THE LANGHAM SERIES AN ILLUSTRATED COLLECTION OF ART MONOGRAPHS EDITED BY SELWYN BRINTON, M.A. THE LANGHAM SERIES OF ART MONOGRAPHS Vol. 1. BARTOLOZZI AND HIS PUPILS IN ENGLAND. By Selwyn Brinton, M.A. 2. COLOUR PRINTS OF JAPAN. By Edward F. Strange, M.J.S. 3. THE ILLUSTRATORS OF MONTMARTRE. By Frank L. Emmanuel. 4. AUGUSTE RODIN. By Rudolf Dircks. 5. VENICE AS AN ART CITY. By Albert Zacher. 6. LONDON AS AN ART CITY. By Mrs. Steuart Erskine. 7. NUREMBERG. By H. Uhde-Bernays. 8. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLISH CARICATURE. By Sel- wyn Brinton, M.A. 9. ITALIAN ARCHITEC- TURE. By ]i Wood- Brown, M.A. Vol. 10. ROME AS AN ART CITY. By Albert Zacher. 11. JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET. By Richard Muther. 12. JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER. By H. W. Singer. 13. FRANCISCO DE GOYA. By Richard Muther. 14. DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTL By H. W. Singer. 15. MOORISH CITIES IN SPAIN. By C. Gasquoine Hartley. 16. OXFORD. By H. J. L. J. Masse. 17. HOKUSAI. By Edward F. Strange, M.J.S. 18. POMPEII AS AN ART CITY. By E. Mayer. 19. LEONARDO DA VINCI By Richard Muther. 20. MURILLO. By A. F. Calvert^ AUGUSTE RODIN. Pboio Steicbea AUGUSTE RODIN WITH LIST OF HIS PRINCIPAL WORKS BY RUDOLF DIRCKS Author of " verisimilitudes," "the libretto," etc. SIEGLE, HILL & CO. 2 LANGHAM PLACE, LONDON, W. T9 W. H. D, Second impression June 1909 All rights reserved The author wishes to express his sense of indebtedness to M. Rodin for the courtesy with which M. Rodin received him at his studios in Paris and at Meudony and for his frank and cordial expression of hi's ideas in regard to the art of sculpture ILLUSTRATIONS Portrait of Auguste Rodin {Photogra-vure) Frontispiece Facing The Thinker g {Musee Rodin at Meudon) The Man with the Broken Nose . s , . , i2 (Musee Rodin at Meudon) St. John the Baptist 24 {Musee du Luxembourg) La Pensbe 30 {Musee du Luxembourg) The Danaide 36 {Musee du Luxembourg) Bust of Jean Paul Laurens ...... 44 {Musee du Luxembourg) The Kiss .......... 46 {Musee du Luxembourg) The Burgesses of Calais {Photogravure) . , , • 5^ {Place de la Poste, Calais) Balzac 60 {Musee Rodin at Meudon) A Sketch from the Model . . . » , .67 Polyphemus s . 70 CONTENTS Introductory — Rodin and the Modern Movement — Compared with the antique — His view of Nature — Esthetics of sculpture . , . Pp. i-io I The art instinct — Rodin's early training — "La Petite !^cole de Dessin " — The Man with the Broken Nose — The Siege of Paris — Brussels — Visit to Italy — '* The Age of Bronze " . . Pp. 11-20 II Combination of artistic and philosophic spirit — Life at Brussels — Accepted at the Salon — Charge of casting from life — M. Turquet appointed Under-Secretary for Fine Arts ..... Pp. 21-26 III Renaissance and Gothic sculpture — " St. John the Baptist " — Rodin's eclecticism — His view of Nature Pp. 27-34 CONTENTS IV At Sevres — " La Defense Nationale " — Commission for "La Porte de I'Enfer" — Its origin — Description — Dante and Baudelaire , , . Pp. 35-42 V "The Three Phantoms " — " The Thinker "—Por- traiture — Antagonism to his work — The Artist and the State—" Le Baiser "... Pp. 43-48 VI Monument of Claude Gellee — The Burgesses of Calais — Froissart's "Chronicles" — The position of the monument Pp. 49-57 VII Monument of Victor Hugo — The Balzac — Lamartine*s description — The " Societe des Gens de Lettres " — - Rejection of the statue . . . Pp. 58-65 VIII Dry-points and sketches — Rodin's symbolism — " Monu- ment du Travail " — Reception in England — Revival of interest in sculpture . . . Pp. 66-70 List of M. Rodin's Principal Works Pp. 71-72 AUGUSTE RODIN DURING the latter half of the nineteenth century the creative forces in various kinds of art, in literature, music, and sculpture, found an expression which did not quite fall in with any of the existing categories. Tolstoy in fiction, Ibsen in drama, Walt Whit- man in poetry, and Wagner in music — to take only the greatest names — brought into art a new spirit, and, in some respects, a new form. To the same type of creative force must now be added the name of Rodin. The tendency of the work of these various artists was to lift art out of a certain parochialism, to give it an intellectual impetus, and to bring within its influence, not only those who cared about art, but also those who cared about life in its more profound aspects, or about philosophy. In idea it was art after what one calls the grand A 2 AUGUSTE RODIN manner ; it extended its influence in all directions, and it provoked discussion, as the profound affairs of life provoke discussion. It forced itself to be taken seriously. It was not a type that captivates and charms ; it was not sensuous ; it appealed to the emotions through the intellect ; and it was fastidious only in its penetration, in its breadth, and in its insistence on the relation of man to the uni- versal scheme of things. When Ibsen takes the affairs of a small Nor- wegian town as the subject for a play, the work turns out to be a microcosm ; and when Tolstoy portrays the perfectly idiosyncratic and Slavonic types of Anna Ka renin and Levin^ he portrays also the universal types of man and woman, not only in relation to their immediate surroundings, to small manners, but in relation to the formidable questions which mankind and womankind are for ever putting to themselves. This intimate, questioning spirit, this subjective appeal, concerned with the spiritual phases of life, accounts not a little, no doubt, for the distaste which this kind of literature has occasioned, and may still occasion, in many quarters. Rodin represents an analogous temper in the art of sculpture. As with those others, his work carries AUGUSTE RODIN the mind beyond the object actually represented. It is curiously metaphysical ; and it is as sincerely the outcome of the conditions and thought of modern life as the sculpture of the ancients was of the life of Greece. The kind of thought which finds expression in his work is entirely opposed to what one calls Hellenic serenity. But the spirit of the Greeks can only be approached to-day in a spirit of scholarship and detachment. Greek sculp- ture, it has been said, was the finest expression of Greek life ; a sensuous, open-air, well ordered life, largely spent between the gymnasia and the temple. In their love and care of the human body they created an image of man more perfect than man himself ; and this applies not only to the figures of Olympian divinities, but to the athletes, for the Discobolus and Apoxyomenus are not less perfect figures than the Apollo and Hermes, All the skill and adaptability of their art was for a considerable period devoted to the human frame alone, the head, the cast of the features, being largely a convention. In the course of time a perfect head was evolved for this perfect body, and the serene and beautiful features, with their touch of sadness, possess