Sculpture is like dramatic art, at once the most difficult and the easiest of all the arts. Copy a model and the work is completed, but to impart a soul into it, to construct a type by making the representation of one man or one woman, that is to commit Prometheus’ sin.* Successes of this order have been achieved in the annals of sculpture, just as there have been poets in the course of human history. Michelangelo, Michel Columb, Jean Goujon, Phidias, Praxiteles, Polyclitus, Puget, Canova, Albrecht Dürer, are the brothers of Milton, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Tasso, Homer, and Molière. Their work is so magnificent that one statue is enough to make a man immortal, just as the characters of Figaro,* Lovelace,* and Manon Lescaut* were enough to immortalize Beaumarchais, Richardson, and the Abbé Prévost.
Superficial people (and there are far too many of them among artists) have said that the only worthwhile sculpture is in the nude, that it died with Greece, and that modern dress makes it impossible.
But, for one thing, sculptors of ancient times made sublime statues fully draped, like the Polymnia* the Julia,* etc. and we have not found a tenth of their works. And then, true art lovers have but to go to Florence to see Michelangelo’s Thinker, or to Mainz Cathedral to see the Virgin of Albrecht Dürer who, out of ebony, has made a living woman beneath her triple layer of robes, with hair as softly waving and as easy to dress as any a lady’s maid ever combed. Let the ignorant hasten to see these works and they will all realize that genius can put its stamp on a coat, a suit of armour, or a dress, and place a body within them, just as much as a man bears the mark of his temperament and habits on his clothes. Sculpture is the continual creation of this achievement, which in painting has one name and one name only, Raphael! The solution to this terrible problem is to be found in constant, unremitting work, for the material difficulties must be so completely mastered, the hand must be so disciplined, so alert and obedient, that the sculptor can have a heart-to-heart struggle with the intangible moral element that he must idealize in giving it material form.
If Paganini,* who expressed his soul through the strings of his violin, had spent three days without practising, he would have lost what he called the register of his instrument; that is what he called the bond that existed between the wood, the bow, the strings, and himself. If that union were dissolved, he would suddenly become an ordinary violinist.
Ceaseless work is the law of art, as it is of life, for art is the creation of an ideal of life. So great artists, like true poets, do not wait for order or customers. They produce today, tomorrow, all the time. Consequently they have a habit of work, a perpetual awareness of their difficulties, which keeps them in partnership with the muse and her creative forces. Canova used to live in his studio just as Voltaire lived in his study. Homer and Phidias must have lived in this way.
Wenceslas Steinbock was set on the difficult road travelled by these great men, a road which leads to the great heights of fame, when Lisbeth had kept him in chains in his garret. Happiness, in the shape of Hortense, had returned the poet to the state of idleness which is normal to artists, for their idleness is an occupation. It is like the pleasure of a pasha in his harem; they fondle ideas, they become drunk at the springs of the intellect. Great artists like Steinbock, totally absorbed in reverie, have rightly been called dreamers. These opium-eaters all sink into poverty, whereas, if they had been sustained by harsh circumstances, they would have been great men. These demi-artists are, moreover, charming; people like them and make them drunk with praise. They appear superior to real artists, who are taxed with egotism, unsociability, and rebellion against social conventions. And this is the reason why.
Great men belong to their creations. Their detachment from all other concerns, their devotion to work, stamps them as egotists in the eyes of fools who would like to see them dressed in smart clothes like men about town, performing the evolutions called social duties. People would like the lions of Atlas to be combed and perfumed like a marchioness’s lapdogs.
These men, who rarely encounter their few equals, fall into solitary, exclusive ways. They become incomprehensible to the majority, which is composed, as we know, of the foolish, the envious, the ignorant, and the superficial. Do you now understand a woman’s function in the life of one of these impressive, exceptional beings? A wife must be both what Lisbeth had been for five years and, in addition, give love, a humble, discreet love, always available, always smiling.
Hortense, having learned from her sufferings as a mother and harried by dire necessity, realized too late the mistakes which, out of excessive love, she had involuntarily committed; but like a true daughter of her mother, she was brokenhearted at the thought of worrying Wenceslas. She loved her dear poet too much to be his tormentor and she saw the time coming when poverty would catch up with her, her son, and her husband.