Part 5 (2/2)

This has been measurably true since the disappearance of the cla.s.sic dress and the concealment of the body by modern costume. The nudes of the early Renaissance, in painting still more than in sculpture, are differentiated by the faces. The rest of the figure is generally conventionalized as thoroughly as the face itself is in Byzantine and the hands in Giottesque painting. Giotto could draw admirably, it need not be said. He did draw as well as the contemporary feeling for the human figure demanded. When the Renaissance reached its climax and the study of the antique led artists to look beneath drapery and interest themselves in the form, expression made an immense step forward. Color was indeed almost lost sight of in the new interest, not to reappear till the Venetians. But owing to the lack of visible nudity, to the lack of the cla.s.sic gymnasia, to the concealments of modern attire, the knowledge of and interest in the form remained, within certain limits, an esoteric affair. The general feeling, even where, as in the Italy of the _quattro_ and _cinque centi_, everyone was a connoisseur, did not hold the artist to expression in his anatomy as the general Greek feeling did. Everyone was a connoisseur of art alone, not of nature as well. Consequently, in spite of such an enthusiastic genius as Donatello, who probably more than any other modern has most nearly approached the Greeks--not in spiritual att.i.tude, for he was eminently of his time, but in his att.i.tude toward nature--the human form in art has for the most part remained, not conventionalized as in the Byzantine and Gothic times, but thoroughly conventional. Michael Angelo himself certainly may be charged with lending the immense weight of his majestic genius to perpetuate the conventional. It is not his distortion of nature, as pre-Raphaelite limitedness glibly a.s.serts, but his carelessness of her prodigious potentialities, that marks one side of his colossal accomplishment. Just as the lover of architecture as architecture will protest that Michael Angelo's was meretricious, however inspiring, so M. Rodin declares his sculpture unsatisfactory, however poetically impressive. ”He used to do a little anatomy evenings,” he said to me, ”and used his chisel next day without a model.

He repeats endlessly his one type--the youth of the Sistine ceiling. Any particular felicity of expression you are apt to find him borrowing from Donatello--such as, for instance, the movement of the arm of the 'David,' which is borrowed from Donatello's 'St. John Baptist.'” Most people to whom Michael Angelo's creations appear celestial in their majesty at once and in their winningness would deny this. But it is worth citing both because M. Rodin strikes so many crude apprehensions as a French Michael Angelo, whereas he is so radically removed from him in point of view and in practice that the unquestionable spiritual a.n.a.logy between them is rather like that between kindred spirits working in different arts, and because, also, it shows not only what M. Rodin is not, but what he is. The grandiose does not run away with him. His imagination is occupied largely in following out nature's suggestions.

His sentiment does not so drench and saturate his work as to float it bodily out of the realm of natural into that of supernal beauty, there to crystallize in decorative and puissant visions appearing out of the void and only superficially related to their corresponding natural forms. Standing before the Medicean tombs the modern susceptibility receives perhaps the most poignant, one may almost say the most intolerable, impression to be obtained from any plastic work by the hand of man; but it is a totally different impression from that left by the sculptures of the Parthenon pediments, not only because the sentiment is wholly different, but because in the great Florentine's work it is so overwhelming as wholly to dominate purely natural expression, natural character, natural beauty. In the Medici Chapel the soul is exalted; in the British Museum the mind is enraptured. The object itself seems to disappear in the one case, and to reveal itself in the other.

I do not mean to compare M. Rodin with the Greeks--from whom in sentiment and imagination he is, of course, as totally removed as what is intensely modern must be from the antique--any more than I mean to contrast him with Michael Angelo, except for the purposes of clearer understanding of his general aesthetic att.i.tude. a.s.sociation of anything contemporary with what is cla.s.sic, and especially with what is greatest in the cla.s.sic, is always a perilous proceeding. Very little time is apt to play havoc with such cla.s.sification. I mean only to indicate that the resemblance to Michael Angelo, found by so many persons in such works as the Dante doors, is only of the loosest kind--as one might, through their common lusciousness, compare peaches with pomegranates--and that to the discerning eye, or the eye at all experienced in observing sculpture, M. Rodin's sculpture is far more closely related to that of Donatello and the Greeks. It, too, reveals rather than constructs beauty, and by the expression of character rather than by the suggestion of sentiment.

