II
We differentiate too rudely if we say offhand that American sculpture has learned its art from France, its craft from Italy. The truth cannot be told so simply as that. For instance, the Piccirillis, American artists and craftsmen of Italian ancestry, are but a few out of many talented American sculptors of Italian birth. Again, we went to France for lessons in casting bronze, as well as in making our weekly “bonhomme” at the école. Yet for the whole Western world of sculpture during the past forty years, the strongest general influence has been that of the French school, and the strongest single influence that of a Frenchman aloof from the school, Auguste Rodin. No thinking sensitive person who uses clay to shape his visions and earn his living has failed to feel Rodin’s influence; it is already so deeply imbedded in consciousness that many of those who most imitate this master are least aware of so doing. It would be a mistake to suppose, because the shouting is over, that this powerful influence has wholly waned.
We have spoken of the uses of collaboration. But there are souls that would perish rather than collaborate. Some of these belong in the ranks of genius, others are distinctly due elsewhere. Of the former class was Rodin, never willing or able to subject himself to any architectural tradition. Even while writing of Rodin’s consistent refusal of collaboration, I hear the ironic voice of M. Anatole France, a veteran in one art speaking of a veteran in another: “Et surtout, avouons-le, il collabore trop avec la catastrophe.” And he adds, with that sparkle of malice veterans allow themselves but not others to use when speaking of veterans, “Il abuse du droit de casser ce qui, dans une œuvre, est mal venu.” According to M. France, Rodin collaborates, and even too much; not with architecture, as a more conventional soul might, but with architecture’s logical opposite, catastrophe. It is more fruitful to dwell on the gifts of genius than on its limitations; yet the limitations also must be noted, whenever blind worship confuses defects with qualities. It was a limitation (and so the Société des Gens de Lettres found it) that Rodin could not bring himself to any architectural conception of his Balzac:—Balzac, more architecturally minded than even the English novelist Hardy; Balzac, who will not let you once look at Père Goriot until you have a clear understanding of the plan and elevation of the sordid pension where the poor man lives; Balzac, who jealously hides Eugénie Grandet from you until you have mastered every arch and cornice of the gloomy mansion that shelters her; Balzac, who insists that you must know period and style and galleries and window-glass of la maison Claes before you can peer at Madame Claes. Balzac built his novels that way because to his mind man’s architecture is part of his life, his fate, his rôle in the Comédie Humaine. So what Rodin did lacked basic fitness. In that portrait statue, the Rodin of it was more precious to him than the Balzac of it; he could make no compromise.
Now an advancing civilization will make its honorable compromises; and it seems to me that Saint-Gaudens’s way of letting the significant winds and waves play about the architectural pedestal or deck that Farragut bestrides is more civilized than Rodin’s far simpler way of letting the magnificent head of his Balzac emerge from monstrous shapelessness to splendor. The Balzac looks splendidly begun, the Farragut splendidly brought to completion. There is indeed a charm in things greatly begun. Such things suggest the untamed glory of the human spirit, and give skyey space for the beholder’s imagination to dip its wings in. The poorest of us in looking at them can at least conjecture, if not create. And a very present refuge for the sculptor is that lump of marble which says nothing but suggests much in Rodin’s portraits of women, and in many of his ideal groups with certain surfaces of soft flesh exquisitely carved in their emergence from the hard stone. Those melodious modulations of light and shade in flesh are Rodin’s secret; here his genius is forever happy. That woman’s marble back, for instance; one thinks that if one should touch it, the skin would yield and pale and redden again. Rodin himself, in his talk of his own work and of the classic masterpieces he loved, constantly uses the word “esprit” rather than “chair,” and from his point of view there is no inconsistency in that. Gratefully we acknowledge that this master has showed the wonders of both flesh and spirit. It was well for American sculpture to applaud both triumphs. What next?
Next, there were certain mannerisms better left unlearned by our students; for example, that use of large extremities, a choice announcing a healthy abhorrence of prettiness. We have seen in our land many a Bertha Broadfoot and many a Helen of the Large Hand created by those who had not Rodin’s excuse for this avoidance of conventional proportion; they were not revealing the scarce-finished new beings of Paradise, or the muscular striding bulk of a John the Baptist in the wilderness. There is yet another mannerism filched by admiring disciples; perhaps it is something less superficial than a mannerism. We need not take M. France too seriously when he says of M. Rodin, “Il me sémble ignorer la science des ensembles.” It is a saying fitter to live in the flow of talk than to be embalmed in print; yet it draws blood, too, with its prickly edge of truth. Rodin’s ensembles are his own, not those of sane tradition; his imitators’ ensembles are often pitifully less good than those of either Rodin or the school. That is serious! At the present moment, many American War monuments are in the making; too many, perhaps, are casting away collaboration and tradition. Their creators seem unaware that they are under an influence; they think they are showing originality, preaching the gospel of simplicity, and in a really messianic way, calling architecture to repentance.
But, nowhere is the architectural conception of work more necessary than in a new country. Without that conception, these United States would be besprinkled with productions richer in the one virtue of individuality than in the many virtues of order, unity, harmony, an underlying sense of natural evolution and continuity. Our civilization is not yet jaded, and does not yet need prickings toward variety. For American sculpture, the lesson of Rodin’s genius, as distinct from the lesson of the school, is that of the titanic conception and the exquisite morceau, but not that of harmonious collaboration. Meanwhile, it is cheering to see that the singular doctrine of deformation distilled in France by vigorous modern followers of Rodin is at present neglected here; when we turn modernist, as sometimes happens, we choose the path of abstractions, seeking perhaps Epstein’s “form that is not the form of anything,” rather than form amplifying itself into ugliness, in defiance of classic balance and measure. In fact, a recent piece of the new poetry, written about a recent piece of the new sculpture tells us that
“the immaculate
conception
of the inaudible bird
occurs
in gorgeous reticence.”
Gorgeous reticence is perhaps preferable to gorgeous loquacity.