Judith Cladel

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Every manifestation of nature is a subject. Artists, pause here! Sketch these flowers; writers, describe them for me, not in the mass, as has always been done, but in minute detail, in the marvelous precision of their organs, in their characteristics, which are as varied as are those of animals and men. How beautiful to be in the same moment an artist and a botanist, to paint and model the plant at the same time that one studied it! Those great realists, the Japanese, understand this, and make the knowledge and cultivation of plants one of the bases of their education. ”

“ Its voluptuousness, whencesoever come, enchants our senses; then the intellect demands an explanation, studies it, traces back the sensation to its sources through one of those rapid and manifold changes which are the law of such natural phenomena as light, sound, electricity.
"The man who awakens to nature," said Rodin, in the presence of his statue. Indeed the body bends over, as if under the exquisite caress of the breezes of spring. The hand rests itself upon the head, flung back as if to hold in the somewhat mournful splendor of some too beautiful vision. ”

“ Our souls have more shadows than the Greek soul, our determinations are more varied; for our clouds and our forests are reflected in our hearts.
Artists, let us, then, revert to the interpretation of our race, but in the spirit, not in the letter. Let us copy only the soul of our external nature, not its Gothic form, for a mere copy is cold and dead. Beautiful architecture is a reproduction by man, but from a divine model. From this it receives the warmth of life. If architecture is true to the spirit of nature, it is embraced by the trees, the rocks, the clouds ”

“ Since then Rodin has added to his knowledge and experience. He has made personal discoveries in the plastic art. He has become the master of color in sculpture. Nevertheless, this portrait, as it stands, remains an adorable masterpiece. Who that has looked at its softly gleaming marble in the Luxembourg has not been overcome by a long dream of tenderness, of uneasy curiosity? Who has not hoped to make this woman speak, to press her heart in order to draw from her a confession of her desires, the secret of her happiness and her melancholy?
It is more than a bust, it is woman herself. ”

“ Fresh tears, one would say, have bathed the most poignant passages; the pity of a man of to-day, of one like ourselves, our brother, has enveloped the terrible work of the Florentine poet, that man of the Middle Ages, with an atmosphere of tenderness and compassion which seems the emotion of Christianity at its purest, its original source. In order to become our own, it has passed through the great soul of Rodin. It is not surprising, then, that the sensibility of our artists, reanimated by this new spectacle, should be touched to so voluminous an expression by this haunting work. ”

“ RODIN'S HOUSE AND STUDIO AT MEUDON.
Man, animals, down to the smallest insects, down to the infinitesimal; the earth, the waters, the woods, the sky—all are marvelous. The firmament is the vastest landscape, the most profound, the most enchanting, with its variations, its effects of color and light, which delight the eye, astonish the thought, and subjugate the heart. And to say that artists—those who consider themselves such—attempt to represent all that simply as it appears to them, without having studied it, without having deciphered it, without having felt it! ”

“ Yet such a realist is he that he quarrels with any artist who does not recognize "the latent heroic in every natural movement."
Therefore he does not force the pose of his model, preferring attitudes or gestures voluntarily adopted. His sketch books, as vivid, as copious, as the drawings of Hokusai—he is studious of Japanese art—are swift memoranda of the human machine as it dispenses its normal muscular motions. Rodin, draughtsman, is as surprisingly original as the sculptor Rodin. He will study a human foot for months, not to copy it, but to master the secret of its rhythms. ”

“ An antique piece of sculpture cannot be imitated. This torso seems to have a soul. Are not the shadows trembling on it there? One can see them move.
What a progress toward truth we find in the advance from Assyrian and Egyptian to Greek art! Antique things, if we knew how to look at them, would bring about a new renaissance for us, we who stagnate in the Parisian spirit. The Parisian spirit, young though it is, is already too old to serve us. It is like those pretentious monuments, those constructions in plaster, which are hollow and horrible under their crumbling stucco. ”

“ A natural man, yet crossed by nature with a perverse strain; the possessor of a sensibility exalted and dolorous; morbid, sick-nerved, and as introspective as Heine; a visionary and a lover of life, close to the periphery of things; an interpreter of Baudelaire; Dante's alter ego in his grasp of the wheel of eternity, in his passionate fling at nature; withal a sculptor, profound and tortured, transposing rhythm into the terms of his art, Rodin is a statuary who, while having affinities with classic and romantic schools, is the most startling apparition of his century. ”

