Seeing my host lost in contemplation, I ventured to ask him if he was religious.
“It is according to the meaning that you give to the word,” he answered. “If you mean by religious the man who follows certain practices, who bows before certain dogmas, I am evidently not religious.
The Hand of God
By Rodin
Photograph reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
“But, to me, religion is more than the mumbling of a creed. It is the meaning of all that is unexplained and doubtless inexplicable in the world. It is the adoration of the unknown force which maintains the universal laws and which preserves the types of all beings; it is the surmise of all that in nature which does not fall within the domain of sense, of all that immense realm of things which neither the eyes of our body, nor even those of our spirit can see; it is the impulse of our conscience towards the infinite, towards eternity, towards unlimited knowledge and love—promises perhaps illusory, but which in this life give wings to our thoughts. In this sense I am religious.” Rodin followed the rapid flickering flames of the fire for a moment, and then continued: “If religion did not exist, I should have had to invent it. In short, true artists are the most religious of men.
“It is a general belief that we live only through our senses, and that the world of appearances suffices us. We are taken for children who, intoxicated with changing colors, amuse themselves with the shapes of things as with dolls. We are misunderstood. Lines and colors are only to us the symbols of hidden realities. Our eyes plunge beneath the surface to the meaning of things, and when afterwards we reproduce the form, we endow it with the spiritual meaning which it covers.
“An artist worthy of the name should express all the truth of nature, not only the exterior truth, but also, and above all, the inner truth.
“When a good sculptor models a torso, he not only represents the muscles, but the life which animates them—more than the life, the force that fashioned them and communicated to them, it may be, grace or strength, or amorous charm, or indomitable will.
“In the works of Michael Angelo, the creative force seems to rumble; in those of Luca della Robbia it smiles divinely. So each sculptor, following his temperament, lends to nature a soul either terrible or gentle.
