“Avez-vous vu ce misérable?Cet individu équivoque?Ce pouilleux, ce voleur en loques,Qui nous r’gardait manger à table?Ma parole! on n’est pus (plus) chez soi,On ne peut pus digérer tranquille—Nous payons l’impôt, gn’a (il y en a) des lois!Qu’est-ce qu’y (ils) font donc, les sergents d’ ville?”
“Avez-vous vu ce misérable?Cet individu équivoque?Ce pouilleux, ce voleur en loques,Qui nous r’gardait manger à table?Ma parole! on n’est pus (plus) chez soi,On ne peut pus digérer tranquille—Nous payons l’impôt, gn’a (il y en a) des lois!Qu’est-ce qu’y (ils) font donc, les sergents d’ ville?”
I laughed almost to tears when I came upon this picture, because I knew that same bourgeois shopkeeper—in Boston—during the historic famine winter of 1893-94, when a great press formed a syndicate for the dissemination of lies, when the authority of a great state was appealed to, and a great governor received congratulatory despatches from the confines of a great country for prompt and decisive action in a great emergency, and all because a few half-starved devils took a notion to show themselves without washing their hands and faces or changing their clothes.
But to return to France. Jehan Rictus loves the white apparitions of the “first communicants,” loves sunshine, lilacs, and watercress, birds and little children. Mrs. Browning’s memorable “Cry of the Children” is feeble and conventional by the side of his “Farandole des Pauv’s ‘tits Fan-Fans.” Charles Lamb was not sweeter, tenderer, daintier, in his tear-compelling reverie, “Dream Children,” than Rictus in dealing with his dream loves,—his “cemetery of innocents” he calls them, his “poor little heap of dead.”
“Et la vie les a massacrés,Mes mains les ont ensevelis,Mes yeux les ont beaucoup pleurés.”
“Et la vie les a massacrés,Mes mains les ont ensevelis,Mes yeux les ont beaucoup pleurés.”
His “Espoir,” in which he dreams of a sweetheart, is a veritable Eugène Carrière in verse.
Another poem containing much of the same sad, tender beauty, strangely commingled with piquant malice, mischievousesprit, broad humour, and bitter satire; a poem which, in spite of startling liberties of vocabulary, rhythm, and rhyme, is said to have brought honest tears to the eyes of the impeccable De Hérédia, is “Le Revenant.” The “Revenant” is Jesus Christ. The appearance of Christ in nineteenth-century Paris is a much-wornmotifin French literature and painting; but the slum poet’s handling of it is so new, bold, and strong that it seems to be altogether fresh.
“Le Revenant” is in three parts.
Part I. is a query as to what would happen if Jesus Christ should come back, and introduces a summary of the principal events of his career and a strikingly original appreciation of his personality and character. He is the “man of the beautiful eyes and the beautiful dreams, whose heart was larger than life.” But he is also “the anarchist,” the “Galilean tramp,” the “carpenter on a strike,” the “boon companion of thieves,” the “quack hated by the doctors,” the “duffer who wore another cross than that of the Legion of Honour, who boxed the bourgeois shop-keepers, and who wasn’t over-polite to the muffs of his time,”—phrases through whose vulgar, uncouth, seemingly sacrilegious envelope are plainly visible intense love and admiration, and which accurately represent the religious attitude of the submerged, who, proverbially, applaud the name of Christ while they hiss the barest mention of his professed followers and his church.
In Part II. Jesus Christ suddenly appears on a corner of one of the exterior boulevards. The surprised poet greets him with bluff good-nature, laments drolly his inability to do the proper thing by him in the matter of drinks, and overwhelms him with eager, naïve questions. Then, touched to the heart by his dazed look and apparent helplessness, he assumes a kindly superiority, taking him under his protection, as he might a lost infant, warning him against many things, especially against the police, who will be certain to arrest him as a vagabond if he falls within their view. Finally, he discovers that the figure he has taken to be that of the Christ is his own figure mirrored in the window of the wine-shop before which he has been standing.
Part III. is the after-thought, what the poet would most wish to have said to Jesus Christ if he really had returned and he had been the first to greet him. Necessarily a repetition at many points of Parts I. and II., its excuse is the following declaration of faith:—
“Chacun a la Beauté en lui,Chacun a la Justice en lui,Chacun a la Force en lui-même.L’Homme est tout seul dans l’Univers.Oh! oui, ben seul, et c’est sa gloire,Car y n’a qu’ deux yeux pour tout voir.“Le Ciel, la Terre, et les EtoilesSont prisonniers d’ ses cils en pleurs.Y’ n’ peut donc compter qu’ sur lui-même,J’ m’en vas m’ remuer qu’ chacun m’imite,C’est là qu’est la clef du Problème.L’Homme doit êt’ son Maître et son Dieu.”
“Chacun a la Beauté en lui,Chacun a la Justice en lui,Chacun a la Force en lui-même.L’Homme est tout seul dans l’Univers.Oh! oui, ben seul, et c’est sa gloire,Car y n’a qu’ deux yeux pour tout voir.“Le Ciel, la Terre, et les EtoilesSont prisonniers d’ ses cils en pleurs.Y’ n’ peut donc compter qu’ sur lui-même,J’ m’en vas m’ remuer qu’ chacun m’imite,C’est là qu’est la clef du Problème.L’Homme doit êt’ son Maître et son Dieu.”
and the following threat:—
“Donnez-nous tous les jours l’ brich’ ton (pain) régulier,Autrement nous tâch’rons d’ le prendre.”
“Donnez-nous tous les jours l’ brich’ ton (pain) régulier,Autrement nous tâch’rons d’ le prendre.”
It was probably this downright and direct threat that led Jules Claretie, writing forLe Temps, to say: “The poetry of the lean Jehan Rictus is the Fronde of to-day. Far better that it mutter in the cabaret than in the street.” The majority of the press critics, ignoring this single unequivocal threat and numerous indirect but slightly veiled anathemas, have pronounced his work “gentle and refined.” Both interpretations are, in a measure, right.
Desiring revolt with his whole soul, and sure of the righteousness of it, he is likewise so sure of its entire uselessness that he deprecates it far oftener than he proclaims it. A better state of things, in even the most distant future, is to him but a dubious “perhaps.” From kings, presidents, councils, parliaments, nobles, bourgeois, popes, priests, economists, reformers, and philanthropists he expects nothing. From his own down-trodden class he expects no more. They are stupid cattle, waiting patientlyto be bled. Enfeebled by hardship, cowed into spiritlessness by police and magistrates, ready to share with the dogs the crumbs that drop from rich men’s tables, to cringe and fawn before the faintest prospect of a bone; ready to sell themselves outright for two bars of music, three sous of absinthe, or a couple of rounds of tobacco; blinded by the dazzling fiction of universal suffrage: they are only fit, at the moment a Bastille ought to be taken, to take the tram-car of that name, and generally show more signs of reverting to the type of the ourang-outang than of ushering in that era of universal affection, when all men will be as brothers, and all nations of one speech and one mind.
His prayers are despairing cries to a half-credited God,—a God at best so old, deaf, blind, unconcerned, and far away that his interference is not much to be counted on.
