discussions, he was much less detached from it all than he wished to
appear. He was suffering, as an artist, from the social unrest. In his
momentary dearth of strong passion he would sometimes pause to look
around and wonder for what people he was writing. Then he would see the
melancholy patrons of contemporary art, the weary creatures of the
upper-classes, the dilettante men and women of the burgess-class, and he
would think:
"What profits it to work for such people as these?" In truth there was
no lack of men of refinement and culture, men sensitive to skill and
craft, men even who were not incapable of appreciating the novelty
or--(it is all the same)--the archaism of fine feeling. But they were
bored, too intellectual, not sufficiently alive to believe in the
reality of art: they were only interested in tricks,--tricks of sound,
or juggling with ideas; most of them were distraught by other worldly
interests, accustomed to scattering their attention over their
multifarious occupations, none of which was "necessary." It was almost
impossible for them to pierce the outer covering of art, to feel its
heart deep down: art was not flesh and blood to them; it was literature.
Their critics built up their impotence to issue from dilettantism into a
theory, an intolerant theory. When it happened that a few here and there
were vibrant enough to respond to the voice of art, they were not strong
enough to bear it, and were left disgruntled and nerve-ridden for life.
They were sick men or dead. What could art do in such a hospital?--And
yet in modern society he was unable to do without these cripples: for
they had money, and they ruled the Press: they only could assure an
artist the means of living. So then he must submit to such humiliation:
an intimate and sorrowful art, music in which is told the secret of the
artist's inmost life, offered up as an amusement--or rather as a
palliative of boredom, or as another sort of boredom--in the theaters or
in fashionable drawing-rooms, to an audience of snobs and worn-out
intellectuals.
Christophe was seeking the real public, the public which believes in the
emotions of art as in those of life, and feels them with a virgin soul.
And he was vaguely attracted by the new promised world--the people. The
memories of his childhood, Gottfried and the poor, who had revealed to
him the living depths of art, or had shared with him the sacred bread of
music, made him inclined to believe that his real friends were to be
found among such people. Like many another young man of a generous heart
and simple faith, he cherished great plans for a popular art, concerts,
and a theater for the people, which he would have been hard put to it to
define. He thought that a revolution might make it possible to bring
about a great artistic renascence, and he pretended that he had no other
interest in the social movement. But he was hoodwinking himself: he was
much too alive not to be attracted and drawn onward by the sight of the
most living activity of the time.
In all that he saw he was least of all interested in the middle-class
theorists. The fruit borne by such trees is too often sapless: all the
juices of life are wasted in ideas. Christophe did not distinguish
between one idea and another. He had no preference even for ideas which
were his own when he came upon them congealed in systems. With
good-humored contempt he held aloof from the theorists of force as from
the theorists of weakness. In every comedy the one ungrateful part is
that of the _raisonneur_. The public prefers not only the
sympathetic characters to him, but the unsympathetic characters also.
Christophe was like the public in that. The _raisonneurs_ of the
social question seemed tiresome to him. But he amused himself by
watching the rest, the simple, the men of conviction, those who believed
and those who wanted to believe, those who were tricked and those who
wanted to be tricked, not to mention the buccaneers who plied their
predatory trade, and the sheep who were made to be fleeced. His sympathy
was indulgent towards the pathetically absurd little people like fat
Canet. Their mediocrity was not offensive to him as it was to Olivier.
He watched them all with affectionate and mocking interest: he believed
that he was outside the piece they were playing: and he did not see that
little by little he was being drawn into it. He thought only of being a
spectator watching the wind rush by. But already the wind had caught
him, and was dragging him along into its whirling cloud of dust.
* * * * *
The social drama was twofold. The piece played by the intellectuals was
a comedy within a comedy; the people hardly heeded it. The real drama
was that of the people. It was not easy to follow it: the people
themselves did not always know where they were in it. It was all
unexpected, unforeseen.
It was not only that there was much more talk in it than action. Every
Frenchman, be he burgess or of the people, is as great an eater of speeches
as he is of bread. But all men do not eat the same sort of
bread. There is the speech of luxury for delicate palates, and the more
nourishing sort of speech for hungry gullets. If the words are the same,
they are not kneaded into the same shape: taste, smell, meaning, all are
different.
The first time Olivier attended a popular meeting and tasted of the fare
he lost his appetite: his gorge rose at it, and he could not swallow. He
was disgusted by the platitudinous quality of thought, the drab and
uncouth clumsiness of expression, the vague generalizations, the
childish logic, the ill-mixed mayonnaise of abstractions and
disconnected facts. The impropriety and looseness of the language were
not compensated by the raciness and vigor of the vulgar tongue. The
whole thing was compounded of a newspaper vocabulary, stale tags picked
up from the reach-me-downs of middle-class rhetoric. Olivier was
particularly amazed at the lack of simplicity. He forgot that literary
simplicity is not natural, but acquired: it is a thing achieved by the
people of the elect. Dwellers in towns cannot be simple: they are rather
always on the lookout for far-fetched expressions.
