Part 18

The production which first brought him the custom of the decadents is a composition which was devised for the gate of Dante’s _Inferno_. He had worked at it for decades. After a few fragments, which were to be seen in 1889 in the Universal Exhibition at Paris, he showed the whole in a plaster model at his private exhibition of 1900. It is inspired unmistakably by Ghiberti’s door of the Baptistery at Florence, but stands in intentional contrast to it. The great Quattrocentist depicts life in Paradise; Rodin’s intention is to show existence in Hell. The framing and articulation of the work, and nearly all its details, were rendered with organic necessity from this starting-point. The door is cut up into panels, which are not divided by stiff, geometrical lines, but, just as in the case of Ghiberti, are at the same time immediately separated, and again indirectly connected into a higher unity, by a feature of the picture itself, _e.g._, a cliff, a man’s figure, a piece of building. In every panel an act from the _Inferno_ is played. The parts, in the majority of cases indicated only in a sketchy way, betray strong, indeed mainly perversely directed, erotic imagination, and the gift of exhibiting human bodies in the movements of passion. Of course, Rodin, too, has not dropped down from heaven, but is the descendant of easily demonstrable spiritual forefathers. This sculpture of violent action, a particular development of French art, and in no way connected with the Laocoon, as one might easily make the mistake of assuming, has its first master in Rude, whose power is revealed most grandly in the “Marseillaise” on the Triumphal Arch at Paris. Rude’s successor and continuer is the incomparable Carpeaux, who, as is most clear from his group “The Dance” at the Grand Opera, in place of the wild heroes of his model and master, substituted wild Bacchantes; who celebrated, instead of self-oblivious joy in sacrifice in the service of rugged duty, self-oblivious intoxication in a debauch of sensuality, but represented a life of excitement no less sublimely and no less ravishingly than the former. Rodin is closely connected with Rude and Carpeaux. With him passion descends a step lower still to the uncivilised and dissolute. Heroic with Rude, voluptuous with Carpeaux, it is Satanic with Rodin. The “Gate of Hell” exhibits rows of naked women in all the situations and occupations of the witches’ Sabbath, when it is most devilish. Fits of hysteria shake and twist these bodies, every motion of which betrays shocking aberration and eager Sadism. The patients of the Salpetrière or the Atlas of Pictures edited in this _clinique_ (_Iconographie de la Salpetrière_) evidently served him for models. And from him, be it incidentally observed, Alexander appears to have drawn his inspirations with the aggravating circumstance that he clothes Rodin’s naked women in rich, modern toilettes, and by this artful means makes them even more obscene. The feminine genius of tragedy in Rude is inspired by Tyrtæan war-songs. Carpeaux’s two female dancers have drunk sparkling wine; Rodin’s demoniac women have swallowed pills of Spanish-fly. Thus it is clear that Rodin must be dear to all wanton schoolboys, impotent debauchees, and incipient spinal sufferers.

If the “Gate of Hell” is an illustration of hystero-epilepsy and feminine Sadism, so, too, is a marble group which he exhibited in 1898 of Masochism. A naked woman with horribly glacial, unmoved features sits leaning against a wall of rock. A man, apparently growing out of the earth, kneels before the merciless image, embraces its knees with despairingly imploring gesture, and presses his head against its body. This is supposed to show man in an ecstasy of desire, subjugated by the sexual power of woman. I can only say that a copy of this group would excellently suit as a frontispiece for an edition of the collected works of Sacher-Masoch. Other smaller groups of Rodin, which he exhibited in the Champs de Mars Salon, hint at other forms of morbid sensuality on which I am reluctant to dwell. They all disclose a sub-soil of corrupted sensuality in the artist’s soul. That secures him influence on natures in harmony with his own. The degenerates who revel with Baudelaire in love of corpses, and with Félicien Rops in highly-spiced lewdness, find the same excitation in Rodin, and they intoxicate themselves with his ecstatic lasciviousness just as with the unnatural or madly exaggerated eroticism of their other fleshly poets and painters.

