Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

ART

Copyright, 1912 by Small, Maynard and Company, Inc.

ART

BY

AUGUSTE RODIN

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF PAUL GSELL BY MRS. ROMILLY FEDDEN

WITH 106 ILLUSTRATIONS IN HALF-TONE AND PHOTOGRAVURE

BOSTON

SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1912

By Small, Maynard & Company

(INCORPORATED)

Auguste Rodin
From a photograph by Edouard J. Steichen, 1907

PREFACE

Not far from Paris, on the Seine, near Meudon, is a hamlet bearing the delightful name of Val-Fleury. Crowning the little hill above this village rises a group of buildings which in their charm and originality at once attract interest. You might almost guess that they belonged to an artist, and it is there, in fact, that Auguste Rodin has made his home.

Approaching, you find that the main buildings are three. The first, a Louis XIII. pavilion of red brick and freestone with a high-gabled roof, serves as his dwelling. Close by stands a great rotunda, entered through a columned portico, which is the one that in 1900 sheltered the special exhibition of Rodin’s work at the angle of the Pont de l’Alma in Paris; as it pleased him, he had it reerected upon this new site and uses it as his atelier. A little further on at the edge of the hill, which here falls steeply away, you see an eighteenth-century château—or rather only a façade—whose fine portal, under a triangular pediment, frames a wrought-iron gate; of this, more later.

This group, so diverse in character, is set in the midst of an idyllic orchard. The spot is certainly one of the most enchanting in the environs of Paris. Nature has done much for it, and the sculptor who settled here has beautified it with all the embellishments that his taste could suggest.

Last year, at the close of a beautiful day in May, as I walked with Auguste Rodin beneath the trees that shade his charming hill, I confided to him my wish to write, from his dictation, his ideas upon Art.

“You are an odd fellow,” he said. “So you are still interested in Art! It is an interest that is out-of-date.

The Flight of Love
By Rodin
Photograph reproduced by permission of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts

“To-day, artists and those who love artists seem like fossils. Imagine a megatherium or a diplodocus stalking the streets of Paris! There you have the impression that we must make upon our contemporaries. Ours is an epoch of engineers and of manufacturers, not one of artists.

“The search in modern life is for utility; the endeavor is to improve existence materially. Every day, science invents new processes for the feeding, clothing, or transportation of man; she manufactures cheaply inferior products in order to give adulterated luxuries to the greatest number—though it is true that she has also made real improvements in all that ministers to our daily wants. But it is no longer a question of spirit, of thought, of dreams. Art is dead.

“Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit by which Nature herself is animated. It is the joy of the intellect which sees clearly into the Universe and which recreates it, with conscientious vision. Art is the most sublime mission of man, since it is the expression of thought seeking to understand the world and to make it understood.

“But to-day, mankind believes itself able to do without Art. It does not wish to meditate, to contemplate, to dream; it wishes to enjoy physically. The heights and the depths of truth are indifferent to it; it is content to satisfy its bodily appetites. Mankind to-day is brutish—it is not the stuff of which artists are made.

“Art, moreover, is taste. It is the reflection of the artist’s heart upon all the objects that he creates. It is the smile of the human soul upon the house and upon the furnishing. It is the charm of thought and of sentiment embodied in all that is of use to man. But how many of our contemporaries feel the necessity of taste in house or furnishing? Formerly, in old France, Art was everywhere. The smallest bourgeois, even the peasant, made use only of articles which pleased the eye. Their chairs, their tables, their pitchers and their pots were beautiful. To-day Art is banished from daily life. People say that the useful need not be beautiful. All is ugly, all is made in haste and without grace by stupid machines. The artist is regarded as an antagonist. Ah, my dear Gsell, you wish to jot down an artist’s musings. Let me look at you! You really are an extraordinary man!”

Auguste Rodin
From a drawing by William Rothenstein
Reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

“I know,” I said, “that Art is the least concern of our epoch. But I trust that this book may be a protest against the ideas of to-day. I trust that your voice may awaken our contemporaries and help them to understand the crime they commit in losing the best part of our national inheritance—an intense love of Art and Beauty.”

“May the gods hear you!” Rodin answered.

We were walking along the rotunda which serves as the atelier. There under the peristyle many charming bits of antique sculpture have found shelter. A little vestal, half-veiled, faces a grave orator wrapped in his toga, while not far from them a cupid rides triumphant upon a great sea-monster. In the midst of these figures two Corinthian columns of charming grace raise their shafts of rose-colored marble. The collection here of these precious fragments shows the devotion of my host to the art of Greece and Rome.