Olivier did not understand the effect such turgid phrases might have on
their audience. He had not the key to their meaning. We call foreign the
languages of other races, and it never occurs to us that there are
almost as many languages in our nation as there are social grades. It is
only for a limited few that words retain their traditional and age-old
meaning: for the rest they represent nothing more than their own
experience and that of the group to which they belong. Many of such
words, which are dead for the select few and despised by them, are like
an empty house, wherein, as soon as the few are gone, new energy and
quivering passion take up their abode. If you wish to know the master of
the house, go into it.
That Christophe did.
* * * * *
He had been brought into touch with the working-classes by a neighbor of
his who was employed on the State Railways. He was a little man of
forty-five, prematurely old, with a pathetically bald head, deep-sunken
eyes, hollow cheeks, a prominent nose, fleshy and aquiline, a clever
mouth, and malformed ears with twisted lobes: the marks of degeneracy.
His name was Alcide Gautier. He was not of the people, but of the lower
middle-class.
He came of a good family who had spent all they had on the education of
their only son, but, for want of means, had been unable to let him go
through with it. As a very young man he had obtained one of those
Government posts which seem to the lower middle-class a very heaven, and
are in reality death,--living death.--Once he had gone into it, it had
been impossible for him to escape. He had committed the offense--(for it
is an offense in modern society)--of marrying for love a pretty
workgirl, whose innate vulgarity had only increased with time. She gave
him three children and he had to earn a living for them. This man, who
was intelligent and longed with all his might to finish his education,
was cramped and fettered by poverty. He was conscious of latent powers
in himself which were stifled by the difficulties of his existence: he
could not take any decisive step. He was never alone. He was a
bookkeeping clerk and had to spend his days over purely mechanical work
in a room which he had to share with several of his colleagues who were
vulgar chattering creatures: they were for ever talking of idiotic
things and avenged themselves for the absurdity of their existence by
slandering their chiefs and making fun of him and his intellectual point
of view which he had not been prudent enough to conceal from them. When
he returned home it was to find an evil-smelling charmless room, a noisy
common wife who did not understand him and regarded him as a humbug or a
fool. His children did not take after him in anything: they took after
their mother. Was it just that it should be so? Was it just? Nothing but
disappointment and suffering and perpetual poverty, and work that took
up his whole day from morning to night, and never the possibility of
snatching an hour for recreation, an hour's silence, all this had
brought him to a state of exhaustion and nervous
irritability.--Christophe, who had pursued his acquaintance with him,
was struck by the tragedy of his lot: an incomplete nature, lacking
sufficient culture and artistic taste, yet made for great things and
crushed by misfortune. Gautier clung to Christophe as a weak man
drowning grasps at the arm of a strong swimmer. He felt a mixture of
sympathy and envy for Christophe. He took him to popular meetings, and
showed him some of the leaders of the syndicalist party to which he
belonged for no other reason than his bitterness against society. For he
was an aristocrat gone wrong. It hurt him terribly to mix with the
people.
Christophe was much more democratic than he--the more so as nothing
forced him to be so--and enjoyed the meetings. The speeches amused him.
He did not share Olivier's feeling of repulsion: he was hardly at all
sensible of the absurdities of the language. In his eyes a windbag was
as good as any other man. He affected a sort of contempt for eloquence
in general. But though he took no particular pains to understand their
rhetoric, he did feel the music which came through the man who was
speaking and the men who were listening. The power of the speaker was
raised to the hundredth degree by the echo thrown back from hie hearers.
At first Christophe only took stock of the speakers, and he was
interested enough to make the acquaintance of some of them.
The man who had the most influence on the crowd was Casimir Joussier,--a
little, pale, dark man, between thirty and thirty-five, with a Mongolian
cast of countenance, thin, puny, with cold burning eyes, scant hair, and
a pointed beard. His power lay not so much in his gesture, which was
poor, stilted, and rarely in harmony with the, words,--not so much in
his speech, which was raucous and sibilant, with marked pauses for
breathing,--as in his personality and the emphatic assurance and force
of will which emanated from it. He never seemed to admit the possibility
of any one thinking differently from himself: and as what he thought was
what his audience wanted to think they had no difficulty in
understanding one another. He would go on saying thrice, four times, ten
times, the things they expected him to say: he never stopped hammering
the same nail with a tenacious fury: and his audience, following his
example, would hammer, hammer, hammer, until the nail was buried deep in
the flesh.--Added to this personal ascendancy was the confidence
inspired by his past life, the _prestige_ of many terms in prison,
largely deserved by his violent writings. He breathed out an indomitable
energy: but for the seeing eye there was revealed beneath it all an
accumulated fund of weariness, disgust with so much continual effort,
anger against fate. He was one of those men who every day spend more
than their income of vitality. From his childhood on he had been ground
down by work and poverty. He had plied all sorts of trades: journeyman
glass-blower, plumber, printer: his health was ruined: he was a prey to
consumption, which plunged him into fits of bitter discouragement and
dumb despair of the cause and of himself: at other times it would raise
him up to a pitch of excitement. He was a mixture of calculated and
morbid violence, of policy and recklessness. He was educated up to a
certain point: he had a good knowledge of many things, science,
sociology, and his various trades: he had a very poor knowledge of many
others: and he was just as cocksure with both: he had Utopian notions,
just ideas, ignorance in many directions, a practical mind, many
prejudices, experience, and suspicion and hatred of burgess society.
