Auguste Rodin

“ At the time when his art took form and prepared itself for expression, when life as it presented itself before him had little significance, Rodin dwelt in the books of the poets and gleaned from the past. Later, when as a creator he again touched those realms, their forms rose like memories in his own life, aching and real, and entered into his work as though into a home. ”

“ Auguste Rodin's career has passed through the inevitable phases. He, who has been so generally discussed and attacked, is to-day the most regarded of all artists. He likes to talk of his art; for he knows that his observations have a priceless value, that of experience—the experience of sixty years of uninterrupted work—and of a conscience perhaps even more exacting to-day than at the time of his impetuous youth. ”

“ Rodin's opinions upon social life are vague. He contents himself with repeating that work lovingly done is the secret of all order and all happiness. To love life and natural forms, and to attempt nothing disobedient to Nature or her aims, that is his whole morality.
He sees very few people and visits nobody. He would baffle visitors accustomed to elegant, literary, well-informed, brilliant artists. His studio in the Rue de l'Université, at the end of an old yard encumbered by blocks of marble and shaded by aged chestnut trees, is like the work-place of a poor beginner. ”

“ Rodin's message and its significance are little understood by the many men who gathered about him. It would be a long and weary task to enlighten them; nor is this necessary, for they assembled about the name, not about the work,—a work that has grown far beyond this name's sound and limitations, and that has become nameless as a plain is nameless or a sea that has a name but on the map, in books, and to men, but which is, in reality, but distance, movement and depth. ”

“ In the same way that Rodin seems to break away the fragments of a block from around an already existing statue hidden in it, he is himself a sort of rock concealing shapes within it and embracing in its secret recesses immense crystallised arborescences. With a simple enough personal psychology he expresses infinite shades and inflexions of emotion. His thought is like the monad of Leibnitz; it seems, when one sees the man, to have no window to the outer world. ”

“ But, to speak truly, all is idea, all is symbol. So the form and the attitude of a human being reveal the emotions of its soul. The body always expresses the spirit whose envelope it is. And for him who can see, the nude offers the richest meaning. In the majestic rhythm of the outline, a great sculptor, a Phidias, recognizes the serene harmony shed upon all nature by the divine wisdom; a simple torso, calm, balanced, radiant with strength and grace, can make him think of the all-powerful mind which governs the world. ”

“ In this martyrdom of those devoted to æsthetic achievements the world over inheres the truth of the Roman adage, patitur qui vincit. Auguste Rodin, who was born in Paris in 1840 and elected President of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Engravers in 1904, has conquered and lives to see his works admired in both hemispheres, notwithstanding his disregard of the canons and conventionalities of the French Institute, which were repulsive to him. He has devoted himself to a mastery of nature, as zealously as did Michael Angelo to the study of anatomy. ”

“ Of Auguste Rodin one thing may be said without fear of contradiction: among his contemporaries to-day he is preëminently the master. Born at Paris, 1840,—the natal year of his friends, Claude Monet and Zola—in humble circumstances, without a liberal education, the young Rodin had to fight from the beginning; fight for bread as well as an art schooling. ”

“ Gradually, beneath Rodin's essential simplicity, one discovers features that were at first hidden; he is ironical, sensuous, nervous, proud. He contains as possibilities all the passions that he expresses with so vibrating a magnificence, and one begins to perceive the secret links between this calm, almost cheerful man and the art that he reveals. At certain moments his clear and rather vague eyes become full of phosphorescent points, the face grows sardonic and almost faunlike; at others it saddens and discloses a sickness for infinity. ”

“ Rodin has discovered these gestures, has evolved them out of one or several figures and moulded them into sculptural forms. He has endowed hundreds and hundreds of figures that were only a little larger than his hand with the life of all passions, the blossoming of all delights and the burden of all vices. He nas created bodies that touch each other all over and cling together like animals bitten into each other, that fall into the depth of oneness like a single organism; bodies that listen like faces and lift themselves like arms ”

“ There is no such face to an artist. To him every head is interesting. Let a sculptor note the insipidity of a face, let him show us a fool absorbed by his care of worldly parade, and there we have a fine bust. ”

“ The masters of the antique did this, aided by the customs of their civilization. Rodin does this in our own day by the force of his own will.
He follows his models with his earnest gaze, he silently savors the beauty of the life which plays through them, he admires the suppleness of this young woman who bends to pick up a chisel, the delicate grace of this other who raises her arms to gather her golden hair above her head, the nervous vigor of a man who walks across the room; and when this one or that makes a movement that pleases him, he instantly asks that the pose be kept. ”

“ II The first and still the best study of Rodin as man and thinker is to be found in a book by Judith Cladel, the daughter of the novelist (author of Mes Paysans) . She named it Auguste Rodin, pris sur la vie, and her pages are filled with surprisingly vital sketches of the workaday Rodin. His conversations are recorded; altogether this little picture has much charm and proves what Rodin asserts—that women understand him better than men. There is a fluid, feminine, disturbing side to his art and nature very appealing to emotional women. ”

“ For erroneous as it is to see in Rodin's plastic art a kind of Impressionism, it is the multitude of precisely and boldly seized impressions that is always the great treasure from which he ultimately chooses the important and necessary, in order to comprehend his work in its perfect synthesis. As he proceeds from the bodies to the faces it must seem to him as though he stepped from a wind-swept distance into a room in which many men are gathered. ”

