Chapter VI: Appendix--Chronological List of Rodin's Principal Works--List (1)

OF THE PRINCIPAL BOOKS OR ARTICLES WRITTEN ABOUT HIM--QUOTATIONS REFERRING TO HIM--AN OPINION OF EUGÈNE CARRIÈRE'S; AN OPINION OF HENLEY'S--VARIOUS NOTES

INDEX 141

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ETERNAL SPRING (photogravure) _Frontispiece_
THE AGE OF BRASS
THE AGE OF BRASS
ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST PREACHING
EVE
SKETCH FOR THE MONUMENT TO THE DEFENDERS OF THE NATION
UGOLINO AND HIS CHILDREN
BELLONA
BELLONA
VICTOR HUGO (dry-point)
VICTOR HUGO (dry-point)
BUST OF VICTOR HUGO
MONUMENT TO VICTOR HUGO (fragment)
VICTOR HUGO (fragment)
NEREIDS (group at base of the Victor Hugo monument)
SHADES (for the top of _The Gate of Hell_)
THE THINKER
DANAID
DANAID
THOUGHT
THE FAIR HELMET-MAKER
A NYMPH (bronze)
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES
JEAN PAUL LAURENS
BUST OF MADAME V.
THE BURGHERS OF CALAIS
A BURGHER OF CALAIS
A BURGHER OF CALAIS
A BURGHER OF CALAIS
BALZAC
BALZAC
PRIMITIVE MAN
YOUNG WOMAN BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL COUNSEL
IRIS
NUDE STUDY
AUGUSTE RODIN
CORNER OF RODIN'S STUDIO AT MEUDON
CORNER OF RODIN'S STUDIO AT MEUDON
STUDY IN BRONZE FOR THE "BALZAC"
NUDE FIGURE (photographed in the open air, at twilight,
in the garden in Meudon)

AUGUSTE RODIN

I

YOUTH AND EARLY WORK OF RODIN--HIS FIRST ATTEMPTS; HIS TIME AT CARRIER'S--HIS STAY IN BRUSSELS AND WORK THERE--"THE AGE OF BRASS" AT THE SALON OF 1877; THE INCIDENT ARISING IN REGARD TO IT--THE "ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST"; BEGINNING OF RODIN'S REPUTATION

Auguste Rodin was born in Paris, in the Val de Grâce quarter, on the 14th of November, 1840, of a family of humble employés. The child at first attended a day-school in the Rue Saint Jacques, then went to a boarding-school at Beauvais, kept by his uncle. At fourteen he returned to Paris and entered the school of art in the Rue de l'École de Médecine. A period of desperate industry at once set in for him.

In addition to the lessons of this little school, where from eight to twelve young Rodin learned the elements of drawing, and later on of modelling, copied drawings in crayons and reliefs in the Louis XVI. style, he went twice a week to Barye's classes at the Jardin des Plantes; "Barye," he says, "did not teach us much; he was always worried and tired when he came, and always told us that it was very good." But Rodin, together with Barye's son and some other lads, had arranged a sort of studio for themselves in a cellar of the museum, making seats of tree-trunks, and already attempting sculpture. At six in the morning he used to go to draw animals, then he copied the anatomical objects in the Museum. He remembers that, being too poor to buy an anatomy of the horse, he copied it piece by piece. After Barye's class, or the classes of the Rue de l'École de Médecine, he would lunch on a bit of bread and some chocolate and hasten to the Louvre, and in the evenings he would go to draw and study at the Gobelins. Then he worked for a maker of ornaments, since it was necessary to earn a living. From fourteen to seventeen years old Rodin led this fevered existence. "In those three years," he has often repeated to me, "I came to understand the meaning of a drawing from the life, the synthesis of my art, and the rhythm of animals. I remember that a companion of those days,[1] of whom I have since lost sight, made me see, in a couple of hours, on a very true and simple principle, an observation of the necessary equilibria of movement not taught in the schools, the secret of the plans of a figure. That lesson has influenced my whole life. As for the ornament-maker, in whose workshop I earned a scanty wage, I long deplored being constrained to do so, but I have since thought with affection of it, understanding that there are as many sources of beauty in ornament as in the face."

