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 his

_romans-feuilletons_ and Jean Grave with his _Malfaiteurs_, 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’s[109] romance, _Le Bilatéral_. But M. Rosny, although he has

appeared on a public platform in company with professed _révoltés_, 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 equally far from throwing

in his lot with those who would incontinently overturn it.

“To think,” says the Bilatéral to his _doctrinaire_ socialist

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, between

_this_ and _that_ there 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’s _Jack_, Goncourt’s

_Fille Elisa_, and Loti’s _Livre de la Pitié et de la Mort_; books of

aspiration, like Prévost’s _Confessions d’un Amant_ and Bourget’s _Terre

Promise_; of wrath, like Léon Daudet’s _Morticoles_; of “revolt against

Puritanism,” like Pierre Louys’ _Aphrodite_; of energy, like Barrès’

_Déracinés_; of searching, like Huysmanns’ _Cathédrale_; of regret,

like Bazin’s _Terre qui Meurt_; of unmoral pessimism, like De

Maupassant’s _Bel-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 philosophers[110] who are more or less

militant iconoclasts and _révoltés_, 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,[111] who says: “Authority,

its value, and its _raison d’être_ are 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, entitled _L’Enfermé_; Henry Mazel, who

exclaimed in the _Mercure de France_, “We are all anarchists, thank

God!” Alfred Naquet, a convert from nationalism; Urbain Gohier, author

of _L’Armée contre la Nation_; Victor Charbonnel, ex-priest and editor

of _La Raison_, and Henri Bérenger, editor of _L’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 of _l’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,[112] Charles 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 called

_L’Endehors_[113] (_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.

The journal bore by way of epigraph this phrase of its leading spirit

and director, Zo d’Axa: “_Celui que rien n’enrôle et qu’une impulsive

nature guide seule, ce hors la loi, ce hors d’école, cet isolé chercheur

d’au delà, ne se dessine-t-il pas dans ce mot, L’Endehors?_”

It explained its purpose as follows: “We belong neither to a party nor

to a group. We are outsiders. We go on our way, individuals, without the

Faith which saves and blinds. Our disgust with society does not engender

convictions in us. We fight for the pleasure of fighting without

dreaming of a better future. What matter to us the to-morrows which in

the centuries shall be! What matter to us the little nephews! It is

_endehors_, outside of all laws, of all rules, of all theories, even

anarchistic; it is now, from this moment, that we wish to give ourselves

over to our compassions, to our transports, to our gentleness, to our

wrath, to our instincts, with the proud consciousness of being

ourselves.”

The first number of _L’Endehors_ appeared in May, 1891, immediately

after the massacre of Fourmies,—in which old men, women, and children,

among them a young girl bearing a hawthorn sprig by way of a flag of

truce, were shot down by the troops of the government,—and dealt

bravely and scathingly with this horrible incident; and the last number

was issued in January, 1893, when the paper was forcibly suppressed.

The staff of _L’Endehors_ defended and even glorified Ravachol.

Mirbeau’s “_Apologie de Ravachol_” (referred to above) is one of the

finest bits of impassioned writing he has ever done. Paul Adam’s “_Eloge

de Ravachol_” is also noteworthy. Here is a brief extract:—

“Politics would have been banished completely from our

preoccupations, had not the legend of sacrifice, of the gift

of a life for the happiness of humanity, suddenly reappeared

in our epoch, with the martyrdom of Ravachol.... At the end of

all these judicial proceedings, _chroniques_, and calls to

legal murder, Ravachol stands as the unmistakable propagator

of the great idea of the ancient religions, which extolled

the seeking of death by the individual for the good of the

world,—the abnegation of one’s self, of one’s life, and one’s

good name by the exaltation of the humble and the poor.

Ravachol is plainly the restorer of the essential

sacrifice....

“He saw suffering round about him, and he has ennobled the

suffering of others by offering his own in a holocaust. His

incontestable charity and disinterestedness, the energy of his

acts, his courage before inevitable death, lift him into the

splendours of legend. In this time of cynicism and of irony A

SAINT IS BORN TO US. His blood will be the example from which

new courages and new martyrs will spring. The grand idea of

universal altruism will bloom in the red pool at the foot of

the guillotine. A fruitful death is about to be consummated.

An event of human history is about to be inscribed in the

annals of the peoples. The legal murder of Ravachol will open

a new era.”

_L’Endehors_ prophesied (or rather supposed), in an article entitled

“_Notre Complot_,” Vaillant’s attempt against the Chamber;[114] and the

ex-members of its staff participated, after its supposition had become a

fact, in the phenomenal demonstrations at Vaillant’s tomb. The

indignation in literary circles over the execution of Vaillant was so

intense that M. Magnard in _Le Figaro_ uttered a vigorous protest

against “_la Vaillantolâtrie_”; and the most orthodox writers in the

most orthodox journals suddenly proclaimed the necessity of stemming

this tide of anarchistic heresy in high places (to which _L’Endehors_

had, so to speak, first given a habitation and a name) by the

accomplishment of a number of necessary but long-delayed legal and

social reforms.

The unlettered protagonist of Augustin Léger’s novel _Le Journal d’un

Anarchiste_ appreciates the review conducted by one Hector de la

Roche-Sableuse, of which _L’Endehors_ may well have been the model, in

the following fashion:—

“After all, in spite of their gibberish, these reviews of the

_jeunes gens_ lent me by Roche-Sableuse are sometimes

interesting. They shed crocodile tears over the lot of the

people? It is possible. They do not believe a word of what

they write? I do not say no. All this does not prevent them

from seeing clearly at times, and from putting their fingers

often on the truth. Besides, although these fine little

_messieurs_ are not in the least anxious at heart for the

triumph of the proletariat, because they know very well that

it would remove several cushions from under their elbows, they

understand and they expound perfectly the legitimacy of our

claims. And I applaud with both hands the eulogiums they

pronounce on the noble victims our cause already counts. In

short, they have interested me, and I have learned not a

little from them.”

_L’Endehors_ was publicly praised by Georges Clemenceau, Henri Bauer,

Laurent-Tailhade, and Jean de Mitty. The last-named said of it:—

“This little sheet so modest in appearance and at the same

time so fastidious in make-up that it might easily have been

taken for a club periodical or for the exclusive organ of a

few æsthetes, raised more tempests and provoked more passions

than a riot in the street. Violent it certainly was, and

violent with a violence which, for wearing always a literary,

subtile, and complex form, penetrated no less deeply, and

gained no less to its object the scattered energies and wills

that were craving definite guidance. Opportune or not, the

influence of _L’Endehors_ was exerted effectively.... But,

aside from its action on public affairs, the journal of Zo

d’Axa realised an incontestable intellectual effort; and it is

for the beauty of this effort that it pleases me to invoke

it.”

It is to be noted that Emile Henry, in whose pontifical attitude before

his judges even his bitterest antagonists found “something atrociously

superior and disquieting,” and in whom the sympathetic Albert Delacour

discerns, or thinks he discerns (by reason of his solitary meditations,

his perpetual ratiocination, his hatred of action up to the moment of

supreme action, his disgust with life,[115] and his brooding on death),

a modern Hamlet, is the only member of the _Endehors_ group who has

committed an overt act of violence.

Of the rest, some have since identified themselves closely with

socialism, some with Boulangism and nationalism, and some with

anarchism; some have given themselves to the creation of the humorous or

the beautiful without too obvious a destructive prepossession; and some

have held themselves scrupulously “_endehors_.”

Most have remained _révoltés_ of one sort or another. Only a few have

conformed, and a part of these only outwardly. Thus Paul Adam, who has

seemed several times, by reason of the enormous range of his interests

and the disconcerting agility of his intelligence, to be utterly lost to

revolution, has written, nevertheless, a number of novels of

revolutionary trend. He published in 1900 a defence of Bresci which

might have been written the very same day as his “_Eloge_” of Ravachol,

and he reaffirmed his essential anarchism as late as the spring of 1904.

Of those who have remained strictly “_endehors_,” Zo d’Axa,[116]

uncorrected by hard experiences of prison and exile, resumed in 1898 his

assault upon the abuses of society in his now famous _Feuilles_ with a

fierceness, a versatility, an independence, a finesse, a facility in

anathema, and a redundance in disdain that have rarely, if ever, been

matched in revolutionary pamphleteering—and privateering. It was as if

Mirbeau, with all the withering force of his mighty scorn, had descended

into the street, or as if _Père Peinard_ had attained the level of

literature.

The _Feuilles de Zo d’Axa_ appeared irregularly in the form of

placards, as events invited, during the troubled years of 1898 and 1899,

and created an enormous sensation. Nothing was exempt from the

sharpshooting of this guerilla of the asphalt,—this handsome,

red-bearded “_mousquetaire chercheur de justes aventures_,” whom all

Paris knows by his picturesque brown cape and felt.

“To the argument of the multitude,” he wrote in his

salutatory, “to the catechism of the crowds, to all the

_raisons-d’état_ of the collectivity, behold the personal

reasons of the Individual oppose themselves!... He goes his

way, he acts, he takes aim, because a combative instinct makes

him prefer the chase to the nostalgic siesta. On the borders

of the code he poaches the big game,—officers and judges,

bucks or _carnivori_. He dislodges from the forests of Bondy

the herd of politicians. He amuses himself by snaring the

ravaging financier. He beats up at all the cross-roads the

domesticated _gent de lettres_, fur and feathers; all the

debauchers of ideas, all the monsters of the press and the

police.”

Lucien Descaves compares the series of Zo d’Axa’s writings to “a

beautiful road bordered with pity and hatred and paved with wrath and

revolt.”

He says further of him: “Zo d’Axa’s phrase is rapid. The fuse of his

articles is short. When a match is approached to them, something is

bound to explode; and D’Axa is quite capable of sacrificing himself, if

need be, in the explosion. He has proved it.”