subtleties which perhaps we AUGUSTE RODIN can no longer adequately apprehend, — the expres- sion of which was modified no doubt by the athletic life, which then, as now, would have taken a visible sign of extreme emotion as a sign of weakness. The sculptors of Greece were faithful interpreters of the feeling and thought of their time ; and rather by working in their interpretative spirit, than by imitation of the works of a past and golden age, may a modern sculptor hope to provide a distant analogy between himself and the ancients. In this respect if in no other Rodin may be said to possess the classic spirit ; he reflects in his work the complex temper of his age more completely than any other living sculptor. And, in so far as the conditions of modern life are almost dramatically opposed to the conditions of Greek life does his art too diverge from that of the antique. In the tur- moil and competition of commerce, in the impetuous advance of science, in the quickened means of mental communication, in the strenuous cultivation of knowledge, in all this curiosity, thirst, and restless- ness of the life of the last hundred years, the nature of man has not remained stationary. Science has scarcely added to the simplicity of either thought or emotion by discounting explanations which had AUGUSTE RODIN 5 hitherto been largely satisfying to both, and by confronting man afresh with the problem of his own being. In all this mental conflict, in this turbulence of feeling, art has found expression which cannot be grouped under the older formulas of classic or romantic or realistic. It is no longer the expression of a controlled and sustained wisdom as was Greek art ; nor of a splendid and irresistible vitality, tempered by religious feeling, as was the art of the Italian Renaissance. It is introspective, experimental, neurotic. Rodin is a manifestation of this spirit in art. Simple-minded and strenuous, he moves in a world of abstract ideas, in a world of mystery and exalta- tion, with a singular lack of self-consciousness. A writer has said that Rodin talks about art as a farmer talks about crops. And these abstractions, — the neurotic images of a Baudelaire, the horrors of the Inferno^ the soul of a Victor Hugo, or a Balzac, or a Rochefort, or a Peruvian beauty, — are to him as much the affairs of his daily life and thought as corn and pasture are to a farmer. He talks incessantly of Nature, of its secrets, of its beauty, as containing the whole problem, in art, that really matters. He does not approach Nature with preconceived ideas. 6 AUGUSTS RODIN He does not wish to pose or arrange it ; for it has it own poses, its own arrangement, which are suf- ficient in themselves. " La Nature" he tells us, se compose elle-memeP He chooses, as it is said that Lysippus chose, that Nature should be his instructor. " Nature," Rodin has said, " is ever full of fine form, of design ; yet so many pass by and see nothing, and copy old things, or work in preconceived notions of Nature ; and all the while Nature is there, full of delightful new forms, in the stalk of a flower, in a bud, in a human limb, in a passing action in the street." * Again, he says, with regard to his method of working : " y observe longuement mon modele^ je ne lui demande pas de pose cherchee, je le laisse libre dialler et venir dans Patelier comme un cheval echappe^ et je transcris les observations que je fats, est par cette etude patient e que j^ai retrouve^ parfois^ les procedes des GrecSy grace au travail lui-me?ne^ et non en imitant leurs statues." t It will, no doubt, be necessary to return to this view of Nature in the independent consideration of his work ; but it may be said here that his view is not that of the realist, — ^but that of the poet, the Jrt Journal, 1900, p. 214. t Cladel ; Auguste Rodin, p. 29. AUGUSTE RODIN 7 visionary, the philosopher. Nature to him is always a concrete presentment of an abstract idea. Clay, marble, bronze, are the materials in which he thinks : his thought is entirely plastic. It is a testimony, if a minor one, to his competence in his art, that he is content for it to speak for itself, that he is indifferent to the literary accompaniment of a title. His type of work is never that of the petite anecdote ; its range is outside the small illus- trations, the small circumstances of life. Nature speaks through him of her larger schemes. He would prefer to number his works as a composer numbers his sonatas. But to be eloquent in sculp- ture, he says, one must be a master of modelling ; further, it is necessary to exaggerate a little, — and it is necessary to sacrifice. He copies Nature at her moment of freedom and expression ; but to give the idea of freedom and expression it is neces- sary for him to use his material as an artist. This is, of course, due to the fact that art is not Nature, but a conversion of Nature ; and to give the effect of truth in art elimination and emphasis are neces- sary as means to an end. A painter, for instance, would not give the true effect of a tree if he painted every leaf, nor of a house if he depicted every brick. 8 AUGUSTE RODIN Lessing has said that the aim of knowledge is truth, and that the aim of art is pleasure. But aesthetics have been largely formulated on the work of the Greeks. Aristotle, Plato, Winckelmann, Buffier, and many others have all assisted in giving lucidity to thought in the philosophy of fine art ; but their expositions are various and often antago- nistic. It may be doubted if a system of aesthetics can be adopted, in any way, as final. For, after all, aesthetics are founded on the achievements of the artist, and a fresh manifestation in art may upset philosophic calculations. Certainly, if one were now to accept Lessing's aim of art as defining its whole scope and breadth, one would have to en- large the significance of the meaning of the word pleasure. The words amusement and pleasure in this con- nection seem to us not only misleading, but respon- sible for a point of view which is antagonistic to a proper conception of the position of art in the general scheme of things. Art is not merely a temporary distraction from the serious affairs of life, an easy refreshment for a mind overburdened by its personal cares. It strikes deeper than that. We realise the world, a recent writer has said, Phoio Haiueis and Coles LE PENSEUR {.Marble) AUGUSTE RODIN 9 in three different ways, from the standpoint of religion, of philosophy, of art. Religion is the realisation of the aspect of things which have the highest emotional significance for us as human beings. Philosophy is the formal or diagrammatic realisation of the world ; art its impressionistic or emotional realisation. Both in philosophy and art we have to convert things into terms of the mind. Art, in its way, is as formal as philosophy : its final object is the same as philosophy. It is essentially impressionistic, and you may have an