JEAN CHARLES CAZIN

“L’HIVER”(Salon d’Arrivée, Hôtel de Ville, Paris)

“L’HIVER”

(Salon d’Arrivée, Hôtel de Ville, Paris)

In the meantime he had found his subject; as for the question of the ridiculous price offered him, he did not even refer to it.

His production was enormous, his energy untiring. After months of labour he would go to the seaside, and give himself up to rest and indolence. “In these times I am in despair,” he said, “and feel as though I should never work again. Delightful as is this repose, it is to the days of labour that I look back with the greatest pleasure. It seems as though my power were gone for ever.” This he wrote from Dieppe, where he was digging shrimps in the sand like a boy. He began his studies for the career of an artist late. What other men accomplished and put by he saw fulfilled in his own day. And because of his unusual vigour and fecund power of production he realised in mature years what to others are the dreams of youth. It is this juvenance carried into ripe age that gives a virginal freshness to his painting. His fresco in the Boston Library, as well as the work upon which he was engaged at the time of his death—“The Old Age of Ste. Geneviève,” a new series for the Panthéon—far from suggesting declining power, possess the fresh bloom by which only the young spirit can make beautiful itscreations. The painter had reached an apotheosis of power. He had been the product of a country whose times are strange and complex. His land, his race, its blood and tradition generated his genius, and he leaves to it in turn his glory, and the stirring example of his life, at the time of his country’s need, it may be well said; and the relics of his beautiful art will remain, when political crusade, when exaggerated types and schools are past and forgotten.

Inthe month of March 1901, the French painter Jean Charles Cazin died at Lavandou, a little nook in Southern France on the borders of the Mediterranean. He was in the plenitude of his talent, in the rich and mellow prime of his life. He had gone to Lavandou on one of his frequent voyages in search of change and refreshment; he died there alone.

It is an ancient prayer—“Lord, may I die in my bed,” but rather an original idea to seek to pass out of life in the very bed where one was born! This, however, was Cazin’s dream. He had carefully preserved every beloved detail in the home of his childhood and youth in Samer (Pas-de-Calais); thither he planned to return and pass his last days. He longed to inhabit again his boyhood’s room; to go forth for ever surrounded by all that had welcomed him into a world he was to leave richer for his existence. Fate disposed otherwise.

He was born in 1846, near Samer, a little town in the neighbourhood of Boulogne. His parents were well-to-do, his father a doctor of some renown. Cazin attended the college at Boulogne, and received later his baccalaureate at Lille.

In order to facilitate his artistic studies his parents sent him to Paris, where he joined the art class of the beloved Boiscaudron. This teacher’s influence on his pupils has been enormous. It must be remembered that he also instructed Rodin and Lhermitte. The tuition was free in the little class near the École de Médecine, and this studio made hot war against the more conservative Beaux-Arts.

Cazin never seems to have considered his student days at an end. He was perpetually learning; for ever pursuing his art as an inexhaustible classic; seeking to discover and develop new technique; to test to the uttermost his capacity. Later in life, when long past the student age, he studied in Antwerp, and his fine figure, with noble head on which the hair was already turning grey, was constantly seen in the museums, where he wandered—enjoying the masterpieces he admired and understood.

He married, early, a woman who shared his artistic

THE WINDMILL

tastes, and who herself has added to modern art. He exhibited his first pictures in the salon of ’65-66, and was also among those men who were in later years proscribed by the jury, and with his colleagues reaped the singular benefit of popularity because of adverse criticism, and became a founder of the new salon, known as the Champ de Mars. He had apparently no feverish desire to rush before the public, to present creations of his youth for criticism. Possessed of that rare patience which can wait for fame, he did not choose to force a future, and put off rather than sought a definite introduction to the world.

Meanwhile he matured his work, labouring at his canvases during that fruitful period when hope is most sanguine and talent freshest; he himself was only timidly appreciative of the work done in the interval between his appearance in the salon of 1876 and that of 1887.