His work at the ornament-maker's allowed Rodin to earn his living as an art-worker and as a strenuous and silent student; and he vegetated in this manner until he attained his twenty-fourth year, never ceasing, in spite of his poverty and of his daily labour, to work at sculpture. Then he offered himself as an assistant and pupil at the studio of Carrier-Belleuse. Carrier-Belleuse was then at the full height of his reputation as an elegant sculptor, whose real gifts of spontaneous invention were being rendered insipid by his desire to please. Rodin remained six years at Carrier-Belleuse's, and worked there without gaining much instruction. But he meditated and taught himself. From his twenty-fourth year dates the head known as _The Man with the Broken Nose_, which is a masterly work, strongly inspired by the antique, and already foreshadowing all his future. This clay head, which the young man sent to the Salon of 1864, was refused. From time to time Rodin tried to compete for admission to the École des Beaux Arts; he was thrice refused. This disgusted him with the usual career upon which his lack of any income invited him to enter. His ideas, his independent temper, his presentiments, and his love of an art personal to himself, showed him that he would never gain anything, and never have the academic discipline necessary to succeed. He took advantage of an opportunity. Carrier-Belleuse had a commission at Brussels and did not care to execute it; Rodin got permission from his master, who esteemed him, to undertake it in his name, and, after having spent six years in the fashionable sculptor's studio, he went to Brussels, where Rude had already spent a considerable time. He was destined to remain there until 1877, working with the Belgian sculptor, Van Rasbourg, at the pediment of the Bourse, where his sign manual may still be seen, as it may upon some caryatids of a house on the Boulevard d'Anspach and upon some other works.

Of this exile at Brussels we know that the artist retains only kindly memories, but he is too sparing of personal details to enable us to analyse with any certainty this part of the life of a tenacious, concentrated man who, entirely occupied with his dreams, with indefatigable study, the anxieties of poverty, and his lonely pride, had no desire to be known.

"I worked very hard over there," he says, to sum up the matter. It is certain that Rodin was at this time already in possession of that formidable will which led to his success, and also of that disdainful obstinacy which prefers obscurity and lack of success to any compromise. He speaks little or not at all of the drama that was being worked out in him at this time, or of the way in which he refined and cultivated his perceptions, nor of the painting lessons that he took of Lecoq de Boisbaudron, in company of Alphonse Legros, who became his intimate friend; but this influence of Lecoq de Boisbaudron must not pass unnoted. It does great honour to that master teacher who has formed so many eminent modern artists. His seven years' stay at Brussels allowed Rodin to live modestly but decently, amid quiet surroundings, to reflect, and to shape himself intellectually; it was a sort of spiritual retreat that did him good, apart from the fact that he gained a thorough knowledge of the Flemish Primitives and of the Gothic masters who were so strongly to influence him. No biography, however, could render comprehensible the way in which, for example, the brain of a low-born and poor child was able, amid poverty and incessant manual labour, to grow into the wide and deep brain of a thinker familiar with the synthesis of art; these things are the secrets of personality.

Rodin was destined to emerge suddenly from obscurity at the age of thirty-seven, that is to say, at a time of life when many men think themselves hopelessly sacrificed, and when he had already produced much and suffered much; for it may be said that the whole of his work from 1855-75 is unknown and lost, and yet what labour it represents! Except _The Man with the Broken Nose_, none of it is ever mentioned; the pediment of the Bourse at Brussels is crumbling away, time is devouring Rodin's work upon it no less than Van Rasbourg's; he will not speak of the many figures that he made to the order of Carrier-Belleuse and interpreted according to his own free inspiration; and he only occasionally alludes to a large figure that was broken in a household removal, and was, in his opinion, one of the best he ever made in his life. In 1876 _The Man with the Broken Nose,_ in marble, was admitted to the Salon. This determined Rodin in 1877 to send in his statue, _The Age of Brass,_ and this gave rise to an incident, the very injustice of which was to bring him into notice.

