Chapter 2

LA PUCELLE.

Thus we see Rodin at the school of the Marquise de Pompadour, placed once more in amilieufull of originality and life. He found himself there surrounded by a little world of beginners in every line, budding artists; almost everybody of his generation has passed through this course. They came there to learn to draw, paint, and model.

In the evening the halls were filled with amateurs who, after their day's work was over, sought to acquire a certain artistic skill as tapestry-workers, ornament-makers, workers in iron, marble, etc. They were energetic, turbulent, poor. Rodin, like them, was energetic and poor, but silent, laborious, and pertinacious. He applied himself to the copying of models of all sorts, most frequently red chalks by Boucher and plaster casts of animals, plants, and flowers.

The school had possessed these things since the eighteenth century and, like almost everything that was created in that bountiful epoch, they were very well done, composed after nature, their elegance full of warm truth; they were models in boldronde-bosse. That is to say, they presented that quality of relief to which drawing, like sculpture, owes its rich oppositions of light and shadow. To those who copied them they communicated the science of relief, the fundamental basis of art, and the living suppleness of the best periods, which has almost entirely disappeared to-day.

One day Rodin entered the modeling class. He worked there after the antique. He had his first experience of working in clay; it was a revelation, an enchantment. He fell in love with thismétier, which seemed to him the most seductive of all; he became obsessed with the desire to mold this soft material himself, to search in it for the form of things.

His first attempts overjoyed him; he was not fifteen years old and he had found his path!

We see him executing a fragment; he models the head, the hands, the arms, the legs, the feet; then he sets about the whole figure; there is no deception; there are no insurmountable difficulties for him; he understands at once the structure of the human body; in the phrase of the atelier, "ses bonshommes tiennent"; the arms and the legs adjust themselves naturally to the body: he is a born sculptor.

Every day he arrives at the class at eight o'clock in the morning; he works without faltering till noon, in company with five or six pupils. At that hour they stop work; they are happy; they leave their seats and take a turn about the model. In the evening things are different; from seven to nine, the class is over-full; one can study the model then only from a distance; a superficial, wretched method that is practised on a large scale at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and against which Rodin has protested all his life.

Thus we find him entered on his artistic career not as a dilettante, as an amateur, as happens too often, but as a veritable workman. Like General Kléber, he could long say, "My poverty has served me well; I am attached to it." It placed him, from his childhood, in the presence of realities. It steeped him in life itself. It safeguarded him from the artificial education that debilitates the young middle-class Frenchman and destroys in him the spirit of initiative and personality. It deprived him luckily of the pleasures that rich young men too easily offer themselves, the abuse of which renders them unsteady, capricious, and indifferent. Rigorously held to his path by necessity, he consecrated all his time and all his energies to study. He became diligent, serious, and prudent.

He had the opportunity of seeing his modeling corrected by Carpeaux. The great sculptor, in fact, taught at the Petite Ecole. Upon his return from Rome, he had asked for a modest post as an assistant master that would help to assure his equally modest existence; they had granted his request, but without seeking to give him anything more! His young pupils scarcely understood his high worth, the substantial and delicate grace of his talent, his voluptuous elegance, inherited from the eighteenth century and united with a certain nervous seductiveness that was altogether modern, a certain palpitating quality of the soul and of the flesh that had not been known before, manifesting itself through the ductility of his modeling. But instinctively they admired him; they marveled, among other things, at the precision and the rapidity of the corrections the master executed under their eyes. Later, when experience had come to him, Rodin greatly honored Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux; he was one of those for whom the appearance of the famous group "The Dance," in the parvis of the Opéra, was a veritable event. At that moment he discovered again in himself the influence of this beautiful spirit which had been slumbering in him since he left the Petite Ecole; then he became almost the disciple of Carpeaux. I know a figure of a bacchante of Rodin's, a marble that is almost unknown, the flesh of which is so supple and so light that one would say it was molded of wheat and honey and the work of the sculptor of "The Dance." There floats also in its countenance that spirituality, that expression as of a sort of angelic malice which Carpeaux seems to have borrowed occasionally from the figures of Leonardo da Vinci.

MINERVA.

When the clocks of the Sorbonne quarter struck noon, Rodin left the Petite Ecole; he walked to the Louvre, eating, as he went, a roll and a cake of chocolate which was all he had for lunch. He sketched the antiques. From there he went on to the Galerie des Estampes at the Bibliothèque Nationale, where they loaned out, without any too much good will, misplaced as that is with students, the albums of plates after Michelangelo and Raphael and the great illustrated work, "L'Histoire de Costume Romain." Because of this miserliness of theirs, he did not always obtain the volumes he wished for, which were reserved for habitués who were better known. This did not prevent him from becoming initiated into the science of draperies. He executed hundreds of sketches from memory, at last developing in himself the faculty of remembering forms. From the rue de Richelieu, always on foot, he would repair to the Gobelin manufactory. There each day, from five to eight o'clock, he followed the course in design. Placed before nature itself, before the nude, he absorbed more excellent principles. The teaching of the eighteenth century was practised there also, and his work became permanently impregnated by it.