The suppression of _L’Endehors_ (whose complete file is now one of the

rarities of the book-mart) and the consequent dispersion of the

_Endehors_ band were soon followed by the formation of another

revolutionary coterie of young poets, men of letters, and sociologists,

called “_Le Groupe de l’Idée Nouvelle_.” This group (of whom Paul Adam,

A. Hamon, Victor Barrucand, and Jean Carrière were the most prominent

figures) organised a series of _soirées-conférences_, which were given

at the _Hôtel Continental_, during the winter of 1893-94, with great

success.

[Illustration: XAVIER PRIVAS DELIVERING HIS LECTURE

_L’Idée Nouvelle_ (somewhat tamed by time, it is true) still exists.

The following announcement, which appeared in 1900 in the anarchist

journal _Les Temps Nouveaux_, explains its more recent activities and

aims:—

“L’ARGENT CONTRE L’HUMANITÉ”]

“_L’Idée Nouvelle_ informs the public that hereafter it adds

to its title _La Rénovation Sociale par le Travail_, and

announces that the first _conférence_ of the year will be

given at the _Hôtel des Sociétés Savantes_, Sunday, November

18, at three o’clock, by the poet and _chansonnier_ Xavier

Privas.[117] Subject, ‘_L’Argent contre l’Humanité_.’ The

second, to be given early in December by the sculptor Jean

Baffier, will treat ‘_La Corporation Autonome et l’Entreprise

Capitaliste_.’”

To the former committee of _L’Idée Nouvelle_, composed of men of

letters, among whom were Paul Adam, Jules Cazes, Lucien Descaves, Louis

de Grammont, Georges Lecomte, and Léopold Lacour, the artists Eugène

Carrière, Jules Dalou, and Steinlen, and the geographer Elisée Reclus,

consented to join themselves at the time of the adoption of its new

name.

Here is the text of the declarations by means of which _La Rénovation

Sociale par le Travail_ quickly rallied to its support many of those of

the intellectual _élite_ who are thinking and acting along the lines of

the better aspirations of humanity:—

“Believing that the action of money as a medium of exchange is

universally injurious, that it is the source of all the

turpitudes and all the infamies of society; that almost all

the crimes, the enmities, the divisions, have for their

initial cause a question of interest,—namely, money; believing

also that money, far from being, as some pretend, a stimulus

to production, is rather an obstacle to it; that venality and

mercantilism dishonour and paralyse art, kill noble dreams and

generous ambitions; that too often, in the actual condition of

society, we propose to ourselves as the end of life, not an

ideal of beauty, of truth, of justice, but money; believing,

further, that there is no other means for counteracting such a

situation than by glorifying, rehabilitating, and equitably

apportioning labour, and by insisting strenuously on this law

of nature, that every consumer should be a producer, the

consumption being proportioned to the need, and the production

to the faculty and the aptitude,—the members of the committee

for _La Rénovation Sociale par le Travail_ pledge themselves

to spread these ideas by every means in their power,—by the

pen, by word, and by example.”

This group is at present preparing a fête, to be held in the fall of

1904, for the “glorification of all the innovators to whom humanity is

indebted for advancement along the line of integral emancipation.”

The _Noël Humaine_ (Human Christmas) is celebrated annually by another

group of emancipated men of letters, under the auspices of Victor

Charbonnel’s journal, _La Raison_.

The revolutionary fervour of a considerable portion of the intellectual

_élite_ has found further expression during the last ten years in a

score or more of reviews (”_jeunes revues_” or “_revues des jeunes_”)

“which,” says Paul Adam, “have created, promulgated, sustained, and

caused to triumph almost two-thirds of the ideas upon which the new

century is beginning its life.” “In each,” says the same writer, “a

group of disinterested spirits, extraordinarily erudite, indifferent to

success and fortune, eager for knowledge and proud in its acquisition,

have cultivated the most beautiful garden of mentality which has been

seen in France since the Pléïade and Port-Royal. Poets, sociologists,

romancers, and critics have disseminated thereby marvellous beauties.”

M. Adam exaggerates, as he is very apt to do. Nevertheless, in spite of

a great deal that is immature, amateurish, intemperate, and fantastic

about most of them, the _revues des jeunes_ are one of the most

significant phenomena of these latter years.

They have been an appreciable disturbing force. The names of most of the

writers mentioned in this chapter are repeatedly appearing in their

tables of contents; and their prospectuses abound in such tell-tale

phrases as these: “_art libre_,” “_beauté sociale_,” “_vie féconde et

humanité forte_,” “_dévoiler les intrigues_, _combattre les abus_,”

“_tribune ouverte_,” “_idées hardies et généreuses_,” “_l’âme purement

désintéressée des futurs Etats-Unis d’Europe_,” “_l’art existe pour la

vie_,” “_la cité radieuse où l’humanité affranchie vivra enfin dans

l’harmonie, dans la justice, et dans la force_.”

Furthermore, such publications as _Le Mercure de France_, _La Grande

Revue_ (edited by Fernand Labori, defender of anarchists and of

Dreyfus), _La Plume_ (whose _soirées littéraires_ have enjoyed an

international renown), _La Revue de Paris_, _La Revue_, _La

Contemporaine_, _La Vogue_, _L’Hermitage_, and _La Grande France_, by

extending the hospitality of their columns to the exploitation of the

most advanced theories and ideas, have—without claiming to be

revolutionary or, at any rate, without limiting themselves to

propaganda—effectively supplemented the efforts of the propagandist

mediums.

The revolutionary sentiments prevalent among the intellectual _élite_ of

France have found abundant expression in the French drama, as was to be

expected in a country which has a literary stage and in which nearly

every man of letters is something of a playwright. Indeed, it would not

be surprising if the stage, by reason of its superior capacity for

giving vividness to ideas, were quite as efficacious an instrument of

revolutionary propaganda as the press, the _chanson_, or the novel.

Octave Mirbeau is the author of several plays, three of which, _Les

Mauvais Bergers_, _L’Epidémie_, and _L’Acquitté_, teem with caustic,

uncompromising anarchism.

_Les Mauvais Bergers_ was successfully produced by Bernhardt’s company

in 1897. Its hero, Jean Roule, is a young, thoughtful, aspiring workman,

who has suffered so much at the hands of the capitalists and the

authorities and has seen so much suffering imposed on others from the

same sources that he is possessed with a colossal, implacable hatred of

everybody and everything that has to do with power. On the other hand,

his heart is full to bursting with unselfish love for the unfortunate

proletariat. “I want to live,” he cries, “to live in my flesh, in my

brain, in the expansion of all my organs, of all my faculties, instead

of remaining the beast of burden that is flogged and the unthinking

machine that is turned for others. I want to be a man, in short,—a man

in my own eyes.... We also need some poetry and some art in our lives;

for, poor as he may be, a man does not live by bread alone. He has a

right, like the rich, to things of beauty.... These flames, this smoke,

these tortures, these accursed machines which every day and every hour

devour my brain, my heart, my right to happiness, my right to

life,—these—these yawning mouths of ovens, these fiery furnaces, these

caldrons which are fed with my muscles, with my will, with my liberty,

by the shovelful,—to make out of them the wealth and the social

puissance of a single man! Extinguish all that, I entreat you! Blow up

all that! Annihilate all that!”

His most complete abhorrence is the politician. The employer is white

beside him. “The employer is a man, like you. You have him before you.

You speak to him, you move him, you threaten him, you kill him! At

least, he has a visage,—a chest in which to sink a knife. But go move

this being without a visage called politician! Go kill this thing called

politics,—this slimy, slippery thing which you think you hold and which

always escapes you, which you believe dead and which always comes to

life again,—this abominable thing by which everything has been debased,

everything corrupted, everything bought, everything sold,—justice,

love, beauty!—which has made venality of conscience a national

institution of France; which has done worse still, since with its filthy

slaver it has befouled the august face of the poor! worse still, since

it has destroyed in you your last ideal,—faith in Revolution!”

Aided and inspirited by a working-girl, Madeleine (Bernhardt’s rôle),

this Jean Roule, who would kill as much from excess of love as from

hate, leads the workmen in a revolt against their employers. But the

latter are sustained by government troops, and the play ends with a

massacre and a procession of coffins.

_L’Epidémie_ (1898) is an extravagant one-act comedy,—almost a

farce,—caricaturing the culpable indifference of the bourgeois

politician to the welfare of the humble and his extreme solicitude for

the welfare of the rich. Typhoid fever has made several victims in the

military barracks of a provincial city. The municipal council assembles

for the purpose of taking measures to arrest it. When the council

learns, however, that the disease has attacked no one outside the

barracks, and within the barracks only the private soldiers, whose duty,

whose glory it is to give their lives for their country, it decides to

do nothing, to the accompaniment of enthusiastic cries of “_Vive la

France!_” The decision has scarcely been made when a messenger arrives

with the news that a bourgeois has died of the plague. Thereupon the

council reconsiders its former action, votes to erect a statue to the

dead bourgeois, to name a street in his honour, to demolish the city’s

unsanitary quarters, to open up boulevards, and to introduce a water

system, and makes an appropriation of 100,000,000 francs therefor.

Finally, each councillor rises in turn, and pronounces a panegyric of

the bourgeois victim.

_L’Acquitté_, another one-act comedy, presents the adventure of a

vagabond, Jean Guenille, who, having carried to the police station (in

an access of honesty) a purse of 10,000 francs which he found in the

street, is browbeaten and put under lock and key by the _commissaire_

because he has no legal domicile. M. Mirbeau’s other plays, _Vieux

Ménages_ (1900), _Le Portefeuille_ and _Scrupules_ (1902), and _Les

Affaires sont les Affaires_ (1903),—the last-named[118] an exposition

of the power of money to destroy natural sentiments,—are only a shade

less subversive in tone.

