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 Chapter 7

7.1 For the simple 4 noded elements it is a violation of displacement compatibility to have a
mid-side node. Some of the elements have mid-side nodes in this model. Use ‘transition’
triangle to go from smaller to larger rectangular elements.

7.2 The mesh sizing is not fine enough in the reentrant corner region at C. We need smaller
elements near point C and small radius at C.
7.3 Based on the formulation used here we cannot have ν = 0.5 for the plane strain case as the
denominator in the material property matrices [D] (see Equation (6.1.10) and [K] (see
Equation (6.4.3) becomes zero. A penalty formulation see Reference [7] can be used to
avoid this problem.
7.4 The structure is plane strain if this section represents a cross section of a long structure in
which the loads do not vary in the z direction.
The structure is a plane stress problem if this section is a thin plate type structure with
loads in the plane of the structure only.
Also see Section 6.1 for descriptions of plane stress and plane strain and examples of
each.
7.5 When abrupt changes in thickness or E’s occur from element to element.
7.6 Unit thickness
7.7 (a) Best aspect ratio.
7.8 See answer to Problem 6.20.
7.9 (a) No, as replacing a portion of the patch by a different material with different mechanical
properties will in general produce non-uniform strain under constant state of applied
stress. For rigid body mode tests, however, different mechanical property materials still
result in rigid body displacement.
(b) Yes, the patch can be arbitrary in shape. If we apply a test displacement field of ux = 1,
uy = 0 at the external nodes of a patch of say 4 elements and set the internal nodal force
to zero, then solve for the displacement components at internal node i, these
displacement components should agree with the value of the displacement function at
that node. Also the strain function or field should vanish identically at any point over
each element.
(c) Yes, we can mix triangular and quadrilateral elements in a 2-d patch test as long as the
material properties are the same.
(d) No. Mixing bars with plane elements would alter the constant strain states as the plane
element and bar are of different structural types.

335
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whole or in part.
 (e) The patch test should be applied when developing new finite elements, to determine if
the element can represent rigid body motion as well as states of constant strain when
these conditions occur.
7.10 Using Mathcad
A = 1  10–4 E = 200  109 L1 = 0.6 L2 = 1.4

1 –1 0 3.333 107 – 3.333 107 0

E 7 7
[k1] = –1 1 0 [k1] = [k1] A [k1] = – 3.333 10 3.333 10 0
L1
0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0
E 7
[k2] = 0 1 –1 [k2] = [k2] A [k2] = 0 1.429 10 –1.429 107
L2
0 –1 1 0 –1.429 107 1.429 107

3.333 107 – 3.333 107 0

7 7
[k] = [k1] + [k2] [k] = – 3.333 10 4.762 10 –1.429 107
0 –1.429 107 1.429 107

Set these 3 values to defined quantities of u1 = u3 = 1 for the rigid body patch test
u1 = 1 u3 = 1 F2 = 0
Guess at F1, F3, and u2 as shown below.
F1 = 1 u2 = 0 F3 = 1
Given Use the given command to create a solve block.
F1 u1
F2 [ k ] u2 Use control and equal sign here.
F3 u3
F1
u2 = Find (F1, u2, F3) Use the ‘Find’ command to find F1, u2, and F3.
F3
F1 = 0 u2 = 1 F3 = 0
The rigid body motion patch test is satisfied as u2 = 1.
Now check the constant strain test. Let u(x) = x for the nodes at the boundaries, i.e.,
u1 = 0 and u3 = 2, Verify that u2 (x = 0.6) = 0.6.
u1 = 0 u3 = 2 F2 = 0 Initial these values
F1 = 1 F3 = 1 u2 = 0 Guesses for these values.
Given
F1 u1
F2 = [ k ] u2
F3 u3

F1
u2 = Find (F1, u2, F3) Use the ‘Find’ command to solve for F1, u2, and F3.
F3

336
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whole or in part.
 F1 = – 2  107 F3 = 2  107 u2 = 0.6
Now upon solving the system of equations u2 = 0.6 as it should to satisfy the patch test
for constant strain.

7.13

7.16

7.17

337
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whole or in part.
 The largest principal stress is 2.23 MPa located at the inner fillet.

7.19

Model Parameters
Implant Material Modulus of Elasticity 12 GPa
Bony Material Modulus of Elasticity 7.5 GPa
Implant Depth below Bony Material 2.5 mm

400 Mesh Density

338
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whole or in part.
 The largest principal stress is 234 MPa located in the implant material where it meets the
top of the bony material.

339
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whole or in part.
 7.21

7.22

340
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whole or in part.
 N
The figure above is the maximum principal stress. The maximum is 3505 . The
m^ 2
location of maximum stress occurs at the corners of the hole (with 1 mm radii)

7.23

341
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whole or in part.
 The largest principal stress is 66336 Pa located at the bottom of the center span of the
overpass.

7.25

7.26

342
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whole or in part.
 The largest von Mises stress of 6.17 MPa occurs at the top and bottom inside edges of the
hole. The second largest principal stress of 5.78 MPa occurs at the elbow between the
smallest cross section and where the taper begins.

7.28

343
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whole or in part.
 7.31

344
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whole or in part.
 Figure 1: Mesh with Boundary Conditions and Nodal Force

Figure 2: The von Mises stress plot for canopy hook  kN
mm 2

7.32

345
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whole or in part.
 Figure 4: von Mises stress of bracket with 1.25 cm radius at re-entrant corner.

The largest von Mises stress is 335 MPa located at the re-entrant corner of the bracket.

Zoomed in view of the finite element model of the bracket using 600 mesh density in
Algor program.
7.33

346
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whole or in part.
 7.37
The pivot hole is fixed as shown in Figure 1. The loads were each distributed across 5 nodes with
the total sum of the 5 nodal forces equaling the given point force of 240 N. Other loads
were handled in a similar fashion as indicated in Figure 1.

Figure 1: The design, mesh and boundary conditions for the Crimper

As you can see in Figure 2, the maximum von Mises stress was calculated to be
approximately 50 MPa. The standard yield strength for steel is approximately 250 MPa.
This chosen thickness of 20 mm is sufficient to provide a FOS greater than 1.5.

347
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whole or in part.
 Figure 2: The von Mises Stress for the Crimper

7.38
The model is shown first with the boundary and loading conditions then applied. The
nodes of the far left hex were constrained from all movement.
Next a material was chosen and an initial guess at the thickness t was made. ASTM A-36
was chosen. A thickness of 3.8 mm was chosen as this is an easy number to work with
and it is compatible with the other wrench dimensions. A pressure of 2631.6 Pa was
applied. The largest von Mises stress was 166.6 MPa as shown.