In the morning, at daybreak, before going to the Petite Ecole, he found the time to walk to an old painter's he knew, where he kept a number of canvases going. In the evening he made careful copies of the sketches he had jotted down at noon in the galleries of the Louvre and the Bibliothèque. He drew far into the night; he drew even during supper, at the frugal board of his family, surrounded by his father, his mother, and his young sister, bending over his paper utterly regardless of his health, a course of things that soon brought on gastric disorders from which he suffered cruelly. In short, he toiled incessantly, ardent and patient, obstinate, and full of self-confidence.

Assuredly he never in the world imagined that he was to become in time one of the most illustrious representatives of the French art of the nineteenth century, that he was to be the equal in renown of celebrities like Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, or Michelet whom he saw occasionally in the Luxembourg Gardens, without even daring to bow to them; but he possessed a fixed and a precise idea of what was required to be a good sculptor and the resolution to realize it. Little did he care how long it would take, how tardy success might prove, how slow fortune might be in coming; little did he care for obstacles, even for misery. He was going the right way, unhesitating, untroubled, not compromising with himself or with anybody. He possessed the irresistible will of a force.

I have had occasion to examine one of the note-books of Rodin's youth. It is quite filled with sketches after engravings from the antique, animals or human figures. The drawing is strangely compact, wilful, for the boy of sixteen or seventeen that he was then. Already, in its accumulation of strokes and hatchings which, during an entire period of his artistic development, render the drawing of Rodin restless and personal like a piece of writing, it exhibits an obstinate search for relief, it speaks to us like hieroglyphics, revealing the power of his grasp. His progress was rapid. At seventeen, he finished his first studies. The moment came for him to pass from the school of decorative arts to that of the Beaux-Arts and to prepare himself, like his companions, for the examinations and for the competition for theprix de Rome, the famousprix de Romethat seemed to Rodin, inexperienced student as he was, the crown of the most rigorous artistic studies.

Rodin presented himself at an examination for entrance into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He was rejected. He presented himself a second time, but with the same result. What was the reason for it? Neither he nor his fellow-students could discover. They used to form a circle about him when he worked. They admired the keenness and precision of his glance, the already astonishing skill of his hand. They told him that he would be accepted. He failed a third time. Finally a fellow-student who was shrewder than the others gave the solution of the enigma. It requires a somewhat long explanation.

The great school is under the direction of the members of the Academy of Fine Arts. These professors correct the work of the students, set the examinations, and award the prizes. They are recruited from members of the society, are, in short, the representatives of official, or conservative, art. Official art is a product of the Revolution of 1789. Up to that time there were not two kinds of art in France. At the most, until the time of Louis XIV only one secession disported itself under the influence of Lebrun, painter to the king. Art was a unit, and its divine florescence spread from France over all Europe. The church, the kings, and their court of great lords and cultivated ladies were the protectors and, indeed, the inspirers, of that flowering of beauty that had grown from the time of the first Capets, indeed from the time of the Merovingians, down to the end of the eighteenth century. The First Empire marked in effect the beginning of the artistic decadence of Europe and, one may say, of the world. Artists at that time divided themselves into two camps, the conservatives, with, at their head, David and his school, who pictured an art of convention and approved formulas, and the independents, who continued, although in a somewhat revolutionary and extravagant spirit, the true traditions of French art. Among those fine rebellious men of talent of the first order were Rude, Barye, and Carpeaux in sculpture, and Baron Gros, Eugène Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet in painting.

PSYCHE.

By a singular contradiction, Louis David was as baneful a theorist as he was a great painter and, above all, an excellent draftsman. That explains itself. The quality of his drawing he owed to the eighteenth century, in which he had appeared and a pupil of which he was; but he derived his esthetic doctrine from the Revolution, which made use of the same sectarian zeal to obtain the triumph of certain false ideas that it used to advance the right principles that were its glory. Through one, David produced works of great worth and some admirable portraits; through the other, he wrought great havoc among artists. The world was, moreover, well disposed to submit to these principles. When art restricts itself to repeating attitudes, gestures, approved receipts, without having studied or observed them in nature in her constant changes, it means decadence. If David was able to have his theories accepted, it was because the time was ripe to receive them, to be contented with them; and to say that the time was ripe is only to say that it was a degenerate time, satisfied to be relieved of the task of reflecting, of discovering for itself the laws of beauty, or, in short, of working from the foundation.

