Remy de Gourmont. An improvement in his health permitted him to mingle a
little with other human beings, and to become less exclusively an
anchorite of the intellect. Having pushed his individualist theories to
their extreme, he withdrew from his violent expression of them, and he
took a new and pleasing interest in public life. He continued to seek
consolation for the disappointments of art in philosophy and science,
and he developed a positive passion for ideas. He founded the _Revue des
Idees_, which had a considerable vogue in the intellectual world. But
his chief activity henceforward was as a publicist. His incessant short
essays, mainly published in the _Mercure de France_, became an element
in the life of thousands of cultivated readers. They dealt briefly with
questions of the day, concerning all that can arrest the attention of an
educated man or woman. The author collected them in volumes which
present the quintessence of his later manner, four of _Epilogues_, three
of _Promenades Litteraires_, three of _Promenades Philosophiques_, and
so forth. These dogmatic expressions of his conception of life were
written in a style more fluid, more buoyant, and less obscure than he
had previously used, and they achieved a great popularity, especially
among women. Meantime, as a critic, he showed less and less interest in
the exceptional and the unwholesome, of which he had been the fantastic
defender, and more in the great standard authors of France. In 1905 he
opened with an anthology from Gerard de Nerval a series of _Les Plus
Belles Pages_, which he continued until the war with admirable judgment.
The war found Remy de Gourmont not totally unprepared. He had always
unflinchingly avowed himself an aristocrat and an anarchist; it was his
way of expressing his horror at vulgarity and tyranny. He had chosen to
be disconcerting in his vindictive pursuit of sentimentality and folly.
He had thought it fitting to be a determined enemy to militarism. It was
difficult for a critic with so fine an ear as his to tolerate patriotic
verses which did not scan. But the ripening years had sobered him, and
he made after 1911 a much more careful examination of the destiny of his
country. He saw that with all his scepticism he had been the dupe of
Teutonic culture, and he repudiated the Nietzsche whom he had done so
much to introduce to Parisian readers. From August, 1914, Remy de
Gourmont put aside all his literary and scientific work, and devoted
himself wholly to a patriotic comment on the war. His short articles in
_La France_ form an admirable volume, _Pendant l'Orage_, by which all
his petulance in times of peace is more than redeemed. The anguish of
the struggle killed him, as it had killed so many others. Remy de
Gourmont was seated at his writing-table, with a protest against the
outrage upon Reims half-completed before him, when a stroke of apoplexy
put an instant period to his life. This was on the 29th of September,
1915.
In one of his best books, _Le Probleme du Style_ (1902), Remy de
Gourmont remarks in his aphoristic way, "Il y a une forme generale de la
sensibilite qui s'impose a tous les hommes d'une meme periode." This is
excessive in its application, but it is sufficiently true to be a useful
guide to the historian. Between 1890 and 1905 there was exhibited, not
merely in France and England, but all over Europe, a "general form of
sensibility" of which Gourmont was the ablest, the most vociferous, and
the most ingenious representative. It is important to try to analyse
this condition or fashion of taste, since, although it has already
passed into the region of things gone by and of "les neiges d'antan," it
has not ceased to be memorable. Our comprehension of it is not helped by
ticketing it "decadent" or "unhealthy," for those are empty adjectives
of prejudice. What was really involved in it was a revolt against
sentimentality and against the tendency to repeat with complacency the
outworn traditions of art. This was its negative side, worthy of all
encouragement. What was not quite so certainly meritorious was its
positive action. It was a demand for an exclusively personal aesthetic,
for an art severely divorced from all emotions except the purely
intellectual ones, the sensuousness of this school of writers being
essentially cerebral. It descended in England from Walter Pater, in
France from Baudelaire, and it aimed at a supreme delicacy of execution,
an exquisite avoidance of everything vulgar and second-hand. The young
men who fought for it considered that the only thing essential was to
achieve what they called a "personal vision" of life. In the pursuit of
it they were willing to be candid at the risk of perversity, while they
obstinately denied that there should be any relation between art and
morals. But Remy de Gourmont, who had been their leader in aiming at an
impossible perfection, lived long enough to see the whole intellect and
conscience of France pressing along a path to greatness which he and his
disciples had never perceived in all the excursions of their
imagination.