The jury,[2] astonished by this work, admitted it, but accused the artist of having taken a cast from life, so perfect was the modelling. The practice of taking a cast from the life is unhappily frequent, and we know he praised academicians who employ this artistic fraud without any scruple. Rodin protested. He had had a Belgian soldier for his model in Brussels: he had photographs taken of him and sent them to the jury, who did not even open the packet, and persisted in the allegations. Three sculptors, however, Desbois, Fagel, and Lefèvre, who thenceforward became Rodin's friends, protested in his favour, some critics spoke of the affair, and Rodin's work made so much impression that the secretary of the Fine Arts, Turquet, bought _The Age of Brass_ (which stood for a long time in the Luxembourg Gardens and is now in the museum).

Rodin waited until 1880 to exhibit _St. John the Baptist_. Meanwhile Turquet had conceived a friendship for him and wished to wipe out the unjust accusation brought against _The Age of Brass._ The inspectors of the Fine Arts department disowned the purchase of that work and declared it cast from life. Rodin, discouraged, remained silent; a chance saved him. As he was continuing to look for work in order to support his young wife and himself, and to defray the expenses of his art, he chanced to be executing a group of children in a composition for the sculptor Boucher. His facility was prodigious; Boucher saw him improvise the group in a few hours and went, thunderstruck, to tell some of his friends. He had the honesty to declare that such a man, having done thus before his own eyes, was capable of making _The Age of Brass._ Chapu, Thomas, Falguière, Delaplanche, Chaplin, Carrier-Belleuse, and Paul Dubois insisted loyally, and Rodin's cause was won. Turquet, delighted, and free to act, bought the _St. John the Baptist_ and gave Rodin a commission. Then the artist answered: "I am ready to fulfil it. But to prove surely that I do not take casts from the life I will make little bas-reliefs--an immense work with small figures, and I think of taking the subject from Dante." This was the origin of that celebrated _Gate of Hell_, which is not yet completed, and which, continually handled afresh, has finally become the central motive of all Rodin's dreams, the storehouse of his ideas and researches.

From that time forward (1880) Rodin was what he is to-day; he had emerged, once for all, from obscurity, and went on to display without interruption and without hesitation the succession of works that have rendered him celebrated. He knew his path, his method, his field of thought. From the age of sixteen to that of forty he had, by unknown persistent labour, been ripening his individuality. And his work, from _The Age of Brass_ to the _Balzac_, is but a visible development of that hidden period. The period from the _Balzac_ to our own day testifies to a new theory that he has framed. But one may say that the Rodin of the years from 1877 to 1897 was entirely contained in the unknown man of the preceding period. It was, indeed, that slow preparation that gave to the revelation of the works that appearance of certainty, of sudden mastery, which so struck people's minds. We are accustomed to see artists make youthful successes with works of brilliant promise, then we follow their course and see them growing greater. Rodin came to light in twenty-four hours. He was thought to be a young beginner; his past struggle was unknown; people were aware of him only when he had done with scruples and had, as he says, "made peace with himself." From this fact came his prestige. From it came also his well-defined attitude in regard to academic art.

