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.