and in all countries: they make themselves felt even in aristocratic
States where there is the endeavor to maintain castes hermetically
sealed one against the other. But nowhere are they more electric than in
democracies which preserve no sanitary barrier between the elect and the
mob. The elect are contaminated at once whatever they do to fight
against it. In spite of their pride and intelligence they cannot resist
the contagion; for the elect are much weaker than they think.
Intelligence is a little island fretted by the tides of humanity,
crumbling away and at last engulfed. It only emerges again on the ebb of
the tide.--One wonders at the self-denial of the French privileged
classes when on the night of August 4 they abdicated their rights. Most
wonderful of all, no doubt, is the fact that they could not do
otherwise. I fancy a good many of them when they returned home must have
said to themselves: "What have I done? I must have been drunk...." A
splendid drunkenness! Blessed be wine and the vine that gives it forth!
It was not the privileged classes of old France who planted the vine
whose blood brought them to drunkenness. The wine was extracted, they
had only to drink it. He who drank must lose his wits. Even those who
did not drink turned dizzy only from the smell of the vat that caught
them as they passed. The vintages of the Revolution!... Hidden away in
the family vaults there are left only a few empty bottles of the wine of
'89: but our grandchildren's children will remember that their
great-grandfathers had their heads turned by it.
It was a sourer wine but a wine no less strong that was mounting to the
heads of the comfortable young people of Olivier's generation. They were
offering up their class as a sacrifice to the new God, _Deo
ignoto_:--the people.
* * * * *
To tell the truth, they were not all equally sincere. Many of them were
only able to see in the movement an opportunity of rising above their
class by affecting to despise it. For the majority it was an
intellectual pastime, an oratorical enthusiasm which they never took
altogether seriously. There is a certain pleasure in believing that you
believe in a cause, that you are fighting, or will fight, for it,--or
at least could fight. There is a by no means negligible satisfaction in the
thought that you are risking something. Theatrical emotions.
They are quite innocent so long as you surrender to them simply without
any admixture of interested motive.--But there were men of a more
worldly type who only played the game of set purpose: the popular
movement was to them only a road to success. Like the Norse pirates,
they made use of the rising tide to carry their ships up into the land:
they aimed at reaching the innermost point of the great estuaries so as
to be left snugly ensconced in the conquered cities when the sea fell
back once more. The channel was narrow and the tide was capricious:
great skill was needed. But two or three generations of demagogy have
created a race of corsairs who know every trick and secret of the trade.
They rushed boldly in with never even so much as a glance back at those
who foundered on the way.
This piratical rabble is made up of all parties: thank Heaven, no party
is responsible for it. But the disgust with which such adventurers had
inspired the sincere and all men of conviction had led some of them to
despair of their class. Olivier came in contact with rich young men of
culture who felt very strongly that the comfortable classes were
moribund and that they themselves were useless. He was only too much
inclined to sympathize with them. They had begun by believing in the
reformation of the people by the elect, they had founded Popular
Universities, and taken no account of the time and money spent upon
them, and now they were forced to admit the futility of their efforts:
their hopes had been pitched too high, their discouragement sank too
low. The people had either not responded to their appeal or had run away
from it. When the people did come, they understood everything all wrong,
and only assimilated the vices and absurdities of the culture of the
superior classes. And in the end more than one scurvy knave had stolen
into the ranks of the burgess apostles, and discredited them by
exploiting both people and apostles at the same time. Then it seemed to
honest men that the middle-class was doomed, that it could only infect
the people who, at all costs, must break free and go their way alone. So
they were left cut off from all possibility of action, save to predict
and foresee a movement which would be made without and against
themselves. Some of them found in this the joy of renunciation, the joy
of deep disinterested human sympathy feeding upon itself and the
sacrifice of itself. To love, to give self! Youth is so richly endowed
that it can afford to do without repayment: youth has no fear of being
left despoiled. And it can do without everything save the art of
loving.--Others again found in it a pleasurable rational satisfaction, a
sort of imperious logic: they sacrificed themselves not to men so much
as to ideas. These were the bolder spirits. They took a proud delight in
deducing the fated end of their class from their reasoned arguments. It
would have hurt them more to see their predictions falsified than to be
crushed beneath the weight of circumstance. In their intellectual
intoxication they cried aloud to those outside: "Harder! Strike harder!
