Chapter 15

LA COMÉDIE FRANÇAISELA COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE

LA COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE

“The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality,His insight and power encircle things of the human race,He is the glory and extract thus far of things and of the human race.”Walt Whitman.

“Venez à moi, claquepatins,Loqueteux, joueurs de musettes,Clampins, loupeurs, voyous, catins,Et marmousets et marmousettes,Tas de traîne-cul-les housettes,Race d’indépendants fougueux!Je suis du pays dont vous êtes:Le poète est le Roi des Gueux.“Vous que la bise des matins,Que la pluie aux âpres sagettes,Que les gendarmes, les mâtins,Les coups, les fièvres, les disettes,Prennent toujours pour amusettes,Vous dont l’habit mince et fougueuxParaît fait de vieilles gazettes,Le poète est le Roi des Gueux.”Jean Richepin.

“Je voudrais dire à mes amis,Sculpteurs d’idéal et de rimes,Que s’enfermer n’est plus permis,Lorsqu’au dehors grondent les crimes.Chantons la justice et l’amour!Le peuple va nous faire escorte.Poète, descends de la tour!Et puis ferme ta porte.”Maurice Boukay.

“Persons of anarchistic mentality are signalised by their love of the new in art and in science, by their feverish search after new forms.”—A. Hamon.

“So it is you who are the poet. Well, as for me, I do not like poets norintellectuels.I do not like them because they are all more or less anarchists, and because the anarchists blow up the bourgeois. I am neither a poet nor anintellectuel,and I am proud of it.”

Monsieur Dupont, in La Petite Bohème ofArmand Charpentier.

ZOLA, being asked to define an anarchist, said, “Un anarchiste, c’est un poète.” Conversely, the poet is more or less of an anarchist. Job and Isaiah are currently quoted by thelibertairesin support of their position. Æschylus, in his immortal “Prometheus,” Euripides in his “Bacchantes,” Schiller, Shelley, Swinburne, Robert Burns, and Walt Whitman, in portions of their works, all promulgated good, sound anarchist doctrine. As to the poets who, without being specifically anarchistic, are revolutionists of one sort or another, their name is legion. A bulky volume would scarcely suffice to name them.

In France, especially, revolutionary singers have never been lacking. “Console-toi, gibet, tu sauveras la France!” cried André Chénier, greatest of the galaxy of poets who illustrated the Revolution. Béranger, before he was dazzled by theépopéeof Napoleon, had his moments of revolt. The two Augustes of the Restoration, Barbier and Barthélemy, the first in hisIambesand the second in hisNémésis, glorified insurrection.

Hégésippe Moreau, who died in theHospice de la Charitéat twenty-eight, just as hisMyosotiswas winning him recognition, heaped terrible imprecations upon the heads of the rich and powerful, and played a valiant part in the outbreak of 1830,

“Non comme l’orateur du banquet populaireDont la flamme du punch attise la colère:Comme un bouffon dans ses parades, non!Mais les pieds dans le sang, en face du canon.”

“Pour que son vers clément pardonne an genre humain,Que faut-il au poète? Un baiser et du pain,”

sang Moreau in his beautiful “Elégie à la Voulzie,” which is recited in revolutionary meetings more often than any other poem.He was hungry,” remarks Sainte-Beuve, apropos of Moreau’s vindictiveness, “and he composed, in his hunger, songs that betrayed by their fierceness and bitterness the want within.”

Moreau defends the excesses of the mobs of the Revolution:—

“Oubliez-vousQue leur âme de feu purifiait leurs œuvres?Oui, d’un pied gigantesque écrasant les couleuvresPar le fer et la flamme ils voulaient aplanirUne route aux français vers un bel avenir.Ils marchaient pleins de foi, pleins d’amour, et l’histoireAbsoudra, comme Dieu, qui sut aimer et croire.”********Au jour de la vengeance,Si l’opprimé s’égare, il est absous d’avance.”

