Clemenceau in his most reflective mood, in the "style bref, mais clair
et vibrant," which Octave Mirbeau commended. This way of writing would
err on the side of rhetoric, were it not so concise and rapid, so full
of the gusto of life even in its celebration of death. For, in the pages
of _La Melee Sociale_, M. Clemenceau shows himself interpenetrated by
the sorrows rather than sustained by the possibilities of the tormented
inhabitants of earth. Recent events, in his own life and in the history
of the French nation, had impressed on his consciousness the inherent
cruelty of human beings to one another. Like Wordsworth, and with a far
sharper personal pang, he had good reason to lament what man has made of
man. Moreover, the months which had extended between M. Clemenceau's
political fall and the publication of _La Melee Sociale_ had been marked
by violent unrest and by a succession of political crimes. Anarchism,
hitherto more a theory and a threat than a practical element in the
existence of the people, had taken startling prominence. In quick and
formidable succession the crimes of Vaillant, of Emile Henry, of Caserio
and others, had filled the minds of men with alarm and horror. These
events, and the strikes in various trades with their attendant sabotage,
and the unrest among the miners, and the earliest germination of that
new disease of the State, syndicalism,--all these and many other
evidences of renewed bitterness in the struggle for life created in the
mind of M. Clemenceau an obsession which is reflected in every chapter
of _La Melee Sociale_. As a physician, no less than as a publicist, he
diagnosed the "misere physiologique" of the age, and he railed against
those in power who touched with the tips of their white kid gloves the
maladies which were blackening the surface and substance of human
society. In the memory of the attempt made last February to assassinate
M. Clemenceau, a special interest attaches to his discussion of this
class of murders, of which he gave a remarkably close and prolonged
analysis, little conceiving, of course, that he would live to be himself
the object of a crime at which the whole world would shudder.
The reader who wishes the literary aspect of M. Clemenceau's mind to be
revealed to him in its greatest amenity may next be recommended to turn
to the preface of the volume entitled _Le Grand Pan_, which appeared in
1896. The book itself consists of seventy little essays, reprinted from
the _Figaro_, the _Echo de Paris_, and other newspapers. These have
nothing or very little to do with Pan, but they are eked out and given
determination by a long rhapsody in honour of the goat-foot son of
Callista, treated as the symbol of natural, as opposed to supernatural
science. Everybody knows the famous passage in Plutarch which describes
how Thamous the pilot, sailing out of the Gulf of Corinth towards the
Ionian Sea on the eve of the crucifixion of Christ, heard a voice
announce that "Great Pan is dead!"
And that dismal cry rose slowly
And sank slowly through the air,
Full of spirit's melancholy
And eternity's despair!
And they heard the words it said--
Pan is dead--Great Pan is dead--
Pan, Pan is dead.
In a passage of rare picturesque beauty M. Clemenceau reproduces the
animated and mysterious scene. He had himself lately returned from a
visit to Greece, which had deeply stirred the sources of his
sensibility. He recalled how the sun, in a transparency of pale gold,
sank behind the blue mass of Ithaca, tinged with rose-colour the crags
of the Echinades, and bathed the mountains and the sea in the delicate
enchantment of sunset. He was sensitive to the paroxysm of pleasure such
an experience produces, and he conceived himself standing by the side of
the grammarian, Epitherses, on board the merchant-vessel, at the very
moment when there sounded three times from the shore the name of
Thamous, the Egyptian pilot, who answered at length, and received the
mysterious command, "When thou art opposite Palodes, announce that the
great Pan is dead!" The recesses of the mountains, the caves on the
island, the solitude of the drear battle-field of Actium, took up the
hollow cry and reverberated it in a thousand accents of despair, with
groans and shrieks of sorrow and confused bewailing, while all nature
united in the echoing lamentation, "Pan, great Pan, is dead!"
In this strange way M. Clemenceau opens an essay in defence of a purely
positivist theory of human existence. He describes the doctrine of the
pagan divinities, under the tyranny of Christianity, and he predicts
their resurrection under clearer and calmer auspices. For M. Clemenceau,
Pan is the symbol of life in its harmonious and composite action, and
science is the intelligent worship of Pan. This despised and fallen god,
who seemed for one dark moment to be dead, survives and will return to
his faithful adorers, has indeed returned already, and turns the tables
on his priestly persecutors. The apparent death of Pan was but a sleep
and a forgetting; the spirit of humanity, dominated for a moment by
superstition and ignorance, seemed to be lying bound and mute, but it is
vocal again, and its powers prove to be unshackled. The Orphic hymn, in
dark numbers, had pronounced the sky and the sea, earth the universal
and fire the immortal, to be the limbs of Pan. Under the early sway of
Christianity the office and meaning of the pagan gods faded into mist;
they seemed to disappear for ever. Darkness gathered over the sweet
natural influences of the physical world, and reality was bartered for a
feverish dream of heaven and hell.