Two swans were drowsing upon the bank of a deep pool. As we passed they unwound their long necks and hissed with anger. Their savageness prompted me to the remark that this bird lacks intelligence, but Rodin replied, laughing:

“They have that of line, and that is enough!”

As we strolled on, small cylindrical altars in marble, carved with garlands, appeared here and there in the shade. Beneath a bower, clothed with the luxuriant green of a sophora, a young Mithra without a head sacrificed a sacred bull. At a green crossway an Eros slept upon his lion-skin, sleep having overcome him who tames the beasts.

The Creation of Man, or Adam
By Rodin
Photograph reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Does it not seem to you,” Rodin asked, “that verdure is the most appropriate setting for antique sculpture? This little drowsy Eros—would you not say that he is the god of the garden? His dimpled flesh is brother to this transparent and luxuriant foliage. The Greek artists loved nature so well that their works bathe in it as in their element.”

Let us notice this attitude of mind. We place statues in a garden to beautify the garden. Rodin places them there that they may be beautified by the garden. For him, Nature is always the sovereign mistress and the infinite perfection.

A Greek amphora, in rose-colored clay, which in all probability had lain for centuries under the sea, so encrusted is it with charming sea-growths, lies upon the ground at the foot of a box-tree. It seems to have been forgotten there, and yet it could not have been presented to our eyes with more grace—for what is natural is the supreme of taste.

Further on we see a torso of Venus. The breasts are hidden by a handkerchief knotted behind the back. Involuntarily one thinks of some Tartuffe who, prompted by false modesty, has felt it his duty to conceal these charms.

“Par de pareils objêts les âmes sont blessées

Et cela fait venir de coupables pensées.”

But surely my host has nothing in common with Molière’s prude. He himself explained his reason.

“I tied that around the breast of this statue,” he said, “because that part is less beautiful than the rest.”

Then, through a door which he unbolted, he led me on to the terrace where he has raised the eighteenth-century façade of which I have spoken.

Seen close to, this noble fragment of architecture is imposing. It is a fine portal raised upon eight steps. On the pediment, which is supported by columns, Themis surrounded by Loves is carved.

EVE
By Rodin

“Formerly,” said my host, “this beautiful château rose on the slope of a neighboring hill at Issy. I often admired it as I passed. But the land speculators bought it and tore it down.” As he spoke his eyes flashed with anger. “You cannot imagine,” he continued, “what horror seized me when I saw this crime committed. To tear down this glorious building! It affected me as much as though these criminals had mangled the fair body of a virgin before my eyes!”

Rodin spoke these words in a tone of deep devotion. You felt that the firm white body of the young girl was to him the masterpiece of creation, the marvel of marvels!

He continued:

“I asked the sacrilegious rascals not to scatter the materials and to sell them to me. They consented. I had all the stones brought here to put them together again as well as I could. Unfortunately, as you see, I have as yet raised only one wall.”

In fact, in his impatience to enjoy this keen artistic pleasure, Rodin has not followed the usual and logical method which consists in raising all parts of a building at once. Up to the present time he has rebuilt only one side of the château, and when you approach to look through the iron entrance gate, you see only broken ground where lines of stones indicate the plan of the building to be. Truly a château of dreams! An artist’s château!

“Verily,” murmured my host, “those old architects were great men, especially when one compares them with their unworthy successors of to-day!”

So speaking, he drew me to a point on the terrace from which the outline of the façade seemed to him most beautiful.

“See,” he cried, “how harmoniously the silhouette cuts the silvery sky, and how it dominates the valley which lies below us.”

Lost in ecstasy, his loving gaze enveloped this monument of a day that is past and all the landscape.

Eve
By Rodin

From the height on which we stood our eyes took in an immense expanse. There, below, the Seine, mirroring long lines of tall poplars, traces a great loop of silver as it rushes towards the solid bridge at Sèvres.... Still further, the white spire of Saint-Cloud against a green hillside, the blue heights of Suresnes and Mont Valerian seem powdered with a mist of dreams.

To the right, Paris, gigantic Paris, spreads away to the horizon her great seed plot, sown with innumerable houses, so small in the distance that one might hold them in the palm of one’s hand. Paris, vision at once monstrous and sublime, colossal crucible wherein bubbles unceasingly that strange mixture of pains and pleasures, of active forces and of fevered ideals!

