FOOTNOTES:

“Je suis la Sainte Démocratie,J’attends mes amants.”

Pour la Prochaine Exposition: Asans-culotte, saucily puffing a cigarette, displays a guillotine of the most approved pattern, with this comment, “Et elle sera à vapeur, mon bourgeois!”

Marquis Talons-Rouges: De Gallifet, “the butcher of the Commune,” stands transfixed with terror while the massacred rise up against him from under the paving-stones.

Vendredi Saint: M. Bérenger,136attired as a Protestant clergyman, glowers at the Magdalen, who is weeping over the Crucified One, and says, “Si j’avais été de ces temps, il n’y aurait pas eu de scandale au pied de la croix.”

On the other hand, Willette is not tenderer with his bewitching dreamland lovers than he is with the abused and the oppressed.

He has contributed to nearly all the illustrated organs of revolt, beginning with thePère Peinard, and at one time made all the illustrations for a most impertinent little sheet, known asLe Pied de Nez, the text for which was furnished by Camille St. Croix. His stained-glass window at theChat Noir, representing the worship of the golden calf and bearing the inscription “Te Deum Laudamus,” will be remembered as long as theChat Noiritself.

Steinlen’s137work is big,—big for its humanity and big for its art; big by reason of its realism and by reason of its idealism; big in extent, intent, and content. His compositions possess all the essential qualities of great pictures; and, if it is ever permitted to class a simpledessinateurwith the masters, Steinlen must surely be ranked as one of the few great artists of his time.

In Steinlen we have all the social types that thechansonnierBruant and the monologist Jehan Rictus have made vivid by their poetry, and a great many more besides; all the social types that the painters of the humble—L’Hermitte, Raffaelli, Sabatté, and Besson—have endeared to us on canvas, and a great many more besides:maquereauxand their white slaves, thefilles du trottoir; criminals, child-martyrs, country and city vagabonds, and parasitic squatters on vacant city lots; coster-mongers and street musicians; little dressmakers and milliners tripping jauntily down the slopes of Montmartre and Belleville; laundresses pounding and gossiping in the wash-houses or wearily traversing the streets, with heavy baskets of clothes on theirarms; Bohemian poets and artists fighting poverty in their humbleménagesor junketing with their mistresses and models; over-dressedfilles de joieawaiting, Danaë-like, in cafés and night restaurants, the descent of the golden shower; unsophisticated or hungry working-girls falling into the traps set by the mistresses of the public houses, and country maidens succumbing to the glitter of the soldier’s coat; toiling peasants, stupid, stolid, and patient; labourers and mechanics at their work, at their noon-day luncheons, and, in the wine-shops after their working hours, under the spell of prating politicians; miners grovelling in the murk or marching, pale, starving, and ominous, as strikers, to the assertion of their rights and the redress of their wrongs. The painter Luce and the sculptor Meunier are, perhaps, the only artists who have displayed continuously, during a series of years, an equal comprehension of the suffering, the yearning, and the revolt of the masses; and Meunier’s field of observation is scarcely as broad as Steinlen’s, while Luce’s technical skill is inferior to his. Steinlen has climbed by the ladder of a marvellous intuition into the very soul of the proletariat, and his superb gift of expression enables him to bear completest witness to all that he has therein felt and seen.

A mighty sadness permeates his work.

Steinlen’s best-known drawings have appeared inLe Père Peinard,Le Chambard,Le Mirliton,La Lanterne, the anarchist child’s paperJean-Pierre,Les Feuilles de Zo d’Axa,Le Canard Sauvage,Le Sifflet, andLe Gil Blas Illustré, to which last he contributed a first page, weekly, for a number of years. He has illustrated two volumes of theChansonsof Bruant (Dans la Rue) and Maurice Boukay’sChansons Rouges. Several of his posters, notably that of the socialist daily,Le Petit Sou, breathe a fierce revolutionary spirit.

