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, 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, 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.