Paul Gsell.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I
REALISM IN ART

At the end of the long rue de l’Université, close to the Champ-de-Mars, in a corner, so deserted and monastic that you might think yourself in the provinces, is the Dépôt des Marbres.

Here in a great grass-grown court sleep heavy grayish blocks, presenting in places fresh breaks of frosted whiteness. These are the marbles reserved by the State for the sculptors whom she honors with her orders.

Along one side of this courtyard is a row of a dozen ateliers which have been granted to different sculptors. A little artist city, marvellously tranquil, it seems the fraternity house of a new order. Rodin occupies two of these cells; in one he houses the plaster cast of his Gate of Hell, astonishing even in its unfinished state, and in the other he works.

More than once I have been to see him here towards evening, when his day of toil drew to its close, and taking a chair, I have waited for the moment when the night would oblige him to stop, and I have studied him at his work. The desire to profit by the last rays of daylight threw him into a fever.

I see him now, rapidly shaping his little figures from the clay. It is a game which he enjoys in the intervals of the more patient care which he gives to his big figures. These sketches flung off on the instant delight him, because they permit him to seize the fleeting beauty of a gesture whose fugitive truth would escape deeper and longer study.

His method of work is singular. In his atelier several nude models walk about or rest.

Plaster Casts of The Gate of Hell
By Rodin

Rodin pays them to furnish him constantly with the sight of the nude moving with all the freedom of life. He observes them without ceasing, and it is thus that he has long since become familiar with the sight of muscles in movement. The nude, which for us moderns is an exceptional revelation and which even for the sculptors is generally only an apparition whose length is limited to a sitting, has become to Rodin a customary sight. The constant familiarity with the human body which the ancient Greeks acquired in watching the games—the wrestling, the throwing of the discus, the boxing, the gymnastics, and the foot races—and which permitted their artists to talk naturally on the subject of the nude, the creator of the Penseur has made sure of by the continual presence of unclothed human beings who come and go before his eyes. In this way he has learned to read the feelings as expressed in every part of the body. The face is generally considered as the only mirror of the soul; the mobility of the features of the face seems to us the only exterior expression of the spiritual life. In reality there is not a muscle of the body which does not express the inner variations of feeling. All speak of joy or of sorrow, of enthusiasm or of despair, of serenity or of madness. Outstretched arms, an unconstrained body, smile with as much sweetness as the eyes or the lips. But to be able to interpret every aspect of the flesh, one must have been drawn patiently to spell out and to read the pages of this beautiful book. 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. Quick, he seizes the clay, and a little figure is under way; then with equal haste he passes to another, which he fashions in the same manner.

Study for a Hand
By Rodin
Photograph reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Study for a Figure
By Rodin
Photograph reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

One evening when the night had begun to darken the atelier with heavy shadows, I had a talk with the master on his method.

“What astonishes me in you,” said I, “is that you work quite differently from your confrères. I know many of them and have seen them at work. They make the model mount upon a pedestal called the throne, and they tell him to take such or such a pose. Generally they bend or stretch his arms and legs to suit them, they bow his head or straighten his body exactly as though he were a lay figure. Then they set to work. You, on the contrary, wait till your models take an interesting attitude, and then you reproduce it. So much so that it is you who seem to be at their orders rather than they at yours.”

Rodin, who was engaged in wrapping his figurines in damp cloths, answered quietly:

“I am not at their orders, but at those of Nature! My confrères doubtless have their reasons for working as you have said. But in thus doing violence to nature and treating human beings like puppets, they run the risk of producing lifeless and artificial work.

“As for me, seeker after truth and student of life as I am, I shall take care not to follow their example. I take from life the movements I observe, but it is not I who impose them.

“Even when a subject which I am working on compels me to ask a model for a certain fixed pose, I indicate it to him, but I carefully avoid touching him to place him in the position, for I will reproduce only what reality spontaneously offers me.

“I obey Nature in everything, and I never pretend to command her. My only ambition is to be servilely faithful to her.”

“Nevertheless,” I answered with some malice, “it is not nature exactly as it is that you evoke in your work.”

Study
By Rodin
Photograph reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Study
By Rodin
Photograph reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

He stopped short, the damp cloth in his hands. “Yes, exactly as it is!” he replied, frowning.

“You are obliged to alter—”

“Not a jot!”

“But, after all, the proof that you do change it is this, that the cast would give not at all the same impression as your work.”

