NOTES:

[56] As a power for the encouragement of virtue and the suppression of vice, caricature cannot be too highly estimated, though often abused. It is doubtful which exercises the greater influence, poem or picture. In England, perhaps, picture wields the greater power; in France, song. Yet, “let me write the ballads and you may govern the people,” is an English axiom which was well known before pictures became so plentiful or so popular, or the refined cartoons of Mr. Punch were ever dreamt of. In Paris, where art-education is highly developed, fugitive designs seems to have, with but few exceptions, descended into vile abuse and indecent metaphor, the wildest invective being exhausted upon trivial matters—hence the failure.
The art advocates of the Commune, with but few exceptions, seem to have been of the most humble sort, inspired with the melodramatic taste of our Seven Dials or the New Out, venting itself in ill-drawn heroic females, symbols of the Republic, clad in white, wearing either mural crowns or Phrygian caps, and waving red flags. They are the work of aspiring juvenile artists or uneducated men. I allude to art favourable to the Commune, and not that coëval with it, or the vast mass of pictorial unpleasantly born of gallic rage during the Franco-Prussian war, including such designs as the horrible allegory of Bayard, “Sedan, 1870,” a large work depicting Napoleon III. drawn in a calèche and four, over legions of his dying soldiers, in the presence of a victorious enemy and the shades of his forefathers’, and the well-known subject, so popular in photography, of “The Pillory,” Napoleon between King William and Bismarck, also set in the midst of a mass of dead and dying humanity. Paper pillories are always very popular in Paris, and under the Commune the heads of Tropmann and Thiers were exhibited in a wooden vice, inscribed Pantin and Neuilly underneath. And, again, in another print, entitled “The Infamous,” we have Thiers, Favre, and MacMahon, seen in a heavenly upper storey, fixed to stakes, contemplating a dead mother and her child, slain in their happy home, the wounds very sanguine and visible, the only remaining relict being a child of very tender years in an overturned cradle; beneath is the inscription “Their Works.” Communal art seems also to have been very severe upon landlords, who are depicted with long faces and threadbare garments, seeking alms in the street, or flying with empty bags and lean stomachs from a very yellow sun, bearing the words “The Commune, 1871.” Whilst as a contrast, a fat labourer, with a patch on his blouse, luxuriates in the same golden sunshine.
As a sample of the better kind of French art, we give two fac-similes, by Bertal, from The Grelot, a courageous journal started during the Commune; it existed unmolested, and still continues. We here insert a fac-simile of a sketch called “Paris and his Playthings.”
“What destruction the unhappy, spoiled, and ill-bred child whose name is Paris has done, especially of late!
“France, his strapping nurse, put herself in a passion in vain, the child would not listen to reason. He broke Trochu’s arms, ripped up Gambetta, to see what there was inside. He blew out the lantern of Rochefort; as to Bergeret himself, he trampled him under foot.
“He has dislocated all his puppets, strewed the ground with the débris of his fancies, and he is not yet content,—‘What do you want, you wretched baby?’—‘I want the moon!’ The old woman called the Assembly was right in refusing this demand,—‘The moon, you little wretch, and what would you do with it if you had it?’—‘I would pull it to bits, as I did the rest.’”
Further on will be found “[Paris eating a General a day]” (Chapter LXXVIII). Early in June, 1871 there appeared in the same journal “The International Centipede,” “John Bull and the Blanche Albion.” The Queen of England, clad in white, holding in her hands a model of the Palace of Westminster, and sundry docks, resists the approach of an interminable centipede, on which she stamps, vainly endeavouring to impede the progress of the coil of fire and blood approaching to soil and fire her fair robe; beside her stands John Bull, in a queer mixed costume, half sailor, with the smalls and gaiters of a coalheaver. He bears the Habeas Corpus Act under his arm, but stands aghast and paralysed, it never seeming to have occurred to the artist that this “Monsieur John Boule, Esquire,” was well adapted by his beetle-crushers to stamp out the vermin. Perhaps, it is needless to add, that the snake-like form issues from a hole in distant Prussia, meandering through many nations, causing great consternation, and that M. Thiers is finishing off the French section in admirable style.

Little Paris and his Playthings. Nurse. Mais! Sacré mille noms d’un moutard! what will you want next?—PETIT PARIS: I’ll have the moon!

LI.