348
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whole or in part.
Other documents randomly have
different content
enough. He sees his thought in the whole of nature and finds it there
again; that thought, indeed, is fed by general ideas, and is, if I may say so,
almost "elemental." From this point of view Rodin's genius is independent
of his talent as a sculptor. It sometimes happens to him to see a block of
marble or a knob of wood, and the form of such an object will show him
what he will make and the movement of the figure. He adapts to it one of
the ideas which he always has in reserve: the aspect of the wood or the
marble determines the passage of the thought to the material which will
incarnate it. I said one day to Rodin: "One would say that you knew there
was a figure in that block, and that you do nothing beyond breaking away
the stone that hides it from us." He answered that that was exactly his
feeling as he worked. Upon the naked figure Rodin has ideas that are
peculiar to his nature as a mystic and a realist. He considers the body with
its four limbs as a cypher, of which the combinations are infinite. That is an
old idea that was held by primitive theologians of the Eastern religions. And
it is the fact that Rodin has invented an immense series of attitudes and
combinations that one would not have thought possible: he attaches little
groups to the side of a block of marble with the freedom of a painter
throwing a figure upon a background. He makes his people light, he makes
them soar, he entwines them in surprising positions.
It was therefore absolutely essential that he should find means to constitute
a logical harmony on every side of his works. Scholastic statuary is opposed
to this principle. Its tendency is to treat groups as bas-reliefs. The spectator
must stand in front, at a certain spot, and whatever is behind is accessory:
the decorative line produces its effect only from that point. So true is this
that statues are very often so placed in public squares that people cannot
pass round them. The academic sculptors treat a piece of sculpture like a
picture; it has a right side and a wrong side. Rodin, shocked at this method,
began by working in quite a different way. He made successive sketches of
all the faces of his works, going constantly round them so as to obtain a
series of views connected in a ring. Travels in Italy had led him to think that
the ancients proceeded in this manner and that their great endeavour was
to get the design of the outline by means of movement, which continually
modifies the anatomy. Anatomy, indispensable to the artist, becomes the
source of all the academic errors if once we forget that it is but inertia, the
state of non-action, and consequently incapable of expressly teaching us
about life and about the modifications that thought imposes upon flesh.
The real value of a living figure is given by profiles studied successively in a
full light. Rodin was delighted by this way of working. But his pictorial
inclinations, his ideas about the possible formation of a background in
sculpture as in painting, were not satisfied.
When the academic school wishes to make use of a background to a figure
it confines itself to a hollow or a relief. Rodin desired that a statue should
stand free and should bear looking at from any point, but he desired
nevertheless that it should remain in relation with light and with the
surrounding atmosphere. He was struck by the hard, cut-out aspect of
ordinary statues, and asked himself how an atmosphere might be given to
them. Painting has two means to this end: of which the first is values.
Values are independent of colour. Values, an element common to both arts,
are in painting and sculpture the relations as to opacity or transparence of
an object and the background against which it is seen. They may be dark
on a light ground, light on a dark ground, or light upon a ground that is
likewise light; but they are always the very life of the outline, and the
important point is to fix that outline first of all. When we see a person
placed between the sun and ourselves, against the light, we do not at first
perceive the details within the outline, but we do see the general mass of
the body, and that mass is filled with more or less intense colour, in which
we presently distinguish details. Our perception at the moment is as much
sculptural as pictorial. Rodin, struck by the importance of this idea, devoted
himself to obtaining, at once and together, the volume; that is to say, the
equivalent in sculpture of the value, and the design of successive views of
one movement.
But the second means in painting is the employment of intermediate tones
encircling the figure and combining with the background. How could an
equivalent be found for that? Logic led Rodin on to a step which alarmed
him: he made experiments after examining the antiques very closely. He
took fragments of his statues and began to raise them in certain places by
layers of clay, intensifying the modelling and enlarging the lines. He
observed that the light now played better upon these enlarged lines; the
refraction of light upon these amplified surfaces was softer, the hardness of
the cut-out outline vanished, and a radiant zone shaped itself around his
figures and united them gradually with the atmosphere. In this way,
therefore, by means of this systematic accentuation of the outlines, an
intermediate tone, a radiancy of the forms, was produced.
Rodin understood at once that he had found his way to the deepest secret
of his art; that is to say, to the ideal limit where through its hidden laws a
plastic art touches the other arts in a negation of all that is merely
materialistic. The intermediate tones in painting, the radiating surfaces in
sculpture, are the same principle as the nervous radiations noted in
photographing a hand, where it may be seen that the fingers are prolonged
by emanations. Nothing is fixed, limited, or finished in nature, and the
radiating state is the only real one. But this was a dangerous discovery for a
sculptor, since people would immediately exclaim upon the deformation of
what was seen, the alteration of the fact, the falsification of anatomy.
Therefore Rodin proceeded in silence and with very great prudence. The
point was not, of course, to enlarge all surfaces equally, for that would
have produced only an increase of scale. The thing was to amplify, with
tact, certain parts of the modelling, the edges of which were swept by the
light, so as to give a halo to the outline. At the same time, Rodin
experimented in a series of drawings made on purpose, forbidding himself
to give any detail, tracing only the outlines of bodies filled in with one wash
of water-colour that gave the value. I shall return to these sketches. They
cannot be understood without a knowledge of their original purpose.
This theory, to which Rodin approved of my giving the name of deliberate
amplification of surfaces, is simply the critical principle of Greek sculpture,
which has been entirely misunderstood by the academic school. That
school, which is supposed to honour the Greeks, is really false to their spirit
and their teaching. Moreover, this principle, which belongs to all the
primitive statuary that was made for the open air, is to be found among the
Egyptians and the Assyrians. It calls in question the academic tradition
whereby exactitude is confounded with truth. In reality it may be said to be
a profoundly classic principle which has been denied by the academic
school. Here, as in painting, classicism is opposed to the academic. Hence it
should be concluded that in reality Rodin is by no means an innovator
opposing himself to a school that retains classic traditions, but, speaking
precisely, a classic, returning to nature, replacing himself in the state of
mind of a Greek before his model, and opposing himself to a school that
has overloaded art with methods, formulas, and expedients that change the
character of antique and Gothic art. Rodin has a horror of what is called
"originality," and an even greater horror of what is called "inspiration." He
only trusts completely to work and to minute, sincere observation of nature.
"Slowness is a beauty," he often says. He has the greatest antipathy for
"sculpture with literary meanings," and has often been galled, without
saying so, by certain praises, in which writers, reeling off pages of
description about his works, have thought to please him by dwelling on the
idea and not on the execution. "I invent nothing," he says; "I rediscover.
And the thing seems new because people have generally lost sight of the
aim and the means of art; they take that for an innovation which is nothing
but a return to the laws of the great sculpture of long ago. Obviously, I
think; I like certain symbols, I see things in a synthetic way, but it is nature
that gives me all that. I do not imitate the Greeks; I try to put myself in the
spiritual state of the men who have left us the antique statues. The 'École'
copies their works; the thing that signifies is to recover their method. I
began by showing close studies from nature like The Age of Brass.
Afterwards I came to understand that art required a little more largeness, a
little exaggeration, and my whole aim, from the time of the Burghers, was
to find a method of exaggerating logically: that method consists in the
deliberate amplification of the modelling. It consists also in the constant
reduction of the figure to a geometrical figure, and in the determination to
sacrifice any part of a figure to the synthesis of its aspect. See what the
Gothic sculptors did. Look at the cathedral of Chartres; one of the towers is
massive and without ornament: they sacrificed it to give value to the
exquisite delicacy of the other tower.
"In sculpture the projection of the muscular fasciculi must be accentuated,
the foreshortening forced, the hollows deepened; sculpture is the art of the
hole and the lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures.
Ignorant people, when they see close-knitted true surfaces, say that 'it is
not finished.' No notion is falser than that of finish unless it be that of
elegance; by means of these two ideas people would kill our art. The way
to obtain solidity and life is by work carried out to the fullest, not in the
direction of achievement and of copying details, but in that of truth in the
successive schemes. The public, perverted by academic prejudices,
confounds art with neatness. The simplicity of the 'École' is a painted
cardboard ideal. A cast from life is a copy, the exactest possible copy, and
yet it has neither motion nor eloquence. Art intervenes to exaggerate
certain surfaces, and also to fine down others. In sculpture everything
depends upon the way in which the modelling is carried out with a constant
thought of the main line of the scheme, upon the rendering of the hollows,
of the projections and of their connections; thus it is that one may get fine
lights, and especially fine shadows that are not opaque. Everything should
be emphasised according to the accent that it is desired to render, and the
degree of amplification is personal, according to the tact and the
temperament of each sculptor; and for this reason there is no transmissible
process, no studio recipe, but only a true law. I see it in the antique and in
Michael Angelo. To work by the profiles, in depth not by surfaces, always
thinking of the few geometrical forms from which all nature proceeds, and
to make these eternal forms perceptible in the individual case of the object
studied, that is my criterion. That is not idealism, it is a part of the
handicraft. My ideas have nothing to do with it but for that method; my
Danaids and my Dante figures would be weak, bad things. From the large
design that I get your mind deduces ideas."
Rodin, then, is convinced that he is classical, and rebels against the "École"
which claims to be so. He has the greatest admiration for the Renascence,
but declares that he does not so clearly understand the genius of the Gothic
sculptors. He admires it, but has not thoroughly penetrated it. "I feel it, but
I cannot express it," he says. "I cannot analyse the Celtic genius to my own
satisfaction. In the Middle Ages art came from groups, not from individuals.
It was anonymous; the sculptors of cathedrals no more put their names to
their works than our workmen put theirs on the pavement that they lay. Ah!
what an admirable scorn of notoriety! The signature is what destroys us.
We do portraits, but what we do is not so great. These kings and queens,
on the cathedrals, were not portraits. The fellow-workers stood for one
