Is there a socialistic art? Can such a thing exist? So far as Socialism is an economic and political philosophy it is hardly comprehensible with the means of expression of art. If the plastic arts are to be instructive, they do not amount to more than chill symbols and halting allegories. On the other hand, they are not prevented from digging down to the psychical roots of Socialism, and presenting the fundamental feelings and ultimate intuitions from which it springs. One of these fundamental feelings is pity for the disinherited. One of the ultimate intuitions is that of the dignity of all work done with moral earnestness and entire devotion.

The artist can show us the destitute, to whose presence amidst our civilisation applies more sharply, what the Psalmist[2] asserts of the life of man in general: “And if it has been splendid, it has been toil and labour”—toil and labour without a ray of happiness; severe physical exertion rendered more wretched by sorrow and distress. Such a picture grips our hearts, and urges on us painful questions: is this misery inevitable? Is it cruelly ordained by nature herself or a consequence of faulty institutions, capable of improvement on the part of man? Cannot we introduce into the lot of this ill-used brother something of joy?

And the artist can also show us the worker, not in want and suffering, like the beast of burden, humiliated into the slave of matter, but rather as creating eagerly, proud of displaying his strength, joyful in the conviction of success, regarding his skill as his honour. This aspect fills us with respect, perhaps with admiration. It opens to us the comprehension of the import of the workman, and the lofty reality of his achievement.

In both cases the artist fashions fully from life; he need not exaggerate, he need add nothing; he can confine himself to the plain facts of life. He need not betray any prejudice or any extra-artistic aim. He will, nevertheless, so contrive that one will be able to speak without falsification of his art as of a socialistic one. For his work will put the spectator in the mood in which he will be inclined to hail as progress every transformation which can improve the earthly lot of the worker, and increase his value in the community.

The school of æsthetes, which maintains the principle of art for art’s sake, will, I grant, admit works of this sort as a form of Socialism, indeed, but not as a form of art. I do not belong to this school. I oppose it at all times and everywhere as strongly as I am able. I am convinced that art has a social mission which reaches far beyond mere gratification, that it must necessarily be moral, and, in the highest sense of the word, useful; not useful in the simple way of painted or chiselled aids to intelligence, not moral in the vulgar way of tracts; but moral through stimulating what is most human and noble in our spirit and soul, and useful through educating us to deeper and wider conceptions of phenomena. In one point, however, I agree with the heralds of l’art pour l’art—I demand beauty in a work of art; not beauty alone, but beauty in the first place.

In order, then, that we can speak of a Socialistic art, the works that would deserve this designation must not only excite sympathy with the disinherited, and respect for the workman, but they must also arouse æsthetic feeling, they must be beautiful. This claim, of course, excludes no kind of beauty. The tragic is absolutely beautiful. Purification is one of the most powerful æsthetic influences. Truth can be beautiful if essential and expressive. The socialist who would prove himself an artist must possess the lucky gift to see and exhibit beauty in the figures and actions of the class of society for which his heart beats.

All these conditions no contemporary artist known to me fulfils in the same degree as Constantin Meunier, the Belgian sculptor, painter, and draughtsman. Meunier died an old man in 1905. He was born in the ‘thirties’ of the last century. The world was slow to recognise him, not because he did not deserve recognition, but because he did not seek it. He was big and unassuming. He lived quietly in a little Belgian town as a teacher in an art school, and modestly avoided the roar of fame’s mart. He had even refused to allow the reproduction of one of his noble bronzes, for business purposes, by a first-rate Paris house which was prepared to pay a munificent price for the right of sale. He was loth that his piece should become a factory-cast and a shop-window article. He belongs to the narrowest circle of the blessed, of the chosen. He is one of the Prometheus-like artists; he informs and inspires life. He feels like a Samaritan, he thinks like an apostle of the submerged, who utters a great cry of wrath over the harshness and unrighteousness of the social scheme, and he compels the bronze, like a Benvenuto Cellini, translated from what was aristocratic and classic into that which is modern and democratic.

In Meunier’s work there is a unity from which he seldom digresses. He lived in a Belgian district of coal-pits and smelting furnaces, in the very midst of rough labourers who passed their lives in the galleries of mines, or in the fiery glow of furnace mouths. He found his models among these figures. There the Labour movement in Belgium arose—one of the most rapid in Europe; there Meunier’s art grew up—one of the most intensive at the present time. The miner and the iron-smelter are his heroes; he admires their strength, and from the bottom of his heart he bewails their pains. And if he is unfaithful to his Cyclopses, it is only, touched and enraptured, to look after his other darlings—the country folk working in the fields, a subject which instils in him as much reverence as the burrowing of the coal-miners underground, and the powerful hammer-strokes of the iron-smiths.

One of his greatest creations, perhaps his greatest is a bronze a span high, representing an old woman, the wife or, as I would rather assume from the stormy intensity of her emotion, the mother of a miner, who, after a driving storm, has gone to the mouth of the shaft of a coal-pit, to which the corpse of some one belonging to her has been brought.

