Part 5 (2/2)

Candor and intelligence will suffice to appreciate that the secret of M

Rodin's art is structural expression, and that it is this and not any superficial eccentricity of execution that definitely distinguishes hiination, his tey and ardor individualize the positive originality of his motive, so the expressiveness of his treatment sets him aside from all as well as from each of the Institute sculptors in what may be broadly called technical attitude No sculptor has ever carried expression further The sculpture of the present day has certainly not occupied itself much with it The Institute is perhaps a little afraid of it It abhors the _baroque_ rightly enough, but very likely it fails to see that the expression of such sculpture as M Rodin's no iants than it does the composure of M Delaplanche The _baroque_ is only violent instead of placid commonplace, and is as conventional as any professor of sculpture could desire Expression means individual character coested It is certainly not too much to say that in the sculpture of the present day the sense of individual character is conveyed noesture of the foresture, form are, when they are not brutally naturalistic and so not art at all, not individual and native, but typical and classic Very ht really have been treated like those antique figurines of which the bodies weresupplied with individual heads when the ti them

This has been measurably true since the disappearance of the classic dress and the concealment of the body by modern costu 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 draell as the conteure 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 ht of in the new interest, not to reappear till the Venetians But owing to the lack of visible nudity, to the lack of the classic gye of and interest in the foreneral 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 anato 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 attitude, for he was eminently of his time, but in his attitude toward nature--the human form in art has for the most part remained, not conventionalized as in the Byzantine and Gothic tielo hiht of his enius to perpetuate the conventional It is not his distortion of nature, as pre-Raphaelite liious potentialities, that marks one side of his colossal accomplishment Just as the lover of architecture as architecture will protest that Michael Angelo's was , so M Rodin declares his sculpture unsatisfactory, however poetically is,” 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 hi 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 whoelo's creations appear celestial in their ness would deny this But it is worth citing both because M Rodin strikes so elo, whereas he is so radically removed from him in point of view and in practice that the unquestionable spiritual analogy between the in different arts, and because, also, it shows not only what M Rodin is not, but what he is The grandiose does not run aith hi 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 for before the Medicean tonant, 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 sentireat Florentine's work it is so overwhel 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--froination he is, of course, as totally removed as what is intensely modern must be from the antique--any elo, except for the purposes of clearer understanding of his general aesthetic attitude association of anything contereatest in the classic, is always a perilous proceeding Very little time is apt to play havoc with such classification I elo, found by so many persons in such works as the Dante doors, is only of the loosest kind--as one h their coranates--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 illustration of M Rodin's affinity with the antique is an incident which he related to e d'Airain” He was in Naples; he saw nature in freer inadvertence than she allows elsewhere; he had the best ofcircu of his statue; ”which is equivalent to saying that I had at last absolutely mastered it,” said he One day in the Museo nazionale 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 h 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 ets farther and farther away froer from conventionality than froh Renaissance, the long line of conventionalities being continued, sometimes punctuated here and there as by Clodion or Houdon, David, Rude, or Barye, sonity and refineence, as in the conteeneral 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” froenre_ 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 sentie adhts the simple admirers of German or Italian treather 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 wholected 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 e of convention, which since the time of the Siennese fountain, at all events, has been classical

The literary artist does not proceed in this way He does not content hi us, for exaood man or a bad man, an able, a selfish, a tall, a blonde, or a stupid man, as the case may be He takes everyto M Taine's definition of a work of art, nizes its complexity and enforces the sense of reality by a thousand expedients of what oneplanes He distinguishes every possible detail that plays any structural part, and, in short, instead of giving us the mere syanised with this strictness, which in literary art is elementary, how much of the best modern sculpture is abstract, syments most of the really eminent Institute 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 _enseuess at it? Would anything surviveinterest 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 huure has never been so well understood Back of such expressiveas we note in the ”Saint Jean,” in the ”Adaures of the Dante doors, is a knowledge of anatoery can proceed only from an immense fondness for nature, an insatiable curiosity as to her secrets, an inexhaustible delight in her e and such handling of it, it is no wonder that the representations of nature which issue from the Institute seem superficial One can understand that frohtful sculpture, very refined, very graceful, very perfectly understood within its liold-beater's skin, that is to say, of which toy animals are ot_ as the figure for whatever lacks structure and substance

Ask M Rodin the explanation of a movement, an attitude, in one of his works which strikes your convention-steeped sense as strange, and he will account for it just as an anato out its necessary derivation froure, 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 forreeable to the easily satisfied eye But then the whole will look anatomical rather than artistic There is the point exactly Will it? I re about this in conversation with M Rodin hi too fond of nature, of dissecting with so much enthusias for pure beauty, of losing the artistic in the purely scientific interest, of beco, ofthe artificial?” I had so myself understood; this perpetual see-saw of nature and art which enshrouds aesthetic dialectics as in a Scotch inative mind But I shall always remember his reply, when he finally s 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 Institute to assert that he obtrudes his anatoence to his iinative power, to his poetic ”possession” His work precisely illustrates 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 assuredly were those relations in the ests their cardinal relations Insufficient study of her leaves these superficial and insipid Inartistic absorption in her leaves theination 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 riffins and Roy, 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 theher conificance, 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 WeM

