Study the Panther! by John Banville | The New York Review of Books

“When Rilke came to Paris he was still a High Romantic, brother-in-art to the likes of Novalis, Klopstock, and the Goethe of Young Werther. Rodin, almost offhandedly, pulled the young dreamer’s head out of the clouds and knocked some common sense into him. For the sculptor, work was everything: Il faut travailler—toujours travailler was his motto. As for inspiration, Rilke wrote, the mere possibility of it he “shakes off indulgently and with an ironic smile, suggesting that there is no such thing….” These assertions must have struck Rilke like thunderbolts. Suddenly it was not the emotion or the idea that mattered, but the thing.6 Rodin was, above all, a maker of things:

And this way of looking and of living is ingrained so firmly in him because he attained it as a craftman; as he was achieving in his art that element of infinite simplicity, of total indifference to subject matter, he was achieving in himself that great justice, that equilibrium in the face of the world that no name can shake. Since he had been granted the gift of seeing things in everything, he had also acquired the ability to construct things; and therein lies the greatness of his art.”

-Study the Panther! by John Banville | The New York Review of Books