another, and they interpreted; they did not copy. They made clothed
figures; the nude and portraiture only date from the Renascence. And then
those fellows cut with the tool's end into the block, that is why they were
called sculptors. As for us, we are modellers. And what a disgraceful thing
that casting from life is, which so many well-known sculptors do not blush
to use! It is a mere swindling in art. Art was a vital function to the image-
makers of the thirteenth century; they would have laughed at the idea of
signing what they did, and never dreamed of honours and titles. When
once their work was finished, they said no more about it, or else they
talked among themselves. How curious it would have been to hear them, to
be present at their gatherings, where they must have discussed in amusing
phrases, and with simple, deep ideas!... Whenever the cathedrals disappear
civilisation will go down one step. And even now we no longer understand
them, we no longer know how to read their silent language. We need to
make excavations not in the earth, but towards heaven...." An admirable
saying that Rodin has often repeated to me and that I have never heard
without deep emotion! He has the secret of these true formulas, and his
words, which are not eloquent, but, rather, obscure, are suddenly lighted up
by them. His speech, like his sculpture, is born from sincere contact with
the essence of nature. In regard to the Renascence and Michael Angelo, he
reports that he received no decisive lesson from either until after a journey
to Italy in 1875. "I believed before that," he says, "that movement was the
whole secret of this art, and I put my models into positions like those of
Michael Angelo. But as I went on observing the free attitudes of my models
I perceived that they possessed these naturally, and that Michael Angelo
had not preconceived them, but merely transcribed them according to the
personal inspiration of human beings moved by the need of action. I went
to Rome to look for what may be found everywhere: the latent heroic in
every natural movement. [4]
"Then I gathered the elements of what people call my symbolism. I do not
understand anything about long words and theories. But I am willing to be
a symbolist, if that defines the ideas that Michael Angelo gave me, namely
that the essence of sculpture is the modelling, the general scheme which
alone enables us to render the intensity, the supple variety of movement
and character. If we can imagine the thought of God in creating the world,
He thought first of the construction, which is the sole principle of nature, of
living things and perhaps of the planets. Michael Angelo seems to me rather
to derive from Donatello than from the ancients; Raphael proceeds from
them. He understood that an architecture can be built up with the human
body, and that, in order to possess volume and harmony, a statue or a
group ought to be contained in a cube, a pyramid; or some simple figure.
Let us look at a Dutch interior and at an interior painted by an artist of the
present day. The latter no longer touches us, because it does not possess
the qualities of depth and volume, the science of distances. The artist who
paints it does not know how to reproduce a cube. An interior by Van der
Meer is a cubic painting. The atmosphere is in it and the exact volume of
the objects; the place of these objects has been respected, the modern
painter places them, arranges them as models. The Dutchmen did not
touch them, but set themselves to render the distances that separated
them, that is, the depth. And then, if I go so far as to say that cubic truth,
not appearance, is the mistress of things, if I add that the sight of the
plains and woods and country views gives me the principle of the plans that
I employ on my statues, that I feel cubic truth everywhere, and that plan
and volume appear to me as laws of all life and all beauty, will it be said
that I am a symbolist, that I generalise, that I am a metaphysician? It
seems to me that I have remained a sculptor and a realist. Unity oppresses
and haunts me."
"What," says Rodin again, "is the principle of my figures, and what is it that
people like in them? It is the very pivot of art, it is balance; that is to say,
the oppositions of volume produced by movement. That is the striking,
material fact in art, with all due deference to those persons who conceive
art as distinct from 'brutal' reality. Art is like love. For many people it is a
dream, a psychological complication, a palace, a perfume, a stage scene;
but nothing of the sort! The essential of love is the pairing; all the rest is
only detail, charming, and full of passion, but detail. It is the same in art:
people come and praise my symbols and my expressions to me; but I know
that the plans are the essential thing. Respect the plan, make it exact from
every point; movement intervenes, displaces these volumes and creates a
fresh balance. The human body is like a walking temple, and like a temple it
has a central point around which the volumes place and spread themselves.
When one understands that, one has everything. It is simple, but it must be
seen, and academism refuses to see it. Instead of recognising that that is
the key to my method they prefer to say that I am a poet. That expression
signifies that people feel, confusedly, the difference between an art resting
on conventions and one derived from truth; only they think that the 'poetic'
art is the conventional one. They call that inspiration. That is the belief that
has led to the theory of genius being madness. But men of genius are just
those who, by their trade-skill, carry the essential thing to perfection.
People say that my sculpture is that of an 'exalté.'[5]
"I do not deny that there is exaltation in my works; but that exaltation
existed not in me, but in nature, in movement. The divine work is naturally
exalted. As for me, all I do is to be true; my temperament is not 'exalted'; it
is patient. I am not a dreamer, but a mathematician; and if my sculpture is
good it is because it is geometrical."
From these fragments of conversation the reader will conceive how Rodin's
generalising spirit leads him from the realism of his daily work to the
synthesis of a sort of ideo-realistic metaphysical system. He has the sense
(belonging only to genius) of the continuity of the universe, and he
certainly had it at a time when, unlettered as he was, he would not have
known how to explain it specifically to himself. He constantly formulates this
metaphysical system, as I have seen it formulated by Stéphane Mallarmé,
who could never see anything without instantly bringing together two ideas
or images that no one would ever have thought of connecting.
Spontaneous analogy is the mark of genius and the secret of all real poetry.
This is why I consider Rodin as a very great poet—not in the sense that he
dislikes, but on the contrary, by giving to the word "poet" its deep
etymological significance according to the Greek, that of "making, creating,
vivifying." We may understand, too, in how great a degree an intellectuality
of this kind offers a living challenge to the ideas of the "École." The man
who thinks thus is necessarily isolated and has struggled all his life, never
making a concession and saying nobly, "The artist, like the woman, has an
honour to preserve." I will further quote from Rodin the following
reflection[6]: "Where you follow nature, you get everything. When I have a
beautiful woman's body for a model the drawings that I make from it give
me images of insects, birds, and fishes. That seems improbable, and I had
no suspicion of it myself. Formerly I used to be seeking shapes for vases,
either to use them at Sèvres, where I used to work, or elsewhere.... I never
succeeding in finding a beauty of proportions and lines such as I had the
feeling of, because I only founded my attempts upon imagination. Since
that time I have drawn women's bodies, and one of these bodies gave me,
in the synthesis of it, a magnificent shape for a vase, with true and
harmonious lines. The point is not to create. Creation and improvisation are
useless words. Genius only comes to the man who understands with his eye
and his brain. Everything is in the things about us. Manufacture and
ornamental art want reforming according to these ideas. I should have liked
to see that. Everything-is contained in nature. There is an harmonious,
continual, uninterrupted movement. A woman, a mountain, a horse, in
conception they are all the same thing, they are made on the same
principles. Young artists compose instead of following their models and
understanding that therein lies infinity." Here Rodin directly touches a
scientific truth—the relative monotony of Nature's productive forms. Nature
does everything with very few forms: the variations are so infinite that
there are no two leaves alike, but the nerves of a leaf, the lines of a vein,
an artery, a bird's wing, a fishbone, a nerve-cell, are identical; multiplicity
derives from identity and returns to it, so that everything is reduced to a
fundamental geometry which perhaps is but the effect of a single cellular
generation. In this respect the laws of art and of science are the same,
even as among all the arts there is a synthesis of common laws, an identity
where we seem to behold a difference. Recent work in science, by
establishing the existence of states of radiation (Crookes, Röntgen, Hertz) is
busy undermining our old conception of matter, showing us the identity of it
with the immaterial, and thereby abolishing our preconceptions about the
idea and the fact, music and sculpture, considered as different
manifestations. I remember that I one day kept Rodin's curiosity excited for
a long time by explaining the details of this theory to him; he was not
acquainted with it, and listened to me as to a writer in love with general
ideas. But it was clear that in his mere province as a sculptor he knew far
better and had penetrated far more deeply into this enthralling problem of
identity. His is a luminous mind, of the same kind as the electric rays; it
rather penetrates than surrounds what is obscure to it. On that day he was
disturbed, and I was irritated by certain declamations which had been
written about his "philosophy," and of which the author had assuredly not
comprehended the logical consequences; and we came to the conclusion
that it would be much better for Rodin's peace of mind to keep silent upon
these points, for his "philosophy" could only be made comprehensible to
those who could understand the method of his sculpture.
It is time, however, to pause in this path and to return simply to the
question of sculpture. Nor was it my purpose to tire the reader by these
abstractions when I began to say a few words about Rodin's opinions
concerning the antique. It must be understood, then, that the Balzac and
even the Hugo, as well as some figures, were the result of all these
preceding reflections. "When I saw my Balzac brought into the yard from
the storehouse of the statues in order to go to the Salon," says Rodin, "I
had it purposely placed beside The Kiss, which had been finished rather
earlier. I was not dissatisfied with the simplified vigour of that group, to
which I had already applied these experiments. But I saw that it looked
slack, that it did not hold its place beside the Balzac as Michael Angelo's
torso does beside a fine antique, and then I understood that I was in the
right path. I have had hesitations, you know, pangs that I do not speak of.
And then, little by little, as I looked at nature, as I came to understand it
better and to throw aside my prejudices more frankly, I took courage. It
seemed to me that I was doing better. When I began I did skilful things,
things that were smartly done, but they were thin and dry, but I felt there
was something beyond, and that something is amplification. I only ventured
on it when I was over fifty years old, but do you not think I have a right
now to disregard the objections of the mob and the newspapers? I have
taken time to know why I was doing as I did. The essential things of my
modelling are there, and they would be there in less degree if I 'finished'
more. As to polishing or repolishing a toe or a curl, I find no interest in it; it
impairs the large line, the soul of what I desired to do, and I have nothing
more to say to the public on that point. There the line of demarcation
comes between the confidence that the public ought to have in me and the
concessions that I ought not to make to the public." To this firm and
discreet resolution Rodin has kept in all the works wrought out by him since
1898.
 PRIMITIVE MAN.