An ill.u.s.tration of M. Rodin's affinity with the antique is an incident which he related to me of his work upon his superb ”age d'Airain.” He was in Naples; he saw nature in freer inadvertence than she allows elsewhere; he had the best of models. Under these favoring circ.u.mstances he spent three months on a leg of his statue; ”which is equivalent to saying that I had at last absolutely mastered it,” said he. One day in the Museo n.a.z.ionale he noticed in an antique the result of all his study and research. Nature, in other words, is M. Rodin's _material_ in the same special sense in which it was the antique material, and in which, since Michael Angelo and the high Renaissance, it has been for the most part only the sculptor's _means_. It need not be said that the personality of the artist may be as strenuous in the one case as in the other; unless, indeed, we maintain, as perhaps we may, that individuality is more apt to atrophy in the latter instance; for as one gets farther and farther away from nature he is in more danger from conventionality than from caprice. And this is in fact what has happened since the high Renaissance, the long line of conventionalities being continued, sometimes punctuated here and there as by Clodion or Houdon, David, Rude, or Barye, sometimes rising into great dignity and refinement of style and intelligence, as in the contemporary sculpture of the Inst.i.tute, but in general almost purely decorative or sentimental, and, so far as natural expression is concerned, confining itself to psychological rather than physical character.

What is it, for instance, that distinguishes a group like M. Dubois's ”Charity” from the _genre_ sentiment or incident of some German or Italian ”professor?” Qualities of style, of refined taste, of elegance, of true intelligence. Its artistic interest is purely decorative and sentimental. Really what its average admirer sees in it is the same moral appeal that delights the simple admirers of German or Italian treatment of a similar theme. It is simply infinitely higher bred. Its character is developed no further. Its significance as form is not insisted on. The parts are not impressively differentiated, and their mysterious mutual relations and correspondences are not dwelt on. The physical character, with its beauties, its salient traits of every kind, appealing so strongly to the sculptor to whom nature appears plastic as well as suggestive, is wholly neglected in favor of the psychological suggestion. And the individual character, the _cachet_ of the whole, the artistic essence and _ensemble_, that is to say, M. Dubois has, after the manner of most modern sculpture, conveyed in a language of convention, which since the time of the Siennese fountain, at all events, has been cla.s.sical.

The literary artist does not proceed in this way. He does not content himself with telling us, for example, that one of his characters is a good man or a bad man, an able, a selfish, a tall, a blonde, or a stupid man, as the case may be. He takes every means to express his character, and to do it, according to M. Taine's definition of a work of art, more completely than it appears in nature. He recognizes its complexity and enforces the sense of reality by a thousand expedients of what one may almost call contrasting ma.s.ses, derivative movements, and balancing planes. He distinguishes every possible detail that plays any structural part, and, in short, instead of giving us the mere symbol of the Sunday-school books, shows us a concrete organism at once characteristic and complex. Judged with this strictness, which in literary art is elementary, how much of the best modern sculpture is abstract, symbolic, purely typical. What insipid fragments most of the really eminent Inst.i.tute statues would make were their heads knocked off by some band of modern barbarian invaders. In the event of such an irruption, would there be any torsos left from which future Poussins could learn all they should know of the human form? Would there be any _disjecta membra_ from which skilled anatomists could reconstruct the lost _ensemble_, or at any rate make a shrewd guess at it? Would anything survive mutilation with the serene confidence in its fragmentary but everywhere penetrating interest which seems to pervade the most fractured fraction of a Greek relief on the Athenian acropolis? Yes, there would be the debris of Auguste Rodin's sculpture.

In our day the human figure has never been so well understood. Back of such expressive modelling as we note in the ”Saint Jean,” in the ”Adam”

and ”Eve,” in the ”Calaisiens,” in a dozen figures of the Dante doors, is a knowledge of anatomy such as even in the purely scientific profession of surgery can proceed only from an immense fondness for nature, an insatiable curiosity as to her secrets, an inexhaustible delight in her manifestations. From the point of view of such knowledge and such handling of it, it is no wonder that the representations of nature which issue from the Inst.i.tute seem superficial. One can understand that from this point of view very delightful sculpture, very refined, very graceful, very perfectly understood within its limits, may appear like _baudruche_--inflated gold-beater's skin, that is to say, of which toy animals are made in France, and which has thus pa.s.sed into studio _argot_ as the figure for whatever lacks structure and substance.

