheme which alone enables us to render the intensity, the supple variety of movement and character. If we can imagine the thought of God in creating the world, He thought first of the construction, which is the sole principle of nature, of living things and perhaps of the planets. Michael Angelo seems to me rather to derive from Donatello than from the ancients; Raphael proceeds from them. He understood that an architecture can be built up with the human body, and that, in order to possess volume and harmony, a statue or a group ought to be contained in a cube, a pyramid; or some simple figure. Let us look at a Dutch interior and at an interior painted by an artist of the present day. The latter no longer touches us, because it does not possess the qualities of depth and volume, the science of distances. The artist who paints it does not know how to reproduce a cube. An interior by Van der Meer is a cubic painting. The atmosphere is in it and the exact volume of the objects; the place of these objects has been respected, the modern painter places them, arranges them as models. The Dutchmen did not touch them, but set themselves to render the distances that separated them, that is, the depth. And then, if I go so far as to say that cubic truth, not appearance, is the mistress of things, if I add that the sight of the plains and woods and country views gives me the principle of the plans that I employ on my statues, that I feel cubic truth everywhere, and that plan and volume appear to me as laws of all life and all beauty, will it be said that I am a symbolist, that I generalise, that I am a metaphysician? It seems to me that I have remained a sculptor and a realist. Unity oppresses and haunts me."

"What," says Rodin again, "is the principle of my figures, and what is it that people like in them? It is the very pivot of art, it is balance; that is to say, the oppositions of volume produced by movement. That is the striking, material fact in art, with all due deference to those persons who conceive art as distinct from 'brutal' reality. Art is like love. For many people it is a dream, a psychological complication, a palace, a perfume, a stage scene; but nothing of the sort! The essential of love is the pairing; all the rest is only detail, charming, and full of passion, but detail. It is the same in art: people come and praise my symbols and my expressions to me; but I know that the plans are the essential thing. Respect the plan, make it exact from every point; movement intervenes, displaces these volumes and creates a fresh balance. The human body is like a walking temple, and like a temple it has a central point around which the volumes place and spread themselves. When one understands that, one has everything. It is simple, but it must be seen, and academism refuses to see it. Instead of recognising that that is the key to my method they prefer to say that I am a poet. That expression signifies that people feel, confusedly, the difference between an art resting on conventions and one derived from truth; only they think that the 'poetic' art is the conventional one. They call that inspiration. That is the belief that has led to the theory of genius being madness. But men of genius are just those who, by their trade-skill, carry the essential thing to perfection. People say that my sculpture is that of an 'exalté.'[5]

"I do not deny that there is exaltation in my works; but that exaltation existed not in me, but in nature, in movement. The divine work is naturally exalted. As for me, all I do is to be true; my temperament is not 'exalted'; it is patient. I am not a dreamer, but a mathematician; and if my sculpture is good it is because it is geometrical."

From these fragments of conversation the reader will conceive how Rodin's generalising spirit leads him from the realism of his daily work to the synthesis of a sort of ideo-realistic metaphysical system. He has the sense (belonging only to genius) of the continuity of the universe, and he certainly had it at a time when, unlettered as he was, he would not have known how to explain it specifically to himself. He constantly formulates this metaphysical system, as I have seen it formulated by Stéphane Mallarmé, who could never see anything without instantly bringing together two ideas or images that no one would ever have thought of connecting. Spontaneous analogy is the mark of genius and the secret of all real poetry. This is why I consider Rodin as a very great poet—not in the sense that he dislikes, but on the contrary, by giving to the word "poet" its deep etymological significance according to the Greek, that of "making, creating, vivifying." We may understand, too, in how great a degree an intellectuality of this kind offers a living challenge to the ideas of the "École." The man who thinks thus is necessarily isolated and has struggled all his life, never making a concession and saying nobly, "The artist, like the woman, has an honour to preserve." I will further quote from Rodin the following reflection [6]: "Where you follow nature, you get everything. When I have a beautiful woman's body for a model the drawings that I make from it give me images of insects, birds, and fishes. That seems improbable, and I had no suspicion of it myself. Formerly I used to be seeking shapes for vases, either to use them at Sèvres, where I used to work, or elsewhere.... I never succeeding in finding a beauty of proportions and lines such as I had the feeling of, because I only founded my attempts upon imagination. Since that time I have drawn women's bodies, and one of these bodies gave me, in the synthesis of it, a magnificent shape for a vase, with true and harmonious lines. The point is not to create. Creation and improvisation are useless words. Genius only comes to the man who understands with his eye and his brain. Everything is in the things about us. Manufacture and ornamental art want reforming according to these ideas. I should have liked to see that. Everything-is contained in nature. There is an harmonious, continual, uninterrupted movement. A woman, a mountain, a horse, in conception they are all the same thing, they are made on the same principles. Young artists compose instead of following their models and understanding that therein lies infinity." Here Rodin directly touches a scientific truth—the relative monotony of Nature's productive forms. Nature does everything with very few forms: the variations are so infinite that there are no two leaves alike, but the nerves of a leaf, the lines of a vein, an artery, a bird's wing, a fishbone, a nerve-cell, are identical; multiplicity derives from identity and returns to it, so that everything is reduced to a fundamental geometry which perhaps is but the effect of a single cellular generation. In this respect the laws of art and of science are the same, even as among all the arts there is a synthesis of common laws, an identity where we seem to behold a difference. Recent work in science, by establishing the existence of states of radiation (Crookes, Röntgen, Hertz) is busy undermining our old conception of matter, showing us the identity of it with the immaterial, and thereby abolishing our preconceptions about the idea and the fact, music and sculpture, considered as different manifestations. I remember that I one day kept Rodin's curiosity excited for a long time by explaining the details of this theory to him; he was not acquainted with it, and listened to me as to a writer in love with general ideas. But it was clear that in his mere province as a sculptor he knew far better and had penetrated far more deeply into this enthralling problem of identity. His is a luminous mind, of the same kind as the electric rays; it rather penetrates than surrounds what is obscure to it. On that day he was disturbed, and I was irritated by certain declamations which had been written about his "philosophy," and of which the author had assuredly not comprehended the logical consequences; and we came to the conclusion that it would be much better for Rodin's peace of mind to keep silent upon these points, for his "philosophy" could only be made comprehensible to those who could understand the method of his sculpture.