He predicts a general cataclysm, declares his intention of doing all in his power to bring it on,—

“J’ameuterai le peuple à mes vérités crues,Je prophétiserai sur le trépied des rues,”—

and exults in the prospect,—

“Et moi, j’applaudirai; ma jeunesse engourdieSe réchauffera bien à ce grand incendie.”

Pierre Dupont (peer almost of Burns in his simple country songs), who died disgraced by reason of his toadyism towards the government of the Third Napoleon, which had banished and then pardoned him, displayed a fine revolutionary fervour in 1848, before his banishment. His “Chant des Ouvriers” and his poem—

“On n’arrête pas le murmureDu peuple quand il dit, j’ai faim,Car c’est le cri de la Nature,Il faut du pain, il faut du pain,”

will be recited and sung by the people of France as long as there is such a thing as hunger within its borders.

At the same epoch, Alfred de Vigny distilled bitterness against society in hisDestinéesandJournal d’un Poète; and Leconte de Lisle vented his accumulated scorn as follows:—

“Hommes, tueurs des Dieux, les temps ne sont pas loinOù, sur un grand tas d’or, vautrés dans quelque coin,Vous mourrez bêtement en emplissant vos poches!”

Victor Hugo’sChâtiments(destined to become the favourite reading of Caserio, the assassin of Carnot) was the supreme cry of revolt of the Second Empire. In such lines as these Hugo proclaimed the anarchist ideal without, however, recognising it as such:—

“Les temps heureux luiront, non pour la seule France,Mais pour tous....Les tyrans s’éteindront comme des météores....Fêtes dans les cités, fêtes dans les campagnes!...Où donc est l’échafaud? Ce monstre a disparu....Plus de soldats l’épée au poing, plus de frontières,Plus de fisc, plus de glaive ayant forme de croix....Le saint labeur de tous se fond en harmonie....Toute l’humanité dans sa splendide ampleurSent le don que lui fait le moindre travailleur....Radieux avenir! Essor universel!Epanouissement de l’homme sous le ciel!”

Eugène Vermesch was the fiercest, though by no means the greatest, poet of the Commune. Laurent Tailhade and Jean Richepin, among the living, have achieved renown as poets of revolt.

Richepin124is as complete a nihilist of the open, rollicking, devil-go-lucky order as Anatole France is of the subtle, JehanRictus of the plaintive, and Zo d’Axa of the fantastic orders. Like them, he commits himself to nothing and credits nothing, not even the faiths and formulas of revolution; and, like them, he is nevertheless a formidable revolutionist.

In the introduction toLes Blasphèmeshe proclaims his intention of “scandalising the devout, the Deists, the sceptics, the materialists, the scientists, the worshippers of Reason, the prosperous and the unprosperous, in a word, the rout of fools and hypocrites who fancy it their duty to save Law, Property, the Family, Society, Morals, etc.” “In the defence of these conventions, of which I do not recognise the binding force,” he adds, “I shall hear all the geese of the Capital clack.”

Book X. ofLes Blasphèmesis entitled “Dernières Idoles.” The “dernières idoles” are Nature, Reason, Progress. Richepin treats them in the most cavalier fashion:—

Nature:

“Farce amère!”“Carcasse qui n’a ni cœur, ni sang, ni lait!”“Toi qui fais des vivants pour amuser la Mort,Ton ensemble n’est rien qu’un mélange sans art.”

Reason:

“Impudente drôlesse dont l’homme se croit le valet!”“Coureuse de chimères,Faiseuse de vœux clandestins!”“Reine fanfaronne,Servante du corps qui t’exhale!”

Progress:

“Voici qu’un Dieu nouveau nous ronge: le Progrès.”“Le Progrès! Oui, grand fou, sous ce titre nouveauC’est toujours Dieu qui vient te hanter le cerveau,365C’est toujours la stérile et dangereuse idéeDont ton âme d’enfant fut jadis obsédée.Sans le savoir tu crois encor.”