Lucien Descaves has to his credit a one-act anarchistic play, entitled

_La Cage_. The Havenne family (consisting of father, mother, a son

Albert, aged twenty-one, and a daughter Madeleine, aged twenty-six),

threatened with eviction and unable to pay their rent or find work, are

in black despair. The father and mother, in the temporary absence of

Albert and Madeleine, drink a vial of laudanum and light a brazier of

charcoal. The children return, find their parents dead, and, desiring to

die likewise, submit themselves to the poisonous fumes of the brazier,

which is still burning. They bethink themselves in time, however, decide

that it is less cowardly to steal than to die, and set out together for

a career of outlawry and revolutionary apostleship. “Are we quite sure,

Madeleine, that there is nothing better to do than to kill ourselves?”

queries Albert. And then he quotes the famous letter of Frederick of

Prussia to D’Alembert: “If there should be found a family destitute of

all resources and in the frightful condition you depict, I should not

hesitate to decide theft legitimate.... The ties of society are based

upon reciprocal services; but, if this society is composed of pitiless

souls, all engagements are broken.”

_La Cage_ was suppressed by the censorship[119] very early in its

career. Descaves, who dedicated his work “_Aux désespérés pour qu’ils

choisissent_,” foresaw and publicly predicted its interdiction. “Let me

try,” he said, “to put on the stage, instead of adulteries and

embarrassing _liaisons_, the distress of a bourgeois family at the end

of its resources, its illusions, and its courage,—the parents reduced

to suicide and the children precipitated into revolt. Ah! you’ll hear a

fine clatter!”

The severity of the censorship towards _La Cage_ called out numerous

protests, notably this from Alexander Hepp (in his _Quotidiens_), little

suspected of doctrinal sympathy with Descaves: “As soon as we show to

the gallery the reality of the miseries, the despairs, the injustices of

society, a fragment of real life, of the true cross people carry, our

delicate sensibilities are shocked; and it is always before that which

is truest that we cry out improbability. The innovating tendencies, the

harsh accent of retribution, the virile sincerity of Descaves, who puts

on the boards a family driven to suicide, have disturbed the digestions

of the orchestra.”

The critic Henri Bauer, commenting on _Les Mauvais Bergers_ and _La

Cage_, wrote: “An anti-social dramatic literature is born in France....

It required authors of the power and eloquence of Mirbeau, of the

devouring passion and the admirable soul of Descaves, to dare to ring

out in dramatic dialogue this conclusion, _On n’améliore pas la société,

on la supprime_.... Society is a lie, social progress a lure, the social

pact is broken: nothing is left but the individual,—his temperament,

his law, his conscience, and his will.”

Descaves’ _Tiers Etat_ is an eloquent plea for the faithful mistress who

is debarred from marriage by legal technicalities. He is also joint

author with Georges Darien of _Les Chapons_ (to which this legend was

prefixed: “_Aux Mânes des Bourgeois de Calais nous sacrifions ce

spécimen de leur pitoyable descendance_”), and with Maurice Donnay of

_La Clairière_ and _Oiseaux de Passage_. _La Clairière_, which was one

of the notable features of the theatrical season of 1898-99, pictures

the life of an anarchist _phalanstère_, which succeeds admirably until

the members send for their _compagnes_, when it is demoralised and

disintegrated by petty intrigues and jealousies.

The moral? Not the obvious and absurd one that men alone will constitute

the society of the future; but this, that women have not been

enfranchised long enough to have developed the maturity of character

necessary to the practice of anarchist precepts. _Oiseaux de Passage_

deals with the experiences of anarchists in exile. “I am proud,” says M.

Descaves, apropos of the piece, “to have been able to transfer to the

stage the theories of a Bakounine, and to introduce them to the public

thus.”

Maurice Donnay is a railing nihilist, subtle, graceful, and gracious,

somewhat after the Anatole France pattern,—a smiling _révolté_, a

refined recalcitrant, whose recipe for a play is said to be “a little

love, much adultery, an enormous amount of _esprit_, a pinch of

politics, and a gramme of sociology,” and whose psychology is “a

sparkling, effervescing affair, the analyses of which explode merrily

with the welcome noise of popping champagne corks.”

In _Amants_, _La Douloureuse_, _La Bascule_, _Le Retour de Jérusalem_,

and _Georgette Lemonnier_, Donnay is prodigal of _bons mots_ and

malicious pleasantries, by which he gives the most piquant conceivable

flavour to the social and political infamies of the time. _Le Torrent_,

his most ambitious work, has this much of the serious, that death is its

dénouement; but its general method and attitude do not differ

essentially from the method and attitude of his other plays.

To those who expressed surprise that the flippant Donnay should

collaborate with the truculent Descaves, Donnay himself said: “A young

man, I produced at the _Chat Noir_ my piece _Pension de Famille_, which

won me the honour of being called ‘joyous anarchist’ by Jules Lemaître.

I remained an anarchist in _La Douloureuse_. And, without doubt, I have

always been an anarchist; more, it is true, for sentimental than for

sociological reasons, but also from a point of view exclusively

philosophical. He who analyses, he who, without ceasing, unravels the

meshes of this complicated network of ideas which constitutes the social

order, is more or less of an anarchist necessarily, is he not?”

Other works of unequivocal revolt produced within the last fifteen years

are:—

_Mais Quelqu’un Troubla la Fête_,[120] a one-act piece by Louis

Marsolleau. A financier, a politician, a bishop, a general, a judge, a

duchess, and a courtesan (so many types of the powerful and privileged

of the world) partake hilariously of a sumptuous banquet. Their revels

are interrupted by the apparition first of a peasant, then of a city

labourer, and are finally put an end to by a mysterious and terrible

unknown, who causes a general explosion.

_Sur la Foi des Etoiles_, by Gabriel Trarieux,—an esoteric symbolistic

effort, a groping towards the society of the future: “I say to myself:

The stars up yonder, with their fixed, impassive air, the stars which

have mounted guard for centuries, are living worlds.... They die and are

born. I compare them to the truths which guide us.... For there are

several truths,—... some very ancient, almost extinguished, to which we

submit by force of habit, and some—oh! just emerging—which will not be

true before to-morrow.”

_Le Cuivre_, by Paul Adam and André Picard, which exposes and explains

the tyranny exercised by money over persons and governments; and

_L’Automne_, by Paul Adam and Gabriel Mourey (forbidden by the

censorship).

_Le Domaine_, by Lucien Besnard, which recounts the progress of

socialism in the rural districts, and defines the antagonism between the

decadent nobility and the rising fourth estate.

_La Pâque Socialiste_, by Emile Veyrin, which describes a practical

experiment in Christian socialism.

_La Sape_, by Georges Leneven, the hero of which is an anarchist dreamer

of a highly intellectual type, _Le Détour_ by Henry Bernstein, and _Le

Masque_ by Henri Bataille.

_Le Voile du Bonheur_, by Georges Clemenceau, which employs Chinese

personages and a Chinese setting to explain the manner in which

Frenchmen are fooled and ruled by their “mandarins”; and _Les Petits

Pieds_ by Henry de Saussine, which employs a similar device to ridicule

French education.

_Le Ressort: Etude de Révolution_, mystic and ominous, by Urbain Gohier;

_Barbapoux_, savagely anti-clerical, by Charles Malato; _En Détresse_,

with a conclusion akin to that of Descaves’ _Cage_, by Henri Fèvre;

_L’Ami de l’Ordre_, by Georges Darien; _La Grève_, by Jean Hugues;

_Conte de Noël_ and _Des Cloches du Cain_, by Auguste Linert; _Le

Chemineau_, by Richepin; Jean Ajalbert’s adaptation of De Goncourt’s _La

Fille Elisa_;[121] and the pieces of Hérold, Pierre Valdagne, and

Georges Lecomte.

These performances have been supplemented by revivals of De Maupassant’s

_Boule de Suif_, which portrays the sacrifice made by a prostitute for

the bourgeois and her ostracism by them when they have no further need

of her assistance; of the stage version of Zola’s _Germinal_ in the

theatres of the working faubourgs; and of certain precursors, such as

Henri Becque’s _Les Corbeaux_ (probably the most terrible arraignment of

law and lawyers ever written) and _L’Evasion_ and _La Révolte_ of

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam; and by the importation of the principal works

of the Russian, Belgian, Scandinavian, German, Italian, and Spanish

innovators.

Alfred Capus, the principal rival of Maurice Donnay in his peculiar

_genre_, holds in completest but most amiable detestation whatever has

to do with regular living. Less sardonic than M. Donnay, lighter,

brighter, and more _spirituel_, if that is possible, he is equally

nihilistic, though not, so far as I am aware, by personal avowal. In

_Rosine_ he ventures to depict a _union libre_ receiving a father’s

benediction; and in _Qui Perd Gagne_, _Années d’Aventures_, _Les Petites

Folles_, _Mariage Bourgeois_, _La Veine_, _La Bourse ou la Vie_, and

_Beau Jeune Homme_ he holds up to ridicule, one after another, all the

traditional bourgeois ideals.

Reformers being notoriously deficient in the sense of humour, it is a

curious and piquant circumstance that not only a majority of the

brilliant school of stage humourists, currently known as the “_Auteurs

Gais_,” but the four most admired of the group,—Georges Courtéline,

Pierre Veber, Jules Renard, and Tristan Bernard,—are frankly

revolutionary, either in their personal opinions or in their writings,

or in both.

Pierre Veber and Tristan Bernard were charter members of the

revolutionary band _L’Endehors_, and have been affiliated latterly with

that of _L’Idée Nouvelle_. Jules Renard is the bitterest of social

philosophers, under the thin disguise of a charming, impeccable style.

Courtéline, whose comic genius is so strong, so pure, and so fine that

he is called, without too gross exaggeration, “_le petit-fils de

Molière_”; Courtéline, who will be read and played, in the opinion of

many, long after every other contemporary French dramatist has been

forgotten; Courtéline, who makes you laugh till you weep over what you

ought to weep over without laughing, who promotes reflection and rouses

the conscience while dispelling melancholy,—this prodigious

Courtéline, truth-loving joker and humane mountebank as he is, has

probably done more than any single individual in any sphere to bring

into disrepute the brutality of the army, and to expose the perpetual

contradiction between essential justice and the texts of the law.