impressionistic realisation of deeper truths, just as you may have a philosophic realisation of them. It is a corollary, noted by Mr. Brownell, that the predominance of the intellectual over the sensuous instinct is that the true should be preferred to the beautiful. One of the most suggestive statements of aesthetics is contained in Mr. Leopold Eidlitz's " Nature and Function of Art," in which he says, first (following Hegel), that art is an idea expressed in matter ; and, secondly, that beauty in art does not rest with the object represented but with the manner of its representation ; that beauty is " the measure of creative force in the abstract." Rodin holds that there is nothing ugly in Nature. There are, how- 10 AUGUSTE RODIN ever, objects in Nature which would give one no pleasure to contemplate ; but which, represented in art, become things of beauty. And this theory becomes of the closest interest to us in relation to much of this sculptor's work. I THE biography of a living person is almost necessarily an essay in impertinence. One feels, above all, in the case of an artist who gives himself to the world in his work, that the intimate facts of his life, the merely personal might be left very well to himself. But the trivial, and, largely, quite inexcusable curiosity which exists about persons with a name, has, perhaps, a definite measure of critical import- ance, when the name happens to be associated either with a philosophic system, — the expres- sion of experimental thought, — or with a work of art whose influence may be as lasting as the material of which it is composed. This curiosity, which in the critic takes the form of a scientific inquiry, that investigates the accidents of influences and tendencies, has a definite, an anthropologic in- terest in so far as it helps to explain man to himself. 12 AUGUSTE RODIN But this explanation can at best be suggestive, tentative; it can never be complete — so far as the creation ef art is concerned. For behind the creation of a work of art, there hangs as great a mystery as behind the creation of the w^orld. It is the mystery vv^hich enables man, with his short span of life, to create an image of himself which may be eloquent for centuries. In the face of great art, which is the work of man, as in the face of nature which is the work of God, man himself becomes of small account. We linger over the names of Ictinus, Pheidias, Lysippus, Homer (and we have no more than the names), because we associate them with various works of Architecture, Sculpture, or Poetry ; but, if their names had been obliterated from the page of history, would the whole or the fragments of their works which have come down to us be less infinitely precious ? Co-ordination and analysis, however scientific, can never ultimately explain the essential thing — the quality of the creative gift itself ; but the rest, the parentage of an artist, the manner in which he lived, what he saw, all the lesser things which have gone to help him to produce what, after all, is a sort of miracle, these remain of interest. They may throw L'HOMME AU NEZ CASSEE (Bronze) AUGUSTE RODIN 13 some light on the direction in which his creative power has sought expression; and in the case of a "revolutionary, protestant" spirit, like Rodin, they possess for us an interest of a very special kind. Biographical history scarcely offers a more in- teresting instance of a man under the spell of the artistic instinct — dominated, that is, by the gift ot expression outside himself which makes for what one calls art. Rodin's battle with circumstances was, in view of his vast productive power, un- usually prolonged. But, sustained by what Pro- fessor Dowden calls a large and wholesome sanity," the suppression of his natural gifts seems to have had the effect of storing impetus, which, when released later, projected its message with greater force and greater certainty. Rodin had arrived at middle age before he found a public, and then a public, for the most part, implacably hostile. During that long period of probation — the fifteen years which lapsed between the creation of " The Man with the Broken Nose " and the " Age of Bronze," between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-seven — Rodin seemed to be in the possession of a dual personality. There was Rodin the work- man of Carrier Belleuse and others, an admirable AUGUSTE RODIN and strenuous craftsman by all accounts, earning the daily wage which provided shelter and food and some sort of studio for the other Rodin — the sculptor, the visionary, the poet, who in the spirit of an alchemist searching for the secrets of eternal life or eternal wealth, sought as zealously for the secret of the quality which makes for permanence in the art of sculpture. This quality he recognised as known to the sculptors of Greece, and of the Italian Renaissance. Finally, a visit to Italy and his observation of the works of Michelangelo, of Donatello, of Verocchio, and of the antique revealed to him the nature of this secret. His discovery found expression in the " Age of Bronze " ; and from the time of the exhibition of that figure dates the Modern Renaissance in sculpture of which he is largely the protagonist. Rodin, like his teacher Barye, or Houdon, is a child of the people. He was born in Paris, in November 1840. His father came from Normandy, his mother from Lorraine, and the pair were in humble circumstances. After spending part of his childhood with a relative at Beauvais, the boy Rodin returned to Paris when he was fourteen, and was sent to La Petite Ecole de Dessin^ No. 5 Rue de VEcole AUGUSTE RODIN 15 de Medecine^ a school for young craftsmen, which had numbered among its students such men as Fr^miet, Carpeaux, Dalou, and seems to have been a nursery for many artists who have liberated them- selves from the purely academic influence. There, Mile. Judith Cladel tells us that he copied the models of animals, of flowers, of plants, and under- took a course in modelling. He also made drawings from the antique at the Louvre. At the Biblio- th^que Imperiale he was permitted to look at albums of prints after Michelangelo, Raphael, and others. His time at la Petite Ecole was not spent without honour. He gained a bronze medal for drawing from the cast ; and at seventeen a first bronze medal for modelling, and a second-class silver medal for drawing from the antique. But he failed in the competition for a place in drawing and modelling at the Beaux-Arts, a failure of some significance in view of his later tendencies. He also attended a class of Barye at the Museum. That sums up the whole course of his academic training. For the rest, he was poor and had to make a living, or, at least, to contribute towards his liveli- hood, " He mixed plaster, cut off the mould marks i6 AUGUSTE RODIN from plaster and papier-mache casts, performed the general duties of a scullion, and made occasionally a simple ornament