In another part of this volume he exalts, beginning with Satan himself, the principalrévoltésof mythology and history. The following ringing stanzas are taken from “Les Nomades”:—

“Oui, ce sont mes aïeux, à moi. Car j’ai beau vivreEn France, je ne suis ni Latin ni Gaulois.J’ai les os fins, la peau jaune, des yeux de cuivre,Un torse d’écuyer, et le mépris des lois.Oui, je suis leur bâtard!Leur sang bout dans mes veines,Leur sang, qui m’a donné cet esprit mécréant,Cet amour du grand air, et des courses lointaines,L’Horreur de l’Idéal et la soif du Néant.”

The “Marches Touraniennes” conclude as follows:—

“Plus de lois, de droits, plus rien!Plus de vrai, de beau, de bien!Ces Aryas!Par le fer et par le feu,Place au Néant, place au DieuDes Parias!”

For hisChansons des Gueux, Richepin was fined five hundred francs (and costs) and kept in prison thirty days. In this volume he acclaims all the outlaws and outcasts, all the flotsam and jetsam of modern civilisation in both country and town,—thieves, tramps, gypsies, beggars, thugs, drunkards, foundlings, panders, and prostitutes; “the halt, the maimed, the blind,” the reckless, the defiant, and the scoffing, the uncontrolled and the uncontrollable, with a vigour of language, a genuineness of accent, a picturesquenessof phrase, an audacity in imagery and epithet, a poignancy of emotion, a naturalness, a freshness, a breeziness, or rather a tempestuousness, that bespeak the master. He lays bare the thoughts and the passions of his disreputable personages, portrays their starvation and their gluttonies, their enforced abstinences and their debaucheries, and makes them speak in their own weird tongues, sing their own ribald songs, and dance their own maddening dances. For lyric savagery and savage lyrism theseChansons des Gueuxhave no counterpart, so far as I know, in modern literature.

“I love my heroes, my lamentable vagabonds,” wrote Richepin, in an extraordinary preface.... “I love this something, I know not what it is, which renders them beautiful, noble, this wild-beast instinct which drives them into adventure,—a rash and sinister instinct, granted, but an instinct characterised by a fierce independence. Oh, the marvellous fable of La Fontaine about the wolf and the dog! The errant wolf is mere skin and bones. The dog is fat and sleek. Yes, but the chafed neck, the collar! To be tied! ‘So you can’t run when you wish? No? Good-bye, then, to your free meals. To the wood! To the wood! Everything at the point of the sword!’ And Master Wolf is off: he runs still. He runs still, and will always run, this wolf, this tramp; and I love him for it. And every soul a bit above the common will love likewise this voluntary pariah, who may be repugnant, hideous, odious, abominable, but who has greatness,—a superb greatness, since his whole being voices the heroic war-cry of Tacitus:Malo periculosam libertatem.

“Periculosam!my brave vagabonds!Periculosam!do you hear, you coddled worldlings, all of you who have your soup and your kennel—and also your collar? Have I then committed a great crime in revealing the brutal poetry of these adventurers, of these braves, of these stubborn children to whom society is almost always a stepmother, and who, finding no milk in the breast of the unnatural nurse, bite the flesh itself to calm their hunger?”

Laurent Tailhade is a less natural and wholesome poet than Jean Richepin, perhaps, but he is certainly a more distinguished one. As a chiseller of poetic cameos and medallions, he has few, if any, superiors among his contemporaries. HisVitrauxandJardin des Rêvesare particularly relished by artists and littérateurs and by his brother-poets.

