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And so it is finally to this acrid, over-sharpened work that the analysis comes. Romanticist pessimism, with its lyrical power, proud of its suffering, exalts voluptuousness. But since it depends too much upon its bitter conclusions, it leads straight to those images, after which there will be no more hope, save in a new Illusion. Here is Renoir, here is Cézanne, who are preparing an unknown world. One would think, though they are but little younger than the hard Manet and the cruel Degas, and but little older than the sinister Lautrec,—one would think that they belong, Renoir especially, to a new century. The world accepted in its indifferent strength, its sensual joy regained—all that which is contemporary with these clear-cut and somber works of art—will not mature in the mind until twenty or thirty years later. Fatigued by a hundred years of one of the most powerful efforts in history, the French soul of their period, penetrated by the tragic disenchantment of Schopenhauer, by the sensual Christianity of Wagner, and by the immense despairing murmur of the Russian novel, feels that what is nearest to it are the final and sudden awakenings of romanticist suffering, whose bitterness increases upon contact with the clear-eyed realism developing beside it and offering it new food. Even when it knows and reasons, perhaps then above all, the heart loves the Illusion. While the writers and painters of the document are pursuing their investigation, in solitude and without pity, the romanticism of Carrière and of Rodin absorbs into the sound of its lyric flight the voice of the truth which they know, and makes a heroic passage between consciousness, into which their time is sinking and carrying on its insistent effort, and the intoxication of the future which they feel to be growing up in them.
And so it is finally to this acrid, over-sharpened work that the analysis comes. Romanticist pessimism, with its lyrical power, proud of its suffering, exalts voluptuousness. But since it depends too much upon its bitter conclusions, it leads straight to those images, after which there will be no more hope, save in a new Illusion. Here is Renoir, here is Cézanne, who are preparing an unknown world. One would think, though they are but little younger than the hard Manet and the cruel Degas, and but little older than the sinister Lautrec,—one would think that they belong, Renoir especially, to a new century. The world accepted in its indifferent strength, its sensual joy regained—all that which is contemporary with these clear-cut and somber works of art—will not mature in the mind until twenty or thirty years later. Fatigued by a hundred years of one of the most powerful efforts in history, the French soul of their period, penetrated by the tragic disenchantment of Schopenhauer, by the sensual Christianity of Wagner, and by the immense despairing murmur of the Russian novel, feels that what is nearest to it are the final and sudden awakenings of romanticist suffering, whose bitterness increases upon contact with the clear-eyed realism developing beside it and offering it new food. Even when it knows and reasons, perhaps then above all, the heart loves the Illusion. While the writers and painters of the document are pursuing their investigation, in solitude and without pity, the romanticism of Carrière and of Rodin absorbs into the sound of its lyric flight the voice of the truth which they know, and makes a heroic passage between consciousness, into which their time is sinking and carrying on its insistent effort, and the intoxication of the future which they feel to be growing up in them.
At
their beginnings, Carrière and Rodin are exact realists, the one rather
hesitating, a little too moral and soft, the other penetrated by the double
current of the sober practice of the stonecutter, and of an academic education
which he is not sufficiently prepared to fathom or to reject. And here are the
first collective portraits of the family and of childhood, and we see in them
the traces left by Whistler's technique, doubtless, that of Courbet probably,
certainly that of the good painter Fantin-Latour, and especially that of
Renoir, whose mothers and nude children with the uncertain outlines of their
soft flesh have been seen by Carrière; and here is the young "Age of
Bronze," erect upon the threshold of the new time, like an antique image
barely touched by its enervated disquietude. Then, with the sculptor's rising
spirit and broadening knowledge, there grows up a lyrical movement which will
burst the earlier form, so that new rhythms may be liberated. With the painter
we find once more the sentimental thought which Millet started on its course
and which, after having been rendered firm in the sculptural mind of Daumier,
will finally result, after traversing the social idealism of the century, in
the forms, sometimes epic, but almost always theatrical and hollow, of the
Belgian sculptor Constantin Meunier. But with Carrière it takes on a didactic
and metaphysical accent which will cause it to be accepted too quickly by the littérateurs, and too quickly forgotten
by the painters. He knows, through Daumier and through Rodin, the power of the
expressive volumes on which all the light falls; he has discovered the spirit
which circulates from form to form, which draws them to a center, presses them
outward, and beats against them as against a metal. Thereupon he follows that
spirit alone; form is no longer more than a symbolic sign which he has not
sufficiently studied and into which his desire is to precipitate the torrent of
universal life rolling from his soul to his heart, and with this torrent, his
love, which binds and cements the whole. In his vague arabesque, in the sinuous
and continuing curves which make of his intertwined groups something like a
single block of life, in which milk and blood, the carnal intoxication of the
mothers, and the gluttonous avidity of the infants flow without interruption,
to make round the breasts which are offered, to sculpture the skulls which
press against them, and to unite the arms which seek each other, the great idea
of transformism appears for the first time in painting, as something voluntary
and conscious. It is too voluntary and too conscious, for it sees no more than
itself, and tries to expose and impose itself; and it is only in the weakest
manner that it kneads its clay around it, the material being but barely
animated by reds and grays, in which the shadows are sometimes hollow, in which
the projections are sometimes awkward, and the embraces are often swollen, as
if wrought in some unknown matter from which the skeleton and the muscles were
absent. Moreover, one divines in this whole art an irresistible need to
subordinate to moral sentiment the plastic intoxication which, with the heroes
of painting, subjugates, dominates, and sweeps along in its wake the highest
moral sentiment. But a great idea broods over this work, and one sees it
fumbling in the irregular movements of the new-born babes, rising with the
growth of the children, lighting up as their astonished eyes open upon the
world, and bursting forth with nobility in the images that he has given of the
faces of certain men, and of himself. The thought is powerful, the work is
uncertain, standing very high in sentiment, but disintegrated by irreconcilable
forces and showing only the few distant summits which emerge from the mist
accumulated in the backgrounds.
