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

Then came the mid-day meal, at which the master would preside, knowing
with fine instinct exactly how to draw out his guests of varying nationalities,
how to induce them to give themselves with much enthusiasm, often with bad
French that no one minded as long as the spirit was true. The dining-hall,
an expression of its owner, was as severely empty in effect as the rooms of the
Japanese. A single painting at one end by Falguiere, simple chairs, a table
whose only ornaments were a white cloth and a big bowl of pine boughs, but
everything, including the simple fare served by Madam Rodin, seemed right
and good, not forgetting the liqueur that withered your tongue as you spoke its
praises. Then followed an afternoon at Versailles when the fountains were
playing, and we wandered along shadowy aisles of trees and statues while
Rodin made the splendors of other days dance before our eyes by his rambling
reminiscences of their art and the conditions that made it possible.
For this man, who seems to have lived such a narrow life, touches hands
with all ages, with most races, and with the various classes in the modern
social state,through absolute devotion and concentration in the single pursuit
of his existence—the understanding and execution of his artistic conceptions.
Through this medium he sees the world, past and present, and knowing this
one field thoroughly, he has found that its fundamental laws are universal
truths and may be applied to all ages and all conditions of life. He has learned
to see his fellow-men of all times with startling accuracy, with what one might
better term startling familiarity, especially if their lives, like his, have been
battling, creative existences. If they too have slept “with the half of a broken
hope for a pillow at night,” he can feel his way to their souls with absolute
certainty, entertain for them the deepest sympathy, and if he be in the mood,
make them live again for you as few of their biographers have succeeded in
doing. It was so he made Balzac rise again for us this late Spring evening at
Versailles, as we sat by the long, shadowy waters of the lake eating our evening
meal. All the struggles, the defeat, the victories of the great man’s most
intimate self were paraded before our eyes. We were made to follow him in
his madness and ecstasies, his sublimity and his despair—until under the
magic of the narration, the colossal lines of Rodin’s “Balzac” seemed to form
themselves out of the mists that were setting over the lake and there came to us
an understanding and an awe of that gigantic conception such as we had never
had before. The realization came: This is Balzac—Balzac depicted by the
only man of our age who was worthy; Balzac as the world will know him in
the future when time has taught its eyes to see.
By the same process of thinking the universe in which he lives assumes an
astounding clarity. To him life is not the ununderstandable thing, the despair-
ing mass of riddles that it becomes to most of us, but something clearly under-
stood in the light of his own experience. I remember that during some strikes
and socialistic upheavals that were taking place in Paris our sympathies,
with the enthusiasm and the naturally rebellious temperament of youth, went
out to the strikers, whom we considered the wronged class, without much
thought or deliberation on the particular conditions. We spoke of the wrongs
of the present day, of the longed-for millennium to come, of the time when all
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