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.