SOME ANARCHIST PERSONALITIES
There has been of late years a remarkable, and, on the whole, a very
futile tendency among certain men of science to dissect and classify
abnormal people and abnormal ideas, to discover that geniuses are mad,
and that all manner of well-intentioned fanatics are born criminals.
But there were elements in the Anarchist party which defied the science
of the psychological analyst, so strangely and intricately were the most
heterogeneous qualities blended in certain of their number--fanaticism,
heroism, criminality, and not unfrequently a spicing of genius.
The primary difference between the ordinary normal man and the
fanatic--as between the normal man and the madman or the genius--is the
totally different standpoint whence each views life. This it is which
renders it impossible for the normal man really to understand or judge
fanatics. He cannot grasp their motive, their point of view, and is
therefore morally incapable of judging them.
Among the Anarchists, who may be said to represent the intellectual
rather than the material side of the Socialist movement--there were many
fanatics. This fanaticism showed itself in different ways--sometimes
in the most admirable self-abnegation, in the sacrifice of wealth,
position, and happiness; frequently in abnormal actions of other kinds,
and most noticeably in deeds of violence.
Very diverse in nature were the motives which prompted the committal of
these acts of violence--these assassinations and dynamite explosions--in
different men. With some it was an act of personal revolt, the outcome
of personal sufferings and wrongs endured by the rebel himself, by his
family or his class. In others violence was rather the offspring of
ideas, the logical result of speculation upon the social evil and the
causes thereof. These Anarchists referred to their actions as Propaganda
by Deed.
Émile Henry, the dynamitard of the Café Terminus, belonged to the number
of what I may call the theoretical dynamitard. His terrible acts were
the outcome of long and earnest thought; they were born of his mental
analysis of the social canker. He committed them not in moments of
passion, but with all the _sang froid_ of a man governed by reason.
His defence when on trial was a masterpiece of logical deduction and
eloquent reasoning.
To the average man it is no doubt very difficult to conceive that when
he threw his bomb among the crowd in the Café Terminus, maiming and
killing indiscriminately, Émile Henry was performing his duty according
to his own lights just as much as a soldier when he obeys orders and
fires on the enemy, a city man when he embarks on the day's business, or
a parson when he preaches a sermon against prevailing vices. It was his
sermon--however vigorously preached--against the prevailing vices and
injustices of Society, and against the indifference which all classes
displayed towards these. He took upon himself to strike a blow against
this indifference on behalf of all the weaker and more unfortunate
members of society. Being a man of intellect and some culture, he could
not, like his more ignorant _confrères_, imagine that one man or one
small group of men, was responsible for these. Earnest thought and
reflection told him that if any section of society suffered, then
society at large was guilty: all the thoughtless, all the indifferent
members of society were equally responsible for its abuses. Now this may
be true enough theoretically, but no one but a fanatic or a madman would
carry the reasoning farther to the point of saying: "Society at large is
guilty; society at large must suffer. Society is fairly well represented
by the mixed crowd in a café. I will attack this crowd indiscriminately,
and kill as many of their number as I can. I will unreluctantly end my
days on the scaffold in order to accomplish this very obvious duty;" and
proceed from words to deeds.
There is something terribly, if pervertedly logical in this reasoning,
and although nothing could be farther from the attitude of the ordinary
delinquent, it is no doubt more dangerous to the peace and continuance
of society; and such was the attitude and the reasoning which rendered
the Anarchists so formidable, and which led up to many of their most
terrible outrages. Émile Henry was in his own way a well-meaning youth;
kindly in private life, frugal in his habits; studious, industrious, and
free from vice, he lived with his old mother and mixed little with his
fellows, and no one who knew him could have suspected that this quiet,
studious boy would have developed into the terrible assassin whose act
sent a thrill of horror through the world.