He conjures Jesus Christ into the world only to chaff him for his faith in man, to characterise his teachings as the beautiful soliloquies of an unfortunate, and, finally, to warn him to make good his escape, if he would keep out of the clutches of nineteenth-century Judas Iscariots and Pontius Pilates.
The prophets and teachers who have tried radically to better the world have always been treated as criminals, and always will be. It is vain to struggle to make things over. Man is a muff by nature, and nature will never change. The kilogramme of iron falsely called a heart will never be anything more than a kilogramme of iron. The bank of love “assigned” centuries ago. Modern civilisation is organised distress. These are his sober and reasoned conclusions.
But ever and anon, when pain grows too great to be borne, the blind instinct of self-preservation overtops reason. Then he swears to be his “own good God all alone,” taking “his own skin for a banner, since that is the only thing he has in the world.” Even so his words are less the rallying cry of a reformer who believes in success than the desperate defiance of a Prometheus chained to a rock; and recoil is speedy to his habitual sentimentreiterated so often as to be a veritable refrain, “It’s only life, after all: there’s nothing to do but to weep.”
“Jehan Rictus,” said a writer in theGil Blas, “has definitely fixed a new poetic sob in the cacophony of eternal human suffering.” Needless to add, a sob was not his choice. Fate chose for him. His is no case of “wilful sadness in literature.” Sweet, tender, affectionate by nature, enamoured of sunlight, he might, under happier conditions, have given a smile, a cheer, a pæan even, to the world. In giving a sob, he gave what life gave him,—his all.
He is the perfect nihilist, who fails to be the perfect anarchist only because he has no faith. His Paris underworld is an Inferno. “All hope abandon ye who enter here,” is the burden of his message from the submerged; and it is this, probably, that led Laurent Tailhade to call him “the Dante ofla misère.”
Jehan Rictus is at present preaching his gospel of blended defiance and despair in prose, in a journal calledL’Ennemi du Peuple. His journalism, however, rises very little above the commonplace. He is growing fat and fashionable, and it is to be feared that his days of significant poetical productiveness are over.
Montmartre participated actively in the revolution of 1830, and was the seat of theClub de la Montagnein that of 1848. Of the period immediately preceding the Commune one of its old residents writes: “There, insurrection held its drums and its guns always ready. The right to live free was the most precious of all things to the hearts of all.” It seems to have been the order to seize the cannons which theGardes Nationauxhad transported to Montmartre after the capitulation of Paris that precipitated the Commune; and it was at Montmartre that the generals Lecomte and Clément Thomas were executed.
Louise Michel—and who should know better?—in her fascinatingMémoirestestifies to the revolutionary prestige of Montmartre. She says, referring to the siege of Paris:—
“The Eighteenth Arrondissement was the terror of the selfish,plundering jobbers, and others of their breed. When it was rumoured, ‘Montmartre is coming down’ (‘Montmartre va descendre’), the reactionaries scampered to their holes like hunted animals, deserting in their panic the secret storehouses in which provisions were rotting while Paris was starving to death.”
Again, apropos of her discharge from custody in the early part of the insurrection, she writes:—
“The fourcitoyens, Th. Ferré, Avronsart, Burlot, and Christ, came to demand my release in the name of the Eighteenth Arrondissement. At the first word of this phrase,—terror of the reaction,—‘Montmartre is coming down,’ I was given into their hands.”
Still again, in a letter to Rochefort and Pain, on her return from exile:—
“I am writing to Joffrin at the same time as to you on the subject of the meeting of Montmartre, before which I cannot go to any other. It was at Montmartre I marched formerly: it is with Montmartre I march to-day.”
It was to the Montmartre of theindigènes, the Montmartre of the workingmen, the Montmartre then regarded as a twin of Belleville, which was known as lecratère de la révolution, that Louise Michel paid these tributes of affection and esteem. The invasion of the hordes of arts and letters, who hold theVache Enragéeabove the Golden Calf, far from weakening the revolutionary fervour of the Butte, has strengthened it. Montmartre is none the less a hot-bed of revolution for having become a shrine of the Muses. On the contrary, its present revolutionary spirit is the spirit of the old Montmartre and of the new Bohemia fused into one; and it makes the “selfish, plundering jobbers, and others of their breed,” quake more than ever.
At every cloud on the municipal horizon no bigger than a man’s hand, at every suggestion of disturbance in the political atmosphere, at every slightest rumble presaging the rising of the masses, the classes peer nervously and timorously in the direction of the beetling Montmartre, regretting from the bottom oftheir hearts that the offer Rothschild is said to have once made, to raze the Butte at his own expense, was not accepted by the government.
The relations between the aboriginal workingmen and the artistic and literary colonists of Montmartre are of the most cordial sort. There is a genuine solidarity between them (wherein is a profound lesson for the social settler), because they have common sufferings, common hatreds, common apprehensions, and common hopes; because they faint from the same hunger, shiver from the same frost, dread the same rent-bills, are liable to the same evictions and the same policerafles, and are under the same temptation, when houseless, to commit a petty misdemeanour in order to get stowed away for the night.
Artists may help the poor working people about them—without that effort of will, that compulsion of duty, which inevitably involves patronage, and which is the bane of all the attempts of the well-to-do to “elevate” the poor—because, poor themselves, they often accept help from them in return andin kind, and because they are neither mysteries nor objects of envy to any.
Nowhere in Paris, certainly, is the identity of interests and sentiments of the simple proletariat and theprolétariat littéraireso graphically presented and the much-prated alliance between brain and brawn, labour and intellect, so completely realised. Nowhere this side of heaven, probably, is social democracy so real and so devoid of pose.
It is not to be supposed that these poor devils of painters and poets, ardent-eyed and beauty-loving, are inwardly submissive because they rail outwardly at their misfortunes; that they pardon either the individuals who victimise them or the society which allows individuals to victimise them. Revolt is none the less revolt for perpetrating and relishing a joke.
The note of social revolt in the cavalcade of theVache Enragéeand in the mock ceremony of the marriage of theRosière; in the more than unconventional daily life, with its contemptuous disregard of ordinances of state and sacraments of church; in the politicaland social satire of thechansonniers, who sing indifferently in thesoiréesof the socialist and anarchist groups and in thecabarets artistiques et littéraires; and in the coarse derision of the bawlers of thecabarets brutaux,—is not to be ignored on the ground that it bears a semblance of mirth. The child’s play theory is absolutely untenable in this connection. These jolly Bohemian dogs of Montmartre are capable of corroding rancours and terrible wrath. And, if that descent from Montmartre which the conscience-stricken bourgeois feel in their bones will come, ever does come, it will not be the simple proletariat that will inaugurate and lead it, but the rollickingprolétariat littéraire.
LES CORBEAUXLES CORBEAUX
LES CORBEAUX
“I have intended to rehabilitate the pariah, whatever form it may take; whether it be a buffoon, like Triboulet, a courtesan, like Marion Delorme, a poisoner, like Lucrezia Borgia, the oppressed, like the people. Those who say that I have practised art for art’s sake say a silly thing. No one, more than I, has practised art for society and humanity. I have always worked for this end, and have known what I wished to do.”—Victor Hugo.
