Auguste Rodin

By Rainer Maria Rilke

"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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Sep 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9780486146294

Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875 and traveled throughout Europe for much of his adult life, returning frequently to Paris. There he came under the influence of the sculptor Auguste Rodin and produced much of his finest verse, most notably the two volumes of New Poems as well as the great modernist novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Among his other books of poems are The Book of Images and The Book of Hours. He lived the last years of his life in Switzerland, where he completed his two poetic masterworks, the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. He died of leukemia in December 1926.

Book preview

EMERSON

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