But the gods were only preparing in silence for their ultimate
resuscitation. Lactantius said that "Idols and religion are two
incompatible things"; in his famous _De Origine Erroris_, conscious of
the necessity of recognizing a central force of energy in nature, the
earliest Christian philosopher repulsed the notion of polytheism, and
insisted that piety can exist only in the worship of the one God. He,
like the Christian Fathers before him, shut up the spirit of man in a
prison from which there seemed no escape. But the polytheists, thus
violently Christianized against their will, remained pagan in essence,
and they escaped, as by a miracle, from the furies of the Gospel and the
Koran. The revolt was held in check through the Middle Ages; in the
Renaissance it became victorious, and the first activity of man in
liberty was an unconscious but none the less real restitution of the old
liberating deities. The shepherds of Arcadia saw the blood come back
into the marble face and hands of their dead god. Pan was moving on the
earth once more, for he had triumphed over the sterile forces of
dissolution. Pan, as ancient as social order itself, radiant master of
the beneficent powers of light, has once more become the supreme deity.
This, put briefly, is the thesis of M. Clemenceau.
The influence of Renan is manifest through the whole of this rhapsody,
which is unique among the writings of its author. M. Clemenceau had
followed the track of Pan through the valleys of Arcadia, and up the
rocky pathways that rise abruptly from the stony bed of Alpheus. An
actual visit to Greece, the date of which I have not verified, appears
to have influenced his imagination; he says, "je l'ai voulu chercher,
moi-meme; au depit de Thamous, pres des antiques sources dolentes," and
he tells us how an avalanche of falling stones and a clatter of cloven
hoofs overhead often made him fancy the deity almost within his grasp.
In these passages M. Clemenceau reveals himself more plainly than
anywhere else as an imaginative positivist, who permits his fancy to
play with romantic and even fantastic visions, yet who is none the less
essentially emancipated from everything but reality. He is never the
dupe of his own symbol. He rejects natural religion no less firmly than
revealed religion, and he will not submit his conscience to any
supernatural authority. The reader, if he has the patience to do so, may
follow the close parallelism of the purely intellectual positivism of
the author with the charming, supple, elusive philosophy of Renan in his
_L'Avenir de la Science_.
In no other of his writings is M. Clemenceau quite so emancipated from
the prejudice of the moment as he is m the preface to _Le Grand Pan_.
His central idea is one of satisfaction in the survival of the spirits
of the dead gods, to whom, of course, he gives his own formula of
definition. Nothing in history seems to affect him more painfully than
the tragedy of the massacre of the sacred statues under Theodosius,
when, as Gibbon has so eloquently described, the most high gods were
exposed to the derision of the crowd, and then melted down. Where M.
Clemenceau's emotion seems to be slightly deficient in logic is the
parallel between these ancient gods who retain his sympathy, and the
strictly impersonal forces of which he acknowledges them a symbol. He
delights in Apollo, Pan, and Jove, and speaks of them almost as though
they were individuals, yet he admits no sentimentality with regard to
what they represent. On the whole, his attitude is not one of benignity.
He confesses that nature reveals nothing but a system of forces
interacting upon one another; it is not moral and it is not beneficent.
Here the tone of _Le Grand Pan_ becomes identical with that of _La Melee
Sociale_. But we demand a clear definition of the central symbol. What
does M. Clemenceau really mean us to understand by Pan? We push him up
into a corner; we refuse to let him take refuge in his Renanesque
imaginations, and we extract an answer at last. Pan is the source of all
moral and intellectual action:
Pan nous commande. II faut agir. L'action est le principe, l'action
est le moyen, l'action est le but. L'action obstinee de tout
l'homme au profit de tous, l'action desinteressee, superieure aux
pueriles glorioles, aux remunerations des reves d'eternite, comme
aux desesperances des batailles perdues ou de l'ineluctable mort,
l'action en evolution d'ideal, unique force et totale vertu.