The woman stands there, leaning slightly forward, her countenance petrified with dumb despair, her arms limp, her one hand lying in the other, yet without any convulsion, and powerless, her knees through a very slight bend betraying her trembling, her feet instinctively somewhat turned inwards, so as to give a broader support to the body, and to protect the almost crippled figure from falling down. The whole is such a frightfully expressive picture of a poor human creature who has, as it were, received a blow on the head, and in her crushed condition is not strong enough even for sobbing and wringing her hands, that it strikes the spectator with a cold shudder. Observe, the old woman wears the garments of the poor Walloons, heavy, stiff gowns and neckerchiefs, the hard angles and folds of which can express only very roughly and indistinctly the soft play of the weakly-quivering muscles. What penetrating keenness of observation does it need to recognise in an entirely self-contained form shrouded in uncouth, shapeless clothes, without gestures or play of features, and to imitate, without the slightest exaggeration, yet overpoweringly, the tenderest lines which, even in such unfavourable conditions of material, express clearly and dramatically all that is passing in this almost impenetrably veiled human soul. This little figure, no larger than the decoration of a clock, is a great monument, and, like every real work of art, it points far beyond the limits of itself. It reveals much more to the power of imagination than it manifests to the eye. This is actually proved in this very case; for Meunier has a group which supplements the work described: the same old woman, and before her, lying outstretched on the ground, the corpse of him whom she is bewailing. We might think that this more complete work would be more deeply affecting than the fragmentary one. The contrary, however, is the case. The corpse, although modelled so exquisitely, leaves us cold; it does not realise the conception we have formed of it. We had expected to feel a horror at the sight of it, at which the blood would congeal in our veins. We are astonished and disappointed at seeing lying there only an unknown man who does not concern us. When we look at the old woman petrified by grief we think of the corpse which is not exhibited to us; we see it with our spiritual eyes in the horror of the old woman, we share the feelings of the old woman, the unseen corpse is that of a relation of our own, the dead man himself is dear to us, we ourselves have suffered the loss of him. On the other hand, the completed group makes any co-operative exertion of our imaginative powers superfluous.

The corpse lies there visible; it distracts our attention from the old woman; we feel less keenly her emotion; the incident no longer occurs in the Holy of Holies of our soul, but in a forecourt, in a place of inspection. We could, in imagination, endow the corpse with the features of a dear relative, and feel sorrow for the dead man: inspection teaches us that the corpse is a stranger to us, and we have no grounds for shedding tears over it. The two works, placed in juxta-position, fully bear out the old dictum, that a work of art is more powerfully effective in proportion as it more strongly excites our imaginative faculties to creative co-operation.

A series of works brings before us the life of the coal-miners. Some of them come to daylight after their shift is ended. They are tired, but cheerful. About their wearied countenances there seems to quiver a reflection of the hearth-fire which awaits them familiarly in their poor homes. Here is a miner at his work. In a painful, half-recumbent position he handles the mattock in the narrow gallery under the seam from which he is dislodging the coal. Here another is sitting inactive, with his spade and lamp, with only a pair of trousers on, the upper part of his body naked, without a particle of fat on his muscles steeled by toil. Here a worker at a smelting furnace, likewise sitting—a reminiscence of the famous “Les Foins” of Bastien Lepage, which is at present in the Luxembourg. Like this peasant lass, Meunier’s labourer is completely bestialised; he stares vacantly before him, with a jaw open like that of an animal; his hand, unused to inactivity, hangs down heavily. It is a shocking picture of the degradation of man through a one-sided exertion of the muscles; a forcible harangue in favour of the eight hours’ day, which would leave more time for the human working machine, not only, as his opponents assert, to visit the public-house, but also for spiritual life.

Meunier rises to the height of the Vedic hymns when he turns towards the countryman and his heroic deeds in nourishing mankind. In the relief, “The Harvest,” a band of reapers—four men and two women—are grappling with the ripe corn. One seizes violently the stalks, the second, bending forward, makes a wide stroke with his sickle, a woman binds into sheaves the ears that have been mown. In the background, one longing for rest looks at the position of the sun, and another, rapido fessus aestu (fatigued by the scorching summer heat), to use Vergil’s words, wipes the sweat from his brow. There is the note of the Eclogues about this work. Over it floats the consecration of the lofty act with which the rooted son of the soil, the ploughman—the creator and bearer of all civilisation—gains the bread of mankind out of the earth. A single figure, “June,” is also created from this emotion. It is the realisation in free sculpture of a motif from the relief. A reaper, stripped to the waist, emaciated by the heavy toil of harvesting, exhausted by his day’s work, leans upon his scythe and glances, shading his eyes with his hand, at the sun—“I would it were bedtime and all was over.” One would like to press the hand of this brave, good fellow, or at any rate that of the artist who has represented him to us so faithfully and straightforwardly.

