[II]
SCATTERED THOUGHTS ON FLOWERS
In Rodin's statues we find his conception of eternal man—man as he really is. They are molded on modern thought, with all its variations. One might suppose that these beautiful beings of marble and bronze had been named by the characteristic poets of the century, Victor Hugo, Musset, Baudelaire.
Beginning with the Renaissance and particularly during the seventeenth century, the royal courts were the great salons in which the taste of the day was developed. Necessity made courtiers of the artists, for to obtain orders, they had to win the good-will of the sovereigns, the great lords, and the financiers.
Art then lost its collective character, the artist his independence and strength. There was no longer the united effort of artists, inspired by love of beauty, to create great masterpieces such as cathedrals, city halls, and castles. The artist wasted his abilities in fragmentary bits, his time in worldly duties. To-day it is even worse. Keeping house, traveling, receiving, exhibiting in a hundred different places, living in great style, carrying on his life-work—all these crowd out the first, and formerly the essential, object of the artist, his work. It is these that lower art to the last degree of decadence.
Rodin has kept aloof from this manner of living, has avoided these innumerable occasions for wasting time, or, rather, has never allowed them to take possession of him. Modest, unpretentious, traveling little or within a limited radius, the unremitting study of the divine model and of the masterpiece, man, forms his whole ambition, while it is also the source of endless delight to him. "Admiration," he says, "is a joy daily kindled afresh," and again, "I talk out of the fullness of life; it belongs to me in a sense larger than that of ownership."
In his villa at Meudon, in the midst of his collections of antiques, he pursues this study incessantly. He who is admitted to the modest garden of the great master first beholds with delight a Greek marble in an arbor. At the turn of a path there is the torso of a goddess resting on an antique column; in a niche in the wall, a Roman bust. Beneath the high arch of the peristyle of the studio, the architecture of which blends into the surrounding background as in the paintings of Claude Lorrain, there is a magnificent torso. Finally dominating the garden and the valley it overlooks, standing on a knoll and projected against the clear sky, there is an isolated façade from a castle of the seventeenth century, its delicate balustrades and casements outlined against the blue sky as in the decorative paintings of Paul Veronese.
These ruins are the remains of the Château d'Issy, the work of Mansart. Rodin saved them at the moment when their destruction at the hands of ignorant workmen was imminent, and at great expense reconstructed them near his residence. These fragments, this noble portico, seem as though placed by chance, but the keen observer quickly perceives the correctness of taste that has determined their disposition. Each fragment forms part of an ensemble with the trees, the grass, the light, and the shadows, and to change any of these in the slightest degree would sacrifice some of its beauty. Sculpture at its finest is architecture, and architecture is perhaps the greatest art, because it collaborates directly with nature. Architecture lives through the life of things, and every hour of the day lends it a new expression.
Innumerable reflections were aroused in the mind of the master Rodin when he essayed to place his treasures: the effect of the changing light on the object, the balancing of values, the relation of proper proportions, the appearance of the object in full light. All these he examined and studied, and he searched into the depths of the language of forms, to him as clear and as mysterious as beautiful music. This remarkable gift for determining the value of the object in its setting—a gift the secret of which is beyond the knowledge of the ignorant—has brought forth that peculiar poetic charm which permeates this little garden in a suburb of Paris, a refuge of persecuted beauty. Here the master confers with the artists of Greece and France of other days. These are his Elysian Fields.
In Paris, where he is daily and where he works every afternoon, he lives in an exquisite, but ruinous, mansion of the eighteenth century, situated in a rustic, neglected park. There he finds his delight in the study of flowers and applies himself to it with his intense, never-dormant desire for understanding. His antique pottery is filled with anemones, carnations, and tulips. During his frugal meals they are before him, and his reverent love of them arouses his desire to understand them as completely as he does human beings. He analyzes and searches out their details without becoming insensible to the beauty of the whole. He jots down his discoveries, his words picture them; like La Rochefoucauld, he searches into their character; but watching over their life admiringly and tenderly until they wither, he does not dissect them, does not destroy them.
Is not the flower the queen of ornaments, the inspiration of all races and ages, the very soul of artistic decoration? Have not the hands of genius contrived to employ the most durable as well as the most fragile material to express this delicate beauty in Greek and Gothic capitals, in the stone lacework of cathedrals, the fabrics of gold and silk, brocades, tapestries, wrought iron-work, old bindings? Is the splendor of stained-glass windows aught else than the splendor of a mass of beautiful flowers?
THE BATH.
"Were this thoroughly understood," says Rodin, "industrial art would be entirely revolutionized—industrial art, that barbarous term, an art which concerns itself with commerce and profit.
"The young artists of to-day understand nothing; they copy to satiety the classic ornaments and designs, and reproduce them in so cold a manner that they lose all meaning. The ancients obtained their designs from nature. They found their models in the garden, even in the vegetable garden. They drew their inspiration from its source. The cabbage-leaf, the oak-leaf, the clover, the thistle, and the brier are the motives of the Gothic capital. It is not photographic truth, but living truth, that we must seek in art."
Rodin writes his observations. He notes them down at the moment as they occur to him in all their freshness, and in this form they will be given here. At first glance, the reader may be surprised at their apparently fragmentary form. They may seem devoid of general continuity, but when one comprehends the great master's method, one sees that a bond much firmer than that of the mere word binds them together. They seem disjointed because here, as in his sculpture, the artist accepts only the essential, and rejects all superfluous detail. In reality they have the continuity of life, which is felt, but not seen, and which renders arbitrary transition unnecessary. This is the prerogative of genius, while all else is within the grasp of any one. His authority strikes us dumb; it puts to rout mere commonplace cleverness.