Let there be nothing left of us!"--They had become the theorists of
violence.
Of the violence of others. For, as usual, these apostles of brute force
were almost always refined and weakly people. Many of them were
officials of the State which they talked of destroying, industrious,
conscientious, and orderly officials.
Their theoretical violence was the throwback from their weakness, their
bitterness, and the suppression of their vitality. But above all it was
an indication of the storms brewing all around them. Theorists are like
meteorologists: they state in scientific terms not what the weather will
be, but what the weather is. They are weathercocks pointing to the
quarter whence the wind blows. When they turn they are never far from
believing that they are turning the wind.
The wind had turned.
Ideas are quickly used up in a democracy, and the more quickly they are
propagated, the more quickly are they worn out. There are any number of
Republicans in France who in less than fifty years have grown disgusted
with the Republic, with Universal Suffrage, with all the manifestations
of liberty won with such blind intoxication! After the fetish worship of
numbers, after the gaping optimism which had believed in the sanctity of
the majority and had looked to it for the progress of humanity, there
came the wind of brute force: the inability of the majority to govern
themselves, their venality, their corruption, their base and fearful
hatred of all superiority, their oppressive cowardice, raised the spirit
of revolt: the minorities of energy--every kind of minority--appealed
from the majority to force. A queer, yet inevitable alliance was brought
about between the royalists of the _Action Française_ and the
syndicalists of the C. G. T. Balzac speaks somewhere of the men of his
time who _"though aristocrats by inclination, yet became Republicans
in spite, of themselves, only to find many inferiors among their
equals."_--A scant sort of pleasure. Those who are inferior must be
made to accept themselves as such: and to bring that about there is
nothing to be done but to create an authority which shall impose the
supremacy of the elect--of either class, working or burgess--upon the
oppressive majority. Our young intellectuals, being proud and of the
better class, became royalists or revolutionaries out of injured vanity
and hatred of democratic equality. And the disinterested theorists, the
philosophers of brute force, like good little weathercocks, reared their
heads above them and were the oriflammes of the storm.
Last of all there was the herd of literary men in search of
inspiration--men who could write and yet knew not what to write: like
the Greeks at Aulis, they were becalmed and could make no progress, and
sat impatiently waiting for a kindly wind from any quarter to come and
belly out their sails.--There were famous men among them, men who had
been wrenched away from their stylistic labors and plunged into public
meetings by the Dreyfus affair. An example which had found only too many
followers for the liking of those who had set it. There was now a mob of
writing men all engrossed in politics, and claiming to control the
affairs of the State. On the slightest excuse they would form societies,
issue manifestoes, save the Capitol. After the intellectuals of the
advance guard came the intellectuals of the rear: they were much of a
muchness. Each of the two parties regarded the other as intellectual and
themselves as intelligent. Those who had the luck to have in their veins
a few drops of the blood of the people bragged about it: they dipped
their pens into it, wrote with it.--They were all malcontents of the
burgess class, and were striving to recapture the authority which that
class had irreparably lost through its selfishness. Only in rare
instances were these apostles known to keep up their apostolic zeal for
any length of time. In the beginning the cause meant a certain amount of
success to them, success which in all probability was in no wise due to
their oratorical gifts. It gave them a delicious flattery for their
vanity. Thereafter they went on with less success and a certain secret
fear of being rather ridiculous. In the long-run the last feeling was
apt to dominate the rest, being increased by the fatigue of playing a
difficult part for men of their distinguished tastes and innate
skepticism. But they waited upon the favor of the wind and of their
escort before they could withdraw. For they were held captive both by
wind and escort. These latter-day Voltaires and Joseph de Maistres,
beneath their boldness in speech and writing, concealed a dread
uncertainty, feeling the ground, being fearful of compromising
themselves with the young men, and striving hard to please them and to
be younger than the young. They were revolutionaries or
counter-revolutionaries merely as a matter of literature, and in the end
they resigned themselves to following the literary fashion which they
themselves had helped to create.
