Chapter VI: Part 6

The Gothic sphinx rises before me. The strength of its beauty overwhelms me. I struggle against it and I am broken by it. Then it attracts me anew with its sweetness; it exalts me. My spirit makes the ascent of this sculptured mountain. What power in these motionless stones to create the sense of movement in the mind! What makes this possible? The mason of genius; the science of oppositions. That whole effect of power--he has put it in the thickness of the foundations, the enormous walls, the buttresses. They are as formidable as the tiers of a dike, as a breakwater planted in the sea. One would say that this church was built to combat the forces of nature: the temple of peace and love has the air of a fortress.

One's spirit is weighed down by the bareness of the stone, but stirred by the height of the structure and the towers; it soars toward them as toward a world that reassures it; the hard material has become humanized; the genius of man is at play there amid the lacework of stone. He has placed there angels, saints, animals, fruits, flowers, all the gifts of the seasons; it is life in its entirety such as the Creator in His infinite munificence has bestowed upon him. The Gothic artist knows that paradise is on earth; he has no need to invent another. The childish and monotonous heaven presented to us in our legends is nothing but a poor copy of the marvels of our life.

Let us enter. I tremble. The beauty is terrible. I am plunged into night, a living night in which I do not know what mysteries are being enacted--the cruel mysteries of the ancient religions? There are shimmering rays from the long windows, the rose windows. Hope enters my heart: there is light here, then? I am no longer alone.

My eyes grow accustomed to this populous obscurity. There is a world about me, a world of columns. It seems terrible, it _is_ terrible because of its power, but this power has its _raison d'être_. It seems frightening to me but it is only necessary. It is distributed power; therefore it is beneficent. It holds the vault in the air, the prodigious weight of stone that it maintains aloft, above my head, as lightly as the canvas of a tent. Marvel of equilibrium, calculation of the intelligence, how is it possible not to adore you? It is you that one comes here to worship under the name of God.

The darkness grows lighter; it becomes chiaroscuro. We are in a picture by Rembrandt, that great Gothic of the sixteenth century. The forest of pillars divides the nave into spaces of shadow and light. It is the order of nature which knows nothing of disorder. This I rediscover with joy: the eye does not love chaos.

I familiarize myself with the people of the columns. I recognize them: they are Romans. It is the Roman, the Romance, hardly altered, that comes to receive the Gothic arch. The immense nave which I thought a forest full of hidden dangers I see, I understand, I read like a sacred book. The mystery is not that of cruelty; it is only that of beauty. It grows lighter gradually in order to allow the spirit to approach slowly the joy of a perfect interior. This solemnity of the nave, this immense void, is like the bed of a great river; the columns range themselves respectfully on each side in order to give free passage to the flood of human piety. It flows like a majestic river; it bears onward toward the tabernacle, about which it spreads itself like a lake of love under the rays of the thought of God. Amid the stones the architect has known how to play the part of the apostle: he has created faith. Art and religion are the same thing; they are love.

SAINT-EUSTACHE

It is the interior of this church that should be admired. Here I do not experience the same commotion of the spirit as in Notre Dame. I am bathed in the fine light of the sixteenth century. At Notre Dame it was the shadow of Rembrandt; here, it is the clear tonality of French painting, of a Clouët. Admirable is the _élan_ of this Renaissance nave; it is as bold as, and even perhaps bolder than that of the Gothic buildings. It proceeds on the same plan. The skyward lift is only to be found in the Gothic; it is of the very spirit of the race. Are the vaults round and no longer pointed? What does it matter if they are equally elegant, if they have the same aërial grace as the ogive?

What I rediscover in Saint-Eustache, less austere than its grand sister of the Middle Age, but with a sweetness which is itself noble, is the determination of the architect to subordinate everything to the effect of simplicity, to the total effect. On each side of the nave the columns cutting the side wall are disposed fanwise in order to hide the light of the lateral windows. One sees nothing but the stone, and yet there is no effect of heaviness; one could not make anything lighter. This is because the color of the stone is admirably varied by the diversity of the flutings that line the columns. The main fluting marks the outline, and the others, less emphatic, shading off, give it a velvet-like quality. The light throws a golden haze between the great columns, among the deep gorges, and is, on the other hand, channeled, streaked by the little nerves that impel it upward toward the vaults. By this effect of lightness the building seems to rise; it is an assumption. It is no longer the forest of trees that one finds here, but the forest of creepers. These vertiginous columns are like fine, delicate vines. Above the altar the great lights of the windows, with their beautiful glass, harmonize well with the general color. The light, at once abundant and restrained, has the coolness which the Renaissance recaptured from Greece. This church welcomes one as with an immense smile; it has the sweetness of Christ holding out his hands: "Suffer the little children to come unto me." Intelligence has planned it, but it is the heart that has modeled it.