Tailhade’s prose is as finely chiselled as his poetry. It is almost invariably lyric; and—although he is caustic and cruel therein to the verge of cut-throatism, and although he has at his command the most extensive vocabulary of invective of any person in France, not excepting M. Henri Rochefort—it is always, like his poetry, distinguished. His cult for the classic French and Latin authors and his scrupulous care for art save him from vulgarity and commonplaceness, even in his most questionable literary undertakings and even in the simple diatribes which he contributes to the most insignificant, the least scholarly, and the least artistic propagandist sheets. “He is alettré,” says M. Ledrain, conservator at the Louvre, “who knows admirably his Latin and his Sixteenth Century, and who has formed thus a particularly savoury style which we all admire.”

Tailhade has unblenchingly defended nearly every anarchist attempt that has occurred in Europe since he came to manhood. He characterised the assassination of Humbert by the Italian Bresci as “un geste qui console et qui revive nos espoirs”; and Sophie Perowskaïa, Hartmann, Rysakoff, Caserio, Angiolillo, Henry, and Ravachol were all eulogised by him. He has been prominently before the public on four occasions during the past decade: at the time of the attempt of Vaillant, by reason of his striking epigram, “Qu’importe le reste, si le geste est beau”; a little later, when he was himself the victim, at theRestaurant Foyot, of an anarchist—or anti-anarchist?—beau gestewhich nearly cost him his eyesight and permanently disfigured him; in the autumn of 1901, at the time of the second visit of the czar, when he was tried and sentenced to a 1,000-franc fine and a year’s imprisonment for having reaffirmed “the venerabletheory of regicide125which has traversed history” in a remarkable prose poem published byLe Libertaire, and entitled “Le Triomphe de la Domesticité”; and lastly, in 1903, when he was mobbed in Brittany for his diatribes against the local clergy, on which occasion he rendered himself ludicrously guilty of inconsistency by appealing to the protection of the police.

The incriminated passage in “Le Triomphe de la Domesticité,” above referred to, is as follows:—

“Quoi, parmi ces soldats illégalement retenus pour veiller sur la route où va passer la couardise impériale, parmi ces gardes-barrières qui gagnent neuf francs tous les mois, parmi les chemineaux, les mendiants, les trimardeurs, les outlaws, ceux qui meurent de froid sous les ponts en hiver, d’insolation en été, de faim toute la vie, il ne s’en trouvera pas un pour prendre son fusil, son tissonnier, pour arracher aux frênes des bois le gourdin préhistorique, et, montant sur le marchepied des carrosses, pour frapper jusqu’à la mort, pour frapper au visage, et pour frapper au cœur la canaille triomphante, tsar, président, ministres, officiers, et les clergés infames, tous les exploiteurs qui rient de sa misère, vivent de sa moelle, courbent son échine, et le payent de vains mots! La rue de la Ferronerie est-elle à jamais barrée? La semence des héros est-elle inféconde pour toujours?

“Le sublime Louvel, Caserio, n’ont-ils plus d’héritiers? Les tueurs de rois sont-ils morts à leur tour, ceux qui disaient avec Jerôme Olgiati, l’exécuteur de Galéas Sforza, qu’un trépas douloureux fait la renommée éternelle? Non! La conscience humaine vit encore.”126

At the banquet offered him by sympathising littérateurs and artists immediately after his trial, Tailhade proposed a toast which illustrates capitally the scope of his emancipating ardour. It was:—

Laurent Tailhade.

“A la Finlande! A la Sibérie! Aux Juifs Roumains! A l’Arménie! A la Catalogne! A la Sicile!”

In the course of his trial he expounded his attitude, as follows:—

“I know that I am on trial before you for excitation to murder. As an author, it is my duty to express all my thought; as an historian, it is my duty to discuss historic facts; as a philosopher, I have the right to think and to deduce from these facts the philosophical consequence which they warrant. I have availed myself largely of what I consider my right. I accept the entire responsibility of my acts. I even hold that they do me honour. If to-morrow an occasion presented itself for me to express again, in the interests of beauty, all my thought, I should, before the general baseness, seize with eagerness this fresh occasion.”

