Book X. of _Les Blasphèmes_ is 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 nouveau C’est toujours Dieu qui vient te hanter le cerveau, C’est toujours la stérile et dangereuse idée Dont 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 principal _révoltés_ of mythology and history. The following ringing stanzas are taken from “_Les Nomades_”:—

“_Oui, ce sont mes aïeux, à moi. Car j’ai beau vivre En 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 Dieu Des Parias!_”

For his _Chansons 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 picturesqueness of 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 these _Chansons des Gueux_ have 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. His _Vitraux_ and _Jardin des Rêves_ are 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 a _lettré_,” 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 the _Restaurant Foyot_, of an anarchist—or anti-anarchist?—_beau geste_ which 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 venerable theory of regicide[125] which has traversed history” in a remarkable prose poem published by _Le 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:—

“_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.”

The _raffiné_ De 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 other _raffiné_, 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 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 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 the _vers libre_ have 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 terms of 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 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 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 revolutionary _Endehors_ group 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.

The _Décadents_[127] and _Néo-Décadents_, _Symbolistes_ and _Néo-Symbolistes_, _Instrumentistes_, _Déliquescents_, 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 _Parnassiens_, 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 extolled _l’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 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 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, Cézanne, 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, Pissarro _fils_, Félix 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 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 the _Néo-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 poètes_,—display, for the most part, pronounced revolutionary affinities. The _Salon des Indépendants_, 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 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 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 god 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 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 Dalou[131] was 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 drama _La 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 a _Calvaire_ that the anarchist Jean Roule, of Mirbeau’s _Mauvais 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 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 Léon L’Hermitte, Pierre Lagarde, and a number of others from motives partly artistic and partly humanitarian, by the _mondain_ Jean Béraud (_Chemin de la Croix_, _Descente de la Croix_, _La Madeleine chez le Pharisien_, and _Le Christ Lié à la Colonne_) out of what seems to be sheer sensationalism, and by the decorators of the _cabarets artistiques et littéraires_ of 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 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 pronounced.

An average Parisian, if asked to name the _dessinateurs_ most 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 captivating _demi-mondaines_ by 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 illustrators 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 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 Willette[135] are out-and-out social revolutionists.

Hermann-Paul provides all the illustrations 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 illustrator of the _Feuilles de Zo d’Axa_, and has participated 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 goddesses and all manner of delicate nudities, of playful elves, sprites, and cupids, of swans and doves, of naïve _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 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,—

“_Je suis la Sainte Démocratie, 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 à vapeur, mon bourgeois!_”

_Marquis Talons-Rouges_: De Gallifet, “the butcher of the Commune,” stands transfixed with terror while the massacred rise up against him from under the paving-stones.

_Vendredi Saint_: M. Bérenger,[136] attired as a Protestant clergyman, glowers at the Magdalen, who is weeping over the Crucified One, and says, “_Si j’avais été 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 illustrated organs of revolt, beginning with the _Père Peinard_, and at one time made all the illustrations for a most impertinent little sheet, known as _Le Pied de Nez_, the text for which was furnished by Camille St. Croix. His stained-glass window at the _Chat Noir_, representing the worship 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 class 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, Sabatté, 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 _ménages_ or junketing with their mistresses and models; over-dressed _filles de joie_ awaiting, Danaë-like, in cafés 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 succumbing 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 assertion 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 masses; 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 Père 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 Illustré_, to which last he contributed a first page, weekly, for a number of years. He has illustrated 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 Petit 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, Pissarro _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 Lefèvre, 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 illustrated by Charpentier, Heidbrinck, Hermann-Paul, Camille Lefèvre, Luce, Mab, Rysselberghe, and Pissarro _fils_. Grandjouan, Léal de Camara, Arthur Michaël, Jossot, Dubuc, Balluriau, Gottlob, Noël Dorville, Jouve, Kupka, Weiluc, Louis Morin, Braun, Borgex, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cadel, Darbour, Roedel, Redon, and Grün are all strongly revolutionary in portions of their work.

_Le Rire_, _Le Sourire_, _Le Cri de Paris_, _Le Gil Blas Illustré_, and nearly a score of illustrated sheets, whose existence is likely to be so ephemeral that their enumeration would be idle, allow a modicum of space to refractory productions by these _dessinateurs_; and in the spring of 1901 an illustrated publication was founded, which is devoted exclusively to full-page drawings of an anti-capitalistic, anti-governmental character. This publication, which is called _L’Assiette au Beurre_,[139] is as fierce in its way as was the suppressed _Père 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’Assiette 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 _assiette 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’Assiette 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, Michaël, Dubuc, Jean Veber, Willette, Van Dongen, Gottlob, Noël Dorville, Heidbrinck, Jouve, Lucien Métivet, Ibels, Guillaume, Caran d’Ache, Kupka, Weiluc, Xavier, José, Minartz, Jacques Villon, Vallotton, Sancha, Pezilla, Louis Morin, Doës, and Abel Faivre have had, each, at least one number, and Hermann-Paul, Steinlen, Léal 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 attitude of the artistic _élite_ 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 assail the political element in power—and quite another thing to demolish the state itself and all the institutions 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-Saëns, and Massenet[141] (who represent, with modifications, the classic 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 César 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 Fauré, 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 connoisseurship, 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 passion, 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 _Opéra Comique_ in 1899, and not yet banished from a prominent place in the répertoire) 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, Pissarro, and Cézanne, and that a pronounced 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 _irréguliers_ in every department of art. He would be a surpassingly subtle analyser 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.