The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865

And nowhere could he have better artistic encouragement and emulation than in his native city. We do not remember who said that "in Geneva every child is born an artist," but the statement would bear investigation. Talent as well as taste for drawing and painting is almost universal, and belongs as well to the poor as to the rich. It may not be well known that De Candolle, the celebrated and untiring Genevese botanist, made use, in a course of lectures, of a valuable collection of tropical American plants, intrusted to his care by a Spanish botanist. Unfortunately, the herbarium was needed by its owner sooner than expected, and Professor De Candolle was requested to send it back. This he stated to his audience, with many a regret for so irreparable a loss. But some of the ladies present at once offered to copy the whole collection in one week, This was done. The drawings, "filling thirteen folio volumes, and amounting in number to eight hundred and sixty, were accurately executed by one hundred and fourteen women-artists in the time specified." In most cases the principal parts of the plants alone were colored; the rest was only pencilled with great accuracy. Where is the other city of the same size in which such a number of amateur lady-artists could be found? One of these very drawings, having been accidentally dropped in the street, was picked up by a little girl ten years old, and was returned to De Candolle, copied by the child; and it is no blemish to the collection.

The son of an artist, Töpffer found his own career ready made, and stepped into it with all the instincts of his Art-loving nature. His few early paintings are full of promise. But the young artist was not destined to distinguish himself in his chosen career. A disease of the eyes compelled him to give up his favorite pursuit. His brush, still warm from the passionate ardor with which it had been grasped, was broken and thrown away. Töpffer lamented all his life long the privation that was thus forced upon him. Art, as a profession, was closed against his eager ambition; yet he loved Art, and lived for it. Happily for him, he was still in the complete possession of all his hopes and illusions. Happily for him, he was young; and, without being discouraged by his great disappointment, he turned the bent of his mind study-ward. Töpffer became a close student of human nature. He took to analyzing it instinctively, as the bird takes to the air. He was more than a dreamer, though the charming dreams which we have from him make us half regret, perhaps, that he did something else besides dreaming. He says, in his story, "La Bibliothèque de mon Oncle,"—"The man who does not enjoy dreaming his time away is but an automaton, who travels from life to death like a locomotive rushing from Manchester to Liverpool. A whole summer spent in this listless manner does not seem de trop in a refined education. It is even probable that one such summer would not prove enough to produce a great man. Socrates dreamed his time away for years. Rousseau did the same till he was forty years old; La Fontaine—his whole life. And what a charming mode of working is that science of losing time!"

But, either dreaming or working, Töpffer knew well what he was capable of; and without impatience, without restlessness, he awaited the future, consoling himself with the sentiment he expresses so well in the following sentence:—"What can be said of those beardless poets who dare to sing at that age, when, if they were true poets, they would not have too much in their whole being with which to feel, and to inhale silently, those perfumes which later only they may know how to diffuse in their verse? There are precocious mathematicians; but precocious poets—never."

Töpffer was right. Life is the true poet. Its teachings drop in tears, and the heart receives them kneeling, and is in no hurry to babble to the world all their silent beauty.

If Töpffer studied, it was not alone. He had devoted himself to the serious task of education. His pupils, mostly the sons of wealthy Englishmen and Russians, together with a few lads from France, Italy, and America, served only to widen his family circle. His relation to them was charming. As an authority, he used the most winning persuasion. He respected the mental individuality even of a child, and would use his admirable tact in kindly encouraging every indication of talent, which, from want of a sufficient self-reliance or of a timely care, was hiding itself. Year after year, in vacation-time, Töpffer left the city with his thirty or forty young companions, and with them he travelled on foot through the mountains and around the lakes of Switzerland,—sometimes pushing in the track of Agassiz over glacier billows, sometimes wandering far down upon the fertile plains of Lombardy and Venetia. These were always most delightful excursions, when the ordinary halt became a common enjoyment, not only from the fun-loving spirit of the master, but also for the promise of future illustrations. After the return home, during the long winter evenings, Töpffer took either his pen or his pencil, and, with his pupils, re-gathered from their memoranda and drawings their summer impressions and adventures. Then he made his paper laugh with the spirited and piquant sketches which all know who have peeped into the "Voyages en Zig-Zag." Thus his fireside amusements have become those of the world. The "Voyages en Zig-Zag," before his death, were already classic in France. The richest luxury of type, paper, and illustration has not been spared, and edition after edition is scattered in Europe from the Neva to the Tagus. In the "Voyages" we find the most correct delineation, in words and sketches, of the peculiarities and glories of Alp-land. The exquisite French of this work has never yet found a translator.