Among the minordessinateurs—minor not necessarily in talent, but in vogue—are the revolutionists Luce, Francis Jourdain, Vallotton, Pissarrofils, Signac, Rysselberghe, and Ibels, already noticed as painters. Roubille, G. Maurin, Jehannet, Guillaume,Barbottin, Anquetin, Cross, Mab, Mabel, Lebasque, Delannoy, Comin-Ache, Chevalier, Daumont, Alexandre Charpentier, Heidbrinck, Camille Lefèvre, and J. Henault have been identified with the propaganda by art ofLes Temps Nouveaux. Couturier138has an intimate connection with the other anarchist organ,Le Libertaire. Jean Grave’s primer of anarchy,Les Aventures de Nono, was illustrated by Charpentier, Heidbrinck, Hermann-Paul, Camille Lefèvre, Luce, Mab, Rysselberghe, and Pissarrofils. Grandjouan, Léal de Camara, Arthur Michaël, Jossot, Dubuc, Balluriau, Gottlob, Noël Dorville, Jouve, Kupka, Weiluc, Louis Morin, Braun, Borgex, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cadel, Darbour, Roedel, Redon, and Grün are all strongly revolutionary in portions of their work.

Le Rire,Le Sourire,Le Cri de Paris,Le Gil Blas Illustré, and nearly a score of illustrated sheets, whose existence is likely to be so ephemeral that their enumeration would be idle, allow a modicum of space to refractory productions by thesedessinateurs; and in the spring of 1901 an illustrated publication was founded, which is devoted exclusively to full-page drawings of an anti-capitalistic, anti-governmental character. This publication, which is calledL’Assiette au Beurre,139is as fierce in its way as was the suppressedPère Peinard. Several of its numbers have been seized; but it has so far escaped complete suppression,—mainly, it is likely, by reason of an entire absence of reading-matter, it being far more difficult for the courts to define the offence contained in an inflammatory drawing than the offence contained in an inflammatory text. The prospectus ofL’Assiette au Beurrethus explains its aim: “We have arrived at a turning-point in history, where it becomes necessary for a publication which addresses itself to thinkers and artists to face the social question under its most diverse aspects. Now is it not a duty to combat by art the possessors of theassiette au beurreand all social iniquities? And how can it be done better than by the pictorial presentation which fixes an idea in the brain with an energy to which the effort of the most puissant writer cannot attain?”

Practically all thedessinateursheretofore mentioned have appeared with greater or less frequency inL’Assiette au Beurre; and it has published many special issues, of twenty-four pages or more, devoted exclusively to a single artist. Thus Braun, Grandjouan, Roubille, Michaël, Dubuc, Jean Veber, Willette, Van Dongen, Gottlob, Noël Dorville, Heidbrinck, Jouve, Lucien Métivet, Ibels, Guillaume, Caran d’Ache, Kupka, Weiluc, Xavier, José, Minartz, Jacques Villon, Vallotton, Sancha, Pezilla, Louis Morin, Doës, and Abel Faivre have had, each, at least one number, and Hermann-Paul, Steinlen, Léal de Camara, Jossot, and Balluriau several numbers, each, consecrated to their works. No other existing journal of caricature has made so comprehensive an artistic effort;140and it is at least a curious commentary—not to insist farther—on the social attitude of the artisticélitethat no other journal of caricature is so unequivocally revolutionary in tone.

Daumier, the father of modern French caricature and the greatest of French caricaturists, was scarcely tenderer in his drawings to the exploiters of the poor, to bourgeois stupidity and sham, and to courts, lawyers, and politicians, than are the Mirbeaus, Tailhades, Jean Graves, and Kropotkines in their writings; and in this respect (ignoring, of course, the question of talent) he is closely resembled by a majority of his successors. To be sure, it is easy to attach too much weight to this fact. The caricaturist, like many another fellow who has to get his living by his wits, does not invariably make it a point to express his own convictions. The caricaturist, furthermore, could not consistently accept a Utopia if he succeeded in ushering one in, since in Utopia he would have no excuse for being. “Caricature is, in the nature of the case, of the opposition.” But it is onething to be of the opposition—that is, to assail the political element in power—and quite another thing to demolish the state itself and all the institutions of society. And it is this latter thing that the great body of contemporary French caricaturists are attempting to do.

Bernard Shaw in a little book of almost diabolical cleverness,The Perfect Wagnerite, has advanced the rather startling theory that no one can comprehend the Wagner music-dramas who is not something of an anarchist.

