Of all countries, France remains the land in which it is possible to
tell the most truth. The nation of Montaigne and Moliere is always the
first to recognise and award the title of talent to lay bare the
shoulders of her community and use the scourge upon them. If at its
first appearance the strange and terrible revelations contained in the
work entitled _Biribi_ were met by official obstruction and attempted
suppression, the book has conquered them, and has been allowed to carry
the light of its torches into the dark places of military administration
and oppression. In Italy, as in Germany and Austria, it would have been
stopped by fine, exile, and seizure. In Russia it could never have been
issued at all. In England it would have been as costly to the author as
were his issues of Zola to the unhappy and martyrised Vizetelly. In
France alone its pictures of the most terrible facts pass unarrested, by
right of that literary liberty which the _esprit gaulois_ has always
awarded, however much government and law may have been alarmed.
It has been said that the accusations contained in the works of Georges
Darien are a _Retrissure a la France_, and as such should never have
been made public by a patriotic writer and a ci-devant soldier. But here
we merely meet again the hackneyed question whether the writer of talent
is bound by patriotism or any other scruple to withhold truth, or
whether he is not rather bound to disclose the truth as he believes it
to be at all costs, whether to himself or to others. It is not necessary
for me to say with which of these opinions I agree. The little which has
been done towards any true progress of the human mind has been done by
the expression of free thought, and by its fearless exposure of evils
protected by the crystallisation of time, usage, and prejudice. Over the
modern world which chatters of liberty, but does not anywhere possess
it, or even know actually what it means, there hang, in heavy and icy
weight, two ever-increasing despotisms: the scientific and the military.
Of the former it is not necessary to treat in these pages; of the latter
the yearly increase throughout Europe, ever since the war of 1870-71,
must alarm every unbiassed thinker, bringing with it, as it does, the
impoverishment of the people, the curse of youth and manhood, the
endless strain of a fiscal burden, so enormous that every class groans
under it, and the perpetual and diseased anxiety in which every nation
lives, suspecting its neighbours, and turn by turn affronting them
insolently and cringing to them obsequiously, according as it is made to
feel the power of its own strength or the weakness of its own
inferiority. Every syllable printed which tends to show the reality of
military tyranny at this moment is valuable, and should be welcomed,
however odious it may be to military authority and government; and
especially valuable when it comes from one who has passed through the
scenes which he depicts, and draws, not from imagination, but from
memory.
Georges Darien has been the man whom he describes; treated as the worst
of criminals, though wholly guiltless of breaking any criminal law.
Georges Darien in using the first person, both in _Biribi_ and in _Bas
les Coeurs_, is but writing portions of his own autobiography; he was
a boy of ten, like his young hero in the latter book, and a volunteer
like the gunner of the second class in the 41st battery of artillery in
the former work, and to this fact there are owing that directness,
simplicity, and virility which are the distinguishing characteristics of
both these volumes. They are alive with life. The reader may resent
them, detest them, dread them and their revelations; but he must be
impressed by them; he must receive from their perusal that thrill which
can only come from reality. They are saturated with the tears of blood
of a strong man who feels his own impotency to rouse his generation and
to change humanity; who knows that his voice is the voice of the prophet
crying in the wilderness, and echoing over a desert of dead bones and
drifting sand. There are few greater pangs than to see the truth and
know it, and feel that the salvation of others lies in it, and to tell
it in vain to deaf ears, and offer its water of life to lips closed by
pride and cruelty and folly.
The name _Biribi_ sounds too light for such a subject; it sounds like a
joke; but the joke is grim indeed, grim as the dance of skeletons round
a gallows-tree. In actual fact _Biribi_ is the nickname given by French
and native soldiers in Algeria to the punishment-battalions of the
Franco-African army; a slangy _petit nom_ given in jest to one of the
most awful hells that earth holds. The tortures which are suffered in
every army, in the best army, and in the time of greatest peace, can
scarcely ever be over-rated; and they are not the less, but the more
terrible, because almost always endured in silence and ignored by
authority. Now and then a voice is raised from the ranks, occasionally,
very rarely, some punishment, or injustice, more brutal than usual,
comes to light, and rouses public indignation. _Biribi_ is one of those
rare utterances rising from the sealed pits, in which uncared-for and
unpitied lives are beaten into senseless pulp of bruised and bleeding
flesh.