He reflected an instant and said: “That is so! Because the cast is less true than my sculpture!

“It would be impossible for any model to keep an animated pose during all the time that it would take to make a cast from it. But I keep in my mind the ensemble of the pose and I insist that the model shall conform to my memory of it. More than that,—the cast only reproduces the exterior; I reproduce, besides that, the spirit which is certainly also a part of nature.

“I see all the truth, and not only that of the outside.

“I accentuate the lines which best express the spiritual state that I interpret.”

As he spoke he showed me on a pedestal near by one of his most beautiful statues, a young man kneeling, raising suppliant arms to heaven. All his being is drawn out with anguish. His body is thrown backwards. The breast heaves, the throat is tense with despair, and the hands are thrown out towards some mysterious being to which they long to cling.

“Look!” he said to me; “I have accented the swelling of the muscles which express distress. Here, here, there—I have exaggerated the straining of the tendons which indicate the outburst of prayer.”

And, with a gesture, he underlined the most vigorous parts of his work.

“I have you, Master!” I cried ironically; “you say yourself that you have accented, accentuated, exaggerated. You see, then, that you have changed nature.”

He began to laugh at my obstinacy.

Invocation
By Rodin

“No,” he replied. “I have not changed it. Or, rather, if I have done it, it was without suspecting it at the time. The feeling which influenced my vision showed me Nature as I have copied her.

“If I had wished to modify what I saw and to make it more beautiful, I should have produced nothing good.”

An instant later he continued:

“I grant you that the artist does not see Nature as she appears to the vulgar, because his emotion reveals to him the hidden truths beneath appearances.

“But, after all, the only principle in Art is to copy what you see. Dealers in æsthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal. There is no recipe for improving nature.

“The only thing is to see.

“Oh, doubtless a mediocre man copying nature will never produce a work of art; because he really looks without seeing, and though he may have noted each detail minutely, the result will be flat and without character. But the profession of artist is not meant for the mediocre, and to them the best counsels will never succeed in giving talent.

“The artist, on the contrary, sees; that is to say, that his eye, grafted on his heart, reads deeply into the bosom of Nature.

“That is why the artist has only to trust to his eyes.”

Study
By Rodin
Photograph reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Study
By Rodin
Photograph reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

CHAPTER II
TO THE ARTIST ALL IN NATURE IS BEAUTIFUL

In Rodin’s great atelier at Meudon stands a cast of that statuette, so magnificently ugly, which the great sculptor wrought upon the text of Villon’s poem, La Belle Heaulmière.

The courtesan, once radiant with youth and grace, is now repulsive with age and decrepitude. Once proud of her beauty, she is now filled with shame at her ugliness.

“Ha, vieillesse felonne et fière,

Pourquoi m’as tu si tôt abattue?

Qui me tient que je ne me fière (frappe)

Et qu’à ce coup je ne me tue!”[^[1]]

[1]. See page [249].

The sculptor has followed the poet step by step. The old hag, more shrivelled than a mummy, mourns her physical decay. Bent double, crouching on her haunches, she gazes despairingly upon her breasts so pitiably shrunken, upon her hideously wrinkled body, upon her arms and legs more knotty than vine stocks.

“Quand je pense, las! au bon temps,

Quelle fus, quelle devenue,

Quand me regarde toute nue

Et je me vois si très changée.

Pauvre, sêche, maigre, menue,

Je suis presque tout enragée!

Qu’est devenue ce front poli,

Ces cheveux blonds....

Ces gentes épaules menues,

Petite tetins, hanches charnues,

Elevées, propres, faictisse (faites à souhait)

A tenir d’amoureuses lices;

C’est d’humaine beauté l’issue!

Les bras courts et les mains contraictes (contractées),

Les épaules toutes bossue.

Mamelles, quoi! toutes retraites (dessechées)

Telles les hanches et que les tettes!

Quant aux cuisses,

Cuisses ne sont plus, mais cuissettes

Grivelées comme saucisses!”[^[2]]

[2]. See page [249].

The Old Courtesan
By Rodin

The Magdalene
By Donatello

The sculptor does not fall below the poet in realism. On the contrary, his work, in the horror which it inspires, is perhaps even more impressive than the truculent verses of Maître Villon. The skin hangs in flaccid folds upon the skeleton; the ribs stand out beneath the parchment that covers them, and the whole figure seems to totter, to tremble, to shrivel, to shrink away.

