Paris and the Social Revolution Part 41

Sem portrays relentlessly the rottenness of society, but draws no conclusions therefrom; Cappiello has no social significance, whatever his artistic significance may be; and Guillaume, who produces captivating _demi-mondaines_ by the yard, has little more social significance, although as ill.u.s.trator he has cleverly seconded Courteline in poking good-natured fun at the army.

Caran d'Ache gives himself by preference to gleeful satire of the follies, frailties, and foibles of the time; but he can be tragic and redoubtable, when he chooses, in the denunciation of its injustices and crimes.

Abel Faivre, who is very much the sort of a caricaturist one fancies Rubens might have been, had Rubens taken to caricature, is slowly, but surely, justifying his seemingly gratuitous grossness by evidences of an uncommon insight into human nature and of a far-reaching philosophical purpose.

Leandre, charming, canny, and critical, easily first of living portrait-caricaturists, amuses himself and his const.i.tuency hugely with the imbecilities, vanities, and idiosyncrasies of public men, particularly of parliamentarians. He was one of the ill.u.s.trators of the _Feuilles de Zo d'Axa_, and contributes irregularly to the anti-bourgeois sheets, but does not appear to be an unequivocal social revolutionist.

Forain, a consummate synthesiser, who can express more with a minimum of strokes than any Frenchman living, at the beginning of his career was a fierce exposer of the emptiness and crookedness of politicians, financiers, and swells, and a convincing pleader for justice to the oppressed. His sympathies have gone out to the people more rarely since.

With prosperity he has become something of a swell himself, but he still electrifies Paris now and then with a drawing whose poignancy shows plainly that his heart has not s.h.i.+fted its position. Crueler than Leandre,-cruelest, in fact, of all the men of his profession,-he is more dreaded by the politicians than any other artist in Paris. As a partisan of anti-Semitism, Forain has latterly directed most of his political caricatures against those whom he considers, rightly or wrongly, to be the tools of the Jews.

Hermann-Paul, Steinlen, and Willette[135] are out-and-out social revolutionists.

Hermann-Paul provides all the ill.u.s.trations for _L'Officiel_, which "does not pretend," says its editor Franc-Nohain, "to be funnier than the _Journal Officiel_ of the French Republic." He was an ill.u.s.trator of the _Feuilles de Zo d'Axa_, and has partic.i.p.ated in the pictorial propaganda of _Les Temps Nouveaux_. He was one of the fiercest attackers of the army during the Dreyfus affair, and his specialty-if a man of such a wide range of antipathies as he may be said to have a specialty-is the exposure of the horrors of war. The military atrocities which have been perpetrated during the last few years, and which are still being perpetrated in various quarters of the globe, have in him an ungullible and indefatigable antagonist.

Willette's grace is proverbial. In his lighter moods he is, with a large allowance of course, a sort of modern Boucher or Watteau. He is prodigal to the last degree of dainty nymphs and G.o.ddesses and all manner of delicate nudities, of playful elves, sprites, and cupids, of swans and doves, of nave _porcelaine-de-Saxe_ shepherdesses, irresponsible fauns and wily satyrs, of lamb-like gambols, young loves, and spring-time settings; while his pale Pierrots and Pierrettes, disporting by the light of the moon or pensively rhyming and serenading, are strangely insinuating and enticing. His Parisian types-at once real and unreal-are equally captivating. Willette takes a mischievous delight in surrounding them with piquant, pagan genii, by way of symbols; and, even when he leaves them quite alone, they belong less to the Paris of the day and the hour, with all their saucy modernity, than to the realm of fantasy. Nevertheless, he can be bitter, vindictive, terrible. No one of his contemporaries, except Forain, can be so awful; and no one, not even Forain, has so often frightened the bourgeois out of their bourgeois wits. A few of his fiercer cartoons deserve notice here:-

A starving miner holds a bloated employer at the mercy of his pick, in the bottom of a mine-shaft, and claims his vengeance.