Whatever one may think of Bernard Shaw in general, of Bernard Shaw as a musical critic in particular, and, still more in particular, of Bernard Shaw as a Wagner interpreter, one must admit that there is always a half-truth, at least, lurking somewhere about his Sibylline epigrams and paradoxes. There is no questioning the fact that Wagner, the transformer of music, was a professor of revolutionary doctrines, and that he incorporated, deliberately or otherwise, the essence of these revolutionary doctrines into his work. “During three years,” in the early part of his career, “he kept pouring forth pamphlets on social evolution, religion, life, art, and the influence of riches”; and one of these pamphlets,Art and Revolution, is esteemed an anarchist text-book by anarchists in all parts of the world. “What man,” he says, “can, with lightness of heart and calm senses, plunge his regard to the bottom of this world of murder and rapine, organised and legalised by deceit, imposture, and hypocrisy, without being obliged to avert his eyes with a shudder of disgust?” Wagner resigned in 1849 his position as conductor of the opera at Dresden in order to become “a leader of the people in the revolution then under way.” He appealed to the king of Saxony “to espouse the people’s cause, and then threw in his lot with the people.” He was publicly proclaimed “a politically dangerous person along with Bakounine and Roeckel,”—the same Bakounine who is held the father of modern anarchism.

In France, as in Germany, the tendency of music during the last fifty years has been towards a greater and greater libertyof form; and most of the notable contemporary French composers—with the exception of Reyer, Saint-Saëns, and Massenet141(who represent, with modifications, the classic tradition), and two or three ardent disciples of Gluck—proceed, more or less directly, either from Wagner or from that other innovator, Hector Berlioz (sometimes called the French Wagner), who was not, it is true, a revolutionist in the political sense, but who was bitter to the last degree against the society that stupidly refused to acknowledge his power.

The writer is not enough of a musical connoisseur to trace the transformations wrought in musical forms by French composers since the time of Berlioz,—by César Franck (who in a sense, however, stood apart from the currents), by Pierre Lalo, Isidore de Lara, Emmanuel Chabrier, Vincent d’Indy, Camille Erlanger, DeBussy, Gabriel Fauré, Leroux, Le Borne, Bourgault-Ducoudray, Gustave Charpentier, and Alfred Bruneau; still less to point out where these changes have been co-ordinated, as they were in Wagner, with revolutionary thinking,—a task for which not only musical connoisseurship, but the temperament of a musician, the knowledge of an adept, and the intellect of a philosopher would be required. But in two of the composers just named, Alfred Bruneau and Gustave Charpentier, the co-ordination is so obvious that “he who runs” (he of the average lay intelligence) “may read,” since they are engaged in disseminating the idea of liberty among the people.

Both have been influenced by Wagner, but both depart from Wagner in taking their subjects, not from legends, but from contemporary life, and the most ordinary every-day sort of life at that.

Bruneau claims as large privileges for the composer of opera as are accorded to the author, the painter, and the dramatist; the same openness to passion, movement, and humanity, and the same range of choice as regards characters, language, and setting. “It is the right of the composer”—I quote from Bruneau’sMusique d’Hier et de Demain—“to unite in a piece of his choosing any beings he pleases, to place these beings in the humanmilieuto which he considers they belong, and to put in their mouths the words which he considers appropriate.... He must insist on liberty of the dialogue, developing itself, without constraint of any sort, upon the woof of the instrumentation, and forming one body with it; liberty of the symphony, never interrupted, trumpeting, rumbling, swelling, subsiding, with the necessities of the drama; liberty of expression, more important still,—justness in the word and precision in the term; liberty unlimited of the melody, tripping, alert, grave, proud, tender, vigorous, joyous, surely, at being able to escape from the imprisonment of the cadence and the rhyme; liberty of the phrase, liberty of inspiration, liberty of art, liberty of form, liberty complete, magnificent, and definitive!”

InMessidor142andL’Attaque du Moulin(prose librettos by Emile Zola) Bruneau deals with strikes and the labour question so frankly that it is not a little surprising that they were allowed a place on a national stage. These works are appreciated by the critics, but have not been, in spite of their popular subjects, signal popular successes.

On the other hand, Charpentier’s opera ofLouise(produced at theOpéra Comiquein 1899, and not yet banished from a prominent place in the répertoire) has rapidly made the tour of France and of Europe.Louise, which treats with a bizarre blending of realism and idealism the life of the Bohemians and labourers of Montmartre, may be said to mark an epoch in opera, in that it is the first work of the French school which, having combined innovation of musical form with innovation of subject and language, has achieved a striking and permanent artistic and popular success.