I cannot better set forth his opinions about the antique than by quoting the
following fragments from two articles that he wrote for the Musée, a review
of ancient art, in January and February, 1904; for Rodin sometimes writes,
quite unpretentiously, but with the same lucidity of thought that he shows
in his familiar conversation. One of these articles refers to a Greek statuette
in the Museum of Naples, the other to the lesson that the ancients give us.
"In the first place, the Antique is Life itself. Nothing is more alive, and no
style in the world has rendered life as it has. The ancients were the
greatest, most serious, and most admirable observers of nature who have
ever existed. The antique was able to render life because the ancients saw
the essential thing in it—large blocks. They confined themselves to the
large shadows cast by these large blocks, and as truth itself lies in that,
their figures being so made could never be feeble. Moreover, the antique is
simple, and that gives it astonishing energy. And then there is much more
study in it than appears; that was brought home to me once. When I had
finished my Age of Brass, I went to Italy and I found an Apollo whose leg
was in exactly the same position as one in The Age of Brass that had taken
me six months' work. Then I saw that though on the surface everything
seems to be done at a stroke, in reality all the muscles are built up and one
sees the details come to light one by one. That is because the ancients
studied everything in its successive profiles, because in any figure and
every part of a figure no profile is like another; when each has been studied
separately the whole appears simple and alive.
"The great error of the neo-Greek school is really this: it is not type that is
antique, but modelling. For want of having understood that, the neo-Greek
school has produced nothing but papier-mâché. It is bad to put the antique
before beginners; one should end, not begin with it. If you wanted to teach
someone to eat, you would give him fresh food, that he might learn to
chew; it would never occur to you to give him food already triturated to
exercise his teeth upon. Well, when you want to teach sculpture to anyone,
set him face to face with nature, and when he has gained plenty of power
to deal with nature, then say to him: 'Now, here is what the antique has
done.' And that will give him a new source of energy. Whereas if you give
the antique to the beginner who has never struggled with nature, he does
not understand anything about it, and loses his individuality over it. You
make a plagiarist of him, and instead of making his own prayer to nature he
will repeat the prayer of the antique without understanding the words of it.
He will die an old pupil; he will not die a man.
"To teach the antique at the outset of a man's studies is to render the
antique incomprehensible. In the first place, no one can teach the antique,
it is not possible; that art of truth and simplicity cannot be taught. The
sculptor works from nature, and afterwards he goes to look, in the galleries,
and see how the antique rendered what he has been trying for from the
life. But if he goes straight to the antique, shutting his eyes to nature, as
the antique has always been done from nature, our sculptor will only be
able to carry that vision into his own work in a factitious way; he will be
neither antique nor modern, but bad.
"A man may do antique work in our day, not in the false sense of producing
the antique type, but in the true sense of modelling like the antique. Such a
man (painter, etcher, or sculptor) will take nature, and if he has the power
of the antique he will produce antique work, which will entirely disagree
with what is taught as such, but will agree with that in the museums. The
'École' begins at the end; when a man begins with nature, he may go on to
the most improbable inventions; the antiques themselves show that. Do
you know of anything more impossible than the centaur? But is there
anything finer in Olympia? The ancients knew nature so well that they
became her fellow-workers and created, not phantoms, but beings that
were alive in spite of physical impossibilities. To my mind it would be better
not to study the antique than to study it wrong. It is not the artist's
alphabet, but the reward of his work. The command which it gives us is not
to copy it, but to do like it.
 YOUNG WOMAN BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL COUNCIL.