for which he received the luxurious salary of forty cents a day." * Later, he found for himself a kind of studio in a stable, and modelling from the head of some casual vagrant, produced after eighteen months' work the mask of The Man with a Broken Nose. This astonishing instance of precocity, this mask which might have been the head of a dilapidated Greek poet, was rejected by the Salon of 1864, only to be accepted fourteen years later, and to win perhaps as large a share of celebrity as any work of modern sculpture. Mean- while, Rodin was working for an ornament-maker, for a jeweller, and for himself, modelling figures, of which it is impossible to estimate the value, as he could not afford to carry the work further than the clay. He was engaged by an ornamentist to under- take work at Marseilles, and, later, by a marchand de horn dieux^ on work at Strasbourg ; but always using his leisure in the cultivation of his native and original talent. In 1863 he formed a connec- tion with Carrier Belleuse (whose Hehe in the Luxembourg may be recalled), the most extensive * Mr. Bartlett in Th American Architect, AUGUSTE RODIN commercial sculptor in Paris, and in point of art rather more than that ; a connection which lasted intermittently for nearly twenty years. " I was very happy," says Rodin, " to go to Belleuse, because it took me away from an ornament-maker to one who made figures." " At my work," he says again, " I was never sad, I always had pleasure in it. My ardour was im- mense. I was always studying. Study embraces it all. Those who saw my things pronounced them bad. I never knew what a word of encouragement was. The little terra cotta heads and figures that I exposed in shop windows never sold. So far as the world went, I was shut out from it, nor did I know that it could be of use to me. I went to the Salon and admired the works of Perraud and other leading sculptors, and thought, as ever, that they were great masters, though in their sketches I saw that they were not strong. In looking at the hands they made, I thought them so fine that I should never be able to equal them. I was all this time working from Nature, but could not make my hands as good as theirs, and I could not understand why. But when I got my hands all right from life, I then saw that theirs were not well made, nor were they B i8 AUGUSTE RODIN true. I now know that those sculptors worked from plaster-casts taken from Nature ; I thought only of copying my model. I don't believe these sculptors knew what was good modelling and what was not, or could get out of Nature all there was in it. As my memory was good, I copied in those days, at home, the pictures I admired at the Louvre. Many of the things I made in my studio were better then than anything I have since executed, and, had I been less negligent, some of them might have been preserved. I would now give many thousands of francs if I could have some of those figures. Since then I have known the value of good friends ; but, if I could have had even one in those days, it might have been a world to me. Then I did not know my work had any merit ? " * When the Franco-German war broke out Rodin served as a corporal in the National Guard, per- formed his duties, starved on horse flesh and stale bread, and modelled whenever he had the oppor- tunity and the means. At the end of the war we find him at Brussels with Belleuse, working on the Cariatides for the Bourse (inside), and on the frieze of the Palais des Academies. Some trifling matter * Mr. Bartlett : The American Architect, AUGUSTE RODIN of jealously occasioned his leaving Belleiise, and he formed a partnership with one Van Rasbourg, a connection which was not unprofitable, but which, on the whole, proved unsatisfactory and was soon terminated. He then returned to the more personal work of his own studio. It was at this time (in 1875) that he was struck by a quality in his work which recalled the work of Michelangelo ; a quality which had occurred spontaneously and which was not at all premeditated imitation. Perplexed, interested, a little startled perhaps, by the resem- blance, Rodin decided to go to Italy to investigate the cause and to arrive, if possible, at the principles which governed the construction of the Italian masterpieces. Hitherto his theory had been that the controlling factor in the art of sculpture was movement. He returned from Italy with the con- viction that this principle lay in the model ; that the inspiration of Renaissance sculpture was derived directly from the study of the human figure ; not in the imitation of the antique, but in going to the same source. " La premiere chose a laquelle Dieu a pense en criant le monde^^ says Judith Cladel, " si nous pouvons nous imaginer la pensee de Dieu — cest au modeled It was 20 AUGUSTE RODIN the cry of the Renaissance in all art, this cry of the return to Nature ; and, at first, it was said of Rodin as it was said of Delacroix, if one may use a para- phrase, ^^cest la massacre de la sculptured Hence- forward his studio was to be what the palaestra was to Pheidas and Praxiteles, a field of observation tor the human figure in every variety of movement. Inspired by his observation of the works of Michelangelo, of Donatello, of the antique, Rodin worked for eighteen months on the figure now known as the " Age of Bronze," but to which his first, and, it would seem, more appropriate title was V Homme qui s*eveille a la Nature, This figure was exhibited in January 1877 at the Cercle Artistique in Brussels, and its mixed recep- tion gave Rodin a foretaste of what was to occur on the exhibition of his later works. II RODIN was now thirty-seven, and had scarcely, yet, found an opportunity for ^ adequate self-expression. His works in sculpture amounted to The Man with the 'Broken Nosey the head of a priest, of a doctor, of a young girl (La Petite Alsacienne completed at Stras- burg), of (it is interesting to note in view of La Porte de VEnfer) a Ugolino, the small unsaleable terra-cottas, a few other works which perished in the clay, and, finally. The Age of Bronze, These had been the fruits of his leisure, of the thought stolen from the hours during which he was engaged in carrying out the ideas of Belleuse and others. In view of the quality of what remains, the loss of his other work is a matter of infinite regret. It is useless, but interesting, to conjecture how a more immediate success might have affected the 22 AUGUSTE RODIN tendency of Rodin's art ; if, for instance, The Man with the ^Broken Nose had been accepted by the Salon of 1864, and criticised as approximating to the modelling of the Greeks, instead of this happening in 1878. It might have created a storm which the premature recognition of genius has rarely weathered. But in Rodin*s case, however, it may be doubted that it would have mattered, any more than it would have mattered in the case of any great creative artist, — a Dante, a Milton, a