In 1887, a space of more than ten years from his début, he exhibited “Le Chantier,” and from this time, with slight interruptions, down to the date of his death, his abundant work never ceased to delight the public, which accorded to Cazin the unusual mark of instantaneous favour. His work has been seen constantly inEngland; it is very popular in Holland, on the Continent everywhere, and he has enjoyed a marked success in America.

Later followed “La Fuite en Egypte” (1877), “Le Voyage de Tobie” (1878), “Le Départ” (1879), “Ismaël” (first medal, 1880), “Tobie” (1880), “Souvenir de Fate” (1881), “Judith,” “Agar and Ismaël” (1883).

Then followed an interval when the public looked in vain for Cazin’s name amongst exhibitors. Modern life failed to inoculate this meditative artist with the fatal haste, the febrile, nervous desire to do everything in a moment. Nothing disturbed his habits of study and the slow working out of his ideas. He retired again from public notice to mature his conceptions before showing them. Art and art alone took Cazin hither and thither on his frequent capricious voyages.

It was as though, suddenly, in a dream, some landscape beckoned him—an Italian evening or a moonlit dyke it might be summoned him; for with little warning he was in Paris to-day, in Tuscany to-morrow. Fortunately he had a family who not only understood his brusque departures, but who enjoyed the journeys

A PICARDY VILLAGE

as well as did the master himself. He was in every land a student; in the Pays Bas he was an ardent painter, in Italy a constant visitor at the galleries and museums, in England a potter. The art of ceramics always strongly interested him, and he has proved himself a clever exponent of it.

For a Frenchman he travelled widely, making many trips to Holland and Flanders, Italy and England. He was keenly appreciative of the art with which these countries teemed, and studied with benefit to his own methods the Flemish and Dutch masters as seen in the Pays Bas—his imagination impressed by the sober stretches of Netherland landscapes, by the velvet seductiveness of Italian hillsides and golden towns, and the misty loveliness of English country. Of Holland he has left us numerous admirable studies, etchings, pictures—the mills and the flat meadows, melancholy dyke lines, scenes on the Zuyder Zee and in Amsterdam. All these are familiar and delightful to his admirers. Possibly he has produced no more perfect piece of work than the picture called “Moonlight on the Zuyder Zee.”

Holland, so long a school and educator and inspirer of landscape painters, has found no modern more quickto represent her country or more appreciative of its native art than Cazin. There is in his work a suggestion of the spirit of the masters of Holland and Flanders far away and removed as he is by his mysticism and the ephemeral handling of colour from the frank colourists of the Dutch School. There is the minute attention to detail, the clever value given to scheme, the massing of much in small compass, the master art of concentrating on the important point. When the painting is analysed the critic discovers that every detail is scrupulously studied.

Italy inflamed him with a love for symbolic subjects. The spirituality of the old masters was an evident inspiration to him. But, in considering Cazin, while interested to trace the different elements he found sympathetic and appealing, one fails to discover anything to detract from Cazin’s own absolute originality.

England, eminentlyconnoisseurof landscape painting, has seen fit to approve Cazin. His exhibition in London was received with the most flattering appreciation. England knew Cazin for one of those foreigners who had adopted London as a dwelling-place, and who was in sympathetic touch with the English people.

THE DEATH CHAMBER OF GAMBETTA

There exists therefore for him a feeling of personal friendship.

He came with his family to England in 1871, and remained there for three years. His original project was to form a school of art of which he should be master. This plan failing, he went instead to Fulham, where he personally directed the management of a pottery, and was thus enabled to carry out his desire to experiment in this plastic art. In this he was successful. His exhibition in 1882 at the Central Union placed him amongst the first masters in modern ceramics, and after his artistic display of clays, France gave him a decoration. There is a case of Cazin’s pottery in the Luxembourg Museum.

