LE JARDIN DES OLIVIERS DE L’HOMME DE GÉNIE
Greed, Lust, Crime, Despair—in short, all the worst of the World, the Flesh, and the Triumphant Fiend. At the lower corners are masks of Pain, and around and about them Satyrs, Centaurs, Nymphs male and female, human forms of all ages and nations, run their terrible race. These remarkably modelled figures are entwined, interlaced, leaning the one on the other, seeking to escape, pursuing, haunting, and fleeing, repelling, clasping in eternal desire, eternal horror, eternal despair. Here are Paola and Francesca in their own forms, and their symbols in many another; here, even, are tiny bodies of infants, “who seek with sightless eyes to penetrate limbo and the shades.” No one but Rodin since the days of the Ghibellines could have ventured upon this subject, and of the tremendous result there has as yet been one general verdict of praise. It is Rodin’s chef-d’œuvre. The doors are to be cast in bronze, and are all but in the hands of the casters.
Carpeaux, Rude, Chapu, have given to France splendid monuments. The sculpture of these men is powerful, virile, telling,—their technique that of the schools, their expression at once comprehensible. This art, picturesque, decorative, ends with the production, and suggests as a whole nothing beyond that which is before the eyes. Rodin’s art, by reason of his more complex, subtle temperament, his more artistic sympathy and profounder insight into nature and humanity, has been a renaissance to modern sculpture, and is to plastic art what Puvis de Chavannes was to decorative painting. He calls himself a student of human life, a disciple of nature, from which he inspires himself, and in an original, individual manner expresses in tangible form his conceptions of the mysteries of life. He has caught the ineffable moment of passion, and dared to transfix the embrace of love in stone. He has dared to portray by his art that which poet, musician, painter, have not waited to confess is an inspiration to all creation; and is it not possible that those who are so hasty to malign and criticise Rodin do not understand him? At all events in his latest productions he shows no sign of temporising, and chooses unflinchingly to be an expositor in stone of the passions, the sensations, and crises of humanity as he apprehends them.
Alongside of the high spirituality reached in the apotheosis of renunciation in the group of “Les Bourgeois de Calais,” alongside of the intellectuality of the “Victor Hugo,” are examples of the grossly material. Here is the exquisite roundness of youth in “Brother and
LA TEMPÊTE