Since the creation of "The Man who Awakens to Nature," in which during two years he had eagerly sought it, this became the characteristic of Rodin's talent. He had conquered it for all time; and so while his insatiable will applies itself with no less energy to other researches, that of movement, of character, of lighting, and sometimes over-emphasizes them, the work that comes from his hand may appear strange, excessive; it will never be mediocre, never indifferent.
And now let us glance at the image of this young man, this proud, unblemished human plant. All we have just been saying is forgotten in the force of our impression. The most powerful impression, first of all, is indolence. It is absorbed in itself; it exhausts like a great draught of life the veins of those who respond to it. Hence the silence, the long, dumb contemplation, the sense of incertitude one experiences in the presence of its beauty. It is not to our spirit that it first addresses itself. Its voluptuousness, whencesoever come, enchants our senses; then the intellect demands an explanation, studies it, traces back the sensation to its sources through one of those rapid and manifold changes which are the law of such natural phenomena as light, sound, electricity.
"The man who awakens to nature," said Rodin, in the presence of his statue. Indeed the body bends over, as if under the exquisite caress of the breezes of spring. The hand rests itself upon the head, flung back as if to hold in the somewhat mournful splendor of some too beautiful vision. The whole torso is gently stirred by the emotion springing up from the depths of the flesh to die out upon the surface of the imperceptibly agitated muscles. He leans lightly backward, bending like a bow and at the same time like a traveler walking toward the dawn; he is drawn on by the desire to renew this inner emotion that swells his human heart almost to the bursting-point. By this double movement reconstituting life, the action does not interrupt itself. It evokes the past and the future; the obscure shadows out of which this soul is endeavoring to emerge and the bright regions toward which it advances.
Auguste Rodin was at this time thirty-five years old. In the career of the artist, this admirable figure has a special significance, that of something symbolic. It marks one of the happiest phases of the sculptor's life, the period of revelation through which he had just been living during his sojourn by the forest of Groenendael. He, too, had awakened to Nature in the heart of the sacred wood; he, too, had come to know the somewhat dazzling torment of a being fully awake to the beauty of the world. This beauty he had at last penetrated; he felt it with all the strength of a ripened heart, he adored it; he made it his religion.
Such is the inner history of this statue. There is another, a history of the anecdotal sort, which is well known to-day, but which it is proper to recall in a complete biography of the master.
The adventure of "The Age of Bronze" was the first resounding battle that Rodin fought in his struggle for the cause of art. It was a victory, but only after great combats.
The plaster model appeared in the Salon of 1877. Before this proud and spirited figure a number of visitors paused, ravished by a sensation that was absolutely new. In itself there was nothing clamorous, no attempt to attract attention by extravagance of gesture or exaggerated expression—quite the contrary; the fragrance of a shy beauty, an idyllic freshness, mingled with the passionate poetry of a virile, artistic conscience, an exquisite sense of measure, a delightful elegance characteristically French, of the north of France, grave and restrained, and with a something hitherto unseen, a vigor till then unknown diffused through this adolescent flesh, irradiating it with tenderness, with a noble charm, a caressing sadness.
Immediately the rumor began to circulate, welcomed here, spurned there, by the world of professionals, amateurs, and journalists: the anatomy of the new work was too exact, its modeling too precise for it to be an interpretation of the model; it was a cast from nature, and the sculptor who gave out as the result of his own labor this mechanical copy of a human body was nothing but an impostor.
What does it matter? thought the public in its up-and-down common sense. There are plenty of fine casts from nature; so much the better for the name of Rodin if he has been particularly successful in this line.