1916.
THE WRITINGS OF M. CLEMENCEAU
In the year 1893, after a succession of events which are still
remembered with emotion, M. Clemenceau fell from political eminence, not
gradually or by transitions of decay, but with theatrical suddenness
like that of a Lucifer "hurled headlong flaming from the aetherial sky."
His enemies, rewarded beyond their extreme hopes, gazed down into the
abyss and thought that they discerned his "cadavre politique" lying
motionless at the bottom. They rejoiced to believe that he would trouble
them no more. He had passed the age of fifty years, and all his hopes
were broken, all his ambitions shattered. They rubbed their hands
together, and smiled; "we shall hear no more of _him_!" But they did not
know with what manner of man they were dealing. What though the field
was lost? All was not lost:
The unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield;
And what is else not to be overcome?
So brilliant an array of mingled intelligence, pertinacity, vigour, and
high spirits have rarely been seen united, and the possessor of these
qualities was not likely to be silenced by the most formidable junta of
intriguers. As a matter of fact, he turned instantly to a new sphere of
action, and became the man of letters of whom I propose to speak in
these pages. But for his catastrophe in 1893, it is probable that M.
Clemenceau would never have become an author.
A brief summary of his early life is needed to bring the series of his
published works into due relief. Georges Clemenceau was the second son
of a family of six; he was born on the 28th of September, 1841, and was
therefore a little younger than Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Morley, and
a little older than Sir Charles Dilke. His birthplace was a hamlet close
to the old and picturesque town of Fontenay-le-Comte, in the Vendee,
where his father practised as a doctor. There can be no doubt that
Benjamin Clemenceau, an old provincial "bleu," materialist and Jacobin,
exercised a great influence on the mind of his son, who accepted, with a
docility remarkable in so firm an individual, the traditions of his race
and family. We are told that the elder Clemenceau "communicated to his
son his hatred of injustice, his independence, his scientific worship of
facts, his refusal to bow to anything less than the verdict of
experiment." There was also a professional tradition to which young
Georges Clemenceau assented. For three hundred years, without a break,
his forebears had been doctors. I do not think that any of his
biographers has observed the fact that Fontenay-le-Comte, though so
small a place, has always been a centre of advanced scientific thought.
It has produced a line of eminent physicians, for Pierre Brissot was
born there in the fifteenth century, Sebastian Collin in the sixteenth,
and Mathurin Brisson in the eighteenth. There can be little doubt that
these facts were in the memory of the elder Clemenceau and were
transmitted to his son.
Fontenay-le-Comte is on the western edge of the Bocage of Poitou, not to
be confounded with the delicious woodland Bocage which lies south and
west of Caen. The Poitou Bocage is a more limited and a more remote
district, little visited by tourists, a rolling country of heatherland
clustered with trees, and split up by little torrential chasms. It is
often to be recognized in M. Clemenceau's sketches of landscapes, and is
manifestly the scene of part of his novel, _Les Plus Forts_. The natural
capital of this Bocage is Nantes, lying full to the north of Fontenay,
and thither the young man went at an early age to study at the Lycee. It
was at the hospital at Nantes that his first introduction to medicine
was made. Thence he finally departed in 1860, another _deracine_, to
fight for his fortunes in Paris. He brought little with him save a
letter of introduction from his father to Etienne Arago. For five years
he worked indomitably at his medical studies, refreshing his brain
occasionally by brief holidays spent at his father's rough and ancient
manor-house of Aubraie, in his native Bocage.
