On the first of May I was sitting outside a café in the Place de
la Bastille in Paris staring at the exultant column, crowned with a
capering figure, which stands in the place where the people destroyed a
prison and ended an age. The thing is a curious example of how symbolic
is the great part of human history. As a matter of mere material fact,
the Bastille when it was taken was not a horrible prison; it was hardly
a prison at all. But it was a symbol, and the people always go by a
sure instinct for symbols; for the Chinaman, for instance, at the last
General Election, or for President Kruger’s hat in the election before;
their poetic sense is perfect. The Chinaman with his pigtail is not
an idle flippancy. He does typify with a compact precision exactly
the thing the people resent in African policy, the alien and grotesque
nature of the power of wealth, the fact that money has no roots, that it
is not a natural and familiar power, but a sort of airy and evil magic
calling monsters from the ends of the earth. The people hate the mine
owner who can bring a Chinaman flying across the sea, exactly as the
people hated the wizard who could fetch a flying dragon through the air.
It was the same with Mr. Kruger’s hat. His hat (that admirable hat) was
not merely a joke. It did symbolise, and symbolise extremely well, the
exact thing which our people at that moment regarded with impatience and
venom; the old-fashioned, dingy, Republican simplicity, the unbeautiful
dignity of the bourgeois, and the heavier truisms of political morality.
No; the people are sometimes wrong on the practical side of politics;
they are never wrong on the artistic side.
.....
So it was, certainly, with the Bastille. The destruction of the Bastille
was not a reform; it was something more important than a reform. It was
an iconoclasm; it was the breaking of a stone image. The people saw the
building like a giant looking at them with a score of eyes, and they
struck at it as at a carved fact. For of all the shapes in which that
immense illusion called materialism can terrify the soul, perhaps the
most oppressive are big buildings. Man feels like a fly, an accident,
in the thing he has himself made. It requires a violent effort of the
spirit to remember that man made this confounding thing and man could
unmake it. Therefore the mere act of the ragged people in the street
taking and destroying a huge public building has a spiritual, a ritual
meaning far beyond its immediate political results. It is a religious
service. If, for instance, the Socialists were numerous or courageous
enough to capture and smash up the Bank of England, you might argue for
ever about the inutility of the act, and how it really did not touch the
root of the economic problem in the correct manner. But mankind would
never forget it. It would change the world.
Architecture is a very good test of the true strength of a society,
for the most valuable things in a human state are the irrevocable
things--marriage, for instance. And architecture approaches nearer than
any other art to being irrevocable, because it is so difficult to get
rid of. You can turn a picture with its face to the wall; it would be a
nuisance to turn that Roman cathedral with its face to the wall. You
can tear a poem to pieces; it is only in moments of very sincere emotion
that you tear a town-hall to pieces. A building is akin to dogma; it
is insolent, like a dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims
permanence like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture
of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is
obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see
anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that
does not change like the clouds of the sky. But along with this decision
which is involved in creating a building, there goes a quite similar
decision in the more delightful task of smashing one. The two of
necessity go together. In few places have so many fine public buildings
been set up as here in Paris, and in few places have so many been
destroyed. When people have finally got into the horrible habit of
preserving buildings, they have got out of the habit of building them.
And in London one mingles, as it were, one’s tears because so few are
pulled down.
.....
As I sat staring at the column of the Bastille, inscribed to Liberty and
Glory, there came out of one corner of the square (which, like so many
such squares, was at once crowded and quiet) a sudden and silent line of
horsemen. Their dress was of a dull blue, plain and prosaic enough,
but the sun set on fire the brass and steel of their helmets; and their
helmets were carved like the helmets of the Romans. I had seen them
by twos and threes often enough before. I had seen plenty of them in
pictures toiling through the snows of Friedland or roaring round
the squares at Waterloo. But now they came file after file, like an
invasion, and something in their numbers, or in the evening light that
lit up their faces and their crests, or something in the reverie into
which they broke, made me inclined to spring to my feet and cry out,
“The French soldiers!” There were the little men with the brown faces
that had so often ridden through the capitals of Europe as coolly as
they now rode through their own. And when I looked across the square I
saw that the two other corners were choked with blue and red; held
by little groups of infantry. The city was garrisoned as against a
revolution.
Of course, I had heard all about the strike, chiefly from a baker. He
said he was not going to “Chomer.” I said, “Qu’est-ce que c’est que le
chome?” He said, “Ils ne veulent pas travailler.” I said, “Ni moi non
plus,” and he thought I was a class-conscious collectivist proletarian.
The whole thing was curious, and the true moral of it one not easy for
us, as a nation, to grasp, because our own faults are so deeply and
dangerously in the other direction. To me, as an Englishman (personally
steeped in the English optimism and the English dislike of severity),
the whole thing seemed a fuss about nothing. It looked like turning out
one of the best armies in Europe against ordinary people walking
about the street. The cavalry charged us once or twice, more or less
harmlessly. But, of course, it is hard to say how far in such criticisms
one is assuming the French populace to be (what it is not) as docile as
the English. But the deeper truth of the matter tingled, so to speak,
through the whole noisy night. This people has a natural faculty for
feeling itself on the eve of something--of the Bartholomew or the
Revolution or the Commune or the Day of Judgment. It is this sense of
crisis that makes France eternally young. It is perpetually pulling down
and building up, as it pulled down the prison and put up the column
in the Place de La Bastille. France has always been at the point of
dissolution. She has found the only method of immortality. She dies
daily.