Childhood. Youth. First Studies
Auguste Rodin is the son of a Norman father and a Lorrainese mother. Each of these two French provinces, Normandy and Lorraine, produces a race eminently realistic, but realistic in quite different ways.
The Lorrainer, opinionated and courageous, hardy in character, and vigorous like his country itself, sees things clearly and precisely in the light of a spirit that has been fashioned by the age-old struggle between Teuton and Gaul on our eastern frontier. The things that surround him, the aspects of his native soil, like the sullen obstinacy of the enemy that seeks in vain to drag him away, present themselves to his eye as a reality stripped of illusions. When one has to fight there is no time to dream, and one must be able to estimate with precision what one is fighting for. When the man of Lorraine utters his feeling about the things he loves and defends, it is with a loyalty rather dry in expression and impression, but also with a force of consciousness that is imposing.
As for the Norman, like his country he overflows with an abundance of life from which he derives a passionate need for the pleasures of sense. Far from stifling in him the love of the beautiful, this appetite for triumphant realities engenders, on the contrary, an exaltation of the senses that leads to the most exquisite taste in the production of art. Compounded of sensuality and mysticism, the twin characteristics of these rich spirits, very like those of Belgium, to whom, by virtue of ancient migrations, they are closely allied, the artists of Normandy necessarily respond to the manifold requirements of their temperament. We know with what a profusion of monuments, robust and imposing in structure and miraculously clothed in the most delicate lacework of stone, the Gothic architects of Normandy have covered not only the soil of their province, but also, beyond the sea, that of the Two Sicilies, strewn even to this day with beautiful cloisters and sumptuous churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which the Norman Conquest carried there.
The child of Normandy and Lorraine was born in Paris, November 14, 1840. His father was a simple employee. He dwelt in one of the oldest and most curious quarters of the great city, the Quartier Saint-Victor in the fifth arrondissement. Rodin saw the light in the rue de l’Arbalète. It is a little, hilly street, quite provincial in its aspect and its quietness, that winds among the rows of old houses, some low, as if crouched down, others narrow and high, as if they wished to look over their shoulders at what passes below, very like a crowd of living people. Its name, the rue de l’Arbalète, is full of suggestion of the Middle Ages, like that of the rue des Patriarches, in which it comes to an end, and that of the rue des Lyonnais and the rue de l’Epée-de-Bois, which are its neighbors. It crosses the famous rue Mouffetard near the little church of St. Médard on the last slopes of the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, which has been, since the thirteenth century, the seat of the university and the schools; below is the plain of the Gobelins, where once the river Bièvre ran exposed.
Even to the present day this corner of the city has not suffered too much from the destructive changes of modernity. At the time of the childhood of Rodin it was still virtually untouched. Crowded, picturesque, and in certain parts dirty and squalid, like an Oriental city, with its little interlacing streets, its countless shops, its swarms of people given over to a thousand familiar trades carried on in public,—open-air kitchens, fruit-stands, grocery shops, clothing shops, and shops of ironmongers, coal-venders, and, wine-sellers,—it is an almost perfect fragment, a human fragment, of the old Gothic Paris.
Truly Rodin was fortunate: he was born in a chapter of Victor Hugo’s “Notre Dame de Paris.” Destiny preserved the first glances of his artist’s eyes from the disenchanting banality of our modern streets. It placed before them, as if to give them a hatred of uniformity, as if to disgust him forever with the misdeeds of the straight line, adopted the world over by the rank and file of contemporary architects,—those congenitally blind and mutilated souls,—a population of houses having a physiognomy and a soul of their own, which, with their sloping roofs, their irregular gables, etch their amusing profiles against the sky and seem to gossip with the birds and the clouds, putting to shame the few regular buildings that have intruded and lost themselves amid this congregation so touched with spirituality.
All this Rodin saw; with a child’s innocent eye, he absorbed all this fantasy of past ages; he studied the little shops with their low ceilings dating from the period of the gilds; he noted through the tiny panes of their windows the Rembrandtesque effects of shadow and golden light, in which the humblest objects live a life that is full of intimate mystery and familiar charm. About them he saw a people full of life, alert, awake, always in action, always in dispute, unconsciously falling into a thousand beautiful, simple attitudes, the eternal attitudes associated with drinking, eating, sleeping, working, and loving.
What admirable, powerful precepts this teaching, without effort, without professors, without pedantry, thus forever imposed upon the memory of the future sculptor! Yes, Rodin there enjoyed a priceless good fortune.
As child and young man, his walks and his duties took him incessantly past Notre Dame, the queen of cathedrals, appearing, from the heights of Ste. Geneviève, magnificently seated on the bank of the Seine that devotedly kisses its feet; in front of it, Ste. Etienne-du-Mont, surrounded by convents, with its nave, that treasure of grace bequeathed to us by the Renaissance. There also is the ancient little Roman church of St. Julien-le-Pauvre; and St. Séverin, that sweet relic of Gothic art, about which lies unrolled the old quartier des truands, with the rues Galande de la Huchette and de la Parcheminerie, which the pick-axes of the housebreakers are now giving over to the universal ugliness.