Yet from this spectacle, at once grotesque and heartrending, a great sorrow breathes.

For what we have before us is the infinite distress of a poor foolish soul which, enamoured of eternal youth and beauty, looks on helpless at the ignominious disgrace of its fleshly envelope; it is the antithesis of the spiritual being which demands endless joy and of the body which wastes away, decays, ends in nothingness. The substance perishes, the flesh dies, but dreams and desires are immortal.

This is what Rodin has wished to make us understand.

And I do not think that any other artist has ever pictured old age with such savage crudity, except one. In the Baptistery at Florence you see upon an altar a strange statue by Donatello—an old woman naked, or at least draped only in the long, thin hair which clings foully to her ruined body. It is Saint Magdalene in the desert, bowed with age, offering to God the cruel mortifications to which she subjects her body as a punishment for the care which she formerly lavished upon it.

The savage sincerity of the Florentine master is so great that it is not even surpassed by Rodin himself. But, aside from this, the sentiment of the two works differs completely, for, while Saint Magdalene in her voluntary renunciation seems to grow more radiant as she sees herself growing more repulsive, the old Heaulmière is terrified at finding herself like a very corpse.

A Hand in Bronze
By Rodin

The modern sculpture is, therefore, much more tragic than the older work.

One day, having studied this figure in the atelier for some moments in silence, I said:

“Master, no one admires this astonishing figure more than I, but I hope you will not be annoyed if I tell you the effect it produces upon many of the visitors to the Musée du Luxembourg, especially upon the women.”

“I shall be much obliged to you if you will.”

“Well, the public generally turn away from it, crying, ‘Oh, how ugly it is!’ and I have often seen women cover their eyes with their hands to shut out the sight.”

Rodin laughed heartily.

“My work must be eloquent,” he said, “to make such a vivid impression, and doubtless these are people who dread stern philosophic truths.

“But what solely matters to me is the opinion of people of taste, and I have been delighted to gain their approbation for my Vieille Heaulmière. I am like that Roman singer who replied to the jeers of the populace: Equitibus cano. I sing only for the nobles! that is to say, for the connoisseurs.

“The vulgar readily imagine that what they consider ugly in existence is not fit subject for the artist. They would like to forbid us to represent what displeases and offends them in nature.

“It is a great error on their part.

“What is commonly called ugliness in nature can in art become full of great beauty.

“In the domain of fact we call ugly whatever is deformed, whatever is unhealthy, whatever suggests the idea of disease, of debility, or of suffering, whatever is contrary to regularity, which is the sign and condition of health and strength: a hunchback is ugly, one who is bandy-legged is ugly, poverty in rags is ugly.

Sebastian, Fool of Philip IV
By Velasquez

“Ugly also are the soul and the conduct of the immoral man, of the vicious and criminal man, of the abnormal man who is harmful to society; ugly the soul of the parricide, of the traitor, of the unscrupulously ambitious.

“And it is right that beings and objects from which we can expect only evil should be called by such an odious epithet. But let a great artist or a great writer make use of one or the other of these uglinesses, instantly it is transfigured: with a touch of his fairy wand he has turned it into beauty; it is alchemy; it is enchantment!

“Let Velasquez paint Sebastian, the dwarf of Philippe IV. He endows him with such a touching gaze that we instantly read in it all the painful secret of this poor afflicted creature, forced, for his livelihood, to lower his human dignity, to become a plaything, a living bauble. And the more poignant the martyrdom of the conscience lodged in this grotesque body, the more beautiful is the artist’s work.

“Let François Millet represent a peasant resting for a moment as he leans on the handle of his hoe, a wretched man worn by fatigue, baked by the sun, as stupid as a beast of burden dulled by blows—he has only to put into the expression of this poor devil a sublime resignation to the suffering ordained by Destiny, to make this creature of a nightmare become for us the great symbol of all Humanity.

“Let Beaudelaire describe a festering corpse, unclean, viscid, eaten by worms, and let him but imagine his beloved mistress under this frightful aspect, and nothing can equal in splendor his picture of this terrible juxtaposition of beauty which we could wish eternal and the atrocious disintegration which awaits it.

“Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure,

A cette horrible infection.

Etoile de mes yeux, Soleil de ma nature,

O mon ange et ma passion!

Oui, telle vous serez, o la reine des Grâces

Après les derniers sacrements.

Quand vous irez sous l’herbe et les floraisons grasses

Pourrir parmi les ossements.

