Chapter VII: Part 7

Higher yet, above his bowed head, rising suddenly from the frame and splayed in a large protuberance, a group of three entwined figures crowns and completes the brow. With the same despairing gesture they point to the multitude of the damned. One does not know what these shuddering beings are, but they have the sweetness of angels; at once we seem to hear their lips murmur the words of the grand Florentine, "_Lasciate ogni speranza_"; but across their forms, their compassionate forms, their fraternal forms, one feels passing a tremor of love and pity. Far from condemning, their clasped hands offer to the sad wreckage of fatality that writhes at their feet a sign, a unique sign, the sign of good-will of pity.

* * * * *

"The Gate of Hell" was shown only once to the public. This was at the Universal Exposition of 1900. Although it was nearly finished, it was seen then only in an incomplete state.

The day of the opening arrived before the master had been able to have placed on the _fronton_ and on the panels of his monument the hundreds of great and small figures destined for their ornamentation. People saw the "Gate," then in the nudity of its construction, grandiose assuredly, but despoiled of its extraordinary raiment of sculpture.

That day was a sad one for the true friends of art and of Rodin. A band of snobs, full of their own importance, crowded about the great man. Having considered the work with the hasty and casual glance of men of the world of the sort that are concerned above all to get themselves noticed, they remarked to Rodin, in a tone of augury, "Your doorway is much more beautiful like that; in no circumstances do anything more to it."

This absurd advice befell at an evil moment: the artist felt worn out from overwork and anxieties of all kinds and, moreover, was troubled over the fate of his exhibit the failure of which might in truth have ruined him completely. In these circumstances he did not have the freedom of spirit necessary to judge correctly the value of his own work. And besides he had seen it too much during the twenty years in which it had been before his eyes. He was tired of it, weary of it.

Thus everything combined to make him lend an ear to the unfavorable opinions of the Parisian aviary. Had he been in better health, more the master of himself physically and morally, he would have replied to the prattling of these excited paroquets and guinea-hens:

"Take more room, examine my 'Gate' from a little farther off, and you will see once more the effect of the whole--the effect of unity which charms you when it is deprived of its ornamentation. You must understand that my sculpture is so calculated as to melt into the principal masses. For that matter, it completes them by modeling them into the light. The essential designs are there: it is possible that in the course of the final work I may find it necessary to diminish such or such a projection, to fill out such or such a pool of shadow; nevertheless, leave this difficulty to my fifty years of artisanship and experience, and you may be sure that quite by myself I shall find the best way of finishing my work."

But the master was silent. Later, carried away by the abundance of his conceptions, by his ever-deepening researches, he lost all interest in the "Gate" and has never taken the trouble to have it entirely mounted.

Fortunately, casts of it have been carefully preserved. It would be only an affair of a few months to reconstruct the work in its original integrity. Since the Universal Exposition time has rolled forward, and events also. Auguste Rodin has entered into the great serenity which age brings with it. He composes less, he corrects his work, he judges himself, and he does not deny his "Gate," one of the most exceptional of his works.

At last the creation of the Musée Rodin has been decided upon by the state. "The Gate of Hell" will be one of its important pieces; we shall be able to contemplate it then in all its majesty; it will not then simply be molded in plaster, but cast in bronze and cut in marble. It will offer a noble example of what work can accomplish when it is served by that supreme gift, will; for it will testify as much to resistance against the powerful enemies of the life of thought as to the intelligence of the man who created it. It forces upon us not only a formidable impression of strength, labor, talent, but also an impression no less lofty of method, order, and inner harmony. The multitude, who through their profound instincts approach much closer than one might suppose to the man of genius, will exclaim in contemplating this work, this true monument which undoubtedly the sculptor has raised through his own force of character, "Whoever erected this beautiful thing with his indefatigable hands was truly a man."

II

"THE BURGHERS OF CALAIS" (1889)--RODIN AND VICTOR HUGO--THE STATUE OF BALZAC (1898)

At the time the plaster model of "The Burghers of Calais" was first offered to the judgment of the public, in 1889, nearly seven years had gone by since Rodin had originally undertaken the group.

This is the period of my own childish memories of the master. He was a frequent visitor at the home of my father, who lived in Sèvres, on the outskirts of Paris.

Rodin, with his silent nature, apparently so full of calm and meditation, delighted in the ardor, the patriotic enthusiasm, the ferment of character, the brilliant conversation of that powerful, original writer, my father; he loved his books, too, spirited and passionate like himself, and possessing a vigor of expression that was new to French letters.

Léon Cladel received his friends on Sundays. In winter they gathered in the drawing-room, in summer on a terrace shaded by great chestnuts and limes, where thousands of birds twittered and chattered so energetically that at dusk they ended by drowning the voices of the visitors. Among the latter were writers, painters, and sculptors, several of whom have since become famous. Among them were Auguste Rodin and his colleague, his dear comrade, Jules Dalou, creator of many fine works, notably the monument to Eugène Delacroix which stands in the Luxembourg Gardens.

