CHAPTER XXI

THE PICTURE WITH A SOCIAL PURPOSE That modern life first entered art, in all countries, under the form of humorous anecdote is partly the consequence of the one-sided æsthetic ideas of the period. In an age that was dominated by idealism it was forgotten that Murillo had painted lame beggars sitting in the sun, Velasquez cripples and drunkards, and Holbein lepers; that Rembrandt had so much love for humble folk, and that old Breughel with a strangely sombre pessimism turned the whole world into a terrible hospital. The modern man was hideous, and art demanded "absolute beauty." If he was to be introduced into painting, despite his want of _beauté suprême_, the only way was to treat him as a humorous figure which had to be handled ironically. Mercantile considerations were also a power in determining this form of humour. At a time when painting was forced to address itself to a public which was uneducated in art, and could only appreciate anecdotes, such comicalities had the best prospect of favour and a rapid sale. The object was to provoke laughter, at all hazards, by drollness of mien, typical stupidity, and absurdity of situation. The choice of figures was practically made according as they were more or less serviceable for a humorous purpose. Children, rustics, and provincial Philistines seemed to be most adapted to it. The painter treated them as strange and naïve beings, and brought them before the public as a sort of performing dogs, who could go through remarkable tricks just as if they were human beings. And the public laughed over whimsical oddities from another world, as the courtiers of Louis XIV had laughed in Versailles when M. Jourdain and M. Dimanche were acted by the king's servants upon the stage of Molière. Meanwhile painters gradually came to remark that this humour _à l'huile_ was bought at too dear a price. For humour, which is like a soap-bubble, can only bear a light method of representation, such as Hokusai's drawing or Brouwer's painting, but becomes insupportable where it is offered as a laborious composition executed with painstaking realism. And ethical reasons made themselves felt independently of these artistic considerations. The drollness of these pictures did not spring from the characters, but from an effort to amuse the public at the expense of the painted figures. As a general rule a peasant is a serious, square-built, angular fellow. For his existence he does battle with the soil; his life is no pleasure to him, but hard toil. But in these pictures he appeared as a figure who had no aim or purport; in his brain the earnestness of life was transformed into a romping game. Painters laughed at the little world which they represented. They were not the friends of man, but parodied him and transformed life into a sort of Punch and Judy show. And even when they did not approach their figures with deliberate irony, they never dreamed of plunging with any sincere love of truth into the depths of modern life. They painted modern matter without taking part in it, like good children who know nothing of the bitter facts that take place in the world. When the old Dutch painters laughed, their laughter had its historical justification. In the pictures of Ostade and Dirk Hals there is seen all the primitive exuberance and wild joy of life belonging to a people who had just won their independence and abandoned themselves after long years of war with a sensuous transport to the gladness of existence. But the smile of these modern _genre_ painters is forced, conventional, and artificial; the smile of a later generation which only took the trouble to smile because the old Dutch had laughed before them. They put on rose-coloured glasses, and through these gaudy spectacles saw only a gay masque of life, a fair but hollow deception. They allowed their heroes to pass such a merry existence that the question of what they lived upon was never touched. When they painted their tavern pictures they anxiously suppressed the thought that people who drained their great mugs so carelessly possibly had sick children at home, hungry and perishing with cold in a room without a fire. Their peasants are the favoured sons of fortune: they sowed not, neither did they reap, nor gathered into barns, but their Heavenly Father fed them. Poverty and vice presented themselves merely as amiable weaknesses, not as great modern problems. Just at this time the way was being paved for the Revolution of 1848: the people fought and suffered, and for years before literature had taken part in this struggle. Before the Revolution the battle had been between the nobility and the middle class; but now that the latter had to some extent taken the place of the nobility of earlier days, there rose the mighty problem of strife between the unproductive and the productive, between rich and poor. In England, the birthplace of the modern capitalistic system, in a country where great industry and great landed property first ousted the independent yeomanry and called forth ever sharper division between those who possessed everything and those who possessed nothing, the unsolved problem of the nineteenth century found its earliest utterance. More than sixty years ago, in the year of Goethe's death, a new literature arose there, the literature of social politics. With Ebenezer Elliott, who had been himself a plain artisan, the Fourth Estate made its entry into literature; a workman led the train of socialistic poets. Thomas Hood wrote his _Song of the Shirt_, that lyric of the poor sempstress which soon spread all over the Continent. Carlyle, the friend and admirer of Goethe, came forward in 1843 as the burning advocate of the poor and miserable in _Past and Present_. He wrote there that this world was no home to the working-man, but a dreary dungeon full of mad and fruitless plagues. It was an utterance that shook the world like a bomb. Benjamin Disraeli's _Sybil_ followed in 1845. As a novel it is a strange mixture of romantic and naturalistic chapters, the latter seeming like a prophetic announcement of Zola's _Germinal_. As a reporter Charles Dickens had in his youth the opportunity of learning the wretchedness of the masses in London, even in the