If we enter Saint-Eustache at nightfall, we could almost believe ourselves in a Gothic building. The Renaissance did not bring about such profound transformations in architecture as people think. There is a heavy Italian Renaissance element that is altogether alien to us; but in the true French Renaissance the Celtic taste was not betrayed: it was modified with a certain grace and elegance. Grace is an aspect of strength. A nation no more escapes from its racial quality than a man from his temperament. The Celtic mingled with the Roman produced the Romance, out of which the Gothic sprang directly--the Romance, that is to say, the Roman which has passed through the spirit of the Franks. It has the severity, the Roman qualities, united with the imagination of the Barbarians, since we have agreed so to call them. The Romance of the second epoch has already sprung forth; it rises during the eleventh and twelfth centuries and goes to make the Gothic. The Gothic elevates and magnifies the Romance. It detaches the buttresses, even to the point of separating them from the walls, in order to carry them further out to sustain the height of the nave.

As for the Renaissance, it continues the Gothic. We could not have a more striking example of this than just here in Saint-Eustache. Here are the same lines, the same idea, with a different ornamentation. It is the same body, clothed in a new way. It is another age of the Gothic; sweeter, less powerful, the final florescence of the French genius, which, despite the adorable eighteenth century, follows a descending path down to the first restoration. Contrary to what has been thought and taught for so long, the Renaissance already marks a stage of decadence. The most beautiful epoch in architecture and sculpture is the Middle Age, an age as beautiful as, perhaps more beautiful than, the great age of Greece, and almost universally despised by our nineteenth century, the century of criticism and pretension, the century of ignorance. Yes, with the Renaissance things begin to give way. And yet to say that is almost a sacrilege! It is as if one struck one's father! Our ravishing Gothic of the sixteenth century has charmed France with its masterpieces; it has made artists cherish a whole country, the sweet country of the Loire. Despite its misalliance with the Italian Renaissance, it stood firm, it did not bend; it remained the grand French style. Witness the Louvre with its high pavilions; that sprang, that too, from the Gothic vein; the sculptors of the Renaissance decorated it less severely, but the general aspect remains the same.

The Gothic under different names has been the main path of our genius during five hundred years. It has been the blessing of France; it was its active principle down to 1820. If we wish to return to art it will only be through comparative study--the comparison with nature of our national style. The beautiful lines are eternal. Why are they used so little?

CONCERNING COLOR IN SCULPTURE

The true difference between the Gothic and the Renaissance does not lie in the structure of the building but in the quality of the sculpture and in its color.

What is meant by color in sculpture and in architecture? It is the law of light and shade, the great law of oppositions which constitutes the charm of nature, the beauty of a landscape at dawn, its splendor at sunset. The color springs from the quality of the modeling; it is the relief which gives the light tones and, by contrast, the dark, in the parts that do not stand out. The ensemble of the intermediary diminutions of light and shade produces the general coloring, whose nuances can be infinitely varied according to the skill of the artist. Modeling is the only way in which to express life; and there is only one thing that counts in sculpture and in architecture--the expression of life. A beautiful statue, a well-made monument, live like living beings; they seem different according to the day and the hour. How beautiful it is to give to stone, through nothing but the values of planes, through the handling of shadow and light, the same charm of color as that of living nature, of the flesh of a woman. In the plastic arts, the color betrays the quality of the planes as a beautiful complexion reveals health in a human being.

The antique has shorter planes than the Gothic; it lacks therefore those deep shadows that give to the Gothic such a tormented and tragic aspect. The Greek balances the framework of the human body on four planes, the Gothic on two only. The latter produces a stronger effect, a more _hollowed_ effect, that _effet de console_ which is essentially Gothic. Nevertheless, the shadow that results from it is more sustained than in the antique and nothing could be softer or more full of nuances.

The Roman presents an abundance of dark shadows which, in turn, create an effect of heaviness and density. The Greek puts in just enough of them to quicken the general coloring. The Roman gives a flatter effect, which shows nevertheless a magnificent vigor. As for us, we copy these styles endlessly without understanding them, for if we did understand them we should do quite otherwise. We abuse the black, the powerful lines, we put them everywhere; we do not know how to shade light. That is why our sculpture is so poor, why our monuments appear so hard, so dry. The Bourse, the Corps Législatif, might be made of iron with their columns set against a uniform background which prevents the light and air from circulating about them and enveloping them and destroys the atmosphere. This is what people call a simple style. It is not simple, it is cold. The simple is the perfect, coldness is impotence.

The Renaissance recaptured the antique measure and imposed its generous color upon the Gothic plane. It used less shadow than our sculptors of the Middle Ages; it diminished the reliefs. The effect in consequence was lighter. This was because the Renaissance was enchanted by all the Greek statues that were discovered at this period; and in its enthusiasm it recreated Greek art, not by copying it, but by copying nature according to antique principles. It is perhaps a little less beautiful but it has quite the same feeling of gentle strength, of delicacy. One feels the joy of the artist who throws himself against the problem of the nude in the open air. Till then statues had been draped, but under the draperies was concealed a carefully studied nude. In the Renaissance the drapery was dropped: the nymphs of Jean Goujon, of Germain Pilon--I recognize them; these long bodies of women, these undulating bodies, are Gothic statues unclothed and set in another light. Our whole sixteenth century is a song of grace rising from the Gothic heart to the art of the Parthenon.