Eugène Brieux is the most prolific producer of the “_pièce à thèse

sociale_” and the most indefatigable corrector of abuses connected with

the Paris stage. He has attacked the race-course and the police station

in _Le Résultat des Courses_, public and private charity in _Les

Bienfaiteurs_, physicians in _L’Evasion_, current methods of instruction

in _Blanchette_, popular ignorance of and prejudice against venereal

diseases in _Les Avariés_,[122] the law and the administrators of the

law in _La Robe Rouge_ (”_C’est donc la loi qui rend criminel?_”), and

the Chamber of Deputies in _L’Engrenage_; and he has defended the rights

of children against parents in _Le Berceau_, the rights of the artistic

temperament in _Ménages d’Artistes_, the rights of the poor against the

rich in _Les Remplaçantes_, and the rights of the _fille-mère_ in

_Maternité_.

M. Brieux is not easy to locate doctrinally or otherwise. He is not an

“_auteur gai_,” far from it, and is not, in the strict sense of the

term, perhaps, a revolutionist. But his mania for the correction of

abuses has surely beguiled him more than once into an attitude towards

society that is, to all intents and purposes, revolutionary.

The rugged, poetic, weird, and philosophical François de Curel is as

difficult to locate doctrinally as M. Brieux. There are times when he

seems to be as irreverent a nihilist as M. France, M. Donnay, or M.

Richepin, and times when he seems to be as reverently ecclesiastical and

reactionary as M. Paul Bourget or M. le Comte de Mun. All his

plays—_Les Fossiles_, in which he pictures the pathetic impotence of

the exhausted nobility; _La Nouvelle Idole_, in which he alternately

exalts and belittles science; _La Fille Sauvage_, in which he studies

the demoralising effect of civilisation upon the mind of the savage;

and _Le Repas du Lion_, in which he confronts orthodox economy with the

socialist’s dream—admit of different and absolutely contradictory

interpretations.

But _Le Repas du Lion_ is claimed, with at least a show of reason, by

the socialists, because of its dénouement. One of its wealthy characters

elucidates the conflict between labour and capital by means of a

parable, “The Lion and the Jackal.” The lion hunts for himself. The

jackal, too feeble to hunt for himself, follows the lion. The lion

gorges himself with his prey. The jackal eats what the lion leaves. If

there were no lion to hunt for him, the jackal would starve. Ergo, the

lion is the benefactor of the jackal.

A labourer objects: “In that case, Monsieur, there is a lion; and we are

the jackals. Since you choose to have the business settled between wild

beasts, we will follow you on to your own ground. When the jackals find

that the remnants left by the lion do not garnish their paunches

sufficiently, they get together in great numbers, surprise the king, and

devour him alive.”

The labourer’s objection is given force by the shooting of the

capitalist of the piece. “The reply of the jackal to the lion,” comments

one of the minor characters.

Jean Jullien considers himself, if rumour speaks true, in no sense a

revolutionist. All the same, his robust drama _La Poigne_, which depicts

vividly the moral ravages wrought by authority in and about a

humanitarian soul, was received enthusiastically by both the socialistic

and the anarchistic press. “Socialists will take notice,” remarked a

socialist organ, “that it behooves them to lavish their money and their

bravos on this attempt at ‘_L’Art Social_.’” And the theatrical critic

of _Le Libertaire_ said: “The piece of Jean Jullien pleased us by its

frankness and its human interest. Rarely has an author so stirred our

minds and hearts. It is only just to say that the personages exemplify

the sentiments and the ideas which are familiar to the anarchists, and

that we find in _La Poigne_ an echo of our passions.”

The same author’s _L’Ecolière_, which denounces the hypocrisy of petty

provincial functionaries and narrates the conflict of a high-minded,

warm-hearted woman with the bourgeois system of morals, was accorded a

similar welcome in similar quarters. So also was his _Oasis_, which

preaches that Humanity should create for itself, remote from “egoisms,

prejudices, mutually hostile religions, and the disgraceful tumults of

injustice and war, the basis of peace, of association, and of love.”

As a _féministe_ who flouts and defies the marriage code, Paul Hervieu

lays himself liable to be classed as a revolutionist, at least a partial

revolutionist, however little such a classification may please him.

Whatever else they are, _La Loi de l’Homme_, _L’Armature_, _Les

Tenailles_, _Les Paroles Restent_, _L’Enigme_, and _Le Dédale_ are works

of revolt. The first-named, _La Loi de l’Homme_, evoked the following

sweeping but not unsympathetic judgment from the critic Emile de St.

Auban, who, lawyer as well as critic, should know whereof he speaks:

“The contemporary theatre occupies itself a great deal with the laws.

The code appears often on the boards, and the dramatist-jurists abrogate

it in prose or in verse. But never was this abrogation so passionate, so

brusque, never was it so radical, so total, as in _La Loi de l’Homme_. I

will add so concise, since three very short acts, two of which make one,

suffice to erase not a text, but _the_ text, not _a_ law, but _the_ law,

and with the law the cortège of egoisms and hypocrisies which have given

it birth, and have assured it its full expansion and the calm and sure

perpetration of its outrages; to erase, I say, an entire jurisprudence,

written or traditional, promulgated against the weak for the strong.”

To the category of partial, unwilling, or unwitting revolutionists to

which Jullien, Brieux, Hervieu, and De Curel belong may be assigned also

Jules Case in _La Vassale_, Gaston Dévore in _La Conscience d’un

Enfant_, Georges Ancey in _Ces Messieurs_ and _La Dupe_, Emile Fabre in

_L’Argent_, _Le Bien d’Autrui_, _La Vie Publique_, and _Comme Ils sont

Tous_, Rostand in _La Samaritaine_, Abel Hermant in _Le Faubourg_, _La

Carrière_, and _La Meute_, Albert Guinon in _Décadence_,[123] Alexandre

Bisson in _Le Bon Juge_, Emile Bourgeois in _Mariage d’Argent_, and

Bruyerre in _En Paix_. Indeed, it is even permitted to query whether the

reputed reactionaries, Jules Lemaître and Henri Lavedan, are not really

(at least so far as certain of their pieces are concerned) in the same

boat.

Revolutionary and semi-revolutionary plays were for a considerable

period well-nigh a monopoly of the _Théâtre Libre_, where unconditional

literary form and unconventional acting were the handmaids of

unconventional ideas. Latterly they have invaded every legitimate stage

of Paris, not excepting the august and supposedly inhospitable _Comédie

Française_; and they may be said to be the specialty of four houses: the

_Théâtre Antoine_ (founded by Antoine after he abandoned the _Théâtre

Libre_); the _Grand Guignol_, the nearest existing counterpart to the

_Théâtre Libre_; and the _Gymnase_ and the _Renaissance_, which are now

copying the general policy of the _Antoine_. Maurice Maeterlinck and his

company have latterly made their headquarters in Paris. Maeterlinck’s

_Monna Vanna_ was applauded by the revolutionary organs.

The various free stages, or _théâtres à côté_, which give private

performances at irregular intervals, also reserve a modicum of space in

their répertoires for pieces of social revolt.

The _revues_ of the variety theatres and concert halls, in which the

events of the year are criticised and caricatured with a freedom that

often calls down the wrath of the censorship, particularly at

Montmartre, are also far from a negligible influence in the direction of

revolution.

In 1883 the socialist Clovis Hugues wrote, in an introduction

to a volume by the refractory Léon Cladel: “The petrification

of the republic in the bourgeois spirit does not prevent

literature from being socialistic. It is unconsciously so,

perhaps; but it is so. And this is the essential thing for the

future.... Open a romance, no matter what one, attend a

theatrical representation, no matter what one, and, so that

you have the slightest aptitude for combining details, for

surprising the idea in the fact, for following a philosophical

train through an intrigue, you will be amazed at the quantity

of socialism which emerges from this romance and that play.

Has the author felt himself responsible towards the Revolution

in writing his work? Not the least in the world. He has

yielded to the mighty pressure of events, he has submitted to

the historic fatalities of his time, the permanent influence

of humanity in travail.... What signifies this transformation?

It signifies that the philosophies soak down into literature;

it signifies that the hour is at hand, since the idea

incarnates itself involuntarily in the form; it signifies that

the fourth estate is mounting, that justice is near.”

A round decade later (1894) A. Hamon, a friend of anarchy, wrote:—

“Read in the sheets which are the most hostile to the

anarchists—such as the _Figaro_, the _Journal_, the _Gil

Blas_, the _Echo de Paris_—the short stories, sketches, and

chroniques of the Mirbeaus, the Bauers, the Descaves, the Paul

Adams, the Bernard Lazares, the Ajalberts, the Sévérines,

etc., and you will perceive that anarchist tendencies throng

them. Follow the ‘_jeunes revues_,’ and you will observe that

there is not, to speak in the large, a piece of verse, a

story, a study of any sort whatsoever, which does not tend

towards the destruction of what the anarchists qualify as

social prejudice,—_la patrie_, authority, family, religion,

courts of law, militarism, etc.

“All the thinking men of this epoch,—savants, littérateurs,

artists, etc.,—one may almost say all, so rare are those who

imprison themselves in the ‘_tour d’ivoire_’ or who profess

doctrines commendatory of the existing order,—all the

relatively young men, I mean, who have attained their majority

since 1870, have _libertaire_ inclinations. The result is a

fervent propaganda under the most varied forms and in the most

dissimilar _milieux_.”