A wild-eyed figure, symbolising the proletariat, brandishes a knife tragically, and cries, "_Je voudrais que la societe n'et qu'une seule tete pour la lui couper d'un seul coup_."

A nude woman, at once voluptuous and august, enthroned before a guillotine, proclaims,-

"_Je suis la Sainte Democratie, J'attends mes amants._"

_Pour la Prochaine Exposition_: A _sans-culotte_, saucily puffing a cigarette, displays a guillotine of the most approved pattern, with this comment, "_Et elle sera a vapeur, mon bourgeois!_"

_Marquis Talons-Rouges_: De Gallifet, "the butcher of the Commune,"

stands transfixed with terror while the ma.s.sacred rise up against him from under the paving-stones.

_Vendredi Saint_: M. Berenger,[136] attired as a Protestant clergyman, glowers at the Magdalen, who is weeping over the Crucified One, and says, "_Si j'avais ete de ces temps, il n'y aurait pas eu de scandale au pied de la croix_."

On the other hand, Willette is not tenderer with his bewitching dreamland lovers than he is with the abused and the oppressed.

He has contributed to nearly all the ill.u.s.trated organs of revolt, beginning with the _Pere Peinard_, and at one time made all the ill.u.s.trations for a most impertinent little sheet, known as _Le Pied de Nez_, the text for which was furnished by Camille St. Croix. His stained-gla.s.s window at the _Chat Noir_, representing the wors.h.i.+p of the golden calf and bearing the inscription "_Te Deum Laudamus_," will be remembered as long as the _Chat Noir_ itself.

Steinlen's[137] work is big,-big for its humanity and big for its art; big by reason of its realism and by reason of its idealism; big in extent, intent, and content. His compositions possess all the essential qualities of great pictures; and, if it is ever permitted to cla.s.s a simple _dessinateur_ with the masters, Steinlen must surely be ranked as one of the few great artists of his time.

In Steinlen we have all the social types that the _chansonnier_ Bruant and the monologist Jehan Rictus have made vivid by their poetry, and a great many more besides; all the social types that the painters of the humble-L'Hermitte, Raffaelli, Sabatte, and Besson-have endeared to us on canvas, and a great many more besides: _maquereaux_ and their white slaves, the _filles du trottoir_; criminals, child-martyrs, country and city vagabonds, and parasitic squatters on vacant city lots; coster-mongers and street musicians; little dressmakers and milliners tripping jauntily down the slopes of Montmartre and Belleville; laundresses pounding and gossiping in the wash-houses or wearily traversing the streets, with heavy baskets of clothes on their arms; Bohemian poets and artists fighting poverty in their humble _menages_ or junketing with their mistresses and models; over-dressed _filles de joie_ awaiting, Danae-like, in cafes and night restaurants, the descent of the golden shower; unsophisticated or hungry working-girls falling into the traps set by the mistresses of the public houses, and country maidens succ.u.mbing to the glitter of the soldier's coat; toiling peasants, stupid, stolid, and patient; labourers and mechanics at their work, at their noon-day luncheons, and, in the wine-shops after their working hours, under the spell of prating politicians; miners grovelling in the murk or marching, pale, starving, and ominous, as strikers, to the a.s.sertion of their rights and the redress of their wrongs. The painter Luce and the sculptor Meunier are, perhaps, the only artists who have displayed continuously, during a series of years, an equal comprehension of the suffering, the yearning, and the revolt of the ma.s.ses; and Meunier's field of observation is scarcely as broad as Steinlen's, while Luce's technical skill is inferior to his. Steinlen has climbed by the ladder of a marvellous intuition into the very soul of the proletariat, and his superb gift of expression enables him to bear completest witness to all that he has therein felt and seen.

A mighty sadness permeates his work.

