II

RODIN

Lines and colors are for us only signs of hidden realities. Our eyes plunge beyond the surfaces to the spirit.-RODIN.

It is perhaps too early for a final estimate of Rodin's work. Time has done much in the way of giving the necessary perspective, but with so startling, so revolutionary an artist it must do much more. Certain prejudices have been cleared away; and to-day at the age of seventy-four Rodin has taken his place at the head of French sculptors as a man of ripe achievement. This recognition he owes largely to himself. He remained unshaken by the ridicule of the press, and was utterly indifferent to the adverse comments of the critics. He took his time; worked in his own way; refused to modify his designs; kept to his ideals and his technique; and routed the scoffers and faultfinders by sheer force of artistic purpose. It is easy to be too severe with these critics. After all there is some excuse for their hostility; they had a right to distrust a sculptor who offered as his début The Man with the Broken Nose, and who, when commissioned to design a statue of

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Balzac, submitted as his sketch jagged, grotesquely sensual features and a huge mass of body wrapped in a formless dressing gown. It was but human to attack a man whose attitude of cheerful independence seemed insulting and whose work could not be made to square with their pet theories. They have had their say, and time has unsaid it. We credit ourselves with greater insight, but it would, I think, be rash of us to deny that we are too near to judge completely and surely, and that much remains for Time, the sifter and shifter of values.

But this much may be said even now of Rodin's sculpture, that it shows a technique which is forceful and resourceful as well as radical, dramatic quality, nervous strength; and that it is intense, imaginative, and intellectually stimulating. Such things are rare in modern sculpture, which at its best is too often simply smooth, graceful or piquant, and at its worst theatrical and lifeless. It gives the impression of being a thing without resource or vitality. Modern music and poetry are vibrant with the spirit of the times; why should sculpture alone of all the arts fail to give something of the passionateness and richness of modern life? Rodin has proved once for all that the fault lies not with sculpture itself, that it, too, can be made responsive and vital; he has broken new ground and shown sculpture to be still very much alive.

His art is not his only answer to the critics. He

has defended his ideals and his technique, has done it brilliantly and incidentally, as only a Frenchman can; he has jotted down his thoughts on art in notebooks; and allowed himself to be interviewed freely. There is hardly a critical study of Rodin in which abundant use has not been made of this material. Perhaps the completest and most suggestive collections published are those of Gsell and Judith Cladel. Some allowance must, of course be made for partisanship, but enough remains. All these sayings of Rodin's give the same impression: of a critic who is unaffected, earnest, and appreciative of fine points; of an artist who takes his art very seriously, reflects on its trend and its sources of inspiration, and refuses to be classed as merely a maker. They are the credo of a reflective artist; they are not afterthoughts; and they are anything but academic. In them may be found the verve, the imaginative boldness, and the intellectual quality so characteristic of Rodin's sculpture. When there is such a parallelism it is worth while to trace it by getting independently the marking qualities of the man's work and then passing on to the sayings, which are the self-expression of the Artist and the Thinker in one.

As a worker in marble and bronze, Rodin is not a believer in smooth, highly polished surfaces, and in the large, monotonous planes of groups in repose. Occasionally he aims very successfully at smoothness

and grace. The softness and delicacy of his Springtime can hardly be matched. But the truer Rodin cuts into surfaces boldly; roughens and hollows out. The effect is strikingly varied and individual. It may be studied in The Burghers of Calais, the busts of Dalou and Puvis de Chavannes, and the face of Balzac. A comparison of the surface of the bust of Falguière with that of The Man with the Broken Nose shows a slow maturing of this principle of technique, in which Rodin saw greater and greater possibilities. In his groups he shows a preference for bodies in motion and for sharp-angled positions such as are given by bent, stooping or writhing bodies. Technically this method of modelling and grouping means a sharp contrast between bulging and hollowed out surfaces, and a strong play of light and shade; there is the illusion of depth, of the thrust of mass, of variety in the breaking up of linear expanse. This furrowing and tilting of planes is not Rodin's only reason for the choice of other than reposeful and wellbalanced groups. He aims to give to his art the free naturalness of life. John the Baptist is sculptured not standing, but walking; thus he, the great forerunner, is caught in his stride. Nothing could be simpler, less of the nature of posturing and arranging, than The Burghers of Calais. The critics protested against such violations of well-established academic principles, and asked him to group the burghers differently: his was such an informal way of sending

men on the road to death, with nothing in the way of pose or set melodramatic touch. And John the Baptist? One might almost suspect them of a naïve fear lest he be off and out of the door before they knew it.

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Beauty, in the accepted sense of formal beauty, not the highest law of Rodin's art. There again he ran afoul of the critics, to whom his continued and bold use of the ugly seemed perverse. He would not fit their pseudo-classical ideal of banishing from sculpture every touch and influence of the ugly. But even this side of their extreme position, Rodin's extensive use of the ugly is startling. There are in formative art few instances of greater daring in its use than La Vieille Heaulmière, that distressingly frank picture of the physical decay of old age in all its hideousness. In The Weeper a face not unattractive in its lines is deliberately caught at its worst, in the grimace of weeping. What has been condemned as absurd in sculpture-a mouth wide openRodin has attempted: in the bust The Tempest there are the head and shoulders of a female figure springing from the solid block with a fine suggestion of frenzied movement; a suggestion carried over to the face with its tense expression, its wild eyes, and wide-open mouth.

A further characteristic of Rodin's work is its dramatic quality. This must not be held to imply theatricalism, which marks an art at once showy and