His early style had something so fresh and so quaint that it can be accounted for only by going to the books which Töpffer studied. His dii majores were Montaigne and Amyot, and Paul Louis Courier, a learned Hellenistic scholar, as well as vivacious writer of the French Revolution and of the first Empire. For Montaigne Töpffer cherished the highest admiration. In his "Reflections and Short Disquisitions upon Art," (Réflexions et Menus Propos,) he thus tersely sums up the excellency of the French philosopher:—"Thinker full of probity and grace; philosopher so much the greater by that which he said he did not know than by that which he thought he knew." In our own language, Shakspeare was his favorite author. M. de Sainte-Beuve says, "Töpffer was sworn to Shakspeare," and adds that the works of Hogarth first taught the Genevese writer to appreciate Shakspeare, Richardson, and Fielding.

Besides possessing the ability to convey instruction to others, Töpffer was a fine classical scholar. With two other literary gentlemen, he published some excellent editions of the Greek classics, which he enriched with notes. All these qualifications marked him as the man for a still higher position. Accordingly, in 1832, when only thirty-three, he was appointed Professor of Belles-Lettres in the College of Geneva. At the same time, while discharging faithfully his duties in the College, he conducted, aided by tutors, his little pension, now so well known by the "Voyages en Zig-Zag."

It was in the midst of these various occupations that Töpffer took his recreation in contributing to the literary periodicals of Geneva superior essays on Art, and many of those charming stories which to-day delight us in the collection entitled "Les Nouvelles Génevoises." He also wrote for political journals. But what made him first known outside those communities where the French tongue is spoken were his humoristic sketches. They were not thrown off from his fertile and genial hand for gain or for renown. From childhood, under the influence of artistic example at home, and of his admiration of Hogarth, he had acquired a remarkable skill in graphically delineating whatever his close observation of men prompted. Like Hogarth, his artist-wit, his fun, and his moral teachings took the shape of series. These were handed around the circle of his intimate friends; yet he had thoughts only of his own amusement and of that of his companions, and did not contemplate offering them to the public. It was at the urgency of Goethe that he gave them to the world.

In 1842, as we stated before, "M. Vieux Bois" (Mr. Oldbuck) appeared in the United States; and the following year, 1843, "M. Cryptogame," under the name of "Bachelor Butterfly," (by no means so amusing or so full of hits for America as some other sketches,) delighted the Transatlantic reader.

Visitors to Geneva had their attention drawn to the "Voyages en Zig-Zag" as soon as it was published; and in 1841 "Les Nouvelles Génevoises" took the literary and artistic world of Paris by surprise. These simple graphic stories gained the hearts of thousands. French tourists and French artists sought the basin of Lake Leman, the wild passes of the Vallée de Trient, the Lac de Gers, the Col d'Anterne, and the Deux Scheidegg, wooed thither by the picturesque pages of Töpffer. The "Presbytère," a fresh story in the epistolary form, not long after crossed the Jura, and amidst the artificial, heated literature of Paris, appeared as reviving as a bracing morning in the Alps.

In this modest way M. Töpffer was unconsciously building up his European reputation. The warp of his talent is the richest of humor blended with woman-like sensibility and tenderness. Fanciful, but never exaggerated, he stands before us an amiable philosopher, whose heart is large enough to comprehend and to pity the frailties of human nature, yet whose spotless purity serves as a beacon—light on the wreck-strewn shore of human passions. He has not the exaltation nor the ardent vehemence of Rousseau, neither has he the sentimental morbidity of Xavier de Maistre. On the contrary, he is always true and always simple, and he remains within the bounds of emotion which the family circle allows. This must be accounted for by the peaceful life which he led, (a life so different from that of his French literary brothers,) as well as by the beneficial influence of the society in which he resided. That society, though cultivated and liberal, has, in contrast with that of France, remained pure. It retains as its birthright a certain nameless innocence, unknown in the polished French circles a few leagues beyond. M. de Sainte-Beuve wonders at this, and asks,—"Is it that man is kept pure and good by the magnificent beauties in which Nature rocks him there from his babyhood? Is it that the heart becomes awed in presence of that sublime calm of Nature, and, before he is aware of it, the passions have transformed themselves into a religious adoration?"

But the true source of the Genevese author's purity was apart from, though deeply influenced by Nature. He was a man of principle and of religious faith. Töpffer had but to gaze into his own heart to find all the sweet, the graceful, and the fresh poetry of his country. His untiring and patient observation of Nature is the secret of his power as a writer. He disdained nothing, for nothing seemed too small for him. Nature, in none of its phases, could appear insignificant to his fertile and mellow soul. When he could not soar in the high regions of contemplative philosophy, he stooped as low as the little child whose rosy cheek he patted, and who then became to him a teacher and a study. An insect crawling on a leaf,—a bit of grass bringing the joy of its short life around the stones of the pavement,—a cloud floating over the meadows,—a murmur of voices in the air,—the wings of a butterfly, or the thundering of the storm above the lake,—all and everything was the domain where his genial disposition reaped so plentiful a harvest of rare graces and smiles.