But nowhere than in the country of the Loire is there Renaissance art more gentle and amply luminous. This is the Greek part of France. The tranquil river touched the heart of our architects and bestowed on them some of its calm and smiling majesty. From it, from the air impregnated with its vapors, came those châteaux so happy in their beauty and those lovable cottages; for the artist worked as beautifully for peasants as for kings. Before Ussé, before Chenonceaux, Blois, Azay-le-Rideau, I am not in the presence of dead things but of a living spirit, the spirit of divine beauty that animated equally the antique and the Gothic. Charming sixteenth century France, it is you who have forced me to the study of chiaroscuro. Formerly I tried my best to understand your motives, your thousand nerves, but the general law escaped me. I did not see your soul, which consists entirely in the voluptuous shadings of light; I did not perceive your principle, the modeling which impressed movement upon everything and gave the movement life.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The eighteenth century is the exaggeration of the sixteenth. Our elegant houses, our houses in the style of Louis XV and Louis XVI have always the Gothic line with its proud, graceful air. Without moldings, without ornaments, their beauty lies in their very lack of ornaments, in their nudity. But what proportions they have! The finest of the fine!

The eighteenth century is considered too frail, too affected. It is, on the contrary, full of life and strength. It possesses admirable sculptors: Pigalle, creator of that immortal masterpiece, the tomb of Marshal Saxe; Houdon, whose busts to-day are bought for their weight in gold without even then bringing their proper price. There were thousands then, the whole rank and file of the trade, who created marvels, with a sureness of hand accustomed to every difficulty. The outline of a table, of a chest, was as much considered as that of a statue. For that matter, what difference did the dimensions of a work make? It was the modeling that counted. The peasant himself sat down in a well-made chair. Artists and artisans had a taste, an alert grace, and a dexterity sufficient to fit out the whole world; but their dexterity was based on a foundation of intelligence as an ornament is based upon a building. The dexterity we possess nowadays is nothing but mockery, a kind of banter that touches everything without discernment; it kills force.

The Louis XV and Louis XVI styles possessed grandeur. We call it the art of the boudoir, but the boudoir of that period had a nobility like that of those white and gold salons where the seats are disposed with dignity like persons of quality. The music had the same character; the dances also, the dances, those charming scenes in which men and women with the natural spirit of play threw themselves into the cadence, translating it with the eloquence of youth. The dance--that was architecture brought to life.

The eighteenth century was a century which _designed_; in this lay its genius. Nowadays people are searching for a new style and do not find it. Style comes unawares through the concurrence of many elements; but can we achieve it without design? To-day we design no longer and our art, which is altogether industrial, is bad. The central matter in art is the nude, and this we no longer understand. How can we be expected to have art when we do not understand its central principle? The minor arts are the rays that go out from the center. When I draw the body of a woman I rediscover the form of the beautiful Greek vases. Through design alone we arrive at a knowledge of the shading of forms. The forms that delight us in the art of past centuries are nothing but those presented by living nature, those of human beings, animals, verdure, interpreted by men of supreme taste. The art that people are struggling to discover to-day might be deduced from my sculpture and my drawings, for I have always drawn with passion. The quality of my drawing I owe in large measure to the eighteenth century. I am nothing but a link in the great chain of artists, but I maintain the connection with those of the past. At the Petite Ecole they made us copy the red chalks of Boucher and the models of flowers, animals, and ornaments. They were Louis XVI models, very well executed; they certainly gave me a little of the warmth of the artists of that period. In my youth I made drawings by the hundreds, by the thousands. At the Petite Ecole we were badly placed, badly lighted by poor candles; when we touched them we made them sticky with the clay with which our fingers were covered so that they were worse than ever afterwards. It did not matter; we were working according to the right principles.

To-day the Petite Ecole is entirely in the power of the larger school, that of the Beaux-Arts. Far from learning one gets spoiled there for the rest of one's life. One copies the antique, but one copies it badly.

I am speaking with the experience of a genuine artistic life. There was a time when I never talked; to-day I hold forth! If I am understood it will not have been in vain. But how much effort it will take to reestablish truths which are so self-evident, so obvious, so fundamental that one is ashamed to repeat them so many times! Nevertheless they are _essential_. The public is a thousand miles away from them, the public, by which I mean the general taste. If it does not become enlightened, art will disappear. Observe its attitude before the works of the new school, before the pictures of those who call themselves cubists: sarcasm, anger. These artists show us squares, cubes, geometrical figures colored according to their own ideas. They name them: _Portrait of Mme. X._ or _Landscape_. This exasperates the public. What does it matter? Is it good? That is the whole point. Is the ornament well treated? That is the capital question, the only one that is not discussed. Their canvases are combinations of color recalling mosaic or even stained glass. We have accepted many other things; we have accepted the green or rather the violet women of our later salons, and women with wooden heads, but we do not wish to admit the squares of the cubists. Why? They are not portraits, we say. They are not landscapes. So much the better! They are something else. What does it matter if the artist has deceived himself knowingly or wilfully on a matter so insignificant as the subject? It is ornamental, that is enough. They are curious, these quarrels that break out, these sects that are created for reasons like this--for a sock put on inside out! Ignorance inflames the passions. There are struggles whose aim is great; others that appear useless have their use perhaps.