He was received at first with a certain wonder. His drawing, intensely delicate, was forceful and striking because of its frank ingenuousness, its primitive simplicity. In his colouring harmonious and extraordinary tones ineffably soft, lights and shades indefinitely blended until at first the picture appeared through a haze, whilst under the eyes it slowly took form out of the mist; lines disengaged themselves, shapes grew distinct, and the perfect little picture fully declared itself. A good example of this is “Nuit d’Etè” (Seine et Marne).

It will be readily understood that this novel technique, at the time of its appearance, did not pass unchallenged. It was evidently a manner, an eccentricity—a trick of colour, a playing with the public vision! Many endeavoured to understand and reproduce the “Cazin effects.” How was it done? And it was bruited by the baffled that M. Cazin painted behind locked doors! The sorcery of the master was not to be discovered, nor was there an élite who, behind the curtain out of gaping sight, learned the power that created “Moonlight on the Zuyder Zee.”

Will amateurs learn one day that rules of rhetoric cannot teach the scribbler how to write a lyric?—that the atelier cannot impart the sign to make brush and palette create that which is none other than theindividualityof the painter? Cazin’s tender, mysterious treatment, Corot’s profound tranquillity, Turner’s golden flame, the genius of the masters,aretheir technique.

Cazin knew nothing of the common struggle of those artists who are obliged to ingratiate themselves into the public favour. He was accepted at once, and soon beloved—an uncommon biography. And his agreeable relations with the public, the atmosphere of

MOONLIGHT

welcome and liking with which his work was met, his own family relations (of the most happy and genial kind), all is evident in his art. His pictures are full of the influence of the repose—“la douceur infinie qui répand les âmes qui sont en paix.”

Cazin possessed a strongly developed decorative sense. His contemporaries appreciated it when they gave him the supervision of the hanging of pictures at the different exhibitions and made him conservateur of the Musée du Luxembourg itself. This special sense is evident in his work, as, for example, the grouping in “L’Ours et l’Amateur des Jardins,” “La Parole de Socrate,” in the drawings and studies for his various pictures, designs which in many instances strongly suggest fresco and are Italian in theirgenre.

Until 1888 his subjects had been chiefly symbolic, chosen from Biblical scenes; figures predominated in these canvases. After this period the character of his work changed, and he devoted himself to landscape painting, and as a landscapist he will pass down to fame. For Cazin chose to surround his conception of figure-painting with the very acme of his art; with the fruit of years of patience, the mystery of labour and all that his poetic soul knew of the seasons and ofchanging nights and days. For even in the most important canvases, where figures fill the foreground, the value of the paintings is in their backgrounds and surroundings.

Take, for example, “Agar and Ismaël in the Desert.” In the picture the eye leaves the group of desolate mother and child for the country’s desolation, the arid sand world, dangerous, sinister—the parching sky, the pitiful scrub growth. The thought of the narrative is lost in Cazin’s delineation of the landscape, in the atmosphere and painting of the picture, and in its subtle composition.

As a rule, for the human drama the scene is the setting, whereas with Cazin humanityillustratesthe text of his creation. His landscapes, his fields, meadows, dunes, deserts, are the picture, and the figures become subordinate, suggestive, taking their character from the character of the soil and country.

The streets of the rustic villages have spoken to Cazin, and told him their secrets at evening time. His studies of the little town near his native village are especially lovely. These French parishes have whispered their mysteries, as twilight, slipping from gold to grey, steals down the twisting lanes. Cazin has caught

THE VILLAGE STREET

the sadness of the country, its monotonous desolation, as well as its repose. The pictures in themselves are almost narrative; the wide slopes of bare meadow after harvesting, the sombre note of little pine-clusters on a sandy hill, and the melancholy of the dyke lands, his own country has spoken to him as a mother to a son who understood and who will interpret her well. See the “Ruisseau en Picardie,” “Lac en Picardie,” “Route près d’Equihen,” “Moonlight at Equihen.” It is into these sympathetic surroundings that he introduced the studies he cared to make of human life, Biblical subjects and a few classic themes. These are not anachronisms, strictly speaking, but show a modern spirit, which places his conception of Christ amongst men and women of to-day, as Rembrandt placed his religious pictures in the land of his birth, which makes the divine legend suddenly appear in the centre of the Norman wheat-field, or sends Mary and Joseph with the Holy Child by moonlight from a little provincial farm in Picardy. Tobias by a French riverside walks with a celestial visitor. Judith is a woman of the people, and nothing but the essence of tradition may be read in Cazin’s popularising of Bible story, in his introduction of Hebraic legend to the scenes and actorsof humble, everyday peasant life. His painting of “Judith” was originally intended for the Gobelin manufactories.

