Auguste Rodin

Rainer Maria Rilke

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780486447209
• eBook ISBN: 9780486146294
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

"Rilke's observations are wonderfully astute. For readers interested in either [sculpture or poetry], this volume is a treat." — The Christian Science Monitor
During the early 1900s, the great German poet lived and worked in Paris with Auguste Rodin. In a work as revealing of its author as it is of his famous subject, Rainer Maria Rilke examines Rodin's life and work, and explains the often elusive connection between the creative forces that drive timeless literature and great art.
Rilke served for several years as Rodin's secretary — living in the sculptor's workshops, watching the shaping of his creations, and discussing his views and ideas. Written in 1903 and 1907, these essays about the master's work and development as an artist mark Rilke's entry into the world of letters. Rodin himself paid the poet the ultimate tribute, declaring these meditations the supreme interpretation of his work. This excellent translation, complemented by 33 illustrations, will fascinate students of literature, philosophy, and art history.

FIRST PART

RODIN was solitary before he became famous. And Fame, when it came, made him if anything still more solitary. For Fame, after all, is but the sum of all the misunderstandings which gather about a new name.

There are a great many about Rodin and it would be a long and difficult task to elucidate them. Nor is it necessary. They surround the name, not the work which has far outgrown the sounding greatness of the name and is now nameless, as a plain is nameless or an ocean, the name of which is found only on maps, in books or in the mouths of men, but which, in reality, is only vastness, movement, and depth.

The work of which we are to speak here has been growing for years and grows every day like a forest, losing no hour of time. Passing amongst its thousand manifestations, one is overwhelmed by the wealth of the discoveries and inventions it embraces, and instinctively one looks for the two hands from which this world has come forth. One thinks of the smallness of human hands, of how soon they weary and of how little time is granted to their activity. And one longs to behold these hands which have lived the life of a hundred hands, of a nation of hands, that rose before daybreak to set out on the long pathway of this work. One asks about the owner of these hands. Who is this man?

He is an old man. And his life is one of those which cannot be told. A life which has had a beginning and which advances, advances far into a great age, and to us it seems as if it had been lived many hundreds of years since. We know nothing of it. It must have had a childhood of some kind, a childhood of poverty, dark, groping, and uncertain. And perhaps it has this childhood still, for—as St. Augustine once said—whither should it have gone? Perhaps it still has all its past hours, hours of expectancy and hours of loneliness, hours of despair and the long hours of distress; it is a life in which nothing has been lost or forgotten, a life which as it passed was stored up. Perhaps, we cannot tell. But we believe that only from such a life could the wealth and abundance of this activity proceed, that only such a life, in which everything is present and alive and nothing past, can remain young and strong, rising with constantly renewed inspiration to works which are sublime. The time may come when the history of this life will be invented, its ramifications, its episodes, its details. They will have to be invented. There will be the story of a child who often forgot to eat, because it seemed to him much more important to carve things in common wood with a blunt knife, and from the days of his boyhood will be dated some episode containing a promise of future greatness, one of those prophecies after the event which make so touching an appeal to the simple. It may quite well be the words which some monk is said to have addressed almost five hundred years ago to the young Michel Colombe, these words: “Travaille, petit, regarde tout ton saoul et le clocher à jour de Saint-Pol, et les belles oeuvres des compaignons, regarde, aime le bon Dieu, et tu auras la grâce des grandes choses.” “And you will have the grace of great things.” Perhaps it was thus, but in tones infinitely softer than those of monkish mouth, that some hidden feeling spoke to the youth at one of the crossroads in the days of his first beginnings. For that was what he sought: the grace of great things. There was the Louvre with its many luminous objects of the antique, suggestive of southern skies and the proximity of the sea, and behind these rose other, heavy things in stone, lasting from incredibly distant civilizations into ages which were still to come. There were stones asleep, and one felt that they would awaken at some Judgment Day, stones which had nothing mortal about them, and others embodying a movement, a gesture, which had retained such freshness that it seemed to be preserved here only until some passing child should receive it one day as a gift. And not only in the famous works of art and in those visible from afar did this quality of life exist; the unnoticed, the small, the nameless, and superfluous were no less filled with this deep inner vitality, with the rich and amazing restlessness of life. Even the tranquillity, where there was tranquillity, was composed of hundreds upon hundreds of moments of motion keeping each other in equilibrium. There were small figures, particularly beasts, moving, stretching or crouching, and even when a bird was at rest one knew at once that it was a bird, there went forth from it a sky which remained about it, distance lay folded on each of its feathers, one could spread it out and make it vast. And it was the same with the animals standing or lying on the cathedrals or crouching under the consoles, stunted and crumpled up and too inert to bear the weight. There were dogs and squirrels, woodpeckers and lizards, tortoises, rats, and snakes. At least one of each kind. These creatures appeared to have been captured out in the woods and on the highways, and the constraint of living among tendrils, flowers, and leaves of stone must have changed them slowly into what they now were and would henceforth remain. But one also came across creatures born in their stone surroundings, who had no recollection of any other existence. From the beginning they were entirely native in this perpendicular, towering, steeply rising world. Consorting with their fanatic leanness were figures of skeletons in the pointed-arch style, their mouths opened wide and shouting, like those who are deaf, for the proximity of the bells had destroyed their hearing. They supported no weight, but stretched themselves, thus helping the stones to soar upward. Some, like birds, crouched aloft on the balustrades, as though their flight were not yet finished and they were but resting a century or two to gaze down upon the growing town. Others, descended from dogs, thrust themselves out horizontally from the edge of the spouting into the air, ready to emit, from jaws swollen in the effort, the rains’ water. All of them, transformed and modified, had yet lost nothing of their vitality, on the contrary, they lived more vigorously, more violently, lived for all time the passionate and impetuous life of the age which gave them birth.