To Anarchists of this order, abstract ideas and opinions replaced all
the ordinary forces of life. Their every action was prompted by some
theory, and they fashioned their lives to fit their peculiar views of
what it ought to be. Émile Henry belonged to this number no less than
Kosinski, Bonafede, and certain so-called Christian Anarchists. For in
some fanatics the Anarchist ideas, instead of leading to violence, led
to the absolute negation and rejection of it.
Among the many frequenters of our office and of the weekly discussion
meetings held there, was a Christian Anarchist, one of those holding
what was known as the "non-resistance to evil" creed. He, too, was a man
who fitted his life to his ideas, who lived in ideas, whose whole being
centred round his ideas. He was a religious fanatic whose course had
deviated into strange paths.
Norbery was a pale, anxious-looking Lancashire man, with weak, restless
eyes and a resolute mouth, who did not lack a certain dignity of
bearing.
Both the organisationists and the individualists united in abusing and
despising the Christian Norbery, but no amount of insults or invective
ruffled his temper or aroused his wrath. "When you preach force or use
force," he said to his opponents, "you imitate the very methods used by
Governments. You will never attain universal peace and brotherhood by
such means. As Anarchists we have no right to use other than passive
resistance, for by using coercion we are defeating our own ends and
justifying the actions of our persecutors."
The more indignant his Anarchist opponents became in the course of
debate, the calmer and more complacent grew Norbery. "Abuse me," he
would say, "insult me, use violence towards me, if you will; I shall
turn the other cheek." Once a hot-headed Italian Anarchist lost patience
with him and threw him downstairs. He lay where he fell with a sprained
ankle, repeating good words from the Sermon on the Mount, until his
adversary, overcome with shame and remorse, picked him up and bandaged
his injured limb. Once during certain strike riots in the North of
England, Norbery journeyed to the scene of trouble to preach passive
measures and the Anarchist principles to the rioters. He was dragged
from his platform by the police and badly hustled and knocked about.
But Norbery was determined on having his say; he procured a chain and
padlock, chained himself to a lamppost, threw away the key, and resumed
the interrupted course of his harangue. A large crowd gathered round the
persistent orator, attracted partly by his eloquence and partly by the
novelty of his situation. The police hurried to the scene and tried to
drag him down; his coat and shirt, torn to shreds, remained in their
hands, while the semi-naked Anarchist preached away to the constantly
increasing crowd. The officers of the law foamed with rage, and
threatened and pommelled the enchained and defenceless Norbery. Norbery
grew more eloquent and more argumentative under this treatment. Nearly
an hour passed before a file could be procured and the chain severed,
and by that time Norbery had ample opportunity to finish his discourse,
and was conveyed to the police station in a fainting and exhausted
condition.
Armitage and I engaged in endless discussions with Norbery on the
question of violence, maintaining on our side that violence could only
be overcome by violence, and that, however peaceful our ultimate aims
might be, force must inevitably be used towards their attainment. We
argued and adduced reasons in support of our views, and Norbery argued
and adduced counter-reasons in support of his views, but neither the
one nor the other of us was ever in the least affected by his opponent's
eloquence, and at the end of the discussion we were all, if anything,
more staunchly persuaded of the sense and justice of our own case than
at the start. So much for the profitableness of debate between confirmed
partisans.
Émile Henry was representative of the theoretical dynamitard; Matthieu,
like Ravachol, of the dynamitard by passion. A----, who belonged rather
to the Ravachol type, and ended by killing one of the crowned heads
of Europe, was during a few weeks a frequenter of the _Tocsin_. He had
turned Anarchist in revolt against the society which had cramped his
life, starved him in childhood, overworked his body, underfed his mind,
where he had found neither place nor welcome. Born into the lowest
depths of society, dragged up amid criminals and drunkards, he had spent
his early years between the streets and the jail-house, at times working
his undeveloped muscles, at other times begging or picking pockets.
