II
Rodin’s Studio—his Works From 1880 to 1889—“eve”; Some Busts; the Monument to Victor Hugo—“the Gate of Hell”—“the Danaid”—the “Thought”—the Exhibition of Claude Monet and Rodin, in 1889—the Monument to Claude Lorraine at Nancy (1892)—“the Burghers of Calais” (1888-1895)
Rodin’s previous works, from 1881 to 1889, had been produced in modest abodes in the Rue des Fourneaux and the Boulevard de Vaugirard, and later, in a little studio, granted by the Government, at the Dépôt des Marbres, in the Rue de l’Université, where a certain number of studios are given to sculptors. From 1889 onwards the Government granted Rodin two larger studios there, which he still occupies. At a later date he also had, at his own expense, a studio in an odd corner of the Boulevard d’Italie, at a place called the Clos Payen, besides a house at Sèvres, and eventually one at Meudon, in which he still lives and of which I shall speak again. Among these were distributed his studies and his finished works: The Gate of Hell was sketched in at the Rue de l’Université, and there, too, Rodin’s assistants are at work upon his present groups.
From 1879 Rodin worked at Sèvres, having been introduced by Carrier-Belleuse, and a vase decorated by him may be seen there. In 1880 he made a fine competitive design for the Monument to the Defenders of the Nation, which was not accepted. In 1881 he made a figure of Adam, which he destroyed, and an Eve, which must be reckoned among his noblest creations—an Eve ashamed of her faults, bowed down by terror, vaguely tormented less by remorse for her sin than by the idea of having created beings for future sorrow. This Eve is a bronze of formidable appearance and all Rodin breathes in it. As in the St. John the Baptist, we feel the effect of a definite conception of sculpture, but here the design is more spiritual and the scheme of modelling simpler and larger. From that time onward we shall find the artist producing regularly, putting forth a peaceful power, and working in complete possession of himself, not free certainly from doubts and searchings, but allowing nothing of the sort to be seen. Rodin’s way of working is very peculiar; he does not begin one piece of work, carry it to its conclusion, and then devote himself to another. He has had from the outset a certain number of thoughts that correspond to forms, and although he has only shown his works one after another, he has nevertheless elaborated them side by side, working at them simultaneously and modifying them one by another. Thus The Gate of Hell has been made and remade for more than twenty years; thus the monument to Hugo, not yet handed over, goes back, by the sketches for it, to 1886; while the studies for The Burghers of Calais date from 1888, though the monument was only completed in 1895; thus, too, among the little groups on which Rodin is still at work, are many that have grown out of rough sketches made fifteen years ago. Rodin has a store of ideas and emotions dear to him, upon which he has patiently meditated, which he has promised himself to execute, and which he brings to ripeness in silence, remaining throughout long years without appearing to concern himself with them. “Strength and patience” might be his characteristic motto. Like all great artists, he thought out the essential lines of his work at once, lines that I shall define at the end of this book. His is a synthetic and generalising mind, which can only begin its active course after slow meditation, and conceives no isolated thing; spontaneous and at the same time prudent. He had that time of meditation at Brussels, not hastening to produce, not permitting himself to express an idea until he had prepared in detail the technical expression, the necessities of the craftsman.
The Ugolino, a cast, of which Rodin exhibited the first sketch in 1882, is the first sign of that preoccupation with Dante, which was to be shown in all his later work. He has read comparatively few things, and that designedly; he attaches himself strongly to a few great and profound works, and meditates upon them indefatigably. His whole symbolic imagination has been fed by Dante and his whole sensuous imagination by Baudelaire. These two gloomy poets have impressed him, and it may be said that he has absorbed them. Almost all Rodin’s great symbolic figures refer to the Inferno, and all his little groups of lovers have the neurotic subtlety, the refined, homesick melancholy of the Fleurs du Mal. He has a constant need to evolve from realism to general ideas, from thought to delight or sorrow, and the ideal of Dante or of Baudelaire is strangely mingled in him with love of the antique and worship of mythology. It is, indeed, this quite individual fusion that forms the basis of his personality. The Ugolino, which was exhibited, first alone and then with his dying children, over whom he is crouching, haggard and already almost like a wild beast, is a tragic and powerful work. The same year Rodin produced the bust of Alphonse Legros, which has taken so high a place in England in the opinion of the best judges, and in that of the lamented W. E. Henley, whose penetrating criticism paid homage from the first to our sculptor’s art.
