VICTOR HUGO. (A FRAGMENT)
Together with the sketch of the Hugo monument, a bust of Henry Becque, and a curious etching made from it, Rodin exhibited in 1886 the first drawings belonging to The Gate of Hell, or at least to the work which people have agreed to call by that title. I have already related the origin of that Government commission. In the beginning Rodin had been asked to make a door in high-relief, intended for the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. But the sculptor's imagination, beset by ideas of Dante, soon deviated from the original scheme. The door really exists in the studio of the Rue de l'Université, under the aspect of a vast rough model in plaster and beams, in the very simple shape of a two-leaved door 19 ½ feet high, with a frieze, a tympanum, and two lateral capitals. It was, at first, to have been surmounted by the two figures of Adam and Eve, but Rodin gave them up. He now seems determined to place the Shades, here reproduced, in the highest plane.[2] On the uppermost beam The Thinker is to be seated. In the panels of the door and upon the wide uprights are enshrined figures—to the number of over a hundred—detached in high-relief, exactly as upon the gates of the Baptistery in Florence, which Rodin has, quite simply, taken as his model. These figures were, at first, direct interpretations from Dante, in particular Paolo and Francesca da Rimini and divers inhabitants of the Inferno. Then Rodin intermingled figures due solely to his inspirations from Baudelaire and to his own sharp perception of tragic perversity. He enlarged Dante's conception as he modernised it, and has ended by making this door into what he smilingly calls "my Noah's Ark." That means that he is continually putting in little figures which replace others; there, plastered into the niches left by unfinished figures, he places everything that he improvises, everything that seems to him to correspond in character and subject with that vast confusion of human passions. The size of these figures is greatly restricted; the largest scarcely exceed thirty-nine inches in height. The dimensions of the final rendering, however, still remain to be fixed. The splendid figure called The Thinker is carried out in bronze larger than life, and Rodin is credited with an intention of bringing up all the other figures to the same dimensions, which would represent an unheard-of outlay and a gate nearly a hundred feet high—a Cyclopean work indeed! The Thinker, who has been so called on account of the likeness between his attitude and that of Michael Angelo's Pensieroso, is much more truly an image, with his stunted body and a primitive man's face, of the cave-dweller, the prognathous savage beholding the crimes and passions of his progeny unroll themselves below him. Immediately beneath him may be seen the most celebrated characters of the Dante cycle, notably the lovers of Rimini entwined and falling into hell.[3] Then as we descend towards the ground the figures become more independent of the subject, more personally invented by the artist, and at the foot we find "women damned," such as Baudelaire conceived, amid characters from heathen mythology.
NEREIDS (Group at the base of the Victor Hugo monument.)