otherwise: her vitality was too strong: she was absorbed by the present:
it was impossible for her to linger over the past. She adapted herself
to things as they were, and would adapt herself to whatever happened. If
the revolution were to come and turn everything topsy-turvy she would
soon manage to be standing firmly on her feet, and do everything that
was there to do; she would be in her place wherever she might be set
down. At heart she had only a modified belief in the revolution. She had
hardly any real faith in anything whatever. It is hardly necessary to
add that she used to consult the cards in her moments of perplexity, and
that she never failed to make the sign of the cross when she met a
funeral. She was very open-minded and very tolerant, and she had the
skepticism of the people of Paris, that healthy skepticism which doubts,
as a man breathes, joyously. Though she was the wife of a revolutionary,
nevertheless she took up a motherly and ironical attitude towards her
husband's ideas and those of his party--and those of the other
parties,--the sort of attitude she had towards the follies of youth--and
of maturity. She was never much moved by anything. But she was
interested in everything. And she was equally prepared for good and bad
luck. In fine, she was an optimist.
"It's no good getting angry.... Everything settles itself so long as
your health is good...."
That was clearly to Christophe's way of thinking. They did not need much
conversation to discover that they belonged to the same family. Every
now and then they would exchange a good-humored smile, while the others
were haranguing and shouting. But, more often, she would laugh to
herself as she looked at Christophe, and saw him being caught up by the
argument to which he would at once bring more passion than all the rest
put together.
* * * * *
Christophe did not observe Olivier's isolation and embarrassment. He
made no attempt to probe down to the inner workings of his companions.
But he used to eat and drink with them, and laugh and lose his temper.
They were never distrustful of him, although they used to argue heatedly
enough. He did not mince his words with them. At bottom he would have
found it very hard to say whether he was with or against them. He never
stopped to think about it. No doubt if the choice had been forced upon
him he would have been a syndicalist as against Socialism and all the
doctrines of the State--that monstrous entity, that factory of
officials, human machines. His reason approved of the mighty effort of
the cooperative groups, the two-edged ax of which strikes at the same
time at the dead abstractions of the socialistic State, and at the
sterility of individualism, that corrosion of energy, that dispersion of
collective force in individual frailties,--the great source of modern
wretchedness for which the French Revolution is in part responsible.
But Nature is stronger than reason. When Christophe came in touch with
the syndicates--those formidable coalitions of the weak--his vigorous
individuality drew back. He could not help despising those men who
needed to be linked together before they could march on--to the fight;
and if he admitted that it was right for them to submit to such a law,
he declared that such a law was not for him. Besides, if the weak and
the oppressed are sympathetic, they cease altogether to be so when they
in their turn become oppressors. Christophe, who had only recently been
shouting out to the honest men living in isolation: "Unite! Unite!" had
a most unpleasant sensation when for the first time he found himself in
the midst of such unions of honest men, all mixed up with other men who
were less honest, and yet were endowed with their force, their rights,
and only too ready to abuse them. The best people, those whom Christophe
loved, the friends whom he had met in The House, on every floor, drew no
sort of profit from these fighting combinations. They were too sensitive
at heart and too timid not to be scared: they were fated to be the first
to be crushed out of existence by them. Face to face with the
working-class movement they were in the same position as Olivier and the
most warmly generous of the young men of the middle-class. Their
sympathies were with the workers organizing themselves. But they had
been brought up in the cult of liberty: now liberty was exactly what the
revolutionaries cared for least of all. Besides, who is there nowadays
that cares for liberty? A select few who have no sort of influence over
the world. Liberty is passing through dark days. The Popes of Rome
proscribe the light of reason. The Popes of Paris put out the light of
the heavens. And M. Pataud puts out the lights of the streets.