With
Rodin, the last of the great romanticists, one who seems to assemble in
himself, multiplied, the lyric power of the loftiest natures of romanticism and
the structural impotence of the poorest men who were inspired by it, the
preoccupation with expressing the spirit which circulates in all the elements
of a group, diminishes, on the contrary, from work to work, in the measure that
he accentuates the strength of the living detail, of the volume determined by
the summit of the movement, and of the play of the lights and shadows on the
vibrant surface over which rolls the wave of muscle. Often—too often, alas!—the
gestures become contorted, the unhappy idea of going beyond plastics and of
running after symbols creates groups in which the embracing figures are
disjointed; the volumes fly out of their orbit, the attitudes are impossible,
and, in the whole literary disorder, the energy of the workman melts like wax
in the fire. Even in his best days, he lives and works by brief paroxysms,
whose burning sensation runs through him in flashes. There is Impressionism in
him. He is not slow in binding the center of his vision through sinuous lines
and continuous passages with everything round about which prepares or
propagates that vision. It is there, alone, tragic, like a cry in the silence.
In order to express it, he does not even have to add a head or arms to a torso,
or, under a face and a neck, to establish the torso which carries them. A
quivering belly, a moving breast, or an agitated head, full of projections and
hollows, imperiously alive and marked by the beat of the blood, the fluid of
the nerves, and by thought, suffices him to create a work which makes everything
around it seem neutral and dull. With an indication of movement, a spot of
aquarelle on a drawing, or a colored vibration overlapping the lines or
permitting them to overlap like a spatter of flame, twisting, sinking down, or
launching forth, he renders the quiver of everything that is most furtive and
most like the lightning in the very spirit of the form through which his
mysterious life penetrates us incessantly.
The
expression. Everything is sacrificed to that undefinable thing. Never did Rodin
quite understand the French sculptors of the Middle Ages, whom he for a long
time claimed to follow, and who, in their dominant preoccupation with saying
what they felt, gave proof of so much balance and measure; and when, later, he
turned to the philosophic sculpture of Greece, he did not, again, completely
understand its meaning, and how it is prolonged beyond the passing moment, and
what it is that causes its echoes to resound beyond the space in which it
lives. And that is not necessary, and his desire to seek in the past for
corroboration is perhaps that which is smallest and least pure in his nature,
that which has too often led him to tricks of plastics which would swamp his
work if a sensual and spiritual force did not almost always uplift it.
In
reality, like all the romanticists, this sculptor is a painter above all, and,
more than any other among the romanticists, unsuited to erecting a monumental
ensemble wherein the architecture of the world should appear summarized. All
the palpitations and all the inner leaping of the life of expression produce a
sonorous undulation which the light on the surface of the form gathers up, in
order to set it vibrating, like a string under the fingers. The dance sends
into the life of expression the quiver of its muscle; the sobs of music
convulse its depths. Since Rembrandt, no one had so powerfully brought up, from
within the living masses, the living spirit which stretches, or breaks, or
relaxes the muscles, swells the breasts, and causes them to move, rolls and
furrows bellies, marks out the bones of the face, and escapes from the open
eyes.
It is
thus that subterranean force gives to the ravaged face of the soil its
irregular modeling. The sculpture of the whole century had labored sufficiently
to bring to the point of culmination of the attitudes in action the inner fluid
which determines their form. While Pradier, the "Athenian of the rue
Bréda," is continuing Falconet, Clodion, and Chinard, by disrobing frail
goddesses in his very Parisian apartment. Rude transports movement into stone.