“We know what it cost the First Empire to have displeased Châteaubriand, what it cost Louis Philippe to have offended Lamartine, Napoleon III. to have vexed Victor Hugo.”—Gaston Deschamps.
“The aptitude for commerce is an inferior aptitude. There are multitudes of banks in which fortunes are perpetuated. Is there an unbroken line of Hugos, of Ampères, of Courbets, which progresses incessantly from father to son? Commerce is an absurd criterion of merit, base in itself and still more degrading when it is regulated by laws like ours.”
Hélier, inRosny’sLe Bilatéral.
“This morning I received the visit of the police commissary, my neighbour, accompanied by four alcoholics. They turned everything topsy-turvy in my rooms, mixed up my correspondence, rumpled my collection of prints, and all to seize, at the end, a wood-cut of Maurin and the works of Tolstoy.”
Meyrargues, inVictor Barrucand’sAvec le Feu.
“I believe it is impossible to-day for a great mind not to be somewhat anarchistic.”—Augustin Filon.
“My own art is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual outside of all rules and of all social necessities.”—Emile Zola.
WHATEVER may be the verdict of posterity regarding the literary and philosophical activity of this restless, problematic period, the verdict of the contemporary world seems to be that Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Zola are the three biggest literary philosophers (or philosophical littérateurs) of their day and generation; and it is a noteworthy fact, to put it mildly, that the attitude towards society of each one of these three intellectual giants is, more or less openly, revolutionary. All three may be claimed by the parties of revolt without any considerable forcing of the note.
Tolstoy, by reason of his adoration of Jesus, his insistence on a literal interpretation of Jesus’ teachings, his advocacy of non-resistance as the most effective form of resistance, and his attempts to incorporate liberty in education and, by education, in life, seems to fall naturally enough into the category of the “Christian anarchist.” But, whether Tolstoy be a “Christian anarchist” or a “Christian socialist,” as certain Christian socialists rather presumptuously claim, is immaterial. He is opposed to the established order, and belongs indisputably with the revolutionists.
Ibsen is a fearless, implacable, self-confessed destroyer of dogma and tradition, whom the anarchists may claim without doing violence either to themselves or to him.
The attitude of Zola towards society and the social problem is not so easy to define.
Zola exposed with a frankness bordering on brutality the rottenness of the wealthy and privileged classes, the oppressions and cruelty of capital, the selfishness and hypocrisy of ministers, magistrates, army officers, and priests; pictured with a friendliness bordering on advocacy the sufferings and struggles of the labourers, and stated with perfect fairness the most revolutionaryideas and ideals. That he had in him little enough of the stuff of which real martyrs are made—in spite of his constitutional inability to “shut himself up in his works, and act only through them,” as he a hundred times announced his intention of doing—was shown clearly enough by his ignominious flight when things turned against him in the Dreyfus affair. Nevertheless, no novelist of his time—at least none in France—has portrayed so masterfully, so sympathetically, one might almost say so devoutly, the character of the extreme, the martyr type of anarchist, thepropagandiste par le fait.
Zola is said to have boasted of the progress anarchistic violence made after he “launched his Souvarine into the world.” The charge is probably a libel; but from this cold, calculating, consecrated Souvarine ofGerminalto the generous, sentimental Salvat of Paris the sincerepropagandiste par le faitwas explained, excused, admired, extolled by him.
This is not saying that Zola was consciously (or unconsciously) an advocate of thepropagande par le fait. He extended an equal cordiality to all the reformers and innovators who are groping towards a new and better world. The evils of contemporary society are so gigantic, in his view, and the necessity for a change of some sort so imperative, that he could understand and condone any and every honest protest, no matter how imprudent and no matter how fruitless.
Besides, Zola was more of an observer than a philosopher, and more of a poet than either. His later works, andGerminalat least among his earlier ones, are primarily prose epics. He loved the dynamiter for his epic value as Milton loved his magnificent Satan, and may have had no more intention of holding him up to men as an exemplar than Milton had of instituting devil-worship.
Emile ZolaEMILE ZOLA
EMILE ZOLA
It is not normal for the poet to have a coherent system, and it is extremely doubtful if Zola had one. Still, the poet must have, like other mortals, his personal point of view; and Zola’s personal point of view (which is not for a moment to be confounded withhis point of view as a poet) seems to have been that of the scientists of his novels,—anarchistic as to end, but evolutionary as to means: the attitude of Guillaume Froment inParis, who saw in “unities creating worlds, atoms producing life by attraction, by free and ardent love, the only scientific theory of society,” and who “dreamed of the emancipated individual evolving, expanding without any restraint whatsoever, for his own good and for the good of all.” The attitude of Bertheroy (Paris), “who worked, in the seclusion of his laboratory, for the ruin of the present superannuated and abominable régime, with its God, its dogmas, its laws, but who desired also repose, too disdainful of useless acts to join in the tumults of the street, preferring to live tranquil, rich, recompensed, in peace with the government (whatever it might be), all in foreseeing and preparing the formidable issue of to-morrow,”—the Bertheroy who says: “I have only contempt for the vain agitations of politics, revolutionary or conservative. Does not science suffice? Of what use is it to wish to hurry things when a single step of science does more to advance humanity towards the city of justice and truth than a hundred years of politics and social revolt? Science alone is revolutionary: it alone can make not only truth, but justice prevail, if justice is ever possible here below. Of a certainty, it alone brushes away dogmas, expels the gods, creates light and happiness. It is I, member of the Institute, rich and decorated, who am the only revolutionist.” The attitude of Jordan (Travail), “a completely emancipated spirit, a tranquil and terrible evolutionist, sure that his labour will ravage and renew the world.... According to Jordan, it is science solely that leads humanity to truth, to justice, to final happiness, to the perfect city of the future towards which the peoples are so slowly and painfully advancing.”
All things considered, it would not be unfair, perhaps, to address to Zola himself the words which he made this Jordan speak to the reforming hero ofTravail, Luc Froment: “Only, my noble friend, you are nothing more nor less than an anarchist,complete evolutionist as you believe yourself; and you have every reason to say that, while it is with the formula of Fourier that we must begin, it is byl’homme libre dans la commune librethat we must end.” And, if Zola had been thus addressed, it is not unlikely that he would have replied laughingly, as he made his Luc reply, “At any rate, let’s begin; and we shall see in due time whither logic leads us.”
