The whole work gives the impression of a menhir, a pagan dedicatory stone. Interest is concentrated solely upon the head. Rodin considered that the representation of a celebrated figure offered no corporeal interest. It is evident that a great error prevails on this subject. The ancients have transmitted to us naked or draped statues. It must be remembered that this homage was almost always paid to warriors, athletes, or courtesans; to represent these at full length was to express their fame. Their beautiful shape received fit homage. The gods were conceived as incarnations of moral beauty in physical beauty. But as time and morality have gradually brought us to honour men who are great in thought, the bodily representation of them has strayed into an extremely false path. Dress and physical exterior ceased to be of plastic interest, but the manner of our homage remained the same. Busts with pedestals commemorating in writing the deeds or the works would have been the right form of celebration. But this, the only intelligent form, appeared to our modern statue-maniac ages too scanty. This heretical opinion has given birth to the gentlemen in frock-coats who disfigure our present towns and are hoisted upon pedestals in our public squares. To this absurd point have we come: in order to honour the soul we reproduce its husk, the body, which is destined to the nothingness of the grave, and we represent the shoes and coats as exactly as the head. We attempt in our pious regard for the essence of a thinker to represent that part of him which was transitory. The result is photography in bronze, a wretched artistic contradiction. Nevertheless, if we are to bow to custom and represent a man at full length of whom the head is the only important fact, we must indeed give him a body that is like reality; but the artist should try to concentrate interest as much as possible on the face. So illogical is this style in itself that the bodies and clothes are copied from chance models; the head of the person to be glorified is stuck on to them, and it is the merest bit of luck if it has been possible to shape this head itself from actual evidence! For plenty of statues represent individuals who never looked like them, and of whom no authentic likeness exists, which is the height of absurdity and the very burlesque of an honour.[2]
BALZAC
In such cases an allegorical monument should be a matter of necessity; yet we behold hundreds of such statues, all the same, and our prejudice in favour of verisimilitude requires us to contemplate the embroidery of their doublets or the trimming of their coats.
Rodin, for his part, to whom such ideas, which degrade his art to the lowest level, are revolting, believes that composition and expression should be so arranged as to make the spectator forget the plastique of the body. In his busts he neglects the inevitable linen collar, coat-collar, and necktie. The graceful dress of Claude Lorraine, the shirt and rope of The Burghers of Calais, had served his purpose well, and in the statues of General Lynch and Bastien-Lepage he had reduced the modern dress to large bronze reliefs without precise details. Especially in the image of a thinker he seeks to annul the costume. The Olympian character of Hugo allowed of the nude; for the massive deformity of Balzac the dressing-gown was appropriate. The majority of those who mocked did not even know that this careless costume was habitual to the author, and that Rodin chose to surprise him in his home and in the fever of work, instead of showing him in the street with a hat and stick, as they would no doubt have expected.
The Balzac, then, presents the aspect of a sheath of stone pushed out by a few twisting folds, which give it the appearance from behind of an upright sarcophagus. The size of the head, the abnormal largeness of the chest and neck, which have aroused mockery, are historic. Apart from these points, one honestly wonders what it is that can have shocked people in this bold and sincere work. The face is admirable in its pride, its strength of will, its haughty irony, and penetrating power of thought. The modelling and the leading lines are masterly. The rather ghostly look of the clay disappears in the bronze, as may be seen from the little head in that material, of which the monument was to be made. It is the freedom, the spontaneity, the life of the statue, which, as in the case of the Burghers, gave a shock to the conventions of the official world and disturbed the ideas of the public at large.
It is true, nevertheless, and is generally admitted even by its most active adversaries that this great figure possesses a strange haunting power; when one had seen it in the Salon one could see nothing else after it, and could not succeed in getting away from it. People returned to it, in order to attack it, but they did return to it inevitably. The same official sculptors who in 1877 had accused The Age of Brass of being cast from life because the figure was so exact did not shrink from accusing this same Rodin, matured by twenty years of work, of "not knowing the figure" and hiding his Balzac under a robe out of weakness. Besides these reproaches, which were made in bad faith, reproaches arose which exclaimed at Rodin's madness or hypocritically regretted that a man of so much talent should have made so great a mistake. But one thing which the Bahac never encountered was indifference; what was the spell which compelled everybody to regard it as an irritating puzzle, as a challenge, as a work out of the ordinary run? Plenty of hostile faces were to be seen, but many of them showed a secret fear of being in the wrong, of misunderstanding a fine thing, a work which was a forerunner. This same fear might have been read as early as 1867 upon the faces of the detractors who stood in a ring around Manet's first works.