places where they lurked distrustfully in dark haunts. In his Christmas stories and his London sketches he worked these scenes of social distress into thrilling pictures. The poor man, whose life is made up of bitter weeks and scanty holidays, received his citizenship in the English novel. In France the year 1830 was an end and a beginning--the close of the struggles begun in 1789, and the opening of those which led to the decisive battle of 1848. With the _roi bourgeois_, whom Lafayette called "the best of republicans," the Third Estate came into possession of the position to which it had long aspired; it rose from the ranks of the oppressed to that of the privileged classes. As a new ruling class it made such abundant capital with the fruits of the Revolution of July that even in 1830 Börne wrote from Paris: "The men who fought against all aristocracy for fifteen years have scarcely conquered--they have not yet wiped the sweat from their faces--and already they want to found for themselves a new aristocracy, an aristocracy of money, a knighthood of fortune." To the same purpose wrote Heine in 1837: "The men of thought who, during the eighteenth century, were so indefatigable in preparing the Revolution, would blush if they saw how self-interest is building its miserable huts on the site of palaces that have been broken down, and how, out of these huts, a new aristocracy is sprouting up which, more ungraciously than the old, has its primary cause in money-making." There the radical ideas of modern socialism were touched. The proletariat and its misery became henceforward the subject of French poetry, though they were not observed with any naturalistic love of truth, but from the romantic standpoint of contrast. Béranger, the popular singer of _chansons_, composed his _Vieux Vagabond_, the song of the old beggar who dies in the gutter; Auguste Barbier wrote his Ode to Freedom, where _la sainte canaille_ are celebrated as immortal heroes, and with the scorn of Juvenal "lashes those who drew profit from the Revolution, those _bourgeois_ in kid gloves who watched the sanguinary street fights comfortably from the window." In 1842-43 Eugène Sue published his _Mystères de Paris_, a forbidding and nonsensical book, but one which made an extraordinary sensation, just because of the disgusting openness with which it unveiled the life of the lower strata of the people. Even the great spirits of the Romantic school began to follow the social and political strife of the age with deep emotion and close sympathy. Already in the course of the thirties socialistic ideas forced their way into the Romantic school from every side. Their source was Saint Simon, whose doctrines first found a wide circulation under Louis Philippe. According to Saint Simon, the task of the new Christianity consisted in improving as quickly as possible the fate of the class which was at once the poorest and the most numerous. His pupils regarded him as the Messiah of the new era, and went forth into the world as his disciples. George Sand, the boldest feminine genius in the literature of the world, mastered these seething ideas and founded the artisan novel in her _Compagnon du Tour de France_. It is the first book with a real love of the people--the people as they actually are, those who drink and commit deeds of violence as well as those who work and make mental progress. In her periodical, _L'Éclaireur de l'Indre_, she pleads the cause both of the artisan in great towns and of the rustic labourer; in 1844 she declared herself as a Socialist, without qualification, in her great essay _Politics and Socialism_, and she brought out her celebrated _Letters to the People_ in 1848. The democratic tide of ideas came to Victor Hugo chiefly through the religious apostle Lamennais, whose book, written in prison, _De l'Esclavage Moderne_, gave the same fuel to the Revolution of 1848 as the works of Rousseau had done to that of 1789. "The peasant bears the whole burden of the day, exposes himself to rain and sun and wind, to make ready by his work the harvest which fills our barns in the late autumn. If there are those who think the lighter of him on that account, and will not accord him freedom and justice, build a high wall round them, so that their noisome breath may not poison the air of Europe." From the forties there mutters through Hugo's poems the muffled sound of the Revolution which was soon to burst over Paris, and thence to move, like a rolling thunderstorm, across Europe. In place of the tricolor under which the _bourgeoisie_ and the artisan class had fought side by side eighteen years before, the banner of the artisan was hoisted blood-red against the ruling _bourgeoisie_. This _Zeitgeist_, this spirit of the age which had grown earnest, necessarily guided art into another course; the painted humour and childlike optimism of the first _genre_ painters began to turn out a lie. In spite of Schiller, art cannot be blithe with sincerity when life is earnest. It can laugh with the muscles of the face, but the laughter is mirthless; it may haughtily declare itself in favour of some consecrated precinct, in which nothing of the battles and struggles of the outside world is allowed to echo; but, for all that, harsh reality demands its rights. Josef Danhauser's modest little picture of 1836, "The Gormandizer," is an illustration of this. In a sumptuously furnished room a company of high station and easy circumstances are seated at dinner. The master of the house, a sleek little man, is draining his glass, and a young dandy is playing the guitar. But an unwelcome disturbance breaks in. The figure of a beggar, covered with rags and with a greasy hat in his hand, appears at the door. The ladies scream, and a dog springs barking from under a chair, whilst the flunkey in attendance angrily prepares to send the impudent intruder about his business. That was the position which art had hitherto taken up towards the social question. It shrank peevishly back as soon as rude and brutal reality disturbed its peaceful course. People wished to see none but cheerful pictures of life around them. [Illustration: DANHAUSER. THE GORMANDIZER.] For this reason peasants were invariably painted in neat