The great Barye who, near Rodin, seems as calm as an antique, because he
conceives form in the ensemble, as an architect does, builds organically,
spreads and distributes movement through the muscles and the skeleton,
accumulates it in jaws and paws, and, under the vibrating planes, keeps his
wealth of energy at high tension. The movement gathers itself together and
bounds, cracks with the crushing bones, wrinkles at the muzzle of the wild
beasts, shines at the level of their flat heads with the eyes like burning
stones, and lays their ears straight back in anger or in fear. One would say
that the artist courts with it all the scattered, hidden, or quivering sources
of power in the world, to concentrate them into the active or reposeful mass,
beating with palpitations and traversed by waves of force, as the Egyptians
concentrate, in their composite monsters, the light and the spirit as they
wander. Dalou, at first far too much vaunted, and then, for political reasons,
a little too much forgotten, surprises it at times in the fold of a feminine
torso, the gentle hollows, the dimples, and the fat curves of the flesh.
Carpeaux sees it springing from all the surfaces, causes it to shine forth from
teeth, mouths, glances, feet, hands, knees, hair—the whole nude skin calling
forth dancing flames from the whirlwind which he whips to frenzy, with the
movement of the nervous limbs, the fleshy torsos, and the round breasts, and to
the sounds of festive music leading a brilliant, light, and cynical world to
the ditch filled with blood. In his work, the movement turns in a circle,
vivifying everything, but not knowing where it can come to rest. Rodin comes to
this work to gather up its movement from its summits alone; as he animates
them, and as he penetrates through them to its very center, to the burning
focus whence the movement radiates, he attaches them to it directly, no longer
perceiving on the whole husk of life anything but the living impulse which
arises from its depth.
It is
thus that he expresses, with dramatic lyricism, that which is most unseizable
in life, and that which is most permanent also. Love haunts him, because it is
love which brings about in the forms that seek each other and unite at its
call, the strongest expression of forms given over to the tragedy of their fate
and sent rolling into indifference toward morality and toward death by a power
higher than morality and death. It is in vain for "Eve" to hide her
face in her arms; she is victorious; behind her flesh, already sinking and
losing its freshness, she drags men, beasts, the plants, the oceans, the stars,
and a whole troop of slaves following her scent, as the wave of dead leaves
runs in the wake of the wind. Here are pitiful couples united by the cohesion
of love. The man tries to flee the outstretched lips, to tear his devoured skin
from the other devouring skin, to lift his athletic torso above the breasts
which undulate and breathe like the sea. He cannot. He is held there by his
soul, whose merging lyricism and revolt boil up at each of those contacts of
mad couples who seek, in their fusion, forgetfulness of thought and of the
void. When the embrace unlocks, there is clotted blood on the bodies and the
limbs, which have been laid open and bruised like those that have been on the
rack. The bodies, rolling with every flux and reflux of the spasm, are like the
damned of Dante, at once drawn together and repelled by the burning within
them. It is impossible for the spirit to tear itself from the flesh and from
the soil, because there is, in the flesh and the soil, a spirit more universal
than itself; it is only a fragment of that universal spirit, turning in space
around its motionless force and seeking to escape it. The "Hand of
God," in which sleeps the embryonic form, need only close in order to
crush the intelligent larva which palpitates as it assumes its rudimentary form
in the primeval clay. The "'Thinker," in his harsh tensity, over the
gate by which one enters hell, is animated by the same spark which, around him,
convulses birth, youth, love, the death struggle, and death itself. The will,
being less powerful than hunger, "Ugolino" crawls, like a filthy
beast, on his hands and knees. The portraits cling to the earth, which rises in
them from everywhere, with the soul and its majesty. The "Balzac" is
like those menhirs which the elementary forces seem to erect on our roads. The
"Claude Lorrain" has worn-out boots, a clumsy bearing, and awkward
gestures, but its face is dazzled by the light. And if the "Apollo,"
whose every step causes sunlight to burst forth, has vanquished the hydra, his
two arms remain fixed to the stone of a pedestal.
One
would say that Rodin rose from the soil and from the flesh in order to reach
the tragic spot to which Michael Angelo descended from the summits of the
intelligence, and in order to utter the cry of the earth as he meets him who
brought us the cry of heaven. Whether their starting point be the senses or the
mind, materialistic pessimism and Christian pessimism meet halfway, in order
that, through orgy or through knowledge, they may teach despair. Incredible
obstinacy of the greatest natures in accepting neither their senses nor their
soul. Sublime also since, apparently, this conflict is necessary, every
thousand or two thousand years, for the gaining of a higher equilibrium between
senses and souls, and of resignation to the intoxication of living, whose
intensity is multiplied by their agreement.
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