“Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit by which Nature herself is animated. It is the joy of the intellect which sees clearly into the Universe and which recreates it, with conscientious vision. Art is the most sublime mission of man, since it is the expression of thought seeking to understand the world and to make it understood.
“But to-day, mankind believes itself able to do without Art. It does not wish to meditate, to contemplate, to dream; it wishes to enjoy physically. The heights and the depths of truth are indifferent to it; it is content to satisfy its bodily appetites. Mankind to-day is brutish—it is not the stuff of which artists are made.
“Art, moreover, is taste. It is the reflection of the artist’s heart upon all the objects that he creates. It is the smile of the human soul upon the house and upon the furnishing. It is the charm of thought and of sentiment embodied in all that is of use to man. But how many of our contemporaries feel the necessity of taste in house or furnishing? Formerly, in old France, Art was everywhere. The smallest bourgeois, even the peasant, made use only of articles which pleased the eye. Their chairs, their tables, their pitchers and their pots were beautiful. To-day Art is banished from daily life. People say that the useful need not be beautiful. All is ugly, all is made in haste and without grace by stupid machines. The artist is regarded as an antagonist. Ah, my dear Gsell, you wish to jot down an artist’s musings. Let me look at you! You really are an extraordinary man!”
Auguste Rodin
From a drawing by William Rothenstein
Reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
“I know,” I said, “that Art is the least concern of our epoch. But I trust that this book may be a protest against the ideas of to-day. I trust that your voice may awaken our contemporaries and help them to understand the crime they commit in losing the best part of our national inheritance—an intense love of Art and Beauty.”
“May the gods hear you!” Rodin answered.
We were walking along the rotunda which serves as the atelier. There under the peristyle many charming bits of antique sculpture have found shelter. A little vestal, half-veiled, faces a grave orator wrapped in his toga, while not far from them a cupid rides triumphant upon a great sea-monster. In the midst of these figures two Corinthian columns of charming grace raise their shafts of rose-colored marble. The collection here of these precious fragments shows the devotion of my host to the art of Greece and Rome.
Two swans were drowsing upon the bank of a deep pool. As we passed they unwound their long necks and hissed with anger. Their savageness prompted me to the remark that this bird lacks intelligence, but Rodin replied, laughing: