But in what, you ask, resides the originality of these decorative commonplaces, their brilliant, unquestionable originality? In the deliberate simplicity, in the spirit of sobriety that has presided over their composition, and, above all, in their execution. It is through their execution that the sculptures of Evian occupy a place apart in the work of Rodin. Since the beautiful Greek epoch, stone has perhaps never assumed such a living sweetness under any human hand. One might believe that it had not been touched by the steel of the chisel, but caressed by a touch as delicate as it is firm, molded like wax under the warmth of that hand. These mellow figures do not detach themselves from the living framework in which they are set; they stand out, thanks to an insensible transition which leaves them enveloped, in the reflections of the fair material; they mass themselves under a sifted light, among the flowers and the clusters of grapes. With all this there is no insipidity. Under the skin one feels the plenitude of bodies rich with health, harmonious organisms: it is a force that has found its equilibrium, a force relaxing in sweetness. Strangely enough, when one seeks for antecedents to which it is possible to relate the reliefs of Evian, it is not in the domain of sculpture, but in that of painting, that one finds the terms of comparison. The intense power, carefully measured as it is, of this vibrant modeling and this color drenched in sunlight we find again among the tenderest creations of Correggio, of Rubens, and, closer to ourselves, of Renoir.
The two jardinières which complete this unique series represent groups of children mad with joy and with liberty; in the one case playing and jostling one another in a field of wheat, in the midst of the moving sea of spears, and in the other, spread out on the green summer grass, rapturously holding up in their little arms, already robust, the grapes heavy with wine. They are exquisite fantasies of movement, of grace, of mad life just beginning. Here, too, the flesh of these little laughing gods, melting in the mass of ripe corn and tottering vines, seems bathed in the clearness of a beautiful day, full of air and of light.
These five works of the old age of the master might be entitled the "Poem of Youth." It is the privilege of genius to return, in its decline, to its point of departure, to remount to the sources of life, which remain ever the most intoxicating. The sensations of infancy and adolescence solicit him with all their unforgettable seductiveness, and he surrenders himself lovingly to the sweetness of this lost dream; but it has cost him his entire, existence to acquire the gift of translating it.
This search for the envelopment of forms fruitful of new effects is the decisive point in the career of Rodin; it is the supreme thought, the end and aim of sixty years of toil and reflection. Therefore it is a very happy thing for French sculpture that Rodin has been able to live long enough to realize completely this definitive conception of his art. For from the summit attained by him other artists can spring forth afresh, to renew once more perhaps the manifestations of the national genius. The resources indicated by Rodin have hardly been used hitherto; to bring them fully into employment meanwhile there will perhaps be born a new school of sculpture.
BUST OF BERNARD SHAW.
What constitutes the originality of a great artist is that it is never isolated. It belongs at once to the past, to the present, and to the future; it is altogether a derivative and a root. It springs from the past through atavism, through study, and through admiration for the masters; it is of the present through contact with those of the artist's contemporaries who march at the same time with him along the road of discovery; finally, it influences the future by bequeathing to the generations that follow a new conception and new methods. To-day we see clearly the sources from which have come the ultimate aspect of the talent of Rodin. They are the art of Greece; they are also certain marvels of Gothic art in which miraculously reblossomed the Hellenic suppleness and sweetness, as if the springs of the Greek genius had mysteriously coursed under the earth from Athens to France, bursting forth at last in the walls of our cathedrals; then there are those unfinished marbles of Michelangelo from which Rodin derived the idea of vapor and flow in sculpture. But other artists have arrived, at about the same time, at the same end, or almost the same end, by different paths. Among these are two of our great painters, friends and comrades of Rodin, Renoir and Carrière. Does not this community of thought prove how profound is the vitality our country continues to possess in the domain of art? We are less struck by this phenomenon than when we verify its effects in the past, when we see them related and summed up in the history of art; because we are not in a position to disengage it from our present life, which is encumbered and complicated, and to draw a conclusion from it. And then, too, the present political régime does little to signalize the great artists, to muster them before the untutored admiration of the multitude, to give value to the intellectual wealth of the country. As a rule, when a man of genius receives the homage he deserves, it is when he is near his end, if it is not after his death. What public festivals have been given in France in this century to honor the glories of our artistic and scientific life, Victor Hugo excepted? When and how have we celebrated men like Puvis de Chavannes, Rodin, Renoir, Carrière, Claude Monet, Besnard, Odilon Redon, and Bartholomé, to mention only masters of the chisel and the brush? Occasionally they have been gratified by the boredom of an official banquet, where they have been assigned a rank considerably lower than that of the least important politician, and they are expected to be thankful when they have had bestowed upon them a few parchments and some bits of ribbon. Fortunately, their joys are in another sphere, whither no one who is not their equal can follow them.