Official painter of the Revolution and the Empire, Louis David proclaimed his doctrine with the authority of a pontiff. He made a set of narrow rules which advocated a superficial imitation of the antique, a copying of the works of Greece and Rome, not in spirit, but in letter; not in that accurate knowledge of construction and of the model, which made up their supreme worth, but in their conventional attitudes and expressions.

Even from beyond the grave David continued to rule the academy of the Beaux-Arts in the name of the artificial idealism which he had proclaimed, and whoever rejected his sorry instruction saw himself without mercy shown to the door of the national schools arid academies. They had shown the door to Rude, the author of the masterpiece of the Arc de Triomphe, "The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792." They had shown it to the unhappy Carpeaux, treated all his life as a heretic and persecuted by the official class, defenders of the so-called heroic achievements and stereotyped forms. They went to every extreme in their contest with free and determined genius. As a last resort they employed every weapon of treachery against the undisciplined great, those fallen angels of the false paradise of the Institute—weapons that later they did not scruple to use against Rodin. They accused Carpeaux of indecency, and in order to strengthen the miserable falsehood, a perverse idiot flung a can of ink on the adorable group of "The Dance," that song of the nymphs, clamorous with youth, laughter, and music.

This digression in the story of Rodin's life explains his whole life. By his manly independence, his persistent refusal to follow the dictates of the school, he naturally found himself placed at the head of those who antagonized the official class. Against an opponent of his strength and obstinacy the struggle naturally took on new energy. It recalled to mind the violence of the famous intellectual quarrels of other days —the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that of the Classicists and the Romanticists in 1830.

When Rodin presented himself at the great school, how, in his inexperience, could he foresee the war of wild beasts that rages in the thickets of art? It needed indeed a better-informed comrade to disclose the situation to him. Then his eyes were opened. He understood then that he would only be wasting his time in striving to force the bronze doors that are closed against the influences of great nature and her triumphant light, the implacable denouncer of the false in art. Perceiving it at last, he renounced the thought of entering the school. Later he gloried, in the fact that he had done so. Possibly he saw the danger that he would have run of parching his spirit and chilling his eye. "Ah," his friend, the sculptor Dalou, exclaimed long after, "Rodin had the luck not to have been at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts!" Dalou himself had not had that luck, and despite beautiful gifts and love for the eighteenth century, he had not recovered from the false teaching.

Rodin, then, without knowing it, had fought his first battle, the slight skirmish to the incessant fight that was to open. After that time the name Institute, by which he understood the group of protagonists of a bad form of art, took in his speech a formidable meaning. When he says, "The Institute," he seems to call up some mythological monster, the hydra of a hundred heads, from the malignant wounds of which the brave usually die slowly. For him the Institute has come to mean a company of able men who substitute dexterity for conscience, who, for long toil in obscurity and poverty, substitute a premature eagerness for all that it may bring—profitable relations, orders from the state, fortune, and honors. In his opinion all that ought to come slowly in order not to distract the artist from the study that alone can give him strength. To him the rewards are secondary; true happiness lies in untrammeled and passionate toil, in the exercise of growing intelligence that is determined not to be stopped on the road to discovery.

THE ADIEU.

Although the struggle is less clamorous to-day, it has not ended, and it never will be ended, despite the wide fame of the master, now known throughout the world as the greatest living artist. This Rodin understands. What the contestants now seek to conquer is the public, some for the purpose of obtaining from it consideration and profit, and others an appreciation of true art. One class strives to flatter its taste, which is bad; the other seeks to inculcate a knowledge of true art in its own work. At the outset the contest is frightfully unequal, for the ignorance of the public is abysmal. Incapable of discerning true beauty, it relies only on the labels placed by the Institute on its own works and on those of its partizans. They say to a man, "This is the sort of thing that should be admired," and straightway he admires it, if one can apply this expression of the highest pleasure of the spirit to the vapid and dull contemplation that the public accords to the works marked for its approval. No, at best the public does not know how to admire; it does not understand the language of beauty.

At eighteen or nineteen, Rodin, being wholly without fortune, could not continue his studies without quickly finding some means of support. It was therefore necessary for him to earn his own living, and at once he bravely entered upon his work as an ornament-maker, and became a journeyman at a few francs a week. We need not regret it. This son of the people, by remaining in the ranks of the working-class, consolidated in himself the virtues of the class—their courage and industry, which are the strong qualities of the humble, and, in the aggregate, those of the whole nation. And the curiosity of a superior man for all the rewards of the exercise of his intelligence led him to cultivate himself unceasingly. His limited studies as a school-boy had not been extensive enough to surfeit him; he now brought to the study of letters a mind keenly alert, and with a joy as alive as love itself he devoted himself to a study of great minds. He read the poets and the historians; he became acquainted with the Greece of Homer and Æschylus, the Italy of Dante, the England of Shakspere, and the France of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; but up to that time he had concerned himself with only one thing—his trade. He worked as a real artisan, with no wider vision, with no thought of formidable power. He saw only his model and his clay; he thought only of these, he loved only these. Thus he had become a journeyman ornament-worker in clay. That did not prevent him from perfecting himself in sculpture. On the contrary, it aided him.