There is no doubt possible regarding Zola’s belief in a good time coming. His later books were fairly saturated with a sublime faith almost childlike. There is also no doubt that he believed that science consecrated to the service of humanity is quite capable of regenerating the world, as he indicated by the communistic experiment of Luc inTravail. But whether he believed that sciencewillbe consecrated to the service of humanity or whether he was presenting a method which might be employed, and which he simply hoped, almost against hope, would be so employed, is not so clear. Thus, in the last chapter ofTravail, after giving a beautiful picture of the superb results of the peaceable revolution accomplished through the altruistic initiative of Luc in the commune of Beauclair, he added a sort of apocalyptic vision of the happenings in the principal divisions of the big world outside, in which the same superb results have been secured by violence,—by a bloody, socialisticcoup d’état, by the multiplication of anarchistic bombs, by a universal war,—quite as if he would say to the classes in power: “I have shown you how society may be renewed. I have shown you the way of your salvation, the only way. If you would but walk in this way, you might save yourselves and the world with you. But you will not. You are too stupid, too selfish, too obstinate, too corrupt. You will not. I have known you only too long, and I know you will not. Well, then, so much the worse for you! Expropriation, massacre, annihilation, await you!”
If you ask intellectual Frenchmen, without distinction of social position or political faith, who is the foremost living French man of letters, five out of six will answer, without an instant’s hesitation,Anatole France. Less pictorial, less colossal, and less epic than Zola, but more penetrating and more profound; æsthetic and erudite (in the good old-fashioned sense of the latter word), subtile, suave, and refined; abundantly endowed withANATOLE FRANCEANATOLE FRANCEthe humour and the wit in which Zola was deficient; as impeccable in point of language and style as Zola was careless, as measured as Zola was violent, as gentle as Zola was brutal, as finished as Zola was crude; as perfect an embodiment of the Greek spirit as Zola, if he had only had a keener sense of the grotesque, would have been of the Gothic,—Anatole France is none the less a redoubtable iconoclast,—the most redoubtable iconoclast of his generation, perhaps. A playful pessimist, a piquant anarchist, a mischievous nihilist, if you will, but a pessimist, an anarchist, a nihilist, for all that. “Prejudices,” he says, “are unmade and remade without ceasing: they have the eternal mobility of the clouds. It is in their nature to be august before appearing to be odious; and the men are rare who have not the superstition of their time, and who look straight in the eye what the crowd does not dare to look at.” M. France is one of these rare men. He combines the amiable doubt of Montaigne with the mocking irreverence of Voltaire and the subversive grace of Renan. “The end which M. France seems to pursue persistently,” says one of his literary brethren, “is the demolition of the social edifice by the force of a logic tinctured with irony, without anger, and without phrases. By as much as Zola, Tailhade, and Mirbeau are ardent and passionate when they attack society, by so much is M. France calm and feline; but he is not, on that account, the less to be feared.”
As the most eminent living representative of the best classictraditions of French prose, M. France is the idol of the lettered youth of France. From admiration of form to acceptance of the substance underlying the form is but a step. His ideas insinuate themselves consequently into the very penetralia of culture,—that exquisite culture which brooks the presence of nothing common or unclean,—and they act as a disintegrating force in circles where downright revolutionary propaganda cannot enter.
In his writings, Anatole France is the precise intellectual counterpart—at every point but that of Catholicism, and even here his passion for Augustine, Chrysostom, and the other Church Fathers deters him from displaying an uncomely asperity—of his own adorable creation, l’Abbé Coignard,105the “delicious Catholicrévolté, who juggles with principles and human institutions as if they were a Merry Andrew’s painted spheres; the railing anarchist who lashes with jests and whose only bombs arebons mots.” And the best characterisation it is possible to give of M. France, the genial iconoclast, is to repeat certain of his observations on the character of his Abbé and certain of the sayings he puts into his Abbé’s mouth,—which I accordingly do in the following detached paragraphs, making no pretence of preserving in the translation the peculiar savour and charm of the original:—
Of the Character of Jerôme Coignard.
“His free intelligence trampled under foot vulgar beliefs and never accepted without examination the common opinion, except in what had to do with the Catholic faith in which he was immovable.
“The sagest of moralists, a sort of marvellous blend of Epicurus and Saint Francis of Assisi.... He preserved, in his boldest explorations, the attitude of a peaceful promenader.... It is certain that the world, to his eyes, resembled less the deserts of the Thébaïde than the gardens of Epicurus. He sauntered therein with the audacious ingenuousness which is the essential trait of his character and the elemental principle of his teaching.”
“Never did spirit show itself at once so daring and so pacific, nor temper its disdain with more sweetness.... He despised men with tenderness. He endeavoured to teach them that, since they have nothing anywhere near great in themselves except their capacity for suffering, they can cultivate nothing useful or beautiful but compassion.”
“It was his benevolence which impelled him to humiliate his fellows in their sentiments, their knowledge, their philosophy, and their institutions. He had to show them that their imbecile natures have neither imagined nor constructed anything worth being attacked or defended very energetically, and that, if they knew the fragile crudity of their greatest works, such as laws and empires, they would fight over them only in play, for the sheer fun of the thing, like the children who build castles of sand on the rim of the sea.”
“The majesty of the laws did not impose on his clairvoyant soul; and he deplored the fact that the unfortunate are burdened with so many obligations of which, for the most part, it is impossible to discover the origin or the sense.”
“What he had the least of was the sense of veneration. Nature had refused it him, and he did nothing to acquire it. He would have feared, in exalting some, to debase others; and his universal charity embraced equally the humble and the proud.”
Some of Jerôme Coignard’s Sayings.
Of Society and Governments:
“After the destruction of all the false principles, society will subsist, because it is founded upon necessity, the laws of which, older than Saturn, will rule when Prometheus shall have dethroned Jupiter.”
“I conclude that all the laws with which a minister swells his portfolio are vain documents that can neither make us live nor prevent us from living.”
“It is well-nigh a matter of indifference whether we are governedin one fashion or another, and ministers are imposing only by reason of their clothes and their carriages.”
“These assemblies [parliaments] will be founded upon the confused mediocrity of the multitude of which they will be the issue. They will revolve obscure and multiple thoughts. They will impose on the heads of the government the task of executing vague wishes, of which they will not have full consciousness themselves; and the ministers, less fortunate than the Œdipus of the fable, will be devoured, one after the other, by the hundred-headed Sphinx, for not having guessed the riddle of which the Sphinx herself did not know the answer. Their greatest hardship will be to resign themselves to impotence, to words instead of action. They will become rhetoricians, and very bad rhetoricians, since the talent which carried with it ever so little clarity would ruin them. They will be obliged to speak without saying anything, and the least stupid among them will be condemned to deceive more than the others. In this way the most intelligent will become the most contemptible. And, if there shall be some capable of arranging treaties, regulating finance, and supervising affairs, their ability will profit them nothing; for time will be lacking, and time is the stuff of great enterprises.”
Of the Army:
“I have observed that the trade the most natural to man is that of soldiering; it is the one towards which he is the most easily borne by his instincts and by his tastes, which are not all good. And apart from certain rare exceptions, of which I am one, man may be defined as an animal with a musket. Give him a handsome uniform and the hope of going to fight, he will be content.... The military condition has this also in keeping with human nature, that one is never forced to think therein; and it is clear that we were not made to think.”
“Thought is a disease peculiar to certain individuals, and could not be propagated without bringing about promptly the endof the species. Soldiers live in bands, and man is a sociable animal. They wear costumes of blue and white, blue and red, gray and blue, ribbons, plumes, and cockades; and these give them the same prestige with women that the cock has with the hen. They go forth marauding and to war; and man is naturally thieving, libidinous, destructive, and sensible to glory.”