And anyone seeing this imagery felt it was not born of any mood, nor of any playful desire to find new, unheard-of forms. Necessity had created it. Fearful of the invisible tribunals of an oppressive faith, men had sought refuge in these visible forms, had escaped from the unknown to this concrete embodiment. Still seeking reality in God, men showed their piety, not any longer by inventing images for Him and seeking to picture the All-too-distant-one, but by bringing into His house, laying in His hand and on His heart all the fear and poverty, all the timidity and the gestures of the humble. This was a better way than by painting, for painting was also an illusion, a beautiful and skilful deception; they desired something more real, something simple. Thus there came about the strange sculpture of the cathedrals, this sacred procession of the heavy-laden and the beasts.

And looking from the plastic art of the Middle Ages back to the antique, and again beyond the antique to the beginning of eras whose age cannot be reckoned, did it not seem that at every hopeful or disquieting turning-point of history the human soul had ever and again demanded this art which gives more than word and picture, more than similitude and appearance, this simple becoming-concrete of its longings or its apprehensions? Finally, in the Renaissance, there arose a great plastic art; at that period when life was renewed, when the mystery of the human countenance was discovered, when gesture in all its greatness developed.

And now? Was not this again an age demanding the same mode of expression, the same strong and penetrative interpretation of all in it which defied utterance, which was confused and enigmatic? The arts had in some way become renewed, filled and animated by eager expectation; perhaps it was just this plastic art, still hesitating in the shadow of a great past, which was destined to find that which the sister arts were feeling for gropingly and with a great desire. It surely possessed the power to bring help to an age tormented by conflicts which lay, almost without exception, in the realm of the invisible. The language of this art was the body. And when had this body last been seen? Layer upon layer of clothing had been laid upon it like constantly renewed varnish, but beneath these protecting incrustations the living soul, breathlessly at work upon the human face, had transformed the body too. It had become a different body. If it were now uncovered, it would probably reveal a thousand forms of expression for all that was new and nameless in its development, and for all those ancient secrets which, emerging from the Unconscious, like strange river gods, lift their dripping heads from out the wild current of the blood. And this body could not but be as beautiful as that of the Greeks. It must possess even greater beauty. Two thousand years more of Life had held it between its hands, had wrought upon it, caught its secrets and had not ceased to work upon it day and night. Painting had dreamt of this body, had adorned it with radiance and steeped it in twilight, had surrounded it with delicacy and charm of every kind, had felt its texture as one feels the petal of a flower, had been borne along by it as by a wave—but in plastic art, to which it properly belonged, it was as yet unknown.