WithLouisethe modern music-drama becomes, like the simple drama, an appreciable force in direct revolutionary propaganda. It is true that everything savouring of politics is scrupulously excluded from the libretto ofLouise, but this scrupulousness (absolutely indispensable in a piece prepared for a subsidised stage)does not prevent the opera from being an unmistakable protest against the social tyranny which is intrenched in the texts of the law. Indeed, Charpentier, whose fine social fervour has been evidenced in a variety of ways which may not be gone into here, has publicly proclaimed his belief “in the efficacy of revolutions well prepared.”

It is more than a coincidence that the revolutionary Zola should have been a zealous defender of the art of Courbet, of Manet, of Monet, Pissarro, and Cezanne, and that a pronounced anarchist like Octave Mirbeau should have been an early admirer of Wagner, the introducer to France of Maeterlinck, the chief champion of Monet, and an apotheosiser of Rodin,—should have been, in short, the foster-father of theirréguliersin every department of art. He would be a surpassingly subtle analyser and a masterful synthesiser who could establish the connection between polyphonic orchestration, impressionism in painting and sculpture and thevers libre, and between each and all of these and the anarchistic philosophy,—between revolt against academicism in the arts and revolt against the state; and yet no one who observes ever so little can doubt that the connection exists.

Paris from Montmartre

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”Shakespeare.

“Truth’s fountains may be clear, her streams are muddy.”Lord Byron.

“Myself when young did eagerly frequentDoctor and Saint, and heard great argumentAbout it and about: but evermoreCame out by the same door wherein I went.*******The Ball no question makes of Ayes and NoesBut Here or There as strikes the Player goes;And He that tossed you down into the Field,He knows about it all—HEknows—HE knows!”Rubáiyát ofOmar Kháyyám.

“A man finds he has been wrong at every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right. Mankind, after centuries of failure, are still upon the eve of a thoroughly constitutional millennium. Since we have explored the maze so long, without result, it follows, for poor human reason, that we cannot have to explore much longer; close by must be the centre.... How if there were no centre at all, but just one alley after another, and the whole world a labyrinth without end or issue?”—Robert Louis Stevenson.

“Avec tous nos points de repères,Te voyons-nous mieux que nos pères,O fond, fond qui nous désespères,Fond obscur, fond mystérieux?Pour avoir fait glose sur glose,Nous croyons savoir quelque chose;Mais la Cause de tout, la Cause,Qui donc la tient devant ses yeux?”Jean Richepin.

“I mean to say that if, in the pitiful comedy of life, princes seem to command and peoples to obey, it is only a piece of acting, a vain appearance, and that really they are both conducted by an invisible force.”

Anatole France, in Les Opinions de M. Jerôme Coignard.

THE wisest words, probably, that were ever heard in a court-room were uttered by Gamaliel, the Pharisee, at the trial of Peter and John: “Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God.”

To a similar purport, Montaigne wrote:—

“‘Tis a very great presumption to slight and condemn all things for false that do not appear to us likely to be true, which is the ordinary vice of such as fancy themselves wiser than their neighbours. I was myself once one of these; and if I heard talk of dead folks walking, of prophecies, enchantments, witchcrafts, or any other story, I had no mind to believe.... I presently pitied the poor people that were abused by these follies, whereas I now find that I myself was to be pitied as much at least as they; not that experience has taught me anything to supersede my former opinions, though my curiosity has endeavoured that way; but reason has instructed me that thus resolutely to condemn anything for false and impossible is to circumscribe and limit the will of God and the power of nature within the bounds of my own capacity, than which no folly can be greater. If we give the names of monster and miracle to everything our reason cannot comprehend, how many such are continually presented before our eyes! Let us but consider through what clouds and, as it were, groping through what darkness, our teachers lead us to the knowledge of most of the things we apply our studies to, and we shall find that it is rather custom than knowledge that takes away the wonder, and renders them easy and familiar to us; ... and that, if those things were now newly presented to us, we should think them as strange and incredible, if not more so, than others.... He that had never seen a river imagined the first he met with to be the sea, and the greatest things that havefallen within our knowledge we conclude to be the extremes that nature makes of the kind.”

To have pondered and appropriated these words of the far-sighted Pharisee and the sage of Périgord is to have stricken the wordimpossiblefrom one’s vocabulary, to have lost the desire to emit shrieks of anger or dismay before new views of life and society, and, without “mockings or arguments,” to simply “witness and wait.”