When Töpffer abandoned his brushes for his pen, it seems that the vision of his mind became intensified, and he began to study man as minutely as he had studied Nature. He became a moral portrait-painter, in the same way as his illustrious townsmen, Calame and Diday, were landscape painters. To analyze and to describe became the occupation he most delighted in; and the more minute the analysis and the more subtile the description, the more also was he pleased with it.

Töpffer's writings are eminently moral. There are few works in French literature in which the moral aspiration is so alive and the worship of duty so eloquently advocated. In reading them one feels that the writer did not step beyond his own sentiments, that he did not borrow convictions, that he did not affect the austerity of a stolen creed. He writes as he feels, and he feels rightly,—never forgetting to remain indulgent, even when he appears most unbendingly severe. Then to it all he adds an inexhaustible cheerfulness. His mind wears no dark-colored glasses; it is strong and healthy enough to bear the dazzling effulgence of the sun. Töpffer was a joyous man. If he so rapidly seized the ridiculous, it was through his love of fun; but while he laughed at others, so kind and genial was he ever that he made others join and laugh with him also.

We said that his genius was universal. He is eminently so in his artistic creations. Take, for instance, his unique comic sketches and compare them with those of other leading caricaturists. Our impression must be that none are like his. Leech, Doyle, and Gavarni have attained a reputation which the world acknowledged long ago, and which no one would dare dispute; yet they differ entirely from the Genevese caricaturist. "Oldbuck" (M. Vieux Bois) is as universal as music or Shakspeare, and belongs to no one country in particular. All of Leech's pretty women, his "Mr. Briggs" and his "Frederick Augustus," with his "Haw" and other swell words and airs, are all unmistakably English. They could have been born on no other soil than England. It requires an Englishman, or an American familiar with English fashions and foibles, to appreciate them. The German, the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Italian, or the Russian, could no more understand them without a previous initiation, or study and experience of English manners, than they could speak English without long application and practice. The same may be said of Richard Doyle's famous "Foreign Tour of Messrs. Brown, Jones, and Robinson." Here we have an irresistible series of sketches, depicting what the famous trio saw, what they said, and what they did, in Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy. The interest of that work lies in an intense expression of English nationality, carried everywhere by the three Englishmen. Their mishaps and adventures are exactly such as every American has witnessed a thousand times, when some of his cousins from the fast-anchored isle have visited him. Gavarni, though freer with his pencil than either Doyle or Leech, is still as much of a Parisian as Albert Smith was a Londoner. Every one of his spirited sketches is intensely French, and, above all, Parisian. To a person who knew nothing of Paris, who had never been in Paris, and who was not somewhat au fait with the gay and triste, the splendid and squalid, the brilliant and unequal society there, these sketches would be meaningless. Again, Gavarni's pictures are not series. He does not develop his heroes and heroines. He does not make us feel for them in their mishaps. We do not laugh with them, as we would with friends or acquaintances, but we laugh at them. We do not once recognize ourselves in them. His portraits stand before us, but we gaze at them as we would at some half-civilized creatures, with curiosity more than with mirth; and while we admire and acknowledge the truthfulness of the sketch, we do not desire to have any familiarity or contact with the individuals represented. Furthermore, Gavarni is more limited than Doyle, by making the "Sweep," the "Rag-Picker," the "Grisette," tell his or her own story; and what each one says is necessary to the comprehension of the person before you. But very different is Töpffer. He possesses, with the funny conception of Leech and Doyle, a freer pictorial conception than either, and holds a pencil that is more at command than Gavarni's. In his single outlines, often of the rudest kind, there is the very rollicking of freedom, the exact hitting of traits and character. He dashes down his creation with the quickness of thought, and with as much confidence that Messrs. Oldbuck, Crépin, and Jabot will leap into the very existence he wishes them to assume, as Giotto had, when, with a single sweep of his arm, he drew his magic circle. It may be objected, that the comparison between the two Englishmen and the two Continentals is hardly equal. Doyle and Leech lost, doubtless, much of their freedom by drawing with hard pencils upon box for the wood-engraver. Töpffer and Gavarni swept the soft, yielding crayon over the lithographer's stone, and hence we have the very conception of the artists in their sketches.

The whole Continent roared over "M. Vieux Bois," then England began to laugh, and finally America. Yet "M. Vieux Bois" was only the portrait of a foolish old bachelor in love. Though born in Geneva, he was neither Swiss nor French, neither English nor American; he was simply human. He exemplifies Töpffer's universality.

