The feeling of being isolated and misunderstood at times threw a shadow over the soul of the sculptor; but on the other hand he felt himself so strong, so solidly based in his will, in his self-confidence, and in the virtue of labor that these moments of depression passed away quickly. Besides, he knew the secret of the poor, the secret of creating happiness for oneself out of everything that the rich and powerful despise: a simple life, health, regular work, the contemplation of nature, and a few real friendships. Rodin earned at Sèvres only two or three francs an hour and lost a great deal of time on the railroad. What did it matter? He found pleasure and rest in these little journeys. Every day he set out from Paris by train, and, the day over, winter and summer, his wife came to meet him. They returned together on foot either along the banks of the Seine, charming in their profusion of little hills and islands, covered with meadows or fine trees, or through the woods of Meudon and Clamart, with their vistas of Paris, its heights, its buildings, its changing sky full of light and spirit.
At the end of four years of opposition and annoyance Rodin gave up pottery in order to consecrate himself wholly to his own work. The museum of the factory preserves a vase signed by him, and the future Musée de l'Hôtel Biron can show a second example. What has become of the others? What price would not be paid for them to-day by admirers of the master?
These supplementary works did not turn him away from his essential task; whatever were the technical means employed, his efforts tended toward one unique end, the plastic quality, and he gave himself up desperately to this search in executing his new order, the "Gate."
Rising at four in the morning, as he had done in his youth, he studied the plans and the details of this great work. He had announced a series of little figures. How was he to group them? What visions surged in the sculptor's imagination? Of what legendary theme, what theme of history or poetry, should he make use in order to realize his program? He had never ceased to be a passionate reader. He read especially the Greek poets and dramatists, the Roman historians, the old French chronicles, Dante, Shakspere, Victor Hugo, and Baudelaire. He did not wish to draw the subject of his future work from Homer, Æschylus or Sophocles; the School of the Beaux-Arts had so abused the theme of the antique, already immortalized by Greek sculptors, that it had entirely lost its freshness. The moderns attracted him less, but he was obsessed by the work of the great poet of the Renaissance, by the "Divine Comedy" of Dante. He had read and reread it and made a sort of commentary in the form of innumerable sketches which he jotted down mornings and evenings at table, while walking, stopping by the wayside to dash off attitudes and gestures on the leaves of his note-book. He rediscovered in the poem of Dante the fateful grandeur of the Greek dramas, but with an atmosphere more modern, closer to ourselves, more mournfully familiar to our anguishes and our torments. The idea took shape in his imagination, "that imagination ceaselessly rumbling and groaning like a forge"; it exalted his bold spirit. Genius joins to the richness of the intellect the simplicity of heart that creates faith. Genius believes ever more than it thinks. It has the strength which succeeds in anything, and it possesses also that supreme gift, the ingenuousness of the child who doubts nothing. Rodin believed the poem of Dante as if he had lived it, as Dante himself believed in Vergil. What a magnificent homage great men render to one another in this credulity of genius toward genius!
RODIN AT WORK ON THE MARBLE.
The subject chosen by Rodin for his decorative panels, then, was hell—hell as Dante conceived it in a vision that lends itself, for that matter, marvelously to a plastic realization. The "Gate" would be a poem, an immense sculptured poem; that is to say, a résumé of the attitudes and gestures of life called forth by the release of the passions, a strange catalogue of the expressions of the human body under the shock of sorrow and of joy. If the imagination of Rodin caught fire like that of a visionary, he remained beyond everything and above everything the sculptor, and he plunged immediately into the search for the general scheme of the work.