The sculptor of "The Burghers of Calais" was then barely fifty. He was far from possessing the immense fame that is his to-day, but artists already regarded him as a master. Of medium height, robust, with large shoulders and heavy limbs, placid and deliberate in appearance, never gesticulating, he himself resembled a block of stone; but above this heavy base his countenance, with its broadly designed features and its gray-blue eyes, expressed an extraordinarily keen intelligence and finesse. Despite my youth I was struck by this physiognomy, so singular and so penetrating, and also by the remarkable shyness that made the sculptor blush whenever he was addressed. Since then innumerable portraits have familiarized people with these features, which with age have settled into an expression of authority and firm will; his strange timidity has disappeared with time, with the consciousness of his strength, with his having become accustomed to glory. Moreover, Rodin has become a ready talker. Of old he listened intently, but always held his peace; at most a few words, spoken in a soft, clear voice, escaped from the waves of his long beard. He would at once relapse into silence, while with a slow movement giving his beard an instinctive caress with his large, square, irresistible hand, the true hand of a builder. But when he raised his eyelids, almost always lowered, the transparent eye, that limpid gray-blue eye, betrayed a perspicacity that was almost malicious, almost cunning: one felt that he penetrated through the forms of people to their very souls; and this he fixed so skilfully in the clay of his busts that his models were not always pleased with it. Many of Rodin's portraits have been refused by sitters offended by their pitiless realism.

Sometimes my father kept Rodin and Jules Dalou to dinner. The two sculptors were devoted to each other. They were comrades from of old who had traveled together the hard road of beginners; since their student days at the Petite Ecole they had many times reëncountered each other in the same workshops, where they had received the same contemptuous wages for their long days of labor. They felt a profound esteem for each other's talent, different as these talents were, altogether opposed, in fact, as were their natures; and it was a fine, a lovely thing to see them bring forward each other's respective merits. Alas! I shall have to tell later how an artistic rivalry came one day to destroy this noble friendship.

The appearance of "The Burghers of Calais" aroused a flood of enthusiasm in the world of art. I remember it well. At that time I was only a young school-girl, and my father was unwilling to allow me to "miss my classes" in order to accompany him to the opening of the Rodin Exhibition. After all, the lessons I received that day, following them quite absent-mindedly, were they worth the lesson I should have received from the contemplation of that masterpiece, even if my age would have prevented me from quite understanding it? Beauty is always the most fertilizing teacher.

A rich art-lover, acting with the municipal authorities of Calais, had ordered from Rodin the statue of Eustache de Saint-Pierre, the Calais hero whose devotion had in the fourteenth century, during the Hundred Years' War, saved the city when it was besieged by King Edward III of England.

Rodin, true to his principles, sought as ever to approach his subject from the quick of reality. He consulted history. He read the old chronicles of France, above all those of Jean Froissart, who was contemporaneous with the event and almost a witness of it. Froissart was a man of the fourteenth century, a man of the age of the cathedrals, and therefore himself a Gothic. His narrative has the force, the savor, the naïveté, the simple and profound art of the masters of that marvelous epoch. What a source of emotion for Rodin, a Gothic likewise in his faith and his artistic rectitude! He caught fire at the recital of the old master as at the voice of a brother-in-arms. He read, he learned that Edward III would not consent to spare the city of Calais from pillage and destruction unless six of her richest citizens would come out to him dressed only in their shirts, barefoot, with ropes about their necks, bringing him the keys of the city and their own heads to be cut off. In response to this terrible message, Eustache de Saint-Pierre and five of his fellow-citizens, taking counsel with the notables of the place, at once rose to go to the king's camp. They set forth immediately, escorted on their way by the hunger-stricken multitude, weeping and groaning over their sacrifice and "adoring them with pity."

This was the vision which from that time on took possession of Rodin, dominating him and never leaving him. But it was not an isolated person detached from his environment that he saw: it was the six martyrs just as they appeared in history, just as they were in life. In his thought he followed this band of heroes marching to the sacrifice in the midst of the weeping city. He could not bring himself to separate them either from their whole number or from their tragic surroundings. Therefore, in accordance with the genius of his theme, that is to say, with historic truth, he would make all six of them, and he would insist that they should be set up in the midst of the city, among the old houses, where they would continue to live their sublime life in the heart of the very town that they had saved.

For the price of one statue, therefore, Rodin set out to execute six. He rented a vast atelier in the rue des Fourneaux, in the Vaugirard Quarter. He worked unceasingly. To keep this enormous group in good condition, to maintain the proper temperature, he moistened the clay morning and evening, having as his _garçon d'atelier_ no one but his devoted wife, who had become thoroughly experienced in these matters. Despite all, accidents would happen: the clay would give way, an arm, modeled with his habitual exactitude, would fall and have to be laboriously repaired; but the fervent modeler never hesitated in his work, and on the day when he exhibited "The Burghers of Calais" at the house of Georges Petit the praise and the homage that sprang forth from the soul of all true artists recompensed him magnificently, bringing him the intoxicating caress of dawning glory. They spoke, in connection with the "Burghers," of the image-makers of our cathedrals; they spoke of the statues of Claus Sluters, of the famous statues of the "Well of Moses" at Dijon. Really, in the Calais monument Rodin is more than ever under the Gothic influence in subject, in thought, and in execution. The equilibrium of the figures composing the group is the same as that of the "Saint John the Baptist." The long shifts that cover the naked bodies of his heroes recall those draperies in vertical folds dear to the Middle Ages. The very modeling of the figures and of the faces increases this effect of elongation caused by the fall of the fabric; the modeling in large planes, the vigorous accents, the simple and pathetic movements are certainly those of the sort that out-of-door sculpture calls for. In twenty years Rodin had made innumerable visits to the Gothic monuments. Here was the result of his tours of France. He had made them in order to recapture the traditions of art from the hands of our wonderful old stone-cutters, and his heart must have throbbed with joy when he was told that in his own hands that tradition had suffered no loss.