CLOVIS HUGUESCLOVIS HUGUES

TheraffinéDe Goncourt was wont to dream of an infernal machine “tuant la bêtise chic qui de quatre à six heures fait le tour du Bois de Boulogne.” Similarly it is the Philistinism and vulgar fetichism of the hour, its imbecility and ugliness, that particularly exasperate M. Tailhade, this otherraffiné, and set scintillating his scholarly and artistic ire. It was out of the depths of a profound disgust that he drew his scorching volume,Le Pays des Mufles; and it is the æsthetic offences quite as much as the economic misdoings of the bourgeois that he habitually lashes.

Socialism likewise has its poets, of whom Clovis Hugues and Maurice Bouchor (poets considerably inferior to Richepin and Tailhade) may be mentioned among the maturer men.

Clovis Hugues has as avocation, when the fortune of elections favours him, the defence of socialistic principles in the Chamber of Deputies; and M. Bouchor gives a considerable portion of his time to acquainting working people with the masterpieces of literature. “The æsthetic sense, which is the most elevated means of enjoyment, being dependent on the regular action of the other senses,” says Bouchor, “we need, if we would assure to all men a complete development, to demand plenty of material comfort for every individual. We ought to realise for all humanity the idea of the old Latin adage,—Mens sana in corpore sano. Thus socialism, which current prejudice interprets as a negation of art for art’s sake, is, on the contrary, the most direct route to it, and the affirmation of it.... We wish to raise the masses to the noblest artistic conceptions.... The people have a right to beauty, to science, to an unutilitarian culture of the mind, to whatever, in a word, can enlighten and ennoble it.”

In poetry the relation between freedom of expression and freedom of thought is a very intimate one. The search for fresh forms and the thinking of fresh thoughts are very apt to go together. Furthermore, there would seem to be some subtle affinity between the releasing of verse from its fetters and the enfranchisement of humanity from its bondage. It would be puerile to lay any stress on the fact that both Henry and Vaillant wrote verses for therevues des jeunes, since this may well have been a mere coincidence. But it is certain that the agitation for thevers librein France these latter years has been one of the manifestations of the prevalent revolutionary spirit.

True, Verlaine and Mallarmé, though sufficiently revolutionary as regards form, were quite the reverse of revolutionary in their thinking; and plenty of similar instances might be cited. On the other hand, a large majority of the poets who have fought the battle for the recognition of the rights of thevers librehave been imbued, or at least touched, with revolutionary ideas; and Verlaine, Mallarmé, and the other poets who remained loyal to the old society, all in discarding the old verse, were on termsof closest intimacy with the revolutionists, and were for a long time mainly encouraged (not to say “boomed”) by them.

Adolphe Retté and Gustave Kahn are unblushing anarchists. The former, who has had in his time more than one misunderstanding with the law, says of himself and his opinions: “I fenced, in therevues, against scholastics of every sort, maintaining that the artist (by the very fact of his being an artist) should translate his emotions by an individual rhythm, and not according to fixed forms.... I set myself to interrogate all the unfortunates whom I elbowed in this hell [the hospital], worse than that of Dante.... It was shocking.... And I understood solidarity.

“Before entering the hospital, I was a theoretical anarchist. On leaving it, I was the militant which I hope I have never ceased to be. I deny and I revolt.”

All the members of the revolutionaryEndehorsgroup were advocates of untrammelled verse; and a goodly portion—among whom Pierre Quillard, Francis Vielé-Griffin, and Henri de Regnier may be mentioned—were exponents of it.

Quillard is now a militant anarchist at home, and has displayed on several occasions a chivalrous and more than platonic enthusiasm for emancipating movements abroad. Vielé-Griffin is mildly anarchistic. He says:—

“My æsthetic convictions, which are founded on the axiom, Art is individualist and normal (that is to say, an artist worthy of the name carries in his consciousness the necessary rules of the expression for which he was born, and all dogmas are by just so much detrimental to art), led me to consider whether the anarchist doctrines might not have some connection with these convictions. I am far from having elucidated all the points which have occupied me up to this moment; but my philosophy, essentially theistic, welcomes without effort a sort of normal anarchism, which I am about to discover, perhaps, in the divers anarchistic works I am consulting.”