The oddest of all the types with which Olivier came in contact in the
small burgess advance guard of the Revolution was the revolutionary who
was so from timidity.
The specimen presented for his immediate observation was named Pierre
Canet. He was brought up in a rich, middle-class, and conservative
family, hermetically sealed against any new idea: they were magistrates
and officials who had distinguished themselves by crabbing authority or
being dismissed: thick-witted citizens of the Marais who flirted with
the Church and thought little, but thought that little well. He had
married, for want of anything better to do, a woman with an aristocratic
name, who had no great capacity for thought, but did her thinking no
less well than he. The bigoted, narrow, and retrograde society in which
he lived, a society which was perpetually chewing the cud of its own
conceit and bitterness, had finally exasperated him,--the more so as his
wife was ugly and a bore. He was fairly intelligent and open-minded, and
liberal in aspiration, without knowing at all clearly in what liberalism
consisted: there was no likelihood of his discovering the meaning of
liberty in his immediate surroundings. The only thing he knew for
certain was that liberty did not exist there: and he fancied that he had
only to leave to find it. On his first move outwards he was lucky enough
to fall in with certain old college friends, some of whom had been
smitten with syndicalistic ideas. He was even more at sea in their
company than in the society which he had just quitted: but he would not
admit it: he had to live somewhere: and he was unable to find people of
his own cast of thought (that is to say, people of no cast of thought
whatever), though, God knows, the species is by no means rare in France!
But they are ashamed of themselves: they hide themselves, or they take
on the hue of one of the fashionable political colors, if not of
several, all at once. Besides, he was under the influence of his
friends.
As always happens, he had particularly attached himself to the very man
who was most different from himself. This Frenchman, French, burgess and
provincial to his very soul, had become the _fidus Achates_ of a
young Jewish doctor named Manousse Heimann, a Russian refugee, who, like
so many of his fellow-countrymen, had the twofold gift of settling at
once among strangers and making himself at home, and of being so much at
his ease in any sort of revolution as to rouse wonder as to what it was
that most interested him in it: the game or the cause. His experiences
and the experiences of others were a source of entertainment to him. He
was a sincere revolutionary, and his scientific habit of mind made him
regard the revolutionaries and himself as a kind of madmen. His excited
dilettantism and his extreme instability of mind made him seek the
company of men the most opposite. He had acquaintances among those in
authority and even among the police: he was perpetually prying and
spying with that morbid and dangerous curiosity which makes so many
Russian revolutionaries seem to be playing a double game, and sometimes
reduces the appearance to reality. It is not treachery so much as
versatility, and it is thoroughly disinterested. There are so many men
of action to whom action is a theater into which they bring their
talents as comedians, quite honestly prepared at any moment to change
their part! Manousse was as faithful to the revolutionary part as it was
possible for him to be: it was the character which was most in accord
with his natural anarchy, and his delight in demolishing the laws of the
countries through which he passed. But yet, in spite of everything, it
was only a part. It was always impossible to know how much was true and
how much invented in what he said, and even he himself was never very
sure. He was intelligent and skeptical, endowed with the psychological
subtlety of his twofold nationality, could discern quite marvelously the
weaknesses of others, and his own, and was extremely skilful in playing
upon them, so that he had no difficulty in gaining an ascendancy over
Canet. It amused him to drag this Sancho Panza into Quixotic pranks. He
made no scruple about using him, disposing of his will, his time, his
money,--not for his own benefit, (he needed none, though no one knew how
or in what way he lived),--but in the most compromising demonstrations
of the cause. Canet submitted to it all: he tried to persuade himself
that he thought like Manousse. He knew perfectly well that this was not
the case: such ideas scared him: they were shocking to his common sense.