The art of ornamentation was then considered, as it is still to-day, an inferior art. People said, still say, of the sculpture of architecture, as of the frescos and mosaic work of a building, that it is only decoration. They declare it in a tone of indulgence that finds an excuse for any mediocrity.

All this is a profound mistake. Sculptured ornament springs naturally from architecture; it is the flowering of its fundamental elements. It is an inherent part of the whole, as the mass of flowers and foliage that crowns a tree is in a way the culminating point of the whole vegetable organism. Ornament demands the same qualities that the fundamental architectural structure demands, and fully as much talent and perhaps even more; because, as Rodin says, one sees in it more clearly, without distracting features, the form of genius. If it is not well done in itself, its function, which is rigorously subordinated to the whole, and consists in molding the contours of the structure by underlining and marking them off, is reversed. It is then only an excrescence, an arbitrary addition. Only mediocre artisans, when employed on a building or a jewel, use ornament capriciously, without proportioning and subordinating it to the mass; they weary and disgust the beholder.

Rodin and his companions did not content themselves with copying, and more or less distorting, their Greek, Roman, and Renaissance models, which were repeated to satiety in all the workshops of the world, and done over and over again so many times, out of place and out of proportion, that they had lost all significance. Their employer possessed a beautiful, but neglected, garden, where a profusion of plants ran riot. Here were models in abundance. Here, in reproducing these, the young craftsmen refreshed their vocation; they copied their ornaments from nature; they studied foliage and flowers from life. To do new work, they had only to borrow from the vegetable world its inexhaustible combinations of beauty.

Here Rodin, by his cleverness and rapidity, became without a peer among them all, and drew to himself the admiration of his fellow-workers. It was here that he met Constant Simon, his elder by many years, who was the first man to teach him to model in profile. It was one of the great epochs in his life. One may say that from that time the two great laws that have given his sculpture its power—the study of nature and the right method of modeling—passed into his blood, as it were. The secret that Simon imparted to him was like a philter that inflamed his soul with enthusiasm. He became intoxicated with the idea of seeing clearly and of holding his hand strictly accountable to what his eyes disclosed. And he possessed, too, both youth and an indefatigable vigor. He sketched everything he could, wherever he could. One saw him making sketches on the street, in the horse-market, jostled by the beasts, repulsed by men, yet indifferent to all difficulties in his enchantment in his discovered prize, at the Jardin des Plantes, where he passed hours before the cages and in the parks, studying the poses of the deer and the grace of the moving antelopes.

RODIN IN HIS STUDIO AT THE HOTEL BIRON.

At that period Barye taught at the Museum. Rodin had become acquainted with the son of the celebrated sculptor. The two had discovered a corner of the basement, a sort of cave, damp and gloomy, where they installed some seats made of old boxes and delighted themselves in modeling from clay. From the Museum they borrowed a few anatomical specimens, fragments of the parts of animals, and these they carried to their cavern and pored over in their efforts to copy them. Sometimes Barye himself would come to cast his eye over their work and give them a word of advice, and then would go away, buried in a silent reverie. He was a man of simple habits, with the appearance of a college tutor, in his well-worn coat, but giving an impressive suggestion of great force and worth. His son and Rodin little understood him; they feared him somewhat and only half profited by his suggestions. Later the author of "The Burghers of Calais," kindled by the genius of the gloomy, severe man whom he had misunderstood, felt a deep remorse at not having rendered to Barye, while living, the homage of admiration which the master merited, and which perhaps would have been sweet to his solitary heart.

Rodin has had only rarely the chance to model animals. He has never received an order for an equestrian statue, and he has regretted it. We have from him only one small rough model of a statue of General Lynch on horseback, which was never executed, and the beautiful relief of the chariot of Apollo which forms the pedestal of the monument of Claude Lorrain at Nancy. But though he has not modeled animals, he has many times sketched them, and he has studied profoundly their anatomy and poses.

It is not so much in the powerful sketches that all his life he has continued to make with the same daily care with which a pianist practises his scales that Rodin shows the chief characteristic of his nature, as it is in accumulating these that he has been enabled to understand relationship between different forms, and to establish the unity between the forms of man and the animals, between the mountains and the vegetable world. It is by understanding this unity that he can occasionally interpret with a scientific exactness this common relationship. In modeling a centaur or the chimera or a spirit with powerful wings, the mythological creature that appears from his hands does not appear less a transcript from reality than each bust or each statue that has been vigorously wrought from the living model. There is no weakening in the points where the bust of the man or of the woman attaches itself to the body of the animal, no doubt that the beautiful, strong wings of the angels are as perfectly united to their bodies and are as necessary as their arms or legs.