and cleanly dress, with their faces beaming with joy, an embodiment of the blessing of work and the delights of country life. Even beggars were harmless, peacefully cheerful figures, sparkling with health and beauty, and enveloped in æsthetic rags. But as political, religious, and social movements have always had a vivid and forcible effect on artists, painters in the nineteenth century could not in the long run hold themselves aloof from this influence. The voice of the disinherited made itself heard sullenly muttering and with ever-increasing strength. The parable of Lazarus lying at the threshold of the rich man had become a terrible reality. Conflict was to be seen everywhere around, and it would have been mere hardness of heart to have used this suffering people any longer as an agreeable subject for merriment. A higher conception of humanity, the entire philanthropic character of the age, made the jests at which the world had laughed seem forced and tasteless. Modern life must cease altogether before it can be a humorous episode for art, and it had become earnest reality through and through. Painting could no longer affect trivial humour; it had to join issue, and speak of what was going on around it. It had to take its part in the struggle for aims that belonged to the immediate time. Powerfully impressed by the Revolution of July, it made its first advance. The Government had been thrown down after a blood-stained struggle, and a liberated people were exulting; and the next Salon showed more than forty representations of the great events, amongst which that of _Delacroix_ took the highest place in artistic impressiveness. The principal figure in his picture is "a youthful woman, with a red Phrygian cap, holding a musket in one hand and a tricolor in the other. Naked to the hip, she strides forward over the corpses, giving challenge to battle, a beautiful vehement body with a face in bold profile and an insolent grief upon her features, a strange mixture of Phryne, _poissarde_, and the goddess of Liberty." Thus has Heine described the work while still under a vivid impression of the event it portrayed. In the thick of the powder smoke stands "Liberty" upon the barricade, at her right a Parisian gamin with a pistol in his hand, a child but already a hero, at her left an artisan with a gun on his arm: it is the people that hastens by, exulting to die the death for the great ideas of liberty and equality. The painter himself had an entirely unpolitical mind. He had drawn his inspiration for the picture, not from experience, but out of _La Curée_, those verses of Auguste Barbier that are ablaze with wrath-- "C'est que la Liberté n'est pas une comtesse Du noble faubourg Saint-Germain, Une femme qu'un cri fait tomber en faiblesse, Qui met du blanc et du carmin; C'est un forte femme aux puissantes mamelles, À la voix rauque, aux durs appas, Qui, du brun sur la peau, du feu dans les prunelles, Agile et marchant à grands pas, Se plait aux cris du peuple, aux sanglantes mêlées, Aux longs roulements des tambours, À l'odeur de la poudre, aux lointaines volées Des cloches et des canons sourds." And by this allegorical figure he has certainly weakened its grip and directness; but it was a bold, naturalistic achievement all the same. By this work the great Romanticist became the father of the naturalistic movement, which henceforward, supported by the revolutionary democratic press, spread more and more widely. The critics on these journals began to reproach painters with troubling themselves too little about social and political affairs. "The actuality and social significance of art," it was written, "is the principal thing. What is meant by Beauty? We demand that painting should influence society, and join in the work of progress. Everything else belongs to the domain of Utopias and abstractions." The place of whimsicalities is accordingly taken by sentimental and melodramatic scenes from the life of the poor. Rendered enthusiastic by the victory of the people, and inspired by democratic sentiments, some painters came to believe that the sufferings of the artisan class were the thing to be represented, and that there was nothing nobler than work. [Illustration: LELEUX. MOT D'ORDRE.] One of the first to give an example was _Jeanron_. His picture of "The Little Patriots," produced in connection with the Revolution of July, was a glorification of the struggle for freedom; his "Scene in Paris" a protest against the sufferings of the people. He sought his models amongst the poor of the suburb, painted their ragged clothes and their rugged heads without idealisation. For him the aim of art was not beauty, but the expression of truth--a truth, no doubt, which made political propaganda. It was Jeanron's purpose to have a socialistic influence. One sees it in his blacksmiths and peasants, and in that picture "The Worker's Rest" which in 1847 induced Thoré's utterance: "It is a melancholy and barren landscape from the neighbourhood of Paris, a plebeian landscape which hardly seems to belong to itself, and which gives up all pretensions to beauty merely to be of service to man. Jeanron is always plebeian, even in his landscapes: he loves the plains which are never allowed to repose, on which there is always labour; there are no beautiful flowers in his fields, as there is no gold ornament on the rags of his beggars and labourers." And afterwards, during the early years of the reign of Louis Philippe, when the tendency became once more latent, the Revolution of February worked out what the Revolution of July had begun. Mediocre painters like _Antigna_ became famous because they bewailed the sorrows of the "common man" in small and medium-sized pictures. Others began to display a greater interest in rustics, and to take them more seriously than they had done in earlier works. _Adolphe Leleux_ made studies in Brittany, and discovered earnest episodes in the daily life of the peasant, which he rendered with great actuality. And after sliding back into Romanticism, as he did with his Arragon smugglers, he enjoyed his chief success in 1849 with that picture at the Luxembourg to which he was incited by the sad aspect of the streets of Paris during the rising of