Auguste Rodin

by Rainer Maria Rilke

There are among the works of Rodin hands, single, small hands which, without belonging to a body, are alive. Hands that rise, irritated and in wrath; hands whose five bristling fingers seem to bark like the five jaws of a dog of Hell. Hands that walk, sleeping hands, and hands that are awaking; criminal hands, tainted with hereditary disease; and hands that are tired and will do no more, and have lain down in some corner like sick animals that know no one can help them. But hands are a complicated organism, a delta into which many divergent streams of life rush together in order to pour themselves into the great storm of action. There is a history of hands; they have their own culture, their particular beauty; one concedes to them the right of their own development, their own needs, feelings, caprices and tendernesses. Rodin, knowing through the education which he has given himself that the entire body consists of scenes of life, of a life that may become in every detail individual and great, has the power to give to any part of this vibrating surface the independence of a whole. As the human body is to Rodin an entirety only as long as a common action stirs all its parts and forces, so on the other hand portions of different bodies that cling to one another from an inner necessity merge into one organism. A hand laid on another's shoulder or thigh does not any more belong to the body from which it came,—from this body and from the object which it touches or seizes something new originates, a new thing that has no name and belongs to no one.

This comprehension is the foundation of the grouping of figures by Rodin; from it springs that coherence of the figures, that concentration of the forms, that quality of clinging together. He does not proceed to work from figures that embrace one another. He has no models which he arranges and places together; he starts with the points of the strongest contact as being the culminating points of the work. There where something new arises, he begins and devotes all the capacity of his chisel to the mysterious phenomenon that accompanies the growth of a new thing. He works, as it were, by the light of the flame that flashes out from these points of contact, and sees only those parts of the body that are thus illuminated.

The spell of the great group of the girl and the man that is named "The Kiss" lies in this understanding distribution of life. In this group waves flow through the bodies, a shuddering ripple, a thrill of strength, and a presaging of beauty. This is the reason why one beholds everywhere on these bodies the ecstacy of this kiss. It is like a sun that rises and floods all with its light.

Still more marvelous is that other kiss "L'éternelle Idole." The material texture of this creation encloses a living impulse as a wall encloses a garden. One of the copies of this marble is in the possession of Eugène Carrière, and in the silent twilight of his house this stone pulsates like a spring in which there is an eternal motion, a rising and falling, a mysterious stir of an elemental force. A girl kneels, her beautiful body is softly bent backward, her right arm is stretched behind her. Her hand has gropingly found her foot. In these three lines which shut her in from the outer world her life lies enclosed with its secret. The stone beneath her lifts her up as she kneels there. And suddenly, in the attitude into which the young girl has fallen from idleness, or reverie, or solitude, one recognizes an ancient, sacred symbol, a posture like that into which the goddess of distant, cruel cults had sunk. The head of this woman bends somewhat forward; with an expression of indulgence, majesty and forbearance, she looks down as from the height of a still night upon the man who sinks his face into her bosom as though into many blossoms. He, too, kneels, but deeper, deep in the stone. His hands lie behind him like worthless and empty things. The right hand is open; one sees into it. From this group radiates a mysterious greatness. One does not dare to give it one meaning, it has thousands. Thoughts glide over it like shadows, new meanings arise like riddles and unfold into clear significance. Something of the mood of a Purgatorio lives within this work. A heaven is near that has not yet been reached, a hell is near that has not yet been forgotten. Here, too, all splendour flashes from the contact of the two bodies and from the contact of the woman with herself.

Another conception of the theme of the contact of living surfaces and moving planes is that stupendous "Porte de L'Enfer" on which Rodin has worked for twenty years and the final casting into bronze of which is imminent. Advancing simultaneously in the pursuit of the import of the movements of planes and their points of confluence Rodin came to seek bodies that touched one another on many points, bodies whose movements were more vehement, stronger and more impetuous. The more mutual points of contact two bodies offered, the more impatiently they rushed upon each other like chemicals of close affinity. The tighter the new whole which they formed held together, the more they became like one organism.