“ In its unblemished nudity, it bears the sign of no one epoch; it is the eternal man touched in his innermost sensibility by something of which he knows not the cause. Is it his soul, is it his flesh that trembles? One does not know. No knowledge comes without suffering. Rodin, aware immediately of this effect of transposition, in the delicious surprise of the artist who sometimes sees himself surpassed by his own work, christened the statue, "The Man of the Age of Bronze," that is to say, one who is passing from the unconsciousness of primitive man into the age of understanding and of love. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To give Rodin his due he stands prosperity not quite as well as poverty. In every great artist there is a large area of self-esteem; it is the reservoir from which he must, during years of drought or defeat, draw upon to keep fresh the soul. Without the consoling fluid of egotism genius would soon perish in the dust of despair. But fill this source to the brim, accelerate the speed of its current, and artistic deterioration may ensue. Rodin has been fatuously called a second Michael Angelo—as if there could ever be a replica of any human. ”

“ Is it not dangerous to say of a genius that his work alone should count, that his personality is negligible? Though Rodin has followed Flaubert's advice to artists to lead an ascetic life that their art might be the more violent, nevertheless his career, colorless as it may seem to those who love better stage players and the comedy of society—this laborious life of a poor sculptor should not be passed over. He always becomes enraged at the prevailing notion that fire descends from heaven upon genius. Rodin believes in but one inspiration—nature. Nature can do no wrong. ”

“ The artist who conceived the Sphinx made her to be the guardian of temples and secrets.
That column there rises up like a druid-stone, as though to converse with the moon at night. It awaits the appearance of man in the solemn ritual of night, for in its immensity it bears witness that man has created it. Man, too, has had his part, an ephemeral part, in the creation; his idea strives with the works of God, as Israel strove with the angel. His illuminating thought, expressed in stone, arouses those who otherwise might be insensible to beauty. ”

“ He who sees and feels deeply never lacks the desire to express his feelings, to be an artist. Is not nature the source of all beauty? Is she not the only creator? It is only by drawing near to her that the artist can bring back to us all that she has revealed to him.
When one says this, the public thinks it a commonplace. All the world believes that it knows that; but it knows it only in seeming, the truth penetrates only the superficial shell of its intelligence. There are so many degrees in real comprehension! Comprehension is like a divine ladder. ”

“ We ought to love in Rodin this intellectual vigor that skirts the borders of the impossible. In our age, consumed with indecision, it is a priceless aid, a resting-place, a point d'appui from which one starts forth afresh, fortified, one's nerves recharged with vitality, to the conquest of one's share of knowledge or of talent. This accounts in part for the irresistible influence which for thirty years the illustrious sculptor has exercised over the minds of artists. One feels that this fount of strength condensed in his virile soul comes from something deeper than his personality alone ”

“ For if the gesture with which Rodin offers to France his work and his dearest possessions is that of those who count in the annals of their country, no one perhaps has ever received such a homage as that which the country has bestowed upon him in the manner of accepting his gift. In the midst of war, in the very hour when the country is suffering unheard of evils, it has self-possession enough in the firmness of its indomitable soul to honor in a magnificent way the work of one of its sons—a work accomplished in time of peace. ”

“ They may seem devoid of general continuity, but when one comprehends the great master's method, one sees that a bond much firmer than that of the mere word binds them together. They seem disjointed because here, as in his sculpture, the artist accepts only the essential, and rejects all superfluous detail. In reality they have the continuity of life, which is felt, but not seen, and which renders arbitrary transition unnecessary. This is the prerogative of genius, while all else is within the grasp of any one. His authority strikes us dumb; it puts to rout mere commonplace cleverness. ”

“ If some among them disturb the spirit, most of them shed upon us a calm enjoyment, the delightful security that one breathes among all-powerful beings that wish to be gracious. They allay the sense of unrest aroused in us by those dramas in marble and bronze which a powerful intellect has conceived—that mind from which sprang "The Burghers of Calais," the two monuments to Victor Hugo, "The Tower of Labor," that imagination, glowing like a forge, which produced "The Gate of Hell," the Sarmiento monument, the statue of Balzac. ”

“ Rodin was then living in Brussels, still young, poor, and unknown, but happy. He tasted the perfect happiness of long days of absorbing labor, of that enthusiasm for work which nothing disturbs. To-day he sometimes yearns for those years free from the never-ceasing bustle of a celebrated man's existence, a giant assailed by a thousand pin-pricks. Yet his poverty was excessive, for the beautiful statue, modeled during successive months with much love, fell to pieces. For want of money, the sculptor had not been able to have it cast. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The vigor of the work and the sovereign gesture by which the bard of contemplation seems to impose silence upon the voice of nature in order that the voices struggling within himself, in the depths of his genius, may be the better heard, the suppleness of the material, of this Carrara marble, with its warm reflections, as if melted under the pressure of a fiery hand, obstinately make one think of Michelangelo; one has the disturbing sensation, not of an imitation, but of a resurrection of the plastic power reincarnated out of nature, of a new spring of sap from the same vein of genius. ”