Everywhere imperialism is triumphant: the theocratic imperialism of the
Church of Rome: the military imperialism of the mercantile and mystic
monarchies: the bureaucratic imperialism of the republics of Freemasonry
and covetousness: the dictatorial imperialism of the revolutionary
committees. Poor liberty, thou art not in this world!... The abuse of
power preached and practised by the revolutionaries revolted Christophe
and Olivier. They had little regard for the blacklegs who refuse to
suffer for the common cause. But it seemed abominable to them that the
others should claim the right to use force against them.--And yet it is
necessary to take sides. Nowadays the choice in fact lies not between
imperialism and liberty, but between one imperialism and another.
Olivier said:
"Neither. I am for the oppressed."
Christophe hated the tyranny of the oppressors no less. But he was
dragged into the wake of force in the track of the army of the
working-classes in revolt.
He was hardly aware that it was so. He would tell his companions in the
restaurant that he was not with them.
"As long as you are only out for material interests," he would say, "you
don't interest me. The day when you march out for a belief then I shall
be with you. Otherwise, what have I to do with the conflict between one
man's belly and another's? I am an artist; it is my duty to defend art;
I have no right to enroll myself in the service of a party. I am
perfectly aware that recently certain ambitious writers, impelled by a
desire for an unwholesome popularity, have set a bad example. It seems
to me that they have not rendered any great service to the cause which
they defended in that way: but they have certainly betrayed art. It is
our, the artists', business to save the light of the intellect. We have
no right to obscure it with your blind struggles. Who shall hold the
light aloft if we let it fall? You will be glad enough to find it still
intact after the battle. There must always be workers busy keeping up
the fire in the engine, while there is fighting on the deck of the ship.
To understand everything is to hate nothing. The artist is the compass
which, through the raging of the storm, points steadily to the north."
They regarded him as a maker of phrases, and said that, if he were
talking of compasses, it was very clear that he had lost his: and they
gave themselves the pleasure of indulging in a little friendly contempt
at his expense. In their eyes an artist was a shirker who contrived to
work as little and as agreeably as possible.
He replied that he worked as hard as they did, harder even, and that he
was not nearly so afraid of work. Nothing disgusted him so much as
_sabotage_, the deliberate bungling of work, and skulking raised to
the level of a principle.
"All these wretched people," he would say, "afraid for their own
skins!... Good Lord! I've never stopped working since I was eight. You
people don't love your work; at heart you're just common men.... If only
you were capable of destroying the Old World! But you can't do it. You
don't even want to. No, you don't even want to. It is all very well for
you to go about shrieking menace and pretending you're going to
exterminate the human race. You have only one thought: to get the upper
hand and lie snugly in the warm beds of the middle-classes. Except for a
few hundred poor devils, navvies, who are always ready to break their
bones or other people's bones for no particular reason,--just for
fun--or for the pain, the age-old pain with which they are simply
bursting, the whole lot of you think of nothing but deserting the camp
and going over to the ranks of the middle-classes on the first
opportunity. You become Socialists, journalists, lecturers, men of
letters, deputies, Ministers.... Bah! Bah! Don't you go howling about
so-and-so! You're no better. You say he is a traitor?... Good. Whose
turn next? You'll all come to it. There is not one of you who can resist
the bait. How could you? There is not one of you who believes in the
immortality of the soul. You are just so many bellies, I tell you. Empty
bellies thinking of nothing but being filled."
Thereupon they would all lose their tempers and all talk at once. And in
the heat of the argument it would often happen that Christophe, whirled
away by his passion, would become more revolutionary than the others. In
vain did he fight against it: his intellectual pride, his complacent
conception of a purely esthetic world, made for the joy of the spirit,
would sink deep into the ground at the sight of injustice. Esthetic, a
world in which eight men out of ten live in nakedness and want, in
physical and moral wretchedness? Oh! come! A man must be an impudent
creature of privilege who would dare to claim as much. An artist like
Christophe, in his inmost conscience, could not but be on the side of
the working-classes. What man more than the spiritual worker has to
suffer from the immorality of social conditions, from the scandalously
unequal partition of wealth among men? The artist dies of hunger or
becomes a millionaire for no other reason than the caprice of fashion
and of those who speculate on fashion. A society which suffers its best
men to die or gives them extravagant rewards is a monstrous society: it
must be swept and put in order. Every man, whether he works or no, has a
right to a living minimum.
