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.
[Illustration: The Modern “Erostrate” Courbet. In progress of removal.
June 1871.]
The artists have done still better than we should; they have not
answered at all, for one cannot call the “General Assembly of all the
Artists in Design,” presided over by Monsieur Gustave Courbet, and held
on the 13th of April, 1871, in the great amphitheatre of the Ecole de
Médecine, a real meeting of French artists. We know several celebrated
painters, and we saw none of them there. The citizens Potier and
Boulaix had been named secretaries. We congratulate them; for this high
distinction may, perhaps, aid in founding their reputation, which was
in great want of a basis of some kind. But there were some sculptors
there, perhaps? We saw some long beards, beards that were quite unknown
to us, and their owners may have been sculptors, perhaps. For Paris is
a city of sculptors. But if artists were wanting, there were talkers
enough. Have you ever remarked that there are no orators so
indefatigable as those who have nothing to say? And the interruptions,
the clamour, the apostrophising, more highly coloured than courteous!
Such an overwhelming tumult was never heard:—
“No more jury!”
“Yes! yes! a jury! a jury!”
“Out with the reactionist!”
“Down with Cabanel!”
“And the women? Are the women to be on the jury?”
“Neither the women, nor the infirm.”
And all the time there is Monsieur Gustave Courbet, the chairman,
desperately ringing his bell for order, and launching some expressive
exclamation from time to time. And the result of all this? Absolutely
nothing at all! No! stop! There were a few statutes proposed—and every
one amused himself immensely. “Well! so much the better,” said one.
“Every one laughed, and no harm was done to anybody.”
We beg your pardon! There was a great deal of harm done—to Monsieur
Courbet.