Alors, o ma Beauté, dîtes à la vermine

Qui vous mangerez de baisers,

Que j’ai gardé la forme et l’essence divine

De mes amours décomposés![^[3]]

[3]. See page [250].

The Man with the Hoe
By Millet

“It is the same when Shakespeare depicts Iago or Richard III., when Racine paints Nero and Narcissus; moral ugliness when interpreted by minds so clear and penetrating becomes a marvellous theme of beauty.

“In fact, in art, only that which has character is beautiful.

“Character is the essential truth of any natural object, whether ugly or beautiful; it is even what one might call a double truth, for it is the inner truth translated by the outer truth; it is the soul, the feelings, the ideas, expressed by the features of a face, by the gestures and actions of a human being, by the tones of a sky, by the lines of a horizon.

“Now, to the great artist, everything in nature has character; for the unswerving directness of his observation searches out the hidden meaning of all things. And that which is considered ugly in nature often presents more character than that which is termed beautiful, because in the contractions of a sickly countenance, in the lines of a vicious face, in all deformity, in all decay, the inner truth shines forth more clearly than in features that are regular and healthy.

“And as it is solely the power of character which makes for beauty in art, it often happens that the uglier a being is in nature, the more beautiful it becomes in art.

“There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character, that is to say, that which offers no outer or inner truth.

“Whatever is false, whatever is artificial, whatever seeks to be pretty rather than expressive, whatever is capricious and affected, whatever smiles without motive, bends or struts without cause, is mannered without reason; all that is without soul and without truth; all that is only a parade of beauty and grace; all, in short, that lies, is ugliness in art.

“When an artist, intending to improve upon nature, adds green to the springtime, rose to the sunrise, carmine to young lips, he creates ugliness because he lies.

“When he softens the grimace of pain, the shapelessness of age, the hideousness of perversion, when he arranges nature—veiling, disguising, tempering it to please the ignorant public—then he is creating ugliness because he fears the truth.

“To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.

“He has only to look into a human face in order to read there the soul within—not a feature deceives him; hypocrisy is as transparent as sincerity—the line of a forehead, the least lifting of a brow, the flash of an eye, reveal to him all the secrets of a heart.

“Or he may study the hidden mind of the animal. A mixture of feelings and of thoughts, of dumb intelligences and of rudimentary affections, he reads the whole humble moral life of the beast in its eyes and in its movements.

“He is even the confidant of nature. The trees, the plants talk to him like friends. The old gnarled oaks speak to him of their kindliness for the human race whom they protect beneath their sheltering branches. The flowers commune with him by the gracious swaying of their stalks, by the singing tones of their petals—each blossom amidst the grass is a friendly word addressed to him by nature.

“For him life is an endless joy, a perpetual delight, a mad intoxication. Not that all seems good to him, for suffering, which must often come to those he loves and to himself, cruelly contradicts his optimism. But all is beautiful to him because he walks forever in the light of spiritual truth.

“Yes, the great artist, and by this I mean the poet as well as the painter and the sculptor, finds even in suffering, in the death of loved ones, in the treachery of friends, something which fills him with a voluptuous though tragic admiration.

“At times his own heart is on the rack, yet stronger than his pain is the bitter joy which he experiences in understanding and giving expression to that pain. In all existence he clearly divines the purposes of Destiny. Upon his own anguish, upon his own gaping wounds, he fixes the enthusiastic gaze of the man who has read the decrees of Fate. Deceived by a beloved one, he reels beneath the blow; then, standing firm, he looks upon the traitor as a fine example of the base. He salutes ingratitude as an experience which shall enrich his soul. His ecstasy is terrifying at times, but it is still happiness, because it is the continual adoration of truth.

“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.”

THE DANAÏD
By Rodin

CHAPTER III
MODELLING

One late afternoon, when I was with Rodin in his atelier, darkness set in while we talked.

“Have you ever looked at an antique statue by lamplight?” my host suddenly demanded.

“No, never,” I answered, with some surprise.

“I astonish you. You seem to consider the idea of studying sculpture excepting by daylight as an odd whim. Of course you can get the effect as a whole better by daylight. But, wait a moment. I want to show you a kind of experiment which will doubtless prove instructive.”

He lighted a lamp as he spoke, took it in his hand, and led me towards a marble statue which stood upon a pedestal in a corner of the atelier.