He took his degree of M.D. in 1865, and presented a thesis _De la
Generation des Elements anatomiques_, which was immediately published,
and which caused some stir in professional circles. It is said to
contain a vigorous refutation of some of the doctrines of Auguste Comte,
and in particular to deprecate a growing agnosticism among men of
science. The axiom, "Supprimer les questions, n'est pas y repondre," is
quoted from it, and again the characteristic statement, "Nous ne sommes
pas de ceux qui admettent avec l'ecole positiviste que la science ne
peut fournir aucun renseignement sur l'enigme des choses." The thesis
dealt, moreover, according to M. Pierre Quillard, who has had the
courage to unearth and to analyse it, with "les organismes rudimentaires
des nepheles, des hirudinees et glossiphonies," subjects the very names
of which are horrifying to the indolent lay reader. The young savant,
shaking off the burden of his studies, escaped to London, where he
appears to have made the acquaintance, through Admiral Maxse, of several
Englishmen who were about to become famous in the world of politics and
letters. But perhaps these friendships are of later date; as the memoirs
of the mid-Victorians come more and more to light, the name of M.
Clemenceau will be looked for in the record.
He went to the United States in 1866, and took an engagement as French
master in a girls' school at Stamford, in Connecticut, a seaside haunt
of tired New Yorkers in summer. A little later, Verlaine was
under-master in a boys' school at Bournemouth. How little we guess, when
we take our walks abroad, that genius, and foreign genius too, may be
lurking in the educational procession! M. Clemenceau appears to look
back on Stamford with complacency; he accompanied "dans leurs
promenades les jeunes misses americaines: c'etaient de libres et
delicieuses chevauchees, des excursions charmantes au long des routes
ombreuses qui sillonnent les riants parages" of Long Island Sound. He
declares that the happy and lighthearted years at Stamford were those in
which his temperament "acheva de se fortifier et de s'affiner." It was
in the course of one of the "suaves equipees" that he ventured to
propose to one of the young American "misses." This was Miss Mary
Plummer, whom he married after a preliminary visit to France.
For the next quarter of a century Clemenceau was exclusively occupied
with politics. In 1870 he was settled in Montmartre, in a circle of
workmen and little employes whose bodily maladies he relieved, and whose
souls he inflamed with his ardent dreams of a humanitarian paradise when
once the hated Empire should fall. Suddenly the war broke out, and the
Empire was shattered. The government of defence nominated Dr. Clemenceau
Mayor of Montmartre, the most violent centre of revolutionary emotion,
where the excesses of the Commune presently began. He represented
Montmartre at Bordeaux in 1871, and in 1876 Montmartre, which had
remained faithful to its doctor-mayor, sent him again to the Chamber of
Deputies as its representative. This is not the occasion on which to
enter into any detail with regard to the ceaseless activity which he
displayed in a purely political capacity between 1870 and 1893. It is
enshrined in the history of the Republic, and will occupy the pens of
innumerable commentators of French affairs. We can only record that in
1889, M. Clemenceau, who had refused many pressing invitations to leave
Paris for Draguignan, consented to take up his election as deputy for
the Provencal department.
The career of M. Clemenceau as deputy for the Var came to an end in
1893, after the explosion of the Panama scandal. On the 8th of August in
that year he pronounced an apologia over his political life, an address
full of dignity and fire, in which the failure of his ambition was
acknowledged. His figure was never more attractive than it was at that
distressing moment, when he found himself the object of almost universal
public disfavour. He had, perhaps, over-estimated the vigour of his own
prestige; he had browbeaten the political leaders of the day, he had
stormed like a bull the china-shops of the little political hucksters,
he had contemptuously exposed the intrigues of the baser sort of
political politician. He disdained popularity so proudly, that one of
his own supporters urged him to cultivate the hatred of the crowd with a
little less coquettishness. But he was a political Don Quixote, not to
be held nor bound; he could but rush straight upon his own temporary
discomfiture.
