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.