Rodin

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Rodin has, for the most part, executed portraits of foreign women, especially American women. There are among these busts some of wonderful craftsmanship, marbles that are like pure and perfect antique cameos. Faces whose smiles play softly over the features like veils that seem to rise and fall with every breath; strangely half-closed lips and eyes which seem to look dreamily into the bright effulgence of an everlasting moonlit night. To Rodin the face of a woman seems to be a part of her beautiful body. ”

“ In his impetuous affection he threw himself right on the neck of Rodin, pressed him in his arms with an effusion of tenderness, and kissed him over and over again upon both cheeks, so loudly and plentifully that the echo resounded through the apartment. In his life Rodin had never been so treated. More and more uneasy at the treachery which must needs lurk under such warm embraces, and irritated by his own evil presentiments, the French Jesuit did, all he could to extricate himself from the Roman's exaggerated tokens of tenderness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We must listen to Rodin as we would listen to Michelangelo or Rembrandt if they were living. For his method may be the starting-point of an artistic renaissance in Europe, perhaps throughout the whole world. Definite signs of a decided resurrection in taste are already manifesting themselves, and it is a splendid satisfaction for the illustrious sculptor to receive such acknowledgment in his glorious old age. For, like every great genius, he has a profound love for the race from which he springs, and feels a strong instinctive confidence in it. ”

“ One recalls the broad, solidly-built figure of Rodin with his rugged features and high, finely chiselled forehead, moving slowly among the white glistening marble busts and statues as a giant in an old legend moves among the rocks and mountains of his realm, patient, all-enduring, the man who has mastered life, strong and tempered by the storms of time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The dazzling richness of modeling, the majesty of the great figures of the prodigious Florentine, and their fullness of movement—for their immobility is charged with movement—the somber melancholy of his thought, his flaming and shadowy soul, his literary romanticism, a romanticism like that of Shakspere, overwhelmed Rodin with that formidable sense of an almost sorrowful admiration that all experience who visit the Medici tombs in the new sacristy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Like all great men working in the grip of a unifying idea, Rodin modified the technique of sculpture so that it would serve him as sound does a musical composer. A lover of music his inner ear may dictate the vibrating rhythms of his forms; his marbles are ever musical, ever in modulation, not "frozen music," as Goethe said of Gothic architecture, but silent, swooning music. This Gate is a Frieze of Paris, as deeply significant of modern inspiration and sorrow as the Parthenon Frieze is the symbol of the great clear beauty of Hellas. ”

“ The cardinal, amazed at this sudden transfiguration, asked himself if he beheld the same man, who, a few minutes before, had fallen back on his bed, almost insensible. Hardly had Rodin finished reading, than he uttered a cry of stifled joy, saying, with an accent impossible to describe: "ONE gone! it works—'tis well!" And, closing his eyes in a kind of ecstatic transport, a smile of proud triumph overspread his face, and rendered him still more hideous, by discovering his yellow and gumless teeth. His emotion was so violent, that the paper fell from his trembling hand. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This remark wonderfully characterizes Rodin's intellectuality as it appears to us to-day. Rich in years and experience, his intellect is in truth as complicated as a cathedral, but like it, too, superbly simple in its general structure. His intellect possesses the wealth of detail that makes up life and the calm balance of the laws that govern nature. His mind, formed on principles scrupulously controlled by observation, abounds in that wonderful artistic imagination which is the poetry of life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The study of light has been carried in these to the supreme nuances. More and more Rodin detests what is black, what is hard, what is dry. He adores, on the other hand, that which is supple, enveloped, drowned in the light mist of the atmosphere. He conceives everything through an almost imperceptible veil which softens the contours, and which he discerns with an eye that grows every day more sensitive. His sculpture has followed the same path. ”

“ When we contemplate one who is wounded or ill, obscure impressions agitate our spirit, impelling it toward ideas higher than those of wounds and illness. It skirts the frontiers of death, the enigma of annihilation or of the world to come, and all those unformulated sentiments, which in their confused flight haunt the profound regions of the soul. Before his beautiful model Rodin experienced these emotions and transcribed them upon his sculpture. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here already Rodin's deep harmony with Nature revealed itself; that harmony which the poet George Rodenbach calls an elemental power. And, indeed, it is an underlying patience in Rodin which renders him so great, a silent, superior forbearance resembling the wonderful patience and kindness of Nature that begins creation with a trifle in order to proceed silently and steadily toward abundant consummation. Rodin did not presume to create the tree in its full growth. He began with the seed beneath the earth, as it were. ”

“ As it happened, the casts of the Iron Age and of Saint John the Baptist stood in the great hall where we were. Rodin asked me to look at them. And I at once recognized the truth of his words.
I noticed that in the first of these works the movement appears to mount, as in the statue of Ney. The legs of the youth, who is not yet fully awake, are still lax and almost vacillating, but as your eye mounts you see the pose become firmer—the ribs rise beneath the skin, the chest expands, the face is lifted towards the sky, and the two arms stretch in an endeavor to throw off their torpor. ”

“ Practically instantaneous is the method of Rodin to register the fleeting attitudes, the first shivering surface. He rapidly draws with his eye on the model. It is often a mere scrawl, a silhouette, a few enveloping lines. But there is vitality in it all, and for his purpose, a notation of a motion. But a sculptor has made these extraordinary drawings, not a painter. It may be well to observe the distinction. And he is the most rhythmic sculptor among the moderns. Rhythm means for him the codification of beauty. ”

“ Sculpture, he asserts, is the "art of the hole and lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodeled figures." Finish kills vitality. Yet Rodin can chisel a smooth nymph, if he so wills, but her flesh will ripple and run in the sunlight. His art is one of accents. He works by profile in depth, not by surfaces. He swears by what he calls "cubic truth"; his pattern is a mathematical figure; the pivot of art is balance, i.e., the opposition of volumes produced by movement. Unity haunts him. He is a believer in the correspondence of things, of continuity in nature. ”

“ Those who know Rodin well know that, on the contrary, he never fails to give serious consideration to anything which is worth considering at all and that his power of observation is the basis of his genius. Always seeking a final method, he came back to the idea with which his earliest education had already inspired him and which his self-communings had only confirmed: that the value of sculpture lies entirely in the modeling. This is the secret of Michelangelo; it is also that of the ancients and of all the great artists of the past and of modern times. ”

“ Drawing about him Adrienne, Dagobert, and Mother Bunch, Rodin said to them in a low voce, and with a mysterious air: “Have you never heard of a powerful association, which extends its net over all the earth, and counts its disciples, agents, and fanatics in every class of society which has had, and often has still, the ear of kings and nobles—which, in a word, can raise its creatures to the highest positions, and with a word can reduce them again to the nothingness from which it alone could uplift them?” ”

“ 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. ”