The year 1896 was occupied by the continuation of work for the Hugo monument. The Muse of Anger and the Muse of the Inna' Voice were brought to their full completion. In addition to these Rodin made a very fine head of Minerva, in marble, with a silver helmet; a statue of a Conqueror, holding a statue of Victory; and two groups—The Poet and the Life of Contemplation (for M. Fenaille, the faithful admirer, who was, at a later date, to publish his sketches) and The Eternal Idol, a marvel of inspiration. A young naked woman is in a half-sitting posture, her head bent, her gaze lost in a dream. A man kneeling before her, his arms behind him and his desire restrained, puts his head gently forward and kisses the idol beneath the left breast over the heart, with mute fervour, and with a mystic, amorous concentration of his whole being. Rarely does sculpture allow of so much pulsating life and so much psychological emotion united to plastic perfection and originality of arrangement.
From 1897 date the marble group of the Women Bathing, the last studies for the Balzac, and the studies for the Monument to President Sarmiento, a statue upon a pedestal in high-relief. Small groups in marble and in bronze are a form of which Rodin is fond. He has been led to devote himself largely to them on account of The Gate of Hell, the dimensions of which necessitated small figures. Moreover, Rodin reserves this form of art for certain categories of works that have a character of passion and intimacy. It should be possible to pass easily round them, to lean over them, almost to touch them and move them about; one should be able to live with them, as one cannot do with large figures meant to be looked at from below. The happy form of the small sculptured block, which the eighteenth century had employed to so much advantage, allows this constant communion of the spectator and the work of art. Rodin, who executes his bigger figures in so large a style, reserves for these a style that is minute but never mannered. The outlines remain large, so much so, indeed, that the work would always bear an enlarged scale; but the modelling is wrought with an almost caressing touch and with a strange love of form. Here the rough sculptor, so Gothic in his austerity, fingers the marble with the care and the delicacy of a lover; he reveals himself as a fervent adorer of smooth, womanly flesh; he plays with the subtlest variations of light upon the inflexion of marble surfaces, and the man who is reproached with caring for nothing but "character" and with despising "beauty" creates arms, necks, knees, and bosoms of exquisite perfection. His favourite type of woman is the long, delicately made woman, with a small bust, largely curved hips, and a face full of will, the nervous, feline, voluptuous woman, of head rather than of heart, such as Baudelaire and Rops have imagined. The characteristic feature of Rodin's small groups is the seeking after new combinations of movement. I have said already that his essential idea was the production of dynamic art; that is to say that, finding himself face to face with an academic school that had grown inert owing to its care for pseudo-harmony, he had determined to draw sculpture out of this blind alley and to show, before all things, how the expression of movement might lead to an entirely new conception of decorative outline. From this endeavour arose those little groups of lovers in which the attitudes are so infinitely varied, those curious presentments in which the arms and legs are placed as freely as in a painting. But the painting has the help of shadow, of backgrounds, and of values, which allow the light to be concentrated on a single point and the rest to be blurred. Rodin has attempted so to compose his most audacious movements that, in walking round, a new aspect of them is constantly presented, whereas ordinary sculpture, meant to be seen from a single point, does not allow the spectator to pass behind it. This difficulty and this main idea have led Rodin to treat modelling and composition in a way upon which I shall dwell more fully later on, and to invent a style of statuary which borrows some of the laws of painting.
These thoughts had long been ripening in Rodin when at last he resolved to apply them to his Balzac, which was really not his first attempt in this direction, but the first that was seen in public. When this statue appeared in the Salon of 1898, it created such a commotion that for a week the public forgot, over it, the events of that vast serial story, the Dreyfus affair. The clamour was extraordinary; some people raged at what they considered a scandalous practical joke, others warmly defended the new work. The Société des Gens de Lettres, already irritated by Rodin's delays in finishing the statue, declared plainly that it refused the Balzac, a decision which led to the resignation of the committee. Rodin might have brought an action and won it, for, strictly speaking, his agreement required the society to accept the work such as he delivered it. He preferred to withdraw his work without claiming its price or discussing the matter. Once again his art encountered violent opposition from the official camp—but to struggle is repugnant to his temper. Inflexible in his will as a producer, he is timid and proud in his attitude towards contradictions. Opportunity, moreover, offered him a roguish and witty revenge. Falguière was commissioned to make a Balzac. This put Falguière in a very awkward position; after all the fuss made about Rodin's statue, he must needs produce something finer, or at the very least equally interesting. He was certain of a bad reception at the hands of Rodin's admirers and he was bound to please the others. Falguière only succeeded in producing a mediocre work. The Balzac that may be seen at the present time in the Avenue de Friedland is nothing but a half-hearted imitation of Rodin's; it is Rodin's Balzac seated, and without character or interest. This work appeared in 1900, at a time when opinion was already beginning to recognise the injustice done to Rodin, and it pleased nobody. Then Rodin, to show that the incident had in no way altered his friendly relations with Falguière,[1] made an admirable bust of his fellow-worker, which was as fine as the second Balzac was poor, and thus gave to Falguière and to the public, also, a silent and ironical lesson.
What, then, was this Balzac which was so much detested, and about which the most abusive and extraordinary things were written? Merely the image of the great writer, draped in a dressing-gown, with empty, hanging sleeves; he has risen in the night and is walking up and down, disturbed and sleepless, pursuing an idea that has suddenly presented itself. He is bent forward, his head thrown back, the eyes deep-set, and the mouth contracted in a smile of challenge. The powerful neck—the neck indeed of a bull—emerges from the open wrapper. Rodin made use of various daguerreotypes, and especially of a celebrated portrait of Balzac, that shows him in shirt-sleeves with one brace, and folded arms. The enormous proportions of the head, the amazing strength of the thorax, the monstrous and leonine character of the face are all exact. "His was the countenance of an element," said Lamartine of Balzac, "with a torso that was joined to the head by an enormous neck, short legs, and short arms." These words absolutely justify the statue. Rodin had made studies for it in the nude (there are some fine clay models of the subject in his studio), then he clothed it with a gown (or to be more exact, with a bath-wrap, for that is what Balzac's famous monk's robe was), and proceeded to simplify the folds until he had left only the two or three essential ones. The result thus obtained, with the disproportion of body and legs, led Rodin to hide the short, ugly, useless arms under the drapery, and the figure thus assumed pretty much the appearance of a mummy, of a sort of monolith, from which nothing stood out but the one point of interest, the savage and magnificent animality of the head, with its darkened gaze and the bitterly curved mouth, of which Rodin had made a separate small study in bronze. A great heave of the shoulders throws the body slightly backward, causing it to rest upon one leg, which is apparently bent, while the other is moved forward to walk.
BALZAC