That did not prevent his welcoming Christophe. His pride was tickled by
being sought out by a well-known artist. He was of the race of leaders,
and, whatever he did, he was brusque with ordinary workmen. Although in
all good faith he desired perfect equality, he found it easier to
realize with those above than with those beneath him.
Christophe came across other leaders of the working-class movement.
There was no great sympathy between them. If the common fight--with
difficulty--produced unity of action, it was very far from creating
unity of feeling. It was easy to see the external and purely transitory
reality to which the distinction between the classes corresponded. The
old antagonisms were only postponed and marked: but they continued to
exist. In the movement were to be found men of the north and men of the
south with their fundamental scorn of each other. The trades were
jealous of each other's wages, and watched each other with an
undisguised feeling of superiority to all others in each. But the great
difference lay--and always will lie--in temperament. Foxes and wolves
and horned beasts, beasts with sharp teeth, and beasts with four
stomachs, beasts that are made to eat, and beasts that are made to be
eaten, all sniffed at each other as they passed in the herd that had been
drawn together by the accident of class and common interest: and
they recognized each other: and they bristled.
Christophe sometimes had his meals at a little creamery and restaurant
kept by a former colleague of Gautier's, one Simon, a railway clerk who
had been dismissed for taking part in a strike. The shop was frequented
by syndicalists. There were five or six of them who used to sit in a
room at the back, looking on to an inclosed courtyard, narrow and
ill-lit, from which there arose the never-ceasing desperate song of two
caged canaries straining after the light. Joussier used to come with
his mistress, the fair Berthe, a large coquettish young woman, with a pale
face, and a purple cap, and merry, wandering eyes. She had under her
thumb a good-looking boy, Léopold Graillot, a journeyman mechanic, who
was clever and rather a _poseur_: he was the esthete of the
company. Although he called himself an anarchist, and was one of the
most violent opponents of the burgess-class, his soul was typical of
that class at its very worst. Every morning for years he had drunk in
the erotic and decadent news of the halfpenny literary papers. His
reading had given him a strongly addled brain. His mental subtlety in
imagining the pleasures of the senses was allied in him with an absolute
lack of physical delicacy, indifference to cleanliness, and the
comparative coarseness of his life. He had acquired a taste for an
occasional glass of such adulterated wine--the intellectual alcohol of
luxury, the unwholesome stimulants of unhealthy rich men. Being unable
to take these pleasures in the flesh, he inoculated his brain with them.
That means a bad tongue in the morning and weakness in the knees. But it
puts you on an equality with the rich. And you hate them.
Christophe could not bear him. He was more in sympathy with Sebastien
Coquard, an electrician, who, with Joussier, was the speaker with the
greatest following. He did not overburden himself with theories. He did
not always know where he was going. But he did go straight ahead. He was
very French. He was heavily built, about forty, with a big red face, a
round head, red hair, a flowing beard, a bull neck, and a bellowing
voice. Like Joussier, he was an excellent workman, but he loved drinking
and laughter. The sickly Joussier regarded his superabundant health with
the eyes of envy: and, though they were friends, there was always a
simmering secret hostility between them.
Amélie, the manageress of the creamery, a kind creature of forty-five,
who must have been pretty once, and still was, in spite of the wear of
time, used to sit with them, with some sewing in her hands, listening to
their talk with a jolly smile, moving her lips in time to their words:
every now and then she would drop a remark into the discussion, and she
would emphasize her words with a nod of her head as she worked. She had
a married daughter and two children of seven and ten--a little girl and
a boy--who used to do their home lessons at the corner of a sticky
table, putting out their tongues, and picking up scraps of conversations
which were not meant for their ears.