Steinlen's best-known drawings have appeared in _Le Pere Peinard_, _Le Chambard_, _Le Mirliton_, _La Lanterne_, the anarchist child's paper _Jean-Pierre_, _Les Feuilles de Zo d'Axa_, _Le Canard Sauvage_, _Le Sifflet_, and _Le Gil Blas Ill.u.s.tre_, to which last he contributed a first page, weekly, for a number of years. He has ill.u.s.trated two volumes of the _Chansons_ of Bruant (_Dans la Rue_) and Maurice Boukay's _Chansons Rouges_. Several of his posters, notably that of the socialist daily, _Le Pet.i.t Sou_, breathe a fierce revolutionary spirit.

Among the minor _dessinateurs_-minor not necessarily in talent, but in vogue-are the revolutionists Luce, Francis Jourdain, Vallotton, p.i.s.sarro _fils_, Signac, Rysselberghe, and Ibels, already noticed as painters. Roubille, G. Maurin, Jehannet, Guillaume, Barbottin, Anquetin, Cross, Mab, Mabel, Lebasque, Delannoy, Comin-Ache, Chevalier, Daumont, Alexandre Charpentier, Heidbrinck, Camille Lefevre, and J.

Henault have been identified with the propaganda by art of _Les Temps Nouveaux_. Couturier[138] has an intimate connection with the other anarchist organ, _Le Libertaire_. Jean Grave's primer of anarchy, _Les Aventures de Nono_, was ill.u.s.trated by Charpentier, Heidbrinck, Hermann-Paul, Camille Lefevre, Luce, Mab, Rysselberghe, and p.i.s.sarro _fils_. Grandjouan, Leal de Camara, Arthur Michael, Jossot, Dubuc, Balluriau, Gottlob, Noel Dorville, Jouve, Kupka, Weiluc, Louis Morin, Braun, Borgex, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cadel, Darbour, Roedel, Redon, and Grun are all strongly revolutionary in portions of their work.

_Le Rire_, _Le Sourire_, _Le Cri de Paris_, _Le Gil Blas Ill.u.s.tre_, and nearly a score of ill.u.s.trated sheets, whose existence is likely to be so ephemeral that their enumeration would be idle, allow a modic.u.m of s.p.a.ce to refractory productions by these _dessinateurs_; and in the spring of 1901 an ill.u.s.trated publication was founded, which is devoted exclusively to full-page drawings of an anti-capitalistic, anti-governmental character. This publication, which is called _L'a.s.siette au Beurre_,[139] is as fierce in its way as was the suppressed _Pere Peinard_. Several of its numbers have been seized; but it has so far escaped complete suppression,-mainly, it is likely, by reason of an entire absence of reading-matter, it being far more difficult for the courts to define the offence contained in an inflammatory drawing than the offence contained in an inflammatory text.

The prospectus of _L'a.s.siette au Beurre_ thus explains its aim: "We have arrived at a turning-point in history, where it becomes necessary for a publication which addresses itself to thinkers and artists to face the social question under its most diverse aspects. Now is it not a duty to combat by art the possessors of the _a.s.siette au beurre_ and all social iniquities? And how can it be done better than by the pictorial presentation which fixes an idea in the brain with an energy to which the effort of the most puissant writer cannot attain?"

Practically all the _dessinateurs_ heretofore mentioned have appeared with greater or less frequency in _L'a.s.siette au Beurre_; and it has published many special issues, of twenty-four pages or more, devoted exclusively to a single artist. Thus Braun, Grandjouan, Roubille, Michael, Dubuc, Jean Veber, Willette, Van Dongen, Gottlob, Noel Dorville, Heidbrinck, Jouve, Lucien Metivet, Ibels, Guillaume, Caran d'Ache, Kupka, Weiluc, Xavier, Jose, Minartz, Jacques Villon, Vallotton, Sancha, Pezilla, Louis Morin, Does, and Abel Faivre have had, each, at least one number, and Hermann-Paul, Steinlen, Leal de Camara, Jossot, and Balluriau several numbers, each, consecrated to their works. No other existing journal of caricature has made so comprehensive an artistic effort;[140] and it is at least a curious commentary-not to insist farther-on the social att.i.tude of the artistic _elite_ that no other journal of caricature is so unequivocally revolutionary in tone.