Despite the fact that his mind was full of his historic and epic legend, and that dramatic subjects constantly presented themselves to his attention as schemes for pictures, his trend towards landscape was too strong, and it is extremely interesting to observe this impassioned hero-worshipper carried toward his dreamy, peaceful current which became his inevitable course. As the painter of lovely landscapes, Cazin is known chiefly as the portrayer of moon-setting and falling rain on a far, unknown country side.

Some one has said, “Turn a hundred painters loose in France before their respective bents have been decided—and ninety-nine will be landscape painters.”

So paintable is the French country, so seductive to the senses and imagination, that the land germinates and brings forth the very finest fruit of open-air painting: witness Troyon, Daubigny, Corot, Lorrain, Poussin, Puvis de Chavannes, Cazin.

Cazin had a magnificent head. His eyes were blue, his features finely chiselled and strong. His manners were most charming, and he was widely beloved.

THE HOLY FAMILY

Properly speaking, no school perishes with the death of Cazin, although, strangely enough, no master displayed greater avidity to inculcate principles of art. Despite his pedagogic passion Cazin leaves behind him no disciples who menace his fame. His art was too personal and varied to permit of a school’s foundation.

THE END OF THE VILLAGE

His pictures have been purchased widely on theContinent and in England and America. Time and space do not permit a catalogue of the canvases which have appeared in public and private collections. When Cazin died he was at work on two pictures destined for the State. They are symbolic subjects, and were intended for the walls of the Sorbonne. They go by the titles of “L’Ours et l’Amateur de Jardins,” and “La Maison de Socrate.”

In the Luxembourg Museum are to be seen several good examples of Cazin’s work: “Agar et Ismaël,” “La Chambre de Gambetta,” a tragic representation of the room in which Gambetta died, two landscapes, a case of pottery, and a bust in bronze.

Mrs. Potter Palmer of Chicago possesses the “Judith”; “Tobie” is in the gallery at Lille; “La Journée Faite” in the Lyons Museum; “Souvenir de Fête” in the Museum of the City of Paris; “Le Chantier” belongs to Monsieur May.

Alexander Harrison, the American painter, said, in speaking of Cazin: “He is a striking contrast toCourbet, for example, whose manner of painting is insistent; whereas Cazin conceals, rather than displays, his technique. His qualities are subtle and elusive. He avoids realistic brutality; his delicacy is a semi-fastidiousness in contrast to the almostférocerealism of Courbet, and the robust Troyon.

“His attitude towards his ideal is reserved, caressing. Suavity, a certain suggestion of concealment distinguish his work. Sometimes the unvaried tone is monotony.

“His subjects were not chosen from the great solitudes; and although figures are often absent from his canvases, the pictures always suggest the human element and are full of associations.

“His townsfolk in the Norman village where he lived seldom saw Cazin at work during daylight; but belated fishermen, returning in the small hours of late night, would find him wandering along-shore, or pondering as he paced the high sand-dunes.

“These reveries were part of Cazin’s science and art; he applied and developed the accumulated science of long study, and created the medium best fitted to express his ideas and the especial times of day he cared to paint.

“His use of awax mediumaccounts for some of the quality of his work.”

RODIN

Inthe vast presentation of subject, in the numberless examples of cause and effect, demand and supply, representative of the tide reached by commerce, industries, and arts in this nervous, intense modern civilisation, there is nothing worthier of note than the work of Rodin, the sculptor, to whom France at last has seen fit to give general recognition.