“It is astounding, Tournebroche, my son, that war and the chase, the mere thought of which ought to overwhelm us with shame and remorse in recalling to us the miserable necessitiesA Pair of Army Officersof our nature and our inveterate wickedness, should, on the contrary, serve as matter for the pride of men; that Christians should continue to honour the trade of butcher and headsman when it is hereditary in the family; and that, in a word, among civilised peoples the illustriousness of the citizens is measured by the quantity of murder and carnage they carry, so to speak, in their veins.”
Of the Academy:
“Happy he who has not put his hope in The Academy! Happy he who lives exempt from fears and desires, and who knows that it is equally vain to be an Academician and not to be an Academician! Such a one leads, without trouble, a life hidden and obscure. Beautiful liberty follows him everywhere. He celebrates in the shade the silent orgies of wisdom, and all the Muses smile on him as on their adept.”
“The immortality which has just been decreed to M. de Séez neither a Bossuet nor a Belzunce desires. It is not gravenin the hearts of wondering peoples: it is inscribed in a big register.”
“If there are to be found, among the forty, persons of more polish than genius, what harm is there in this? Mediocrity triumphs in the Academy. Where does it not triumph? Do you find it less powerful in the parliaments and in the councils of the crown, where, surely, it is less in its place? Does one need to be a rare man to work on a dictionary which pretends to control usage and which can only follow it?
“TheAcadémistesorAcadémicienswere instituted, as you know, to fix the proper usage in what concerns discourse, to purge the language of every venerable and popular impurity, and to prevent the appearance of another Rabelais, another Montaigne,tout puant la canaille, la cuistrerie, et la province.”
“Genius is something unsociable. An extraordinary man is rarely a man of resources. The Academy was very well able to do without Descartes and Pascal. Who can say that it could as easily have done without M. Godeau or M. Conrart?”
Of Justice, Courts, and Judges:
“I hold man free in his acts because my religion teaches it; but, outside the doctrine of the Church (which is unequivocal), there is so little reason to believe in human liberty that I shudder in thinking of the verdicts of a justice that punishes actions of which the motives, the order, and the causes equally elude us, in which the will has often little part, and which are sometimes accomplished unconsciously.”
“Tournebroche, my son, consider that I am speaking of human justice, which is different from the justice of God, and which is generally opposed to it.”
“The cruelest insult that men have been able to offer to our Lord Jesus Christ has been the placing of his image in the halls where the judges absolve the Pharisees who crucified him and condemn the Magdalen whom he lifted up with his divine hands.”106
“What has he, the Just, to do with these men who could not show themselves just, even if they wished it, since their dreary duty is to consider the actions of their fellows not in themselves and in their essence, but from the single point of view of the interests of society; that is to say, in the interests of this mass of egoism, avarice, errors, and abuses which constitute communities, and of which they (the judges) are the blind conservators.”
“Judges do not sound the loins and do not read hearts, and their justest justice is crude and superficial.... They are men; that is to say, feeble and corruptible, gentle to the strong and pitiless to the weak. They consecrate by their sentences the cruelest social iniquities; and it is difficult to distinguish, in this partiality, what comes from their personal baseness and what is imposed on them by the duty of their profession, this duty being, in reality, to support the State in what it has of evil as well as in what it has of good; to watch over the conservation of public morals, whether they are excellent or detestable.... Furthermore, it should be observed that the magistrate is the defender, by virtue of his function, not only of the current prejudices to which we are all more or less subject, but also of the time-worn prejudices which are conserved in the laws after they have been effaced from our souls and our habits. And there is not a spirit ever so little meditative and free that does not feel how much there is of Gothic in the law, while the judge has not the right to feel it.”
“By the very nature of their profession, judges are inclined to see a culprit in every prisoner; and their zeal seems so terrible to certain European peoples that they have them assisted, in important cases, by ten citizens chosen by lot. From which it appears that chance, in its blindness, guarantees the life and liberty of the accused better than the enlightenment of the judges can. It is true that these impromptu bourgeois magistrates, selected by a lottery, are held well outside the affair of which they see only the exterior pomp. It is true further that, being ignorant of the laws, they are called in, not to apply them, but also simplyto decide, by a single word, if there is occasion to apply them. We are told that assizes of this sort give absurd results sometimes, but that the peoples who have established them cling to them as to a highly precious protection. I easily believe it. And I comprehend the acceptance of verdicts rendered in this fashion, which may be inept and cruel, but of which the absurdity and barbarity are, so to speak, attributable to nobody. Injustice seems tolerable when it is sufficiently incoherent to appear involuntary.”
“Just now this little bailiff, who has so strong a sentiment of justice, suspected me of belonging to the party of thieves and assassins. On the contrary, I so far disapprove theft and assassination that I cannot endure even the copy of them regularised by the laws; and it is painful for me to see that judges have found no better means of punishing robbers and homicides than by imitating them. For, after all, Tournebroche, my son, in good faith, what are fines and the death penalty, if not robbery and assassination perpetrated with an august exactitude? And do you not see that our justice merely tends, in all its pride, to this shame of avenging an evil by an evil, a suffering by a suffering, and in doubling misdemeanours and crimes in the name of equilibrium and symmetry?
“Customs have more force than laws. Gentleness of demeanour and sweetness of spirit are the only remedies which can reasonably be applied to legal barbarity. For to correct laws by laws is to take a slow and uncertain route.”
But for the historic setting, the turn of the phrase, and the absence of bitterness, one might fancy himself reading the contemporary anarchist organs,Les Temps NouveauxandLe Libertaire.
Anatole France is as chary of Utopias as Zola is prone to them. He fears nothing so much as intemperance of emotion and speech. He believes in nothing, not even in his own unbelief. “If ever M. Anatole France,” says Gaston Deschamps, “seeks martyrdom,it will be to confess the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, to affirm the nothingness of human opinions, and to attest, at the price of his blood, that there is no truth”; and yet it was apropos of this same M. France that this same M. Deschamps, in the course of a contention that literature always ends by having its way, sounded the note of warning placed at the beginning of this chapter.
In spite of the dilettante humour or, to be more accurate, the dilettante philosophy that informs his writings, Anatole France did not remain within histour d’ivoireduring that strange Dreyfus affair which transformed nearly every literary Frenchman into an agitator—for one side or the other. Like Zola and like most of his fellow-craftsmen of an anarchistic or socialistic bent, he engaged actively in the anti-militarist campaign, the pretext of which was the wrongs of a Jew whom they believed to be persecuted. In M. France, apostle of the nothingness of things in general and in particular, such a course was very surprising and, it must be admitted, very inconsistent. His most plausible excuse probably is that he could not help himself, his chivalrous instincts proving stronger than his quietism. But he might defend himself, if he thought it worth while, by citing the reply of Jerôme Coignard to his satellite Tournebroche when the latter inquired why he would “reduce to dust the foundations of equity, of justice, of laws, and of all the civil and military magistracies”:—
“My son, I have always observed that the troubles of men come to them from their prejudices, as spiders and scorpions come from the dimness of cellars and from the humidity of vaults. It is good to flourish the broom and the brush a little in all the dark corners. It is good even to give a little blow of the pick here and there in the walls of the cellar and garden to frighten the vermin and prepare the necessary ruins.”