Ask M. Rodin the explanation of a movement, an att.i.tude, in one of his works which strikes your convention-steeped sense as strange, and he will account for it just as an anatomical demonstrator would--pointing out its necessary derivation from some disposition of another part of the figure, and not at all dwelling on its grace or its other purely decorative felicity. Its artistic function in his eyes is to aid in expressing fully and completely the whole of which it forms a part, not to const.i.tute a harmonious detail merely agreeable to the easily satisfied eye. But then the whole will look anatomical rather than artistic. There is the point exactly. Will it? I remember speculating about this in conversation with M. Rodin himself. ”Isn't there danger,”

I said, ”of getting too fond of nature, of dissecting with so much enthusiasm that the pleasure of discovery may obscure one's feeling for pure beauty, of losing the artistic in the purely scientific interest, of becoming pedantic, of imitating rather than constructing, of missing art in avoiding the artificial?” I had some difficulty in making myself understood; this perpetual see-saw of nature and art which enshrouds aesthetic dialectics as in a Scotch mist seems curiously fact.i.tious to the truly imaginative mind. But I shall always remember his reply, when he finally made me out, as one of the finest severings conceivable of a Gordian knot of this kind. ”Oh, yes,” said he; ”there is, no doubt, such a danger for a mediocre artist.”

M. Rodin is, whatever one may think of him, certainly not a mediocre artist. The instinct of self-preservation may incline the Inst.i.tute to a.s.sert that he obtrudes his anatomy. But prejudice itself can blind no one of intelligence to his immense imaginative power, to his poetic ”possession.” His work precisely ill.u.s.trates what I take to have been, at the best epochs, the relations of nature to such art as is loosely to be called imitative art--what a.s.suredly were those relations in the mind of the Greek artist. Nature supplies the parts and suggests their cardinal relations. Insufficient study of her leaves these superficial and insipid. Inartistic absorption in her leaves them lifeless. The imagination which has itself conceived the whole, the idea, fuses them in its own heat into a new creation which is ”imitative” only in the sense that its elements are not inventions. The art of sculpture has retraced its steps far enough to make pure invention, as of Gothic griffins and Romanesque symbology, unsatisfactory to everyone. But, save in M. Rodin's sculpture, it has not fully renewed the old alliance with nature on the old terms--Donatello's terms; the terms which exact the most tribute from nature, which insist on her according her completest significance, her closest secrets, her faculty of expressing character as well as of suggesting sentiment. Very beautiful works are produced without her aid to this extent. We may be sure of this without asking M.

Rodin to admit it. He would not do his own work so well were he prepared to; as Millet pointed out when asked to write a criticism of some other painter's canvas, in estimating the production of his fellows an artist is inevitably handicapped by the feeling that he would have done it very differently himself. It is easy not to share M. Rodin's gloomy vaticinations as to French sculpture based on the continued triumph of the Inst.i.tute style and suavity. The Inst.i.tute sculpture is too good for anyone not himself engaged in the struggle to avoid being impressed chiefly by its qualities to the neglect of its defects. At the same time it is clear that no art can long survive in undiminished vigor that does not from time to time renew its vitality by resteeping itself in the influences of nature. And so M. Rodin's service to French sculpture becomes, at the present moment, especially signal and salutary because French sculpture, however refined and delightful, shows, just now, very plainly the tendency toward the conventional which has always proved so dangerous, and because M. Rodin's work is a conspicuous, a s.h.i.+ning example of the return to nature on the part not of a mere realist, naturalist, or other variety of ”mediocre artist,” but of a profoundly poetic and imaginative temperament.