I have already mentioned the "Nouvelles Génevoises," the "Voyages en Zig-Zag," and the "Presbytère." But it is not possible to quote from them. Before pages so lively and so picturesquely effective, one feels embarrassed in selecting any particular portion, lest another should be left unnoticed,—like the child, who, being told that he may help himself to choice flowers, feels afraid that he will not take those he most wants, and, in his hesitation, dares not so much as untie the bouquet. The reader must choose for himself. He can accompany the amiable philosopher in his summer excursions, take the Alpine-stock, and with him visit the mountain solitudes, or linger around the blue lakes—those air-hung forget-me-nots—which gem the highest valleys of Switzerland.

His remaining works, published in book-form, are "Rosa et Gertrude," and the "Réflexions et Menus Propos d'un Peintre Génevois, ou Essai sur le Beau dans les Arts."

"Rosa et Gertrude," given to the public a short time before his death, is considered by some as holding the first place in Töpffer's works of imagination. It is a touching story of two orphan girls, deeply attached to each other, one of whom, deceived and maltreated by the world, receives that kind and Christian charity "which thinketh no evil" from M. Bernier, the good old clergyman, who is the guardian of Rosa and Gertrude, as well as the narrator of their simple history. In this book Töpffer has abandoned the humoristic, his ordinary vein in his short stones, and in taking up the more serious mode of treating his characters has succeeded so well that Albert Aubert of Paris, in his criticism, says, "In 'Rosa and Gertrude' M. Töpffer has surpassed himself"; and yet it is not so characteristic as his other writings.

However, that one of M. Töpffer's works which, it seems to me, is destined to live longest in the future, is his "Réflexions et Menus Propos," etc.,—"Reflections and Short Disquisitions on Art." Here are the results of twelve years' meditations on Art, by one who felt Art in his inmost soul, and who understood its practice as well as its theory. In this work we find a Ruskin without dogmatism, uncertainty, or man-worship. If Töpffer had written several volumes on his favorite subject, we should not find him, in each succeeding tome, taking back what he had said in the first. He studied, reflected, rewrote, and then waited patiently for years before he committed his mature judgment to the perpetuity of print. Long before Ruskin's first volume appeared, Töpffer's "Réflexions et Menus Propos" had commanded the admiration of the best writers and artists of the Continent. As an æsthetic and philosophic work, it is of the highest value. Pearls of thought and beauty are dropped on every side. It is relieved by fanciful episodes; and yet the whole book starts from and plays around a stick of India ink! It is not merely a volume in which the professional artist can gain great advantage, but one by which the general reader is fascinated as well as instructed. The former may discern its scope and its importance in the felicity with which Töpffer illustrates the true aim of Art, as being the expression, the idealization, and not the rigid copy of Nature. He maintains that Nature should be the only teacher, and that we are to be wedded to no man's mannerism.

It is to be hoped that some day the "Réflexions et Menus Propos" may be rendered into English by one fully acquainted, not only with French, but with the philosophic and the æsthetic writings of France. If the late Bayle St. John (whose knowledge of the French language and manner of thought was so thorough) had possessed the finished style of the author of "Six Months in Italy," he would have been the very man to have introduced M. Töpffer's works to English readers.

Whoever reads the works which I have thus briefly mentioned will regret that so genial and gifted a man as M. Töpffer should have been so soon snatched away from earth. It is rare to find in any author's or artist's life such calm happiness as that which smiled over his existence. Fame did not spoil him; and if he lived long enough to win it, he died too soon to enjoy it.

The last two years of M. Töpffer's life were years of continual suffering, through which his amiable cheerfulness never faltered. When he was told by his physicians that he could not recover, as if he thought only of alleviating the sorrow of those who loved him, he did not give way for one hour to impressions of sadness, and his private journal alone received the confidence of the keen regret he felt in taking farewell of his young wife and his lovely children. To the very last day of his life his friends found him in the evening surrounded by his family, and even then handling the pencil for their amusement and his own.

On Sundays, Calame dined with him; and we may imagine what a brilliant coloring of thought must have characterized the conversation of these two sympathetic men.

In 1844, when M. Töpffer had just concluded his romance of "Rosa et Gertrude," his disease took an alarming turn, and he became aware that he was fast drawing to the close of his earthly voyage. After two repeated visits to the French watering-place of Vichy, he returned to Geneva. Towards the end of the following winter he was obliged to abandon those duties which hitherto had been to him so pure an enjoyment. Unable now to write, he tried painting, which, it will be remembered, he had given up in early manhood. Leaning heavily forward in his chair, his easel before him, he painted with an enthusiasm which was the last of his life. But that diversion could not be kept up long, and he was soon compelled to sit motionless, awaiting his release.

On the morning of the 8th of June, 1846, consoled by the hopes of the Christian, he expired. On the 14th he was followed to his final resting-place by the whole city, among whom were those who in him had lost their friend, their colleague, and their master. His remains sleep in the cemetery of Plain-palais, which he has so graphically described in "La Peur"; but his memory and his works still live in the minds of his countrymen, and his fame is daily widening, wherever the good, the true, and the beautiful are appreciated.