"It is all very well," he said to me one day, "for those on the top
rungs of the ladder to talk of the unrelenting laws of nature and the
survival of the fittest. For my part I have felt very forcibly one great
law of nature, the law of self-preservation: the right to live when you
have once been born, the right to food and to the pleasures of life, and
I determined to survive at all costs. When my stomach is empty and my
boots let in water, the mere sight of a replete and well-clothed man
makes me feel like murder. It may be true that it is natural for the
strongest and the best men to rise above their fellows, but even this
is not the case in our society of to-day. The weakest and the worst have
somehow got to the top, and giants are bolstering up the impotence of
dwarfs. These dwarfs are crushing the life-blood out of us. We must pull
them down, exterminate them; we must turn the whole world upside down
before we can create a new and better order of things."
His action was not a theoretical protest translated into deeds; it was
an act of vengeance, of personal and class revenge.
Giannoli was a type apart. His desires and actions were responsible for
his views. They coloured and distorted his opinions and destroyed all
sense of proportion. An incident in his private life would stand up
giant-like in the way of all the doctrines in the world, dwarfing
opinions and creeds. He was a physically active man and his ideas grew
out of his life, whereas men like Kosinski might be said to abandon the
material life in the pursuit of an ideal.
Giacomo Giannoli was a man of some education, and no ordinary degree of
natural refinement and culture, one whom you would pronounce at first
sight to be a gentleman. He was the son of a fairly well-to-do builder
in a provincial town of Lombardy, and had received a good general
education in boyhood. Early left an orphan by his father's death, he
had inherited his business, and for some years he carried it on
prosperously, living with his mother and sisters. But before he was
two-and-twenty his naturally erratic disposition asserted itself, and he
chafed under the restraints and monotony of life in a small provincial
town. He sold up his business at a great loss, well-nigh ruining his
family, had it not been for his mother's small private means; and with
his share of the proceeds of the sale he travelled about for some years,
leading a roving life, and devoting most of his time and cash to the
Anarchist propaganda, constantly getting into troubles and bothers, at
times in hiding, at others in prison, always in difficulties, growing
harder and harder up as the months went by, and his moderate means
slipped through his untenacious fingers.
Two convergent factors had led up to this sudden change in his life.
Firstly, an incident of a private nature which revolutionised his
notions of individual morality, and secondly, the discovery of the
Anarchist doctrines which gave form to his new views. The incident which
was primarily responsible for his new views of life, he recounted to me
not long after his arrival in London.
"It was a woman," he said, "who completely altered my views of life, and
made me see how perverted and unnatural are our ideas of sex and love
and morals, and, in short, of everything. She was an ignorant peasant
girl who lived in a neighbouring village, but a woman of rare mind and
character. I shall never forget her, nor what I owe her. I was a young
fellow of some twenty-one years at the time, and I loved this girl with
all the passion and faith of a youth of those years. Teresina loved me
in return, and for some two years we lived on happily till one day it
was brought to my knowledge that she was unfaithful to me. I was beside
myself with grief and mortification and jealous fury. For some hours I
just raged up and down my room like one demented, crying like a child
one minute, cursing and meditating revenge the next. I felt that I
must have blood at all costs to appease my passion--Teresina's or her
lover's, or somebody's. I was to meet Teresina that evening as usual
towards nine o'clock, and I thought the intervening hours would never go
by. One hope suddenly suggested itself to me, and I clung desperately to
it. 'Perhaps it is false!' I said to myself. 'I will ask Teresina. It is
all a lie,' and then 'Proofs, proofs, I must have proofs!' I cried, and
once more my thoughts turned back to murder. Thus I went through the
long hours, and at last evening came--a beautiful warm May evening, and
long before the appointed hour I was at our rendezvous in a deserted
_podere_ on the mountain-side, overgrown with flags and other spring
flowers, among which the fireflies were flitting noiselessly. I had no
eyes for the beauty of the scene, however. I paced up and down waiting
for my sweetheart, cursing the treachery of women and the blindness
of men. Suddenly she appeared, dark against the clear evening sky,
graceful, gay, and unconscious as ever. Without a word of welcome
I rushed at her, seized her by the arm, and hurled forth all my
accusations and all my reproaches.