"To say that the antiques, which portray the plain marvel of life, are
beautiful is a superficial sort of praise. Beauty is not the starting-point, but
the point of arrival; a thing can only be beautiful if it is true. Truth itself is
only a complete harmony, and harmony is finally only a bundle of utilities.
The miracle of life could not be perpetuated but for the constant renewal of
universal balance. The ancients felt that vast rhythm, and their art, being
modelled upon it, appears to us as a natural and sublime expression of
beauty.... One of the ancients made a statue. How did he set about it? It is
useless to bring in rules that only grew up in the brains of commentators
dissecting a series of works, centuries afterwards. The antique remains
uncomprehended because we have not a simple enough spirit. It is not by
studying the antique that we shall learn its secret; in order to understand,
not its nomenclature, but its spirit, we must begin by studying nature.
Rembrandt cannot be understood by copying him at the Louvre, he can
only be understood when we travel through nature to him. Well, nature is
always there, waiting patiently for antiques to be made afresh; the model is
there waiting for someone to come at last, no matter whence. For it is an
error to think the antique comes from the south: it comes from everywhere.
The antique can be produced from a Dutch woman or an American woman;
the type is nothing, the modelling is everything.
"What makes the strength of the antique is the plan, the connection of all
the profiles. The neo-Greeks say: 'The antiques are line, and their works, in
which all the lines, except two, dance about, show their error. The antiques,
we will say, are lines or rather plan. Look at an antique; you can guess the
full face from the profile. The eye cannot grasp the shape on the opposite
side to that which it beholds, but it deduces it from this side: walk round,
and the study of the profiles will afford you an irrefragable proof by rule of
three. The sculptor swells the half-tones by slight exaggerations, so as to
heighten the light by a tone. The drapery lives; like the body that it hides, it
receives life from that body without needing the subterfuge of wetted
drapery.'[7]
"There is in the antiques an astonishing mystery of life which causes all
idea of dimension to disappear. A figure an inch or two high might just as
well be life-size; when a thing is well organised, the greatness is in the
modelling and not in the size. If one were to photograph a Tanagra figure
 [5] The word exalté has in this use no precise equivalent in English.
"Enthusiast," as the eighteenth century knew the word—that is, with the
infusion of a touch of lunacy—conies perhaps nearest.—TRANS.
[6] An observation noted by Mlle. Judith Cladel in her curious volume,
Rodin, drawn from life. (Éditions de La Plume, 1903.)
[7] Loïe Fuller has obtained, by means of stuffs not wetted, the effects
that the 'École' loves, because her plastic dance is logically derived from
nature.

