Nationalism and Culture (92 page)

Much has changed since then. Periods of reaction and of revolution have followed one another in varied sequence and influenced the intellectual and social development of the European peoples. Many a vantage point that seemed to have been won for all time was lost again in the unending struggles of the times. What, however, no reaction could again turn back, was the fact that the revolution had for the first time set the masses permanently in motion and had brought them to believe that they would get their rights only by struggle. At first it was the ideals of political radicalism which set thesfe masses astir j then came the great ideas of socialism, which powerfully affected the thought and feeling of men and gave a deeper and more comprehensive meaning to the revolution. A new stratum of society was aroused to a sense of its own life: the class of working people, which defiantly stretched its limbs and from then on took part in public affairs. And no one would ever again put them down after

the recognition slowly dawned on them that their labor kept society alive. This movement of the masses, the most characteristic phenomenon of modern history, had also to find its expression in art and literature. The great reaction which spread over all Europe after the overthrow of Napoleon was able for a time to suppress this movement on the surface, but it was not in a position to destroy in the minds of the peoples the memory of the heroic time of the revolution. The revolutionary hurricane had shaken society too deeply. The French Revolution had thrown a new bond around the peoples of Europe that no government could destroy. All the revolutionary occurrences in Europe up to the middle of the second half of the last century had been inspired by its ideas and had set the masses in motion. In Delacroix's painting. Freedom on the Barricades, these ambitions are given powerful expression. Exultant passion roars out of it. The mass goes into action, fights, dies, falls into ecstasies, seized by the intoxication of the moment, which reflects the secret yearning of the centuries. And that current never disappears again from the art of our time.

Up to the year 1848 the "Fourth Estate" fought the battles of the bourgeoisie in the struggle against the last bulwarks of the old regime. But the bloody tragedy of June put an end to all the illusions about the harmony of the classes and revealed with dreadful clarity the yawning abyss that had opened between the new upstarts and the awakened working class. It must have been clear even to the blindest that the paths of the new holders of power could never be the paths of the working people. A new social type had gradually taken shape in the years since the great revolution: the "bourgeois," the repulsive misbirth of the citizenry that had once taken part in the storming of the Bastille and had let loose the revolution. But the sons and the grandsons had in them no more of that unrestful spirit j they hated nothing more than revolt and fermenting riot. The bourgeois loves order, which allows him to pursue his business with proper deliberation. His heart beats in his pocketbook, and to this he sacrifices ruthlessly all deeper social feeling. With the revolting greed of the upstart he tries to subject everything to himself and to oppress everyone as suits him. He is intellectually limited, plebeian and loutish in behavior, comfortable and self-satisfied, a born Philistine, but ready for any baseness when he thinks his property is threatened.

Louis-Philippe was the worthy representative of this class, whose type he even illustrated physically: a fat banker's face, with rolling double chin and crafty glance, in which lurked sly cunning and clever business sense. After those hot July days of 1830 two hundred nineteen Bourgeois deputies had palavered off this scion of the House of Orleans on the French as their king. They called him the "citizen king," and no crowned head ever wore his title with better right than did Louis-Philippe. The

period of this man's government was one of the most shameful that France has ever had to endure. The infamous slogan of the Minister Guizot, "Get rich!" was written on the body of this miserable system, which during the eighteen years of its duration stirred up such frightful bitterness in the people.

In Honore Daumier there arose a terrible and implacable opponent of the miserable regime. Daumier was a genuinely great man who was able to give to his drawings, although they were designed for the demands of the moment, an eternal worth. He was utterly inexhaustible in his attacks upon the ruling system and its chief representatives, spied out its every weakness and lashed them with burning scorn. He aimed the sharp darts of his diabolic wit at the king. He depicted him in every conceivable situation: as a harlequin, a ropedancer, a swindling stockbroker, even as a criminal, Louis-Philippe had nothing majestic about him, and no one could take from him what he had never possessed j but Daumier sketched him in his pitiful weak humanity as the typical symbol of bourgeois society, with his stove-pipe hat as "citizen's crown," his thick umbrella under his arm—the veritable "king of the paunches," to whom the mind is merely ballast, the prototype of the gluttonous Philistine always pregnant with petty commonplaces.