It may be that this slackening of taste and knowledge is necessary. Perhaps it is a period of transition, a fallow period required by the intelligence like that required by a soil that has been productive for too long. If ignorance is prolonged it will mean that the history of France is ended; it will mean the annihilation of the Celtic genius which has fertilized Europe for two thousand years. We shall become like Asia. Roman art declined for four or five centuries after Augustus. With us the decadence has only been going on for a hundred years. During the present war marvels have been destroyed. Formerly, even during the religious wars, the monuments were spared; it is for this reason that France is still so rich. When stone is no longer respected, it means decadence. The cannon turn up the earth like a plow, leveling everything. This war appears therefore like an explosion of barbarism; at bottom it indicates a latent state of soul which has been shaping itself since the beginning of the nineteenth century. During this period the world has ceased to obey the law of beauty and love; it has lived for nothing but business. What is the leading idea that has precipitated the nations against one another? Trade: the desire, the longing to make more money than one's neighbor. Trade is the anxious care of people who think of nothing but their own petty welfare; it is not the basis on which is founded the grandeur of peoples. It alone regulates at present the relations between things. The war is nothing but the consequence of such habits and their natural conclusion.

Do you ask me what will spring out of the conflict? I am not a prophet. I know only that without religion, without art, without the love of nature--these three words are for me synonymous--men will die of ennui. But nothing easily resigns itself to death. An outburst of courage has just transfigured the world. Can we preserve this courage during peace? The patience of the soldier, the patience of the trenches surpasses in sublimity the virtue of the ancients. Will it produce a rebirth of intelligence? Shall we have, in study, the force of soul that we have had in the great struggle? That is the question. Of course the stupid, the ignorant will not suffer any transformation through the war; but men of character will be reinvigorated by the hardships of the military life; we have recaptured patience and we have yet to learn what we can expect from this virtue. Genius is as much character as talent. If we have men of force in this country where taste is a natural gift, it seems to me impossible that this force will not quicken the gift and develop it and that we shall not have once more an era of beauty.

AUGUSTE RODIN.

THE WORK OF RODIN

I

THE STUDY OF THE CATHEDRALS--INFLUENCE OF THE GOTHIC ON THE ART OF RODIN--"SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST" (1880)--"THE GATE OF HELL"

In 1877 Rodin visited our most illustrious cathedrals, Rheims, Amiens, Chartres, Soissons, Noyon. During his youth, the choir of Beauvais and Notre Dame de Paris appealed more to his imagination than to his taste, and it required many years of travel and comparison to enable him to grasp the splendors of that Gothic art which he was to admire thenceforth at least as much as the antique. As a splendidly gifted, but inexperienced young man, he shared the error of his epoch: the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century had despised the Roman and the Gothic; they had ridiculed them and called them barbaric; the nineteenth century, while flattering itself that it appreciated them, did still worse--it restored them.

The romantic writers of the Schools of Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo had exalted the art of the Middle Ages, but chiefly because of their hatred of the classic and without understanding its true worth. What struck them, especially, was the immensity and the picturesqueness of the buildings, the luxuriousness of this stone vegetation, but not the unique character of their architecture and sculpture.

Victor Hugo was perhaps one of the few to discover the precise explanation of this beauty: relief and modeling. This all-powerful writer, this architect of words who constructed poems like cathedrals, understood the plastic intelligence of the master masons because he himself possessed the _sense of mass_. One is convinced of this not only in reading his descriptions of cities and monuments, but in studying those astonishing pen-and-ink drawings which he multiplied in idle moments.

If the romanticists have failed fully to explain medieval art to us, let us still be grateful to them: they gave our cathedrals back to us, they denounced ignorance and scourged the stupidity that would have ended by tearing down those sublime piles. Finally if the writers and art critics of this epoch have not given them superlative praise, if on their behalf they have not burned with apostolic zeal, it is because it was necessary for this prophecy of art to come from a man of the craft, a man dominated, captivated, himself, by the craft, a man who understood stone and adored it because he had married it in spirit with all its difficulties and its dazzling possibilities.