Without the walls proper of the Exposition, at the Pont de l’Alma, a building known as the Pavillon Rodin was constructed, wherein a collection, although incomplete, divulged Rodin to a world who did not know him, and delighted his admirers. The concession of the site for the little gallery marks the history of yet another struggle between artist and prejudice. “In spite of my efforts,” Rodin said, “and a widespread cordial feeling toward me in other countries, Paris was so loth to grant me this place, that had it not been for two of my friends—a Minister, and a Conseiller Municipal—I should have pleaded in vain!”

Rodin, together with his architect, constructed, arranged, and decorated this hall. It is a circularsalon, with a succession of smaller rooms surrounding the main rotunda like a gallery; the walls are covered with pale yellow stuff; and a splendid flood of sun pours in from skylight and sides, all of which are of glass. Within this limited space are gathered many of the most important statues, bronzes, and busts, and the casts of several originals which it was impossible to secure for this exhibition. “Les Bourgeois de Calais,” the “Balzac,” the incompleted group of “Victor Hugo,” “Porte de l’Enfer” (“Door of Hell”), “L’Age d’Airain” (“The Age of Bronze”), “L’Homme au Nez Cassé” (“The Man with the Broken Nose”), “L’Eve” (Eve), “L’Éternelle Idole” (“The Eternal Idol”), “La Guerre” (“War”), “La Pensée” (“Thought” or “Reverie”), “Psyche,” “The Moon bids Adieu to Earth in order to ascend to the Zenith,” “Amor Fugit” (“Love Flees”), “Le Printemps” (“Spring”), L’Homme qui s’Eveille” (“The Awakening of Man”), the busts of Jean Paul Laurens, of Dalou, of Mirabeau, Falguière, Mme. M. V. Besides these

“LE FRÈRE ET LA SŒUR”

there are countless figurines, little groups,ébauches, studies, schemes for old and new work, heads, torsos in plaster, marble, bronze, iron, and stone; whilst about the walls are hung the photographs of works not exhibited and the drawings of the sculptor.

The acknowledgment and recognition by Paris of her great son has not come too late. In spite of the fact that he has been for forty years an object of intense, displayed hatred (“so keen a hate,” he says, “that if Paris had been Italy in the time of the Borgia, I should have been poisoned”), in spite of the enmity of artists and populace, this tardy reception finds him unembittered, his temper warm and human, and with hand quick and outstretched to the tardy greeting. The man himself is so simple, so great, that he is even touched by the long-denied meed of praise.

Standing before the head of “L’Homme au Nez Cassé” (curiously enough the milestone of his first defeat, refused by the Salon in 1864), his masterpieces all around him, in the mellow light of the autumn sun falling on exquisite marble or dark bronze, Rodin said: “It is good to be alive. I find existence marvellous, glorious. These effigies of human pain” (and he indicated a bronze representing an emaciated poet dying on theknees of the Muse) “no longer make me suffer as they used. I am happy. To me nature is so beautiful, the truths of humanity are so thrilling, that I have grown to adore life and the world.Je trouve que la vie est tellement belle!” His face was fairly luminous. This apotheosis ofbien-êtrethat the sculptor has reached in late middle age is perhaps Nature’s gift, her reward to him who, in spite of discouragement and the world’s scorn, has for forty years been her faithful, adoring disciple. France is true to her traditions in her treatment of her celebrated men. She has slaughtered a king, dethroned an emperor, sold a deliverer (Jeanne d’Arc), and to her immortal artists offers as a stirrup-cup at starting such draughts of bitterness that if the very divinity within them did not preserve them for posterity’s good, who can tell whether Carpeaux, Delacroix, Manet, Rude, Berlioz, Garnier, Baryé, Puvis de Chavannes, and Rodin would not have fallen by the way?—and all the names are not here! Prejudice and schools in every country and age have their scores to level. (Shades of Shelley, Keats, Chatterton, will bid England hold her peace.) Puvis de Chavannes (Rodin’s mighty brother amongst France’s great artists) stretched toward his laurels in old age a hand that stiffened in

INTERIEUR D’ATELIER

death before it could hold the wreaths of fame. One and all of the illustrious ones were misapprehended; and Auguste Rodin, when he made his first appeal to public judgment, stepped into this rank, and awakened “the idiot risibles of a gaping stupidity,” instead of the grave appreciation that was his due.