So much for Rodin’s choice of themes. Now for his technique. One of his singularities is that he loves to astonish people by a crude, external contrast between a block of unworked marble and the most exquisitely finished and sweetly polished sculpture of bodies. He takes a great cube out of all proportion, which he leaves as the labourer hewed it as it came out of the quarry; and he works a little corner of it into a head and body polished with the utmost nicety. In this way, the figure grows out of, or into, the natural stone. Looked at from three sides, a lump of rock or stone is presented to the eye, only on the fourth side the work of art is revealed, blooming, as it were, in the wilderness. We may describe this manner as the sculptural form of mysticism. The association of ideas which Rodin wishes to awaken by this device should make the idea dawn on the consciousness that here, before our eyes, a miracle of creation is being accomplished; that we surprise the very incarnation of the stone; that we are witnesses of the birth of organic form from the stiff, lifeless original matter, and may observe how the figure, still half imprisoned in chaos, struggles painfully forth to a form instinct with life. There are subjects for the representation of which Rodin’s style would have been a happy invention: perhaps the creation of Adam from a clod of earth, or the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, or a Promethean motive. But its uniform employment for all possible subjects—on banal busts or groups which have no reference to creation or genesis—causes the manner to be recognised for what it is, a snatching at effect by means of eccentricity. Of course, this striking and easily imitatable freak has founded a school. No American or Scandinavian who wants to frighten the Philistines with “modernism” neglects to exhibit a piece of, for the most part, wretched sculpture as tiny as possible on a clump of unworked rock as Cyclopean as possible. It cannot be said that the joke is cheap. The unhewn block of marble often represents a pretty stiff value in hard cash, in any case a higher one than the corner that has been chiselled. One can only say that any idiot can succeed in using a ton weight of stone as a support to a figure the size of a man’s hand.

Yet, in conclusion, it is a comparatively harmless folly which a practitioner can remedy with a few strokes of the saw. It is sufficient to cut the sculpture off, and give the rough block to a needy sculptor. Far worse, because it is incurable, is the æsthetic principle to which Rodin pays homage in the technique of his more important works especially. He is, to wit, an Impressionist. A line of motion in an individuality or group interests him. He seizes it, shapes it with convincing truth, with an emphasis exaggerated—certainly purposely—to the point of caricature, and neglects everything that does not serve to illustrate this line of motion. Sculpture, however, is an art which does not allow any Impressionism. It demands, according to its nature, a perfectly accurate formation of the whole figure, and simple honesty in reproducing the phenomenon. This can be proved by a theory of perception. Sculpture fills space and is of three dimensions; it addresses itself, in the first place, certainly to the eye, but also to the sense of touch. It calls for stereoscopic vision, and is, at least in theory, capable of further proof by a second sense. Now just this theoretic possibility of further proof, by means of the sense of touch, has the prohibitive effect, that fancy feels no inclination to supplement the image provided by the sense of sight. In works of painting we add in our mind much which is not optically given in the picture. In plastic works we have not this psychical habit, because a testing with the hands is opposed to the free, inventive power of the imagination, and makes us at once recognise what has been given in space, and what has been added by our imagination. On this ground, there is no place in sculpture for intentions or hints. That is enough for a rough plan, but not for the finished work. Rodin, however, stops at a stage of completion, which may, at best, pass for a promise, but never, in any case, for an achievement. He deliberately breaks up the frame of artistic form. He would fain work with the habits of the painter’s eye and the painter’s hand, and he applies this treatment to the statute, standing free and exposed to examination from all sides.

The confused lines which represent the draughtsman’s first sketch (_ébauche_) have their special charm and meaning on the surface to be painted. If, however, you translate them into three dimensions, if every careless movement of the artist’s hand, either still feeling its way or hurrying on, is finally fixed in clay or bronze, something inadmissible results, which has no right to proclaim itself a work of art.

Such a seeking after the right expression, such a stammering in metal is Rodin’s monument at Calais, which represents the burgesses of Calais with the rope round their necks, standing before Edward III., who had successfully besieged that city, and asking for mercy. The crushed spirit which Rodin tried to express is actually visible in the group; but the figures which express this emotion are formless from head to foot. The limbs are rugged boughs; the bodies violate the laws of anatomy; the whole group is on the stage of technical perfection reached by the idols hewn from wood by the South Sea Islanders, and is far inferior to many a pre-historic picture on mammoth’s teeth and stag’s horn, which may be seen, for instance, in the Museum of St Germain. Rodin’s domestic trumpeters promptly proclaimed this for a work of lofty genius. The Corporation of the town of Calais, who had ordered it, dared not reject it. The decadents’ reign of terror—it was in the year 1895—was then in all its fury. The whole Paris Press was in the power of the dictators of the Chat Noir, and the poor Calais burgesses, clever men of business, but very uncertain in questions of art, feared to be jeered at as wise men of Gotham, if they rebelled against the æsthetic edicts of the tyrants of Paris criticism. But they blush for shame and anger whenever they pass by the memorial, and now, when the reign of terror of decadent criticism is over, it will probably not be long before the Calais people pluck up courage enough to have Rodin’s bronze abomination carted off from the public square, and withdrawn, in a store-room in the Town Hall, from the scornful eyes of strangers.