"'Tell me it is not true,' I cried at last, 'tell me it is not true, or
I will kill you where you stand!'
"I expected the usual routine of tears and protestations of innocence,
all the lies and subterfuges with which women are wont to defend
themselves against the unreasoning savagery of their mates. I was
disappointed. Teresina stood perfectly silent till I had finished
speaking; then without flinching, without one instant's hesitation, she
answered, 'It is true. Every word of it is true.'
"If the moon and the stars had all dropped simultaneously out of heaven
at my feet I should not have been more astonished. The calmness of her
answer, the steady earnestness of her gaze as she looked back fearlessly
into my eyes, her utter lack of subterfuge, took away my breath.
I dropped her arm and stood staring at her, bereft of speech and
understanding. At last I blurted out stupidly that I did not understand
her, that I must be going mad, and entreated her to explain.
"'I said it was true; that I love Giordano, and have accepted his love,'
she answered. Still I did not fully grasp her meaning.
"'But, Teresina, I thought that you loved me; have you lied to me then?'
I exclaimed.
"'No, I have not lied,' she answered me. 'I have never lied to you,' and
she took my hand in her strong little hand, and led me like one blind
or intoxicated to the projecting root of a tree close by, and there sat
down by my side.
"'Listen,' she said, still holding my hand in hers, 'I ought to have
told you what I have to say before now. I only hesitated because I
knew it would cause you acute suffering at first ... until you could
understand. Believe me, I do love you as much as ever I did, and I could
not bear even the thought of living without you. I love Giordano too,
in a different way it is true, but still I love him. He has not got
your mind or your heart, or your wonderful knowledge' (she was a very
ignorant girl, so far as learning was concerned, and my small knowledge
of books appeared to her little short of miraculous, poor child!), 'but
then he has some qualities you do not possess. Well, I love him for
these, and I enjoy being with him in a quite different way from what I
experience with you.'
"I was silent, and she continued after a short pause:--
"'Nothing is more brutish or more selfish than jealousy, my friend. If I
thought another woman could give you a moment's happiness, I should
say: "Take it, enjoy it!" We do not grudge our friends every moment of
enjoyment not enjoyed in our company. We wish them other friendships and
other joys. What is there in the love between man and woman which should
make us so selfish and so unreasonable? For my part, I must have freedom
at all costs, absolutely at all costs. It is dearer to me than anything
else in life, and I had sooner sacrifice even love and happiness;
indeed, I cannot love or be happy without it. For God's sake grant me
this liberty as I grant it to you! Take my love as I can give it to you,
but do not ask me to be your slave on its account! Be sure you have my
heart, and little of it remains to be squandered in other directions.
What does the rest matter? I do not grudge you your loves, your
pleasures, your caprices! Do not grudge me mine. Life is necessarily
full of sorrows; do not let us embitter it unnecessarily.'
"She ceased speaking. She had risen to her feet and stood in front of
me as she spoke, then as she finished she sank down on her knees by my
side.
"'Do you understand?' she asked me. 'Can you love me on these terms?
liberty--absolute liberty for us both?'
"I answered 'Yes,' nor did I ever regret the answer.
"I think that was the most momentous day in my life, for it wrought the
greatest change in me. My eyes were opened by the peasant girl's words,
and from that evening forward I regarded life quite differently. For the
first time I realised the necessity to the individual to enjoy absolute
personal freedom in love as in all else in life. All my previous ideas
and prejudices appeared to me monstrous and iniquitous. I saw the
falseness of all our ideas of morality, the absurdity of placing
conventions before nature and the detestable character of our dealings
with women and of our attitude in such matters. And with this suddenly
awakened vision I looked anew on life, and it seemed to me that till
then I had never lived. All that which I had before taken for granted
I now began to question. I found that instead of thinking out life's
problems for myself I had allowed myself to grow into other peoples'
ideas, that I had tacitly taken for right what they had pronounced
right, and for wrong what they had stigmatised as wrong. My spiritual
world now turned, as it were, a complete somersault, and I was re-born a
new man--an Anarchist.