The means which his enemies employed to displace him were contemptible
in the extreme, but their malice was easily accounted for. He had
excited the deep resentment of all the supporters of General Boulanger,
who accused him of being the cause of their favourite's fall, and with
having betrayed him in 1888. The fanatics of the Panama scandal
endeavoured to prove that his newspaper, _La Justice_, had supported the
schemes and accepted the cheques of the egregious Cornelius Herz. The
Anglophobes, who unhappily numbered too many of the less thinking
population of France at that time, accused him of intriguing with the
English Government to the detriment of the Republic, and they went so
far as to produce documents, forged by the notorious mulatto, Norton,
which they pretended had been stolen from our embassy in Paris. "Qu'il
parle anglais," was one accusation shouted at Clemenceau in the Chamber
on the 4th of June, 1888. Calamities of every sort, public and private,
gathered round his undaunted head. At last he could ignore these attacks
no longer, and on a fateful day he rose to put himself right before
Parliament. It was too late; his appearance was greeted by an icy
silence, and, as he said himself, he glanced round to see none but the
hungry faces of men longing for the moment when they could trample on
his corpse. Magnificent as was his defence, it availed him nothing
against such a combination of malignities; even his few friends, losing
courage, failed to support him. The legislative elections were at hand,
and the enemies of M. Clemenceau very cleverly organized a press
propaganda, which presented him to the French public in an absolutely
odious light. He went down to address his Provencal constituents, and in
the little mountain town of Salernes he delivered the remarkable speech
to which reference has been made. All in vain: on the 20th of August,
1893, he was ignominiously rejected by the electors of the Var in favour
of a local nonentity, and his career as a member of parliament ended.[7]
These circumstances, which paralysed for many years the parliamentary
activity of Clemenceau, have to be borne in mind when we examine his
literary record. Without delay, in that spirit of prompt acceptance of
the inevitable which has never ceased to mark his buoyant, elastic
character, he threw himself into a new employment. He became, in his
fifty-third year, one of the most active and persistent journalists in
France. His fiery independence and his audacious vivacity pointed him
out at once to editors who had the wit to cater for the better, that is
to say for the livelier, class of readers. M. Clemenceau, a free lance
if ever there was one, became the terror and the delight of _Le Figaro_,
_La Justice_, and _Le Journal_, while to _La Depeche de Toulouse_ he
contributed articles which presupposed a wider horizon and depended less
on the passion of the moment. Future bibliographers, it may be, will
search the files of these and other newspapers of that day for more and
more numerous examples of his fecundity, since he embraced all subjects
in what he called the huge forest of social existence. An exhibition of
pictures, a new novel, an accident in the suburbs, a definition of God
by M. Jules Simon, a joke by M. Francis Maynard, the effect of champagne
upon labour unrest, the architecture of Chicago--nothing came amiss to
the pen of a man whose curiosity about life was boundless, and whose
facility in expression was volcanic.
But there was a certain group of subjects which, at this critical hour
in his career, particularly attracted the attention of M. Clemenceau,
and these give a special colour to the earliest, and perhaps the most
remarkable, collection of his essays. A student of the temperament of
the great statesman, as he has since then so pre-eminently shown himself
to be, is bound to give his mind to the volume called _La Melee Sociale_
which M. Clemenceau published in 1895. This was practically his earliest
bid for purely literary distinction, since the juvenile theses on
anatomical subjects, and the translations from John Stuart Mill, hardly
come within the category of literature. Between 1876 and 1885 M.
Clemenceau had printed, or had permitted to be circulated, a certain
number of his speeches in the Chamber; I have traced eight of these in
the catalogue of M. Le Blond. These formed a very small fraction of his
abundant eloquence in Parliament, and they were not particularly
finished as specimens of lettered oratory. But between 1885 and 1895 we
do not find even such slender evidences as these of the politician's
desire to pose as an author. The publication of _La Melee Sociale_,
therefore, was, to speak practically, an experiment; it was the
challenge of a new writer, or at least of a publicist who had never
before competed with the recognized creators of books.