Here was a task great as the world itself. And he who stood facing it was a man unknown, whose hands sought blindly for bread. He stood alone, and had he been only a dreamer he might have dreamt a dream deep and beautiful, which none would have understood, one of those long, long dreams in the dreaming of which life passes like a day. But this young man, employed in the factory at Sèvres, was a dreamer whose dream went to his hands and he began forthwith to achieve its realization. He felt where he must begin; a calmness in him showed him the true way. At this point is revealed that deep agreement with Nature, which is characteristic of Rodin and which has been described so well by the poet Georges Rodenbach, who calls him simply “an elemental force”. And, indeed, there is in Rodin a deep patience which makes him almost anonymous, a quiet, wise forbearance, something of the great patience and kindness of Nature herself, who, beginning with some negligible quantity, traverses silently and seriously the long pathway to abundance. Neither did Rodin presume to create trees full-grown. He began with the seed, below the surface as it were. And this seed grew downwards, struck many roots downwards and anchored firmly, before the first small shoot rose upward. This meant time and yet more time. “It does not do to hurry,” said Rodin to the few friends about him, who urged him forward.

Then the war ¹ came and Rodin went to Brussels to do the work which each day brought with it. He did some figures on private houses and several of the groups on the Exchange Buildings and carved the four large corner figures of the monument to Burgomaster Loos in the park of Anvers. Commissions which he carried out conscientiously, without any expression of his own growing personality. His own development went on simultaneously, uneasily in the cramped intervals of the day and in evening hours, spaciously in the solitary stillness of the night; and this division of his energies he had to suffer for many years. But he had the strength of those for whom some great work is waiting, the silent endurance of those whom the world needs.

Whilst at work upon the Brussels Exchange, he must have felt that buildings no longer attracted sculpture to them, as did the old cathedrals, those great magnets of the plastic art of a bygone age. The piece of sculpture was a thing standing apart as the picture was apart, the easel-picture, but, unlike the latter, it did not need even a wall. Nor even a roof. It was something which could exist for its own sake alone, and it was well to give it absolutely the character of an object round which one could pass and which could be observed from all sides. And yet, it must in some way be distinguished from other things, ordinary things, which anyone may lay hold of. It must be made, by some means, untouchable, sacrosanct, separated from the influence of accident or time, in the midst of which it appears solitary and strange, like the face of some visionary. It must have its own assured place, uninfluenced by arbitrary considerations, and it must be made part of the calm permanence of space and its great laws. It must be fitted into the surrounding air as into a niche and thus be given a security, a stability, a sublimity due to its simple existence and not to its significance.

Rodin knew that the first indispensable factor was an unerring knowledge of the human body. Slowly, exploringly he had moved from within outwards to its surface, and now a hand from without stretched forward and measured and limited this surface as exactly from without as from within. The further he advanced upon this untrodden way, the further was accident left behind, one law leading him on to another. And ultimately it was this surface which became the subject of his study. It consisted of innumerable effects of light falling upon the object, and it appeared that each of these effects was different and each remarkable. At one place the light seemed to be absorbed, at another to give a lingering greeting, at a third to pass coldly by; and there was no end to such surfaces and no surface where some effect did not take place. No part was blank.

It was at this point that Rodin discovered the fundamental element of his art, as it were, the cell of his world. And this was the plane, the exactly defined plane, of varying size and emphasis, from which all else must be made. From this time onward it was the subject of his art, the object of all his efforts, of his vigilance and his endurance. His art was not based upon any great idea, but upon the conscientious realization of something small, upon something capable of achievement, upon a matter of technique. There was no arrogance in him. He devoted himself to this insignificant and difficult aspect of beauty which he could survey, command and judge. The other, the greater beauty, must come when all was ready for it, as animals come to drink when night holds sway and the forest is free of strangers.

With this discovery began Rodin’s own peculiar work. All the traditional conceptions of plastic art now lost their meaning for him. Pose, group, composition, none of these things any longer existed. Only an endless variety of living surfaces, only life; and the mode of expression which he had evolved for himself was immediately concerned with that life. It was henceforth a question of making Life and all its fullness obey his purpose. Rodin seized upon Life as he saw it everywhere about him. He laid...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Auguste Rodin
• Epigraph
• FIRST PART
• SECOND PART
• ILLUSTRATIONS