"I and Teresina and Giordano lived very happily for some months, much
to the scandal of the narrow-minded, bigoted village folk, until I
was compelled to absent myself from the country owing to some little
disturbances in the neighbourhood in which I had got implicated.
"Teresina followed me into exile, and with little intermission remained
with me during all those early years of wanderings and adventure. She
cared little about Anarchist doctrines, though herself a born rebel and
an innate Anarchist. She did more for me than all the doctrines in the
world. Poor child! When at last I got through all my money, and life
from day to day grew harder and more precarious, food scantier, clothes
raggeder, and surroundings more dangerous, she still remained faithful
to me in her own way, but the life was too hard for her. We had spent
the summer in Paris, and there I had got seriously implicated in a
little Anarchist venture and found it necessary to flee the country
with all haste. Teresina followed me into Belgium in the bitter winter
weather. She died of consumption in a Brussels hospital shortly after
our arrival."
Such, in his own words, were the influences and the circumstances which
revolutionised Giannoli's entire life and his outlook on things.
He became one of the leaders of the most advanced section of the
"Individualist Anarchists," who maintain that not only is government of
man by man wrong and objectionable, but that no ties or obligations of
any sort bind men together. The ethics of "humanity" and "brotherhood"
are unknown to these Anarchists. They recognise no laws, social or
moral, no obligations or duties towards their fellows, no organisation
or association of any sort. They claim absolute freedom for the
individual, freedom to live, die, love, enjoy, think, work, or
take--this freedom in each individual only curtailed by others claiming
equal rights. And I am bound to admit that the question whether such
individual freedom would not tend to individual licence and domination
by the stronger and cleverer or more unscrupulous man in the future, met
with little consideration.
That it led to such licence in the present among themselves was an
indubitable fact. All the individualist Anarchists agreed that, being
at war with existing society, which interfered with, coerced, and used
violence towards them, they were at liberty to use all means against
society in retaliation--force and even fraud if expedient. But the
less intelligent and more ignorant men who came in contact with these
principles considered themselves not only at liberty to use all means
against society, the enemy; but honour or scruples of any sort among
themselves were tabooed. A naturally honourable man like Giannoli was,
of course, free from the danger of falling victim to such perverted
sophistry. But the manner in which these doctrines succeeded in
perverting the minds of fairly intelligent and well-meaning men is
illustrated by the following incident.
One evening, some months after the advent of Giannoli and his friends,
there arrived at the office of the _Tocsin_ a small party of three men
and one woman--all of them Spaniards. They requested me to help them to
procure lodgings for the night, and, as they knew nothing of the English
language, to assist them the following morning in procuring tickets,
etc., with a view to their immediate re-departure for the States.
Giannoli, who knew the men, having spent some years in Spain, explained
to me that the leader of the party, a handsome, well-spoken young man,
was an engineer belonging to a good Barcelona family. The second one,
a good-natured giant, was his brother and an engineer like himself. The
third male member of the party was a lanky, scrofulous journalist, a
man of many words and few wits. The lady, a pretty brunette, was their
"compagna." She had escaped from her family and eloped with Fernandez,
the engineer, but was apparently shared on communistic principles.
I settled the party for the night in a small hotel and procured their
tickets for the morrow's journey, after which they proceeded to hand
over to Giannoli, with many cautions and precautions, a mysterious linen
bag which, it was whispered, contained some twelve thousand lire in
bank-notes (about five hundred pounds sterling). Then, having been
assured by Giannoli that I was to be trusted, they told me their story.