Moliere — whose art has been the irresistible expression of a temperament which is, at root, philosophic. This sort of temperament, absorbed in problems of the universal, has other things to think about than the immediate recognition of its qualities ; or, it may be that when this combination of the artistic and philo- sophic character occurs, the various qualities exercise a common sustaining power, which makes what one calls success, if not a matter of great indifference, at least not a matter of first importance. Rodin was still a workman whose skill and facility in the exercise of his craft had won the admiration of his comrades ; and, on the whole, he was content to be a workman. He has said, that during these years of probation he was not conscious AUGUSTE RODIN of possessing ability out of the common. That would seem an amazing statement, were it not realised that he approached his work as a student, and that his standard was high. Possibly but few of his contemporaries seemed to him to possess ability out of the common ; this is largely a matter of per- spective. His life in Brussels remains with him a pleasant memory. He lived on the outskirts of the city in one room. There was a little garden attached with a tree in it, where he might sit and take the air with his wife. There was also the larger contentment, the spaciousness of country and sky, all the charm and suggestiveness of Belgian landscape, which have provided refreshment and inspiration for many artists, to be obtained in a country walk, when the pleasures of his little garden were exhausted. In this wholly sane and reason- able existence, in this life of work, of reverie, of thought, of detachment from material things, there may have entered a desire for liberation from the bonds which fettered his complete art expression. But Rodin was scarcely, even here, waiting for his opportunity ; not, at least, in the ordinary sense of waiting to exploit his talent as if it were an article of commerce. Suppression, in such circum- 24 AUGUSTE RODIN stances, may be a factor in self-development, self- realisation, as it was, one may think, in the case of Rodin. His emotional life at this period cul- minated in the symbol, " U Homme qui s*eveille a la Nature^^ a foreshadowing of his awakening to a personal sense of Nature which as time went on was to become more and more articulate in sculpture. The Age of Bronze and The Man with the Broken Nosey the latter now under the title of a Portrait of M. , were exhibited at the Salons of 1877 and 1878. Over a quarter of a century has passed, and The Age of Bronze has become one of the familiar things of the world — except to the guardians of the gardensiof the Luxembourg, as I have had occasion to notice. From its place in the Luxembourg Gardens it has been removed recently to the Musee du Lux- embourg ; and it may be mentioned that M. Rodin prefers the open air for the statue, as sculpture, par- ticularly when it is cast in bronze, needs an equal diffusion of light which does not always exist in a gallery. On its exhibition at the Salon the figure was badly placed,"and criticised adversely. But its posi- tion, and the commentary which within a few years has become entirely reversed, were small matters AUGUSTE RODIN 25 compared with the gra-. charge that Rodin had made his figure with moulds cast direct from life. Rodin found this accusation sufficiently disconcert- ing. The offence was not unknown among sculp- tors ; but it would be difficult to formulate a charge more likely to wound the feelings of a sculptor with a conscience ; and it was particularly irrele- vant in the case of Rodin. He had neither money nor friends to back him in the matter. So far as the world was concerned he was merely an employ^ of Belleuse. But, after all, the charge was ground- less, and that was the main thing. Photographs ' and moulds taken from his model, a young Belgian soldier, which he procured from Brussels, were not sufficient to clear the air. Whereupon Rodin determined to convince his opponents by producing a figure, equally true to Nature, but on a larger scale than life. This figure, St. John the Baptist^ was exhibited at the Salon two years later. Meanwhile, M. Edmond Turquet was in 1879 appointed Under Secretary of State for Fine Arts. He had been attracted by The Age of Bronze at the Salon. Convinced of its genuineness, he proceeded on his appointment to investigate the charge which had been made against Rodin, and delegates were 26 AUGUSTE RODIN sent to Brussels to see the model. Further, and independently of the minister, a group of artists, with M. Paul Dubois at their head (he had visited, with the sculptor Chapuis, Rodin at his studio), sent a letter to M. Turquet stating that " loin avoir fait un moulage sur nature^ M, Rodin a crei une tres belle figure et qu*il sera un grand sculpteur^ * Among the signatories to the letter were Carrier Belleuse, Lap- lanche, Falguiere, Chaplin, and Chapuis. The upshot of the attack, and of the discussion which it occasioned, gave Rodin a larger share of celebrity than he was likely, as yet, to have derived merely from the merit of his work. It provided him with a public, with friends, and — with what, perhaps, was of more importance in vitalising his temperament,- — plenty of hostility. He was finally vindicated completely, and the purchase of the statue by the State was the last word in the matter. * Judith Cladel : Auguste Rodin. Ill IN 1877 ^odin visited the French Cathe- drals, those precious links in the continuity of plastic thought in France — a continuity in which is the most individual manifestion of the genius of the French race. In painting, in the arts of literature and the drama, even in archi- tecture, France has her rivals, equal in performance if various in kind. But in the art of sculpture, from mediaeval times to the present day, the tradition has been preserved as in no other country. The effloresence of the Renaissance in Italy, vv^ith its gallery of splendid achievement, a quarry from which, later, [the sculptors of; France persistently derived, was, in comparison, the expression of a period which may be comprised within a circle of dates like our own Elizabethan literature. In France the circle is indefinitely extended. Prior even to the Italian Renaissance, anticipating its 28 AUGUSTE RODIN breadth, its qualities, both structural and psycho- logical, is there not the Philip the Bold of Claux Slater at Dijon, which, like the Colleoni of Veroc- chio and Leopardi at Venice, would seem to express not merely the spirit and life of an individual, of a type, but of a race and a generation ? The sculptures of the Gothic period, which Rodin had now set forth to examine, are, like the sculptures of the Panathenaic freize, mainly decorative, subordi- nate to the architecture ; but there, of course, tks comparison ends. Gothic sculpture — subservient as it was to a larger purpose, an elemental