The philosophic doubt which no one more than Montaigne has approved—the “Que sçais-je?” which forbids the swearing of unconditional allegiance to unproved theories—is, of course, always in order; but doubt becomes most pernicious dogmatism when it assumes the rôle of denial. It plays its proper part when, and only when, it produces a willingness to “leave great changes,” as Stevenson happily puts it, “to what we call great blind forces, their blindness being so much more perspicacious than the little peering, partial eyesight of men.”

“La folie d’hier est la sagesse de demain” has been said so long, and accepted so long, that there is no tracing it to its origin; and yet we go on diligently disregarding it, seizing every fresh occasion to “kick against the pricks,” quite as if the stupidity of the practice had not been demonstrated a thousand times over, quite as if the stones rejected by the builders had never become the heads of the corners, and the first had never been last, and the last first.

“Vieux soldats de plomb que nous sommes,Au cordeau nous alignant tous,Si de nos rangs sortent des hommes,Tous nous crions: A bas les fous!On les persécute, on les tue,Sauf, après un long examen,A leur dresser une statuePour la gloire du genre humain.”143

“If we came from a globe where there was some semblance of rule and order,” says Georges Clemenceau, “the spectacle of our planet would appear to us a pure abomination.” In the interests of clearness, M. Clemenceau has exaggerated, perhaps. Nevertheless, there is an element of truth in what he says. Our society is abundantly open to criticism; and that we chance to be inimical to panaceas and suspicious of Utopias is no valid reason for calling the black of our society white, and blandly treating its absurdities, illogicalities, injustices, and cruelties as infallibilities and amenities. Because the reformer commits the folly of dogmatising in one direction does not excuse us for committing the counter-folly of dogmatising in another. Suppose we hold with Omar that

“the first Morning of Creation wroteWhat the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read,”

and suppose we are prone to take at the letter these lines of Walt Whitman,—

“There was never any more inception than there is now,Nor any more youth or age than there is now,And will never be any more perfection than there is now,Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now,”—

is it, therefore, necessary for us to shut our eyes to the most obvious facts of the present and to all possibilities for the future?

When Victor Barrucand, a few years ago, put forward his scheme for free bread (“le pain gratuit”), he was not treated as a visionary in any important quarter. The semi-bourgeois journals showed themselves, in several instances, rather friendly; and the opposition he encountered from the straight bourgeois press was of quite a different sort from that which is evoked by a preposterous proposition. M. Clemenceau, one of the few radicals who has never for a moment lost his balance, supported him warmly.

“It is high time we knew,” said Clemenceau, “whether, at the degree of civilisation to which we have attained, we can continue to tolerate that men, women, and children die of want—in a few months from the exhaustion induced by insufficiently remunerated work or in a few hours from downright hunger. Our republican and monarchical conservatives—all excellent Christians—answer, ‘No,’ but continue to act ‘Yes.’... I just remarked that M. Barrucand did not propose revolution to us. I ask myself now if I did not go a bit too fast. Yes, eighteen hundred years after the Christ, it is a revolution for Christians to prevent the death of their fellows by slow and rapid starvation. Well, then, let us inaugurate this revolution!”

“Le pain gratuit c’est le futur,” said Jules Lermina at the same moment. And, really, is it so unreasonable that every one should be given enough to eat, when slaves have been, and domestic animals are, so provided for, and when every one is given the privilege of learning to read and write? Is it not rather surprising that a person should be permitted, nay, forced, to acquire reading and writing, and should be supplied at the public expense (without apparent opposition from any source) with fresh air, lights, pure water, paved streets, and parks, and should not be provided with bread; that he is entitled to food inspection and is not entitled to food itself; that he is assured proper disposition for his waste and is not assured a sufficiency of supply; that he can count on a burial and cannot count—supreme irony!—on a living; has the right to a grave-plot and has not the right to a loaf? Is illiteracy so much more dangerous to society than destitution? Is everything as merry as it might be when death thus lords it over life; when a man asks for bread, and is given a coffin?