Rodin is of the people, and was born in Paris in 1840. His parents were poor, and during the long years—apparently fruitless, and heaping disappointment on disappointment—urged him to take to a trade which would bring him immediate results. “I have no history,” he says; “my life is simply the story of constant struggle and unchanged poverty. I was poor, but I was strong; and in the moments when I was not bitterly discouraged I felt a certain stimulus in setting myself against the world. Over by the École de Médecine, in Paris, is the little school where I went as a boy, and where I first took simple lessons in drawing.”

He acknowledges the influence of no directed instruction on his art. In his young manhood he was a workman in theatelierof Baryé, and the models of twisted cobras, lithe tigers, crouching panthers, maddened lions—their graceful contours and curves, the attitude of savage grace—may have impressed theirimages on the keen memory of the young journeyman. At all events, in his types of the animal triumphant in man, in the pose and gesture ofabandon, there is much that suggests kinship between the human being and the uncivilised beast—the barbarous grace and beauty of both. But Rodin is not conscious of the effect of any school: in theateliersof both Baryé or Carrier-Belleuse he sold his skill for his daily bread.

In 1864 he sent the head of “The Man with the Broken Nose” to the Salon. This mask, perfectly modelled, worthy the seal of antiquity, was refused “because of its originality.” The refusal was a bitter blow to Rodin; and whether or not the verdict appeared to him just, it had the effect of intimidating him, and he waited thirteen years before again appearing before his adverse jury.

At this period (1864-70), on the edge of his own doorstep, as it were, with no power to franchise the threshold, he worked, a paid daily labourer, for Baryé, Carrier-Belleuse, and in 1871-77 for Van Rasbourg in Brussels. “During the long time,” he says, “when I gave what power I possessed to others, my thoughts were keen and alive toward my own creations. On Sunday I was free, and that day I afforded a model for myself and worked in my little room from the life. I

LE DÉSESPOIR

LA PORTE DE L’ENFER

tried to make the most of every expression, every turn, of my varying model,—for the human being changes constantly, and my time was infinitely precious and infinitely short. I was never able to bring to satisfactory termination very much during theseséances. It was in the paid week, it was during the days of others, that I really produced. I permitted myself then a careful mental study of what Sunday had suggested and hadfailed to achieve. As I thus meditated, fleeting thoughts and inspirations came to me, and I would hold them, force them to remain, until at the followingséancewith my model I could mould their likeness in clay. I consider that this training of my memory was of inestimable advantage.”

In 1877 “L’Age d’Airain” was sent to the Salon, and accepted. The extraordinary criticism it evoked is sufficient praise. It was said to be “too perfect,” and the sculptor was accused of having “cast the statue from life”! When these insulting suspicions had been disproved to the eminent jury’s satisfaction, Rodin’s statue—a strong, beautiful male form of Greek purity and classical simplicity of outline—received, in 1880, a third-class medal. This was bought by the State, and can be seen in the Luxembourg Gardens.

Thus, successively accused first of too great originality, second of too faithful realism, Rodin was received by his censors; but ridicule reached its dizzy height when at the Salon of 1898 was exhibited the statue of Balzac, ordered by the Société des Gens de Lettres, and refused by them.

Above theéclatof that time, when Paris made rendezvous before the rejected monument to laugh and

ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST

immoderately jeer, it is hard even now to raise a reasonable voice.