The two brothers, the engineers, had till quite recently been employed
by a large electrical engineering firm in Barcelona, of which an elder
brother, some years their senior, was the manager. For some time the
two younger men had been engaged, unknown to their family, in Anarchist
propaganda, and had fallen in with the section of the _individualisti_.
Fernandez was in love with Adolfa, the daughter of a well-to-do
merchant, and had secretly talked her over to his own ideas. The girl's
parents objected to the match on account of the extreme youth of
the couple--the girl was not quite eighteen and the young man still
considerably under age. Therefore they settled to elope, and Fernandez's
brother and Vanni, their journalist friend, expressed a desire to form
an addition to the elopement. This Fernandez had at first objected to,
but the girl, who had made rapid strides into the Giannolian free-love
theories, insisted. Lack of money formed the only obstacle to this
scheme, but an unforeseen circumstance enabled them to remove it.
The eldest brother, who had charge of the finances of the establishment,
and whose business it was to pay the men their wages, wished to absent
himself from the works for a few days, and, without the knowledge of his
employers, he broke rules to the extent of handing over to his brother
Fernandez, as to one beyond suspicion, the men's wages--the five hundred
pounds now contained in the mysterious linen bag.
"Now," argued Fernandez to himself, "I, as an Anarchist, do not
recognise private property, nor any set moral laws. The company's money
is the result of plunder; they can afford to lose it and have no right
to it; I stand desperately in need of it--and it is in my hands.... My
brother?... oh, my brother, he is after all nothing but a bourgeois, and
I, as an Anarchist, admit of no family ties."
Thus when, two days later, the unfortunate manager returned, he found
his brothers gone, the money nowhere to be found, and disgrace and ruin
ahead. Driven to despair, and not knowing in what direction to turn
for the necessary sum, the wretched man ended his perplexities with
a bullet. This was the first news which greeted the runaways on their
arrival in the States.
Now the younger brothers who had perpetrated this cruel thing were not
hardened criminals. From what little I saw of them, they appeared to
be kindly, courteous, and, by nature, fairly honourable men. What they
lacked was moral strength. Under ordinarily good influences they would
have acted in an ordinarily proper way. They had not the force of
character necessary for handling the Anarchist individualist doctrines,
which, excellently as they may work with men of character, are fatal
to weaker men. The man who recognises no law outside himself must be
capable of governing himself.
The office of the _Tocsin_ was the constant scene of debate and dispute
between the two rival camps in the Anarchist party--the organisationists
and the individualists. Bonafede and Gnecco belonged to the former,
while most of the active staff of the _Tocsin_--myself among
others--adhered to the latter section. A curious feature of the
matter--and I fancy it is not exclusively characteristic of the
Anarchist party--was the amount of invective and hatred, which both
factions ought properly to have expended on the common enemy, but which
instead they spent most of their time in levelling at one another. A
casual witness of these internal strifes might have imagined that the
two parties were at the antipodes in their ideas and objects, rather
than comrades and participators in a common belief. Their dissensions
were alone forgotten in a common hatred of government and existing
society. And even in their efforts to upraise the social revolution--the
great upheaval to which all Anarchists aspired--I doubt whether there
lurked not some secret hope that the detested rival faction might
be demolished in the fray. Bonafede and Giannoli were warm friends
personally, and held one another in great esteem. Yet I can clearly
recollect Giannoli one evening, with tears in his eyes, assuring me that
his first duty when the Revolution broke out would be to disembowel his
dear friend.
"He is my friend," Giannoli said to me, "and I love him as such, and as
a man I admire him. But his doctrines are noxious; in time of Revolution
they would prove fatal to our Cause; they would be the undoing of all
the work for which we have suffered and fought. Organise a Revolution,
indeed! You might as well attempt to organise a tempest and to marshal
the elements into order! I know Bonafede to be above personal ambition,
but, take my word for it, most of these organisationists hope to
organise themselves into comfortable places when their time comes! It is
our duty to destroy them."