Still later (1899) a declared opponent of anarchism, M. Fierens-Gevaert,

wrote in his admirable social study, _La Tristesse Contemporaine_:

“There are, to begin with, the militant anarchists,—a handful of

wretched starvelings and lunatics, whose doctrine consists solely in

listening to the instincts of the brute within them. There are, next,

the unwitting or dilettante anarchists. These latter are legion. They

are to be found in the highest grades of society. They even compose the

intellectual _élite_ of their time. Every philosopher, novelist, poet,

dramatist, and artist is to-day a latent anarchist; and very often he

boasts of it.”

Just how far this surprising situation is an heirloom of the four

revolutions which France traversed during the last century, and just how

far it is traceable to forces which have entered from without,—to

Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Darwin and Spencer, Leopardi and the

pleiades of Russian and Scandinavian innovators,—it is not necessary to

determine. The really significant thing is that the intellectual and

social conditions which have produced Anatole France, Descaves, and

Mirbeau in France have likewise produced Björnson, Brandès, and

Strindberg in Scandinavia, Maxim Gorky in Russia, Hermann Heijermanns in

the Netherlands, Gerhardt Hauptmann in Germany, Camille Lemonnier in

Belgium, Gabriel d’Annunzio in Italy, and José Echegaray in the Biscayan

Peninsula; and it is only by keeping well in mind the intensity and the

scope of this world-movement of revolt that the dynamic value of French

revolt can be properly estimated.

[Illustration: LA COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE]

CHAPTER XVIII

THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT IN POETRY, MUSIC AND ART

“_The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality,

His insight and power encircle things of the human race, He is

the glory and extract thus far of things and of the human

race._”

WALT WHITMAN.

“_Venez à moi, claquepatins,

Loqueteux, joueurs de musettes,

Clampins, loupeurs, voyous, catins,

Et marmousets et marmousettes,

Tas de traîne-cul-les housettes,

Race d’indépendants fougueux!

Je suis du pays dont vous êtes:

Le poète est le Roi des Gueux._

“_Vous que la bise des matins,

Que la pluie aux âpres sagettes,

Que les gendarmes, les mâtins,

Les coups, les fièvres, les disettes,

Prennent toujours pour amusettes,

Vous dont l’habit mince et fougueux

Paraît fait de vieilles gazettes,

Le poète est le Roi des Gueux._”

JEAN RICHEPIN.

“_Je voudrais dire à mes amis,

Sculpteurs d’idéal et de rimes,

Que s’enfermer n’est plus permis,

Lorsqu’au dehors grondent les crimes.

Chantons la justice et l’amour!

Le peuple va nous faire escorte.

Poète, descends de la tour!

Et puis ferme ta porte._”

MAURICE BOUKAY.

“_Persons of anarchistic mentality are signalised by their

love of the new in art and in science, by their feverish

search after new forms._”—A. HAMON.

“_So it is you who are the poet. Well, as for me, I do not

like poets nor_ intellectuels. _I do not like them because

they are all more or less anarchists, and because the

anarchists blow up the bourgeois. I am neither a poet nor an_

intellectuel, _and I am proud of it._”

Monsieur Dupont, in La Petite Bohème of ARMAND CHARPENTIER.

Zola, being asked to define an anarchist, said, “_Un anarchiste, c’est

un poète._” Conversely, the poet is more or less of an anarchist. Job

and Isaiah are currently quoted by the _libertaires_ in support of their

position. Æschylus, in his immortal “_Prometheus_,” Euripides in his

“_Bacchantes_,” Schiller, Shelley, Swinburne, Robert Burns, and Walt

Whitman, in portions of their works, all promulgated good, sound

anarchist doctrine. As to the poets who, without being specifically

anarchistic, are revolutionists of one sort or another, their name is

legion. A bulky volume would scarcely suffice to name them.

In France, especially, revolutionary singers have never been lacking.

“_Console-toi, gibet, tu sauveras la France!_” cried André Chénier,

greatest of the galaxy of poets who illustrated the Revolution.

Béranger, before he was dazzled by the _épopée_ of Napoleon, had his

moments of revolt. The two Augustes of the Restoration, Barbier and

Barthélemy, the first in his _Iambes_ and the second in his _Némésis_,

glorified insurrection.

Hégésippe Moreau, who died in the _Hospice de la Charité_ at

twenty-eight, just as his _Myosotis_ was winning him recognition, heaped

terrible imprecations upon the heads of the rich and powerful, and

played a valiant part in the outbreak of 1830,

“_Non comme l’orateur du banquet populaire

Dont la flamme du punch attise la colère:

Comme un bouffon dans ses parades, non!

Mais les pieds dans le sang, en face du canon._”

“_Pour que son vers clément pardonne an genre humain,

Que faut-il au poète? Un baiser et du pain_,”

sang Moreau in his beautiful “_Elégie à la Voulzie_,” which is recited

in revolutionary meetings more often than any other poem. “He was

hungry,” remarks Sainte-Beuve, apropos of Moreau’s vindictiveness, “and

he composed, in his hunger, songs that betrayed by their fierceness and

bitterness the want within.”

Moreau defends the excesses of the mobs of the Revolution:—

“_Oubliez-vous

Que leur âme de feu purifiait leurs œuvres?

Oui, d’un pied gigantesque écrasant les couleuvres

Par le fer et la flamme ils voulaient aplanir

Une route aux français vers un bel avenir.

Ils marchaient pleins de foi, pleins d’amour, et l’histoire

Absoudra, comme Dieu, qui sut aimer et croire._”

* * * * *

_Au jour de la vengeance,

Si l’opprimé s’égare, il est absous d’avance._”

He predicts a general cataclysm, declares his intention of doing all in

his power to bring it on,—

“_J’ameuterai le peuple à mes vérités crues,

Je prophétiserai sur le trépied des rues,_”—

and exults in the prospect,—

“_Et moi, j’applaudirai; ma jeunesse engourdie

Se réchauffera bien à ce grand incendie._”

Pierre Dupont (peer almost of Burns in his simple country songs), who

died disgraced by reason of his toadyism towards the government of the

Third Napoleon, which had banished and then pardoned him, displayed a

fine revolutionary fervour in 1848, before his banishment. His “_Chant

des Ouvriers_” and his poem—

“_On n’arrête pas le murmure

Du peuple quand il dit, j’ai faim,

Car c’est le cri de la Nature,

Il faut du pain, il faut du pain,_”

will be recited and sung by the people of France as long as there is

such a thing as hunger within its borders.

At the same epoch, Alfred de Vigny distilled bitterness against society

in his _Destinées_ and _Journal d’un Poète_; and Leconte de Lisle vented

his accumulated scorn as follows:—

“_Hommes, tueurs des Dieux, les temps ne sont pas loin

Où, sur un grand tas d’or, vautrés dans quelque coin,

Vous mourrez bêtement en emplissant vos poches!_”

Victor Hugo’s _Châtiments_ (destined to become the favourite reading of

Caserio, the assassin of Carnot) was the supreme cry of revolt of the

Second Empire. In such lines as these Hugo proclaimed the anarchist

ideal without, however, recognising it as such:—

“_Les temps heureux luiront, non pour la seule France,

Mais pour tous....

Les tyrans s’éteindront comme des météores....

Fêtes dans les cités, fêtes dans les campagnes!...

Où donc est l’échafaud? Ce monstre a disparu....

Plus de soldats l’épée au poing, plus de frontières,

Plus de fisc, plus de glaive ayant forme de croix....

Le saint labeur de tous se fond en harmonie....

Toute l’humanité dans sa splendide ampleur

Sent le don que lui fait le moindre travailleur....

Radieux avenir! Essor universel!

Epanouissement de l’homme sous le ciel!_”

Eugène Vermesch was the fiercest, though by no means the greatest, poet

of the Commune. Laurent Tailhade and Jean Richepin, among the living,

have achieved renown as poets of revolt.

Richepin[124] is as complete a nihilist of the open, rollicking,

devil-go-lucky order as Anatole France is of the subtle, Jehan

Rictus of the plaintive, and Zo d’Axa of the fantastic orders. Like

them, he commits himself to nothing and credits nothing, not even the

faiths and formulas of revolution; and, like them, he is nevertheless a

formidable revolutionist.

In the introduction to _Les Blasphèmes_ he proclaims his intention of

“scandalising the devout, the Deists, the sceptics, the materialists,

the scientists, the worshippers of Reason, the prosperous and the

unprosperous, in a word, the rout of fools and hypocrites who fancy it

their duty to save Law, Property, the Family, Society, Morals, etc.” “In

the defence of these conventions, of which I do not recognise the

binding force,” he adds, “I shall hear all the geese of the Capital

clack.”

Book X. of _Les Blasphèmes_ is entitled “_Dernières Idoles_.” The

“_dernières idoles_” are Nature, Reason, Progress. Richepin treats them

in the most cavalier fashion:—

Nature:

“_Farce amère!_”

“_Carcasse qui n’a ni cœur, ni sang, ni lait!_”

“_Toi qui fais des vivants pour amuser la Mort, Ton ensemble

n’est rien qu’un mélange sans art._”

Reason:

“_Impudente drôlesse dont l’homme se croit le valet!_”

“_Coureuse de chimères, Faiseuse de vœux clandestins!_”

“_Reine fanfaronne, Servante du corps qui t’exhale!_”

Progress:

“_Voici qu’un Dieu nouveau nous ronge: le Progrès._”

“_Le Progrès! Oui, grand fou, sous ce titre nouveau

C’est toujours Dieu qui vient te hanter le cerveau,

C’est toujours la stérile et dangereuse idée

Dont ton âme d’enfant fut jadis obsédée.

Sans le savoir tu crois encor._”

In another part of this volume he exalts, beginning with Satan himself,

the principal _révoltés_ of mythology and history. The following ringing

stanzas are taken from “_Les Nomades_”:—

“_Oui, ce sont mes aïeux, à moi. Car j’ai beau vivre

En France, je ne suis ni Latin ni Gaulois.