The Genius of War, the Monument to General Lynch, and the very curious Bellona, date from 1883; the President Vicunha1 and a Bust of a Young Woman, from 1884. This was rather a period of groping than of production; Rodin was continuing his studies, and becoming more confirmed in his technical methods. We must go on to the year 1885 to reach the revelation of three of his finest sculptures—the three busts of Dalou, Victor Hugo, and Antonin Proust, which powerfully declare his personality. These are works that are not disputable, that cannot be accused of having a “literary” intention, mere bits of sculpture giving evidence of mastery and showing surfaces, planes, and high lights worthy of the very finest busts of the French school. As time goes by, the ideas, the philosophy, the symbolism, the “dramatisation” of Rodin’s compositions may come to be disputed, or exact comprehension of them may be lost; but works like these will always, by their mere professional worth, bear witness for him. Life, thought, strength, and character are carried as far as is possible. The bust of Hugo was the outcome of some few studies that the artist was able to make from the life. Hugo declared David of Angers to have made so good a bust of him that he considered it unnecessary ever to sit again. Rodin wished to obtain sittings, but failed; the poet admitted him to his table, and merely said to him, “Come when you like, observe me... and do what you can.” At table Rodin took sketches of Hugo in cigarette-paper books; he had a stand and some clay in the ante-room, and from time to time he would run in to note down anything that had just struck him.
In this manner was that admirable bust completed, which (with the two etchings here reproduced) was the only material of which Rodin could make use for the Hugo with the bowed head of his future monument, the commission for which was given him by the Government after the death of the national poet in 1883, and which is on the eve of completion.
The next year (1886) Rodin exhibited the scheme of the monument itself, which has since undergone several variations, but of which the central theme is always as follows: Hugo, naked and half-draped, like a god, is seated on a rock at the edge of the sea. With his outstretched left arm he makes a silencing gesture towards the sea and the Nereids, and thus begs them to let him listen to the Muse of his Inner Voice, who rises, pensively, behind him, and to the Muse of Anger, who, crouched on a rock above his head, seems ready to fly up into the sky. This Muse may also be interpreted as an Ins, the messenger of the voices of the elements, and the Muse of the Inner Voice is also called Meditation. She is of the greatest beauty; hers is one of the figures in which, before the Balzac, Rodin indicates his new method of amplifying the relief and systematically altering the proportions, in order—according to an idea which I shall analyse in detail in the next chapter—to secure a decorative effect. Nothing can be more expressive and more supernatural than the harmonious sadness of this great drooping shape; it is really a soul incarnated in a movement of modesty and secret contemplation that disturbs and moves us as we gaze. The Hugo himself is truly Olympian in the majesty of his gesture, the vastness of his heroic nudity, and the magic of the shadow that bathes his face bowed partly down over his breast; and the monument as a whole is of magnificent decorative unity. There are to be two monuments to Victor Hugo, one for the Pantheon, the other for the Luxembourg Gardens, and they are to have slight variations, not in the attitude of Hugo himself, but in the significance and style of the adjacent figures. These two monuments, however, have not been accepted without great difficulties caused by the very nature of Rodin’s conception; and the fact that they are accepted has not prevented the Place Victor Hugo from being disfigured by a hideous and gigantic monument, the work of Barrias, which fills the place of those that Rodin had not completed. Rodin’s slowness, which arises from the scrupulous circumspection of his mind—never satisfied with itself—and from his habit of working simultaneously at several subjects, has always contributed towards driving away official commissions from him; while the jealousy of his fellows and the exceptional character of his work have further helped to bring about strained relations between him and the official circle. Rodin does not care about pleasing or about being understood by everybody, and he has no idea of concessions. Thus almost all his important works have given rise to incidents likely to disturb his peace and hinder his work.