M. France has not yet gone back into thetour d’ivoirefrom which the irresistible “Affair” drew him. He is a member of the executive committee of the Co-operative Bakery and a leader in the organisation of theUniversités Populaires; he presided on the occasionof the Victor Hugo Centennial over a gigantic mass meeting of the latter, in which he gave “a little blow of the pick” to clericalism;OCTAVE MIRBEAUOCTAVE MIRBEAUand in 1903 he contributed an introduction to Premier Combes’ volumeCampagne Laïque, in defence of anti-clericalism.
At a recent anniversary of Diderot, whom both anarchists and socialists claim as an ancestor, but who is more particularly an idol of the anarchists, he said:—
“Citoyens, master-spirits who are our friends have come here to speak of Diderot, the savant, and Diderot, the philosopher. As for me, I have only a word to say. I desire to show you Diderot, the friend of the people. This son of the cutler of Langres was an excellent man. A contemporary of Voltaire and of Rousseau, he was the best of men in the best of centuries.
“He loved men and the pacific works of men. He conceived the great design of lifting up into esteem the manual trades looked down upon by the military, civil, and religious aristocracies.
“Citoyens, at a time when the united enemies of knowledge, of peace, of liberty, arm themselves against the Republic, and threaten to stifle democracy under the weight of all that which does not think, or thinks only against thought, you have had a happy inspiration in singling out for honour the memory of this philosopher who teaches men happiness through work, knowledge, and love; and who, looking far into the future, announcedthe new era, the coming of the proletariat into a pacified and comforted world.
“His penetrating view discerned our present struggles and our future successes. And it is not too much to say that Diderot, whose memory we celebrate to-day, Diderot, dead for one hundred and twenty years, touches us very closely; that he is ours, a great servitor of the people and a defender of the proletariat.”
Anatole France is the gentlest and subtlest ironist of his time; Octave Mirbeau (to whom M. France’sJerôme Coignardwas dedicated) is the fiercest. M. Mirbeau has not yet obtained the world renown of Zola nor the national renown of M. France, but he may become in time as famous as either. He surpasses every living French writer in portraying the monstrous, the atrocious, and the horrible, and in expressing hatred and disgust; and his irony—too often fulminated, in violation of the commonest courtesy, not to say decency, against individuals antipathetic to him—rives and blasts like the thunderbolt. It is doubtful if the world has seen anything comparable to him for vitriolic vindictiveness since England had Dean Swift. He is bitter, brutal, savage, terrifying to the last degree; “one of those combative natures,” says Eugène Montfort, “who are dreaded because their conviction partakes of the nature of an animate being, ... breathes, feeds, grows, is endowed with the instinct of self-preservation and struggles for life.”
HisCalvaire, as he himself puts it, “strips war of all its heroism.” HisJournal d’une Femme de Chambreis the most complete and awful arraignment of society it is possible to imagine between the covers of a single volume. Merciless towards the hypocrisy and hollowness of the hour, towards meanness and pretentiousness, towards impotent and misdirected philanthropy, above all, towards the stupidity and ugliness of the smug bourgeois, whom he fairly flays alive as Apollo flayed Marsyas, M. Mirbeau is, on the other hand,—and here his resemblance to Swift ceases,—infinitely humane and uplifting, full of tenderness and chivalryfor the outcast and unfortunate, for the goodness which would diffuse happiness everywhere; full of generous ardour, high aspiration, and unfaltering faith in the ultimate triumph of the just.
M. Mirbeau is a declared anarchist; and, as such, he published a wonderful Apology of Ravachol, furnished an introduction for Jean Grave’s most famous volume, and played a leading rôle in the Dreyfus affair.
Hischroniquesare daring, incisive, brilliant, explosive, virile, insulting. They cut, burn, scald, corrode. His short stories are passionate, dramatic, lyrical even, all in being realistic. His novels, though they deal only indirectly with public issues, are upon all the anarchist library lists.
Emile Zola, Anatole France, and Octave Mirbeau are held, by many persons who do not in the least share their views, to be the three pre-eminent masters of modern French fiction. On a distinctly lower plane than these three, but still far above mediocrity, are two other novelists of a revolutionary cast, Lucien Descaves and Victor Barrucand.
Descaves demonstrated in his first volume—a collection of short stories entitledLe Calvaire d’Héloïse Pajadin—the depressing and degrading influence of the decent poverty of petty clerks and tradesmen; hisLa Colonneportrayed the contrasts of the Commune; and hisSoupesexposed the hypocrisies, cruelties, and absurdities of professional and amateur charity and philanthropy. But M. Descaves’ specialty is the army: it is in his novels of the barracks that he is at his best, and by these works he is best known.
In these books, with a talent which approaches genius, through hundreds of pages he holds the reader’s attention to the flat, stale, and unprofitable barrack life,—to its pettiness, selfishness, monotony, physical and moral untidiness, desolation and disgust,—a life entirely lacking in all that we are accustomed to consider the material for romance. Under his skilful handling the commonplace and the vulgar become alternately tragic and grimlycomic; and hisSous-OffsandEmmurés, to which he owes his nomination as a charter member of theAcadémie Goncourt, are almost classics of their kind. Less exalted and less epic than Zola, of whose big, spectacular qualities he is quite destitute, Descaves is, nevertheless, much closer to Zola than he is to Mirbeau or to France. And he easily surpasses Zola in the latter’s much-heralded but rather superficial realism; that is, in the capacity for heaping up significantly and without boresomeness minute, unromantic details.
Descaves has a square bull-dog head and jaw, if his photographs are to be trusted. He certainly has a bull-dog’s fixity of purpose in the matter of both substance and form. Nothing in the world will induce him to relax his grip on his immediate aim to indulge in fine ideas or fine writing. His style is cold, hard, dry, correct, keen, and sure. He is an out-and-out anarchist, who has played a fairly active part in the events of the last few years. HisSous-Offs, though entirely free from doctrinal discussion, cost him, by reason of its damaging revelations, an encounter with the law. No other novel—indeed, no other work of this generation, unless it be Bruant’schanson,Biribi—has exerted so profound an anti-militarist influence in France.
In 1895 Victor Barrucand published in theRevue Blanchea series of articles, concluding with a serious proposition for the establishment of “Le Pain Gratuit” (free bread); and on the occasion of the municipal elections of that year he placarded the principal communes of France with the following appeal:—
“TO THE PEOPLE.
“The tactics of the ambitious and the usurpers have always been to create division in order to reign.
“Workers!
“Be no more divided over political programmes of which you are the dupes.
“Band yourselves together upon the basis of your interests.
“Let us not expect anything from the good will of anybody, but let us define our own wills. Let us not say to any exterior power,‘Give us(Donnez-nous)our daily bread’; for manna will not fall from heaven nor from the governmental spheres. But let us say, ‘Give ourselves’ (Donnons-nous)! We can, if we will it, affirm with solidarity trueLiberty for All.