The career of M. Clemenceau has been marked throughout by sudden and
spasmodic crises, rather than by slow evolution of events. If this is
true of his political history, it is repeated in his literary record. We
need not, therefore, affect surprise at finding him, at the age of
fifty-seven, and in the midst of the most bewildering distractions,
produce his one and only novel, a modern story deliberately conducted
to its close in four hundred pages. When _Les Plus Forts_ was published,
in 1898, its author was extremely out of the fashion, and it passed
almost unobserved from the press. Not a single Parisian critic, so far
as I have discovered, gave it any serious attention, and it sank at once
into an obscurity out of which the immense recent vogue of M. Clemenceau
has only lately drawn it. _Les Plus Forts_ was issued at the darkest
moment of the statesman's reversal, when he was repudiated by the great
majority of those who adore him to-day. He had actually gone so far as
to speak of his own as a "vie manquee," when a fresh opportunity of
perilous service to the State fell in his way.
In October, 1897, M. Ernest Vaughan, who had laid by a very considerable
sum of money for the purpose of founding an efficient social and
literary newspaper, approached Clemenceau with the offer of the
editorship in chief. The famous _L'Aurore_ came into existence, and it
set sail at once in the stormy waters of the Dreyfus affair. Terrific
was the clash of passions around the name of the mysterious Jew, whose
exact character and definite purpose will perhaps never be completely
elucidated. M. Clemenceau did not hesitate to throw the weight of his
pen into the unpopular scale. When Esterhazy was acquitted he almost
lost his self-control; with furious irony and snarling invectives he
lashed the populace into a frenzy. Then followed (on the 13th of
January, 1898) the famous intervention of Zola, in a manifesto which
rang from one end of the civilized world to the other. This was
_J'accuse_, the admirably effective title of which, so M. Maurice Le
Blond assures us, was the invention of Clemenceau. Next month, at the
Zola trial, Clemenceau defended the cause of justice in the teeth of
enemies who did not refrain from threatening his very life, and for two
years _L'Aurore_, in the midst of the frenzied Dreyfus hurly-burly, was
unflagging in its attacks and its rejoinders.
At such a moment M. Clemenceau sat down to write his solitary novel. It
would be fulsome to represent _Les Plus Forts_ as a masterpiece of
fiction, though in the present flush of the author's celebrity some have
dared so to describe it. As a matter of fact it owes the interest which
it possesses almost entirely to the light which it throws on the
character of its author. As a mere romance, _Les Plus Forts_ suffers
from the fact that its author, gifted in so many other directions, is
not an effective narrator. As Dr. Johnson mischievously said of
Congreve's one novel, _Incognita_, it is easier to praise _Les Plus
Forts_ than to read it. The scene is laid in a village deep in the heart
of Poitou, and commentators have recognized a close reproduction of
Mouilleron-en-Paradis, the hamlet near Fontenay where M. Clemenceau was
born. At the moment of his fiercest struggle in Paris, his thoughts
turned back to the cool woods and the still waters of his old home in
the west, to the land of hollow valleys, and to the inexpressive
sixteenth-century chateau which the doctor's child learned to regard as
the symbol of rapine and tyranny in the past.
We are introduced to M. Henri, marquis de Puymaufray, a man of over
sixty, solitary, a confirmed bachelor, not so good a shot as he used to
be. The lonely old man comes back, defeated by life, to his chateau in
Poitou. The mise-en-scene is lugubrious in the extreme, punctuated by
the shrieking peacocks at noon and the hooting owls at night. When this
impression has been sketched in, we turn back to the hero's early
history, and follow the adventures of a young buck of the Second Empire,
brought up to despise science, modern thought, the action of democracy
in every form. He begins as a pontifical zouave in bondage to Rome; he
ends as a sort of anarchist. The biography of the young and stupid
nobleman is thus made a peg on which to hang dissertations on all the
principal maladies which affected French society a quarter of a century
ago. There is an exaggerated forceful woman, the Vicomtesse de
Fourchamps, who plays a sustained but obscure part in the intrigue. What
does she want? It is difficult to say; she is always "preparing for the
battle" or attempting to "conquer" somebody. "Il faut conquerir," she
incessantly repeats; she is a kind of tigress, and she seems to be, in
petticoats, a type of every social and political movement of which M.
