Chapter III: Part 3

Pelletan has just published Anatole France’s new book “L’Affaire Crainquebille,” a satire on French law and modes of justice, done in Anatole France’s most delightful manner, and illustrated by Steinlen.

Crainquebille, a seller of turnips, which he pushes through the streets in a little hand-cart, is accused of having called out to a policeman “_Mort aux Vaches!_”--a slang opprobium of the streets. The poor innocent, unconscious of offending, is haled to the courts, where he becomes the victim of a most amusing and witty _procès_, withal tragically pathetic. He is condemned to prison, and when once more at liberty attempts to resume his ancient, respectable calling. He finds himself a pariah, shunned because of the stigma of “jail-bird!” Crainquebille falls into abject poverty and inebriation. In his starving misery he reflects, “Prison isn’t half a bad place, after all!” and to partake once more of its peace he sins deliberately. Bearding the policeman in his den--that is, the street lamp’s shadow--he cries out to him, “_Mort aux Vaches!_” But the amiable officer, “un bon père de famille,” laughs at the old man and bids him go about his business. The poor old Crainquebille finds the justice of the world too intricate to comprehend. Imprisoned for a fault which when repeated evokes

mirth! He disappears in the fogs of a winter street.

This collaboration of Anatole France and Steinlen is _spirituel_ and successful. “Once more Steinlen was quite carried away” (Monsieur Pelletan says); “I suggested twenty drawings. He has given me fifty-five!” And each illustration is a little masterpiece, admirable in execution and full of sympathy with the class the downtrodden Crainquebille represents.

It is false to suppose that Steinlen does not give to each of his creations the greatest pains. For the little volume called “Le Chien de Brisquet”[A] he made eighty drawings for Anatole France before he got one to his satisfaction, and it was for “Le Chien de Brisquet,” which volume of drawings it will be difficult to surpass, that Steinlen drew and re-drew his canine sketches. “Although,” said Monsieur Pelletan, “I assure you _I_ was quite satisfied with the first drawings!”

A word must be said regarding his feline studies. Cats have been favourite animals with poets and painters: witness Baudelaire, Poe, Coppée, Manet; and Steinlen, too, has found these slender, graceful felines interesting. There is in his representation of this animal a subtle perceiving of the link and of the difference between the brute and the human. It suggests the masters whose paintings of animals have made them famous, Landseer above all. When his book “Le Chat” came out, it was bought at first for children, but could not long be kept in the nurseries. Copies were pilfered for drawing-rooms and studios, where elders claimed these treasures of clever design. Steinlen’s host of drawings are undoubted indications of a power not to be confined in the sphere of the illustration for books. Admirers of Steinlen’s look for great things of him during the next years, claiming that his future is more brilliant in promise than any of his colleagues, Jean Veber excepted.

Steinlen himself is a delightful personality, and distinctly a force. The grasp of his hand, the fire of his eye, his courtesy, charm, and the pleasure it is to hear him speak, render him an unusual companion. His friends, naturally, are legion--he is much beloved; but, as they say in France, he is _très sauvage_--preferring to let the world go its ways, and to shut himself away with his work in his remote studio.

His intimate contact with the very poor, the very

suffering, has formed his points of view and left its mark on his nature. He is a Bohemian, and values slightly luxuries and ways of modern worldly life. He is familiar with the haunts of the thieves in the dangerous parts of Paris: he may well take his life in his hands--he is beloved and known, he is safe. He knows the interiors where starvation and cold and crime are side by side. He has helped generously, who can say how many? directly from his own purse and indirectly through the wide sympathy he has aroused.

No peculiarities of the fluctuating mass which is the very life of the city, which is the agglomerate expression of pleasure, pain, vice, crime, good, evil, sadness, joy, are lost upon Steinlen. He seems to be _en rapport_ with those people whom we call our brothers and treat as our inferiors and our enemies. The tricks, the attitudes, the expressions, the behaviour of the passers-by are familiar to him. With a few clever strokes of brush or pencil he has given us the _piquante ouvrière_, the modest apprentice, in a graceful, unconscious pose as she poises on her hip the hat-box she is carrying to a customer. In this _jeune fille_ representative, in the toss of her head, the curve of her arm, the swish of her neat skirts high above her well-shod feet, in this jaunty creature, scrupulous as to tidiness, is a certain phase of Paris drawn with crystalline distinctness. This girl of the people is dangerous, charming, and to her the boulevardier is an enemy. Paris is epitomised by this one flaring street-wall decoration. So much for the _jeunesse_, gay, laborious, and generally self-respecting. We do not often see Steinlen so gay.