We need to recall the graceful, effeminate, and conventional statuary of the generation from 1865 to 1875 in order to comprehend fully what _The Age of Brass_ and _St. John the Baptist_ brought into the exhibitions when they made their appearance there. Rough truth, a sense of movement, an intense realism, an absolute scorn of the pleasing, a lofty style, a deep feeling of organic life, power due to the eager love of form, of muscular formation and physical activity; all these things inevitably shocked the gentle sculptors who were enamoured of the academic style and of mythology. Moreover, Rodin was unknown; he had no claim, knew nobody, had never asked for anything, and was a son of the people. That Carrier-Belleuse's former workman should take upon himself to make statues all by himself aroused scorn. His technical skill was so great that there could be no possibility of denying it. Therefore, in spite, the accusation of casting from the life was invented. The accusers did not reflect upon the splendid testimonial that would be given to the artist if he should succeed in proving that his skill alone had created this perfection. The amusing thing is that the same people who declared this skill too great to be anything but a reproduction, accused Rodin, twenty years later, over his _Balzac_, of not knowing his craft! Apart from this question of fact, and these professional jealousies, the style of these works could not fail to displease. In them there was already a sort of symbolic and savage beauty, which has become a characteristic of Rodin's art. The pained, awakening movement of the man in _The Age of Brass_, the gesture of _St. John the Baptist_, and still more his wild face with its open mouth, were so much outside the usual conventions as to make everybody feel that here was an artist resolved to take no account of the "École" and its principles. These two splendid studies of the nude already contained a very special thought. Rodin, therefore, was hated in the first place as a man who would be revolutionary. He was hated because he was powerful, because he emerged suddenly from obscurity, and because he was felt to possess an obstinate individuality. It was also for these very reasons that warm sympathies went out to Rodin from among artists opposed to the spirit of the "École," and from independent writers who divined in him a man capable of expressing in his art thoughts and emotions that had ceased to be found in art.

[1] This unknown student was called Constant Simon. Rodin remembers him as a remarkable man.

[2] The hanging committee of the Salon is called a "jury."--TRANS.

II

RODIN'S STUDIO--HIS WORKS FROM 1880 TO 1889--"EVE"; SOME BUSTS; THE MONUMENT TO VICTOR HUGO--"THE GATE OF HELL"--"THE DANAID"--THE "THOUGHT"--THE EXHIBITION OF CLAUDE MONET AND RODIN, IN 1889--THE MONUMENT TO CLAUDE LORRAINE AT NANCY (1892)--"THE BURGHERS OF CALAIS" (1888-1895)

Rodin's previous works, from 1881 to 1889, had been produced in modest abodes in the Rue des Fourneaux and the Boulevard de Vaugirard, and later, in a little studio, granted by the Government, at the Dépôt des Marbres, in the Rue de l'Université, where a certain number of studios are given to sculptors. From 1889 onwards the Government granted Rodin two larger studios there, which he still occupies. At a later date he also had, at his own expense, a studio in an odd corner of the Boulevard d'Italie, at a place called the Clos Payen, besides a house at Sèvres, and eventually one at Meudon, in which he still lives and of which I shall speak again. Among these were distributed his studies and his finished works: _The Gate of Hell_ was sketched in at the Rue de l'Université, and there, too, Rodin's assistants are at work upon his present groups.

From 1879 Rodin worked at Sèvres, having been introduced by Carrier-Belleuse, and a vase decorated by him may be seen there. In 1880 he made a fine competitive design for the _Monument to the Defenders of the Nation,_ which was not accepted. In 1881 he made a figure of _Adam_, which he destroyed, and an _Eve,_ which must be reckoned among his noblest creations--an _Eve_ ashamed of her faults, bowed down by terror, vaguely tormented less by remorse for her sin than by the idea of having created beings for future sorrow. This _Eve_ is a bronze of formidable appearance and all Rodin breathes in it. As in the _St. John the Baptist,_ we feel the effect of a definite conception of sculpture, but here the design is more spiritual and the scheme of modelling simpler and larger. From that time onward we shall find the artist producing regularly, putting forth a peaceful power, and working in complete possession of himself, not free certainly from doubts and searchings, but allowing nothing of the sort to be seen. Rodin's way of working is very peculiar; he does not begin one piece of work, carry it to its conclusion, and then devote himself to another. He has had from the outset a certain number of thoughts that correspond to forms, and although he has only shown his works one after another, he has nevertheless elaborated them side by side, working at them simultaneously and modifying them one by another. Thus _The Gate of Hell_ has been made and remade for more than twenty years; thus the monument to Hugo, not yet handed over, goes back, by the sketches for it, to 1886; while the studies for _The Burghers of Calais_ date from 1888, though the monument was only completed in 1895; thus, too, among the little groups on which Rodin is still at work, are many that have grown out of rough sketches made fifteen years ago. Rodin has a store of ideas and emotions dear to him, upon which he has patiently meditated, which he has promised himself to execute, and which he brings to ripeness in silence, remaining throughout long years without appearing to concern himself with them. "Strength and patience" might be his characteristic motto. Like all great artists, he thought out the essential lines of his work at once, lines that I shall define at the end of this book. His is a synthetic and generalising mind, which can only begin its active course after slow meditation, and conceives no isolated thing; spontaneous and at the same time prudent. He had that time of meditation at Brussels, not hastening to produce, not permitting himself to express an idea until he had prepared in detail the technical expression, the necessities of the craftsman.

