However, in the case of Rodin the Fates have so contrived their malicious game that at no point in his career has he been without the company of envy and slander. Often when he had attained a summit he would be thrust down into a deeper valley. He has mounted to triumphs and fallen to humiliations; but his spirit has never been quelled; and if each acclivity he scales is steeper, the air atop has grown purer, more stimulating, and below the landscape spreads wider before him. With Dante he can say: "La montagna ch'e drizza voi ch'e il mondo fece torti." Rodin's mountain has always straightened in him what the world made crooked. The name of his mountain is Art. A born nonconformist, Rodin makes the fourth of that group of nineteenth century artists—Richard Wagner, Henrik Ibsen, Edouard Manet—who taught a deaf, dumb, and blind world to hear, see, think, and feel.
Is it not dangerous to say of a genius that his work alone should count, that his personality is negligible? Though Rodin has followed Flaubert's advice to artists to lead an ascetic life that their art might be the more violent, nevertheless his career, colorless as it may seem to those who love better stage players and the comedy of society—this laborious life of a poor sculptor should not be passed over. He always becomes enraged at the prevailing notion that fire descends from heaven upon genius. Rodin believes in but one inspiration—nature. Nature can do no wrong. He swears that he does not invent, he copies nature. He despises improvisation, has contemptuous words for "fatal facility," and, being a slow-thinking, slow-moving man, he only admits to his councils those who have conquered art, not by assault, but by stealth and after years of hard work. He sympathizes with Flaubert's patient, toiling days. He praises Holland because after Paris it seems slow. "Slowness is beauty," he declares. In a word, he has evolved a theory and practice of his art that is the outcome—like all theories, all techniques—of his own temperament. And that temperament is giant-like, massive, ironic, grave, strangely perverse; it is the temperament of a magician of art doubled by a mathematician's.
Books are written about him. With picturesque precision De Maupassant described him in "Notre Coeur." Rodin is tempting as a psychologic study. He appeals to the literary critic, though his art is not "literary." His modeling arouses tempests, either of dispraise or idolatry. To see him steadily after a visit to his studios at Paris or Meudon is difficult. If the master be present then one feels the impact of a personality that is misty as the clouds about the base of a mountain, and as impressive as the bulk of the mountain. Yet a sane, pleasant, unassuming man interested in his clay—that is, unless you happen to discover him interested in humanity. If you watch him well you may in turn find yourself watched; those peering eyes possess a vision that plunges into the depths of your soul. And this master of marble sees the soul as nude as he sees the body. It is the union in him of sculptor and psychologist that places Rodin apart from other artists. These two arts (psychology is the art of divination) he practises in a medium that hitherto did not betray potentialities for such performances. Walter Pater is right in maintaining that each art has its separate subject matter; still, in the debatable province of Rodin's sculpture we find strange emotional power, hints of the pictorial, and a rare suggestion of music. This, obviously, is not playing the game according to the rules of Lessing and his Laocoön.
Let us drop the old aesthetic rule of thumb and confess that during the last century a new race of artists sprang up and in their novel element they, like flying-fishes, revealed to a wondering world their composite structure. Thus we find Berlioz painting with his instrumentation; Franz Liszt, Tschaikowsky, and Richard Strauss filling their symphonic poems with drama and poetry; while Richard Wagner invented an art which he believed embraced all the others. And there was Ibsen who employed the dramatic form as a vehicle for his anarchistic ideas; and Nietzsche, who was such a poet that he was able to sing a mad philosophy into life; not to forget Rossetti, who painted poems and made poetry of his pictures. Sculpture was the only art that resisted this universal disintegration, this imbroglio of the seven arts. No sculptor before Rodin had dared to shiver the syntax of stone. For sculpture is a static, not a dynamic art—is it not? Let us observe the rules though we call up the chill spirit of the cemetery. What Mallarmé attempted with French poetry Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles do not represent, but present, emotion; they are the evocation of emotion itself; as in music, form and substance coalesce. If he does not, as does Mallarmé, arouse "the silent thunder afloat in the leaves," he can summon from the vasty deep the spirits of love, hate, pain, sin, despair, beauty, ecstasy; above all, ecstasy. Now, the primal gift of ecstasy is bestowed upon few artists. Keats had it, and Shelley; Byron, despite his passion, missed it. We find it in Swinburne, he had it from the first. Few French poets know it. Like the "cold devils" of Félicien Rops, coiled in frozen ecstasy, the fiery blasts of hell about them, Charles Baudelaire boasted the dangerous gift. Poe and Heine felt ecstasy, and Liszt. Wagner was the master-adept of ecstasy: Tristan and Isolde! And in the music of Chopin ecstasy is pinioned within a bar, the soul rapt to heaven in a phrase. Richard Strauss has given us a variation on the theme of ecstasy; voluptuousness troubled by pain, the soul tormented pathologically.
Rodin is of this tormented choir. He is revealer of its psychology. It may be decadence, as any art is in its decadence which stakes the part against the whole. The same was said of Beethoven by the followers of Haydn, and the successors of Richard Strauss—Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg—are abused quite as violently as the Wagnerites abused Richard Strauss, turning against him the same critical artillery that was formerly employed against Wagner. Nowadays, Rodin is looked on as superannuated, as a reactionary by the younger men, the Cubists and Futurists, who spoil marble with their iconoclastic chisels and canvas with their paint-tubes.
That this ecstasy should be aroused by pictures of love and death, as in the case of Poe and Baudelaire, Wagner and Strauss and Rodin, is not to be judged an artistic crime. In the Far East they hypnotize neophytes with a bit of broken mirror, for in the kingdom of art there are many mansions. Possibly it was a relic of his early admiration for Baudelaire that set Wagner to extorting ecstasy from his orchestra by images of love and death. And no doubt the temperament which seeks such synthesis, a temperament commoner in medieval times than ours, was inherent in Wagner, as it is in Rodin. Both men play with the same counters: love and death. In Pisa we may see (attributed by Vasari) Orcagna's fresco of the Triumph of Death. The sting of the flesh and the way of all flesh are inextricably blended in Rodin's Gate of Hell. His principal reading for half a century has been Dante and Baudelaire; the Divine Comedy and "Les Fleurs du Mal" are the keynotes in the grandiose white symphony of the French sculptor. Love and life, and bitterness and death rule the themes of his marbles. Like Beethoven and Wagner, he breaks academic rules, for he is Auguste Rodin, and where he magnificently achieves, lesser men fail or fumble. His large, tumultuous music is alone for his chisel to ring out and to sing.
[CONTENTS]
[THE CAREER OF RODIN]
[RODIN AND THE BEAUX-ARTS]
Sojourn in Belgium—"The Man Who Awakens to
Nature"—Realism and Plaster Casts.
[FLEMISH PAINTING—JOURNEYS IN ITALY AND FRANCE.]