And he had no love for the people. And, in addition, he had no courage.
This big, bulky, corpulent young man, with his clean-shaven pinkish face,
his short breathing, his pleasant, pompous, and rather childish way of
speaking, with a chest like the Farnese Hercules, (he was a fair hand at
boxing and singlestick), was the most timid of men. If he took a certain
pride in being taken for a man of a subversive temper by his own people,
in his heart of hearts he used to tremble at the boldness of his
friends. No doubt the little thrill they gave him was by no means
disagreeable as long as it was only in fun. But their fun was becoming
dangerous. His fervent friends were growing aggressive, their hardy
pretensions were increasing: they alarmed Canet's fundamental egoism,
his deeply rooted sense of propriety, his middle-class pusillanimity. He
dared not ask: "Where are you taking me to?" But, under his breath, he
fretted and fumed at the recklessness of these young men who seemed to
love nothing so much as breaking their necks, and never to give a
thought as to whether they were not at the same time running a risk of
breaking other people's.--What was it impelled him to follow them? Was
he not free to break with them? He had not the courage. He was afraid of
being left alone, like a child who gets left behind and begins to
whimper. He was like so many men: they have no opinions, except in so
far as they disapprove of all enthusiastic opinion: but if a man is to
be independent he must stand alone, and how many men are there who are
capable of that? How many men are there, even amongst the most clear
sighted, who will dare to break free of the bondage of certain
prejudices, certain postulates which cramp and fetter all the men of the
same generation? That would mean setting up a wall between themselves
and others. On the one hand, freedom in the wilderness, on the other,
mankind. They do not hesitate: they choose mankind, the herd. The herd
is evil smelling, but it gives warmth. Then those who have chosen
pretend to think what they do not in fact think. It is not very
difficult for them: they know so little what they think!... _"Know
thyself!"_... How could they, these men who have hardly a _Me_
to know? In every collective belief, religious or social, very rare are
the men who believe, because very rare are the men who are men. Faith is
an heroic force: its fire has kindled but a very few human torches, and
even these have often flickered. The apostles, the prophets, even Jesus
have doubted. The rest are only reflections,--save at certain hours when
their souls are dry and a few sparks falling from a great torch set
light to all the surface of the plain: then the fire dies down, and
nothing gleams but the glowing embers beneath the ashes. Not more than a
few hundred Christians really believe in Christ. The rest believe that
they believe, or else they only try to believe.
Many of these revolutionaries were like that. Our friend Canet tried
hard to believe that he was a revolutionary: he did believe it. And he
was scared at his own boldness.
All these comfortable people invoked divers principles: some followed
the bidding of their hearts, others that of their reason, others again
only their interests: some associated their way of thinking with the
Gospel, others with M. Bergson, others, again, with Karl Marx, with
Proudhon, with Joseph de Maistre. with Nietzsche, or with M. Sorel.
There were men who were revolutionaries to be in the fashion, some who
were so out of snobbishness, and some from shyness: some from hatred,
others from love: some from a need of active, hot-headed heroism: and
some in sheer slavishness, from the sheeplike quality of their minds.
But all, without knowing it, were at the mercy of the wind. All were no
more than those whirling clouds of dust which are to be seen like smoke
in the far distance on the white roads in the country, clouds of dust
foretelling the coming of the storm.
Olivier and Christophe watched the wind coming. Both of them had strong
eyes. But they used them in different ways. Olivier, whose clear gaze,
in spite of himself, pierced to the very inmost thoughts of men, was
saddened by their mediocrity: but he saw the hidden force that sustained
them: he was most struck by the tragic aspect of things. Christophe was
more sensible of their comic aspect. Men interested him, ideas not at
all. He affected a contemptuous indifference towards them. He laughed at
Socialistic Utopias. In a spirit of contradiction and out of instinctive
reaction against the morbid humanitarianism which was the order of the
day, he appeared to be more selfish than he was: he was a self-made man,
a sturdy upstart, proud of his strength of body and will, and he was a
little too apt to regard all those who had not his force as shirkers. In
poverty and alone he had been able to win through: let others do the
same! Why all this talk of a social question? What question? Poverty?