That man was to be Rodin. Although he has been listened to by the ignorant and superficial multitude, it has not been chiefly because of the authority of his genius, of the general renown that he has enjoyed. He has truly thrown a new light over the mystery of Gothic construction. Thanks to him, we understand in a measure, for tangible reasons, the reasons of an actual carver, this "world in little" that constitutes the Gothic cathedrals. What study, what researches are necessary in order to comprehend the art of stonework! Does any one suppose that Rodin himself has attained this in a day? By no means. That lover of perfection in detail does not possess the instantly penetrating glance that is often the property of genius: to the task of deciphering our monuments he brought that slow-minded, customary patience of his, together with his energy. He had first of all to rid himself of the false current ideas. After that thirty years of observation were necessary for him to reach conclusions that satisfied his artistic conscience. Even to-day he is far from affirming that he has understood everything, that he has grasped the full significance of the Gothics. Read his book, "The Cathedrals of France," published in 1914; observe the carefullness of his judgments, the gropings of his thought, the constant retracing of his steps. He makes attempts, ventures; he never proclaims his opinion in the peremptory tone dear to specialists in criticism, but endeavors to approach respectfully, as closely as possible, to the spirit of the masters. Sometimes a flash of genius springs from his brain and illumines to the depths of its mysteries the Gothic universe; but nothing is suggested that does not spring from a prolonged observation, and when at last he speaks it is in the tone of a man who mistrusts himself. It must be confessed that in this work, "The Cathedrals of France," something is lacking, even though it is prefaced by a long and very learned introduction by one of our good writers, Charles Morice. It lacks the magnificent lesson that the reader will find in these pages, signed with Rodin's name. This lesson constitutes really a vital page that is, as it were, the key and the summary of the whole work; but the master, having given me the first rights in it, had scruples, as had Charles Morice, about including it in his own book.

Before obtaining this page, with what insistence did I have to question Rodin not once, not twice, but twenty times, during the course of a number of years. Every time he came back from one of his pilgrimages to some old city of the provinces, to our churches, our town halls, I renewed my questions without receiving any satisfactory answer. In my heart I could not but honor this rigorous honesty which was unwilling to venture anything lightly on so vast, so noble a subject.

In 1877, after having accomplished his first tour of France, he came back filled with wonder. But the impression that he carried with him was still confused; he did not know at what point to begin the analytical study of French architecture, for in what concerned sculpture he had immediately been struck with amazement and adoration before the essential beauty of the status of Chartres, Amiens, and Rheims. He had returned from Italy haunted by the antique and Michelangelo, and now here he was haunted by the modeling and the rhythm of the Gothic figures.

But in order to understand them entirely he had to rediscover this modeling and these movements in nature, he had to verify them in the living model. Fortune favors those who seek greatly. When one is the victim of an idea unexpected elements arise to nourish and develop it. One day two Italians knocked at the door of his studio. One of them, a professional model, had already posed for Rodin and he introduced the other, his comrade. He was a peasant from the Abruzzi who had come to seek his fortune in Paris. He was fresh from his native province. His robust body, his fierce head, his bristling beard and hair, and above all his expression of indomitable force charmed the artist. He undressed, climbed upon the model's stand, planted himself firmly on his legs, which were spread like a compass, the head well raised, and, continuing to talk, advanced with a gesture full of ardor.

Rodin, struck by this wild energy, immediately set to work. He made the man such as he saw him; he desired to capture this movement of the legs, this brusk forward movement that complemented the movement of the arms, the shining eyes, the open mouth. He surrendered himself to a great study, without any preconceived idea, without any intention of treating a _subject_. What he made was _a man walking_. The name has stuck to the figure. The first study remains incomplete; Rodin has sculptured neither the head nor the arms; what he sought eagerly, passionately, was the equilibrium of the torso and of the legs cast forward into space. He succeeded; he made a superb fragment, "The Man Walking." Thirty years later it occurred to a group of his admirers to ask the state to acquire this study and erect it in the court of the French embassy at Rome, in the Farnese Palace; but the official architects up to the present time have objected to the erection of this statue, and for the last seven or eight years it has awaited, in some obscure shed, the good pleasure of these gentlemen.

Rodin, in the presence of his Italian peasant, had rediscovered, to his great joy as a seeker, the peculiar equipoise of the Gothic figures. In the antique statues the plumb-line falls through one of the legs, while the other, lightly raised, impresses on the different planes of the body the graceful effect that has become classic. In Gothic statues, on the contrary, the line of equilibrium passes through the middle of the body and falls right between the two legs as they are planted on the earth.

In "The Age of Bronze" Rodin has adopted the balanced rhythm of Greek sculpture; in his new figure he passed to the Gothic equipoise, with a harmony that is less gracious, but with a reality stronger and more living. What he did not abandon was the rigorous construction and the strength of modeling which his study of the antique had given him. "The Man Walking," as well as the greater part of his subsequent works, thus exhibits the union of the two great principles of sculpture that have governed the Occidental genius.

Rodin, strengthened by study, now made a complete statue with head and arms. While he was working he discovered that his model was half a savage, still close to the animal and its ferocious instincts. Sometimes his eyes burned, his jaws, armed with powerful teeth, were thrust forward as if to bite something; he resembled a wolf. At other times a kind of strange passion inflamed him. His face radiated faith and will; he spoke with such energy that he seemed to be haranguing a crowd; one would have thought him a prophet of the primitive ages, a visionary bursting forth from the desert to preach and to convert the people. Rodin regarded him in amazement. It was no longer his model, but a man from the Bible; surely it was a prophet that stood before him: it was Saint John the Baptist brought back to life. The sculptor bowed before the command of nature: his statue should bear the name of the forerunner.

He thought at first of emphasizing the disturbing impression: he placed on the shoulders of Saint John a simple cross. But here was revealed the all-powerful instinct of the sculptor, making the subject, the anecdote, the literary connotation a matter of secondary importance. The cross, the sublime symbol, would be here only an accessory, not really needed. It would complicate the simplicity of line dictated by the laws of sculpture, destroying the appositions of equilibrium of the great body and distracting the attention from that speaking head.