A counterpart of the Calais group is the design for the Victor Hugo Memorial, which was for the first time exhibited in 1897, and again five years later, when it was somewhat further advanced. This design also showed nothing but intentions. The poet is sitting naked by the seashore. The last shallow wave washes gently up to his feet. Two female tutelary figures—perhaps History and Legend, or Poetry and Philosophy—are flying to him horizontally at the level of his head and whispering secrets in his ear. As a mere intention, the composition might be allowed to pass; but nothing of execution, practically, was yet to be seen. Victor Hugo’s body was not modelled; the flying female figures could not be distinguished, either from a distance or on close inspection, from cloud packs, or the fantastic animal figures of Gothic gargoyles. Nevertheless, Rodin disarmed intelligent criticism by declaring that the work was a mere sketch. Of course, he could no longer be fairly reproached with its shapelessness, and people had to content themselves with waiting for its completion, which has not come to pass up to now.

Rodin has overstepped, in his Balzac Memorial, which he first exhibited in 1898, the very extensive limits within which his silly aberrations might have been borne. Master Shallow, who tolerates much, could not tolerate this work, and broke down under its crushing exaction. When the public saw this provocative monstrosity, it broke out into that uncontrollable laughter, whereby the outraged intelligence of mankind revenges itself with primitive force for restraints that it has long suffered in silence. In the face of this result, the Committee of the French Union of Authors, which had commissioned the Balzac Memorial, resolved unanimously to decline it. In vain the Condottieri, who had usurped supremacy in art criticism by the most unscrupulous methods of conspiracy, violence, and oppression, made desperate efforts to maintain themselves. They were powerless against the armed rising of sensible people who had at last come to themselves. Their tyranny was vanquished, and they were swept away. They might still talk all sorts of twaddle about the stupidity of the masses, and, in impotent rage, hiss at the victors the well-known shibboleths, “Philistine,” “provincial,” etc., but this final, faint-hearted nagging sank unheard in the unanimous cry of scorn from public opinion.

Rodin has represented Balzac as, jumping out of bed in the morning, he wraps himself unclad in his monk-like dressing-gown, without even putting his arms in the sleeves, irresistibly impelled to hurry to his writing-table in order to fix the thoughts of which his creative brain is full to bursting. Agreed: that, again, is the intention which Rodin might, perhaps, have secretly put into the figure. What the eye really sees is a sort of tree-trunk, hewn in the roughest manner by a woodman with an axe, which is surmounted by a hideously swollen tadpole head on a goitred neck. Malicious Parisian wit has exhausted all the droll comparisons that this monstrosity can suggest to flouting humour. People have called Rodin’s work a meal-sack, a carved potato, a snowman made by a cheeky schoolboy, an unpacked statue, a stalactite, etc. The work is all that, for it is nothing at all; but it is pre-eminently the conclusive refutation of Rodin’s æsthetics. For it is the highest expression, and, on that account, the unintentional parody, of his impressionist technique and of his third mistake, viz., ignorance of the limitations of his art.

Rodin worked at this wretched piece of work for ten whole years. First he read all Balzac’s works; then he made a journey to Touraine and spent months there, so as to absorb the human environment from which Balzac took so many of his models, and to become permeated with the feelings and impressions with which Balzac may have satiated himself when composing—all this to make a human figure which was to be the likeness of a man whom many people now living have known in the flesh. After these preliminary studies, Rodin finally proceeded to form his Balzac. His head was to be “a synthesis of his works,” his physiognomy was to be summed up “in an eye that looks on the _Comédie humaine_ and in an upper lip that is curled in contempt for humanity.” So said Rodin himself in several interviews which were published at the time when his statue was exhibited. He was then merely repeating what the twaddlers of Montmartre had chattered to him. It would be easy to make jests about this inflammation of the brain, but it is not worth even cheap raillery. It is quite enough to establish, soberly and drily, that Rodin, like a child or an idiot, aimed at something impossible. Sculpture cannot furnish any “synthesis of Balzac’s works.” Nature herself cannot, in the sense that Balzac himself, when he was alive, did not synthetise his works, in his externals, in his physiognomy. He had perhaps the head of a man of mark, but there was assuredly nothing in his face to show that he had written the “Physiology of Marriage,” and not written “La Chartreuse de Parme” (Stendhal). Rodin imagined that a portrait-statue could quite alone, merely by its own means, supply the place of a biography and a psychological and literary characterisation of the person represented. This patent lunacy was necessarily bound to end, as it has ended, in a mad caricature.

“The Thinker,” a colossal statue which was exhibited in 1904, is almost as bad an aberration as Balzac. It is a gigantic enlargement of a little sketch that one saw many years ago over Rodin’s “Gate of Dante’s Hell,” in the confused and scarcely indicated unborn _foetus_ lines of which confident devotion might imagine all possible promises of future splendour.