Naturally, the appearance of "The Burghers of Calais," even that, could not fail to have its share of comic anecdote, that bitter and painful humor that marks the adventures of genius in its struggle with vulgarity. Let us not complain too much. The contrast between these adventures and the proud way of life of a great man, the regularity of his hours of toil--it is this that creates opposition, movement, life. The elect soul feels a savage joy in these blows which shake it like a tree tormented by brutal hands, a tree aware of the vigor of its resistance and its ever-increasing tenacity.

The municipality of Calais, hearing that there were to be six statues instead of the one that had been ordered, took umbrage, and deliberated for two years. The heroic group waited, and, as it encumbered Rodin's atelier, where other works were going forward, it was placed in a stable. At last the worthy town authorities decided to assign it a site. Naturally, the site in question was exactly opposed to the ideas of the master--ideas that had been thought out and that were perfectly logical, based on the laws of decorative art and still more determined by that infallible criterion, taste. Rodin desired that his monument should be in the center of the town; they placed it on the edge of the sea. He counted on emphasizing the tall stature of his figures by enshrining it in the narrow frame of the houses; they placed it against a horizon without limits. He requested that the group should be placed very low, almost on the ground, or else very high on an elevated pedestal, like the "Colleoni" at Venice or the "Gattamelata" at Padua; they placed it at a middle height, thus diminishing the effect of its imposing proportions. The lesson had to come from foreign lands. The city of Antwerp has erected, in front of its museum of fine arts, two of the statues of the celebrated group, and England, which does things splendidly when it is a question of embellishing its cities or of rendering homage to the valor of its adversaries, has erected the effigies of the six heroes of Calais on one of the most beautiful sites in London, before the Palace of Westminster.

* * * * *

By this time the reader is sufficiently familiar with the technic of Rodin for it to be unnecessary to analyze here in detail this well-known work. What must not be forgotten is that the sculptor had first modeled these six powerful bodies entirely in the nude. This is his invariable method when he executes draped figures. One realizes this, even without knowing it, before these arms, these hands, these legs, and these feet constructed with that rigorous conscience which, with the true artist, is at once a necessity and a delight; one divines the slope of the torsos bent with grief or rigid in the pride of sacrifice.

"Yes, they are beautiful," the master said to me one day when I was talking with him. "The shirt, the blouse are garments the folds of which yield simple planes and effects that, rightly rendered, are those of true sculpture. But there is something better still, and that is sackcloth. If I had clothed my 'Burghers of Calais' in sackcloth, they would certainly be more beautiful. I did not dare to. Some one else will do this and will succeed. It is sufficient to express an idea and leave it to its destiny."

We ought to love in Rodin this intellectual vigor that skirts the borders of the impossible. In our age, consumed with indecision, it is a priceless aid, a resting-place, a _point d'appui_ from which one starts forth afresh, fortified, one's nerves recharged with vitality, to the conquest of one's share of knowledge or of talent. This accounts in part for the irresistible influence which for thirty years the illustrious sculptor has exercised over the minds of artists. One feels that this fount of strength condensed in his virile soul comes from something deeper than his personality alone; it comes from the very depths of the national reserves. The conviction, the energy of Rodin are those of the workman who knows his trade, of the laborer impassioned by the culture of his own soil. This endurance is the foundation of the French temperament; the events happening now have proved it. When a country possesses such individualities through the course of history, the roads of the future open out before it brilliant with hope despite passing shadows, and promise the highest surprises.

RODIN AND VICTOR HUGO

The creation of "The Burghers of Calais" marks the middle of a period of truly prodigious fecundity. From 1889 to 1896, monuments, busts, statues, and groups of every kind issue without interruption from the ateliers of Rodin, and the more numerous the works his hand models, the more it grasps the contexture of the work, the more it refines the execution. Orders for portraits pour in; collectors hold it an honor to possess a marble, a bronze, signed with a name which every day increases in celebrity. In 1888 comes that jewel of marble, the bust of Madame Morla Vicuñha, and the monument to Claude Vicuñha, president of the Republic of Chile; in 1889, the bronze portrait of Dalou, the statue of Bastien-Lepage, that admirable head "La Pensée," acquired by the Musée du Luxembourg.

In 1890 comes the portrait of Mme. Russell, a bust in silver, of noble simplicity, which one would say was the head of a Roman matron, with the luminous veil upon her thoughtful forehead and the flower of good-will blossoming upon her delicately swelling mouth. Then there is "The Danaïd," "La vielle Heaulmière," and a great study, a long woman's torso, "La Terre."

