Paris and the Social Revolution Part 40

La s.e.m.e.nce des heros est-elle infeconde pour toujours?_

"_Le sublime Louvel, Caserio, n'ont-ils plus d'heritiers? Les tueurs de rois sont-ils morts a leur tour, ceux qui disaient avec Jerome Olgiati, l'executeur de Galeas Sforza, qu'un trepas douloureux fait la renommee eternelle? Non! La conscience humaine vit encore._"[126]

At the banquet offered him by sympathising litterateurs and artists immediately after his trial, Tailhade proposed a toast which ill.u.s.trates capitally the scope of his emanc.i.p.ating ardour. It was:-

"_A la Finlande! A la Siberie! Aux Juifs Roumains! A l'Armenie! A la Catalogne! A la Sicile!_"

[Ill.u.s.tration: Laurent Tailhade.]

In the course of his trial he expounded his att.i.tude, 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: CLOVIS HUGUES]

The _raffine_ De Goncourt was wont to dream of an infernal machine "_tuant la betise chic qui de quatre a 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 other _raffine_, 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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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 a.s.sure 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 ma.s.ses to the n.o.blest 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 enn.o.ble 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 enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of humanity from its bondage. It would be puerile to lay any stress on the fact that both Henry and Vaillant wrote verses for the _revues des jeunes_, since this may well have been a mere coincidence. But it is certain that the agitation for the _vers libre_ in France these latter years has been one of the manifestations of the prevalent revolutionary spirit.

True, Verlaine and Mallarme, 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 the _vers libre_ have been imbued, or at least touched, with revolutionary ideas; and Verlaine, Mallarme, and the other poets who remained loyal to the old society, all in discarding the old verse, were on terms of closest intimacy with the revolutionists, and were for a long time mainly encouraged (not to say "boomed") by them.

Adolphe Rette 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 the _revues_, 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 h.e.l.l [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 revolutionary _Endehors_ group were advocates of untrammelled verse; and a goodly portion-among whom Pierre Quillard, Francis Viele-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 emanc.i.p.ating movements abroad. Viele-Griffin is mildly anarchistic. He says:-

"My aesthetic 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 a.s.sociated with Paris are, or have been, poets of revolt.

The _Decadents_[127] and _Neo-Decadents_, _Symbolistes_ and _Neo-Symbolistes_, _Instrumentistes_, _Deliquescents_, and _Brutalistes_,[128] most 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 the _Parna.s.siens_, 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 inst.i.tutions.... Some attacked property, religion, family; others ridiculed marriage and extolled _l'union libre_; others vaunted the blessings of cosmopolitanism and of universal a.s.sociation.... 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 unrecognised talent, 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 a.s.sertion that there are, and long have been, in France more revolutionists of various stripes among the artists than among any other cla.s.s 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 Valles, "_du charbon dans le crane_." 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. Eugene Carriere, 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 p.i.s.sarro, 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 att.i.tude of Maximilien Luce, Ibels, Paul Signac, p.i.s.sarro _fils_, Felix Vallotton, Francis Jourdain (present managing editor of _Le 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 technical lapses, perhaps, but with truth, originality, robustness, and intensity notwithstanding, two cla.s.ses 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 the _Neo-Impressionistes_, enumerates as follows the influences which have led him to identify himself with anarchism:-

"I. The laws of physiology-the rights of the stomach, of the brain, of the eyes.

"II. Logic.

"III. Uprightness.

"IV. The sufferings of my fellows.

"V. The need of seeing happy people about me."

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 the _jeunes poetes_,-display, for the most part, p.r.o.nounced revolutionary affinities. The _Salon des Independants_, whose motto is, "Neither juries nor awards," and whose object is "to enable artists to present their works freely to the judgment of 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 organ _Les 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 att.i.tude 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, Sabatte, Leon 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 Meunier[130] has painted, like Luce, the black and bristling region of the furnaces and the mines described by Zola in _Germinal_.

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 G.o.d in the eyes of all the revolutionary elements, and which would have produced the same effect, perhaps, had his art been far less convincing and colossal than it is.

Constantin Meunier,[131] also an innovator, and second in merit to Rodin alone according to many, is the sculptor _par excellence_ of 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 att.i.tudes 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 compa.s.sionate, 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 Dalou[131] was banished, like Cazin, for his partic.i.p.ation 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 drama _La Paque 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 a _Calvaire_ that the anarchist Jean Roule, of Mirbeau's _Mauvais Bergers_, harangues the mult.i.tude 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 certain professional 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_"[132] and 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,[133] by Leon L'Hermitte, Pierre Lagarde, and a number of others from motives partly artistic and partly humanitarian, by the _mondain_ Jean Beraud (_Chemin de la Croix_, _Descente de la Croix_, _La Madeleine chez le Pharisien_, and _Le Christ Lie a la Colonne_) out of what seems to be sheer sensationalism, and by the decorators of the _cabarets artistiques et litteraires_ of Montmartre, half out of a bravado which those who cannot distinguish between religion and the church misname blasphemy and half out of cla.s.s 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 of _cocottes_; 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 at and pommelled by militarist mobs; and vagabond Christs, "without legal domiciles," brutalised by the police and hauled into the courts.

It is among the "_dessinateurs_,"[134] however, that the tendency to utilise the Christ for purposes of revolutionary propaganda is the most in evidence. Indeed, it is among the _dessinateurs_ (who are often painters likewise) that the spirit of revolt all along the line is the most p.r.o.nounced.

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