When about twenty-two or twenty-three Rodin entered the atelier of Carrier-Belleuse. At that time the vogue of this charming artist was great. He well represented the spirit and workmanship of the eighteenth century in the knickknack art of the Second Empire. He was a Clodion of the boulevard. Besides the spirited busts, some of which, like those of Ernest Renan, Jules Simon, and the actress Marie Laurent, were celebrated, he sent out from his atelier, in the rue de la Tour d'Auvergne at Montmartre, hundreds of designs to be used in industrial art: mantelpieces, centerpieces for tables, vases, ornamental clocks, and decorative figures and groups. Rodin, then, applied himself to executing for Carrier-Belleuse a variety of statuettes and figures. There was in the task a great danger, for he saw the risk of limiting himself to a facile use of his art that was both remunerative and attractive; but his sturdy Northern temperament was able to protect him against every danger, whether of success or poverty.

Carrier had an astonishing skill, and not only worked without a model, but compelled his employees to work without one. His rough sketches were admirable, but he weakened in working them out. Rodin never trifled with his art. Before going to the atelier he always took care to study his subject in the nude and to fix it in his memory as firmly as possible. As soon as he reached his bench he transferred to the clay the result of his remembered observations. On returning to his home in the evening he consulted his model anew in order to correct his work of the day. It was for him an excellent exercise of memory. The true workman is quick to turn to advantage all the inconveniences of a situation. I have heard Rodin relate that often in the course of a quarrel with a friend or a relative he would completely forget the subject of the contention and the anger of his opponent in his absorption, from the point of view of a sculptor, in the play of the muscles and their influence on the expression of the face of the angry speaker.

REPRESENTATION OF FRANCE—IN THE MONUMENT TO CHAMPLAIN.

Rodin remained about five years with Carrier-Belleuse. What works his active hands accomplished there in a day! One still finds them in the shops of the sellers of bronzes, in the shops of the dealers of the Marais and the Faubourg St. Antoine. Certainly hundreds of examples were brought there, to the great profit of tradesmen, but to the injury of the artist; for he drew from them only such wages as the least competent workers are to-day content with.

One may see in the gallery of Mrs. —— of New York certain little terra-cotta busts which date from that period. They represent pretty Parisian women in hats, whose wild locks veil glances full of spirit and roguishness. Creatures of youth and frivolity, they are sisters of the elegant ladies that Alfred Stevens drew with his delightful brush, and which were the charm of Paris under Napoleon III. Who could believe that they had sprung from the hands of Rodin, the austere creator of "The Burghers of Calais" and of the "Victor Hugo"?

But before becoming the audaciously personal genius that he now is, he was subjected to the most varied influences—influences that have been felt by the modern sculptors with whom he has worked and those that guided the old masters. He has none the less shielded himself from the world. He declares indeed, with the authority that permits the freedom, that originality signifies nothing; that that which counts is the quality of the intrinsic sculpture; that if the temperament of the artist is truly steadfast, he always finds himself after the necessary study; and finally that it is of little importance whether a statue bears the name of Praxiteles or that of one of his pupils. The essential thing is that it is well done, that it appears in a great epoch. Anonymous, it proclaims none the less to the eyes of the man of taste the signature of genius.

In order to live Rodin applied himself to the most varied occupations; thus he gained the liberty to labor at his own work for a few hours. He chipped at stone and marble for the benefit of sculpture to-day unknown, but then in vogue; he made sketches for trinkets for certain fashionable jewelers, and fashioned objects of decorative art ordered of him by manufacturers. Despite a considerable loss of time, he obtained thus a true apprenticeship in art wholly like that which in earlier days was obtained by Ghiberti, Donatello, and most of the great artists of, the Renaissance, who were proud to be good artisans before they were accounted great sculptors.

Thus finally he was enabled to realize his first dream—to have an atelier of his own. His atelier! It was a stable, at a rental of twenty-four dollars a year, in the rue Lebrun, in the quarter of the Gobelins, near which he was born. It was a cold hovel, a cave indeed, with a well sunk in an angle of one wall that at every season exhaled its chilling breath. It did not matter. The place was sufficiently large and well lighted. The artist, young and strong, and as happy as possible in his stable, felt his talent increasing. There he accumulated a quantity of studies and works until the place was so crowded that he could scarcely turn himself about; but being too poor to have them cast, he lost the greater part of them. Every day he spent hours moistening the cloths that enveloped them, yet not without suffering frightful disasters. Sometimes the clay, through being too soft, would settle and fall asunder; sometimes it would become dry, crack, and crumble. One day, in moving, the great figure of a bacchante that had been tenderly molded for months was seized by the rough hands of the furniture-movers, and broke, crashing to the ground. What lost efforts! What destroyed beauty! Even to-day when the artist speaks of it his heart bleeds anew.