It was a delightful little antique copy of the Venus di Medici. Rodin kept it there to stimulate his own inspiration while he worked.

“Come nearer,” he said.

Holding the lamp at the side of the statue and as close as possible, he threw the full light upon the body.

“What do you notice?” he asked.

At the first glance I was extraordinarily struck by what was suddenly revealed to me.

The light so directed, indeed, disclosed numbers of slight projections and depressions upon the surface of the marble which I should never have suspected. I said so to Rodin.

“Good!” he cried approvingly; then, “Watch closely.”

Venus di Medici

At the same time he slowly turned the moving stand which supported the Venus. As he turned, I still noticed in the general form of the body a multitude of almost imperceptible roughnesses. What had at first seemed simple was really of astonishing complexity. Rodin threw up his head smiling.

“Is it not marvellous?” he cried. “Confess that you did not expect to discover so much detail. Just look at these numberless undulations of the hollow which unites the body to the thigh. Notice all the voluptuous curvings of the hip. And now, here, the adorable dimples along the loins.”

He spoke in a low voice, with the ardor of a devotee, bending above the marble as if he loved it.

“It is truly flesh!” he said.

And beaming, he added: “You would think it moulded by kisses and caresses!” Then, suddenly, laying his hand on the statue, “You almost expect, when you touch this body, to find it warm.”

A few moments later he said:

“Well, what do you think now of the opinion usually held on Greek art? They say—it is especially the academic school which has spread abroad this idea—that the ancients, in their cult of the ideal, despised the flesh as low and vulgar, and that they refused to reproduce in their works the thousand details of material reality.

“They pretend that the ancients wished to teach Nature by creating an abstract beauty of simplified form which should appeal only to the intellect and not consent to flatter the senses. And those who talk like this take examples which they imagine they find in antique art as their authority for correcting, for emasculating nature, reducing it to contours so dry, cold, and meagre that they have nothing in common with the truth.

“You have just proved how much they are mistaken.

A Drawing
By Michael Angelo
See page [98]

Antique Torso
Bibliothèque Nationale

“Without doubt the Greeks with their powerfully logical minds instinctively accentuated the essential. They accented the dominant traits of the human type; nevertheless they never suppressed living detail. They were satisfied to envelop it and melt it into the whole. As they were enamoured of calm rhythms, they involuntarily subjected all secondary reliefs which should disturb the serenity of a movement; but they carefully refrained from entirely obliterating them.

“They never made a method out of falsehood.

“Full of respect and love for Nature, they always represented her as they saw her. And on every occasion they passionately testified their worship of the flesh. For it is madness to believe that they despised it. Among no other people has the beauty of the human body excited a more sensuous tenderness. A transport of ecstasy seems to hover over all the forms that they modelled.

“Thus is explained the unbelievable difference which separates the false academic ideal from Greek art. While among the ancients the generalization of lines is totalization, a result made up of all the details, the academic simplification is an impoverishment, an empty bombastry. While life animates and warms the palpitating muscles of the Greek statues, the inconsistent dolls of academic art look as if they were chilled by death.”

He was silent for a time, then—

“I will tell you a great secret. Do you know how the impression of actual life, which we have just felt before that Venus, is produced?

“By the science of modelling.

“These words seem banal to you, but you will soon gauge their importance.

“The science of modelling was taught me by one Constant, who worked in the atelier where I made my début as a sculptor. One day, watching me model a capital ornamented with foliage—‘Rodin,’ he said to me, ‘you are going about that in the wrong way. All your leaves are seen flat. That is why they do not look real. Make some with the tips pointed at you, so that, in seeing them, one has the sensation of depth.’ I followed his advice and I was astounded at the result that I obtained. ‘Always remember what I am about to tell you,’ went on Constant. ‘Henceforth, when you carve, never see the form in length, but always in thickness. Never consider a surface except as the extremity of a volume, as the point, more or less large, which it directs towards you. In that way you will acquire the science of modelling.’

Crouching Venus

“This principle was astonishingly fruitful to me. I applied it to the execution of figures. Instead of imagining the different parts of a body as surfaces more or less flat, I represented them as projectures of interior volumes. I forced myself to express in each swelling of the torso or of the limbs the efflorescence of a muscle or of a bone which lay deep beneath the skin. And so the truth of my figures, instead of being merely superficial, seems to blossom from within to the outside, like life itself.

“Now I have discovered that the ancients practised precisely this method of modelling. And it is certainly to this technique that their works owe at once their vigor and their palpitating suppleness.”