form, as yet, which was to give birth to the pure sculpture of the Renaissance, — was, nevertheless, a living art, of individual and high cultivation, Rodin's St. John the Baptist^ exhibited at the Salon of 1880, would seem almost to have been achieved under the influence of the memory of his visit to Chartres and Rheims. Incomparably more accomplished in technique it suggests something of the Gothic spirit. It has been called a protest against academic influences ; but one may believe that neither here nor in any of his work was Rodin solely animated by any such feeling. His lack of sympathy for the scholarly and conventional in AUGUSTE RODIN French sculpture found expression in a more deter- mined insistence on his own point of view ; it may- have helped him to find himself. And without the school, the associated, scholarly influence, which has existed in France since the days of Louis XIV., a Rodin, just as a Fr^miet or a Carpeaux, might have been impossible. The school provided a milieu for the rebel. But if the creation of St, John the Baptist is attributed to Gothic influences, it must be with many reservations. For here, as indeed in all Rodin's work, may be observed a curious, almost elusive, eclecticism. " Je suis^ dans la tradition des primitifs^^ he has said, " des Egyptiens, des GrecSy des Romains, Je me suis simplement applique d copier la nature. Je rinterprete comme je la voisy selon mon temperament^ ma sensibilite\ d^aprh les sentiments qiC elk evoque en moi. jfe n^ai pas cherche d V arranger ^je ne lui at pas applique les lois de la composition^ je ne me suis pas astreint d harmoniser ses mouvements. Je Pai observee et je Pai saisi dans son plein abandony dans sa pleine vie, dans sa pleine harmonie.^^ * In this direct approach to Nature may perhaps be found the secret of Rodin's eclecticism ; for * Claris (E.), ** De rimpressionnisme en sculpture." 30 • AUGUSTE RODIN nature herself is eclectic. A contemporary model may present the same aspect as a model for the Assyrian reliefs presented to the sculptors of that day ; or may there not be the same measure in his stride as in that of an Egyptian king ? In speaking of Nature, Rodin, with great simple-mindedness, would seem to leave himself out of account. He says, in effect, that you merely have to look at things and the rest comes of itself, according to your temperament. He says further— and he insists on the point — that he has no preconceived ideas with regard to his subject. The model suggests the subject. But this seeing of things for oneself is, after all, the most considerable achievement of an artist. Imagin- ation in its highest expression is the realisation of the actual, of what exists, of what is before one's eyes, or of that which it connotes. It is not a matter of invention, but of seeing. There is nothing to which one is so blind as the obvious ; nothing we find so difficuit to apprehend as our own emotions. A Michelangelo, a Turner, a Balzac, or a Dickens, provide generations with eyes and emotions. And Rodin's view of Nature is so sweeping, so comprehensive, so pantheistic really, and yet a view so natural to himself, himself une LA PENS6E AUGUSTE RODIN force dl la nature " (as he has been called), that he seems a little oblivious of the importance of the temperament in connection with the creation of a work of art. For, look at it how one may, it is the artist's sense of the fitness of things which produces the work of art. He selects the model in the first instance, and seizes the moment which appeals to him as the right moment. But an artist may approach Nature in various ways. 5/. yohn the Baptist is a theme on which many sculptors have played. There are, for instance, the two St. Johns of Donatello ; and here, one feels, that the sculptor was moved by rehgious fervour and belief, by an abstract conception of the Precursor, while using the symbols associated with St. John, and clothing him after the manner in which he lived. The splendid qualities of his art were put humbly to the service of the realisation of a religious conception. With Rodin the process, we fancy, was entirely different. His St. John is perfectly satisfactory as an interpretative figure ; criticism at least has been content to accept it from that point of view. But is it the whole point of view ? He starts from the concrete, from Nature herself, from, in fact, the model. AUGUSTE RODIN Donatello appeals to truth from the abstract ; Rodin to the abstract from truth. The one says, in effect, here is St. John ; the other, here is a figure which a literary friend says represents St. John. In one case the definite title is appropriate ; in the other, it is not perhaps of so much importance. It is possibly not carrying the distinction too far, to say that Donatello appeals to one's artistic sense through the emotions occasioned by his realisation of the Baptist, and Rodin through the verisimilitude of his figure, apart from any preconceived ideas. The realisation of truth in a matter of aesthetics is an intellectual adventure, of which we are only beginning to realise the importance. " Nothing," Rodin has said, " is ugly that has life. . . . What- ever suggests human emotion, whether of grief or pain, goodness or anger, hate or love, has its indi- vidual seal of beauty. Therefore, since I hold all existence to be beautiful, and all beauty to be truth — on a bien le droit de choisir parmi les choses vraies" * A smaller figure of St. John, in bronze, incom- plete, without the head and arms, may be referred to here ; as it helps, I think, to explain an attitude * Pa// Ma// Magazine, 1901, p. 26. AUGUSTE RODIN of Rodin which is imperfectly understood. This incomplete figure represents, just as adequately as the complete figure, his theories with regard to the principles of movement and modelling in sculpture. It is a synthesis of his views in this respect. And, as the complete figure, in this instance, has been achieved and labelled, he cannot very well be accused of artistic incompetence, or of failing inspiration. Obviously Rodin himself regards the dismembered St. John, cast in bronze and to a smaller scale, as sufficiently fulfilling the purposes of his art. And if the starting-point in art is Nature, in which " I'insecte vaut un monde, il a autant coute," one may account for the aesthetic satisfaction we derive from a bronze figure deprived of its head and arms. Who would, for instance, maintain that a torso of Praxiteles was not worth more than galleries of completed and labelled sculpture ? Or, in painting, who would ask, in a representation of inanimate nature, that the tree should be extended to its topmost twig or farthest branch ? Art, it is well to remember, is not the actual thing, but a representation of the actual thing, that is to say, of Nature. A completed figure in sculpture can, therefore, only suggest the c AUGUSTE RODIN complete figure, as it is not the actual figure ; and a