This is why, one immediately perceives in studying his works, Rodin's treatment, while exhausting every contributary detail to the end of complete expression, is never permitted to fritter away its energy either in the mystifications of optical illusion, or in the infantine idealization of what is essentially subordinate and ancillary. This is why he devotes three months to the study of a leg, for example--not to copy, but to ”possess” it. Indeed, no sculptor of our time has made such a sincere and, in general, successful, effort to sink the sense of the material in the conception, the actual object in the artistic idea. One loses all sense of bronze or marble, as the case may be, not only because the artistic significance is so overmastering that one is exclusively occupied in apprehending it, but because there are none of those superficial graces, those felicities of surface modelling, which, however they may delight, infallibly distract as well. Such excellences have a.s.suredly their place. When the motive is conventional or otherwise insipid, or even when its character is distinctly light without being trivial, they are legitimately enough agreeable. And because, in our day, sculptural motives have generally been of this order we have become accustomed to look for such excellences, and, very justly, to miss them when they are absent. Grace of pose, suavity of outline, pleasing disposition of ma.s.s, smooth, round deltoids and osseous articulations, and perpetually changing planes of flesh and free play of muscular movement, are excellences which, in the best of academic French sculpture, are sensuously delightful in a high degree. But they invariably rivet our attention on the successful way in which the sculptor has used his bronze or marble to decorative ends, and when they are accentuated so as to dominate the idea they invariably enfeeble its expression. With M. Rodin one does not think of his material at all; one does not reflect whether he used it well or ill, caused it to lose weight and immobility to the eye or not, because all his superficial modelling appears as an inevitable deduction from the way in which he has conceived his larger subject, and not as ”handling” at all. In reality, of course, it is the acme of sensitive handling. The point is a nice one. His practice is a dangerous one. It would be fatal to a less strenuous temperament. To leave, in a manner and so far as obvious insistence on it goes, ”handling” to take care of itself, is to incur the peril of careless, clumsy, and even brutal, modelling, which, so far from dissembling its existence behind the prominence of the idea, really emphasizes itself unduly because of its imperfect and undeveloped character. Detail that is neglected really acquires a greater prominence than detail that is carried too far, because it is sensuously disagreeable. But when an artist like M. Rodin conceives his spiritual subject so largely and with so much intensity that mere sensuous agreeableness seems too insignificant to him even to be treated with contempt, he treats his detail solely with reference to its centripetal and organic value, which immediately becomes immensely enhanced, and the detail itself, dropping thus into its proper place, takes on a beauty wholly transcending the ordinary agreeable aspect of sculptural detail.

And the _ensemble_, of course, is in this way enforced as it can be in no other, and we get an idea of Victor Hugo or St. John Baptist so powerfully and yet so subtly suggested, that the abstraction seems actually all that we see in looking at the concrete bust or statue.

Objections to M. Rodin's ”handling” as eccentric or capricious, appear to the sympathetic beholder of one of his majestic works the very acme of misappreciation, and their real excuse--which is, as I have said, the fact that such ”handling” is as unfamiliar as the motives it accompanies--singularly poor and feeble.

As for the common nature of these motives, the character of the personality which appears in their varied presentments, it is almost idle to speak in the absence of the work itself, so eloquent is this at once and so untranslatable. But it may be said approximately that M.

Rodin's temperament is in the first place deeply romantic. Everything the Inst.i.tute likes repels him. He has the poetic conception of art and its mission, and in poetry any authoritative and codifying consensus seems to him paradoxical. Style, in his view, unless it is something wholly uncharacterizable, is a vague and impalpable spirit breathing through the work of some strongly marked individuality, or else it is formalism. He delights in the fantasticality of the Gothic. The west facade of Rouen inspires him more than all the formulae of Palladian proportions. He detests systematization. He reads Shakespeare, Schiller, Dante almost exclusively. He sees visions and dreams dreams. The awful in the natural forces, moral and material, seems his element. He believes in freedom, in the absolute emanc.i.p.ation of every faculty. As for study, study nature. If then you fail in restraint and measure you are a ”mediocre artist,” whom no artificial system devised to secure measure and restraint could have rescued from essential insignificance.

No poet or landscape painter ever delighted more in the infinitely varied suggestiveness and exuberance of nature, or ever felt the formality of much that pa.s.ses for art as more chill and drear. Hence in all his works we have the sense, first of all, of an overmastering sincerity; then of a prodigious wealth of fancy; then of a marvellous acquaintance with his material. His imagination has all the vivacity and tumultuousness of Rubens's, but its images, if not better understood, which would perhaps be impossible, are more compact and their evolution more orderly. And they are furthermore one and all vivified by a wholly remarkable feeling for beauty. In spite of all his knowledge of the external world, no artist of our time is more completely mastered by sentiment. In the very circ.u.mstance of being free from such conventions as the cameo relief, the picturesque costume details, the goldsmith's work characteristic of the Renaissance, now so much in vogue, M. Rodin's things acquire a certain largeness and loftiness as well as simplicity and sincerity of sentiment. The same model posed for the ”Saint Jean”