So Rodin gave it up. He came at last to the decision that his work should remain free from what was not of the very essence of art. He sent it off in the form in which it appeared in the Salon of 1880, adding also "The Age of Bronze."

The artists, the true artists, those whose enthusiasm was not poisoned by envy and jealousy, applauded these two superb figures artistically so different, but so similar in their sincerity; they acclaimed them with the grave joy of generous souls who perceive the dawn of a great talent. The name of Rodin became fixed forever in their memory.

As for the jury of this Salon, it considered it sufficient to award the "Saint John the Baptist" and "The Age of Bronze" a medal _of the third class_. Let us, in turn, give it our reward--the reward for its insensitiveness--by not disclosing the names of the sages who composed it.

"THE GATE OF HELL"

While finishing these works, which he was not even certain of being able to sell, Rodin was still compelled to provide for his own subsistence and that of his family; he had also to meet the expenses of his trade. A costly trade! It requires a studio, models, large fires to keep them warm, clay, tools of every kind. It was luck enough if the sculptor, still unknown, was able to have plaster casts made of his work. But this did not satisfy him; he dreamed of seeing them take on a new aspect in the richness of marble and bronze. Alas! in many cases he had to wait until middle age to have this dream realized. Rodin has never complained of the slowness of fortune. He knows that in order to attain the fullness of his productive power it is well for the artist to be thwarted, exalted by difficulties, the desire to conquer. After a five-years' stay in Belgium he had returned to Paris to take part in the work of the World Exposition of 1878, and he had taken a position with the ornament-worker Legrain, in whose workshop he met Jules Desbois, the future great sculptor, to whom he became attached for life. What innumerable decorations he executed at that time--decorations which disappeared like the leaves and flowers of the season when the stucco palaces of the exposition vanished! Only the masks ornamenting the Palais du Trocadéro remained.

At the same time he accumulated busts, studies, large figures with a fury of work which from then on was to resemble that of the most powerfully productive minds, the fecundity of a Rubens, of a Balzac, of a Michelet, of a Hugo. In the studios which he rented in the Faubourg St. Jacques, from 1877 to 1883, besides the "Saint John the Baptist," he executed the admirable little tough model of the "Monument Commemorating the National Defense"; after his wife, whose characterful features and naturally tragic countenance he had often reproduced, he made a helmeted bust, a "Bellona." He exhibited three life-sized figures: "The Creation of Man"; "Adam," since destroyed; and "Eve," the bronze of which did not appear until the Salon of 1899. He did the busts of W.E. Henley; the painter Jean-Paul Laurens (to mention some of the most beautiful), Carrier-Belleuse, the etcher Alphonse Legros, all in the midst of difficulties and injustices which did not in any way disturb the depths of his serenity, the noble tranquillity of the artisan sure of attaining his end by labor. Is it possible to-day to believe that the model of the "Monument of the Defense" was not only refused, but was not even classed among the thirty designs that were retained by the jury of 1880 after the first choice had been made? This same jury, the composition of which is also worthy of passing into history, decided on a solemn confection by M. Barrias for the _prix de Rome_, the result of which was that four years later its creator was elected a member of the Academy of Fine Arts.

I do not know whether many collectors contend for reproductions of M. Barrias's monstrous design for a clock; but Rodin's group, a wounded soldier entirely enveloped by the wings of a prodigious figure of a warrior goddess crying out for aid, which was later renamed "The Genius of the Defense" or "The Appeal to Arms," and which has acquired to-day so pathetic a character of actuality, is coveted by most of the museums and art collectors of Europe and America.

As if these works, which have since acquired such glory, were nothing but fragments of secondary importance, Rodin attacked a great piece of work, like those that used to be executed in the great ages of art: he undertook the famous "Gate of Hell."

At the time of the affair of "The Age of Bronze" there was at the head of the ministry of fine arts, an under-secretary of state named Edmond Turquet. To him fell the task of deciding in the last resort the case of Rodin. M. Edmond Turquet was a brilliant lawyer who had become _procureur_ under the empire, which did not altogether qualify him for the part of director of fine arts under the republic. In the field of art he knew no more than any one else, Rodin says; but he was a very fair-minded man, and his honesty had the effect of quickly straightening out the affair of the sculptor. In his genuine desire to atone for the wrong done to Rodin in the eyes of public opinion he not only offered to obtain for him a position in the porcelain factory at Sèvres, in order to assure him a regular livelihood, but ordered from him a great ornamental piece, a door destined for the Palais des Arts Décoratifs. In addition, by a special privilege created in favor of artists under Louis XIV,--a privilege the traditions of which the French Government has happily perpetuated,--M. Turquet granted Rodin a good studio in the Dépôt des Marbres, so that he could execute his order.

"And what will you represent on that door?" enquired the under-secretary of state.

"I am sure I don't know," replied the artist. "But I shall make a quantity of little figures; then no one will say that they are casts taken from the life."