"I know all about that," he would say. "My father, my mother, I myself,
we have been through it. It's only a matter of getting out of it."
"Not everybody can," Olivier would reply. "What about the sick and the
unlucky?"
"One must help them, that's all. But that is a very different thing from
setting them on a pinnacle, as people are doing nowadays. Only a short
while ago people were asserting the odious doctrine of the rights of the
strongest man. Upon my word, I'm inclined to think that the rights of
the weakest are even more detestable: they're sapping the thought of
to-day, the weakest man is tyrannizing over the strong, and exploiting
them. It really looks as though it has become a merit to be diseased,
poor, unintelligent, broken,--and a vice to be strong, upstanding, happy
in fighting, and an aristocrat in brains and blood. And what is most
absurd of all is this, that the strong are the first to believe it....
It's a fine subject for a comedy, my dear Olivier!"
"I'd rather have people laugh at me than make other people weep."
"Good boy!" said Christophe. "But, good Lord, who ever said anything to
the contrary? When I see a hunchback, my back aches for him.... We're
playing the comedy, we won't write it."
He did not suffer himself to be bitten by the prevalent dreams of social
justice. His vulgar common sense told him and he believed that what had
been would be.
"But if anybody said that to you about art you'd be up in arms against
him."
"May be. Anyhow, I don't know about anything except art. Nor do you.
I've no faith in people who talk about things without knowing anything
about them."
Olivier's faith in such people was no greater. Both of them were
inclined to push their distrust a little too far: they had always held
aloof from politics. Olivier confessed, not without shame, that he could
not remember ever having used his rights as an elector: for the last ten
years he had not even entered his name at the _mairie_.
"Why," he asked, "should I take part in a comedy which I know to be
futile? Vote? For whom should I vote? I don't see any reason for
choosing between two candidates, both of whom are unknown to me, while I
have only too much reason to expect that, directly the election is over,
they will both be false to all their professions of faith. Keep an eye
on them? Remind them of their duty? It would take up the whole of my
life, with no result. I have neither time, nor strength, nor the
rhetorical weapons, nor sufficient lack of scruple, nor is my heart
steeled against all the disgust that action brings. Much better to keep
clear of it all. I am quite ready to submit to the evil. But at least I
won't subscribe to it."
But, in spite of his excessive clear-sightedness, Olivier, to whom the
ordinary routine of politics was repulsive, yet preserved a chimerical
hope in a revolution. He knew that it was chimerical: but he did not
discard it. It was a sort of racial mysticism in him. Not for nothing
does a man belong to the greatest destructive and constructive people of
the Western world, the people who destroy to construct and construct to
destroy,--the people who play with ideas and life, and are for ever
making a clean sweep so as to make a new and better beginning, and shed
their blood in pledge.
Christophe was endowed with no such hereditary Messianism. He was too
German to relish much the idea of a revolution. He thought that there
was no changing the world. Why all these theories, all these words, all
this futile uproar?
"I have no need," he would say, "to make a revolution--or long speeches
about revolution--in order to prove to my own satisfaction that I am
strong. I have no need, like these young men of yours, to overthrow the
State in order to restore a King or a Committee of Public Safety to
defend me. That's a queer way of proving your strength! I can defend
myself. I am not an anarchist: I love all necessary order and I revere
the laws which govern the universe. But I don't want an intermediary
between them and myself. My will knows how to command, and it knows also
how to submit. You've got the classics on the tip of your tongue. Why
don't you remember your Corneille: _'Myself alone, and that is
enough.'_ Your desire for a master is only a cloak for your weakness.
Force is like the light: only the blind can deny it. Be strong, calmly,
without all your theories, without any act of violence, and then, as
plants turn to the sun, so the souls of the weak will turn to you."