The _Ugolino_, a cast, of which Rodin exhibited the first sketch in 1882, is the first sign of that preoccupation with Dante, which was to be shown in all his later work. He has read comparatively few things, and that designedly; he attaches himself strongly to a few great and profound works, and meditates upon them indefatigably. His whole symbolic imagination has been fed by Dante and his whole sensuous imagination by Baudelaire. These two gloomy poets have impressed him, and it may be said that he has absorbed them. Almost all Rodin's great symbolic figures refer to the _Inferno_, and all his little groups of lovers have the neurotic subtlety, the refined, homesick melancholy of the _Fleurs du Mal._ He has a constant need to evolve from realism to general ideas, from thought to delight or sorrow, and the ideal of Dante or of Baudelaire is strangely mingled in him with love of the antique and worship of mythology. It is, indeed, this quite individual fusion that forms the basis of his personality. The _Ugolino_, which was exhibited, first alone and then with his dying children, over whom he is crouching, haggard and already almost like a wild beast, is a tragic and powerful work. The same year Rodin produced the bust of Alphonse Legros, which has taken so high a place in England in the opinion of the best judges, and in that of the lamented W. E. Henley, whose penetrating criticism paid homage from the first to our sculptor's art.

_The Genius of War,_ the _Monument to General Lynch_, and the very curious _Bellona,_ date from 1883; the _President Vicunha_[1] and a _Bust of a Young Woman_, from 1884. This was rather a period of groping than of production; Rodin was continuing his studies, and becoming more confirmed in his technical methods. We must go on to the year 1885 to reach the revelation of three of his finest sculptures--the three busts of _Dalou_, _Victor Hugo,_ and _Antonin Proust_, which powerfully declare his personality. These are works that are not disputable, that cannot be accused of having a "literary" intention, mere bits of sculpture giving evidence of mastery and showing surfaces, planes, and high lights worthy of the very finest busts of the French school. As time goes by, the ideas, the philosophy, the symbolism, the "dramatisation" of Rodin's compositions may come to be disputed, or exact comprehension of them may be lost; but works like these will always, by their mere professional worth, bear witness for him. Life, thought, strength, and character are carried as far as is possible. The bust of Hugo was the outcome of some few studies that the artist was able to make from the life. Hugo declared David of Angers to have made so good a bust of him that he considered it unnecessary ever to sit again. Rodin wished to obtain sittings, but failed; the poet admitted him to his table, and merely said to him, "Come when you like, observe me ... and do what you can." At table Rodin took sketches of Hugo in cigarette-paper books; he had a stand and some clay in the ante-room, and from time to time he would run in to note down anything that had just struck him.

VICTOR HUGO. (DRY POINT)

VICTOR HUGO. (DRY-POINT)

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.

It may thus be said that, although, perhaps, the celebrated doorway may never be finished, it is a storehouse of Rodin's creations. It stands by him as a theme for inspirations, and he brings into it a whole category of thoughts and works, never troubling himself about the architecture or the actual scheme. He will be for ever improvising some little figure, shaping the notation of some feeling, idea, or form, and this he plants in his door, studies it against the other figures, then takes it out again, and if need be, breaks it up and uses the fragments for other attempts. Many of these little figures have developed into important separate groups. Rodin is ruled primarily by the need to create and to satisfy an irresistible vocation; he cares little what may be the ultimate transformation of his inventions, and his sculpture is, furthermore, so conceived that it may be executed on a large scale or a small; this is indeed so much the case that it is often impossible to judge from a photograph what are the dimensions.