At that time he carried about the ateliers of Paris a design to which he gave the name of "The Man with the Broken Nose." Struck by the curious face of an old shepherd, flat-nosed, with every appearance of a slave that had been crushed under heel, Rodin made a bust of the man and strove to portray the energy and imposing simplicity that had astonished him in the antique busts and the statue of "The Knife-Grinder" that he had seen in the galleries of the Louvre. The solidity of the design, the patience shown in the composition, and the strength of the details coöperated in producing an admirable whole. The wrinkles of the forehead, the creased eyelids, the deep furrows of the face converged toward the base of the broken nose in an expression of old age and hardship, presenting an admirable head of a Thessalian shepherd. Alas! one frosty day the clay contracted, and the skull of "The Man with the Broken Nose" fell to the ground, leaving only the face. Rodin did not make over the composition. Too honest to restore the skull by approximation, he contented himself with modeling the face, to-day become famous.

He cast it in plaster, and sent it to the Salon of 1864. There it was rejected. Thus the opposition that had closed the door of the Beaux-Arts against him was renewed at his first attempt to take rank among contemporary artists. The reason was the same; it will always and invariably be the same: this sculptor of the naked truth, this fervent lover of nature, offends, shocks, and wounds the majority of the followers of formulas, the imitators of the past, the makers of smooth and pretty wares, things without conscience or significance. The artist remains alone with his deception. The day has not yet come when enlightened amateurs can understand in which school true talent is to be found, when they are able to renounce the moldings on nature, the theatrical postures, the irritating silliness of figures a thousand times repeated.

THE MAN WITH THE BROKEN NOSE.

They will some day learn to perceive truth, observation, strength, and grace. When that day comes they will throw out of the window all the trumpery art of which they will have become tired, in order to collect that of Rude, Barye, Carpeaux, Rodin, Jules Desbois, Camille Claudel, those glories of the nineteenth century.

The year of the Salon of 1864 may serve to close the first period of Rodin's career. It is difficult, indeed impossible, to place between fixed dates the events of a life that has been an example of uniform continuity; but nevertheless it is permitted to one to say that the year 1864 marks the end of the first youth of the master. His preliminary studies, those which one may call the studies of his mere profession, were ended. He was then at the beginning of larger studies; he was about to visit Belgium, Italy, and France; he was about to come face to face with the most varied geniuses and examine their work. He was about to question them rigorously, to demand of them their technical methods. He was also about to exalt himself in the presence of these immortal thoughts, to become intoxicated with the desire to equal them in science and greatness. From that time on he approached them as a disciple, as a man who had already thought much and comprehended much, and who was worthy to study them and follow in their footsteps: in a word, as an artist of their own lineage.

Rodin worked under Carrier-Belleuse from 1865 to 1870. He remained in Paris during the Franco-German War. What influence did this event have upon him? He has said little about it. Although he has a strong attachment for his native land, he has none of the extravagant patriotism of a Rude, whose great soul was caught up in the flames of the national epopee. Rodin has too contemplative a temperament; he is too devoted to reflective work to allow himself to be long disturbed by external facts, even the gravest.

At the signing of the peace, he went to Belgium, drawn by the promise of work in decorative art. He remained there five years, staying first in Brussels, then in Antwerp.

This period of his life left with him a delightful memory. He was poor and unknown, but full of the vigor of youth, and free in how splendid a freedom! He had all his time to himself, without any of those thousand obligations that eat up the days of a celebrated man and break down his ardor.

Life in Belgium was at that time simple, easy-going, family-like. Many small pleasures made it attractive; the cleanliness of the streets and the houses was a constant delight to the eye; the bread, the beer, the coffee were excellent and cost almost nothing. On Sundays bands of children, fair-haired, robust, healthy, dressed in aprons very white and very well starched, ran about laughing and singing; the women went to church; the men assembled in the sanded gardens of the public houses to play at ball, sipping glasses offaroandlambic. The whole scene was full of the charm of intimacy and happiness which for the artist served as a sort of frame, so to say, for the old pictures. The works of the Flemish painters are so impressive in all their power, in the splendor of their fresh coloring and their gem-like finish, that Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, Mechlin seem to have been built and decorated by the Brueghels, the Jan Steens, the Tenierses, whose dazzling canvases strike one almost as if they had been the plans for the construction of these queenly cities instead of being simply mirrors of them. As for nature, its grandeur and its nobility are disconcerting in such a little country.