In his studio in the Rue Caulaincourt, walking to and fro, he converses delightfully with his friends. He is a workman, his muscular hands are full of force, his build powerful, although he is compact and small. He suggests endurance, and the patience that is the result of hand-to-hand tussle with existence, and tender understanding of the needs of one’s neighbour. His eyes are keen, penetrating, and kind, his features strong. He has a golden voice, as the French say, caressing and indolent. Its measured cadence, its slow, agreeable flow contrasts strongly with the man himself. He wears the coarse velveteens of the labourer, cuffs close around his muscular wrists. His trousers are voluminous, and on his feet flap loose Indian slippers. His appearance, and the fact that his studio is in one of the poorest quarters of Paris, his whole attitude and life, suggest, not a

scorn of material things, but a perfect ability to forego them.

The studio is a workshop first of all; it is free from would-be artistic decorations, full of canvases and folios of drawings. He has his own lithographic stones, and does his own printing, holding this as an art important, as do many of the moderns; and he, as well as many another modern, insists on the expediency of making his own colours.

Steinlen thinks unfavourably of academies and salons, “where,” he says, “in order to exhibit at stated periods the artists paint anything and everything under rush and stress.” He sends to no public collections. When a goodly number of studies have accumulated in his studio, he organises a little _exposition_ of his own, and the admirers of his work have an opportunity to visit a Steinlen exhibition in the autumn, when he will delight, charm, and touch the public as he has never hitherto failed to do.

At this period of his life--and he is still young--he finds the insistent needs of daily existence are met; and he draws, as it were, a sigh of relief, and turns toward what is his recreation, because a beloved labour, and the goal of his career, painting in oil. Steinlen bemoans the fact that he lacks the prescribed technicalities an academic education would have given to him; but this fact has left him a freedom from rules which, in spite of their immense importance, are often trammels to individuality. At all events the daring boldness of his stroke, and his perfect originality, have been developed with no hindrance. Need has been his spur, talent the response to the goad.

Possibly Steinlen is nowhere better displayed than in a certain canvas at present in his studio in the Rue Caulaincourt. It is a life-size oil painting, a study of a man and woman in the working class. It is evidently the end of the day, and the scene a nook or corner in some room so distant from the rooms we all know that it is hard even to imagine where it may be. The workman has taken the young creature in his arms for a long embrace. His head is bent over her, and she looks out from the picture above the man’s arm. Her face is exquisite, and in thorough keeping with the type of her class.

The sombre note predominates throughout Steinlen’s work. That inevitable penalty of sadness which must be paid when the eye dares to look, and the soul dares to consider how our fellow beings struggle for existence.

The work of this man, who is not a caricaturist, but a student and faithful representer, bears a strong likeness to things in literature rather than to things in art. He suggests Dickens, Zola, Tolstoi. Throughout his work is apparent the broad sympathy of a man of the people who has espoused their cause and made himself their prophet.

Part of the crowd, elbow to elbow with humanity in the very vortex of the mass, he has felt the multitude, blood and sinew, around him, until it has become amalgamated fairly with his inspiration. Then withdrawn to a fortification, possibly, of his city, in semi-retirement, he lets the turbulent suggestions take form that he may present them to the world. Thus Steinlen, so closely of the people, is in reality separated from mankind by virtue of his talent. And if to the eye demanding agreeable form, beauty seems sometimes lacking in this artist’s strong, original, profoundly human creations, it may be said that æsthetics do not abound in the walks of life which this student of humanity portrays.

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
London & Edinburgh

FOOTNOTE:

[A] Chez Pelletan.

End of Project Gutenberg's Modern French Masters, by Marie Van Vorst