The august Société, which claimed that it “failed to recognise Balzac in the statue,” should have been put to the blush by a commercial man, a Monsieur Pellerin, who pleaded to purchase the Balzac. The sculptor refused, and took the offending plaster back to his own workshop. “I was cruelly hurt and made ill,” Rodin said, “and it did me great harm.” A brilliant pamphlet was forthcoming, however, by Arsène Alexandre, which suggested to at least part of the intelligent spectators that “they may have laughed too soon.” The Balzac has held, during the Exposition, chief place in the Pavilion Rodin, where those who still seek it for its stimulus to laughter may find it, and where others may study it to calm advantage. France’s greatest novelist, the writer of theComédie Humaine, as conceived and made to exist in sculptured form by a man like Rodin, is a combination in itself not without interest. There is in this work a tremendous, almost savage force, a virility and power, an abandonment to subject above form, characteristic of Rodin. Balzac is posed as a spectator, his arms folded across the chest under the flowing monk’s robe which the novelist assumed when at work. His body is rested on one backward-drawnfoot, whilst the other, a little advanced, throws out the line of leg and knee. The head, superb and massive, is lifted and backward inclined; the lips are parted, the eyes, deep-set, caverns of thought under heavy brows, look out at the defile of humanity which the romancer so keenly studied to immortal results. This Balzac ismoqueur,rêveur, student, analyst; and the genius which has—roughly if you will—mightily modelled the Titian of literature, has finely comprehended, with the kinship of greatness, the type of the immortal Parisian. The stupendous figure has nothing in common with the approved style of statues to great men that mark the public places and squares of our cities and towns, and there is everything in theoutranceof presentation, the novel, daring, crude handling, to bewilder the crowd who distrust what they fail to understand. But it is sufficient for the serious, unprejudiced observer to come once and look, to return and gaze, in order to recognise that he is before a masterpiece—the effigy of a human being appearing as in life from a flowing garment, symbol of the art of the romancer, the robe of imagination with which he enveloped his analyses. It becomes thus impossible not to feel the power of Rodin’s Balzac as one studies the gigantic head emerging from the

INTERIÉUR D’ATELIER AVEC LE GROUPE DES “BOURGEOIS DE CALAIS”

drapery as the author lifts his eyes on the comedy of life.

In 1882 appeared simultaneously “St. Jean préchant” (“St. John the Baptist preaching”) and “The Creation of Man”; and down till 1885 the busts of Jean Paul Laurens, Carrier-Belleuse, Victor Hugo, Antonin Proust, Dalou, were exhibited at the Champs de Mars. To subsequent exhibitions were sent busts of Puvis de Chavannes, “Le Cariatide,” “La Danaïde,” “La Pensée,” monument to Victor Hugo, the “Balzac,” “Le Baiser,” “L’Ève,” and the busts of Falguière and Rochefort.

In the Salon of 1889 was exhibited the group known asLes Bourgeois de Calais, ordered by Calais, and which, cast in bronze, stands to-day on the marketplace of that town. This piece, which has not its compeer, commemorates the heroism of six of the city’s citizens in the days when England was France’s conqueror. Froissart with characteristically simple pathos tells the story. Calais, taken by the English, was destined to destruction, but King Edward offered to spare the populace on the condition that six notable bourgeois should come forth to him bare-headed, bare-footed, ropes round their necks, and the city’s keys in their hands. “I shall do with them according to mygood pleasure”—which good pleasure, as the world knows, was to grant pardon and safeconvoi, at the plea of the gracious Queen Philippa. But they have no dream of pardon, these men, who one after another seem again to pursue their expiatory way for us across the ages. The grateful people of the town have bathed their naked feet with tears of adoration and farewell, and, devoted to probable death and to sure humiliation, they are before us. History has kept the names of four: Eustache de St. Pierre, Jean d’Aire, Jacques and Pierre de Wissant. On their faces are depicted all things save the sense of defeat. In the drawn visages, convulsed hands, in the bent and defiant attitude, are pride, hauteur, grief, resolution. The wasted forms bear the marks of siege, privation, hunger, and anxiety, but there is no trace of submission in the mediæval vicarious offering. Old age is here, passive in a moment of sublime renunciation; youth, rebellious at this demand of Fate; middle life, desperate in tense despair. These figures are real and human; this is modern realism with classic delineation. Verse or prose, brush or pencil, could not, line for line, have caught the story better and told it more expressively. The mass loves a work of art that tells a tale, and here

“LE PENSEUR”

the layman and the most difficult symbolist may alike enjoy. A narrative is told, and Art, in the mode of recount, is elevated.