From "The Gates of Hell" memories of Dante emerged. Ugolino; the wandering ones, Dante and Virgil, close together; the throng of the voluptuous from among whom like a dried up tree rose the grasping gesture of the avaricious. The centaurs, the giants and monsters, the syrens, fauns and wives of fauns, all the wild and ravenous god-animals of the pre-Christian forest rose before him. He conjured all the forms of Dante's dream as though from out the stirring depths of personal remembrance and gave them one after another the silent deliverance of material existence. Hundreds of figures and groups were thus created. The visions of the poet who belonged to another age awakened the artist who made them rise again to the knowledge of a thousand other gestures; gestures of seizing, losing, suffering and abandoning, and his tireless hands stretched out farther and farther beyond the world of the Florentine to ever new forms and revelations.

This earnest, self-centred worker who had never sought for material and who desired no other fulfilment than was attainable by the increasingly maturing mastery of his chisel thus penetrated through all the dramas of life. The depths of the nights of love unfolded themselves to him and revealed the dark, sorrowful and blissful breadth of a realm like that of a still heroic world in which there were no garments, in which faces were extinguished and bodies were supreme. With senses at white heat he sought life in the great chaos of this wrestling, and what he saw was Life.

Life did not close in about him in sultry narrowness: the atmosphere of the alcoves was far away. Here life became work; a thousandfold life throbbed in every moment. Here was loss and gain, madness and fright, longing and sorrow. Here was a desire that was immeasurable, a thirst so great that all the waters of the world dried up in it like a single drop. Here was no lying and denying, and here the joys of giving and taking were genuine and great. Here were the vices and blasphemies, the damnations and the beatitudes; and suddenly it became evident that a world was poor that concealed or buried all this life or pretended that it did not exist. It was!

Alongside of the whole history of mankind was this other history that did not know disguises, conventions, differences or ranks, that only knew strife. This history, too, had its evolution. From an instinct it had become a longing, from a physical possessorship between man and woman it had become an uplifting desire of human being for human being. Thus this history appears in the work of Rodin; still the eternal struggle of the sexes, but the woman is no more the overpowered or willing animal. She is longing and awake like the man, and both man and woman seem to have met in order to find their souls. The man who rises at night and softly seeks another is like a treasure-seeker who wishes to find on the cross-roads of sex the great happiness. To discover in all lusts and crimes, in all trials and all despair, an infinite reason for existence is a part of that great longing that creates poets. Here humanity hungers for something beyond itself. Here hands stretch out for eternity. Here eyes open, see Death and do not fear him. Here a hopeless heroism reveals itself whose glory dawns and vanishes like a smile, blossoms and withers like a rose. Here are all the storms of desire and the calms of expectation. Here are dreams that become deeds and deeds that fade into dreams. Here, as at a gigantic gambling table, great fortunes are lost or won.

Rodin's work embodied all this. He who had seen so much life found here life's fulness and abundance: the body each part of which was will, the mouths, that had the form of cries which seemed to rise from the depths of the earth. He found the gestures of the ancient gods, the beauty and suppleness of animals, the reeling of old dances, the movements of forgotten divine services, strangely combined with new gestures that had originated during the long period in which art was alien and blind to all these relations. These new gestures were particularly interesting to him. They were impatient. As someone who seeks for an object for a long time becomes more and more helpless, confused, and hasty, and finally creates a disorder in an accumulation of things about him, so the gestures of mankind who cannot find reason for existence, have become more and more impatient, nervous and hurried. Man's movements have become more hesitating. They have no more the athletic and resolute strength with which former men grappled all things. They do not resemble those movements that are preserved in ancient images, those gestures of which only the first and the last were important. Between these two simple movements innumerable transitions have been interpolated, and it is manifest that it is just in these intervening moments that the life of the man of to-day passes by; his action and his disability for action, the seizing, the holding, the abandoning has changed. In everything there is much more experience and at the same time more ignorance; there is despondency and a continuous attack against opposition; there is grief over things lost; there is calculation, judgment, consideration and less spontaneity.