Rodin rented a modest room in the chaussée de Brendael, in one of the quarters of the capital quite close to the Bois de la Cambre. He worked there during the whole of the day; his young wife did the housework, went out marketing, sewed beside him, posed for him, helped him to moisten his clay, made herself, as she said proudly, hisgarçon d'atelier. He modeled caryatids for the Palais de la Bourse at Brussels; for the Palais des Académies he made a frieze representing children and the attributes of the arts and sciences; he was charged also with the execution of decorative pieces for different municipal buildings of the city of Antwerp. Nowadays the Belgians display with pride these works, in which, without flattering them, one can recognize the touch of a future master.

Intent as he was upon his modeling work, Rodin did not abandon drawing; he added to it landscape-painting in oils. The Brabant country-side is one of the most beautiful in Europe. The Forest of Soigne, which surrounds Brussels, is full of the lofty trees of the Northern countries, splendid beeches, healthy as the bodies of athletes, reaching up into the sky like columns of light bronze, planted in regular rows, giving the impression of an immense and solemn temple. Narrow avenues, alleys, pierce the long naves; one's soul seems to glide lingeringly along these shadowy paths drawn on to the end by the far-away glimmer like stained glass. The light that falls from above through the tree-tops slips down the long green trunks, gray or silvery, bringing with it a touch of the sky. There is no exuberant vegetation, none of that undergrowth trembling with delicate little leaves, such as that which makes the spiritual grace of the Ile-de-France, arranged for the frolic of nymphs and fawns. This is the Gothic forest, the tree-cathedral, a fitting place for the miracles of Christianity and the devout walk of solitaries. Rodin fell in love with this forest. His grave soul, his youth, which knew nothing of frivolity, found itself here. His nature, so full of self-contained enthusiasm and the profound and slowly moved spirit of admiration, not yet capable of expressing itself, found its true element under the protection of these age-old beeches. But one corner enchanted him, a verdurous hollow filled with running water that breaks the austerity of the wood, the valley of Groenendael. There the majestic colonnade of trunks opens out, with the condescension of giants, before the caprices of an undulating glade. It is covered with a down of grass, like an immense green cloud, always pure, always fresh, which spring and autumn embroider with delicate shoots of a multitude of flowers, like the tapestries of the Flemish masters. Little ponds shyly spread out their mirrors, full of the sky, full of reflections. An old low-built house, entirely white, speaks of security, of calm shelter, of good nourishment, in the midst of this verdurous solitude, where one hears only the song of the birds and where squirrels cross in their flight like sudden flames. The valley of Groenendael is far enough away from Brussels to be almost always deserted and silent. It was the site the famous Brabançon mystic, Ruysbroeck the Admirable, chose in the fourteenth century for a monastery. At that time the Forest of Soigne sheltered no less than eleven monastic houses in its fragrant, shadowy depths. At the north of the valley the ground rises and the path leads one to the modest chapel of Notre Dame de Bonne-Odeur.

At this period Rodin certainly knew nothing of the great contemplatives of the fourteenth century or of this same Ruysbroeck whom later a glorious compatriot, Maurice Maeterlinck, kinsman by election of the hermit, was to translate and interpret; but in the peaceful glade, the vallon vert, as under the vaults of the great forest, the soul of the sculptor rejoined those of the old monks who perhaps still wander there at times; it shared with them the religion of this beauty which their dumb love of nature had come thither to seek.

At dawn he would start out, loaded down with his box of colors. His companion followed him, proud to carry part of the artist's paraphernalia. He was on his way to make sketches, to take notes of the landscape, to jot down his impressions; but often the day passed without his touching his brushes. It was not indifference or indolence on the part of this great worker, but simply that he had not the strength to interrupt his delightful contemplations. Time lost? In the case of another, perhaps. Not for him. His excursion had no immediate result; that was all: but how he would observe, how he would compare, how he would reflect! He was initiating himself in the sense of proportion, grandeur of style, and the nobility of simplicity. He was studying the laws of the light and shade distributed by the columns the true work of the architect. It was no longer school lessons that he was prosecuting here; it was the mighty exercise of personal talent, the ripening of his taste that was taking place, thanks to the technical knowledge he already possessed. The sense of the eternal laws comes only to those who can contrail them through long experience.

Later, when the time came for Rodin to visit the cathedrals, he was to understand better than any other this art which has sprung from the forests of France, engendered by their mysterious grandeur, once full of terrors and marvels. The benefit which he derived immediately from his acquaintance with Belgium was the experience of those intellectual joys and that happiness which await any one who is serious, loyal, reverent in the presence of the divine work that offers itself as an object of study to the assiduous.

Another besides himself had already received this teaching of nature in exactly this place. Rude, whom the Bourbons had exiled on their return to France because of his worship of Napoleon, passed several years in Brussels and executed there a number of works, among others the famous bas-reliefs of the Château de Tervueren, since destroyed by fire; "La Chasse de Méléagre," of which the authorities of the Belgian department of fine arts were fortunately able to take casts. On his way between Brussels and Tervueren, Rude went every day several leagues on foot, crossing the Forest of Soignes, where he, too, endeavored to forget the lessons of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, on the benches of which he had, according to his own confession, lost many years.