Rodin contemplated afresh his exquisite Greek Venus. And suddenly he said:

“In your opinion, Gsell, is color a quality of painting or of sculpture?”

“Of painting, naturally.”

“Well, then, just look at this statue.”

So saying, he raised the lamp as high as he could in order to light the antique torso from above.

“Just see the high lights on the breasts, the heavy shadows in the folds of the flesh, and then this paleness, these vaporous half-tones, trembling over the most delicate portions of this divine body, these bits so finely shaded that they seem to dissolve in air. What do you say to it? Is it not a great symphony in black and white?”

I had to agree.

“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.

Faun
By Praxiteles

“Now color—it is to this remark that I wished to lead—is the flower of fine modelling. These two qualities always accompany each other, and it is these qualities which give to every masterpiece of the sculptor the radiant appearance of living flesh.”

The Age of Iron
By Rodin

CHAPTER IV
MOVEMENT IN ART

There are two statues by Rodin at the Musée du Luxembourg which especially attract and hold me; l’Age d’Airain (the Iron Age) and Saint-Jean-Baptiste. They seem even more full of life than the others, if that is possible. The other works of the Master which bear them company are certainly all quivering with truth; they all produce the impression of real flesh, they all breathe, but these move.

One day in the Master’s atelier at Meudon I told him my especial fondness for these two figures.

“They are certainly among those in which I have carried imitative art farthest,” he replied. “Though I have produced others whose animation is not less striking; for example, my Bourgeois de Calais, my Balzac, my Homme qui marche (Man walking).

“And even in those of my works in which action is less pronounced, I have always sought to give some indication of movement. I have very rarely represented complete repose. 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? Now, the illusion of life is obtained in our art by good modelling and by movement. These two qualities are like the blood and the breath of all good work.”

Man Walking
By Rodin

“Master,” I said, “you have already talked to me of modelling, and I have noticed that since then I am better able to appreciate the masterpieces of sculpture. I should like to ask a few questions about movement, which, I feel, is not less important.

“When I look at your figure of the Iron Age, who awakes, fills his lungs and raises high his arms; or at your Saint John, who seems to long to leave his pedestal to carry abroad his words of faith, my admiration is mixed with amazement. It seems to me that there is sorcery in this science which lends movement to bronze. I have also studied other chefs-d’œuvre of your great predecessors; for example, Maréchal Ney and the Marseillaise by Rude, the Dance by Carpeaux, as well as Barye’s wild animals, and I confess that I have never found any satisfactory explanation for the effect which these sculptures produce upon me. I continue to ask myself how such masses of stone and iron can possibly seem to move, how figures so evidently motionless can yet appear to act and even to lend themselves to violent effort.”

“As you take me for a sorcerer,” Rodin answered, “I shall try to do justice to my reputation by accomplishing a task much more difficult for me than animating bronze—that of explaining how I do it.

“Note, first, that movement is the transition from one attitude to another.

“This simple statement, which has the air of a truism, is, to tell the truth, the key to the mystery.

“You have certainly read in Ovid how Daphne was transformed into a bay-tree and Progne into a swallow. This charming writer shows us the body of the one taking on its covering of leaves and bark and the members of the other clothing themselves in feathers, so that in each of them one still sees the woman which will cease to be and the tree or bird which she will become. You remember, too, how in Dante’s Inferno a serpent, coiling itself about the body of one of the damned, changes into man as the man becomes reptile. The great poet describes this scene so ingeniously that in each of these two beings one follows the struggle between two natures which progressively invade and supplant each other.

The Tempest
By Rodin
Photograph reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

“It is, in short, a metamorphosis of this kind that the painter or the sculptor effects in giving movement to his personages. He represents the transition from one pose to another—he indicates how insensibly the first glides into the second. In his work we still see a part of what was and we discover a part of what is to be. An example will enlighten you better.

“You mentioned just now the statue of Marshal Ney by Rude. Do you recall the figure clearly?”

“Yes,” I said. “The hero raises his sword, shouting ‘Forward’ to his troops at the top of his voice.”

“Exactly! Well—when you next pass that statue, look at it still more closely. You will then notice this: the legs of the statue and the hand which holds the sheath of the sabre are placed in the attitude that they had when he drew—the left leg is drawn back so that the sabre may be easily grasped by the right hand, which has just drawn it; and as for the left hand, it is arrested in the air as if still offering the sheath.