IV

WORKS SINCE THE "BALZAC"—SMALL WORKS IN MARBLE—PLAN

OF THE MONUMENT TO LABOUR—DRAWINGS AND ETCHINGS

"I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.
I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat
better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation....
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist ... must not be hindered
by the name of goodness, but must inquire if it be goodness. Nothing is at
last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and
you shall have the suffrage of the world."
I quoted these high-minded words of Emerson's to Rodin at the time of the
Balzac incident. "They are," I said to him, "the very epigraph of your whole
life." Nor have they ceased to epitomise the man and the artist. From the
time of the Balzac Rodin's work has proceeded very regularly and on the
same principles. The Victor Hugo is being finished in marble, in its two
versions, in the studio of the Rue de l'Université. The group in which Hugo,
his extended arm commanding silence of the waves, sits surrounded by
Muses is almost ready; the other, in which Hugo, dreamily listening to the
counsels of Iris, stands on the edge of a rock washed by waves, amid which
Nereids are entwined, is not quite so far advanced. The Gate of Hell is
ready to receive its finally chosen and ordered figures. In the Salon of 1902
Rodin exhibited the three Shades from its summit, inspired by the
celebrated Lasciate ogni speransa. In 1900 Rodin only showed two or three
old productions at the Universal Exhibition, because his work was collected
in a special pavilion at the Rond-point de l'Alma, the concession of which
pavilion was made uncomfortable for him by his colleagues, so much so
that the artist was obliged to remove on the very day of closing, with less
delay and consideration allowed to him than to the most unimportant
industrial exhibitor. This special exhibition was, nevertheless, a great
international success for Rodin, and the amazing development of his fame
may be said to date from it. Before 1900 Rodin stood in the position of an
exceptional artist, celebrated but envied, isolated and challenged, whose
relations with the Government were strained, whom a minority upheld, but
on whom the official world looked coldly. Since that time his eminence is so
firmly established that he now holds the rank that Puvis de Chavannes held
in the estimation of all artists. His triumphant journey to Prague (1901-2),
London's enthusiastic reception, and Rodin's recent election to be President
of the Society over which Whistler presided, have finally given him the
acknowledgment so long looked for. In 1903 his marble bust of Hugo
aroused enthusiasm, and at the Salon of 1904 the colossal bronze Thinker
had a most flattering reception, and disarmed the last of his former
detractors.
A woman's bust accompanied The Thinker to the Salon. Rodin, who does
portraits now and again, had previously made an admirable one of Mme.
Fenaille, wife of the art-patron who had been of such great service to him;
and he is attempting a curious variation of it. He has just finished a bust of
a helmeted Minerva, as impressive as a Donatello, and this, too, is a
portrait.
Various works have been produced by Rodin since the Balzac, in addition to
the Monument of President Sarmiento, which shows an admirable bas-relief
of a radiant Apollo. These works are nearly all in marble, and small. It is
almost impossible to describe and classify them; a much larger book would
be required, and my main purpose here has been to give a general idea of
Rodin's art and an explanation of principles. I have spoken about some of
his poems of the flesh, especially that Eternal Idol, which will be the glory
of thought in modern sculpture. Rodin's recent works in marble have the
same inspiration. Some demand special notice: The Hand of God, a gigantic
hand, between the fingers of which, and amid a handful of clay, two beings
are tenderly embracing; Icarus, falling from the sky to be crushed on the
earth amid his whirling wings; several groups of lovers, entwined, and
breathing immeasurable tenderness, the most celebrated of which is Spring
or Love and Psyche. Another Psyche, alone, is discovering Love asleep, with
extraordinary restrained emotion; and there are several attempts at Poets
and Muses, embracing or consoling one another, as well as a splendid
sketch of the Magdalen wiping Christ's Body with her Hair. Rodin has thus
sometimes touched religious subjects, but with an undogmatic symbolism,
philosophic and wide. We may also enumerate another version in marble of
the Nereids of the Hugo monument, a winged Inspiration coming to
breathe upon the sleeping poet, and holding back the tips of her wings with
one hand lest she should make a sound in closing them; a faun drawing
towards him a nymph, who struggles in silent, fierce resistance; two high-
reliefs of Summer and Autumn in stone; tall women with children, intended
for the town of Evian, where Baron Vitta is accumulating treasures of
modern art; Pygmalion beholding his statue come to life, who, as soon as
she feels herself live, turns from him with a surprising movement of
coquetry and aversion. Such works as these cannot be described in words.
In them Rodin has excelled to an unparalleled degree in rendering the
profoundest psychological complexities, refined intentions, and the
hesitations of feeling. I will further note a sketch of Sappho, seated at rest,
with her arms leaning upon two little naked women, which is a work
inspired equally by the Greeks and by the eighteenth century; it bears
witness to the artist's wish of avoiding the massive, and making as many
holes as possible within the general block, so as to give lightness and to
allow a circulation of light, as the Greeks did in works that were meant to
stand against a background of sea or of sky. Many studies of men and
women crouching, or squatting, in curious attitudes, recall the art of the
Japanese bronzes, which Rodin immensely admires. We must further note
some groups of Women Damned, in which Rodin's art attains the highest
point of voluptuous tension, audacious suggestiveness, and tragic
eagerness of the flesh aspiring to impossible delight. This whole world of
figures is ruled by the same lyrical and poetic imagination, the same
symbolism incarnated in impeccable forms. Everywhere we find the same
nervous art, agitating, sad, and ardent in its voluptuous character,
expressing the insatiability of human souls; the aspiration of a troubled time
towards an ideality which would deliver it from the solicitations of
pessimism; the hope of escape by the way of desire; and love sought for in
the over-excitement of neurosis. Rodin, gloomy psychologist of passion,
understands the disease of the age, and at the same time pities it; a true
thinker, he extracts its mournful beauty without ceasing to retain faith,
admiration, and affection for the human creature. Bending over life and
over his work, he is himself his own Thinker, attentive and reverent before
an unknown and terrible divinity. Never did any other sculptor attempt to
vivify his art with such intellectual superiority and by such meditations, and
Rodin is at once the most realistic and most metaphysical of poets in stone
and bronze.
 ISIS

Two or three works of more important dimensions stand out from his recent
productions; besides a nude female torso (in bronze) of startling
truthfulness, and two plaster studies that astonished at the Salons, and
besides The Christian Martyr, so masterly in its modelling, Rodin has
continued to work at his Ugolino, taken out of The Gate of Hell, and has put
the finishing touch to two plans. One of these is the Monument to Labour, a
grand conception, which one may dream of seeing carried out and rising up
in some square of busy Paris, but which want of money will prevent from
ever being realised. It is a column upon a vast rectangular base, with a
crypt in it. Two colossal figures of Night and Day would stand at the
entrance. In the crypt would be shown, in bas-relief, different subterranean
works—mining, etc. Around the column would run a covered spiral
staircase, and upon the column itself would be figured in bas-reliefs all the
various manifestations of labour, so that as one ascended the stairs all the
divers phases of human genius could be successively studied. On the top
would hover the Benedictions, two—winged spirits, descended from
heaven, which are already executed in marble on a small scale, and are
among Rodin's finest conceptions. This colossal project was conceived as
long ago as 1897. The rough model is in the studio at Meudon-Val-Fleury.
 NUDE STUDY