Daumier, the father of modern French caricature and the greatest of French caricaturists, was scarcely tenderer in his drawings to the exploiters of the poor, to bourgeois stupidity and sham, and to courts, lawyers, and politicians, than are the Mirbeaus, Tailhades, Jean Graves, and Kropotkines in their writings; and in this respect (ignoring, of course, the question of talent) he is closely resembled by a majority of his successors. To be sure, it is easy to attach too much weight to this fact. The caricaturist, like many another fellow who has to get his living by his wits, does not invariably make it a point to express his own convictions. The caricaturist, furthermore, could not consistently accept a Utopia if he succeeded in ushering one in, since in Utopia he would have no excuse for being. "Caricature is, in the nature of the case, of the opposition." But it is one thing to be of the opposition-that is, to a.s.sail the political element in power-and quite another thing to demolish the state itself and all the inst.i.tutions of society. And it is this latter thing that the great body of contemporary French caricaturists are attempting to do.

Bernard Shaw in a little book of almost diabolical cleverness, _The Perfect Wagnerite_, has advanced the rather startling theory that no one can comprehend the Wagner music-dramas who is not something of an anarchist.

Whatever one may think of Bernard Shaw in general, of Bernard Shaw as a musical critic in particular, and, still more in particular, of Bernard Shaw as a Wagner interpreter, one must admit that there is always a half-truth, at least, lurking somewhere about his Sibylline epigrams and paradoxes. There is no questioning the fact that Wagner, the transformer of music, was a professor of revolutionary doctrines, and that he incorporated, deliberately or otherwise, the essence of these revolutionary doctrines into his work. "During three years," in the early part of his career, "he kept pouring forth pamphlets on social evolution, religion, life, art, and the influence of riches"; and one of these pamphlets, _Art and Revolution_, is esteemed an anarchist text-book by anarchists in all parts of the world. "What man," he says, "can, with lightness of heart and calm senses, plunge his regard to the bottom of this world of murder and rapine, organised and legalised by deceit, imposture, and hypocrisy, without being obliged to avert his eyes with a shudder of disgust?" Wagner resigned in 1849 his position as conductor of the opera at Dresden in order to become "a leader of the people in the revolution then under way." He appealed to the king of Saxony "to espouse the people's cause, and then threw in his lot with the people." He was publicly proclaimed "a politically dangerous person along with Bakounine and Roeckel,"-the same Bakounine who is held the father of modern anarchism.

In France, as in Germany, the tendency of music during the last fifty years has been towards a greater and greater liberty of form; and most of the notable contemporary French composers-with the exception of Reyer, Saint-Saens, and Ma.s.senet[141] (who represent, with modifications, the cla.s.sic tradition), and two or three ardent disciples of Gluck-proceed, more or less directly, either from Wagner or from that other innovator, Hector Berlioz (sometimes called the French Wagner), who was not, it is true, a revolutionist in the political sense, but who was bitter to the last degree against the society that stupidly refused to acknowledge his power.

The writer is not enough of a musical connoisseur to trace the transformations wrought in musical forms by French composers since the time of Berlioz,-by Cesar Franck (who in a sense, however, stood apart from the currents), by Pierre Lalo, Isidore de Lara, Emmanuel Chabrier, Vincent d'Indy, Camille Erlanger, DeBussy, Gabriel Faure, Leroux, Le Borne, Bourgault-Ducoudray, Gustave Charpentier, and Alfred Bruneau; still less to point out where these changes have been co-ordinated, as they were in Wagner, with revolutionary thinking,-a task for which not only musical connoisseurs.h.i.+p, but the temperament of a musician, the knowledge of an adept, and the intellect of a philosopher would be required. But in two of the composers just named, Alfred Bruneau and Gustave Charpentier, the co-ordination is so obvious that "he who runs"

(he of the average lay intelligence) "may read," since they are engaged in disseminating the idea of liberty among the people.