BEAU TORSE

Rodin’s busts are strikinglyressemblant—not always flattering to the subject, but remarkable revelations ofthe character of the individuals themselves. His busts of Victor Hugo and Henri Rochefort and Jean Paul Laurens are especially fine.

“In making a portrait, for example,” Rodin says, “it requires severalséancesfor me to get into the spirit of my model. I am seeking always the distinguishing trait that makes this man or woman an individual different from the rest of his kind. When I discover thistrait marquantI dwell upon it, I insist on it—I caricature it, if you like—until my bust has likeness; then I knowthat I knowmy model.”

The sculptor has been at work for fifteen years on the famous “Porte de l’Enfer” (“Door of Hades”), ordered by the Museum of Decorative Art in Paris. Of this stupendous undertaking, as yet incomplete, only the most inadequate idea can be given. The portal measures six mètres in height; the panels and borders are filled with countless figures inbasand high relief. Above the doors is a nude male figure in a sitting posture, elbows on the knees, head sunk on the hands. This isDante, dreamer, meditator, before whose eyes passes the vision of the condemned. The groups, couples, and single figures represent everything that a fertile talent can conceive of dread and grief; there are visible

LE JARDIN DES OLIVIERS DE L’HOMME DE GÉNIE

Greed, Lust, Crime, Despair—in short, all the worst of the World, the Flesh, and the Triumphant Fiend. At the lower corners are masks of Pain, and around and about them Satyrs, Centaurs, Nymphs male and female, human forms of all ages and nations, run their terrible race. These remarkably modelled figures are entwined, interlaced, leaning the one on the other, seeking to escape, pursuing, haunting, and fleeing, repelling, clasping in eternal desire, eternal horror, eternal despair. Here are Paola and Francesca in their own forms, and their symbols in many another; here, even, are tiny bodies of infants, “who seek with sightless eyes to penetrate limbo and the shades.” No one but Rodin since the days of the Ghibellines could have ventured upon this subject, and of the tremendous result there has as yet been one general verdict of praise. It is Rodin’schef-d’œuvre. The doors are to be cast in bronze, and are all but in the hands of the casters.

Carpeaux, Rude, Chapu, have given to France splendid monuments. The sculpture of these men is powerful, virile, telling,—their technique that of the schools, their expression at once comprehensible. This art, picturesque, decorative, ends with the production, and suggests as a whole nothing beyond that which isbefore the eyes. Rodin’s art, by reason of his more complex, subtle temperament, his more artistic sympathy and profounder insight into nature and humanity, has been a renaissance to modern sculpture, and is to plastic art what Puvis de Chavannes was to decorative painting. He calls himself a student of human life, a disciple of nature, from which he inspires himself, and in an original, individual manner expresses in tangible form his conceptions of the mysteries of life. He has caught the ineffable moment of passion, and dared to transfix the embrace of love in stone. He has dared to portray by his art that which poet, musician, painter, have not waited to confess is an inspiration to all creation; and is it not possible that those who are so hasty to malign and criticise Rodin do not understand him? At all events in his latest productions he shows no sign of temporising, and chooses unflinchingly to be an expositor in stone of the passions, the sensations, and crises of humanity as he apprehends them.

Alongside of the high spirituality reached in the apotheosis of renunciation in the group of “Les Bourgeois de Calais,” alongside of the intellectuality of the “Victor Hugo,” are examples of the grossly material. Here is the exquisite roundness of youth in “Brother and

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