The promises are realised in “The Thinker.” He who still wishes to shudder with foreboding in the presence of the finished work will be at liberty to do so. It will be the same sort of man who grew enthusiastic over the “Balzac,” before which every criticism of intelligent—not “intellectual”—men dissolved into unextinguishable laughter. “The Thinker” is brother of the “Balzac,” only it is not so comic, for it is not dressed in a meal-sack, but is naked, and the bared human body, when misshapen, excites in a spectator of unvitiated taste, not cheerfulness, but discomfort, which may even rise to loathing.

“The Thinker” is not only naked, but also flayed. Its anatomy is executed with obtrusive importance, without the covering epidermis with its vital warmth. The enormous exaggeration of the muscles, the impossible assertion of strength which is expressed by the extreme contraction of all the muscles, therefore also of the counteracting muscles, are well-known features of sculpture in its worst period of decline. There is still, however, a distinction between Rodin and the _rococo_ sculptors, who confused fleshy tumours over the whole surface of the bodies of their statues with the power of portraying artistically. At any rate, the latter had a correct knowledge of myology, or the subject of the muscles, whereas Rodin’s anatomy is shockingly inaccurate. I really do not think much of Lorenzo Matthielly’s groups at the Vienna Hofburg-gates; but in the face of Rodin’s monstrosity I apologise in my heart for all the objections I have ever made against them. At any rate, with Matthielly every muscle occupies its proper place. Rodin, however, invents muscles which do not exist, and never did exist. Two mighty ridges, ending below in sausage-tips, run down the “Thinker’s” back, which are perhaps intended for the two _longissimi dorsi_; in this case, however, they are howling blunders as regards their attachment, their whole course, and their form. The muscles of the forehead and temples are treated quite as arbitrarily as those of the back. Where nature only recognises thin cutaneous muscles and ligatures, there Rodin puts bumps which remind one of blood tumours after blows from a club, and impart to the face the appearance of evil _Verschlagenheit_; not, as Fritz Reuter says, in the sense of craftiness, but in that of receiving a sound cudgeling. As a record “The Thinker” stands on the same level as the anatomical plates in Japanese manuals of the healing art of the time of the Shoguns.

This, however, is not yet the worst; the intellectual element fares even worse than the bodily one with this oaf who calls himself so pretentiously “The Thinker.” The flayed man sits crouching, with a distinctly crooked hump, on a sharp-edged block of stone. His toes claw convulsively into the ground. He holds a clenched fist before his mouth, and seems to bite it fiercely. His bestial countenance, with its bloated, contracted forehead, gazes as threateningly dark as midnight. He who has to interpret the figure without the help of a title will, from a back view, conclude it is some one writhing in agony on the rack; and from a front view, a criminal meditating over some foul deed. Its mien and bearing would suggest a designation such as “The Fallen Titan,” “Lucifer’s Rebellion,” or “Cain before he murdered his Brother.” The last thing which one would think of would be to look for a mind working behind this bulgy forehead, or to imagine that thought was supreme in this body seized by a spasm of rigidity in all its muscles. The name given by Rodin to this wretched performance sounds like a scoff or a calumny, and it might be thought the misled artist, robbed by his fanatics of all self-criticism, had intended to make a malicious parody of Michael Angelo’s _Pensieroso_.

Rodin himself, by his portrait busts, makes it possible to gauge the whole insincerity of his pose as a profound thinker, and his genius-playing arrogance; for instance, by that of Octave Mirbeau, and, still more easily, by a female bust which was exhibited at the same time as “The Thinker” monstrosity. With the exception of the folly, which is, moreover, not too obtrusive, that a piece of the rough block was allowed to remain on both shoulders, there was not the faintest feature in the bust that could differentiate it from a severely classical, coldly correct work. Here he had to satisfy a lady client, and he was irreproachably smooth, executed all the details lovingly, and produced a soft, delicate flesh, to which the elegant Injalbert might sign his name. If one were desirous of making an objection to this pleasant bust, it would, at worst, be that it is too sweet. He becomes the destroyer of all form, the bungling sham-Titan, the inscrutable philosopher, dramatist, and lyric poet, whose eye rolls in a fine frenzy, and who, in the throes of his fever to create, confines himself to hurried indications—he becomes all this only when he works for his bodyguard of sympathetic sensitivism.

How future generations will laugh over all this buffoonery of “nerve art”! Only, indeed, when it comes to know the comments of contemporary “intellectuals” in addition to the artists’ silly bungling. For the former will show them in a way to excite sympathy and amusement what devastation the deafening babble of a band of gossips, dreadfully ignorant of art and innocent of any feeling for beauty, could produce in the taste and thought of a large majority, which honestly yearns after æsthetic education, but, on account of a lack of trustworthy traditions and adequate instruction in art, has not sufficient self-confidence to set up the promptings, however obscure, of their own feeling against the impudent dictates of presumptuous arbiters of taste.