Every kind of work, good or mediocre, should be rewarded, not according
to its real value--(who can be the infallible judge of that?)--but
according to the normal legitimate needs of the worker. Society can and
should assure the artist, the scientist, and the inventor an income
sufficient to guarantee that they have the means and the time yet
further to grace and honor it. Nothing more. The _Gioconda_ is not
worth a million. There is no relation between a sum of money and a work
of art: a work of art is neither above nor below money: it is outside
it. It is not a question of payment: it is a question of allowing the
artist to live. Give him enough to feed him, and allow him to work in
peace. It is absurd and horrible to try to make him a robber of
another's property. This thing must be put bluntly: every man who has
more than is necessary for his livelihood and that of his family, and
for the normal development of his intelligence, is a thief and a robber.
If he has too much, it means that others have too little. How often have
we smiled sadly to hear tell of the inexhaustible wealth of France, and
the number of great fortunes, we workers, and toilers, and
intellectuals, and men and women who from our very birth have been given
up to the wearying task of keeping ourselves from dying of hunger, often
struggling in vain, often seeing the very best of us succumbing to the
pain of it all,--we who are the moral and intellectual treasure of the
nation! You who have more than your share of the wealth of the world are
rich at the cost of our suffering and our poverty. That troubles you not
at all: you have sophistries and to spare to reassure you: the sacred
rights of property, the fair struggle for life, the supreme interests of
that Moloch, the State and Progress, that fabulous monster, that
problematical Better to which men sacrifice the Good,--the Good of other
men.--But for all that, the fact remains, and all your sophistries will
never manage to deny it: "You have too much to live on. We have not
enough. And we are as good as you. And some of us are better than the
whole lot of you put together."
* * * * *
So Christophe was affected by the intoxication of the passions with
which he was surrounded. Then he was astonished at his own bursts of
eloquence. But he did not attach any importance to them. He was amused
by such easily roused excitement, which he attributed to the bottle. His
only regret was that the wine was not better, and he would belaud the
wines of the Rhine. He still thought that he was detached from
revolutionary ideas. But there arose the singular phenomenon that
Christophe brought into the discussion, if not the upholding of them, a
steadily increasing passion, while that of his companions seemed in
comparison to diminish.
As a matter of fact, they had fewer illusions than he. Even the most
violent leaders, the men who were most feared by the middle-classes,
were at heart uncertain and horribly middle-class. Coquard, with his
laugh like a stallion's neigh, shouted at the top of his voice and made
terrifying gestures: but he only half believed what he was saying: it
was all for the pleasure of talking, giving orders, being active: he was
a braggart of violence. He knew the cowardice of the middle-classes
through and through, and he loved terrorizing them by showing that he
was stronger than they: he was quite ready to admit as much to
Christophe, and to laugh over it. Graillot criticized everything, and
everything anybody tried to do: he made every plan come to nothing.
Joussier was for ever affirming, for he was unwilling ever to be in the
wrong. He would be perfectly aware of the inherent weakness of his line
of argument, but that would make him only the more obstinate in sticking
to it: he would have sacrificed the victory of his cause to his pride of
principle. But he would rush from extremes of bullet-headed faith to
extremes of ironical pessimism, when he would bitterly condemn the lie
of all systems of ideas and the futility of all efforts.
