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

mankind would struggle, not against each other, but toward one and the same
end, the Beautiful, the True and other such vague capitalizations, looking as
usual for the ready accord and amplification of our thoughts which we usually
found in our sympathetic friend. Instead there was nothing but an indulgent
smile for over-zealous young energies. “Do you not see,” came the patient
reply, in the usual slow tones, “ that what you dream can never be ? After all,
society rightly understood is nothing but one huge structure, a building held
together like every other piece of architecture by opposing forces. Now, what
your socialist friends want is that all the forces should pull in the same direc-
tion. But in that case the building would fall.”
Views such as these by no means make Rodin an ultra-conservative, as some
of his biographers have stated. It is not with things as they are that he is content-
ed, but with the ultimate and fundamental conditions of the universe he is atone.
Surface conditions, which the usual interpretations of conservatism imply, have
nothing to do with such a conception, for it sees beyond these as unimportant
to the basic principles that are the final and only real governing forces. Butin
these principles he has an absolute faith. The structure of the universe rightly
understood is beautiful in all phases. That may fairly be said to be Rodin’s re-
ligion, for Nature, he believes, contains all things if we have but the eyes to see.
For the same reason it is unfair to think of Rodin as a materialist, as even
some of his friends are prone to do. To be sure, Rodin declares that he models
the world as he sees it, but it must be remembered that he sees with other eyes
than those of most of us. It is not the passing phenomena of Nature that in-
terest him, for this would result in nothing more than a mechanical art, but it is
the synthesis, the essential value of form, that he seeks and embodies. For him
there is a vein of glory which runs through all things, nor is it ever so deeply
hidden but that it can be seen in everything if only we have the patience to
search it out. To be sure it has been claimed, and justly, that the spiritual
side of things cannot be found in this way, that it is completely lost in model-
ling, and can be conveyed only by composition and line. Mr. Berenson, in one
of his admirable treatises on the Sienese and Florentines of the fourteenth
century, gives exactly this reason for the more religious quality in the paintings
of the former school. The Florentines, he rightly claims, tied themselves down
to earth by their superior knowledge of form and modelling, whereas the
Sienese, by a fine instinct for line and spacing, persuade us more readily of
the saintliness of their saints. And, triumphantly, Mr. Berenson points to the
Buddhist paintings of India and China as his final argument.
This law Rodin has set aside for himself, and through sheer force of
modelling alone, seeks to arrive at the god in man. His faith in this concep-
tion is so absolute that his whole work, his whole life, is based on it. He has
built himself no heaven in other regions, but sought to find and convey that
heaven lies about us here, and right or wrong, successful or not, one thing at
least is certain—when all sides of the question have been weighed, it must
remain the deeper faith, the greater glory, to take the world as it is and find
the eternal in it, than to seek for our realities in some fictitious atmosphere born
of the imagination.
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