The Panthéon and the buildings that surround it taught the young Rodin that the public monuments of the style of Louis XV, although colder and stiffer, still offer a certain grandeur by virtue of their beauty of proportion and character. Close beside the somewhat formal solemnity of these buildings, the Gardens of the Luxembourg that invite the passer-by with all their tender, smiling charm, the exquisite parterre, the elegant little pilastered palace, the Medici fountain, whose charming statues pour out their water that murmurs beneath the branches of the trees spread out above like a tent of lacework, taught him the enchantment of the architectural harmonies of the Renaissance, harmonies of chiseled stone, noble shadows, and carpeting flowers.
Like all artists, Rodin adores the Luxembourg. More than this, he would not for anything in the world see those statues of the queens of France banished, those enormous stone dolls of a quality, as regards sculpture, little calculated to satisfy lovers of rich modeling. No matter, he loves the gray mass they make under the fragrant summits of the limes and the hawthorns; they are part of the scenery of his youth; he remains faithful to them as to old playthings. Was it not these that he sketched in those first attempts of his?
His aptitude quickly revealed itself. This man, whom ignorant critics were to reproach one day with not knowing how to draw, handled the pencil from his earliest childhood.
His mother bought her provisions from a grocer in the neighborhood. The grocer wrapped up his rice, vermicelli, and dried prunes in bags made from cut-up illustrated papers and engravings that had been thrown away. Rodin got hold of these bags, and they were his first models. He copied these wretched images passionately.
Toward the age of twelve, he was sent to Beauvais, to the house of an uncle who undertook to bring him up. Beauvais and its unfinished cathedral was another silent lesson, never to be forgotten—that cathedral which is nothing but a choir, but how marvelous a choir!
Of course at the time he did not appreciate its splendor. With the indifference of his age, he studied its architecture and its sculpture, which, for that matter, all his contemporaries, even the cultivated, despised from the depth of their ignorance. That was the time when art critics and professors of esthetics denied Gothic art without comprehending it, the Roman school being in the ascendant in the admiration of the public. Nevertheless, the jewel in stone did not fail to speak in the language of beauty and truth to this predestined young man. His sensibility registered its impressions, noted down those points of comparison which he was to find later in the depths of his memory and which were to enable him to judge and appreciate. Under the vault of the majestic nave he listened to the mass, he took part in the grand, sacred drama, whose phrases touched his imagination profoundly, sometimes exalting it to the point of mysticism and impregnating it with the nobility of the symbols and of the Catholic ritual tempered by eighteen centuries of usage.
Rodin was placed in a boarding-school. He found the scholar’s life dreary and dull; his comrades seemed to him noisy young barbarians, absorbed in brutal and too often vicious pastimes. Certain studies were repugnant to him, mathematics and solfeggio. Near-sighted, without being aware of it, he could not make out the figures and the notes the masters wrote on the blackboard; he understood nothing and was almost bored to death.
This myopia was destined to have the most vital influence on his art. Because of his difficulty in perceiving total effects, his instinct has only rarely led him to the composition of monuments on a very large scale, in which the architectural construction is of nearly as great importance as the sculpture proper. The most considerable that we owe to him is that of “The Burghers of Calais”; and there is also “The Gate of Hell,” which, almost inexplicably, remained incomplete even in the very hour when it was given over as finished. The great sculptor, at the time when he turned it over to the founders, perhaps unconsciously experienced a lapse of vision, an insurmountable fatigue of the eyes, over-strained by the prolonged effort to grasp the ensemble of the edifice and the harmony of the countless details of this superb composition.
But if he has been turned aside, by his physical constitution, from monumental art, it has only served to concentrate him with all the more ardor upon the minute work of modeling, for which, by a sort of compensation, he is endowed with an eye whose penetration has had no equal since the time of the Renaissance.
At the age of fourteen he returned to Paris. His parents judged that the moment had come for him to choose a career. Observing his astonishing gifts, they decided to let him take up drawing, but, having small means, they were unable to provide him with special masters. They entered him at the School of Decorative Arts, another piece of good fortune.
This school, called by abbreviation the Petite Ecole, in distinction from the great school, that of the Beaux-Arts, is situated in the old rue de l’Ecole de Médecine, close to the Faculté de Médecine and the Sorbonne. It was founded in 1765, under the name of the Free School of Design, by the painter Jean-Jacques Bachelier, a clever artist and student of styles in art no longer practised or little known, who had been well thought of by Madame de Pompadour, the favorite of Louis XV, the charming and virtually official minister of fine arts during the reign of that monarch. It was she who placed Bachelier in charge of the ateliers de décoration at the Sèvres manufactory. In creating the Petite Ecole, the painter seemed to be following out, after the death of his gracious protectress, the impulse she had communicated to French art during her lifetime.
Thus we see Rodin at the school of the Marquise de Pompadour, placed once more in a milieu full 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 bold ronde-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 this métier, 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.
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 the prix de Rome, the famous prix de Rome that seemed to Rodin, inexperienced student as he was, the crown of the most rigorous artistic studies.