“Let us combine our determination and our scattered energies, and let us constitute the great party of men with hearts upon this question of bread, proclaimingTHE RIGHT TO LIVE(le droit à la vie) without humiliating conditions.
“Let bread, in all the communes, be the property of all, like the water of the fountains, the lights of the streets, and the streets themselves.
“We have free instruction, which profits only those who can receive instruction. Let us organise, more justly,Le Pain Gratuitfor the profit and the liberty of all the workers.
“Let the bread necessary to life be a right, and not an alms. Let it be no more the derisive price with which the labourer, nourisher of the rich, is paid. Let us abrogate the law of death inscribed on the margin of the code against him who has not found a way to sell himself.
“The people must speak out loud and firm! They must dictate their terms!
“Let us vote no more for individuals nor for complicated programmes. Let us vote forLe Pain Gratuit! Let there be no political divisions upon this point. Let us be with those who are with us, and be on our guard against the false philanthropists who promise more butter than bread.
“Let us begin at the beginning. Let us lay the corner-stone of a social edifice which shall shelter our childrenFREE AND RECONCILED IN THE COMMON HAPPINESS.
“Let us silence the ambitious who see in the suffering of the people only a means of attaining their ends. Let us replace the politics of personalities (so remote from the interests of themasses) by a finely human organisation of things. Let us vote for the idea which cannot betray us.
“LET US VOTE FOR FREE BREAD!
“Victor Barrucand.”107
InAvec le Feu, a novel whose action is placed in the troubled period of the execution of Vaillant and the overt act of Emile Henry, M. Barrucand has given an exceedingly subtle and suggestive study of the disgust with society of a certain element of the intellectualélite, and of the reasons for their espousal of the anarchist cause.
The principal character, one Robert, is a good type of the cultured, semi-neurasthenic anarchist of a period chiefly characterised by its restlessness and yearning:—
“On certain evenings he descended into the street, and saturated himself with the crowd. On the benches he breathed the mortality of the squares. He suffered for these miserable cattle who bleed no more under the goad of conscience. He roamed entire nights as chance led, hunting the débris of souls, exploring with his emotions, as with a dark lantern, the pavements of the drowsy city. At daybreak he came back shivering, coughing, weary with over-walking, drunk with pity, his stomach steeped in bad drinks. He concluded then that labour had brutalised the species, and he sought the secret of lifting it up. On these mornings he speculated daringly, dreamed of sacrifices, of revolts, of noble disdains, of ferocious protests against philanthropy and respectability. A savour of death blended with his charity and perfumed his heroic sleep.”
The novel ends dramatically, not with bomb-throwing, but with suicide, which this strange anarchist hero, who aspires to bomb-throwing, without having the necessary force of character to achieve it, chooses in its stead.
It would be unfair to class M. Barrucand as an anarchist, or even as a revolutionist, on the strength of this book, in spite of the generally sympathetic tone which pervades it. In fact, M. Barrucand’s philosophy as displayed therein is of so cynical and, at times, of so flippant an order, his temperament so weary and so buoyant, his moral outlook so severe and lackadaisical, his style so lurid and simple, his appreciations so morbid and sane, and his literary method so impressionistic, realistic, and symbolic, by turns, that it would be rash to draw any conclusions from it whatsoever, did not his attitude in his other works—notably in his two historical biographies,La Vie Véritable du Citoyen Rossignol,Vainqueur de la Bastille, andMémoires et Notes de Choudieu, Représentant du Peuple—and his identification with the movement for Free Bread enroll him definitively in the ranks of revolt.
Maurice Barrès, who is at present an apostle of nationalism, was at one time classed as a “sentimental anarchist,”—an anarchist “with a rebel’s brain and a voluptuary’s nerves, who would wear purple and fine linen.” “I am an enemy of the laws,” he said at that time.
Among other French novelists and short-story writers of a certain reputation who are more or less revolutionary in tone may be mentioned:—
Georges Darien, author ofBiribi-Armée d’Afrique, a novel of the convict-legion, which has proved a potent factor in lessening the rigours of the companies of discipline; Dubois-Dessaulle,108author ofSous la Casaque, who, after being released from the convict-legion to which he had been consigned (because a brochure by Jean Grave and an article by Sévérine were found in his knapsack), had the superhuman courage to soak his left arm in kerosene and set fire to it in order to avoid ever being sent back into this inferno; Jean Ajalbert, author ofSous le Sabre; Marcel Lami, author ofLa Débandade;Louis Lamarque, author ofUn An de Caserne; Paul Brulat, author ofLa Faiseuse de Gloire,Le Nouveau Candide,La Gangue, andEldorado, books replete with generous indignation against social abuses; Jean Lombard, one of the makers of the programme of theCongrès Régionalof Paris (1880) which declared for class candidates, whose untimely death was a great loss to French literature; Camille Pert, author ofEn l’Anarchie; Henri Rainaldy, author ofDelcros, an exposure of the cowardices and murderousness of society; Adolphe Retté, author ofLe Régicide; Marcel Schwob, author ofSpicilege; Mme. Sévérine, author ofPages Rouges; Frantz Jourdain, author ofL’Atelier Chanterel; Zéphirin Raganasse, author ofFabrique de Pions; Louis Lumet, author ofLa Fièvre; M. Reepmaker, author ofVengeance; Théodore Chèze, Henri Fèvre, Jules Cazes, Pierre Valdagne, and thefeuilletonisteMichel Zevacco.
A number of the revolutionists who are primarily public agitators have made attempts of varying merit to propagate their pet ideas through the medium of fiction. Such are Sébastien Faure with hisromans-feuilletonsand Jean Grave with hisMalfaiteurs, his military romance,La Grande Famille, and his book for boys,Les Aventures de Nono.
The most thorough single-volume study that has as yet appeared of the psychology of the different varieties of contemporary revolutionary types, and of their aims and methods, is unquestionably J.-H. Rosny’s109romance,Le Bilatéral. But M. Rosny, although he has appeared on a public platform in company with professedrévoltés, to protest against “La Cruauté Contemporaine,” is primarily a scientific observer, who cannot reasonably be classed as an agitator.
Like the hero of this romance (Hélier, the “Bilatéral,” who habitually looks at all sides of a subject, and then looks at them again), Rosny is impassive, impartial, tolerant, eclectic. Far from excusing the crimes and errors of the capitalistic state, he is equallyfar from throwing in his lot with those who would incontinently overturn it.
“To think,” says the Bilatéral to hisdoctrinairesocialist and anarchist friends, “that there are multitudes of brave souls like you who, like you, see only white and black. Nothing but white and black! Why,citoyens, the complex is grey, all shades of grey.”
Again he says: “You see, my dear” (he is speaking to an ardent socialist girl), “that in the things of the social order we meet rarely a problem simple enough to make it possible to assert;—‘it is this’ or ‘it is that.’ Generally, betweenthisandthatthere are an endless number of points to elucidate.... There is a high civilisation with plenty of grain, with immense unemployed forces, with a science already so large that it can resolve the problem of giving to all a nest and nourishment; ... and those above are stupid, and those below are stupid, and all so evilly disposed! My God! dear child, if the people were not a brutal instinct, we might indeed hope for a consoling solution.”