A CONTRAST IN FUNERALSA CONTRAST IN FUNERALS

A CONTRAST IN FUNERALS

A republic with manhood suffrage and generally disseminated book-knowledge would probably have seemed as chimerical to the minds of our not very remote ancestors as the community of the socialist or anarchist dream seems to us. It would not be more remarkable if wage-earners should disappear than it wasthat serfs and slaves disappeared; if the factory system should disappear than it was that it once appeared; if alms-giving should be replaced by a recognition of the right to work than that charity from being a fine, spontaneous human impulse has become an unwieldy, soulless machine; if private property should be transformed into collective property than that private property was evolved out of the tribal possessions; if the church should cease to be an institution of the state—indeed it has already ceased to be in America—than that it ever became one; ifl’union libreshould supersede marriage (with the loss of the latter’s chief sanctions, private property and the already much-enfeebled authority of the church) than that monogamy has superseded polygamy; if woman should be emancipated than that man has, up to a certain point, been emancipated. Furthermore, it would be no more extraordinary if thetiers état(the present dominantbourgeoisie) should be evicted by thequatrième état(the proletariat) than it was that thetiers étatevicted the nobility and clergy in 1789; if a social republic (under which without knowing or, at least, without admitting it we are already half installed) should follow close upon the heels of a simple republic than that a simple republic followed close upon the heels of a monarchy and a monarchy close upon the heels of a feudal system; if nations should pass as political entities by being merged in anInternationalethan that they emerged out of the seeming chaos of the Middle Ages; if there should be one tongue over all the earth144than that there has come to be one tongue over any entire people; if there should be general peace than that there has been general war.

No, there is nothing inherently incredible or absurd about the ideas and ideals of the contemporary revolutionists; nothing more transcendental or more visionary than there was, for their day and their generation, in the ideas and ideals of the Encyclopedists, and of the innovators and reformers of all the past.

It may have been a mistake for the classes to impose book-learning on the masses, to compel them to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which makes men as gods; but, having given their wards to eat thereof, having deliberately stimulated them to think, the privileged must let them follow out their thinking to the logical—perhaps, also, to the bitter—end. There is no alternative. There is no such thing as staying them midway in their course, since with growing knowledge has come growing desire.

If the classes did not wish the masses to drink deep of the Pierian spring, they should have had the sense to keep them away from it altogether instead of ingenuously leading them up to sip. As it is, the people have become mentally and morally incapable of blind submission. They cannot be hoodwinked by fine phrases as of yore. Their roused and trained intelligence is rapidly penetrating the shams, puncturing the frauds, and stripping off the shows of republicanism. They will not much longer be put off with the mere forms and formulas of liberty and well-being which satisfied them at the start. They are now beginning to demand the things themselves, and they have at last the minds and the manhood necessary to enforce their demand. The illogical, hypocritical, plutocratic republic which they find themselves under disgusts and exasperates them quite as much as would a monarchy. They have resolved to have out-and-out democracy instead of the miserable makeshift for democracy that has been thrown to them as a sop; and have it they will!Gare à vous, naïve, short-sighted bourgeois, who with your reading and writing started them on their quest for the new, if you attempt to place obstructions in their path!

The people have a startling way of getting, in the long run, the specific things they set their hearts on. And one may admit—without the slightest prejudice to his intellectual independence or the slightest abdication of his preferences—that the specific things the revolutionists of Paris and the world at large are striving for may sooner or later be theirs.

A successful social revolution, one day or another, is neither an inconceivable, an impossible, nor even an improbable event. The time may come, at least for all that we can reasonably affirm to the contrary, when there will be no more governments, no more great fortunes, no more private property, no more poverty, no more “marrying and giving in marriage,” no more wars, no more armies, no more patriotism, and no more diversity of tongues.

This is not saying that the individual life will be fuller, richer, and sweeter then than it has been and is, nor that the world will be enormously better and happier than it is and has been. Apples of the most golden seeming have been known to turn to ashes in the plucker’s hand; and, when the time comes—if it does come—that the revolutionists’ present cravings have all been satisfied, the millennium will still, in all likelihood, be as far as ever away.

Change, incessant change, is the law of the universe; but change, though inevitable, and hence never really bad and never really to be regretted, is not synonymous with progress,—not in the sense, at least, in which the latter word is generally understood.

“Partout de l’astre à l’étincelle,Partout la vie universelle,Se fond, tourbillonne, et ruisselle,Et tout passe, etrien s’en va.”