In 1892, not to mention delightful minor works like "The Young Mother" and "Brother and Sister," appear two masterpieces: the bust of Puvis de Chavannes and that of Henri Rochefort, magnificent contrasts in construction and execution. The painter-gentleman carries his haughty head like an old leaguer chief, and the pamphleteer bends over the destinies of France, which for fifty years he has defended day in, day out, with his flaming pen, an enormous brow--a brow like a spherical vault that seems to contain a world.

"You have made it grander, you have made it more beautiful than nature," some one said to Rodin one day.

"One can never do anything so beautiful as nature," he replied.

In this same year, 1892, he exhibited the charming monument to Claude Lorrain, in which he recaptured the spirit of the eighteenth century. It was the town of Nancy that ordered this figure of its painter and has placed it in its vast park.

One cannot mention everything. Forms and attitudes renew themselves, but not the terms that express them. To measure the abundance of this work one should read the catalogue, till now incomplete,--for it has been impossible to compile one that was not so,--of the master's works; only so can we realize how almost dizzily his productiveness became accelerated with the epoch of his maturity. Mythological subjects dominate it, but are always treated with a profoundly human understanding of the poetry and the grace of the form in which they achieve an aspect delightfully new.

Such titles as "Venus and Adonis," "The Education of Achilles," "The Death of Alcestis," "Cupid and Psyche," "The Faun and the Fountain," "Pygmalion and Galatea," Rodin inscribed only as an afterthought on the pedestals of his groups. They are not the result of a necessary preliminary conception; it is his figures themselves that breathe them, his models unconsciously repeated the combinations of movement and gesture through which are translated the eternal sentiments immortalized by the legends of paganism. So true is this that Rodin obtained his charming groups by assembling in harmony with his researches the animated little figures that encumbered the windows of his ateliers. He amused himself by uniting them, by marrying their attitudes; with these little figures, these puppets of genius, he composed actual little intimate dramas or idylls revived from the antique. In the hollow of a Greek bowl he places a little nude body, and one would say that it is the soul of the wave that conceals itself against the side of the vase. He enlaces three feminine figures, upright, beside the body of a recumbent youth: they are the Graces, who come to bend over the dying poet. Thus he perpetuates the fantasy of things through that of his own taste; he eternalizes the most delicious caprices of nature.

* * * * *

We come now to the year 1896 and the appearance of the "Monument to Victor Hugo."

This monument had been ordered for the Panthéon. Rodin, who had modeled in 1885 the bust of the singer of the "Légende des Siècles," was doubly, on this account, entitled to the order. In the midst of what difficulties had he achieved that bust! It required all his patience, all the tenacity of a Lorrainese peasant, to accomplish it. When he had begged the honor of reproducing those illustrious features, the poet, already nearing his end, tired out with having posed for mediocre plaster-daubers and unaware of the superiority of his new sculptor, consented to pose only for two hours. All the same, he authorized Rodin to come as often as necessary and make as many sketches as he needed while he, Hugo, worked or received his friends.

Rodin accepted these difficult conditions. Was it not Victor Hugo with whom he was dealing, the father of modern poetry? And then what a spectacle for his artist's eyes, that of the great man bending over his papers that Jupiter-like head of his in which thought, in gestation, swelled the sublime brow with a tumult of ideas! When he talked, what majesty in "this face of a lion in repose"!

The sculptor placed a stool, some clay, some tools in the corner of a gallery; it was there that he worked out the general form of the bust. Then, studying his wonderful model for months, he made hundreds of sketches of him, under every aspect; at times, having used up the pages of his note-books, he even covered entire blocks of cigarette paper with rapid notes and jottings. Then he transferred this record of observations to his clay. Working in this manner, it took him three months to finish his bust. He exhibited it, in bronze, at the Salon of 1884. One cannot fail to admire the volumes, the beautiful mass of the whole, even though it does not show that brilliant touch of genius which strikes us before the bust of Jean-Paul Laurens or that of Rochefort; but later, relying upon this document and upon his own special memory of forms in action, Rodin was to restore for us this moving head in his monument of the poet, which was to be one of his very loftiest works. This same bust of Victor Hugo was to rupture the friendship between Rodin and Jules Dalou--Dalou of whom he sent to the same Salon of 1884, by a curious coincidence, an incomparable bust that puts one in mind of those of Donatello.

The family of Victor Hugo did not like Rodin's portrait of the master. When the poet died (1885), it was Dalou whom they called to execute a death-mask of the features of the great poet. Filled with ambition and eager for official glory, Dalou had the weakness to accept, forgetting what he owed to Rodin, not even informing him, in fact. Deeply hurt, the latter withdrew his affection for his old friend. My father, saddened by this occurrence, which destroyed so rare and noble a friendship, brought the two friends together at his table in the hope of reconciling them; but nothing could melt the wall of ice that had fallen between these dissevered hearts.

Ten years afterward a magnificent compensation was offered to Rodin. From him was ordered the monument of the poet for the Panthéon. He represented him nude, under the folds of a vast cloak, and seated on a rock, as if by the seashore, with his wonderful head bowed in an attitude of meditation, just as Rodin had often contemplated it in priceless hours.

