SIRÈNES CHANTANT
Sister” (“Frère et Sœur”), a group of charming, innocent loveliness. Touching it is the lankness of shrivelled age (Statue of an Old Woman). Here are expressed the violence of all sensation, the legitimate happiness of love, the languor of satiety, the wantonness of riot, the solemnity of death, the hopeless horror of the damned (“La Porte de l’Enfer”).
Rodin the man is unassuming, and his manners are almost naïve. In his accueil he is courteous and charming, extending a gracious reception to the world he generously permits to freely seek him. Below medium height, strongly, powerfully built, his head lionesque, his eyes keen, deep-set, and very brilliant, we see him when at work in the white long blouse he wears in his atelier, Rue de l’Université. The vast room is filled with groups completed and others in different stages of advancement, chiefly innumerable casts for the “Porte de l’Enfer.” Around Rodin are his stone-cutters, achieving from blocks of marble the contours of the models in clay before their eyes. A fine, clinking sound, a “tin-tin,” fills the place to echo as the penetrating instruments tap the hard surface. Rodin’s hands are covered with wet and drying clay; the metallic sound is an accompaniment to his thoughts. “My métier is to express my ideas in plastic form; and, curiously, it is of form I think the least.” (His enemies will find here a point d’appui and fresh impetus to mirth!) “To me all expression should be subordinate to the
BUSTE DE MONS. RODIN, PAR FALGUIÈRE
idea; and for the elusive, fleeting ideals I am on an eternal search. I may imagine that under my hands, as I mould a faun possibly, or a satyr, I have caught the ineffable conception fast at last; when, under my very touch, I see the being change. My inspiration becomes another, and lo! the clay is a faun no longer, but a Sappho—head thrown back, lips parted, plunging into a sea!”
And to this man, the eternal search is for beauty, which, according to his creed, exists in everything that lives, moves, or has its being. “Nothing is ugly that has life,” Rodin says. “Age has its own loveliness, as youth has its especial charm. Whatever suggests human emotion, whether of grief or pain, goodness or anger, hate or love, has its individual seal of beauty. Therefore,” he exclaims, “since I hold all existence to be beautiful, and all beauty to be truth, on a bien le droit de choisir parmi les choses vraies” (one has the right to choose amongst truths). And although to Rodin has been attributed mastery in all arts save that in which he is absolutely maître, of his drawings, his designs, his ceramics, bear the touch of genius,—he is par excellence the sculptor. No critic can observe certain groups without conceding mastery to him in his art. It is claimed that there exist in antiquity no more perfect examples of the human form than “L’Age d’Airain,” “Le Printemps,” and “Le Baiser.” Had these marbles been unearthed at Samothrace or disinterred at Athens, antiquarians (if puzzled to trace the Grecian spirit) would scarcely have hesitated to assign these figures their places amongst the remnants of the dust and ashes of the Golden Age. But between Phidias and Rodin, between pure Greek and the complex modern, there is a great gulf fixed. The times demand, crave, insist upon and generate, another spirit. The ancients portrayed divinity in the mystic ideal clothed in ideal form; this modern portrays humanity, with its warring desires, its breath, span, happiness of love.