J’ai les os fins, la peau jaune, des yeux de cuivre,

Un torse d’écuyer, et le mépris des lois.

Oui, je suis leur bâtard!_

_Leur sang bout dans mes veines,

Leur sang, qui m’a donné cet esprit mécréant,

Cet amour du grand air, et des courses lointaines,

L’Horreur de l’Idéal et la soif du Néant._”

The “_Marches Touraniennes_” conclude as follows:—

“_Plus de lois, de droits, plus rien!

Plus de vrai, de beau, de bien!

Ces Aryas!

Par le fer et par le feu,

Place au Néant, place au Dieu

Des Parias!_”

For his _Chansons des Gueux_, Richepin was fined five hundred francs

(and costs) and kept in prison thirty days. In this volume he acclaims

all the outlaws and outcasts, all the flotsam and jetsam of modern

civilisation in both country and town,—thieves, tramps, gypsies,

beggars, thugs, drunkards, foundlings, panders, and prostitutes; “the

halt, the maimed, the blind,” the reckless, the defiant, and the

scoffing, the uncontrolled and the uncontrollable, with a vigour of

language, a genuineness of accent, a picturesqueness of phrase, an

audacity in imagery and epithet, a poignancy of emotion, a naturalness,

a freshness, a breeziness, or rather a tempestuousness, that bespeak the

master. He lays bare the thoughts and the passions of his disreputable

personages, portrays their starvation and their gluttonies, their

enforced abstinences and their debaucheries, and makes them speak in

their own weird tongues, sing their own ribald songs, and dance their

own maddening dances. For lyric savagery and savage lyrism these

_Chansons des Gueux_ have no counterpart, so far as I know, in modern

literature.

“I love my heroes, my lamentable vagabonds,” wrote Richepin,

in an extraordinary preface.... “I love this something, I know

not what it is, which renders them beautiful, noble, this

wild-beast instinct which drives them into adventure,—a rash

and sinister instinct, granted, but an instinct characterised

by a fierce independence. Oh, the marvellous fable of La

Fontaine about the wolf and the dog! The errant wolf is mere

skin and bones. The dog is fat and sleek. Yes, but the chafed

neck, the collar! To be tied! ‘So you can’t run when you wish?

No? Good-bye, then, to your free meals. To the wood! To the

wood! Everything at the point of the sword!’ And Master Wolf

is off: he runs still. He runs still, and will always run,

this wolf, this tramp; and I love him for it. And every soul a

bit above the common will love likewise this voluntary pariah,

who may be repugnant, hideous, odious, abominable, but who has

greatness,—a superb greatness, since his whole being voices

the heroic war-cry of Tacitus: _Malo periculosam libertatem_.

“_Periculosam!_ my brave vagabonds! _Periculosam!_ do you

hear, you coddled worldlings, all of you who have your soup

and your kennel—and also your collar? Have I then committed a

great crime in revealing the brutal poetry of these

adventurers, of these braves, of these stubborn children to

whom society is almost always a stepmother, and who, finding

no milk in the breast of the unnatural nurse, bite the flesh

itself to calm their hunger?”

Laurent Tailhade is a less natural and wholesome poet than Jean

Richepin, perhaps, but he is certainly a more distinguished one. As a

chiseller of poetic cameos and medallions, he has few, if any, superiors

among his contemporaries. His _Vitraux_ and _Jardin des Rêves_ are

particularly relished by artists and littérateurs and by his

brother-poets.

Tailhade’s prose is as finely chiselled as his poetry. It is almost

invariably lyric; and—although he is caustic and cruel therein to the

verge of cut-throatism, and although he has at his command the most

extensive vocabulary of invective of any person in France, not excepting

M. Henri Rochefort—it is always, like his poetry, distinguished. His

cult for the classic French and Latin authors and his scrupulous care

for art save him from vulgarity and commonplaceness, even in his most

questionable literary undertakings and even in the simple diatribes

which he contributes to the most insignificant, the least scholarly, and

the least artistic propagandist sheets. “He is a _lettré_,” says M.

Ledrain, conservator at the Louvre, “who knows admirably his Latin and

his Sixteenth Century, and who has formed thus a particularly savoury

style which we all admire.”

Tailhade has unblenchingly defended nearly every anarchist attempt that

has occurred in Europe since he came to manhood. He characterised the

assassination of Humbert by the Italian Bresci as “_un geste qui console

et qui revive nos espoirs_”; and Sophie Perowskaïa, Hartmann, Rysakoff,

Caserio, Angiolillo, Henry, and Ravachol were all eulogised by him. He

has been prominently before the public on four occasions during the past

decade: at the time of the attempt of Vaillant, by reason of his

striking epigram, “_Qu’importe le reste, si le geste est beau_”; a

little later, when he was himself the victim, at the _Restaurant Foyot_,

of an anarchist—or anti-anarchist?—_beau geste_ which nearly cost him

his eyesight and permanently disfigured him; in the autumn of 1901, at

the time of the second visit of the czar, when he was tried and

sentenced to a 1,000-franc fine and a year’s imprisonment for having

reaffirmed “the venerable theory of regicide[125] which has traversed

history” in a remarkable prose poem published by _Le Libertaire_, and

entitled “_Le Triomphe de la Domesticité_”; and lastly, in 1903, when he

was mobbed in Brittany for his diatribes against the local clergy, on

which occasion he rendered himself ludicrously guilty of inconsistency

by appealing to the protection of the police.

The incriminated passage in “_Le Triomphe de la Domesticité_,” above

referred to, is as follows:—

“_Quoi, parmi ces soldats illégalement retenus pour veiller

sur la route où va passer la couardise impériale, parmi ces

gardes-barrières qui gagnent neuf francs tous les mois, parmi

les chemineaux, les mendiants, les trimardeurs, les outlaws,

ceux qui meurent de froid sous les ponts en hiver,

d’insolation en été, de faim toute la vie, il ne s’en trouvera

pas un pour prendre son fusil, son tissonnier, pour arracher

aux frênes des bois le gourdin préhistorique, et, montant sur

le marchepied des carrosses, pour frapper jusqu’à la mort,

pour frapper au visage, et pour frapper au cœur la canaille

triomphante, tsar, président, ministres, officiers, et les

clergés infames, tous les exploiteurs qui rient de sa misère,

vivent de sa moelle, courbent son échine, et le payent de

vains mots! La rue de la Ferronerie est-elle à jamais barrée?

La semence des héros est-elle inféconde pour toujours?_

“_Le sublime Louvel, Caserio, n’ont-ils plus d’héritiers? Les

tueurs de rois sont-ils morts à leur tour, ceux qui disaient

avec Jerôme Olgiati, l’exécuteur de Galéas Sforza, qu’un

trépas douloureux fait la renommée éternelle? Non! La

conscience humaine vit encore._”[126]

At the banquet offered him by sympathising littérateurs and artists

immediately after his trial, Tailhade proposed a toast which illustrates

capitally the scope of his emancipating ardour. It was:—

“_A la Finlande! A la Sibérie! Aux Juifs Roumains! A l’Arménie! A la

Catalogne! A la Sicile!_”

[Illustration: Laurent Tailhade.]

In the course of his trial he expounded his attitude, as follows:—

“I know that I am on trial before you for excitation to

murder. As an author, it is my duty to express all my thought;

as an historian, it is my duty to discuss historic facts; as a

philosopher, I have the right to think and to deduce from

these facts the philosophical consequence which they warrant.

I have availed myself largely of what I consider my right. I

accept the entire responsibility of my acts. I even hold that

they do me honour. If to-morrow an occasion presented itself

for me to express again, in the interests of beauty, all my

thought, I should, before the general baseness, seize with

eagerness this fresh occasion.”

[Illustration: CLOVIS HUGUES]

The _raffiné_ De Goncourt was wont to dream of an infernal machine

“_tuant la bêtise chic qui de quatre à six heures fait le tour du Bois

de Boulogne_.” Similarly it is the Philistinism and vulgar fetichism of

the hour, its imbecility and ugliness, that particularly exasperate M.

Tailhade, this other _raffiné_, and set scintillating his scholarly and

artistic ire. It was out of the depths of a profound disgust that he

drew his scorching volume, _Le Pays des Mufles_; and it is the æsthetic

offences quite as much as the economic misdoings of the bourgeois that

he habitually lashes.

Socialism likewise has its poets, of whom Clovis Hugues and Maurice

Bouchor (poets considerably inferior to Richepin and Tailhade) may be

mentioned among the maturer men.

Clovis Hugues has as avocation, when the fortune of elections favours

him, the defence of socialistic principles in the Chamber of Deputies;

and M. Bouchor gives a considerable portion of his time to acquainting

working people with the masterpieces of literature. “The æsthetic sense,

which is the most elevated means of enjoyment, being dependent on the

regular action of the other senses,” says Bouchor, “we need, if we would

assure to all men a complete development, to demand plenty of material

comfort for every individual. We ought to realise for all humanity the

idea of the old Latin adage,—_Mens sana in corpore sano_. Thus

socialism, which current prejudice interprets as a negation of art for

art’s sake, is, on the contrary, the most direct route to it, and the

affirmation of it.... We wish to raise the masses to the noblest

artistic conceptions.... The people have a right to beauty, to science,

to an unutilitarian culture of the mind, to whatever, in a word, can

enlighten and ennoble it.”

In poetry the relation between freedom of expression and freedom of

thought is a very intimate one. The search for fresh forms and the

thinking of fresh thoughts are very apt to go together. Furthermore,

there would seem to be some subtle affinity between the releasing of

verse from its fetters and the enfranchisement of humanity from its

bondage. It would be puerile to lay any stress on the fact that both

Henry and Vaillant wrote verses for the _revues des jeunes_, since this

may well have been a mere coincidence. But it is certain that the

agitation for the _vers libre_ in France these latter years has been one

of the manifestations of the prevalent revolutionary spirit.