torso may be thus as suggestive of the complete figure as the complete figure itself. Apart from this, it is within the province or a sculptor to represent a torso as it is for him to represent a bust. Is not the completeness of a work of art the representation of that which is complete in the artist's mind ? and in sculpture, what Mr. Freeman calls " the sensationed impression " of a torso may be equal to that derived from the repre- sentation of the whole figure. Rodin, in one respect if in no other, suggests a parallel with the Greeks ; for if only fragments of the statue of St. John remained each would possess an artistic value for the perfection of its modelling. St. John the Baptist was exhibited at the Salon of 1882 together with the Age of Bronze, now cast in bronze and in the possession of the State. For these exhibits Rodin was awarded a medal of the third class. IV IN 1879 Carrier Belleuse was appointed art director of the Sevres Porcelain Works. He engaged Rodin to decorate vases ; and one ot his vases, purchased by the State, is preserved in the Sevres Museum. It was about this time (1879) that Rodin took part in a competition to commemorate la Defense Nationale^ an echo of the Franco-German War. The sketch which he submitted was not, according to Mile. Cladel, included among the first thirty chosen by the jury for further consideration. Rodin had been through the siege of Paris. He had known and realised the horrors of war ; and it did not present itselt to him in symbolic and plastic form as a pyramid capped by an ideal figure, sur- rounded by animated and graceful nudities. Le Genie de la Guerre dominates the group. This is a winged figure with vibrant outstretched arms ; the 36 AUGUSTE RODIN evil face is contorted with passion, and the mouth is hurling forth invectives of blood and misery. One wing is broken, and at the knees is the bent figure of a wounded soldier, superbly modelled, supporting himself on his broken sword. The group is as dramatic as war itself ; war, not as conquest, not as glory, but as tragedy. Placed in the position for which it was intended, Le Rond Point de Courbevoie, such a group would have kept the memory of a terrible time an open wound. Rodin failed also to be selected in another competition for a bust of the Republic. Himself a man of the people, he saw forces which make both for good and evil in democratic government ; and it was scarcely likely that an impartial conception would be appre- ciated by a partial jury. But an event occurred about this time (1880) which marked the turning-point in Rodin's career ; an event which not only gave him liberty for the free and unrestrained exercise of his art ; but which, one may think, largely affected the tendencies of much of his later work. M. Turquet, who had befriended him in the matter of The Age of Bronze^ now offered him a commission for an important public work, the great door for the Musee des AUGUSTE RODIN 37 Arts Decotatifs^ upon which Rodin has been in- termittently engaged ever since, and which has as yet to be completed. This commission pro- vided him with a studio at the Government's expense, and with sufficient means to carry out his work. The initial idea of the subject or the door was, that it should be derived from the cantos of Dante's " Inferno," and called La Porte de TEnfer ; an idea which has not been quite fulfilled, but which at the time was congenial to Rodin. It would, at any rate, serve as a starting-point. He still felt the sting of the accusation of having cast his figure from the model, and the motives of the subject were susceptible of treatment at various scales, in the round, in high and low reliefs, in which his sheerly technical honesty would be made manifest. So that one of the most imaginative achievements of modern sculpture had its origin largely in the desire ot the artist to clear up an obvious and absurd misrepresentation. ^^Je ne crois pas^" says M. Edouard Rod, " qu'il existe, en sculpture^ une page plus eloquentCy ni plus variee" The height of the door is about eighteen feet. It is dominated by three figures, the Three 38 AUGUSTE RODIN Phantoms^ imaginatively grouped so that the visible shadows help to emphasise the sense of destiny, of pity, the mystery of contemplative and controlling elements, which they express. Below, projecting from the frieze, is the figure of The Thinker [Le Penseur)y originally intended for Dante, but happier in its generic title. This figure is approached on each side by a procession entering the gate. On the Door itself, on its vague and plastic background, are represented the various circles (but not those of the cantos) of human tribulation. On the narrow pilasters, at either side, are represented symbols of achieved and defeated passion. A beautiful disorder, M. Roger Miles has said, is an effect of art ; certainly here in this gesticulation of the flesh, in the varying motifs united by a common motif represented by " Lasciate ogni speranza^ voi cWentrate^ there is a complete effect. Here, at any rate, in his audacious use of the nude Rodin shows a com- plete mastery of his material. So far, indeed, as the general scheme is concerned (and one would not push the comparison further in view of the unfinished state of the work) it is a more logical expression of purely plastic thought than the bronze gates of Ghiberti of the Baptistery of Florence, AUGUSTE RODIN which are rather pictorial than sculpturesque. The portal in this instance provides a frame for a series, — a wonderful series, — of small pictures, each one of which is in itself an independent work of art. The Door of Rodin represents a complete idea, a rhythm with varying motives ; it is an epic of human weakness, human destiny, the futility or human desire. The conception, as a whole, can hardly be said to be Dantesque, although it follows the Inferno in general idea and in some points of detail. Rodin was also largely influenced by Baudelaire, " le mis- anthrope de la vie coupable," in whose Fleurs du mal he discovered some affinity to Dante. It seems a far cry from the serene, essentially religious, view of Dante to the morbid paganism of the French decadent. Vune vient de YenfeVy V autre y voy^ as a French writer has said. Rodin would seem to have assimilated the spirit of both Dante and Baudelaire, and, finally, while borrowing from each, to have arrived at a personal point of view : The Door, in fine, is Rodinesque. Dante's Inferno is documentary. Animated by didactic religious faith, he has peopled his circles with historic persons, who suffer the torments of AUGUSTE RODIN hell as conceived by a religious visionary of the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Baudelaire, on the other hand, modern, pagan, a virtuoso or sensations, seeking experiences rather than ex- periencing life, sincere as an artist, and a little affected in most other directions, discovered Limbo w^ithout having crossed the