The monument to Puvis de Chavannes was entrusted to his friend Rodin,

and is already finished. Rodin conceived it in an original and charming way.
Instead of making the customary statue, he considered the purely Greek
quality of Puvis' genius and chose to pay homage to him in a form
reproduced from the antique. The bust of the great painter is placed on a
plain table, as the ancients placed those of their dead upon little domestic
altars. A fine tree loaded with fruit bends over and shades the head.
Leaning on the table behind the bust is a beautiful naked youth, who sits
dreaming in a well-chosen supple attitude. The whole design is intimate,
gentle, and pure. Placed on the ground in a garden this votive monument
would show how much delicacy and caressing lightness sometimes lies in
Rodin's sombre and pathetic thoughts.
Another important group is that of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus has
fallen on one knee and is lifting his great lyre towards the gods whom he
has just implored. Above him, almost on his back, suspended in a way that
would appear to contradict the laws of equilibrium and the material
conditions of sculpture, soars Eurydice, compassionate and almost
vaporous, truly an immaterial shade, with a smile of despair. I regret that
the unfinished condition of this model does not allow me to publish a
photograph of it, for nothing would give a clearer impression of Rodin's
originality in the matter of contour and in the mutual relation of figures.
The extreme freedom of his attitudes and his caprices of balance are,
indeed, the newest features that he has brought into his art and are not to
be found in anyone else in any country or time. In these is his true
signature, and by them his work might be recognised among a hundred
statues of all periods. As to the expressive beauty of the faces and bodies,
that is supreme. No one has better comprehended than Rodin all that can
be rendered by the naked human body and all the intellectual significations
that it can hide. The nude is to Rodin a whole language.
In his latest spiritualised works there is something Correggio-like in the
vibration of light upon the softened forms and amplified surfaces. They
suggest the Antiope, at once soft and muscular, and Rodin often speaks of
"morbidezza" as a quality which he no longer distrusts, whereas he formerly
banished it from his ascetic, sinewy, and dry figures. He gives his women
the pulpy flesh of fruits. The lines of landscape seem to him to correspond
to the planes of the body; he lately said to me that since he has lived at
Meudon, opposite the flowing Seine, the wooded hills and the fields, he has
found useful resemblances between the modelling of the body and that of a
horizon. I have even once suggested to him the title of "The Hill" for the
body of a young man reclining, the outline of which did in truth resemble
the undulations of a hill, and he retained the name and the analogy, for he
delights in everything that binds the human being to the earth, and, like a
true metaphysician, conceives of nothing isolated or distinct in nature.
I come now to Rodin's drawings, drawings which were not made to be
shown, but which, having nevertheless become known, have surprised and
puzzled people. Rodin's drawings, like some other drawings by sculptors,
are not themselves works of art; they are thoughts noted down, and are
not comprehensible unless they are seen with the statues of which they
indicate the first idea, or some variation.
Rodin has published some of his sketches; and has produced some dry-
points (in particular the Ronde,[1] Antonin Proust, the three portraits of
Henry Becque, full face and two profiles upon the same sheet, and two
heads of Hugo), some drawings for books by M. Mirbeau and M. Bergerat,
and a complete set of illustrations of the Fleurs du Mal, in the form of
marginal drawings for a unique copy belonging to M. Gallimard. Many
drawings in black or colour have been published (by the clever lithographer
Clot), and M. Fenaille has superintended an admirable edition de luxe of
142 drawings by Rodin.[2] Notwithstanding this partial publicity, these
works must be considered as standing apart; and to consider them by
themselves would actually be to injure Rodin with the public at large, since
they form an integral part of his statues. For this reason I have not chosen
to reproduce any of them here, studies so purely professional not seeming
to fall within the scope of a work intended to give a general idea of an
artist's work.
Having said so much, I wish to dwell upon the great beauty of these
drawings—a special and terrible beauty. Many deal with Dante. Rodin did
some painting under Lecoq de Boisbaudron, landscapes, a portrait of his
father, and sketches after Rubens; but there has never been any danger of
painting intruding upon his vocation, and his sketches rapidly became
nothing but notes for sculpture. The objective reality of his Dantesque
figures is vague, if their subjective reality is intense. Rodin, anxious to note
down his impressions, and not to illustrate, made his sketches into a sort of
passionate writing, only devoting himself to the scheme and to the
contrasts of black and white, and neglecting every detail. In these violent
washes, these pencillings and pen-scribbles, the spectator who is not
forewarned sees nothing, but the lover of art, who knows beforehand what
to seek, follows the creative thought. Nothing can be less like what is
generally known as "a drawing." After the regular drawings, the "painter's
drawings" of his first period, which have but a restricted interest, and which
are no longer known, those of his second manner are confusions of light
and shadow, and show fantastically. I will quote at this point a passage
from an essay by M. Clément Jasmin, a discerning critic, whose noisy rivals
do not give him his due place, and who has described these works
excellently.
"These sketches are altogether the work of a sculptor, even in their colour,
which seems to have sunk into plaster or clay, and especially in the
firmness of their modelling, which is imparted by shaded touches of body-
colour, on grey paper, or rendered by spaces left white. These blanks, these
white spaces, are the extreme point of the modelling, the 'high light' of
some projection, which lower down is wrapped in half-tints that carry the
eye to the shadows of the inflections or the hollows. There is a constant
relation between the contour and the interior modelling. A thrill is
communicated by the fantastic lighting of some sketches. Rodin adds
further strength to this dramatic distribution of lights and shadows by one
or two tones that accentuate the impression or fix a plan. Often his ink will
become blue or yellow, (water-colours, sepia, or coloured inks being
employed), in order to settle a value or intensify a feeling. Such is the case
in the Fenaille publication, with the gloomy red in the face of the Ugolino,
of the Dantesque Mahomet, whose entrails are hanging out, and of some
other figures dashed in, in black, on a violet background. One plainly feels
the material in which the work, of which the sketch is the first idea, will be
executed. It is always a sculptor who is at work, even when he exchanges
the chisel for the pen or the brush."
Painters would scorn these drawings. They commonly believe that sculptors
cannot express upon a plane surface the mass and movement of a body. In
reality a painter's sketch and a sculptor's sketch differ in intention and
execution. Rodin's are translations of movements, in no way decorative and
not attempting to express either modelling or detail, but, if we may say so,
the abstract geometry, the thought that commands the movement. The use
of coloured inks, which are solely meant to modify certain values that black
or white would not express to Rodin's mind, has given rise to mistakes.
These colours are not there to express real tints, as is the case in ordinary
drawings thus touched up; inaccurate things have been said about these
colourings, and about the fantastic and almost Japanese appearance of
some of the plates. Rodin is certainly not thinking of prints in colour. He
makes these notes instinctively, and displays not so much a deliberate
thought as a natural faculty of transcription.
In his early drawings Rodin refers to—for I must insist upon the point that
the drawings do not represent things—many of Dante's persons and many
fanciful animals, and later, to his statues. Now he does not draw at all from
literary impressions, but solely from the living model. He uses ordinary
cheap paper, a pencil or a pen; he makes his model take some transitory,
absolutely free position, often in the rest between two sittings, and rapidly
draws contour without taking his eyes from the model and without looking
at his sketch. Sometimes the stroke will fall upon emptiness, the sheet of
paper will be too small, a head or a limb will fail to find its place. Naturally
this instantaneous sketch will be deformed in the most unexpected way;
the proportions are false, but the scheme of the contour and the modelling
of each piece are true. Often the hurrying pencil will miss the curve of a
breast or a leg. Then the artist will return to that point with hasty,
intermingled, impatient strokes that play around the true line. His only
concern is to fix the first view, the absolutely living impression. Afterwards,
in tracing his sketch, he rectifies, but his chief aim is to amplify the
impression of the life, taken spontaneously, according to his principle of
enlarging the form, in order to place it better in the atmosphere (about in
the proportion of 5/4 instead of 4/4). Then he connects the contours and
further enlarges the modelling, filling the outline with a wash of burnt-
sienna, which gives the general value, or sometimes with blue or red water-
colour. Rodin likes this practice in catching movements, and he has in his
studio hundreds of drawings of this kind that differ from his early ones.
Those aimed at the imaginative transcription of tragic and literary elements
under strange illuminations, and were almost like the drawings of Odilon
Redon; the later ones are merely graphic notes of movements, and are
incapable of having any direct aim or meaning.
I must add a few words upon a delicate point of which I should not have
spoken if others had not spoken mistakenly upon the subject. Rodin's
drawings, especially those of the present time, have shocked some people
who have seen them by their licentious character. Why should we assume
embarrassment in explaining this? In all Rodin's work there is a profound
and violent sense of the voluptuous, and the stern painter of the vices and
damnations of hell does not need to think of prudery. The elevation and
dramatic character of his conceptions clothe the most daring attitudes with
the severe chastity of the beautiful. In his sketches, made for himself alone,
and in the privacy of his studio, Rodin no more fears erotic positions than
did Hokusai. Beneath the original animality he perceives nature; and
feminine sexuality, its movements, and impulses interest him, because
therein woman is psychologically revealed. Everything, in physical desire,
that exalts, maddens, contorts, and fevers the human body is, for the
sculptor, the object of an intensely interested study that he does not
communicate to the general public; nor is he the only one among the great
artists of form whom the erotic has interested from this point of view. Only
mediocre minds and minds capable of low intentions see anything low in
the movements of life. Rodin's studies from the model, naked and free,
without spectators, in the serious presence of work, never sully his grand
and melancholy inspiration; and his daring art is assuredly that which most
leads away the beholder from erotic ideas, because it notes in every human
being the melancholy of the insatiable, and makes the pleasure of the
senses a suffering of the flesh and the spirit. By this point he touches the
profound morality of art, and his consciousness is free from any
equivocation. The recent drawings in which he catches the animal attitudes
of the model are thus no more questionable, from the delicate point of view
of which I am speaking, than anatomical plates, or the sad immodesties of
a post-mortem examination. He adds to them the power of expressing
passion with which he is endowed, but since he only shows these drawings
to friends and artists in whom nudity does not arouse silly thoughts, this
concerns no one else. A comparison cannot even be ventured between
these drawings and the masterly etchings of Rops, which are deliberate
illustrations of licentious subjects, relieved only by beauty of execution, and
which should only be shown with express reservations. Rodin admires
certain bronzes in the secret museum at Naples, and certain Japanese
prints, because in these, too, art has done its work by expressing a secret
and essential spring of the nervous and psychological life of humanity; a
fierce and serious subject which only fools consider laughable or indecent,
because their minds approach it with indecorum and ridicule. But I do not
know that Rodin ever even yielded to the fancy of modelling one of these
subjects for himself, as Rubens and many others did not forbid themselves
to do. It is time, therefore, to have done with this question in regard to the
great French sculptor. I do not know for whom he intends these recent
drawings, a whole framed collection of which occupies one of the
storerooms of his country house. Perhaps he will have them destroyed; in
any case, they are but studies of movements and masses, and in no way
direct representations of life.
Rodin's drawings are "rough drafts" to be compared with those of a writer.
Some are very impressive, and all constitute precious evidence of his
psychological preoccupations and of his desire for simplification. But they
remain on the margin of his work, and neither the public nor the critics
have those rights over them that belong to biographers and friends. That is
a point to be plainly specified, and I desire to repeat that that is the reason
this book contains none of them.
[1] This word may mean either a certain sort of dance, or the "round" of
a patrol.—TRANS.
[2] Album of 142 sketches, reproduced in heliogravure by M. Manzi and
published by Goupil, 1897. These sketches in wash or colour have been
selected according to the advice of M. Fenaille, their owner, who lent
them, from the most imaginative of Rodin's drawings in his second
manner.