Still, again, speaking to a group upon the Bourse: “‘History, science, daily observation, demonstrate to us that nothing durable is elaborated without the aid of the great collaborator, Time. Did this horse-chestnut-tree grow in a day? And you would have the humanity which has evolved so slowly—oh, so slowly!—through myriads of years, humanity bounded by prejudices, by predispositions against progressive ideas, humanity which includes a hundred social sects ready to combat each other,—you would have this humanity change by means of a lousy, bloody, revolution? Granted that once, after centuries of patience, a cataclysm like that of ‘93 occurred. (And, even so, France, properly speaking, has no reason to felicitate itself over Jacobinism.) But you pretend to establish as a normal condition these cataclysms which can be only the exception in the social life; and it is this that I am powerless to conceive.’
“‘Bravo!’ exclaimed the bourgeois.
“‘I have nothing to do with your bravos!’ cried the Bilatéral,with a shade of nervousness. ‘If their ignorance saddens me, your rottenness exasperates me; and it is not of protecting the rich that I think, but of preventing a generous minority of the poor from getting themselves butchered to no purpose or from casting France into the maw of the rival powers. As to the vile and cowardly cormorants, the whole race of big and little parasites, the vermin that swarm in this pseudo-republic alongside of the Orleanist penny-scrapers and the pests of imperialism, if I had only to press a button to annihilate them all, I would not hesitate a second.’”
Other fiction writers who have shown an understanding of the gravity of the revolutionary issue, a familiarity with revolutionary tenets and the workings of the revolutionary mind, but whose points of view are either neutral, like Rosny’s, or frankly hostile, are Rachilde, Jane de la Vaudère, Augustin Léger, Paul Dubost, and Adolphe Chenevière. These have aided the propaganda, in their own despite, by rendering the revolutionary types familiar and comprehensible, and so lifting them out of the category of monsters.
It seems that Emile Henry’s favourite book, his “livre de chevet,” the book which he contrived to secrete in his cell during a part of his imprisonment, and which his jailers, when they pounced upon it, imagined to be of the most incendiary nature, was Cervantes’Don Quixote. And it is not infrequently the case, in this matter of literature, that the most potent revolutionary agents are those which make the least pretence of being so. The masterpieces of the humourists Meilhac, Halévy, Tristan Bernard, Jules Renard, Pierre Veber, and Georges Courtéline, which hold up to ridicule rather than to reprobation the emptiness and baseness of society; such books of pity and of pardon as Daudet’sJack, Goncourt’sFille Elisa, and Loti’sLivre de la Pitié et de la Mort; books of aspiration, like Prévost’sConfessions d’un Amantand Bourget’sTerre Promise; of wrath, like Léon Daudet’sMorticoles; of “revolt against Puritanism,” like Pierre Louys’Aphrodite; of energy, like Barrès’Déracinés; of searching, like Huysmanns’Cathédrale; of regret, like Bazin’sTerre qui Meurt; of unmoral pessimism, like De Maupassant’sBel-Ami; and the whole range of disquieting feminist fiction,—may turn out to be the most active social ferments and the real forerunners (little as their authors would wish it) of violent change,—of revolt and revolution!
All contemporary fiction, in fact, has in it something of the doubt, the trouble, and the protest of the period; and, once upon this tack, nothing less than a minute examination of every novel and volume of short stories that has appeared since the Franco-Prussian war would be imposed.
Of the essayists, critics, and philosophers110who are more or less militant iconoclasts andrévoltés, the most important are:—
A. Ferdinand Hérold, who expounds his attitude as follows: “From the time I was able to think a little for myself, I have had an anarchist mind. I mean that I have always had a horror of undisputed authority, of dogmatism, and of conventional ideas,—ideas which, the greater part of the time, one does not attempt to justify to himself”; Camille Mauclair, who says: “If anarchy is primarily the reform of ethics, in accordance with the principles of individualism, I can declare squarely that anarchy was born in me, with the study of metaphysics and the awakening of sensibility in the period when I began to know myself.... Furthermore, pity for the disinherited and execration of the spoliators is a point of honour for the few clean and upright people who are still to be found in the world”; Bernard Lazare,111who says: “Authority, its value, and itsraison d’êtreare things which I have never been able to comprehend. That a man arrogate to himself the right to domineer over his fellows, in any fashion whatsoever, is still inconceivable to me. At first I regarded myself as the only victim of baneful circumstances and vicious wills. Later I came to consider mankind at large; and from my own sentiments I divined the feelings of those who more or less continuously,or at some moment of their existence, are slaves. Then what had appeared to me odious for myself appeared to me odious for all”; Gustave Geffroy, who devoted a decade to his biography of the Communard Blanqui, entitledL’Enfermé; Henry Mazel, who exclaimed in theMercure de France, “We are all anarchists, thank God!” Alfred Naquet, a convert from nationalism; Urbain Gohier, author ofL’Armée contre la Nation; Victor Charbonnel, ex-priest and editor ofLa Raison, and Henri Bérenger, editor ofL’Action, who have acted together in exciting the masses to anti-clerical rioting; the socialist-anthropologist Charles Letourneau; the bacteriologists Melchnikoff, Roux, and Duclaux;[112] Charles Albert and Armand Charpentier, apostles ofl’amour libre; Christian Cornélissen, Georges Pioch, Jean Jullien, G. Bachot, Léopold Lacour, Jules Laforgue,[112] B. Guineaudau, Auguste Chirac, Albert Delacour, E. Fournière, Jacques Santarelle, Louis Lumet, Maurice Bigeon, A. Hamon, Camille de St. Croix, Félix Fénéon, Han Ryner, Alex. Cohen, Henri Bauer,112Charles Vallier, Gabriel de la Salle, Emile Michelet, Laurent Tailhade, Francis de Pressensé, Maurice Le Blond, Saint-Georges de Bouhélier, G. Lhermitte, Paul Robin, Eugène Montfort, and Gustave Kahn.
In the first months of 1891 a weekly publication calledL’Endehors113(The Outsider) was founded by a band of young literary men. They were Zo d’Axa, Roinard, Georges Darien, Félix Fénéon, Lucien Descaves, Victor Barrucand, Arthur Byl, A. Tabarant, Bernard Lazare, Charles Malato, Pierre Quillard, Ghil, Edmond Cousturier, Henri Fèvre, Edouard Dubus, A. F. Hérold, Georges Lecomte, Etienne Decrept, Emile Henry, Saint-Pol-Roux, Jules Méry, Alexandre Cohen, J. LeCoq, Chatel, Cholin, Ludovic Malquin, Camille Mauclair, Octave Mirbeau, Lucien Muhlfeld, Pierre Veber, Victor Melnotte, A. Mercier, Tristan Bernard, Paul Adam, Charles Saunier, Jean Ajalbert, Emile Verhaeren, Henri de Regnier, and Francis Vielé-Griffin.