Acheron. It existed in his imagination, in his life. Rodin has given shape to two, at least, of the most important passages in the Inferno, There are Paolo and Francesco, "those two who go together, and seem to be so light upon the wind," and there are Count Ugolino and his sons. Virgil, however, is not represented ; and Rodin could not see Beatrice in the nude. The Ugolino group depicts the brutal horror of the incident, but not at its moment of greatest horror, where Dante and Virgil discover Ugolino gnawing at the head of his enemy Ruggieri. The Count is represented nude, blind, crawling on his knees, his hands groping over the bodies of his sons. In his own words, " When we had come to the fourth day, Gaddo flung himself down outstretched at my feet, saying, * My father, why dost thou not help me.' There he died, and as thou seest me, so saw I the three sink down AUGUSTE RODIN one by one between the fifth and sixth days ; then, already blind, I betook me to grope about over each of them, and for three days I called upon them when they were dead ; after which want of food effected more than sorrow." The Door, as has been said, is as yet unfinished. Rodin lingers over it as a poet lingers over a poem, eliminating, revising, recasting, always seeking for a more perfect expression. " In an aim before all of his studies," says M. Rod, speaking in an intimate study of the Door, " he sought the occasion of bringing together various compositions, with figures restrained and in move- ment. At that moment, that is to say, in the full maturity of his art, M. Rodin, as formerly Delacroix, did not think that he could find expression other- wise than in movement : later he recognised that there was something dangerous and false in this theory. Movement, in effect, is only compatible in a certain degree with the exigences and means of the plastic arts : there are movements which it is imprudent or impossible to attempt to represent, because they are fugitive, and cannot be fixed." Possibly here M. Rod was thinking of Lessing's statement that sculpture should express nothing 42 AUGUSTE RODIN that can be thought of as transitory. " M. Rodin said formerly," M. Rod continues, V eloquence de la sculpture est dans le mouvement^'* He says to-day : V eloquence de la sculpture est dans le modeler * * Gazette des ^Beux Arts, 1898, vol. i. p. 421. V THE Commission for la Porte de PEnfer provided Rodin with the opportunity to express himself. Hitherto we have known him by The Man with the Broken Nose, by his St. John, and The Age of Bronze — each, speaking broadly, a manifestation of the actual in art. But the conception of the Door seemed to give wings to his plastic thought ; to open the way to a a range or new ideas. The Door itself, decorative, necessarily subordi- nate to a structural idea, restricted in point of scale, was a conception of spiritual things which contained elements susceptible of independent treatment. The Three Phantoms and The Thinker, necessary as they are to the whole composition, are admirable as inde- pendent works, and to a larger scale. The Thinker, which in its pose so obviously recalls // Pensieroso of the Medicean tombs, gains in effectiveness 44 AUGUSTE RODIN and power with the larger treatment ; and the in- creased scale of the Three Phantoms adds to their portentous and fateful aspect. In dealing with an abstract idea, — particularly with ideas of such a mystical and grandiose kind as those expressed in The Thinker and the Three Phantoms^ meta- physical ideas of destiny and fate, — scale itself may be an element of some importance. But with a group like the Ugolino it is different. In the concrete presentment of an incident, terrible as it may be, where the emotions are definite and com- prehensible, where the idea is essentially dramatic, the larger scale does not broaden the effect ot the idea. And one feels that the crawling figure of Ugolino gains nothing in tragic suggestiveness in its monumental shape. With M. Turquet's important commission, the life of Rodin as a workman, — as the skilled inter- preter of the ideas of Carrier Belleuse and others, — came to an end. Within a couple of years his works were exhibited in London, Vienna, Pau; and The Age of Bronze had been placed in the gardens of the Luxembourg. In the Salon of 1881 the Creation of Man was exhibited. A year later there appeared his busts of J. P. Laurens and Carrier AUGUSTE RODIN 45 Belleuse^ — the beginning of a remarkable series in portraiture, which has included Henley, Rochefort, Legros, Puvis de Chavannes, Octave Mirbeau, Roger Marx, Victor Hugo, and others. And in this phase of his art, opinion, which is so much at variance in regard to the other phases, meets on a common ground. To find a series, or even individual works, possessing the insight which gives not only a likeness, but a biography with multi- tudinous annotations, one must go back to the Diderot, the Voltaire, the Franklin, the Moliere of Houdon, to the portrait busts of the Italian Renaissance, or to the Romans. Rodin's genius, now unfettered, began, further, to find voluminous and splendid expression in such works as Le Baiser^ UEternel Printemps, the Eve^ the Monuments of Victor Hugo^ Bastien Lepage^ the Bourgeois of Calais^ the Balzac; and in such mystical subjects as Le crepuscule descendant dans la nuit^ La mis ere on la fatigue^ La par que et la jeune fille^ La fnain de Dieu^ and so on, which, as they were exhibited, puzzled an interested, but largely inimical, public. The general view of his work may be said to have followed an evolutionary course, not infrequent in the case of art which makes for any sort of 46 AUGUSTE RODIN permanence. The successive stages of this public recognition may be classed briefly as, at first, active disapproval, then curiosity as to meaning, later a recognition that, after all, the work may mean some- thing^ and, finally, a concession that it is extremely original, or that it possesses beauty and power ; or that it is an outrage on all the canons of art. That, in a general way, may be said to summarise the critical process in regard to creative work which does not follow the official path ; a process in France made sufficiently familiar to men of genius like Delacroix, Carpeaux, and Rude, and, more recently, to Rodin. In turning over the pages of criticism, it is curious to find an eminent English critic and scholar denouncing Carpeaux's group at the Opera on the score of pruriency. In the con- sideration of art matters in France, however, one cannot reckon without taking into account the influence of the State ; and this influence of depart- mental control in certain matters in relation to fine art has been a power for good. The self-respecting qualities of a nation may be largely estimated by the degree of its concern tor art. It is a tribute to the French that the affairs of an artist may become an affair of State ; that Pans, Muse',- du I-!i.\riul