Together with the sketch of the Hugo monument, a bust of Henry Becque, and a curious etching made from it, Rodin exhibited in 1886 the first drawings belonging to The Gate of Hell, or at least to the work which people have agreed to call by that title. I have already related the origin of that Government commission. In the beginning Rodin had been asked to make a door in high-relief, intended for the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. But the sculptor’s imagination, beset by ideas of Dante, soon deviated from the original scheme. The door really exists in the studio of the Rue de l’Université, under the aspect of a vast rough model in plaster and beams, in the very simple shape of a two-leaved door 19 ½ feet high, with a frieze, a tympanum, and two lateral capitals. It was, at first, to have been surmounted by the two figures of Adam and Eve, but Rodin gave them up. He now seems determined to place the Shades, here reproduced, in the highest plane.2 On the uppermost beam The Thinker is to be seated. In the panels of the door and upon the wide uprights are enshrined figures—to the number of over a hundred—detached in high-relief, exactly as upon the gates of the Baptistery in Florence, which Rodin has, quite simply, taken as his model. These figures were, at first, direct interpretations from Dante, in particular Paolo and Francesca da Rimini and divers inhabitants of the Inferno. Then Rodin intermingled figures due solely to his inspirations from Baudelaire and to his own sharp perception of tragic perversity. He enlarged Dante’s conception as he modernised it, and has ended by making this door into what he smilingly calls “my Noah’s Ark.” That means that he is continually putting in little figures which replace others; there, plastered into the niches left by unfinished figures, he places everything that he improvises, everything that seems to him to correspond in character and subject with that vast confusion of human passions. The size of these figures is greatly restricted; the largest scarcely exceed thirty-nine inches in height. The dimensions of the final rendering, however, still remain to be fixed. The splendid figure called The Thinker is carried out in bronze larger than life, and Rodin is credited with an intention of bringing up all the other figures to the same dimensions, which would represent an unheard-of outlay and a gate nearly a hundred feet high—a Cyclopean work indeed! The Thinker, who has been so called on account of the likeness between his attitude and that of Michael Angelo’s Pensieroso, is much more truly an image, with his stunted body and a primitive man’s face, of the cave-dweller, the prognathous savage beholding the crimes and passions of his progeny unroll themselves below him. Immediately beneath him may be seen the most celebrated characters of the Dante cycle, notably the lovers of Rimini entwined and falling into hell.3 Then as we descend towards the ground the figures become more independent of the subject, more personally invented by the artist, and at the foot we find “women damned,” such as Baudelaire conceived, amid characters from heathen mythology.
It may thus be said that, although, perhaps, the celebrated doorway may never be finished, it is a storehouse of Rodin’s creations. It stands by him as a theme for inspirations, and he brings into it a whole category of thoughts and works, never troubling himself about the architecture or the actual scheme. He will be for ever improvising some little figure, shaping the notation of some feeling, idea, or form, and this he plants in his door, studies it against the other figures, then takes it out again, and if need be, breaks it up and uses the fragments for other attempts. Many of these little figures have developed into important separate groups. Rodin is ruled primarily by the need to create and to satisfy an irresistible vocation; he cares little what may be the ultimate transformation of his inventions, and his sculpture is, furthermore, so conceived that it may be executed on a large scale or a small; this is indeed so much the case that it is often impossible to judge from a photograph what are the dimensions.
The Gate of Hell might therefore better be called “the Pandemonium,” or some quite other name. If it were to be carried out it could not contain all the figures destined for it by the artist. There they stand, innumerable, ranged on shelves beside the rough model of the door, representing the entire evolution of Rodin’s inspiration, and forming what I call, with his consent, “the diary of his life as a sculptor.” To enumerate these figures and groups would take too long; suffice to say that the larger part of Rodin’s small marbles and bronzes are but completions of these sketches, and that on account of the essentially decorative character of the outlines and the intense originality of the proportion and balance of the figures, they can be conceived either as statuettes or as lifesized works. Such as it is, The Gate of Hell is the plan of a piece of work unique in the sculpture of modern days, a plan slowly elaborated, and of which every detail has been foreseen and analysed for years. No one has dared to undertake so audacious an assemblage of figures upon such a scheme, and the scheme is present to Rodin in its entirety. He by no means forgets the decorative effect nor the harmonious aspects, the concords that the gate should have, and if ever Government should require him to deliver his work he would be able to do so without delay. Twenty years in the studio have matured it in his mind. The work that Dante inspired has assumed a more general significance. Low-relief, high-relief, figures standing free, groups, single figures, all the styles of sculpture are gathered into the symphony of a throng, lost amid whirling mists of hell and converging towards the figure of the Thinker. The conception embraces centuries. Ugolino is there, and so are centaurs, female fauns, satyrs, and creatures dreamed of by Baudelaire, abstract personifications of vices—in particular, there is the extraordinary group of the miser dying of hunger over his treasure beside a prostitute (Avarice and Lewdness). The Thinker, in his austere nudity and pensive strength, is at one and the same time the alarmed Adam, the implacable Dante, and the compassionate Virgil of this frightful unrestrained humanity, but he is, above all, the ancestor, the first man, simple and unconscious, looking down on what he has begotten. The symbolism and philosophy of the artist are independent of any religious doctrine; his spiritual ardour excels in setting free the symbols of the various creeds, and he is supported mainly by deep and incessant consultation of nature, and by his exceptional sense of expression in movements. He attains the decorative harmony of his work not by additions, but by systematic suppressions, as the Gothic artists and those of the Renascence did.