_The Gate of Hell_ might therefore better be called "the Pandemonium," or some quite other name. If it were to be carried out it could not contain all the figures destined for it by the artist. There they stand, innumerable, ranged on shelves beside the rough model of the door, representing the entire evolution of Rodin's inspiration, and forming what I call, with his consent, "the diary of his life as a sculptor." To enumerate these figures and groups would take too long; suffice to say that the larger part of Rodin's small marbles and bronzes are but completions of these sketches, and that on account of the essentially decorative character of the outlines and the intense originality of the proportion and balance of the figures, they can be conceived either as statuettes or as lifesized works. Such as it is, _The Gate of Hell_ is the plan of a piece of work unique in the sculpture of modern days, a plan slowly elaborated, and of which every detail has been foreseen and analysed for years. No one has dared to undertake so audacious an assemblage of figures upon such a scheme, and the scheme is present to Rodin in its entirety. He by no means forgets the decorative effect nor the harmonious aspects, the concords that the gate should have, and if ever Government should require him to deliver his work he would be able to do so without delay. Twenty years in the studio have matured it in his mind. The work that Dante inspired has assumed a more general significance. Low-relief, high-relief, figures standing free, groups, single figures, all the styles of sculpture are gathered into the symphony of a throng, lost amid whirling mists of hell and converging towards the figure of the Thinker. The conception embraces centuries. Ugolino is there, and so are centaurs, female fauns, satyrs, and creatures dreamed of by Baudelaire, abstract personifications of vices--in particular, there is the extraordinary group of the miser dying of hunger over his treasure beside a prostitute _(Avarice and Lewdness)._ The Thinker, in his austere nudity and pensive strength, is at one and the same time the alarmed Adam, the implacable Dante, and the compassionate Virgil of this frightful unrestrained humanity, but he is, above all, the ancestor, the first man, simple and unconscious, looking down on what he has begotten. The symbolism and philosophy of the artist are independent of any religious doctrine; his spiritual ardour excels in setting free the symbols of the various creeds, and he is supported mainly by deep and incessant consultation of nature, and by his exceptional sense of expression in movements. He attains the decorative harmony of his work not by additions, but by systematic suppressions, as the Gothic artists and those of the Renascence did.

_The Gate of Hell_ is the outcome of studies made by Rodin from the Gothic sculptors, during his stay in Brussels. In this, and in _The Burghers of Calais_, he resumes the deep influence that he there underwent. As to the influence that the antique had upon him, that only showed itself later, in his smaller works in marble, and especially in the _Balzac_ and recent productions. The _Gate_ corresponds to the period in which Rodin's great aim was to create, through intensity of movement and originality of attitude and outline, a _new system of the dramatic_ in his art, which the taste of the day had frozen into a false "neo-Greek nobility," obtained by immobility, by inertia of outline, and by a fear of seeing too living a movement break the general harmony. To seek a fresh harmony in the very study of movement, to create, side by side with _static_ art, a _dynamic_ art, such, in a brief formula, was Rodin's idea.