M. de Regnier, recognised in the most reputable quarters, has practically ceased his commerce with revolutionary spirits.But this fact does not in the least impair the significance of the other fact that he found this commerce conducive, necessary even, to his proper development in the earlier stages of his career. Emile Verhaeren, Georges Eekhoud, and several other Belgians whose art is intimately associated with Paris are, or have been, poets of revolt.

TheDécadents127andNéo-Décadents,SymbolistesandNéo-Symbolistes,Instrumentistes,Déliquescents, andBrutalistes,128most of the sets of poets, in fact, who have made a stir in the French world of letters since the disappearance—as a coterie—of theParnassiens, have included many revolutionists, mostly of anarchistic bent, protesters as well against the oppressions of politics and the conventions of society as against the obsession of stereotyped poetic forms.129

“The greater part,” writes one of their number, “flaunted proudly their disdain of current prejudices, current morals, and current institutions.... Some attacked property, religion, family; others ridiculed marriage and extolledl’union libre; others vaunted the blessings of cosmopolitanism and of universal association.... With some, it is true, the antagonism was only apparent,—simple love of paradox, inordinate desire to get themselves talked about by uttering eccentric phrases. But this state of mind existed. If all did not detest sincerely our bourgeois society, each one lashed it with violent diatribes, each one had a vague intuition of something better.”

Whatever the reason therefor may be,—emotional temperament, weariness with physical privation, bitterness of unrecognisedtalent, disgust with the ugliness of modern commercialism and industrialism, the subtle connection between freedom of thought and freedom of form (noted in the discussion of poetry), or all these things combined,—it is safe to venture the assertion that there are, and long have been, in France more revolutionists of various stripes among the artists than among any other class of the community engaged in liberal pursuits.

The great Courbet—to go no farther back—was a disciple of Proudhon. “Il avait,” to use the picturesque phrase of Jules Vallès, “du charbon dans le crâne.” The story of Courbet’s career of revolt—largely mingled with sheer legend, it is true, but even so scarcely more extraordinary than the reality—is world property. Courbet suffered imprisonment for his opinions, and had his pictures and household effects sold by the state.

Cazin, mildest of painters, was so involved in the Commune that he was forced to take refuge in London, where he supported himself by making artistic earthen jars. Eugène Carrière, whose simple, original, eminently human art is slowly conquering two hemispheres, is an outspoken antagonist of society as it is.

It is impossible for me to say whether a majority of the Impressionists hold (apart from their art, which has proved profoundly revolutionary) revolutionary views. It is currently known, however, that Pissarro, Cezanne, and Delattre hold, or did hold, such views; and the more prominent Neo-Impressionists have anarchistic leanings almost to a man. As to the social attitude of Maximilien Luce, Ibels, Paul Signac, Pissarrofils, Félix Vallotton, Francis Jourdain (present managing editor ofLe Libertaire), and Van Rysselberghe, for example, there is no possibility of dispute.

Luce is the most typical living instance of the artist who is, as was Courbet, at once a striking figure in the art world and an influential personality in the revolutionary groups. Born and brought up in a working faubourg, which he still inhabits, Luce has an affection as genuine as it is ardent for the common people; and he has rendered, with disagreeable mannerisms and technicallapses, perhaps, but with truth, originality, robustness, and intensity notwithstanding, two classes of subjects which really make one,—the street and working life of Paris and the life of the lurid mining and smelting regions of Belgium and the north of France.

