Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1911 (Heft 34-35))

RODIN AND THE ETERNALITY OF
THE PAGAN SOUL!

WHAT is pagan ecstasy ? What is the meaning of that deathless
passion that has come to flower in the sublime art of Rodin and
Matisse ?
It is this: The perception of the mystery of surfaces; the delirious
delight of touch; the transports of joy bred of the melodies of motion; the
worship of Venus for the sake of her divine body, that body that is a love-
canticle of mystic lines and shadows.
And again it is this: The adventure of the mind in matter; the adventure
of the senses in air, water and sunlight; the deliria of creation; the divinizing
of the sensual and the materializing of the sensuous.
The Pagan Spirit in art, that eternal renaissance of Passion and Beauty,
dethroning in its wild Dionysian frenzy all the anemic gods of renunciant
impotents, skirts the coasts of strange lands, houses itself in unfamiliar moods,
forages on all men’s thoughts. It mints the gold and silver of daily experience
in the smithies of its passionate will, and forth from those molds come the
things of nameless beauty that Phidias, Leonardo, Rodin and Matisse have
given us.
The Pagan Spirit pillages life and marauds on the last secrets of the Ineff-
able God—the Ineffable God of open spaces, the God of light and laughter,
the God of color and sex, the God that halloos his invitation from every line
and pore and witching curve of woman’s body.
The miraculous! There is nothing but the miraculous. The miracu-
lous does not happen now and then. The miraculous is—ask Rodin whether
he believes in miracles and his answer would be: “Am I not alive?” The
pagan attitude, then, assumes the miracle of beauty and life. It opens its
eyes on the universe with wonder, amazement and childish delight graven
there.
All matter is haunted. Everything that is is a perpetual miraculous
epiphany. Winter is the womb of springtime. Withered branches with the
ice glittering upon them hold latent within them the perfumed rose. The atom
is a tiny house with many ghosts. Sunlight on my shoe is inexplicable. The
joy that comes to me from the bodies of nude women is religious. Sunlight
is haunted; else how came this world to be ?
So the souls of those great wonder-working magicians, the great artists,
stand swathed in this sense of elemental mystery, translating, with brush or
chisel, all things back to their private, original glamour, and with the witch-
craft of this holy pagan innocence unwinding the cords of complexity that
use and wont and the emasculating Christian virtues have wound round and
round the Holy Ghost of Beauty.
By the mechanism of the association of ideas we generally ally the word
“paganism” with the words “ancient Greece.” But that admirable flowering
of the human spirit—those few centuries wherein Mind and Matter played the
impenitent prodigal with its own native inheritances—was no isolated phenom-