CARYATID—TAKEN AT MEUDON IN RODIN'S GARDEN.

In addition to these works of decorative art, Rodin executed a number of busts and sketches. He even found time to make a large figure modeled after his wife, a figure draped like a Gothic statue, which he worked over lovingly. It had the same disastrous fate as that which befell the other one at Paris, and for the same reason; poverty prevented the artist from having a cast taken of his work in time: like the "Bacchante," it was completely destroyed. Despite this loss, the sculptor was not discouraged; work for him was a happiness which was begun anew each day; he at once began on another subject. This time he took for his model a young man whose acquaintance he had made and who willingly consented to pose for him.

This young man was not a model by trade, spoiled by the conventional attitudes which the Parisian sculptors impose on professionals. He was a soldier, living in barracks near Rodin's house. As soon as the sculptor saw, disengaging itself from the clothes, the graceful figure of this boy of twenty-five who was not aware of his beauty and did quite simply whatever his companion asked him, he promised himself not to abandon this work before he had carried it as far as his skill permitted him to go. His model disposed himself in simple attitudes, which were not vitiated by any pretentious forethoughts. One day he came toward him, his arms upraised, his head thrown back, with an air of youthfully voluptuous lassitude that filled the artist with enthusiasm. One would have said that he was a young hero staggering under the shock of a wound. And Rodin set himself to execute the statue of the wounded hero. But nature lends itself to infinite interpretations. The sense of an attitude that is well rendered creates of itself more comprehensive ideas. When we contemplate one who is wounded or ill, obscure impressions agitate our spirit, impelling it toward ideas higher than those of wounds and illness. It skirts the frontiers of death, the enigma of annihilation or of the world to come, and all those unformulated sentiments, which in their confused flight haunt the profound regions of the soul. Before his beautiful model Rodin experienced these emotions and transcribed them upon his sculpture. In its unblemished nudity, it bears the sign of no one epoch; it is the eternal man touched in his innermost sensibility by something of which he knows not the cause. Is it his soul, is it his flesh that trembles? One does not know. No knowledge comes without suffering. Rodin, aware immediately of this effect of transposition, in the delicious surprise of the artist who sometimes sees himself surpassed by his own work, christened the statue, "The Man of the Age of Bronze," that is to say, one who is passing from the unconsciousness of primitive man into the age of understanding and of love. A few years later he gave it this still happier final name, "The Man who Awakens to Nature."

He worked over it eighteen months. There is no part of this harmonious figure that has not been passionately thought out. He had to render, beneath the supple covering of the skin, those firm, fine muscles which possess the elasticity of youth and its sobriety. In giving the sense of the presence of these things, one creates the illusion of their activity. This is the secret of great sculpture and of all the arts, to evoke that which we do not see by the quality of that which we do see. "Carefully examine the Venus de Medici," Rude used to advise his pupils, "and under the polish of the skin you will see the whole muscular system appear."

Rodin did not spare either his own strength or that of his model. An implacable goddess led him on, his conscience. He did not content himself with rendering only the masses that his direct vision gave him. In this way he would have possessed only two dimensions, the length and width of the human body. He needed the exact relief of masses, which is the basis ofronde-bosse, of "cubic sculpture." He studied his profiles not only from below, but from above. He mounted a painting ladder and looked down over his model; he measured the surface of the skull, which, seen from above, has an ovoid form; he took and compared with his clay model the dimensions of the shoulders, the chest, the hips, the feet as they appeared with the floor as a background. He observed the points where the arm muscles were inserted, and those of the thighs and the legs. How, after such a rigorously minute process of noting his masses, could his work be flat? That became impossible. But the geometric labor, the taking of measurements, was not all. The next question was to reassemble the different profiles by careful transcription. There is an entire school of conscientious sculptors who believe that they can obtain reality by the simple method of making identical points correspond. They multiply the measurements taken from the model with the aid of a plumb-line and a compass; it is only a mechanical process which does not even give good practical effects. To unify the manifold surface of the human body, to endow the whole with the suppleness of life, with its harmonious continuity and poise, the personal judgment of the artist must unceasingly intervene. His own special taste is supremely what adjusts the elements which are waiting to be unified by him in order to take on animation and to live one beside another. It is during this last effort that the expression, summoned up by the truth of the ensemble, comes almost of itself to the fingers of the sculptor. If the preceding principles have not been scrupulously observed, it seems to refuse to come; it is the reward only of conscience joined with intelligence; it is the fruit of this indissoluble union that works in the spirit of the true artist. The true expression is that to which we give the indefinable name of poetry.

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