The Gate of Hell is the outcome of studies made by Rodin from the Gothic sculptors, during his stay in Brussels. In this, and in The Burghers of Calais, he resumes the deep influence that he there underwent. As to the influence that the antique had upon him, that only showed itself later, in his smaller works in marble, and especially in the Balzac and recent productions. The Gate corresponds to the period in which Rodin’s great aim was to create, through intensity of movement and originality of attitude and outline, a new system of the dramatic in his art, which the taste of the day had frozen into a false “neo-Greek nobility,” obtained by immobility, by inertia of outline, and by a fear of seeing too living a movement break the general harmony. To seek a fresh harmony in the very study of movement, to create, side by side with static art, a dynamic art, such, in a brief formula, was Rodin’s idea.
He was shortly to exhibit a work which was still more significant of the thoughts with which he was busy. For, though I have spoken at once of that famous Gate, which is the leit-motiv of Rodin’s art, it must be remembered that in 1886 nothing was known of it but drawings. Only by degrees have groups and fragments of it been seen, and the work itself has never left the studio in the Rue de l’Université. It was The Burghers of Calais which revealed most clearly to the public Rodin’s capabilities in the way of style and of composing a whole work, and I will speak of the Burghers in this chapter, although the work was not completed until 1892 and was not set up in Calais until 1895.
In 1887 we may note Perseus and the Gorgon, and a marble Head of the beheaded St. John, which belongs to the Marchioness of Carcano. In 1888 was exhibited the exquisite Danaid, one of the most tender female figures that were ever lovingly moulded by this sculptor of the energetic, and one which has a subtle delicacy of soul that seems strangely placed between two works of power. At the same time a naked figure was also shown at the Exposition des Beaux Arts, in Brussels—a Man Walking, which was no other than one of the Burghers, and of which the robust execution made an impression. The year 1889 marked an increase of the artist’s activity. He was busy upon preparatory work for the monument of Claude Lorraine, which he had been commissioned to make for Nancy. He was going on with The Gate of Hell. He completed a statue of Bastien-Lepage for the cemetery of Damvilliers. He began upon the busts of the art critics, Octave Mirbeau and Roger Marx, finished an admirable little Dream-Group in marble, in which a young man is lying back and trying to hold fast a sphinx-woman who takes flight, wild and fateful. An impressionist sketch of Hecuba, crouching down and shrieking, and Thought, in marble, completed the record of this well-filled year. Thought, a proud, sweet head rising from a block, is one of Rodin’s best known works and the very symbol of his art. It occupies a place in the Museum of the Luxembourg, where it is in company with The Danaid, the St. John, The Kiss, a masterly female bust, and a bronze statuette. The Fair Helmet-Maker, from Villon’s poem, is a work on a very small scale, but containing the depth and strength of tragedy—the whole drama of a human body’s ruin.
In 1889 Rodin and Claude Monet together held, in the George Petit gallery, an exhibition which has remained famous and which united our two greatest artists. Rodin sent to it the Women Damned, the Beheaded St. John, some Fauns and Bacchantes, Bastien-Lepage, in all some thirty works, among which was The Burghers of Calais, shown complete for the first time. The sensation produced was immense. Rodin now tasted unmistakable fame, and his reputation spread all over the world. This fame, however, did not disarm the official circle, and not until the last three or four years have the critics been unanimous in their praise of the great French sculptor, whose every important work has given occasion to a battle, because its beauty arose from principles opposed to the whole system taught in the schools.