Not even prison made Daumier any more docile, and when the "government of the paunches" put into effect the infamous September law of ^^35J by which all political caricatures were forbidden and the freedom of the press practically suspended, the artist turned upon the bourgeois himself and made him the target of his infernal mockery. He fairly stripped him naked to the gaze of all beholders and pointed out every hidden wrinkle in his dreary Philistine soul. We see him on the street, in the theater, on his promenades in the Bois, in the tavern, by the side of his loved spouse, in the bath, in his bedroom, and come to know thoroughly every aspect of his unintellectual existence. Daumier's uncompromising pencil preserved for us a whole gallery of types that belong among the most imperishable that art has ever produced. Unexcelled are his drawings of Robert Macaire, the type of the cunning sharper and cut-purse, who is always busy coining into money the intellectual limitations of his dear fellow men and, together with his friend, Bertram, attends to the plucking of those who are not quite all there. A well-known Parisian playwright had put this type on the stage in a melodrama, and Daumier availed himself of the clever idea, of which he made an unexampled success. Under his cunning hand the entire period became the era of Robert Macaire. The clever rascal, who is firmly convinced that the stupidity of his gallant contemporaries has no limit whatever, with calm arrogance engages in every field of human activity and plays his star role with the expert air of the connoisseur who knows just what men will

swallow. The variations that Daumier was able to play with this type of charlatan were quite inexhaustible.

Never was an artist so intimately intergrown with his social environment as was Daumier. Even if he had not uttered for us his "Je suis de tnon temps" we should know it. A single glance at his work is enough to tell us that he was a "child of his time." Well said! Of his time. Not of his people or his nation, for his art reached far beyond the frontiers of France} his work is the cultural possession of the entire world. Daumier felt the pulse-beat of his age, recognized its slightest stirrings and saw, above all, its profound debasement. He saw with the keen eye of the artist, which nothing escapes j therefore he saw more deeply than most of his contemporaries who stood with him on the same side of the barricades. Thus, he already recognized the entire hollowness and triviality of the legislative assembly while parliamentarism was still in the flowering springtime of its sins. Let one contemplate the ideal figures that grin back at us from the drawing of the "legislative paunch." Never have the so-called "representatives of the people" and members of the government been so pitilessly unmasked as here. Here the very innermost things were brought to the surface. Those charming contemporaries were a company of intellectual zeros, who for narrow-mindedness, windiness, complacent self-satisfaction, petrifaction of brain, petty intrigue and brutal indifference represent about the worst that can be gathered under the heading, "popular representation." And then the delicious figures of his "repre-sentants representes*^ of the period of 1848-49, figures of irresistible drollery and gruesome realism, in which the unintelligence and impotence of the parliamentary system is more eloquently portrayed than the most skillful pen could do it.

Daumier was a fervent worshiper of freedom and remained one till death closed his eyes. He felt truly that freedom cannot be hemmed in by the narrow frame of a constitution, that it cannot breathe, must suffocate, as soon as it is delivered over to the hair-split-ting of advocates and lawmakers. What an expressive language is spoken by the plate, "The constitution puts Liberty into a hypnotic sleep!" And that other drawing where the constitution is fitting a new dress on Liberty, who pleads anxiously, "Don't take off too much, please!" Ah, the time has not yet come, will never come, when—as Georg Biichner expects in Dantons Tod —the pattern of the state will be like a transparent garment that clings close to the body of the people so that every beat of a blood-vessel, every tensing of a muscle, every twitch of desire will show clearly through it. Even the best state constitution is inevitably a strait-jacket for freedom. Besides, the worthy tailors of the constitution have in every country cut away so much of the stuff of freedom that what is left makes hardly a decent nightshirt. And then that splendid picture: The Constitution on the