V.

RODIN'S PRIVATE LIFE—HIS PERSON, STUDIO, AND HOME—HIS

INFLUENCE; SCULPTORS INSPIRED BY HIS IDEAS—RODIN'S PLACE
IN THE FRENCH SCHOOL—HIS PRESENT POSITION IN RESPECT TO
ACADEMIC SCULPTURE

Auguste Rodin is in person a man of middle height, with an enormous head

upon a massive torso. At first sight one sees nothing of him but this leonine
bust, the head with its strong nose, flowing grey beard, and small, keen,
light-coloured eyes, slightly veiled by short sight and by a gentle irony. The
impression of power is accentuated by the rolling gait, the rocky aspect of
the troubled brow under the rough brush of hair, the bony thickness of the
aquiline nose and the ample curls of beard. But the first impression is partly
contradicted by the reticent line of the mouth, the quick look, penetrating,
simple, and arch, (one of the most composite glances I have ever seen),
and especially by the voice, which is hollow, not easily modulated, with
deep inflections and sudden returns to a dental pronunciation, and of which
the meaning and intention are further modified by certain very expressive
tossings of the head. He appears simple, precise, reserved, courteous, and
cordial, without liveliness. Little by little his shyness gives place to a calm
and remarkable tone of authority. He is neither emphatic nor awkward, and
would seem rather dispirited than inspired. An immense energy breathes in
his sober and measured gestures. The slowness and apparent
embarrassment of his speech and the pauses in his conversation give
especial significance to what he says; moreover, Rodin has acquired of late
years a genuine case as a talker and even as a writer, which previously he
did not possess. I was intimately acquainted with Stéphane Mallarmé, who,
measured by Rodin, was incomparably eloquent, and I often associate
these two men in my thoughts. The voices were alike, and Rodin, too, with
his improvised phrases, has the same veiled circumspect way of speech,
hitting suddenly upon words that illuminate the idea.
 AUGUSTE RODIN

Rodin, in speaking of any work of his, has a way of explaining it that is very
elliptical, but very clear, and which has caused some brilliant chatterers to
say, because he did not offer a prolix commentary, that he did not know
what he had done. In reality he utters the essential, and his gesture, which
seems to model his thought in space, completes his words. He looks
lovingly on his creations, and sometimes seems to meditate in
astonishment at the idea of having created them; he speaks of them as
though they existed apart from himself.
Gradually, beneath Rodin's essential simplicity, one discovers features that
were at first hidden; he is ironical, sensuous, nervous, proud. He contains
as possibilities all the passions that he expresses with so vibrating a
magnificence, and one begins to perceive the secret links between this
calm, almost cheerful man and the art that he reveals. At certain moments
his clear and rather vague eyes become full of phosphorescent points, the
face grows sardonic and almost faunlike; at others it saddens and discloses
a sickness for infinity. This man is the comrade of his dumb white creatures;
he loves them, follows their abstract life, has moral obligations towards
them. Fundamentally the one thing with which Rodin is really concerned is
the life of permanent forms. Of late celebrity, age, and experience have
disposed him to become an adviser, a master, and he has begun to talk
æsthetics. But his ideas and opinions are restricted. He perceives human
beings only very summarily, his cordiality is a way of fulfilling his social
duties hastily. He has, if I may venture the expression, very fine moral
antennae, and they serve to recognise the persons whom he will like. Very
capable of friendship, Rodin reduces friendship to tacit agreements upon
the essential subjects of thought, and it is only if one meets him upon one
of these points that one takes a place in his remembrance or his liking. He
does not put his faith in individuals, but in general ideas. He loves nothing
but his work, and endures everything else with civil boredom. He has a
horror of debates and disturbances. I have never heard him speak ill of bad
artists; he neglects, but does not criticise. He has a silent humour which
leads him to make busts of official and mediocre sculptors, with an amusing
good grace. Uncompromising in everything that touches his art, Rodin has
throughout his whole career endured severe struggles and grave injustices,
and, too proud to dispute, has never shown his secret revolts. At the time
when the Balzac was refused all Rodin's friends said to him: "Resist, force
your work upon them; you ought, for the work's sake, and a court would
surely decide for you, for your agreement is definitely in your favour." He
listened and thanked them, always good-tempered, and then withdrew his
statue without saying anything.
It is not weakness, for Rodin has had an excessively hard life and is strong
and patient; it is dignity of the inner life and profound indifference for the
life about him. Rodin is a high dignitary of the Legion of Honour, a president
of the judges of sculpture of an important society of artists (the Société
Nationale), he is honoured all over Europe, has been received in England as
a genius, and has succeeded Whistler as the head of a chosen band of
artists; but he remains the man that he was when he was unknown and
poor in his solitude at Brussels.
He likes few things, but likes those thoroughly. He reads little, but what he
reads strikes home to him as to no one else; Baudelaire and Rousseau, in
whom he delights, are instances. He is passionately fond of music,
especially of Gluck, but seldom speaks of it. He simplifies everything, sees
only the main lines in morality as in art, lives by two or three principles, and
has an aversion for everything that is not essential.
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