RODIN'S HOUSE AND STUDIO AT MEUDON.
Man, animals, down to the smallest insects, down to the infinitesimal; the earth, the waters, the woods, the sky—all are marvelous. The firmament is the vastest landscape, the most profound, the most enchanting, with its variations, its effects of color and light, which delight the eye, astonish the thought, and subjugate the heart. And to say that artists—those who consider themselves such—attempt to represent all that simply as it appears to them, without having studied it, without having deciphered it, without having felt it! I pity them. They are prisoners, slaves of stupidity.
I was like them in the first periods of my perverted youth, but I have delivered myself. I have regained the liberty to approach the things that I love by the pathway of true study. Who follows me on the road? Who can learn it from a study of sculpture and design in books? You who have caught a glimpse of the splendor of that tree, of that giant whose magnificent column has been denuded by autumn of its leafy capital, but which is perhaps more beautiful in the nudity of its members; you who admire the structure of its branches and twigs, etched in an infinitude of forms against the sky, where they resemble the lacework of the windows of our churches, would you not understand far better that beauty, would not your pleasure be far more complete, if you sketched that tree not only in the mass, but in the innumerable details of its framework? And to think that the schools recommend to pupils, painters, and sculptors research on the subject! The subject! The subject does not exist in that—the poor little arrangement that you, one and all, summon up while poring over the same anecdotes, the same conventional attitudes. The human imagination is narrow, and you do not see the hundred thousand motives of art that multiply themselves under your eye. I could pass my whole life in the garden where I walk without exhausting them.
The subject is everywhere. Every manifestation of nature is a subject. Artists, pause here! Sketch these flowers; writers, describe them for me, not in the mass, as has always been done, but in minute detail, in the marvelous precision of their organs, in their characteristics, which are as varied as are those of animals and men. How beautiful to be in the same moment an artist and a botanist, to paint and model the plant at the same time that one studied it! Those great realists, the Japanese, understand this, and make the knowledge and cultivation of plants one of the bases of their education.
We place love and sensual pleasure in the same category. Undoubtedly it is nature herself who has led is astray in this by the instinct to perpetuate ourselves, in youth this instinct is like an overflowing river; it sweeps away everything, yet pleasure is everywhere about us. I imbibe it in the forms of the clouds that build their majestic architecture in the sky, in the rapture of this woman who holds her child in her arms, an attitude divine, so beautiful indeed, that the poet of the Gospels has deified it. It is the attitude of the Virgin. I imbibe it in the atmosphere which bathes me now, and will still continue to bless me, bringing me peace, rest, and health.
For that which is beautiful in a landscape is that which is beautiful in architecture—the air, space. No one in these days realizes its depth. It is this quality of depth that carries the soul where it wishes to go. In a well-constructed monument that which enraptures us is the science of its depths. The throngs in the churches attribute their emotion to mysticism, to the transport of the soul toward divinity. They are unaware that they owe their emotion to the exact knowledge of great planes possessed by the architects of former days. Even upon the most ignorant beholder they impose this. Man disregards that which he already has, and longs for something else. He longs for swiftness, to have wings like a bird. He does not know that he already enjoys this pleasure of moving through space. He rejoices in it in his soul, which takes wing and goes where it pleases, through the sky, on the waters, to the depths of the forests.
All the misfortune here below arises from a lack of comprehension. We classify our limited knowledge in narrow systems, like the card-systems of an office, and these pitiful conventions we take seriously. They teach us disconnected things, and we leave them disconnected. Those who have a little patience assemble these isolated facts; but such patient ones are rare, and nothing is so unbearable as that man who, not having it, speaks ill of him who has a sense of the truth. To see accurately is the secret of good design. Objects dart at one another, unite, and throw light on one another, explain themselves. That is life; a marvelous beauty covers all things like a garment, like an ægis.