“Landscapist before everything,” says Emile Verhaeren, “Luce remains faithful to the tendency to sink in nature the immense strivings of human beings. The surroundings of men determine their existence and their history. In seeing these monumental and sinister chimneys and scaffoldings under the moon, these smoke-clouds which move towards the horizon like hordes, these fires which tear the night and seem to bleed like flesh, we think of the tortured humanity of which they express the suffering. Tracts of desolation and of tragic pangs, miseries kindled in space, mad vortexes of matter roundabout the voluntary activity which violates it, which subjugates it, and which it opposes,—all anguish and all fear are unveiled.”

Paul Signac, after Luce and Seurat (deceased) the best known of theNéo-Impressionistes, enumerates as follows the influences which have led him to identify himself with anarchism:—

It is certain that there are more revolutionary personalities in the seceding “Champ de Mars” than in the old, and so-called Official,Salon; and the various coteries of aggressive and often eccentric innovators, who hold themselves aloof from or are held aloof by these two salons,—coteries which correspond vaguely to the coteries of thejeunes poètes,—display, for the most part, pronounced revolutionary affinities. TheSalon des Indépendants, whose motto is, “Neither juries nor awards,” and whose object is “to enable artists to present their works freely to the judgmentof the public, without any outside intervention whatsoever,” has been from the beginning an anarchistic salon in every sense of the term,—an exhibition by revolutionary artists as well as an exhibition of revolutionary art. One has only to compare the names of its exhibitors with the names of those who have co-operated in the pictorial propaganda of the anarchist organLes Temps Nouveaux, to be convinced of it.

It was not necessary that an Edwin Markham should write a “Man with a Hoe” for the world to recognise that the art of Millet—whether Millet so intended it or not—has a social significance. There are many living painters, about whose social attitude the public at large knows little or nothing, who, like Millet (if in less degree), feel and express so well, when they will, the benumbing influence of poverty, the hardness of the toil, or the meagreness of the joys of peasants and town labourers, that this expression is an indirect plea—no less eloquent than the most direct plea—for a redress of social wrongs.

Such, to name only a fraction of those who might be mentioned, are Besson, Buland, Leclerc, Sabatté, Léon L’Hermitte, Cottet, Dauchez, Jean Veber, Zwiller, Geffroy, Boggio, Prunier, Raffaelli, Luigi Loir, Mlle. Delasalle, Aublet, and Lubin de Beauvais.

Jules Adler, more positive, has given pictorial expression to the most violent impulses of the mob and the sweeping demands of labour; and Constantin Meunier130has painted, like Luce, the black and bristling region of the furnaces and the mines described by Zola inGerminal.

Auguste Rodin, symbolic and synthetic, surely the greatest innovator in sculpture and probably the greatest sculptor of the century just closed, has been subjected throughout his career to a systematic official and academic opposition and persecution, which have not, so far as I know, made a revolutionist of him, but which have made him a very god in the eyes of all the revolutionary elements, and which would have produced the sameeffect, perhaps, had his art been far less convincing and colossal than it is.

Constantin Meunier,131also an innovator, and second in merit to Rodin alone according to many, is the sculptorpar excellenceof the “fourth estate.” The grim and tragic poetry of labour has been interpreted by him as it had never been interpreted before in marble and bronze. The special physique, the attitudes and the gestures, of all the overworked miners, puddlers, fishermen, and peasants,—their dignity and their pain, their capacity for endurance and resentment, their thirst for resistance,—have in him a superbly realistic and a compassionate, loving, high-minded, almost spiritual exponent. Righteous indignation against the present order of things underlies Meunier’s work. Indeed, he makes no secret of his Utopian desires.

Both Meunier and Rodin have elaborated projects for a monument to the glorification of labour, which are enthusiastically praised by the champions of social revolt.

Jules Dalou131was banished, like Cazin, for his participation in the Commune, and was the sculptor of the monuments to the revolutionists Blanqui and Victor Noir. Baffier is an avowed revolutionist, who affects the name of artisan and the artisan’s garb.

