Since the Exposition of 1900, Rodin's reputation has increased steadily in France and abroad. England and Italy have organized triumphal receptions for him of a sort reserved hitherto for the most illustrious men of state. The artists of London have acclaimed him, and have charged him, on the death of Whistler, with the presidency of the International Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers. Oxford University has given him a doctorate. The municipality of Rome has greeted him with special homage at the capitol; the court of Greece, having invited him, awaits his visit; at Prague, where he was received by the Society of Young Czech Artists, they accorded him royal honors, the public unharnessing the horses from his carriage and applauding at the same time the personal genius of this great Frenchman and the free ideas of his country.
Without altering in any way his life of labor, which these tributes have at times slightly interfered with, he has permitted himself only one luxury as the result of his fortune—a collection of antiques. This he has formed with passion. It is, once more, for purposes of study, and what a study, to possess a few of these sublime fragments, to feel them and handle them under all aspects of light! Rodin has placed a certain number of them in his garden, arranging them among the trees, among the shrubs; he has placed them on the fresh grass, where they seem to live in another and a happier way than in the rooms of museums. At a stroke the little garden at Meudon, with its pedestals, its statues, with its grove where a charming little marble, the "Sleeping Cupid," reposes, has become like the villa of a Roman citizen of the time of Augustus.
ROMEO AND JULIET
The art of Rodin has in a certain measure shown the effect of these happy events. During these latter years he has grown calm; he displays a serenity of spirit and a self-possession that increases day by day. But if the struggle in his composition has been tranquilized, his workmanship has grown freer. The sculptor's effort concentrates itself now in the search for a modeling ever more ample and suppler, which with him constitutes a new and decisive manner. It is to this that we owe those exquisite marbles, "Psyche Bearing the Lamp," "Benedictions," "The Young Girl and the Two Genii," "Romeo and Juliet," "The Fall of Icarus." This has been the epoch also of the busts of Mrs. Simpson and the proud and handsome George Wyndham, the English statesman. It is the epoch, finally, of the "Monument to President Sarmiento," which offers at the same time, in happy opposition, the two most recent and most characteristic methods of Rodin. The bronze statue of the great Argentine statesman has an aspect at once romantic and realistic that recalls that of "The Burghers of Calais," and the marble pedestal that supports it, a vanquishing Apollo emerging from the clouds all luminous with youth and glory, belongs to the latest period. Of this monument, ordered by the city of Buenos Aires, France does not possess a replica, though the model has been preserved. The Musée Rodin will soon contain a duplicate.
From 1901 to 1906 there was an uninterrupted creation of figures and of portraits, among them the busts of Sir Howard Walden, Berthelot, Gustave Geffroy, Mme. Hunter, and Bernard Shaw.
One must add the myriad drawings that Rodin has never ceased to execute. The will to sustain his eye and his hand instead of permitting them to become weakened with age has become a passion with him. He draws as a writer thinks. He thinks pencil in hand; his drawings are aphorisms. Line-sketches, stump-drawings, water-colors in strange tints multiply themselves like the leaves of a tree and quite constitute alone a complete work. The master has sold and given away quantities of them, yet; nevertheless, the Musée will contain more than three thousand. I have been honored with the charge of counting them over and classifying them. After days of this work one has a sensation of dazzlement, as I have discovered, before this accumulation of toil and beauty.