that posed for a dozen things turned out of the academic studios, but compared with the result in the latter cases, that in the former is even more remarkable for sentiment than for its structural sapience and general physical interest. How perfectly insignificant beside its moral impressiveness are the graceful works whose sentiment does not result from the expression of the form, but is conveyed in some convention of pose, of gesture, of physiognomy! It is like the contrast between a great and a graceful actor. The one interests you by his intelligent mastery of convention, by the tact and taste with which he employs in voice, carriage, facial expression, gesture, diction, the several conventions according to which ideas and emotions are habitually conveyed to your comprehension. Salvini, Coquelin, Got, pa.s.s immediately outside the realm of conventions. Their language, their medium of communication, is as new as what it expresses. They are inventive as well as intelligent. Their effect is prodigiously heightened because in this way, the warp as well as the woof of their art being expressive and original, the artistic result is greatly fortified. Given the same model, M. Rodin's result is in like manner expressly and originally enforced far beyond the result toward which the academic French school employs the labels of the Renaissance as conventionally as its predecessor at the beginning of the century employed those of the antique. ”Formerly we used to do Greek,” says M. Rodin, with no small justice; ”now we do Italian. That is all the difference there is.” And I cannot better conclude this imperfect notice of the work of a great master, in characterizing which such epithets as majestic, Miltonic, grandiose suggest themselves first of all, than by calling attention to the range which it covers, and to the fact that, even into the domain which one would have called consecrate to the imitators of the antique and the Renaissance, M. Rodin's informing sentiment and sense of beauty penetrate with their habitual distinction; and that the little child's head ent.i.tled ”Alsace,” that considerable portion of his work represented by ”The Wave and the Sh.o.r.e,” for example, and a small ideal female figure, which the manufacturer might covet for reproduction, but which, as Bastien-Lepage said to me, is ”a definition of the essence of art,” are really as n.o.ble as his more majestic works are beautiful.

II

Aube is another sculptor of acknowledged eminence who ranges himself with M. Rodin in his opposition to the Inst.i.tute. His figures of ”Bailly” and ”Dante” are very fine, full of a most impressive dignity in the _ensemble_, and marked by the most vigorous kind of modelling. One may easily like his ”Gambetta” less. But for years Rodin's only eminent fellow sculptor was Dalou. Perhaps his protestantism has been less p.r.o.nounced than M. Rodin's. It was certainly long more successful in winning both the connoisseur and the public. The state itself, which is now and then even more conservative than the Inst.i.tute, has charged him with important works, and the Salon has given him its highest medal. And he was thus recognized long before M. Rodin's works had risen out of the turmoil of critical contention to their present envied if not cordially approved eminence. But for being less energetic, less absorbed, less intense than M. Rodin's, M. Dalou's enthusiasm for nature involves a scarcely less uncompromising dislike of convention. He had no success at the ecole des Beaux Arts. Unlike Rodin, he entered those precincts and worked long within them, but never sympathetically or felicitously. The rigor of academic precept was from the first excessively distasteful to his essentially and eminently romantic nature. He chafed incessantly.

The training doubtless stood him in good stead when he found himself driven by hard necessity into commercial sculpture, into that cla.s.s of work which is on a very high plane for its kind in Paris, but for which the manufacturer rather than the designer receives the credit. But he probably felt no grat.i.tude to it for this, persuaded that but for its despotic prevalence there would have been a clearer field for his spontaneous and agreeable effort to win distinction in. He greatly preferred at this time the artistic anarchy of England, whither he betook himself after the Commune--not altogether upon compulsion, but by prudence perhaps; for like Rodin, his birth, his training, his disposition, his ideas, have always been as liberal and popular in politics as in art, and in France a man of any sincerity and dignity of character has profound political convictions, even though his profession be purely aesthetic. In England he was very successful both at the Academy and with the amateurs of the aristocracy, of many of whom he made portraits, besides finding ready purchasers among them for his imaginative works. The list of these latter begins, if we except some delightful decoration for one of the Champs-elysees palaces, with a statue called ”La Brodeuse,” which won for him a medal at the Salon of 1870. Since then his production has been prodigious in view of its originality, of its lack of the powerful momentum extraneously supplied to the productive force that follows convention and keeps in the beaten track.