This manner of representing a great man, quite simply revived from the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, shocked to the last degree the administrative staff of the department of fine arts. Why this nude personage, instead of a quite respectable Victor Hugo in the frock-coat of an academician? Why not one of those statues that peacefully occupy some corner of a public square without attracting any one's attention, one of those statues that are not made to be looked at? As for this poet, who resembled a Homer, a hero or a demigod, this grand body, outrageously beautiful and simple, is it not scandalous in the midst of the conformity of bourgeois civilization, enslaved by the ugliness of fashion, whose perverted taste can no longer recognize the beauty of the nude? The painter David used to say of his epoch, in which, however, the mode of dress was less displeasing than it is to-day, "What misery to be obliged to spend one's life in fashioning coats and shoes!" Rodin, like David, and like Phidias, preferred the trade of the sculptor to that of the tailor.

Such an uproar arose that he had to withdraw the model of his monument and promise another. But everything comes with time, even the best: the fortunes of politics brought to the ministry of fine arts an intelligent and cultivated director, the dramatic critic Gustave Larroumet. Delighted with Rodin's scheme, the magnificent symbolization of French poetry, he confirmed the order for the audacious monument, no longer for the Panthéon, but for the Luxembourg Gardens; and, not satisfied with this reparation, charged the master with the additional execution of another monument destined for the Panthéon. One can imagine the anger in certain circles--two orders on the same subject to the same sculptor! What an aberration! What madness! But the decision was made and well made.

Rodin took six years to perfect his first "Victor Hugo"; the marble was not exhibited until 1901. The vigor of the work and the sovereign gesture by which the bard of contemplation seems to impose silence upon the voice of nature in order that the voices struggling within himself, in the depths of his genius, may be the better heard, the suppleness of the material, of this Carrara marble, with its warm reflections, as if melted under the pressure of a fiery hand, obstinately make one think of Michelangelo; one has the disturbing sensation, not of an imitation, but of a resurrection of the plastic power reincarnated out of nature, of a new spring of sap from the same vein of genius.

The original plan allowed, in addition, for two allegorical figures, "The Inner Voice" and "The Tragic Muse," which, placed beside the poet, should breathe into him thought and inspiration. But, very beautiful in themselves, they gave to the monument, once they were executed and placed, an anecdotal quality that diminished its force; they weakened the grandeur of the Olympian gesture and destroyed that feeling of solitude inseparable from such a personality as that of the great man: an island in the midst of the flood of the human multitude, genius itself is aware of its own splendid isolation.

This is what I ventured to express one day to the master, not without hesitation. Nothing equals the simplicity of Rodin face to face with what he knows is sincere and animated by a true love of art. He listened, gazed at his work, and, turning toward me, gave me a joyous glance.

"You are right," he replied, with a spontaneity that put my sense of responsibility on its mettle. "I sacrificed to the mania of the age, which is to overload things. My modeling is there, the eloquence of the gesture also. The rest would only spoil the essential things. It is a stroke of genius. I am going to write to the under-secretary of state that my monument is ready."

In lieu of the two figures that were to have accompanied the statue of Victor Hugo, to indemnify the Government Rodin gave to the Musée du Luxembourg a series of his most beautiful busts in bronze, including the head of the poet.

As for the marble, it was in the garden of the Palais Royal that it was finally erected; but this site is not of the happiest: a large lawn separates the spectator from the monument; one sees it from the wrong angle, and this destroys the equilibrium of its planes. Moreover, in our damp climate marble quickly loses the charm of its purity and transparency; streaks of brown already stain and deface that of the "Victor Hugo." Let us hope that the organizers of the Musée Rodin will find it possible to place it in one of the rooms of the future museum, substituting for it a bronze upon which the inclemencies of the atmosphere will serve to produce a beautiful patina.

THE STATUE OF BALZAC (1898)

This is the most famous and the least known of Rodin's works. Newspaper controversies have made it famous throughout the whole world; but it has, nevertheless, made only one brief appearance in public, in 1898, at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts. It marks at the same time a vital stage in the career of the master and the most poignant period of his life as a fighter. It is the point of equilibrium in the perpetual balancing of the art of Rodin between the several great traditions. It was the object of a famous quarrel, in which the glory of the sculptor, momentarily all but eclipsed by ridicule, recovered itself, nevertheless, and rose higher than ever.

What strikes one in this statue, at first sight, is its strange block-like aspect, its monolithic simplicity. People say quite rightly that it looks like a stone _lovée_, a druidic monument. Ever since "The Burghers of Calais," one of the figures of which at least, that of the man with the key, already suggests the idea of a monolith, Rodin had been going further and further in his stubborn search for the simplification of planes, and here he finally achieved his object. In order to obtain it, he went back all the way to the primitive Gothic and even to the archaic Greek, which likewise preserves in the general outline of its statues the rigid aspect of those statues of wood that had preceded it. In all these early epochs of art one finds the form of the tree trunk in which their sculpture was cut. One of the examples of this art that had most forcibly impressed Rodin was the statue of Hera of Samothrace in the Louvre. The beauty of this figure, denuded of all foreign artifice in the exact research for masses, the public little comprehends; but the sculptor perceives its justness, the power of its relief and its modeling, disconcerting in these primitive artists, qualities that are concealed under the extreme simplicity of its appearance. In this magnificent Hera it is as if one saw the rotundities of woman coming to birth and undergoing in the tree, the vegetal column, one of those metamorphoses familiar in the fables of paganism. The "Balzac," with its athletic body, veiled in a spread robe that envelopes it, does not it also resemble a powerful tree trunk from the summit of which looks down, like a solitary, monstrous flower, the head of the inspired writer?