True, Verlaine and Mallarmé, though sufficiently revolutionary as

regards form, were quite the reverse of revolutionary in their thinking;

and plenty of similar instances might be cited. On the other hand, a

large majority of the poets who have fought the battle for the

recognition of the rights of the _vers libre_ have been imbued, or at

least touched, with revolutionary ideas; and Verlaine, Mallarmé, and the

other poets who remained loyal to the old society, all in discarding the

old verse, were on terms of closest intimacy with the revolutionists,

and were for a long time mainly encouraged (not to say “boomed”) by

them.

Adolphe Retté and Gustave Kahn are unblushing anarchists. The former,

who has had in his time more than one misunderstanding with the law,

says of himself and his opinions: “I fenced, in the _revues_, against

scholastics of every sort, maintaining that the artist (by the very fact

of his being an artist) should translate his emotions by an individual

rhythm, and not according to fixed forms.... I set myself to interrogate

all the unfortunates whom I elbowed in this hell [the hospital], worse

than that of Dante.... It was shocking.... And I understood solidarity.

“Before entering the hospital, I was a theoretical anarchist.

On leaving it, I was the militant which I hope I have never

ceased to be. I deny and I revolt.”

All the members of the revolutionary _Endehors_ group were advocates of

untrammelled verse; and a goodly portion—among whom Pierre Quillard,

Francis Vielé-Griffin, and Henri de Regnier may be mentioned—were

exponents of it.

Quillard is now a militant anarchist at home, and has displayed on

several occasions a chivalrous and more than platonic enthusiasm for

emancipating movements abroad. Vielé-Griffin is mildly anarchistic. He

says:—

“My æsthetic convictions, which are founded on the axiom, Art

is individualist and normal (that is to say, an artist worthy

of the name carries in his consciousness the necessary rules

of the expression for which he was born, and all dogmas are by

just so much detrimental to art), led me to consider whether

the anarchist doctrines might not have some connection with

these convictions. I am far from having elucidated all the

points which have occupied me up to this moment; but my

philosophy, essentially theistic, welcomes without effort a

sort of normal anarchism, which I am about to discover,

perhaps, in the divers anarchistic works I am consulting.”

M. de Regnier, recognised in the most reputable quarters, has

practically ceased his commerce with revolutionary spirits. But this

fact does not in the least impair the significance of the other fact

that he found this commerce conducive, necessary even, to his proper

development in the earlier stages of his career. Emile Verhaeren,

Georges Eekhoud, and several other Belgians whose art is intimately

associated with Paris are, or have been, poets of revolt.

The _Décadents_[127] and _Néo-Décadents_, _Symbolistes_ and

_Néo-Symbolistes_, _Instrumentistes_, _Déliquescents_, and

_Brutalistes_,[128] most of the sets of poets, in fact, who have made a

stir in the French world of letters since the disappearance—as a

coterie—of the _Parnassiens_, have included many revolutionists, mostly

of anarchistic bent, protesters as well against the oppressions of

politics and the conventions of society as against the obsession of

stereotyped poetic forms.[129]

“The greater part,” writes one of their number, “flaunted

proudly their disdain of current prejudices, current morals,

and current institutions.... Some attacked property, religion,

family; others ridiculed marriage and extolled _l’union

libre_; others vaunted the blessings of cosmopolitanism and of

universal association.... With some, it is true, the

antagonism was only apparent,—simple love of paradox,

inordinate desire to get themselves talked about by uttering

eccentric phrases. But this state of mind existed. If all did

not detest sincerely our bourgeois society, each one lashed it

with violent diatribes, each one had a vague intuition of

something better.”

Whatever the reason therefor may be,—emotional temperament, weariness

with physical privation, bitterness of unrecognised talent, disgust

with the ugliness of modern commercialism and industrialism, the subtle

connection between freedom of thought and freedom of form (noted in the

discussion of poetry), or all these things combined,—it is safe to

venture the assertion that there are, and long have been, in France more

revolutionists of various stripes among the artists than among any other

class of the community engaged in liberal pursuits.

The great Courbet—to go no farther back—was a disciple of Proudhon.

“_Il avait_,” to use the picturesque phrase of Jules Vallès, “_du

charbon dans le crâne_.” The story of Courbet’s career of

revolt—largely mingled with sheer legend, it is true, but even so

scarcely more extraordinary than the reality—is world property. Courbet

suffered imprisonment for his opinions, and had his pictures and

household effects sold by the state.

Cazin, mildest of painters, was so involved in the Commune that he was

forced to take refuge in London, where he supported himself by making

artistic earthen jars. Eugène Carrière, whose simple, original,

eminently human art is slowly conquering two hemispheres, is an

outspoken antagonist of society as it is.

It is impossible for me to say whether a majority of the Impressionists

hold (apart from their art, which has proved profoundly revolutionary)

revolutionary views. It is currently known, however, that Pissarro,

Cézanne, and Delattre hold, or did hold, such views; and the more

prominent Neo-Impressionists have anarchistic leanings almost to a man.

As to the social attitude of Maximilien Luce, Ibels, Paul Signac,

Pissarro _fils_, Félix Vallotton, Francis Jourdain (present managing

editor of _Le Libertaire_), and Van Rysselberghe, for example, there is

no possibility of dispute.

Luce is the most typical living instance of the artist who is, as was

Courbet, at once a striking figure in the art world and an influential

personality in the revolutionary groups. Born and brought up in a

working faubourg, which he still inhabits, Luce has an affection as

genuine as it is ardent for the common people; and he has rendered, with

disagreeable mannerisms and technical lapses, perhaps, but with truth,

originality, robustness, and intensity notwithstanding, two classes of

subjects which really make one,—the street and working life of Paris

and the life of the lurid mining and smelting regions of Belgium and the

north of France.

“Landscapist before everything,” says Emile Verhaeren, “Luce

remains faithful to the tendency to sink in nature the immense

strivings of human beings. The surroundings of men determine

their existence and their history. In seeing these monumental

and sinister chimneys and scaffoldings under the moon, these

smoke-clouds which move towards the horizon like hordes, these

fires which tear the night and seem to bleed like flesh, we

think of the tortured humanity of which they express the

suffering. Tracts of desolation and of tragic pangs, miseries

kindled in space, mad vortexes of matter roundabout the

voluntary activity which violates it, which subjugates it, and

which it opposes,—all anguish and all fear are unveiled.”

Paul Signac, after Luce and Seurat (deceased) the best known of the

_Néo-Impressionistes_, enumerates as follows the influences which have

led him to identify himself with anarchism:—

“I. The laws of physiology—the rights of the stomach, of the

brain, of the eyes.

“II. Logic.

“III. Uprightness.

“IV. The sufferings of my fellows.

“V. The need of seeing happy people about me.”

It is certain that there are more revolutionary personalities in the

seceding “_Champ de Mars_” than in the old, and so-called Official,

_Salon_; and the various coteries of aggressive and often eccentric

innovators, who hold themselves aloof from or are held aloof by these

two salons,—coteries which correspond vaguely to the coteries of the

_jeunes poètes_,—display, for the most part, pronounced revolutionary

affinities. The _Salon des Indépendants_, whose motto is, “Neither

juries nor awards,” and whose object is “to enable artists to present

their works freely to the judgment of the public, without any outside

intervention whatsoever,” has been from the beginning an anarchistic

salon in every sense of the term,—an exhibition by revolutionary

artists as well as an exhibition of revolutionary art. One has only to

compare the names of its exhibitors with the names of those who have

co-operated in the pictorial propaganda of the anarchist organ _Les

Temps Nouveaux_, to be convinced of it.

It was not necessary that an Edwin Markham should write a “Man with a

Hoe” for the world to recognise that the art of Millet—whether Millet

so intended it or not—has a social significance. There are many living

painters, about whose social attitude the public at large knows little

or nothing, who, like Millet (if in less degree), feel and express so

well, when they will, the benumbing influence of poverty, the hardness

of the toil, or the meagreness of the joys of peasants and town

labourers, that this expression is an indirect plea—no less eloquent

than the most direct plea—for a redress of social wrongs.

Such, to name only a fraction of those who might be mentioned, are

Besson, Buland, Leclerc, Sabatté, Léon L’Hermitte, Cottet, Dauchez, Jean

Veber, Zwiller, Geffroy, Boggio, Prunier, Raffaelli, Luigi Loir, Mlle.

Delasalle, Aublet, and Lubin de Beauvais.

Jules Adler, more positive, has given pictorial expression to the most

violent impulses of the mob and the sweeping demands of labour; and

Constantin Meunier[130] has painted, like Luce, the black and bristling

region of the furnaces and the mines described by Zola in _Germinal_.

Auguste Rodin, symbolic and synthetic, surely the greatest innovator in

sculpture and probably the greatest sculptor of the century just closed,

has been subjected throughout his career to a systematic official and

academic opposition and persecution, which have not, so far as I know,

made a revolutionist of him, but which have made him a very god in the

eyes of all the revolutionary elements, and which would have produced

the same effect, perhaps, had his art been far less convincing and

colossal than it is.

Constantin Meunier,[131] also an innovator, and second in merit to Rodin

alone according to many, is the sculptor _par excellence_ of the “fourth

estate.” The grim and tragic poetry of labour has been interpreted by

him as it had never been interpreted before in marble and bronze. The

special physique, the attitudes and the gestures, of all the overworked

miners, puddlers, fishermen, and peasants,—their dignity and their

pain, their capacity for endurance and resentment, their thirst for

resistance,—have in him a superbly realistic and a compassionate,

loving, high-minded, almost spiritual exponent. Righteous indignation

against the present order of things underlies Meunier’s work. Indeed, he

makes no secret of his Utopian desires.

Both Meunier and Rodin have elaborated projects for a monument to the

glorification of labour, which are enthusiastically praised by the

champions of social revolt.