Micheline, the good angel of Emile Veyrin’s dramaLa Pâque Socialiste, says: “Jesus of Nazareth, called the Christ, remained nailed to a cross six hours. Humanity is on a cross of suffering. Humanity, the great crucified, will release itself.” When she is asked whence she draws her hope, she replies, lifting her eyes to the cross, “From the gospel.” Furthermore, she distributes the bread of a new covenant to a band of weavers at a symbolic feast, patterned after the Last Supper. It is at the foot of aCalvairethat the anarchist Jean Roule, of Mirbeau’sMauvais Bergers, harangues the multitude of striking workmen, who are for the moment furious against him because he has refused to accept, in behalf of the strikers, a strike fund offered by certainprofessional labour leaders, who intend to utilise the strike for their own selfish ends; and it is by pointing to the cross—“this cross where for two thousand years, under the weight of miserable hatreds, He agonises who, the first, dared to speak to men of liberty and love”—that his companion Madeleine, fearing for his life, transforms their fury into enthusiasm.

The Montmartre monologist Jehan Rictus, in “Le Revenant”132and other of his poems, has presented the Christ as a modern city vagrant suffering the buffets of modern society.

This fashion of bringing the Christian story up to date by introducing the Christ into the life of the period has invaded painting as well as poetry and the drama. Practised by Dagnan-Bouveret from motives solely artistic,133by Léon L’Hermitte, Pierre Lagarde, and a number of others from motives partly artistic and partly humanitarian, by themondainJean Béraud (Chemin de la Croix,Descente de la Croix,La Madeleine chez le Pharisien, andLe Christ Lié à la Colonne) out of what seems to be sheer sensationalism, and by the decorators of thecabarets artistiques et littérairesof Montmartre, half out of a bravado which those who cannot distinguish between religion and the church misname blasphemy and half out of class hatred, it has also been practised with unalloyed reverence and conviction by a number of painters as a direct and undisguised form of revolutionary propaganda. These last, perceiving that Christ, in the person of his unfortunate children, is mocked, spit upon, and crucified every day, and that a Magdalen is treated with no more consideration by the scribes and Pharisees of the twentieth century than by the scribes and Pharisees of the first century, have given us Christs watching by the sick-beds ofcocottes; Christs in corduroys and sabots, fraternising with peasants; Christs in the garb of the Paris labourer, exhorting in wine-shops and anarchist meetings; tatterdemalion Christs, pleading vainly for alms in city streets and along the country roads; peace-proclaiming Christs, jeered atand pommelled by militarist mobs; and vagabond Christs, “without legal domiciles,” brutalised by the police and hauled into the courts.

It is among the “dessinateurs,”134however, that the tendency to utilise the Christ for purposes of revolutionary propaganda is the most in evidence. Indeed, it is among thedessinateurs(who are often painters likewise) that the spirit of revolt all along the line is the most pronounced.

An average Parisian, if asked to name thedessinateursmost in the public view, will cite for you Forain, Caran d’Ache, Léandre, Guillaume, Cappiello, Sem, Abel Faivre, Steinlen, Willette, and Hermann-Paul.

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 captivatingdemi-mondainesby the yard, has little more social significance, although as illustrator he has cleverly seconded Courtéline 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.

Léandre, charming, canny, and critical, easily first of living portrait-caricaturists, amuses himself and his constituency hugely with the imbecilities, vanities, and idiosyncrasies of public men, particularly of parliamentarians. He was one of the illustratorsof theFeuilles 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 shifted its position. Crueler than Léandre,—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 Willette135are out-and-out social revolutionists.

Hermann-Paul provides all the illustrations forL’Officiel, which “does not pretend,” says its editor Franc-Nohain, “to be funnier than theJournal Officielof the French Republic.” He was an illustrator of theFeuilles de Zo d’Axa, and has participated in the pictorial propaganda ofLes 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 goddesses and all manner of delicate nudities, of playful elves, sprites, and cupids, of swans and doves, of naïveporcelaine-de-Saxeshepherdesses, 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 société n’eût qu’une seule tête pour la lui couper d’un seul coup.”

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

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