Clemenceau disapproves.
The Parisian scenes in M. Clemenceau's novel are not very amusing, and,
oddly enough, they are weighed down by a sort of heavy gorgeousness,
somewhat in the mode of Disraeli not at his best. All the characters
preach, and the reader comes to sympathize with the vicomtesse when she
declares herself "agacee des sermons du marquis." The young girl, Claude
Harle, is a somewhat shadowy heroine. She passes as the daughter of a
rich industrial, but she is in reality the child of Puymaufray, who was
the lover of her mother, since deceased. It is easy to understand that
M. Clemenceau has taken this pathetic and tremulous figure as
representative of what is chimerical in the society of the day. In her
original condition, he puts into her mouth the crude sentiments which
are supposed to be nurtured by the enemies of democracy. Claude calmly
states that "the good God has instituted two classes of human beings,
the rich and the poor, and it is our duty to maintain our inferiors in
the practices of religion." A good deal of art is required to remove
from such speeches as these the crude appearance of falsity; and it may
be remarked that the pious characters in _Les Plus Forts_ are not more
like real human beings than are the atheists in M. Paul Bourget's later
romances.
What is of extraordinary interest in _Les Plus Forts_ is not the story
itself, which is thin, nor the conduct of the adventures, which is
stilted, but the temper and attitude of the writer. If we ask ourselves
what is the principal characteristic of this novel, the answer must
be--the intensity of action of the personages; they seem to have springs
of steel in their insides; they run when other people walk, and cannot
move without leaping in the air. "Il faut aux conquerants la pleine
securite de leur corps. Ou l'ame conduit, la bete doit suivre." The book
is full of strange utterances of this order, which reveal the violence
of the author's temperament in flashes of odd light. The episodes, the
conversations, are little more than a series of irregular theses on
various aspects of the struggle for life. The world is regarded as
simply "le syndicat des plus forts," and this idea underlies the title
of the book. We are not allowed to forget it, even when our attention is
being switched away to the discipline of little Chinese children in a
missionary settlement, or to the importance of encouraging a
manufacturer of paper in Ceylon.
What is perhaps the most characteristic passage of M. Clemenceau's
single novel may be quoted as an example both of his philosophy and of
his style. It occurs in the course of a long conversation between father
and daughter.
Certes non, l'argent n'est pas tout. Il est trop, simplement.
L'argent n'est pas tout, mais il a le genre humain pour clientele,
car il est devenu, de force liberatrice, l'egoisme tangible en
rondelles de metal. Voila pourquoi tout cede a l'universelle
attraction qui n'est pas suffisamment contre-balancee par d'autres.
L'argent n'est pas tout. Pourtant autour de lui se rassemblent
toutes les autres puissances sociales, et celles-la meme qui
s'annoncerent protectrices des hommes, aussitot installees, par lui
se sont agglomerees en tyrannie. Il a remplace la force brutale,
dit-on ... a la condition de l'exprimer par d'autres signes. Contre
l'expression du monde, il y avait Dieu autrefois, a dit quelqu'un.
Peut-etre. J'ai toujours trouve Dieu du cote des plus forts.
M. Clemenceau did not pause, meanwhile, from his journalistic labours,
and he continued to offer to the public of Paris successive selections
from the mass of his productions. On each of these occasions a preface,
composed with more than usual care, gave the keynote to the series of
essays, or rather suggested a tone of mind in which the reader would do
well to study them. In the introduction to the volume of 1900, called
_Au Fil des Jours_, the author returned to his favourite theme, the
struggle against the universally destructive forces of Nature. The life
of man is concentrated on resistance to the persistent attacks upon it
made by an army of inimical forces. The pride of existence is humbled by
the inevitable fatality which governs the fortunes of the Olympian gods
themselves. And it is useless to appeal, with the sentimental
pantheists, to the beneficence of Nature, for Nature is the most
relentless, the most indomitable of our enemies. In that extraordinary
little tragedy of Victor Hugo, _Mangeront-ils_, the vain appeal is made:
Est-ce pas,
Nature, que tu hais les semeurs de trepas,
Qui dans l'air frappent l'aigle et sur l'eau la sarcelle,
Et font partout saigner la vie universelle?