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 1887 we may note _Perseus and the Gorgon_, and a marble _Head of the beheaded St. John_, which belongs to the Marchioness of Carcano. In 1888 was exhibited the exquisite _Danaid,_ one of the most tender female figures that were ever lovingly moulded by this sculptor of the energetic, and one which has a subtle delicacy of soul that seems strangely placed between two works of power. At the same time a naked figure was also shown at the Exposition des Beaux Arts, in Brussels--a _Man Walking_, which was no other than one of the _Burghers,_ and of which the robust execution made an impression. The year 1889 marked an increase of the artist's activity. He was busy upon preparatory work for the monument of Claude Lorraine, which he had been commissioned to make for Nancy. He was going on with _The Gate of Hell._ He completed a statue of Bastien-Lepage for the cemetery of Damvilliers. He began upon the busts of the art critics, Octave Mirbeau and Roger Marx, finished an admirable little _Dream-Group_ in marble, in which a young man is lying back and trying to hold fast a sphinx-woman who takes flight, wild and fateful. An impressionist sketch of _Hecuba_, crouching down and shrieking, and _Thought_, in marble, completed the record of this well-filled year. _Thought,_ a proud, sweet head rising from a block, is one of Rodin's best known works and the very symbol of his art. It occupies a place in the Museum of the Luxembourg, where it is in company with _The Danaid,_ the _St. John, The Kiss,_ a masterly female bust, and a bronze statuette. _The Fair Helmet-Maker,_ from Villon's poem, is a work on a very small scale, but containing the depth and strength of tragedy--the whole drama of a human body's ruin.

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.

In 1893 Rodin made the bust of Madame _Séverine,_ the medallion of _César Franck,_ and several works in marble; _Galatea, The Death of Adonis, The Education of Achilles,_ and _The Wave._ From 1894 date the _Eternal Spring,_ one of his tenderest and purest works, besides an _Orpheus and Eurydice,_ an _Adonis and Venus,_ and finally _Christ and the Magdalen._ For, by degrees, he was returning to religious and mythological subjects, after having expressed only general symbols or pieces of pure realism; and I shall have to call attention at a later point to the original manner in which Rodin was bold enough to interpret these subjects which the academic classicism seemed to have worn out and left insipid for ever.

The year 1895 at last beheld the inauguration, on the 3rd of June, of _The Burghers of Calais_ at Calais. To the same year belongs another fine work in marble: _Illusion, the Daughter of Icarus,_ besides a vigorous bronze, _The Crouching Man,_ a medallion of _Octave Mirbeau,_ and--at this early date--some nude studies for the _Balzac,_ for the _Balzac_ was studied minutely in the nude, a point of which many people know nothing, before appearing draped in the famous dressing-gown which was destined, in 1898, to arouse so much clamour.

The _Burghers_ were set up, by subscription, in a square in Calais.[4]

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.

The entire reality of these figures is no less striking than their ideality, just as is the case in the beautiful creations of the "Primitives." These are men whose absolutely real nakedness reveals itself beneath the coarse sacks that clothe them, a nakedness not harmonised into any style, but shown in all its veracity by an artist who has chosen models suitable to his characters without any care to arrange them or to give them that pretended _beauty_ which would be merely a falsehood and an enfeeblement. These are six wretched men, shivering with cold and anguish. The scene is as close as possible to history, and the faces are real--ugly or ordinary. But an idea transfigures them. The tragedy of their sacrifice gives them a strange greatness, and they become fine because their soul is fine. We guess the gradation of their reflections: none faces his fate just like another, and the reason is that, though what they will is one, what they leave is different for each, and everything in them speaks, from their faces down to the least attitude of their limbs. Their expression is sober; a heavy silence enwraps them; we follow them with our eyes as the dwellers in Calais must have done from the heights of their walls; and they are so grouped that from every point we see them separately, presenting a distinct aspect, and yet the one base unites and uplifts them. This is a marvel of psychological composition.

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.

The _Burghers_ ought, according to Rodin's idea, to be placed in front of the old Hotel de Ville of Calais, facing the sea; and he wished the group to be placed on a very high pedestal, so that the figures should stand out against the open sky, or else, on the other hand, almost on the level, so that everyone could walk round them, live with them, almost elbow them. A bad site has been chosen and a pedestal of moderate height and ordinary appearance. The _Burghers_ are very fine all the same, and are certainly the most powerful piece of sculpture of the epoch. I have promised to be sober in my praises of Rodin, but I do not see why in speaking of such a work as this I should hide my convictions. Those who have seen it cannot fail to consider it, as I do, the work of a thinker and of an artist of genius.

[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.