It is as big a piece of dogmatism to be cock-sure the world is growing better all the time and all along the line, simply because it is perpetually changing, as it is to be cock-sure it is constantly growing worse, and as big a piece of credulity to look forward confidently to a Golden Age in the future as to revert—unhumorously—to a Golden Age in the past. Every system of society which has existed thus far is now admitted to have had its qualities and its defects,—what is more, the defects of its qualities. Our period of machinery, universal suffrage, and diffused book-knowledge (factors from which our fathers expected miracles tospring) has its blemishes as well as the periods of illiteracy, blooded aristocracy, and hand labour. Our new woman—we are reminded every day—is as antipathetic and inept in some ways as she is charming and useful in other ways; and, while we cannot be sure that every future period will “depress some elements of goodness just as much as it will encourage others,” we have, alas! no adequate guarantee that it will not do so.

It may be that it is again to be the mission of France to redeem (or appear to redeem) the world by a sort of vicarious atonement. The cult of revolution is not dead there, and the impulse that demolished the Bastille has by no means spent itself. Or it may be that for Russia, where the provocation is greatest, or for America, where there is most initiative and the most accelerated rate of change, is reserved this fearsome rôle. But, wherever the Social Revolution begins and wherever it reaches, the well-balanced man, who has won through stress and travail to a sane outlook and to an enthusiasm for life; he who can say with Kipling’s “Tramp Royal,”—

“Gawd bless this world! Whatever she ‘ath done—Excep’ when awful long—I’ve found it good.So write before I die, ‘’E liked it all!’”—

will await its arrival with complete equanimity.

“Think, then, you are To-day what YesterdayYou were—To-morrow you shall not be less.”

Friendships and loves—the only things really worth while to seasoned natures—have always been. Under all régimes, men have had friends and sweethearts and little ones for the greater glory of their souls; and friends and sweethearts and little ones—the boldest innovators do not assert otherwise—they are likely to have while time is.

These loves and these friendships have found such beautiful expression already that there is little to hope from the future.On the other hand, so far as they are concerned, there is nothing to fear.

What matters, then, in the last analysis the march of public events,—monarchy, republic, social republic, or anarchistic commune,—so that we bear the brunt together, heart to heart, and the great elemental things abide?

The Eternal Realities

“Of thepossibilityof a free communistic society there can really I take it be no doubt. The question that more definitely presses on us now is one of transition—By what steps shall we, or can we pass to that land of freedom?

“We have supposed a whole people started on its journey by the lifting off of the burden of Fear and Anxiety; but in the long slow ascent of Evolution no sudden miraculous change can be expected; and for this reason alone it is obvious that we can look for no sudden transformation to the communist form. Peoples that have learnt the lesson of ‘trade’ and competition so thoroughly as the modern nations have—each man fighting for his own hand—must take some time to unlearn it. The Sentiment of the Common Life, so long nipped and blighted, must have leisure to grow and expand again; and we must acknowledge that—in order to foster new ideas and new habits—an intermediate stage of Collectivism will be quite necessary. Formulæ like the ‘nationalisation of the land and all the instruments of production,’ though they be vague and indeed impossible ofrigorousapplication, will serve as centres for the growth of the sentiment. The partial application of these formulæ will put folk through a lot of usefuldrillingin the effort to work together and for common ends.”—Edward Carpenter.

1Reclus’ anarchist brochureA mon Ami le Paysanis a veritable literary gem.

2When they do not render it unproductive by transforming it into hunting grounds or pleasure parks or leave it sterile, either through want of sufficient capital to ameliorate it or simply from indifference and neglect.—Jean Grave.

3In France. The usage is somewhat different in certain other countries.

4Normally, all posters must carry revenue stamps.

5The officers of an assembly are so called in France.

6Charenton is the Paris insane hospital.

7The wordtrimardeuris derived from the dialect wordtrimard, which meansgrande route(the great road).

8Strictly, at 2 sous a four-page folder, each folder containing the words and music of one song and the words of two or three others.

9Ravachol was convicted of several overt acts, among them the dynamiting of the house of the judges Benoit and Bulot.

10M. Leroy now has a little book-store in the Montsouris district.

11Henri Bérenger’sL’Action, for all its violence, cannot be so classed. A pronounced anarchist, Charles Malato, was for a time one of the pillars of the acrimonious dailyL’Aurore, and it is frequently recommended by the anarchist press for anarchist reading. But it was never, strictly speaking, an anarchist sheet. It is now under the control of the radical Clemenceau.

12The general title of the series isLa Bibliothèque Documentaire.

13The office of theTemps Nouveauxhas been transferred to the rue Broca, in the same district.

14A set of anarchist groups, loosely federated, which devote themselves to study with persistence and zeal.

15Drawn after animage de propagande.

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