Thus we find him at Sèvres, a ceramist; he has carried on so many different trades that he succeeds marvelously with this one. It was his task to decorate vases of delicate clay; he modeled light bas-reliefs, representations of mythological scenes, idylls. Nymphs, cupids, fauns, evoked by his miraculously delicate fingers, were born out of the milky, transparent material, bringing back to life the flowery graces of the drawing-room art of the eighteenth century, the dainty elegances of the wax figures of Clodion, but with a graver sense of the mystery of nature and of love.

Unfortunately, when these vases left the hand of the master they were overladen with hideous ornaments in the style of Louis-Philippe. Moreover, the officials at the head of the factory did not like them. They were carried up to the attics, they were left lying about on the floor, in the secret hope of seeing them broken by the feet of some careless or ill-willed workman.

The feeling of being isolated and misunderstood at times threw a shadow over the soul of the sculptor; but on the other hand he felt himself so strong, so solidly based in his will, in his self-confidence, and in the virtue of labor that these moments of depression passed away quickly. Besides, he knew the secret of the poor, the secret of creating happiness for oneself out of everything that the rich and powerful despise: a simple life, health, regular work, the contemplation of nature, and a few real friendships. Rodin earned at Sèvres only two or three francs an hour and lost a great deal of time on the railroad. What did it matter? He found pleasure and rest in these little journeys. Every day he set out from Paris by train, and, the day over, winter and summer, his wife came to meet him. They returned together on foot either along the banks of the Seine, charming in their profusion of little hills and islands, covered with meadows or fine trees, or through the woods of Meudon and Clamart, with their vistas of Paris, its heights, its buildings, its changing sky full of light and spirit.

At the end of four years of opposition and annoyance Rodin gave up pottery in order to consecrate himself wholly to his own work. The museum of the factory preserves a vase signed by him, and the future Musée de l'Hôtel Biron can show a second example. What has become of the others? What price would not be paid for them to-day by admirers of the master?

These supplementary works did not turn him away from his essential task; whatever were the technical means employed, his efforts tended toward one unique end, the plastic quality, and he gave himself up desperately to this search in executing his new order, the "Gate."

Rising at four in the morning, as he had done in his youth, he studied the plans and the details of this great work. He had announced a series of little figures. How was he to group them? What visions surged in the sculptor's imagination? Of what legendary theme, what theme of history or poetry, should he make use in order to realize his program? He had never ceased to be a passionate reader. He read especially the Greek poets and dramatists, the Roman historians, the old French chronicles, Dante, Shakspere, Victor Hugo, and Baudelaire. He did not wish to draw the subject of his future work from Homer, Æschylus or Sophocles; the School of the Beaux-Arts had so abused the theme of the antique, already immortalized by Greek sculptors, that it had entirely lost its freshness. The moderns attracted him less, but he was obsessed by the work of the great poet of the Renaissance, by the "Divine Comedy" of Dante. He had read and reread it and made a sort of commentary in the form of innumerable sketches which he jotted down mornings and evenings at table, while walking, stopping by the wayside to dash off attitudes and gestures on the leaves of his note-book. He rediscovered in the poem of Dante the fateful grandeur of the Greek dramas, but with an atmosphere more modern, closer to ourselves, more mournfully familiar to our anguishes and our torments. The idea took shape in his imagination, "that imagination ceaselessly rumbling and groaning like a forge"; it exalted his bold spirit. Genius joins to the richness of the intellect the simplicity of heart that creates faith. Genius _believes_ ever more than it _thinks_. It has the strength which succeeds in anything, and it possesses also that supreme gift, the ingenuousness of the child who doubts nothing. Rodin believed the poem of Dante as if he had lived it, as Dante himself believed in Vergil. What a magnificent homage great men render to one another in this credulity of genius toward genius!

The subject chosen by Rodin for his decorative panels, then, was hell--hell as Dante conceived it in a vision that lends itself, for that matter, marvelously to a plastic realization. The "Gate" would be a poem, an immense sculptured poem; that is to say, a résumé of the attitudes and gestures of life called forth by the release of the passions, a strange catalogue of the expressions of the human body under the shock of sorrow and of joy. If the imagination of Rodin caught fire like that of a visionary, he remained beyond everything and above everything the sculptor, and he plunged immediately into the search for the general scheme of the work.

The truth of the movements, the poetry of the evocations, his models would give him; he could feel at ease as to that: the resources that nature would offer him were inexhaustible. But the plan, that he must find himself; he must do the work of the builder, almost of the geometrician. There could be no self-deception as to that. The fuller the ornamentation was to be of figures and movements, the more solid must be the frame of the immense picture, the more vigorous and compact must be the general plan of the work.

Rodin's mind wavered between two great schools, that of the Renaissance and that of the Middle Ages, that which had produced the doors of the baptistry at Florence and that to which we owe the portals of the Gothic cathedrals.