This statue had been ordered by the Société des Gens de Lettres, and was intended for one of the public squares of Paris. After Victor Hugo, Balzac. After the giant of modern poetry, the giant of the novel. What a redoutable honor, but also what a homage to the talent of the great sculptor! What joy for artists in the association of these two names, Balzac and Rodin! On the other hand, how many adversaries rejoiced in the hope of seeing Rodin come to grief with this task, fraught not less with peril than with glory! He did not conceal from himself that the statue of Balzac would be a severe problem to solve. We possess no authentic bust of the creator of the "Comédie Humaine," not even a death-mask giving the exact measure of the cranial bones and hence the actual planes. We know through his contemporaries that the author was fat and short. Fat and short--that is far from facilitating the composition of a work of decorative art. But, more precious than mediocre portraits, there is a famous page about him by Lamartine, another great genius. "Balzac," he says, "was the figure of an element ... stout, thick-set, square at the base and at the shoulders, ample, much as Mirabeau was; but not heavy in any way; he had so much soul that it carried _him_ lightly."

It was this essence that he set out to render. A frank artist takes no liberties with reality. It alone gives him force; the "majesty of the true" is alone durable. Nature, which dowered Balzac with one of the most prodigious intellects known to us, dowered him at the same time, to support this intellect, with the physical breadth of a colossus. To have altered anything that went to make up the harmony of the structure would have been to commit a grave error; it would have been to denaturalize the divine work. On the other hand, above this mass of flesh it was necessary to make that marvelous spirit hover, that sparkling spirit, that myriad-faceted spirit of the greatest of novelists.

Rodin knows by experience that nature repeats herself. Has not a humorist said: "It is useless to make a bust of you; it exists already. You have only to look for it in the museums"?

He set out to find a man who resembled Balzac, going all the way to Touraine, the writer's native province, a hundred times depicted by him in his books. The family of Balzac was originally from Languedoc, but that made no difference; the intuition of a great artist is always rewarded. Rodin found at Tours the model he desired; he was a young countryman, a carter, who resembled his hero to an almost miraculous degree. Of him he made a very animated bust, in which one sees the full face, the nose, concave and large at the end, but voluptuous and full of spirit, the rounded chin, the vast shoulders of the master of the "Comédie Humaine." There was lacking, however, the flame of thought that spiritualized and rendered buoyant this mass of human substance. Rodin modified the expression, illuminating the physiognomy with delicacy and frank gaiety. It is Balzac at twenty-five, a peasant Balzac, breathing at every pore youth, self-confidence, and the love of life. Not yet is it the man tormented by fate, the tragic visionary of the "Comédie Humaine," the slave of his work who in twenty years wrote fifty novels, staged a thousand characters, and gave life to an entire society. It is not the man who has suffered, thought, meditated, with all the power of one of the most extraordinary organisms known to us; it has not the appearance of a phenomenon.

After this Rodin skilfully altered these features; he gave them the scars of the interior effort, he made them soft and hollowed them, he made them old and grave. In a few weeks he did the work that nature had taken years to accomplish. He finished by creating that Titan's mask which we know, that head as round as a bullet and, like a bullet, terrible in its concentrated force. Later he augmented this; that is to say, he doubled its proportions: and this head, almost frightening in its expression, recalls the masks which the Greek tragedians wore when they played in the open air. Finally he modeled the body of the colossus, making it entirely nude, with arms crossed, braced against the earth with the tension of the whole will, evoking the idea of some prodigious birth. Then he draped this heavy body in the monk's robe in which the writer used to envelope himself for work and the straight folds of which enwrapped him like the sheath of a mummy, offering to the sight nothing but the tumultuous head--the head ravaged by intelligence and savage energy.

Rodin felt almost frightened by his own work.

He kept it a long time before turning it over to the cast-makers. He had worked it out in his atelier, but it was destined for the open air. How would it appear in broad daylight?

The gestation of this work was accompanied by a thousand miseries. The committee of the Société des Gens de Lettres incessantly demanded the "Balzac"; they were dumfounded before the extraordinary figure that was shown to them, before this white phantom the conception of which was so utterly the reverse of all current ideas. Not knowing what to say, they insisted that it should be modified and urged haste upon Rodin, whose extraordinary dexterity became slowness itself when it was a question of putting the final touches upon a great work. The press began to take note of the affair. He himself became troubled and nervous. With what transports would he have left it, fled, gone away to rest and to dream of something else for a few weeks! The time of the Salon was approaching. Quite suddenly he made his decision, gave the clay to be cast, and ordered an enlargement. The statue was brought back to him at the Dépôt des Marbres, in the rue de l'Université; it was twice as large as the original model. It was placed in the garden that stretched out in front of the studio. He examined it as it rose against the depths of the open sky and the bright spring light. It was as if he had never seen it, and suddenly his mind was illuminated. The work was grand, simple, strong; the essential modeling was there, and the details they had exhorted him to add would only have diminished its unsurpassable unity.