What has Monsieur Courbet to do among these people? He is a painter, not a politician. A few beery speeches uttered at the Hautefeuille Café cannot turn his past into a revolutionary one, and an order refused for the simple reason that it is more piquant for a man to have his button-hole without ornament than with a slip of red ribbon in it, when it is well known that he disdains whatever every one else admires, is but a poor title to fame. To your last, Napoleon Gaillard![[57]] To your paint-brushes, Gustave Courbet! And if we say this, it is not only from fear that the meagre lights of Monsieur Courbet are insufficient, and may draw the Commune into new acts of folly,—(though we scarcely know, alas! if there be any folly the Commune has left undone,)—but it is, above all, because we fear the odium and ridicule that the false politician may throw upon the painter. Yes! whatever may be our horror for the nude women and unsightly productions with which Monsieur Courbet[[58]] has honoured the exhibitions of paintings, we remember with delight several, admirably true to nature, with sunshine and summer breezes playing among the leaves, and streams murmuring refreshingly over the pebbles, and rocks whereon climbing plants cling closely; and, besides these landscapes, a good picture here and there, executed, if not by the hand of an artist—for the word artist possesses a higher meaning in our eyes—at least by the hand of a man of some power, and we hate that this painter should be at the Hôtel de Ville at the moment when the spring is awakening in forest and field, and when he would do so much better to go into the woods of Meudon or Fontainebleau to study the waving of the branches and the eccentric twists and turns of the oak-tree’s huge trunk, than in making answers to Monsieur Lefrançais—iconoclast in theory only as yet—and to Monsieur Jules Vallès, who has read Homer in Madame Dacier’s translation, or has never read it at all. That one should try a little of everything, even of polities, when one is capable of nothing else, is, if not excusable, at any rate comprehensible; but when a man can make excellent boots like Napoleon Gaillard, or good paintings like Gustave Courbet, that he should deliberately lay himself open to ridicule, and perhaps to everlasting execration, is what we cannot admit. To this Monsieur Courbet would reply: “It is the artists that I represent; it is the rights and claims of modern art that I uphold. There must be a great revolution in painting as in politics; we must federate too, I tell you; we’ll decapitate those aristocrats, the Titians and Paul Veroneses; we’ll establish, instead of a jury, a revolutionary tribunal, which shall condemn to instant death any man who troubles himself about the ideal—that king whom we have knocked off his throne; and at this tribunal I will be at once complainant, lawyer, and judge. Yes! my brother painters, rally around me, and we will die for the Commune of Art. As to those who are not of my opinion, I don’t care the snap of a finger about them.” By this last expression the friends of Monsieur Gustave Courbet will perceive that we are not without some experience of his style of conversation. Courbet, my master, you don’t know what you are talking about, and all true artists will send you to old Harry, you and your federation. Do you know what an artistic association, such as you understand it, would result in? In serving the puerile ambition of one man—its chief, for there will be a chief, will there not, Monsieur Courbet?—and the puerile rancours of a parcel of daubers, without name and without talent. Artist in our way we assert, that no matter, what painter, even had he composed works superior in their way to Courbet’s “Combat de Cerfs” and “Femme au Perroquet,” who came and said, “Let us federate,” we would answer him plainly: “Leave us in peace, messieurs of the federation, we are dreamers and workers; when we exhibit or publish and are happy enough to meet with a man who will buy or print a few thousand copies of our work without reducing himself to beggary, we are happy. When that is done, we do not trouble ourselves much about our work; the indulgence of a few friends, and the indignation of a few fools, is all we ask or hope for. We federate? Why? With whom? If our work is bad, will the association with any society in the world make it good? Will the works of others gain anything by their association with ours? Let us go home, messieurs les artistes, let us shut our doors, let us say to our servants—if we have any—that we are at home to no one, and, after having cut our best pencil, or seized our best pen, let us labour in solitude, without relaxation, with no other thought than that of doing the best we can, with no higher judge than that of our own artistic conscience; and when the work is completed, let us cordially shake hands with those of our comrades who love us; let us help them, and let them bring help to us, but freely, without obligation, without subscriptions, without societies, and without statutes. We have nothing to do with these free-masonries, absurd when brought into the domain of intelligence, and in which two or three hundred people get together to do that, which some new-comer, however unknown his budding fame, would accomplish at a blow, in the face of all the associations in the world.” This is what I should naïvely reply to Monsieur Courbet if he took it into his head to offer me any advice or compact whatsoever to sign.