“So, all the masters advance to the barrier which parts us from the Unknowable. Certain among them have cruelly wounded their brows against it; others, whose imagination is more cheerful, imagine that they hear through that wall the melodious songs of the birds which people the secret orchard.”
I listened attentively to my host, who was giving me his most precious thoughts on his art. It seemed that the fatigue which had condemned his body to rest before that hearth where the flames were leaping had left his spirit, on the contrary, more free, and had tempted it to fling itself passionately into dreams. I led the talk to his own works.
“Master,” I said, “you speak of other artists, but you are silent about yourself. Yet you are one of those who have put into their art most mystery. The torment of the invisible and of the inexplicable is seen in even the least of your sculptures.”
The Three Fates
From the Parthenon
“Ah! my dear Gsell,” he said, throwing me a glance of irony, “if I have expressed certain feelings in my works, it is utterly useless for me to try to put them into words, for I am not a poet, but a sculptor, and they ought to be easily read in my statues; if not, I might as well not have experienced the feelings.”
“You are right; it is for the public to discover them. So I am going to tell you all the mystery that I have found in your inspiration. You will tell me if I have seen rightly. It seems to me that what has especially interested you in humanity is that strange uneasiness of the soul bound to the body.
“In all your statues there is the same impulse of the spirit towards the ideal, in spite of the weight and the cowardice of the flesh.
“In your Saint John the Baptist, a heavy, almost gross body is strained, uplifted by a divine mission which outruns all earthly limits. In your Bourgeois de Calais, the soul enamoured of immortality drags the hesitant body to its martyrdom, while it seems to cry the words, ‘Thou tremblest, vile flesh!’
“In your Penseur, meditation, in its terrible effort to embrace the absolute, contracts the athletic body, bends it, crushes it. In your Baiser, the bodies tremble as though they felt, in advance, the impossibility of realizing that indissoluble union desired by their souls. In your Balzac, genius, haunted by gigantic visions, shakes the sick body, dooms it to insomnia, and condemns it to the labor of a galley-slave. Am I right, master?”