Rodin had made up his mind. He sent his "Balzac" to the Salon.

Immediately there was war. The press, worked upon by the committee of the Société des Gens de Lettres, was unfavorable in advance. On the day of the opening of the Salon the word was passed around, and the official art world _s'esclaffe_. There was a crowd at the foot of the lofty image, near which Rodin took up his position, calm according to his wont, and talked quietly with his friends. Some, a very few, told him how they admired this work so proudly offered, so strange in its banal surroundings.

The next day the press broke forth. What an uproar! Everything went off at once: the heavy artillery of the great newspapers scolded solemnly, the light artillery crackled in the political sheets, and the grape-shot of the minor papers spat their rage, only too happy for so rich a prey to cut to pieces. The Institute, as might have been foreseen, fanned the conflagration. The public, excited, in turn broke loose, in the fury of ignorance stirred up against knowledge.

It became a "case," an affair, the _affaire de Balzac_. The committee of the Société des Gens de Lettres mobilized; by a vote of eleven to four it declared that it "did not recognize the writer in the statue of M. Rodin." The president of the same society, the poet Jean Aicard, refused the chance of immortality which this stupidity was to confer upon his colleagues and flung his resignation in their faces. A group of members of the municipal council of Paris decreed that it would be ridiculous to accord "this block" a place in one of the squares of the city. For two months music-halls and café-concerts vented every evening the wit of the gutter on the scandalous statue and its sculptor; peddlers sold caricatures of it in plaster, Balzac being represented as a heap of snow or as a seal. In short, such was the event that it required nothing but the pen of Aristophanes to note down the harmonies of this chorus of frogs. The health of Rodin suffered a reaction from his long effort and from this battle. Then, too, there are hours when the strongest are seized with nausea before the bad faith and the stupidity of people. Nervous, his mind aching, a prey to insomnia, the master offered a melancholy spectacle, that beautiful serenity of his destroyed and his working strength put in jeopardy.

"For all that," says M. Léon Riotor, who tells the story with eloquence, "Rodin had a wonderful awakening. All the young world of letters rose up to declare its sympathy with the vanquished in this new skirmish. A number of painters and sculptors joined in. And the protest that was circulated came back covered with signatures."

No, Rodin was not vanquished. He retired for a moment from the mêlée to recover and to meditate in peace, but without deviating by a single step from his line of conduct. A collector offered to buy the "Balzac." A group of intellectuals started a public subscription; funds flowed in. Although he was not yet wealthy, Rodin courteously declined these offers, and, declaring that "an artist, like a woman, has to guard his honor," decided to withdraw his monument from the Salon and not have it erected anywhere.

The epic statue was transported to Meudon, and placed in the garden of the villa. In its loftiness it imposes itself against the sky, against the hills, against the trees that surround it, with the quality of nature herself. Like a gigantic pole it triumphs in the open air. It is specially on clear nights that its disturbing authority strikes the soul. The great phantom appears then formidable in the extreme simplicity of its planes, which, as in strong architecture, distribute over large spaces the masses of shadow and light. The American painter Steichen has passed nights in this enchanted garden in order to take of the "Balzac" photographs that are more beautiful than engravings. Haughty, with a ferocious majesty in the moonlight, the master of the "Comédie Humaine" brings his soul face to face with nature; he listens to its silence, he sounds its mysteries, he questions it in mute dialogue, the like of which has not been heard since the colloquy of _Hamlet_ with the shade of his father. For it is of _Hamlet_, of the most profound symbolization of the human spirit wrestling with the unknown, that one dreams before this meditating Balzac, alone, under the nocturnal light. This is what Rodin has known how to make out of that short, thick-set man who was the author of the "Etudes Philosophiques"; this is how he has lighted the fires of the intelligence on the mask of genius.

It is at the Musée Rodin that we shall rediscover this statue. Time will have progressed, and ideas also. When they see it anew, how many people will be astounded at having formerly scoffed at the work and offended the master, struck dumb and secretly humiliated at having thus contributed to the writing of the hundred thousandth chapter of that endless book, the book of human stupidity.

THE EXPOSITION OF 1900--THE BAS-RELIEFS OF EVIAN--RODIN AND THE WAR

In 1899, Rodin exhibited a large part of his work at Brussels and in Holland. The effect produced upon artists and upon the cultivated portion of the public was such that he resolved to repeat this experiment at the Universal Exposition of Paris.

It was foreordained that nothing should be easy for the great toiler, that it would be necessary for him to conquer everything through effort and struggle.

The administration of the Exposition, which had granted innumerable requests for space addressed to it by the industrialists and business men of the whole world, by bar-keepers, itinerant booth-holders, and managers of café-concerts, raised a thousand difficulties when it was a question of according a few feet of ground to the greatest of living sculptors. It required all the insistence of his most devoted and powerful friends to gain his point. Rodin finally received the authorization to construct a pavilion not in the Exposition itself, but outside the grounds in the place de l'Alma.