With the clairvoyance of the biologist, M. Clemenceau divines the vanity
of these remonstrances, and from the terrible cruelty of Nature he sees
no relief save in vigorous action. "Toute ame haute veut etre de la
melee." The most troublous epochs are battles for the ideal, even at
their worst moments. The only way to resist the destructive fatality of
Nature is to strive for an amelioration of the lot of the human race. In
all this, the texture of which is occasionally a little stretched when
it is made to cover newspaper articles on the lighting of Paris or a
show of prize pigeons, M. Clemenceau displays his eager wish to
subordinate all his writing to a set of philosophical ideas. He has
always held that the general impulses on which our daily existence
depends reach us through the channels of thought. He is, therefore, a
philosopher by determination, and he bases his own intellectual system
on Pasteur and Spencer, on Darwin and J. S. Mill, on Taine and Renan. I
have already spoken of the immense influence evidently exercised on
Clemenceau by Renan's early and least ripe work _L'Avenir de la
Science_. No doubt it was the reading of that remarkable book which led
Clemenceau, already biassed in favour of materialism, to transfer to
science all the passion which an earlier generation, and since his
middle age a later generation, gave to religion. It must be understood
that he does not belong in habit of mind or intellectual aspiration to
the characteristic French tradition of to-day.
The great merit of M. Clemenceau, in the agitated years when he wielded
a pen that was like a rapier, consisted in his fearless and disdainful
audacity. He fought in literature exactly as he has always fought in
politics, with the air of one who had no wish to conciliate his
opponent, but always to browbeat him, to crush him by the weight of his
argument, and then run him through the body with his irony. When we turn
over the pages of his books, which suffer an inevitable loss from the
fugitive nature of the themes on which they mainly expatiate, we are
astounded at the ceaseless agility of the lucid, restless brain of the
man. He is an acrobat, incessantly flinging himself with aerial
lightness into some new impossible position. An article a day for
twenty-five years--what an expenditure of vital force that seems to sum
up; and yet to-day, at the age of seventy-eight, the indefatigable brain
and body seem as elastic as ever! The fullness of the material in M.
Clemenceau's articles has always been a matter of amazement to those who
know how much clever journalism is of the kind Francisque Sarcey
described when he said, "You may turn the tap as much as you please; if
the cistern is empty, nothing but wind comes out!" But M. Clemenceau
seemed always full, and copious as was the output, the reader had always
the impression that there was much more behind.
We may regret that while the great politician was chiefly engaged in
writing, namely between 1893 and 1903, he was obliged by circumstances
to expend so much of his experience and his condition upon occasional
issues. In turning over his pages, we must not forget that he wrote, not
in the calm retirement of a study, but out in the street, in the midst
of the battle and heat of the day. His insatiable appetite for action
drove him forth into the madding crowd. There has always been something
encyclopaedic about his passion for knowledge, for practical acquaintance
with the actual practice of life. He has cultivated a genius for
observation, and his feverish career has been spent in pursuing
knowledge day by day, without giving himself time to arrange the
trophies of his pursuit. He has published no systematic scheme of his
philosophy, but has left us to gather it as well as we may from his
prefaces, and most of all from _Le Grand Pan_. As an author, we may sum
him up as the latest, and in some respects the most vigorous and agile,
of the disciples of the Encyclopaedists. Like them, through a long and
breathless career, he has ceaselessly striven to struggle upward into
the light of knowledge.
1919.
A VISIT TO THE FRIENDS OF IBSEN
In the summer of 1872 I received special leave from the Principal
Librarian of the British Museum to visit Denmark and Norway for the
purpose of reporting on the state of current literature in those
countries. Of my Danish experiences I have given an account in my book
called _Two Visits to Denmark_ (Smith, Elder & Co., 1911); but hitherto
I have not published any of my Norwegian adventures. I am led to do so
now, in consequence of a letter which I have just received from Rektor
Frederik Ording, of Holmestrand, who is engaged on a biographical study
of "Henrik Ibsen's Ungdomsvenner," and who tells me that it has become
almost impossible to obtain information about the particular group of
men of letters whom I conversed with more than forty-five years ago.
They are all long since dead, and no one survives who recollects them in
their prime. No one--so it appears--but me! The fact is a solemnizing
one. I feel like the Moses of the poet:
Je vivrai donc toujours puissant et solitaire?
Laissez-moi m'endormir du sommeil de la terre;
but before I am allowed by Norway to do that, it seems that I am called
upon to disgorge my recollections. They are, I am afraid, though founded
on a full journal, rather slight.