All Meunier’s works have not this delicacy; many are weak, some absolute failures. As an instance of such I point to “The Puddlers,” though it has been particularly admired by some critics. Three iron-founders stand at the open stoke-hole of the puddle-furnace, and feed it with mighty pieces for melting. From the opening issue steam and smoke, which curl round the three men wielding rakes and tongs, and eddy upwards. Meunier has tried to represent this steam in sculpture. He has given it a concrete form, necessarily the same corporeality as the bodies, tools, blocks of metal, the flaming furnace; for sculpture possesses no means of differentiating the thickness of matter, when it abandons the mere engraved line or the make-shift of various perforations. The result is, that instead of smoke there is an amazing image which partly reminds us of an untrimmed dab of plaster, partly of a weather-beaten stalactite. Meunier was originally a painter, and took to sculpture only late in life. His “Puddlers” are formed with the technique of a painter, from which the artist did not immediately emancipate himself. Another relief, “The Bricklayers,” is absolutely a mistake. Two men are standing in the loam-pit and handing up the bricks to their mates above. They do this with theatrical gestures, as if a conquered king were handing over his crown to his conqueror. The contrast between the bombastic movement and its vulgar purpose is so grotesque that the picture has an irresistibly comic effect. Here Meunier is, for the only occasion in all the works of his with which I am acquainted, insincere and affected. I have looked for a long time at this deplorable work, and it made me thoughtful. How heavy is the responsibility of the critic! Supposing I knew nothing of Meunier and only saw this work, I should find it hard to resist the impulse to abuse him in the sharpest terms, for it unites the two worst faults that can be found in a work of art: it is at the same time inanely futile and obtrusively pretentious. So far I should be acting within the scope of my perfect rights. But am I certain that I was not allowing myself to be carried away by my own natural propensity to generalise, and to condemn not only the work, but also its author, to call him a bungler and a botcher? Such a verdict would, apparently, be well-grounded and, in fact, revoltingly false. Works such as “The Bricklayers” are a warning to the critic; they admonish him to be conscientious. Their teaching is that every comprehensive verdict on an artist must presuppose a knowledge of his whole life’s work, and that no single work can offer sufficient basis for the general appreciation of its author, especially of his depreciation.

In his figures of the miners and iron-founders, Meunier showed sympathy with the lot of the proletariate; in his portrayals of the countryman’s life, reverence for the civilising work of the man who ploughs the soil. But he reveals in certain other works of similar subjects beauty which prevents us from wishing for one moment for those Invalides of Olympus, the unchangeable troop of academic sculpture. The “Blacksmith” wielding his hammer, the “Harbour-Workers,” the more than life-sized “Smith,” are discoveries which are tantamount to revelations. Especially this smith in his working garb, with his stiff leather apron, leggings, and the foot coverings that are intended to protect him from the sparks. Leaning on the tongs that are almost the height of a man, he rests his hand on his hips and waits until it is his turn to attack the work. There is a proud tranquillity, and a reserve of ready strength in him that carry us away. This artisan is every whit as handsome in his way as an antique statue in a toga of ample fold, or a noble nudity, or a knight in romantic armour. His body possesses the elegance which perfect fitness confers, his movement the energetic restraint that the workman, thrifty in exerting himself, acquires through being in the habit of avoiding every prodigal expenditure of his strength. Meunier trains our eyes to appreciate the æsthetic charm of this phenomenon of our own days, which great art has hitherto stupidly passed by.

Of what expressive poetry Meunier is capable we recognise with admiration in a statue of an animal, the mine-horse—one of those unfortunate nags which are brought to the mine as foals, in order to draw the coal waggons to the galleries, and who are condemned to spend the whole of their lives in the bowels of the earth, far from the sun. The animal’s head droops, its lips are flabby, eyes half-closed, ears sunken, flanks fallen in; the whole wretchedness of an innocent creature condemned to night and woe is embodied in this shivering beast. The mine-nag has certainly no sense of its disconsolate fate; it does not miss the sun, or long for green pastures. It does not envy its luckier brothers who can skip in the fresh grass beneath the blue sky. Meunier has all these feelings for it; he infuses them into the animal’s stupid soul; but doubly amazing is the power with which he himself can express through a coarse animal body humanly lofty tragedy.

What had already become clear to me when I saw Meunier’s works separately in the salon at the Champs de Mars, deepened itself within me, at the sight of the whole collection of them, into a certain conviction that Meunier is, perhaps unconsciously, a pupil of Millet’s. He learnt from him to look with reverence on the homely men who with holy zeal, without gazing to the left or right, with body and soul in their work, wrest the works of civilisation from the forces of nature. He improves Millet’s peasants and artisans into the plastic and monumental. It is the same simplicity, almost crudeness; the same contempt of pose, the same extreme energy of activity, and the same deep, inward life as in the master who painted the “Angelus.” And what makes the most vivid impression on us in Meunier, as in Millet, is the ardent piety with which the sight of true and earnestly working people fills him—people who rise high in their apparently humble, yet fruitful and, through its connection with the corporate life of mankind, especially significant labour. An artist, however, who discloses to us such outlooks on the path of civilisation, and such insight into the human soul, has some claim to a place near the acknowledged masters.