RODIN

THE MAN AND HIS ART

WITH LEAVES FROM HIS NOTE-BOOK

COMPILED BY JUDITH CLADEL

AND TRANSLATED BY S.K. STAR

WITH INTRODUCTION BY JAMES HUNEKER

AND ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

NEW YORK

THE CENTURY CO.

1917

Contents

AUGUSTE RODIN

BY JAMES HUNEKER

I

Of Auguste Rodin one thing may be said without fear of contradiction: among his contemporaries to-day he is preëminently the master. Born at Paris, 1840,—the natal year of his friends, Claude Monet and Zola—in humble circumstances, without a liberal education, the young Rodin had to fight from the beginning; fight for bread as well as an art schooling. He was not even sure of his vocation. An accident determined it. He became a workman in the atelier of the sculptor, Carrier-Belleuse, though not until he had failed at the Beaux-Arts (a stroke of luck for his genius), and after he had enjoyed some tentative instruction under the animal sculptor, Barye (he was not a steady pupil of Barye, nor did he care to remain with him) he went to Belgium and "ghosted" for other sculptors; it was his privilege or misfortune to have been the anonymous assistant of a half dozen sculptors. He mastered the technique of his art by the sweat of his brow before he began to make music upon his own instrument. How his first work, "The Man with the Broken Nose," was refused by the Salon jury is history. He designed for the Sèvres porcelain works. He executed portrait busts, architectural ornaments, caryatids; all styles that were huddled in the studios and yards of sculptors he essayed. No man knew his trade better, although it is said that with the chisel of the practicien Rodin was never proficient; he could not, or would not, work at the marble en bloc. His sculptures to-day are in the museums of the world, and he is admitted to possess "talent" by academic men. Rivals he has none. His production is too personal. Like Richard Wagner he has proved a upas tree for lesser artists—he has deflected, or else absorbed them. His friend Eugene Carrière warned young sculptors not to study Rodin too curiously. Carrière was wise, yet his art of portraiture was influenced by Rodin; swimming in shadow his enigmatic heads have more the quality of Rodin's than the mortuary art of academic sculpture.

A profound student of light and movement, Rodin by deliberate amplification of the surfaces of his statues, avoiding dryness and harshness of outline, secures a zone of radiancy, a luminosity which creates the illusion of reality. He handles values in clay as a painter does his tones. He gets the design of the outline by movement which continually modifies the anatomy; the secret of the Greeks, he believes. He studies his profiles successively in full light, obtaining volume—or planes—at once and together; successive views of one movement. The light plays with more freedom upon his amplified surfaces, intensified in the modeling by enlarging the lines. The edges of certain parts are amplified, deformed, falsified, and we enjoy light-swept effects, luminous emanations. This deformation, he declares, was always practised by the great sculptors to snare the undulating appearance of life. Sculpture, he asserts, is the "art of the hole and lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodeled figures." Finish kills vitality. Yet Rodin can chisel a smooth nymph, if he so wills, but her flesh will ripple and run in the sunlight. His art is one of accents. He works by profile in depth, not by surfaces. He swears by what he calls "cubic truth"; his pattern is a mathematical figure; the pivot of art is balance, i.e., the opposition of volumes produced by movement. Unity haunts him. He is a believer in the correspondence of things, of continuity in nature. He is mystic, as well as a geometrician. Yet such a realist is he that he quarrels with any artist who does not recognize "the latent heroic in every natural movement."

Therefore he does not force the pose of his model, preferring attitudes or gestures voluntarily adopted. His sketch books, as vivid, as copious, as the drawings of Hokusai—he is studious of Japanese art—are swift memoranda of the human machine as it dispenses its normal muscular motions. Rodin, draughtsman, is as surprisingly original as the sculptor Rodin. He will study a human foot for months, not to copy it, but to master the secret of its rhythms. His drawings are the swift notations of a sculptor whose eye is never satisfied, whose desire to pin to paper the most evanescent vibrations of the human machine is almost a mania. The model may tumble down anywhere, in any contortion or relaxation he or she wishes. Practically instantaneous is the method of Rodin to register the fleeting attitudes, the first shivering surface. He rapidly draws with his eye on the model. It is often a mere scrawl, a silhouette, a few enveloping lines. But there is vitality in it all, and for his purpose, a notation of a motion. But a sculptor has made these extraordinary drawings, not a painter. It may be well to observe the distinction. And he is the most rhythmic sculptor among the moderns. Rhythm means for him the codification of beauty. Because, with a vision quite virginal, he has observed, he insists that he has affiliations with the Greeks. But if his vision is Greek his models are French, while his forms are more Gothic than the pseudo-Greek of the academy.

As Mr. W.C. Brownell wrote: "Rodin reveals rather than constructs beauty ... no sculptor has carried expression further; and expression means individual character completely exhibited rather than conventionally suggested." Mr. Brownell was the first critic to point out that Rodin's art was more nearly related to Donatello's than to Michael Angelo's. He is in the legitimate line of Gallic sculpture, the line of Goujon, Puget, Rude, Barye. Dalou, the celebrated sculptor, did not hesitate to assert that the Dante portal is "one of the most, if not the most, original and astonishing pieces of sculpture of the nineteenth century."

This Dante gate, begun thirty years ago, not finished yet—and probably never to be—is an astoundingly plastic fugue, with death, the devil, hell, and human passions, for a complicated four-voiced theme. I first saw the composition at the Rue de l'Université atelier. It is as terrifying a conception as the Last Judgment. Nor does it miss the sonorous and sorrowful grandeur of the Medici Tombs. Yet how different. How feverish, how tragic. Like all great men working in the grip of a unifying idea, Rodin modified the technique of sculpture so that it would serve him as sound does a musical composer. A lover of music his inner ear may dictate the vibrating rhythms of his forms; his marbles are ever musical, ever in modulation, not "frozen music," as Goethe said of Gothic architecture, but silent, swooning music. This Gate is a Frieze of Paris, as deeply significant of modern inspiration and sorrow as the Parthenon Frieze is the symbol of the great clear beauty of Hellas. Dante inspired this monstrous yet ennobled masterpiece, and Baudelaire's poetry filled many of its chinks and crannies with ignoble writhing shapes; shapes of dusky fire that, as they tremulously stand above the gulf of fear, wave ineffectual and desperate hands as if imploring destiny.

But Rodin is not all hell-fire and tragedy. Of singular delicacy and exquisite