Operating Table. An unconscious woman lies stretched out on a table j about her stand the doctors in their operating gowns and listen to the explanations of the professor. Uncanny goblins, those political surgeons, repulsive and of revolting ugliness. One feels with horror what it means to intrust confidingly to these fellows the safety of hard-won freedoms. Is not even this operating room haunted by the ghost of Robert Macaire.'' How modern this plate seems. Just as if it were dedicated to Herr Briining and the Weimar constitution. Yes, everything in Daumier is modern, for the bigoted faith in the miraculous power of the constitution has not yet become, by a long way, a dead dream. Daumier might very well have felt as did Bakunin, who said in this connection: "I do not believe in constitutions and lawsj the best of constitutions could not satisfy me. We need something else: storm and life and a new, lawless, and therefore free, world." *

And as Daumier had chosen the men of the legislative bodies as the target of his bitter scorn, so also he hated their executive instruments with all the passion of his southern temperament. The whole of bourgeois justice was to him just the whore of that society of the paunches which he so profoundly despised. It is in this light that he portrays for us its administrators J living embodiments of sanctimonious pretense and infamous knavery, slayers of souls who think in formulas and whose feeling has grown dull in the routine of legal violence and intellectual rape. These plates, too, still have the same force, for in this respect nothing has changed, and justice is still today the organized revenge of privileged castes which press the law into their service.

Daumier's art depicted the spirit of things, and the individual supporters of existing institutions he used merely to give expression to this spirit. Thus he attacked war and its instigator, militarism, also. It is not the external that excites him, the immediate causes that lead to war. His gaze penetrates deeper and shows us that horrible bond which still chains the men of today to the past and in an evil hour awakens to new life the seemingly dead. Daumier knew, too, that militarism was not just the existence of standing armies. He had recognized clearly that here we have to deal with a special state of mind which, once it is artificially bred in him, transforms man into an unfeeling automaton that obeys every command blindly and takes no account of the consequences of his deed. This artificial crippling of the conscience and of individual reflection, which breaks down in man all moral control, all sense of personality, is the first presupposition of every militarism without distinction of flag or uniform. By expressing in his pictures just this Daumier went far beyond the narrow bounds of nationally conditioned situations and treated

■* Marcel Herwegh, Briefe von und zu Georg Herwegh: "Brief Bakunins an Herwegh aus dem Jahre 1848" Miinchen, 1898.

war and militarism as the unwholesome results of a system which in every land, through the same fundamental conditions of life produces the same effects. Here speaks to us an artist in whom the man has conquered the citizen of the state! to whom hum.anity as a whole is more precious than that artificial creation, the nation, and that so variable concept, the fatherland, despite which he was devoted with all his heart to his native country. It is this all-embracing character of his view that lifts his art far above the level of a mere cross-section of everyday events and lends to it its imperishable greatness.

What Daumier began as draftsman and painter, others carried on and developed further. In the dark period after the Napoleonic wars up to the outbreak of the Revolution of July the relation of art to the immediate social occurrences of life had almost been lost. Daumier had reestablished it by making himself the herald of an art out of which spoke the thought and feeling of the people. These endeavors in art were powerfully advanced by the development of the labor movement in Europe. A new time threw its shadow ahead. Labor, which had been so long despised and whose representatives had been regarded as inferior helots, won a new esteem. The working masses began to understand that their creative activity lay at the foundation of all social existence. The spirit of socialism was aroused. And in every country it laid the intellectual foundation for a new community of the future. The people, who had to toil in sweaty slavery, who built palaces and drove shafts deep into the earth to drag forth its treasures J the people, who daily spread life's table for their masters and dragged out their own days in poverty and want, matured gradually to a new understanding and began to strain at the chains that had been put on them.