There is great originality in the literary talent of Georges Darien. His
style is all his own. His manner of relation resembles no other. He has
nothing of the modern school, except its hopelessness; he is strong,
intense, virile, rough; he seeks no ornament, he strives for no effect;
he writes as he feels, boldly, passionately, with that eloquence which
is the offspring of simplicity and of veracity, and that potency which
comes from wide knowledge of literatures and of mankind. Belonging by
birth to the _bourgeoisie_, son of a Catholic father and a Calvinist
mother, his early years were embittered by religious strife. He has
later on travelled much; he has known the lowest classes and the hardest
ways of life; he is still young in years, but old in the most varied
experiences; and he has, certainly, uncommon powers, which have as yet
not been duly recognised, for he offends the prejudices and vested
interests of his generation, and even in France prejudice and vested
interests are strong and close many channels.
He disdains, moreover, to appeal to that large class of readers who
require a book, cast in the form of a story, to possess a story. Like
the famous knife-grinder he has none to tell, if by story we understand,
as most people do, a love-tale in some one of its forms. _Biribi_ is the
stern and terrible narrative of the career of an _insoumis_; _Bas les
Coeurs_ is the simple, domestic record of a boy's recollections of the
_Annee Terrible_. In neither is there any hint or fragment of romance.
This fact at once limits his public to the restricted number who
appreciate the skill which can afford to dispense with the elements of
romance, and to rely solely on its own power of description and analysis
of character. In this respect for literary excellence and harmonious
treatment I should place _Bas les Coeurs_ before _Biribi_. The
relation of events at Versailles, before and after the Prussian
occupation, as seen from the point of view of a family of the town, is
told with such perfect naturalness that the reader follows it with the
deepest interest, and remains fascinated by the admirable manner in
which the most tragic and momentous events of history are reflected in
the mind of a boy of ten years old.
The tranquillity and precision of his use of the etching-needle, with
which he describes the daily life and street scenes in Versailles,
contrasts curiously with the hot colour and broad charcoal marks with
which he portrays the tortures of the punishment-battalions in Africa.
This testifies to the flexibility of Darien's talent, since nothing can
be more different to the impetuous and turgid violence of _Biribi_ than
the restrained and delicate irony of _Bas les Coeurs_: the one is a
battle-piece of Vereschagin, crowded with begrimed and panting figures,
in which the dumb canvas seems to shriek with war and smoke with blood;
the other is a cabinet picture of Meissonier's, finished, polished,
small in measurement, illimitable in suggestion, fine as the point of a
needle, cruel as the fork of a snake's tongue. For, undoubtedly, Darien
is cruel; but he is cruel from the impotent rage which is in him, the
powerless sorrow and scorn which his country, his generation, his fellow
mortals, his vision of things as they are, awaken in his memory and in
his desires.
The apathy and sheepishness of the general multitude fill him with
wrath; he longs to pull down on the world its temple, like Samson,
regardless of the fall of the column and the roof on himself. No one who
loves received doctrines, crystallised commonplaces, undisputed formulae,
should open these books. Such persons will only see in them blasphemies
against their honoured gods; for this author is not suited to the smug
self-complacency of Philistinism, 'sanding its sugar and praising its
Lord.'
To represent war as it is done in the terrible pages of _La Debacle_, or
in the heartrending sketch of the _Attaque du Moulin_, is not difficult
to the novelist who has power and knowledge. To represent the effects of
war on entirely uninteresting and commonplace persons, and yet keep the
attention of the reader riveted to what is passing in one ordinary
household during a frightful national calamity, is a far more difficult
feat; especially when all the sympathies of the reader which would be
easily roused by noble sentiments in the sufferers are voluntarily
alienated, and the only motives and feelings depicted are sordid,
egotistic, and miserable, except in the young narrator, whose childish
intelligence is so slowly awakened to the baseness of those around him,
but whose naturally honest and patriotic little soul burns and thrills
with shame when once it becomes conscious of the meanness and cowardice
of his family and of his neighbours. The highest literary faculty seems
to me to show itself in the completeness with which the childlikeness of
the young observer is retained, the vague apprehension, the slowly
awakening comprehension, the gradually dawning horror with which the
events around him impress themselves on a mind remaining instinctively
loyal and just in the midst of corrupt and unworthy examples.