His numerous peasant subjects at one time led to comparison of him with Millet, but the likeness is of the most superficial kind. There is no spiritual kins.h.i.+p whatever between him and Millet. Dalou models the Marquis de Dreux-Breze with as much zest as he does his ”Boulonnaise allaitant son enfant;” his touch is as sympathetic in his Rubens-like ”Silenus” as in his naturalistic ”Berceuse.” Furthermore, there is absolutely no note of melancholy in his realism--which, at the present time, is a point well worth noting. His vivacity excludes the pathetic.

Traces of Carpeaux's influence are plain in his way of conceiving such subjects as Carpeaux would have handled. No one could have come so closely into contact with that vigorous individuality without in some degree undergoing its impress, without learning to look for the alert and elegant aspects of his model, whatever it might be. But with Carpeaux's distinction Dalou has more poise. He is considerably farther away from the rococo. His ideal is equally to be summarized in the word Life, but he cares more for its essence, so to speak, than for its phenomena, or at all events manages to make it felt rather than seen.

One perceives that humanity interests him on the moral side, that he is interested in its significance as well as its form. Accordingly with him the movement ill.u.s.trates the form, which is in its turn truly expressive, whereas occasionally, so bitter was his disgust with the pedantry of the schools, with Carpeaux the form is used to exhibit movement. Then, too, M. Dalou has a certain n.o.bility which Carpeaux's vivacity is a shade too animated to reach. Motive and treatment blend in a larger sweep. The graver substance follows the planes and lines of a statelier if less brilliant style. It _has_, in a word, more style.

I can find no exacter epithet, on the whole, for Dalou's large distinction, and conscious yet sober freedom, than the word Venetian.

There is some subtle phrenotype that a.s.sociates him with the great colorists. His work is, in fact, full of color, if one may trench on the jargon of the studios. It has the sumptuousness of t.i.tian and Paul Veronese. Its motives are cast in the same ample mould. Many of his figures breathe the same air of high-born ease and well-being, of serene and not too intellectual composure. There is an aristocratic tincture even in his peasants--a kind of native distinction inseparable from his touch. And in his women there is a certain gracious sweetness, a certain exquisite and elusive refinement elsewhere caught only by Tintoretto, but ill.u.s.trated by Tintoretto with such penetrating intensity as to leave perhaps the most nearly indelible impression that the sensitive amateur carries away with him from Venice. The female figures in the colossal group which should have been placed in the Place de la Republique, but was relegated by official stupidity to the Place des Nations, are examples of this patrician charm in carriage, in form, in feature, in expression. They have not the witchery, the touch of Bohemian sprightliness that make such figures as Carpeaux's ”Flora” so enchanting, but they are at once sweeter and more distinguished. The sense for the exquisite which this betrays excludes all dross from M.

Dalou's rich magnificence. Even the ”Silenus” group ill.u.s.trates exuberance without excess: I spoke of it just now as Rubens-like, but it is only because it recalls Rubens's superb strength and riotous fancy; it is in reality a Rubens-like motive purged in the execution of all Flemish grossness. There is even in Dalou's fantasticality of this sort a measure and distinction which temper animation into resemblance to such delicate blitheness as is ill.u.s.trated by the Bargello ”Bacchus” of Jacopo Sansovino. Sansovino afterward, by the way, amid the artificiality of Venice, whither he went, wholly lost his individual force, as M. Dalou, owing to his love of nature, is less likely to do.

But his sketch for a monument to Victor Hugo, and perhaps still more his memorial of Delacroix in the Luxembourg Gardens, point warningly in this direction, and it would perhaps be easier than he supposes to permit his extraordinary decorative facility to lead him on to execute works unpenetrated by personal feeling, and recalling less the acme of the Renaissance than the period just afterward, when original effort had exhausted itself and the movement of art was due mainly to momentum--when, as in France at the present moment, the enormous ma.s.s of artistic production really forced pedantry upon culture, and prevented any but the most strenuous personalities from being genuine, because of the immensely increased authoritativeness of what had become cla.s.sic.

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