Both have been influenced by Wagner, but both depart from Wagner in taking their subjects, not from legends, but from contemporary life, and the most ordinary every-day sort of life at that.

Bruneau claims as large privileges for the composer of opera as are accorded to the author, the painter, and the dramatist; the same openness to pa.s.sion, movement, and humanity, and the same range of choice as regards characters, language, and setting. "It is the right of the composer"-I quote from Bruneau's _Musique d'Hier et de Demain_-"to unite in a piece of his choosing any beings he pleases, to place these beings in the human _milieu_ to which he considers they belong, and to put in their mouths the words which he considers appropriate.... He must insist on liberty of the dialogue, developing itself, without constraint of any sort, upon the woof of the instrumentation, and forming one body with it; liberty of the symphony, never interrupted, trumpeting, rumbling, swelling, subsiding, with the necessities of the drama; liberty of expression, more important still,-justness in the word and precision in the term; liberty unlimited of the melody, tripping, alert, grave, proud, tender, vigorous, joyous, surely, at being able to escape from the imprisonment of the cadence and the rhyme; liberty of the phrase, liberty of inspiration, liberty of art, liberty of form, liberty complete, magnificent, and definitive!"

In _Messidor_[142] and _L'Attaque du Moulin_ (prose librettos by Emile Zola) Bruneau deals with strikes and the labour question so frankly that it is not a little surprising that they were allowed a place on a national stage. These works are appreciated by the critics, but have not been, in spite of their popular subjects, signal popular successes.

On the other hand, Charpentier's opera of _Louise_ (produced at the _Opera Comique_ in 1899, and not yet banished from a prominent place in the repertoire) has rapidly made the tour of France and of Europe.

_Louise_, which treats with a bizarre blending of realism and idealism the life of the Bohemians and labourers of Montmartre, may be said to mark an epoch in opera, in that it is the first work of the French school which, having combined innovation of musical form with innovation of subject and language, has achieved a striking and permanent artistic and popular success.

With _Louise_ the modern music-drama becomes, like the simple drama, an appreciable force in direct revolutionary propaganda. It is true that everything savouring of politics is scrupulously excluded from the libretto of _Louise_, but this scrupulousness (absolutely indispensable in a piece prepared for a subsidised stage) does not prevent the opera from being an unmistakable protest against the social tyranny which is intrenched in the texts of the law. Indeed, Charpentier, whose fine social fervour has been evidenced in a variety of ways which may not be gone into here, has publicly proclaimed his belief "in the efficacy of revolutions well prepared."

It is more than a coincidence that the revolutionary Zola should have been a zealous defender of the art of Courbet, of Manet, of Monet, p.i.s.sarro, and Cezanne, and that a p.r.o.nounced anarchist like Octave Mirbeau should have been an early admirer of Wagner, the introducer to France of Maeterlinck, the chief champion of Monet, and an apotheosiser of Rodin,-should have been, in short, the foster-father of the _irreguliers_ in every department of art. He would be a surpa.s.singly subtle a.n.a.lyser and a masterful synthesiser who could establish the connection between polyphonic orchestration, impressionism in painting and sculpture and the _vers libre_, and between each and all of these and the anarchistic philosophy,-between revolt against academicism in the arts and revolt against the state; and yet no one who observes ever so little can doubt that the connection exists.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Paris from Montmartre]

CHAPTER XIX

TO WHAT END?

"_There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy._"

SHAKESPEARE.

"_Truth's fountains may be clear, her streams are muddy._"

LORD BYRON.

"_Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument About it and about: but evermore Came out by the same door wherein I went._