The five following years were marked by various works which did not, however, interfere with the threefold parallel continuation of the Victor Hugo, The Burghers of Calais, and The Gate of Hell, which were exhibited in various states in the Salon. Rodin considers it his duty, indeed, to submit to the public the phases of his work, rough attempts, clay, marbles, or bronzes, before the final completion; and understanding very well that his style is, or seems to be difficult, he thus explains himself to the public in the exhibitions, and allows people to follow the stages through which his thought passes. In addition to these works may be noted, for the year 1890, the bust of a young woman, in silver, Brother and Sister, bronze, and the Torso of St. John the Baptist. In 1891, The Caryatid, a marble figure of a young woman with a stone upon her shoulder, the group of The Young Mother (first bronze and then marble), and A Nymph. In 1892, the busts of Rochefort and of Puvis de Chavannes, which, with those of Dalou, Jean Paul Laurens, Hugo, and Falguière, form an incomparable series from Rodin’s hand of portraits that surpass all modern French sculpture, and are admirable alike in execution and expression. The Puvis de Chavannes is perhaps the finest; it is a work that does not pall even beside Donatello himself. In 1892 the Burghers and the Claude Lorraine were completed. The Burghers waited three years for their setting up, but the monument to Lorraine was inaugurated immediately, thanks to the devoted efforts of that great art-worker in glass, Émile Gallé, and of Roger Marx, who by his writings and his incessant activity has had a most noble effect upon modern French art. These two eminent men, both natives of Nancy, enforced the acceptance of the work. The monument consists of a statue of Lorraine, standing, palette in hand, his head raised eagerly towards the east, and of a pedestal from which Apollo and his rearing horses stand out in splendid high-relief. Thus did Rodin seek to pay homage to the master-painter who adored movement in light, by acclaiming both these in his turn. Fault has been found with the importance of the pedestal in comparison with the statue, the objectors failing to understand that this allegory of Apollo incarnated the very soul of the great artist whose effigy towered over the whole work, and that this whole could not be dissevered. The idea animating this composition was criticised by the authorities. Here, once more, Rodin with his symbolic vision, his tendency to bold simplifications of the general, synthetic idea, was found disturbing. He was asked for the sculptured portrait of a man, and he preferred to give prominence to a symbol that expressed the dream and the essential genius of that man, the sun-painter—an idea which was logical, but which ran counter to the received prejudice as to portrait statues. The propagandist persistence of Gallé and Roger Marx, however, convinced the people of Nancy, who are now very proud of their monument. The horses and the Apollo are the most living, palpitating, and lyrical things that Rodin has produced.
In 1893 Rodin made the bust of Madame Séverine, the medallion of César Franck, and several works in marble; Galatea, The Death of Adonis, The Education of Achilles, and The Wave. From 1894 date the Eternal Spring, one of his tenderest and purest works, besides an Orpheus and Eurydice, an Adonis and Venus, and finally Christ and the Magdalen. For, by degrees, he was returning to religious and mythological subjects, after having expressed only general symbols or pieces of pure realism; and I shall have to call attention at a later point to the original manner in which Rodin was bold enough to interpret these subjects which the academic classicism seemed to have worn out and left insipid for ever.
The year 1895 at last beheld the inauguration, on the 3rd of June, of The Burghers of Calais at Calais. To the same year belongs another fine work in marble: Illusion, the Daughter of Icarus, besides a vigorous bronze, The Crouching Man, a medallion of Octave Mirbeau, and—at this early date—some nude studies for the Balzac, for the Balzac was studied minutely in the nude, a point of which many people know nothing, before appearing draped in the famous dressing-gown which was destined, in 1898, to arouse so much clamour.
The Burghers were set up, by subscription, in a square in Calais.4
The monument is one in which Rodin has deliberately departed from all the rules of official art. These require that the effect should be pursued primarily by a compact grouping, the same thought being translated by the same gesture from all the persons. Rodin, on the contrary, desired to leave their full individuality to his six burghers going in their shirts and with halters on their necks to surrender themselves to King Edward, and he has isolated them on their one base. These six men are walking, one behind the other, two by two, half naked and miserable, with their emaciated faces—men besieged, sacrificed. One devotion unites them in the name of their town’s salvation, but their characters and their thoughts remain distinct, and in each may be read a different drama of the conscience. They have not the factitious enthusiasm and the declamatory gesture with which an ordinary sculptor would have thought well to furnish them; they are simply citizens who have resolved to fulfil a fatal duty, and are going to perform it without cowardice, but nevertheless were, yesterday, trades-people and family-men with no pretensions to the heroic. They bear with them their regrets, their inner heartbreak, and are not thinking of striking an attitude in the eyes of history. They are the unknown, obscure heroes of a fatality such as often arose in their rough times; and of how many dead men, devoted like them, has history forgotten the deeds and names! There is Eustace de St. Pierre, with his shaven magistrate’s face, stiff and controlled, carrying the key of the town; behind him Andrieux d’Andres, with his hands clenched over his sobbing face, turns back, this last time, towards the city. Jean de Fiennes, with his rough beard and weak, old man’s shoulders, is listening to Jean d’Aire, who, younger than he, is murmuring words that perhaps confide to him his horror of death, and entreat from the old man encouragement in renunciation. But in front of all the others the two brothers, Jacques and Pierre de Wissant, advance resolutely; and one turns back to hasten his friends, while one exhorts them, pointing with a restrained gesture towards heaven.