“ Now that it is accomplished, it is time to speak of its significance. Some time after this monument has been erected it will be recognized that Rodin willed nothing that was beyond his art. The body of work here manifests itself as did formerly the body of love:—it is a new revelation of life. This creator lived so completely in his conceptions, so entirely in the depths of his work, that inspiration or revelation came to him only through the medium of his art. New life in the ultimate sense meant to him, new surfaces, new gestures. ”

“ More vital than the influence of the personalities and the art treasures of the countries which Rilke visited and more potent in its effect upon his creations, like a great sun over the most fruitful years of his life, stands the towering personality of Auguste Rodin. The New Poems bear the dedication: "A mon grand ami, Auguste Rodin," indicating the twofold influence which the French sculptor wielded over the poet, that of a friend and that of an artist. ”

“ Auguste Rodin, symbolic and synthetic, surely the greatest innovator in sculpture and probably the greatest sculptor of the century just closed, has been subjected throughout his career to a systematic official and academic opposition and persecution, which have not, so far as I know, made a revolutionist of him, but which have made him a very god in the eyes of all the revolutionary elements, and which would have produced the same 376 effect, perhaps, had his art been far less convincing and colossal than it is. ”

“ The mask of "The Man with the Broken Nose" was the first portrait that Rodin modeled. In this work his individual manner of portraying a face is entirely formed. One feels his admitted devotion to reality, his reverence for every line that fate has drawn, his confidence in life that creates even where it disfigures. In a kind of blind faith he sculptured "L'Homme au Nez Cassé" without asking who the man was who lived again in his hands. He made this mask as God created the first man, without intention of presenting anything save Life itself—immeasurable Life. ”

“ Art shows man his raison d’être. It reveals to him the meaning of life, it enlightens him upon his destiny, and consequently points him on his way. When Titian painted that marvellously aristocratic society, where each person carries written in his face, imprinted in his gestures and noted in his costume, the pride of intellect, of authority and of wealth, he set before the patricians of Venice the ideal which they wished to realize. When Poussin composed his clear, majestic, orderly landscapes, where Reason seems to reign; when Puget swelled the muscles of his heroes ”

“ Does not the sculptor perform his act of adoration when he perceives the majestic character of the forms that he studies?—when, from the midst of fleeting lines, he knows how to extricate the eternal type of each being?—when he seems to discern in the very breast of the divinity the immutable models on which all living creatures are moulded? ”

“ Our eyes plunge beneath the surface to the meaning of things, and when afterwards we reproduce the form, we endow it with the spiritual meaning which it covers.
“An artist worthy of the name should express all the truth of nature, not only the exterior truth, but also, and above all, the inner truth.
“When a good sculptor models a torso, he not only represents the muscles, but the life which animates them—more than the life, the force that fashioned them and communicated to them, it may be, grace or strength, or amorous charm, or indomitable will. ”

“ This intuitive quality gives to his portraits the clear accuracy and at the same time the prophetic greatness which rises to such indescribable perfection in the figures of Victor Hugo and of Balzac. To create an image meant to Rodin to seek eternity in a countenance, that part of eternity with which the face was allied in the great course of things eternal. Each face that he has modeled he has lifted out of the bondage of the present into the freedom of the future, as one holds a thing up toward the light of the sky in order to understand its purer and simpler forms. ”

“ From the Parthenon
185“Ah! my dear Gsell,” he said, throwing me a glance of irony, “if I have expressed certain feelings in my works, it is utterly useless for me to try to put them into words, for I am not a poet, but a sculptor, and they ought to be easily read in my statues; if not, I might as well not have experienced the feelings.”
“You are right; it is for the public to discover them. So I am going to tell you all the mystery that I have found in your inspiration. ”

“ There is a history of hands; they have their own culture, their particular beauty; one concedes to them the right of their own development, their own needs, feelings, caprices and tendernesses. Rodin, knowing through the education which he has given himself that the entire body consists of scenes of life, of a life that may become in every detail individual and great, has the power to give to any part of this vibrating surface the independence of a whole. ”

“ 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 have always endeavored to express the inner feelings by the mobility of the muscles.
“This is so even in my busts, to which I have often given a certain slant, a certain obliquity, a certain expressive direction, which would emphasize the meaning of the physiognomy.
“Art cannot exist without life. If a sculptor wishes to interpret joy, sorrow, any passion whatsoever, he will not be able to move us unless he first knows how to make the beings live which he evokes. For how could the joy or the sorrow of an inert object—of a block of stone—affect us? ”

“ As paradoxical as it may seem, a great sculptor is as much a colorist as the best painter, or rather, the best engraver.
“He plays so skilfully with all the resources of relief, he blends so well the boldness of light with the modesty of shadow, that his sculptures please one as much as the most charming etchings. ”

“ His ecstasy is terrifying at times, but it is still happiness, because it is the continual adoration of truth.
50“When he sees beings everywhere destroying each other; when he sees all youth fading, all strength failing, all genius dying, when he is face to face with the will which decreed these tragic laws, more than ever he rejoices in his knowledge, and, seized anew by the passion for truth, he is happy.” ”

“ With his own development Rodin has given an impetus to all the arts in this confused age. Some time it will be realized what has made this great artist so supreme. He was a worker whose only desire was to penetrate with all his forces into the humble and difficult significance of his tools. Therein lay a certain renunciation of Life, but in just this renunciation lay his triumph, for Life entered into his work. ”