Jules Dalou[131] was banished, like Cazin, for his participation in the

Commune, and was the sculptor of the monuments to the revolutionists

Blanqui and Victor Noir. Baffier is an avowed revolutionist, who affects

the name of artisan and the artisan’s garb.

Micheline, the good angel of Emile Veyrin’s drama _La Pâque Socialiste_,

says: “Jesus of Nazareth, called the Christ, remained nailed to a cross

six hours. Humanity is on a cross of suffering. Humanity, the great

crucified, will release itself.” When she is asked whence she draws her

hope, she replies, lifting her eyes to the cross, “From the gospel.”

Furthermore, she distributes the bread of a new covenant to a band of

weavers at a symbolic feast, patterned after the Last Supper. It is at

the foot of a _Calvaire_ that the anarchist Jean Roule, of Mirbeau’s

_Mauvais Bergers_, harangues the multitude of striking workmen, who are

for the moment furious against him because he has refused to accept, in

behalf of the strikers, a strike fund offered by certain professional

labour leaders, who intend to utilise the strike for their own selfish

ends; and it is by pointing to the cross—“this cross where for two

thousand years, under the weight of miserable hatreds, He agonises who,

the first, dared to speak to men of liberty and love”—that his

companion Madeleine, fearing for his life, transforms their fury into

enthusiasm.

The Montmartre monologist Jehan Rictus, in “_Le Revenant_”[132] and

other of his poems, has presented the Christ as a modern city vagrant

suffering the buffets of modern society.

This fashion of bringing the Christian story up to date by introducing

the Christ into the life of the period has invaded painting as well as

poetry and the drama. Practised by Dagnan-Bouveret from motives solely

artistic,[133] by Léon L’Hermitte, Pierre Lagarde, and a number of

others from motives partly artistic and partly humanitarian, by the

_mondain_ Jean Béraud (_Chemin de la Croix_, _Descente de la Croix_, _La

Madeleine chez le Pharisien_, and _Le Christ Lié à la Colonne_) out of

what seems to be sheer sensationalism, and by the decorators of the

_cabarets artistiques et littéraires_ of Montmartre, half out of a

bravado which those who cannot distinguish between religion and the

church misname blasphemy and half out of class hatred, it has also been

practised with unalloyed reverence and conviction by a number of

painters as a direct and undisguised form of revolutionary propaganda.

These last, perceiving that Christ, in the person of his unfortunate

children, is mocked, spit upon, and crucified every day, and that a

Magdalen is treated with no more consideration by the scribes and

Pharisees of the twentieth century than by the scribes and Pharisees of

the first century, have given us Christs watching by the sick-beds of

_cocottes_; Christs in corduroys and sabots, fraternising with peasants;

Christs in the garb of the Paris labourer, exhorting in wine-shops and

anarchist meetings; tatterdemalion Christs, pleading vainly for alms in

city streets and along the country roads; peace-proclaiming Christs,

jeered at and pommelled by militarist mobs; and vagabond Christs,

“without legal domiciles,” brutalised by the police and hauled into the

courts.

It is among the “_dessinateurs_,”[134] however, that the tendency to

utilise the Christ for purposes of revolutionary propaganda is the most

in evidence. Indeed, it is among the _dessinateurs_ (who are often

painters likewise) that the spirit of revolt all along the line is the

most pronounced.

An average Parisian, if asked to name the _dessinateurs_ most in the

public view, will cite for you Forain, Caran d’Ache, Léandre, Guillaume,

Cappiello, Sem, Abel Faivre, Steinlen, Willette, and Hermann-Paul.

Sem portrays relentlessly the rottenness of society, but draws no

conclusions therefrom; Cappiello has no social significance, whatever

his artistic significance may be; and Guillaume, who produces

captivating _demi-mondaines_ by the yard, has little more social

significance, although as illustrator he has cleverly seconded

Courtéline in poking good-natured fun at the army.

Caran d’Ache gives himself by preference to gleeful satire of the

follies, frailties, and foibles of the time; but he can be tragic and

redoubtable, when he chooses, in the denunciation of its injustices and

crimes.

Abel Faivre, who is very much the sort of a caricaturist one fancies

Rubens might have been, had Rubens taken to caricature, is slowly, but

surely, justifying his seemingly gratuitous grossness by evidences of an

uncommon insight into human nature and of a far-reaching philosophical

purpose.

Léandre, charming, canny, and critical, easily first of living

portrait-caricaturists, amuses himself and his constituency hugely with

the imbecilities, vanities, and idiosyncrasies of public men,

particularly of parliamentarians. He was one of the illustrators of the

_Feuilles de Zo d’Axa_, and contributes irregularly to the

anti-bourgeois sheets, but does not appear to be an unequivocal social

revolutionist.

Forain, a consummate synthesiser, who can express more with a minimum of

strokes than any Frenchman living, at the beginning of his career was a

fierce exposer of the emptiness and crookedness of politicians,

financiers, and swells, and a convincing pleader for justice to the

oppressed. His sympathies have gone out to the people more rarely since.

With prosperity he has become something of a swell himself, but he still

electrifies Paris now and then with a drawing whose poignancy shows

plainly that his heart has not shifted its position. Crueler than

Léandre,—cruelest, in fact, of all the men of his profession,—he is

more dreaded by the politicians than any other artist in Paris. As a

partisan of anti-Semitism, Forain has latterly directed most of his

political caricatures against those whom he considers, rightly or

wrongly, to be the tools of the Jews.

Hermann-Paul, Steinlen, and Willette[135] are out-and-out social

revolutionists.

Hermann-Paul provides all the illustrations for _L’Officiel_, which

“does not pretend,” says its editor Franc-Nohain, “to be funnier than

the _Journal Officiel_ of the French Republic.” He was an illustrator of

the _Feuilles de Zo d’Axa_, and has participated in the pictorial

propaganda of _Les Temps Nouveaux_. He was one of the fiercest attackers

of the army during the Dreyfus affair, and his specialty—if a man of

such a wide range of antipathies as he may be said to have a

specialty—is the exposure of the horrors of war. The military

atrocities which have been perpetrated during the last few years, and

which are still being perpetrated in various quarters of the globe, have

in him an ungullible and indefatigable antagonist.

Willette’s grace is proverbial. In his lighter moods he is, with a large

allowance of course, a sort of modern Boucher or Watteau. He is prodigal

to the last degree of dainty nymphs and goddesses and all manner of

delicate nudities, of playful elves, sprites, and cupids, of swans and

doves, of naïve _porcelaine-de-Saxe_ shepherdesses, irresponsible fauns

and wily satyrs, of lamb-like gambols, young loves, and spring-time

settings; while his pale Pierrots and Pierrettes, disporting by the

light of the moon or pensively rhyming and serenading, are strangely

insinuating and enticing. His Parisian types—at once real and

unreal—are equally captivating. Willette takes a mischievous delight in

surrounding them with piquant, pagan genii, by way of symbols; and, even

when he leaves them quite alone, they belong less to the Paris of the

day and the hour, with all their saucy modernity, than to the realm of

fantasy. Nevertheless, he can be bitter, vindictive, terrible. No one of

his contemporaries, except Forain, can be so awful; and no one, not even

Forain, has so often frightened the bourgeois out of their bourgeois

wits. A few of his fiercer cartoons deserve notice here:—

A starving miner holds a bloated employer at the mercy of his pick, in

the bottom of a mine-shaft, and claims his vengeance.

A wild-eyed figure, symbolising the proletariat, brandishes a knife

tragically, and cries, “_Je voudrais que la société n’eût qu’une seule

tête pour la lui couper d’un seul coup_.”

A nude woman, at once voluptuous and august, enthroned before a

guillotine, proclaims,—

“_Je suis la Sainte Démocratie,

J’attends mes amants._”

_Pour la Prochaine Exposition_: A _sans-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,[136] attired 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 the _Père Peinard_, and at one time made all the

illustrations for a most impertinent little sheet, known as _Le Pied de

Nez_, the text for which was furnished by Camille St. Croix. His

stained-glass window at the _Chat Noir_, representing the worship of the

golden calf and bearing the inscription “_Te Deum Laudamus_,” will be

remembered as long as the _Chat Noir_ itself.

Steinlen’s[137] work 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

simple _dessinateur_ with 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 the _chansonnier_ Bruant

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: _maquereaux_ and their white

slaves, the _filles 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 their arms;

Bohemian poets and artists fighting poverty in their humble _ménages_ or

junketing with their mistresses and models; over-dressed _filles de

joie_ awaiting, 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 in _Le Père Peinard_, _Le

Chambard_, _Le Mirliton_, _La Lanterne_, the anarchist child’s paper

_Jean-Pierre_, _Les Feuilles de Zo d’Axa_, _Le Canard Sauvage_, _Le

Sifflet_, and _Le Gil Blas Illustré_, to which last he contributed a

first page, weekly, for a number of years. He has illustrated two

volumes of the _Chansons_ of Bruant (_Dans la Rue_) and Maurice Boukay’s

_Chansons Rouges_. Several of his posters, notably that of the socialist

daily, _Le Petit Sou_, breathe a fierce revolutionary spirit.

Among the minor _dessinateurs_—minor not necessarily in talent, but in

vogue—are the revolutionists Luce, Francis Jourdain, Vallotton,

Pissarro _fils_, 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 of _Les Temps

Nouveaux_. Couturier[138] has 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 Pissarro

_fils_. 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 these _dessinateurs_; 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 called

_L’Assiette au Beurre_,[139] is as fierce in its way as was the

suppressed _Père 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 of _L’Assiette au Beurre_ thus 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 the _assiette au beurre_ and 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 the _dessinateurs_ heretofore mentioned have appeared

with greater or less frequency in _L’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;[140] and it is at least a curious commentary—not to

insist farther—on the social attitude of the artistic _élite_ that 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 one thing 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 liberty of form; and most

of the notable contemporary French composers—with the exception of

Reyer, Saint-Saëns, and Massenet[141] (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.