The entire reality of these figures is no less striking than their ideality, just as is the case in the beautiful creations of the “Primitives.” These are men whose absolutely real nakedness reveals itself beneath the coarse sacks that clothe them, a nakedness not harmonised into any style, but shown in all its veracity by an artist who has chosen models suitable to his characters without any care to arrange them or to give them that pretended beauty which would be merely a falsehood and an enfeeblement. These are six wretched men, shivering with cold and anguish. The scene is as close as possible to history, and the faces are real—ugly or ordinary. But an idea transfigures them. The tragedy of their sacrifice gives them a strange greatness, and they become fine because their soul is fine. We guess the gradation of their reflections: none faces his fate just like another, and the reason is that, though what they will is one, what they leave is different for each, and everything in them speaks, from their faces down to the least attitude of their limbs. Their expression is sober; a heavy silence enwraps them; we follow them with our eyes as the dwellers in Calais must have done from the heights of their walls; and they are so grouped that from every point we see them separately, presenting a distinct aspect, and yet the one base unites and uplifts them. This is a marvel of psychological composition.
Technical skill assists this composition; we find the power of the St. John, but more simplification. Only the essential lines attract the eye, the details are subsidiary to the whole. Admirable bits of flesh modelling are only noticed after long examination; the substance is scarcely thought of, so much is the mind held at first by the intellectual drama, and this was what Rodin desired. These six beings, side by side, are august in their sorrow, and they move us by means of their simplicity and by the absence of any theatrical gesture. We feel the bodies under the shirts, for Rodin made six complete models in the nude before he threw upon them these rags of stuff and knotted ropes. The feet are strongly attached to the earth; we guess that their limbs are heavy, because, though their will bids them walk, every step leads towards death. The impression is extraordinary and such as perhaps no sculpture ever gave before. This is a reality of all time: the epic of the sacrifice of the humble. As for the style, it recalls the Gothic sculptors by the rugged power of the moulding, the asceticism of the heads, and the strength of the knotty limbs. We are compelled to think of the Flemish “primitives,” and especially of those genial Burgundian sculptors and image-makers of genius who produced the immortal figures of Philippe Pot’s tomb in the Louvre. There is the same desire for expression in sculpture, which seeks beauty solely in intensity of character, and finds style in the sincere study of reality—all these things concurring towards the greater synthesis of the work’s general thought. Rodin there shows himself an essentially French and northern artist, alien from all that the academies, hypnotised by the Italianism of the second Renascence, have chosen to invent as dogmas of beauty. The Burghers of Calais is a work of the true French classic tradition—of the national classicality which has nothing in common with that classicality imported from Italy in 1550 by which our indigenous artists have so long been oppressed, thanks to the “École de Rome.” Standing before such a creation we recognise this truth sharply—this truth which is the secret of Rodin’s genius and of the enthusiasm that he aroused. Better than Rude, better than Barye, better even than Carpeaux, has he found the way to free himself, and to go back, by power of thought and mastery, to our true national lineage.
The Burghers ought, according to Rodin’s idea, to be placed in front of the old Hotel de Ville of Calais, facing the sea; and he wished the group to be placed on a very high pedestal, so that the figures should stand out against the open sky, or else, on the other hand, almost on the level, so that everyone could walk round them, live with them, almost elbow them. A bad site has been chosen and a pedestal of moderate height and ordinary appearance. The Burghers are very fine all the same, and are certainly the most powerful piece of sculpture of the epoch. I have promised to be sober in my praises of Rodin, but I do not see why in speaking of such a work as this I should hide my convictions. Those who have seen it cannot fail to consider it, as I do, the work of a thinker and of an artist of genius.
Notes
1 It Is curious to recollect that the very fine equestrian statue of General Lynch and the monument to President Vicunha, sent to America by Rodin, were never paid for, and that, owing to revolutions, they actually disappeared, so that these works may be considered lost. Only the spoiled rough models and some photographs remain.
2 These Shades are a symbolic representation of men who are just dead, and who are bending down with folded hands in misery and terror gazing at the hellish crowd into which they are about to fall.
3 The final version of this group has been treated by Rodin separately, and is known by the name of The Kiss. The marble group is in the Museum of the Luxembourg.
4 A statue of Eustace de St. Pierre had been asked for. Rodin sent the six effigies of burghers, and this gave rise to fresh difficulties with the authorities. ⁂