The celebrated gates of Florence are a series of bas-reliefs arranged symmetrically in a regular framework; they present a series of separate pictures having no common bond except their subject. The execution is admirable, and it is perhaps impossible to surpass it. Lorenzo Ghiberti has done there the work of an incomparable modeler, actually a goldsmith; but he has in no way troubled himself with regard to architecture. Now, architecture is the great French point of view. The Roman and the Gothic have placed in their monument (the church) that other monument (the portal). The portal is complete in itself; the art of the sculptor and that of the architect have united and become indistinguishable here in order to realize an absolute beauty.

Rodin, profoundly French, inheriting the instinct and taste of his ancestors the master-masons, having to compose a door, was fated to conceive a portal. On the other hand, he could not escape the influence of the antique, the result of his early studies. This was the entirely different element which in the course of the work he had undertaken was to mingle with the Gothic element.

It was not the first time that the mingling of these two great conceptions of art had occurred in France. From it had sprung our Renaissance sculpture; in that epoch the sculpture of the Greeks united itself with the Gothic architecture, the Hellenic sunlight brought to blossom the majesty of our monuments. Does not Rodin himself, with his vast outlook over the whole field of art, call this period of national art, the sixteenth century, the French Gothic?

"The Gate of Hell," then, took on in its general structure a Renaissance aspect. It preserves the graceful line of the Gothic portal and has the luminous whiteness inspired by Greek sculpture. This singular work has touched all contemporary artists. Most of our writers have described it, and, after them, the critics of other countries. This living multitude, this suffering, groaning multitude that covers the two panels with a thousand passionate movements, has drawn into its magic whirlpool the world of literature, which has been able to liberate itself only by means of innumerable printed pages. The poem of Dante has come forth as it were revivified from the hands of Rodin. Fresh tears, one would say, have bathed the most poignant passages; the pity of a man of to-day, of one like ourselves, our brother, has enveloped the terrible work of the Florentine poet, that man of the Middle Ages, with an atmosphere of tenderness and compassion which seems the emotion of Christianity at its purest, its original source. In order to become our own, it has passed through the great soul of Rodin. It is not surprising, then, that the sensibility of our artists, reanimated by this new spectacle, should be touched to so voluminous an expression by this haunting work.

But what has not been sufficiently remarked is that the "Gate" is, above everything, a piece of architecture of the highest order.

When we see it we are at once struck with an impression of majesty, of calm strength and plenitude. It seems even longer than it actually is. It is a rectangle six meters high and two and a half meters wide, but the source of the illusion is the justness of the proportions and the value of the masses.

The powerful frame is furrowed with deep depressions. It rests on the ground upon a strong base from which rise the two door-posts, as robust as pillars and mounting together toward the summit. A pediment in the shape of an entablature overhangs the entire monument, casting over it a deep shadow full of nuances; and it is this shadow, skilfully graduated, that gives to the work its rich, soft color. The body of the portal is divided into two panels; a vast tympanum surmounts them transversally. This tympanum, surmounted by a large cornice, dominates the work. Without weighing it down, it gives it its mass, it attracts, it obsesses, the eye; it is the soul of the edifice, its intellect. No word can more justly describe it than the word brow, for it is magnetic, haunting, mysterious, like the forehead of a man of genius.

The panels sink deep into a shadow that is heavy, but not harsh, while in the foreground the pillars advance into the light; the delicate bas-reliefs that cover them keep them in a silvery atmosphere, the source of the great softness which envelopes this work, otherwise severe and tragic, the source of the fugitive lightness of the lines, which strike up from the earth toward the somber and tormented upper regions.

Carried away by this marvelous technic, the spirit of the visitor succumbs; it follows this ascending movement of the door-posts, to lose itself in the sorrowful dream sculptured on the tympanum.

On the panel writhe the clusters of human figures, the eddies of the multitude of damned souls pursued by the rage of the elements, by the devouring tongues of the infernal fire, by the frozen waters, by the wind that tears them and stings them. "It is," says the eminent art critic Gustave Jeffroy, in the most beautiful pages that have been consecrated to a description of this work, "the dizzy whirl, the falling through space, the groveling on the face of the earth of a whole wretched humanity obstinately persisting in living and suffering, bruised and wounded in its flesh, saddened in its soul, crying aloud its griefs, harshly laughing through its tears, chanting its breathless fears, its sickly joys, its ecstatic sorrows."

The genius of Rodin became intoxicated with all the resources of his art. Master of a technic of the first order, he delighted in every kind of effect, arranging them as a great symphonist arranges the instruments of an immense orchestra. Low-relief, half-relief, high-relief, and sculpture in the round, he omitted none. He did not yield to the literary temptation. At the height of his fever of invention he was circumspect, measured, guided by his knowledge as a modeler. The poet thinks, but the carver speaks; he speaks justly, he speaks admirably, because he uses only his own true and personal language, which he knows from the ground up. That is the whole secret of the way in which this man inflames our soul and subjugates our imagination.

Two principal notes, two motives form, above the whirlwind of the infernal fires, a resting-place for the eye troubled by so much vehemence: one, in the midst of the tympanum, is the figure of Dante. It is Dante, but it is even more the eternal poet. Seated, leaning over the abyss of suffering, thrilled with anguish, he seems to seek in the very depths of the pit itself the word of infinite pity that will deliver this sorrowful humanity.