It is obvious that in making this experiment M. Clemenceau exercised a
great deal of care and forethought. The articles reprinted are not
presented haphazard, nor without an evident intention of producing the
best effect possible. They are selected on a peculiar system from the
mass of the journalist's miscellaneous output. The collection has a
central idea, and this is developed in a very remarkable preface, which
remains one of the author's most philosophical and most elaborate
compositions. This central idea is the tragical one of the great vital
conflict which pervades the world, has always pervaded it, and must ever
remain unaffected by the superficial improvements of civilization. All
through the universe the various living organisms are in a condition of
ceaseless contest. Everywhere something conquers something else which is
conquered, and life sustains itself and ensures its own permanence by
spreading death around it. Life, in fact, depends on death for its
sustaining energy, and the fiercer the passion of vitality the more
vehemently flourishes the instinct of destruction.
The imagination of the author of _La Melee Sociale_ broods upon the
monstrous facts of natural history. If he traverses a woodland, he is
conscious of a silent army of beasts and birds and insects, and even of
trees and plants, which are waging ceaseless battle against others of
their kind. If he begins to stir the soil of a meadow with his foot, he
refrains with a shudder, since millions of corpses lie but just below
the surface of the fruitful earth. He peers down into the depths of the
sea, only to recognize that a prodigious and unflagging massacre of
living forms is necessary to keep the ocean habitable for those who
survive. Everywhere, throughout the universe, he finds carnage
triumphant; and eternal warfare is the symbol of the instinct of
self-preservation.
It will be seen that the new author approached literature definitely
from the scientific side, but also that he placed himself almost
exclusively under the direction of English minds. M. Clemenceau, in that
intense and unceasing contemplation of life which has been his most
remarkable characteristic, has always been inspired by English models.
In his early youth he was deeply impressed with the teaching of J. S.
Mill, and in later years he was manifestly under the successive sway of
Sir Charles Lyell and of Herbert Spencer. But by the time he collected
his essays in _La Melee Sociale_, he was completely infatuated by the
system of Darwin. He had long been familiar with _The Origin of
Species_ and _The Descent of Man_; the death of Darwin in 1882 had
deprived him of a master and, as it seemed, a friend, while the
publication of the _Life and Letters_ in 1887 had given a coherency and,
we may say, an atmosphere, to his conception of the illustrious English
savant. When, therefore, M. Clemenceau put together the material of _La
Melee Sociale_, he did so in the quality of an advanced Darwinian, and
he produced his first book almost as a tribute of affection to the
memory of the greatest exponent of the tragedy of natural selection. But
the habit of his mind, and no doubt the conditions of his own fortunes,
led him into a field more tragical than any haunted by the spirit of the
placid philosopher of Down. Charles Darwin refrained from pushing his
observations to such sinister conclusions as this:
La mort, partout la mort. Les continents et les mers gemissent de
l'effroyable offrande de massacre. C'est le cirque, l'immense
Collysee de la Terre, ou tout ce qui ne pouvait vivre que de mort,
se pare de lumiere et de vie pour mourir. De l'herbe a l'elephant,
pas d'autre loi que la loi du plus fort. Au nom de la meme loi, le
dernier ne de l'evolution vivante confond tout ce qui est de vie
dans une prodigieuse hecatombe offerte a la suprematie de sa race.
Point de pitie. Le pouce retourne commande la mort. L'ame ingrate
repudie l'antique solidarite des etres enlaces en la chaine des
generations transformees. Le coeur dur est ferme. Tout ce qui
echappe au carnage premedite, voulu, s'entretue pour la gloire du
grand barbare. La splendeur de la floraison de vie s'eteint dans le
sang, pour en renaitre, pour y sombrer encore. Et le cirque,
toujours vide, s'emplit toujours.