On more than one occasion Olivier tried to go with Christophe. But he
could not feel at ease with these people. When these working-men were
not tied down by strict factory hours or the insistent scream of a
hooter, they seemed to have an incredible amount of time to waste,
either after work, or between jobs, in loafing or idleness. Christophe,
being in one of those periods when the mind has completed one piece of
work and is waiting until a new piece of work presents itself, was in no
greater hurry than they were: and he liked sitting there with his elbows
on the table, smoking, drinking, and talking. But Olivier's respectable
burgess instincts were shocked, and so were his traditional habits of
mental discipline, and regular work, and scrupulous economy of time: and
he did not relish such a waste of so many precious hours. Besides that,
he was not good at talking or drinking. Above all there was his physical
distaste for it all, the secret antipathy which raises a physical
barrier between the different types of men, the hostility of the senses,
which stands in the way of the communion of their souls, the revolt of
the flesh against the heart. When Olivier was alone with Christophe he
would talk most feelingly about the duty of fraternizing with the
people: but when he found himself face to face with the people, he was
impotent to do anything, in spite of his good will. Christophe, on the
other hand, who laughed at his ideas, could, without the least effort,
meet any workman he chanced to come across in brotherhood. It really
hurt Olivier to find himself so cut off from these men. He tried to be
like them, to think like them, to speak like them. He could not do it.
His voice was dull, husky, had not the ring that was in theirs. When he
tried to catch some of their expressions the words would stick in his
throat or sound queer and strange. He watched himself; he was
embarrassed, and embarrassed them. He knew it. He knew that to them he
was a stranger and suspect, that none of them was in sympathy with him,
and then, when he was gone, everybody would sigh with relief: "Ouf!" As
he passed among them he would notice hard, icy glances, such hostile
glances as the working-classes, embittered by poverty, cast at any
comfortable burgess. Perhaps Christophe came in for some of it too: but
he never noticed it.
Of all the people in that place the only ones who showed any inclination
to be friendly with Olivier were Amélie's children. They were much more
attracted by their superior in station than disposed to hate him. The
little boy was fascinated by the burgess mode of thought: he was clever
enough to love it, though not clever enough to understand it: the little
girl, who was very pretty, had once been taken by Olivier to see Madame
Arnaud, and she was hypnotized by the comfort and ease of it all: she
was silently delighted to sit in the fine armchairs, and to feel the
beautiful clothes, and to be with lovely ladies: like the little
simpleton she was, she longed to escape from the people and soar upwards
to the paradise of riches and solid comfort. Olivier had no desire or
taste for the cultivation of these inclinations in her: and the simple
homage she paid to his class by no means consoled him for the silent
antipathy of her companions. Their ill-disposition towards him pained
him. He had such a burning desire to understand them! And in truth he
did understand them, too well, perhaps: he watched them too closely, and
he irritated them. It was not that he was indiscreet in his curiosity,
but that he brought to bear on it his habit of analyzing the souls of
men and his need of love.
It was not long before he perceived the secret drama of Joussier's life:
the disease which was undermining his constitution, and the cruelty of
his mistress. She loved him, she was proud of him: but she had too much
vitality: he knew that she was slipping away from him, would slip away
from him: and he was aflame with jealousy. She found his jealousy
diverting: she was for ever exciting the men about her, bombarding them
with her eyes, flinging around them her sensual provocative atmosphere:
she loved to play with him like a cat. Perhaps she deceived him with
Graillot. Perhaps it pleased her to let him think so. In any case if she
were not actually doing so, she very probably would. Joussier dared not
forbid her to love whomsoever she pleased: did he not profess the woman's
right to liberty equally with the man's? She reminded him of
that slyly and insolently one day when he was upbraiding her. He was
delivered up to a terrible struggle within himself between his theories
of liberty and his violent instincts. At heart he was still a man like
the men of old, despotic and jealous: by reason he was a man of the
future, a Utopian. She was neither more nor less than the woman of
yesterday, to-morrow, and all time.--And Olivier, looking on at their
secret duel, the savagery of which was known to him by his own
experience, was full of pity for Joussier when he realized his weakness.
But Joussier guessed that Olivier was reading him: and he was very far
from liking him for it.
There was another interested witness, an indulgent spectator of this
game of love and hate. This was the manageress, Amélie. She saw
everything without seeming to do so. She knew life. She was an honest,
healthy, tranquil, easy-going woman, and in her youth had been free
enough. She had been in a florist's shop: she had had a lover of the
class above her own: she had had other lovers. Then she had married a
working-man. She had become a good wife and mother. But she understood
everything, all the foolish ways of the heart, Joussier's jealousy, as
well as the young woman's desire for amusement. She tried to help them
to understand each other with a few affectionate words:
"You must make allowances: it is not worth while creating bad blood
between you for such a trifle...."
She was not at all surprised when her words produced no result....
"That's the way of the world. We must always be torturing ourselves...."
She had that splendid carelessness of the people, from which misfortune
of every sort seems harmlessly to glide. She had had her share of
unhappiness. Three months ago she had lost a boy of fifteen whom she
dearly loved: it had been a great grief to her: but now she was once
more busy and laughing. She used to say:
"If one were to think of these things one could not live."