Once again, so much the better. How much finer for a man of the élite to stand aside from the rout!

According to the master's plan, there was erected a hall simple in appearance, elegant, reservedly in the Louis XVI style, a veritable repose for the eye strained by the strident architecture of the great fair of 1900. There were assembled the people of his sculpture.

Once more Rodin experienced an hour of trial, a formidable hour. If for the last dozen years he had left poverty behind, he had not yet achieved wealth, and it was a great risk to assume the expenses of his exhibition. If these expenses were not covered by the entrance-fees and the sale of his sculpture, how would he come out? He would be forced to a kind of transaction that he had always spurned, he would have to turn over all or part of his work to the art dealers. These groups, these busts, so painstakingly cast, or cut in the most beautiful marble by excellent workmen, and often by renowned sculptors, once the dealers had acquired rights in them, would they not be duplicated in a quantity of replicas of mediocre workmanship or, worse, reproduced by undiscriminating stone-cutters, who would disfigure the modeling and the character? The idea was odious to the scrupulous sculptor. He had reached the age of sixty, and if he did not show it, thanks to the vigor of his temperament and the persistent youth that goes with great minds, it was not less painful for him to put his apprehensions to the test. Too dignified, too proud, to give way to vain lamentations, he made only the most reserved references to his ordeal.

The success of the exhibition remained uncertain during the first weeks: many people hoped it would be a failure. At the end of a month or two, visitors from abroad, to whom thanks be given, began to pour in; the principal museums of Europe wished to possess some important figure of Rodin's. Soon the number of purchasers increased day by day, and I do not have to mention here how many art-lovers from the United States decided to enrich their collections with some rare piece signed by the master. In short, during the latter months Rodin had the joy of perceiving that he could remain the sole possessor of his work, that nothing could now separate him from his dear family of bronze and marble. It was happiness for him; it signalized also the great glory that comes with outstretched wing, bringing fortune with it.

The pretty pavilion in the place de l'Alma was transported and reërected in the garden at Meudon, and he filled it with masterpieces. Since then the whole world of art and literature and that portion of the political world that esteems art has passed through it. The French aristocracy and that of England, the most eminent personages of the two Americas, have been eager to visit it. One receives in it an impression at once grand and touching, giving one the highest idea of the supremacy of intellectual valor above the other goods of this world when one perceives the contrast of these artistic treasures with the altogether modest little house, almost bare, attended by a single servant, where Rodin continues, in the midst of the luxury of an epoch intoxicated with pleasures, to maintain the simplicity of his life in the sober company of his old single-spirited, faithful-hearted wife. This impression I never felt more vividly than on the occasion of the visit of the late King of England. Edward VII, like others, had conceived the desire to render this homage to French art. The day before, when I encountered the master in Paris, he said to me, without further explanation, "Come and have a look at the studio."

It was a beautiful afternoon in May. When I entered the pavilion, I could not restrain a cry of admiration. Marbles, nothing but marbles, of a dazzling whiteness! He had brought together all that he possessed, all those that his friends and the purchasers of his work had consented to lend him for the occasion, and one would have said that it was these groups of young, enlaced bodies, these busts of women, with their transparent, rosy flesh, that gave forth the light with which the apartment was filled. It was a unique vision, a vision which, in its purity and its unity, surpassed in delicate splendor that of the most celebrated collections, with all their accumulation of pictures, tapestries, bronze, and jewels. I wondered in silence; I wondered at the sure taste of the artist, but I wondered also at his will: everything of him was there. Who can deny that it was necessary for him to put pressure on himself to decide on such a choice, to sacrifice the bronzes, the sketches, the terra cottas, and many charming pieces? Nothing but marble, the kingdom of marble, but also that of life; for the sumptuous material trembled and palpitated under the play of the light that entered through the bay-windows of the atelier, bringing with it the soft brilliance of the season.

Since the Exposition of 1900, Rodin's reputation has increased steadily in France and abroad. England and Italy have organized triumphal receptions for him of a sort reserved hitherto for the most illustrious men of state. The artists of London have acclaimed him, and have charged him, on the death of Whistler, with the presidency of the International Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers. Oxford University has given him a doctorate. The municipality of Rome has greeted him with special homage at the capitol; the court of Greece, having invited him, awaits his visit; at Prague, where he was received by the Society of Young Czech Artists, they accorded him royal honors, the public unharnessing the horses from his carriage and applauding at the same time the personal genius of this great Frenchman and the free ideas of his country.

Without altering in any way his life of labor, which these tributes have at times slightly interfered with, he has permitted himself only one luxury as the result of his fortune--a collection of antiques. This he has formed with passion. It is, once more, for purposes of study, and what a study, to possess a few of these sublime fragments, to feel them and handle them under all aspects of light! Rodin has placed a certain number of them in his garden, arranging them among the trees, among the shrubs; he has placed them on the fresh grass, where they seem to live in another and a happier way than in the rooms of museums. At a stroke the little garden at Meudon, with its pedestals, its statues, with its grove where a charming little marble, the "Sleeping Cupid," reposes, has become like the villa of a Roman citizen of the time of Augustus.

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