Rodin to admit it He would not do his oork so ere he prepared to; as Millet pointed out when asked to write a criticis the production of his fellows an artist is inevitably handicapped by the feeling that he would have done it very differently hiloomy vaticinations as to French sculpture based on the continued triumph of the Institute style and suavity The Institute sculpture is too good for anyone not hi ilect of its defects At the sa survive in undior that does not fro itself in the influences of nature And so M Rodin's service to French sculpture beconal 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 shi+ning example of the return to nature on the part not of a mere realist, naturalist, or other variety of ”inative tempera his works, Rodin's treat every contributary detail to the end of complete expression, is never pery 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 , for example--not to copy, but to ”possess” it Indeed, no sculptor of our tieneral, 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 nificance is so over it, but because there are none of those superficial graces, those felicities of surface ht, infallibly distract as well Such excellences have assuredly their place When the motive is conventional or otherwise insipid, or even when its character is distinctly light without being trivial, they are legitireeable And because, in our day, sculptural enerally 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 mass, 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 acaderee 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 superficialappears as an inevitable deduction froer subject, and not as ”handling” at all In reality, of course, it is the ac 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 ” to take care of itself, is to incur the peril of careless, clu, which, so far fro its existence behind the prominence of the idea, really emphasizes itself unduly because of its ilected 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 reeableness seenificant to him even to be treated with contempt, he treats his detail solely with reference to its centripetal and organic value, which immediately beco 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 see 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 unfaularly 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 te the Institute likes repels him He has the poetic conception of art and itsconsensus seems to hi wholly uncharacterizable, is a vague and ily hts 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 emancipation 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 nificance

No poet or landscape painter ever delighted estiveness and exuberance of nature, or ever felt the formality of much that passes for art as more chill and drear Hence in all his works we have the sense, first of all, of an overious wealth of fancy; then of a ination has all the vivacity and tues, if not better understood, which would perhaps be impossible, are more compact and their evolution more orderly And they are further for beauty In spite of all his knowledge of the external world, no artist of our time is more completelyfree from such conventions as the caoldsmith's work characteristic of the Renaissance, now so eness 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 reeneral physical interest How perfectly insignificant beside its raceful works whose sentiment does not result from the expression of the foresture, of physiognoraceful actor The one interests you by his intelligent mastery of convention, by the tact and taste hich he eesture, diction, the several conventions according to which ideas and emotions are habitually conveyed to your comprehension Salvini, Coquelin, Got, pass ie, their medium of communication, is as nehat 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 inally enforced far beyond the result tohich 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; ”noe do Italian That is all the difference there is” And I cannot better conclude this ireatwhich such epithets as est thee 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 infor sentiment and sense of beauty penetrate with their habitual distinction; and that the little child's head entitled ”Alsace,” that considerable portion of his work represented by ”The Wave and the Shore,” for exaure, which the ht covet for reproduction, but which, as Bastien-Lepage said to me, is ”a definition of the essence of art,” are really as noble as his more majestic works are beautiful

II

Aube is another sculptor of acknowledged ees himself with M Rodin in his opposition to the Institute His figures of ”Bailly” and ”Dante” are very fine, full of a nity in the _ense One may easily like his ”Gambetta” less But for years Rodin's only eminent fellow sculptor was Dalou Perhaps his protestantism has been less pronounced than M Rodin's It was certainly longboth the connoisseur and the public The state itself, which is now and then even ed hihestbefore M Rodin's works had risen out of the turmoil of critical contention to their present envied if not cordially approved eetic, less absorbed, less intense than M Rodin's, M Dalou's enthusias dislike of convention He had no success at the ecole des Beaux Arts Unlike Rodin, he entered those precincts and worked long within theor of academic precept was from the first excessively distasteful to his essentially and eminently ro doubtless stood hiood stead when he found himself driven by hard necessity into commercial sculpture, into that class of hich is on a very high plane for its kind in Paris, but for which the ner receives the credit But he probably felt no gratitude 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 tiland, whither he betook hiether 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 nity 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, ofready purchasers ainative works The list of these latter begins, if we except sohtful 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 kinshi+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 realis 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 coorous individuality without in so to look for the alert and elegant aspects of his ht 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 phenoes to make it felt rather than seen

One perceives that humanity interests hinificance as well as its forly with him the movement illustrates 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 nobility which Carpeaux's vivacity is a shade too anier 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 soreat colorists His work is, in fact, full of color, if one on of the studios It has the sumptuousness of titian and Paul Veronese Its ures breathe the sa, of serene and not too intellectual composure There is an aristocratic tincture even in his peasants--a kind of native distinction inseparable froracious sweetness, a certain exquisite and elusive refineht only by Tintoretto, but illustrated by Tintoretto with such penetrating intensity as to leave perhaps the most nearly indelible impression that the sensitive aures 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 exae, in form, in feature, in expression They have not the witchery, the touch of Boheures as Carpeaux's ”Flora” so enchanting, but they are at once sweeter and uished The sense for the exquisite which this betrays excludes all dross froroup illustrates 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 rossness 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 illustrated 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 o, and perhaps stillGardens, point warningly in this direction, and it would perhaps be easier than he supposes to permit his extraordinary decorative facility to lead hi, 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 mass of artistic production really forced pedantry upon culture, and prevented any but the enuine, because of the immensely increased authoritativeness of what had become classic