In 1893 Rodin made the bust of Madame Séverine, the medallion of César Franck, and several works in marble; Galatea, The Death of Adonis, The Education of Achilles, and The Wave. From 1894 date the Eternal Spring, one of his tenderest and purest works, besides an Orpheus and Eurydice, an Adonis and Venus, and finally Christ and the Magdalen. For, by degrees, he was returning to religious and mythological subjects, after having expressed only general symbols or pieces of pure realism; and I shall have to call attention at a later point to the original manner in which Rodin was bold enough to interpret these subjects which the academic classicism seemed to have worn out and left insipid for ever.
The year 1895 at last beheld the inauguration, on the 3rd of June, of The Burghers of Calais at Calais. To the same year belongs another fine work in marble: Illusion, the Daughter of Icarus, besides a vigorous bronze, The Crouching Man, a medallion of Octave Mirbeau, and—at this early date—some nude studies for the Balzac, for the Balzac was studied minutely in the nude, a point of which many people know nothing, before appearing draped in the famous dressing-gown which was destined, in 1898, to arouse so much clamour.
BUST OF MADAME V.
The Burghers were set up, by subscription, in a square in Calais.[4]
The monument is one in which Rodin has deliberately departed from all the rules of official art. These require that the effect should be pursued primarily by a compact grouping, the same thought being translated by the same gesture from all the persons. Rodin, on the contrary, desired to leave their full individuality to his six burghers going in their shirts and with halters on their necks to surrender themselves to King Edward, and he has isolated them on their one base. These six men are walking, one behind the other, two by two, half naked and miserable, with their emaciated faces—men besieged, sacrificed. One devotion unites them in the name of their town's salvation, but their characters and their thoughts remain distinct, and in each may be read a different drama of the conscience. They have not the factitious enthusiasm and the declamatory gesture with which an ordinary sculptor would have thought well to furnish them; they are simply citizens who have resolved to fulfil a fatal duty, and are going to perform it without cowardice, but nevertheless were, yesterday, trades-people and family-men with no pretensions to the heroic. They bear with them their regrets, their inner heartbreak, and are not thinking of striking an attitude in the eyes of history. They are the unknown, obscure heroes of a fatality such as often arose in their rough times; and of how many dead men, devoted like them, has history forgotten the deeds and names! There is Eustace de St. Pierre, with his shaven magistrate's face, stiff and controlled, carrying the key of the town; behind him Andrieux d'Andres, with his hands clenched over his sobbing face, turns back, this last time, towards the city. Jean de Fiennes, with his rough beard and weak, old man's shoulders, is listening to Jean d'Aire, who, younger than he, is murmuring words that perhaps confide to him his horror of death, and entreat from the old man encouragement in renunciation. But in front of all the others the two brothers, Jacques and Pierre de Wissant, advance resolutely; and one turns back to hasten his friends, while one exhorts them, pointing with a restrained gesture towards heaven.