The majority of the working-classes were just the same. They would
suddenly relapse from the intoxication of words into the depths of
discouragement. They had immense illusions: but they were based upon
nothing: they had not won them in pain or forged them for themselves:
they had received them ready-made, by that law of the smallest effort
which led them for their amusements to the slaughter-house and the
blatant show. They suffered from an incurable indolence of mind for
which there were only too many excuses: they were like weary beasts
asking only to be suffered to lie down and in peace to ruminate over
their end and their dreams. But once they had slept off their dreams
there was nothing left but an even greater weariness and the doleful
dumps. They were for ever flaring up to a new leader: and very soon they
became suspicious of him and spurned him. The sad part of it all was
that they were never wrong: one after another their leaders were dazzled
by the bait of wealth, success, or vanity: for one Joussier, who was
kept from temptation by the consumption under which he was wasting away,
a brave crumbling to death, how many leaders were there who betrayed the
people or grew weary of the fight! They were victims of the secret sore
which was devouring the politicians of every party in those days:
demoralization through women and money, women and money,--(the two
scourges are one and the same).--In the Government as in the ministry
there were men of first-rate talent, men who had in them the stuff of
which great statesmen are made--(they, might have been great statesmen
in the days of Richelieu, perhaps);--but they lacked faith and
character: the need, the habit, the weariness of pleasure, had sapped
them: when they were engaged upon vast schemes they fumbled into
incoherent action, or they would suddenly fling up the whole thing,
while important business was in progress, desert their country or their
cause for rest and pleasure. They were brave enough to meet death in
battle: but very few of the leaders were capable of dying in harness, at
their posts, never budging, with their hands upon the rudder and their
eyes unswervingly fixed upon the invisible goal.
The revolution was hamstrung by the consciousness of the fundamental
weakness. The leaders of the working-classes spent part of their time in
blaming each other. Their strikes always failed as a result of the
perpetual dissensions between the leaders and the trades-unions, between
the reformers and the revolutionaries--and of the profound timidity
that underlay their blustering threats--and of the inherited
sheepishness that made the rebels creep once more beneath the yoke upon
the first legal sentence,--and of the cowardly egoism and the baseness
of those who profited by the revolt of others to creep a little nearer
the masters, to curry favor and win a rich reward for their
disinterested devotion. Not to speak of the disorder inherent in all
crowds, the anarchy of the people. They tried hard to create corporate
strikes which should assume a revolutionary character: but they were not
willing to be treated as revolutionaries. They had no liking for
bayonets. They fancied that it was possible to make an omelette without
eggs. In any case, they preferred the eggs to be broken by other people.
Olivier watched, observed, and was not surprised. From the very outset
he had recognized the great inferiority of these men to the work which
they were supposed to be accomplishing: but he had also recognized the
inevitable force that swept them on: and he saw that Christophe, unknown
to himself, was being carried on by the stream. But the current would
have nothing to do with himself, who would have asked nothing better
than to let himself be carried away.
It was a strong current: it was sweeping along an enormous mass of
passions, interest, and faith, all jostling, pushing, merging into each
other, boiling and frothing and eddying this way and that. The leaders
were in the van; they were the least free of all, for they were pushed
forward, and perhaps they had the least faith of all: there had been a
time when they believed: they were like the priests against whom they
had so loudly railed, imprisoned by their vows, by the faith they once
had had, and were forced to profess to the bitter end. Behind them the
common herd was brutal, vacillating, and short-sighted. The great
majority had a sort of random faith, because the current had now set in
the direction of Utopia: but a little while, and they would cease to
believe because the current had changed. Many believed from a need of
action, a desire for adventure, from romantic folly. Others believed
from a sort of impertinent logic, which was stripped of all common
sense. Some believed from goodness of heart. The self-seeking only made
use of ideas as weapons for the fight: their eye was for the main
chance: they were fighting for a definite sum as wages for a definite
number of hours' work. The worst of all were nursing a secret hope of
wreaking a brutal revenge for the wretched lives they had led.
But the current which bore them all along was wiser than they: it knew
where it was going. What did it matter that at any moment it might dash
up against the dyke of the Old World! Olivier foresaw that a social
revolution in these days would be squashed. But he knew also that
revolution would achieve its end through defeat as well as through
victory: for the oppressors only accede to the demands of the oppressed
when the oppressed inspire them with fear. And so the violence of the
revolutionaries was of no less service to their cause than the justice
of that cause. Both violence and justice were part and parcel of the
plan of that blind and certain force which moves the herd of human
kind....
_"For consider what you are, you whom the Master has summoned. If the
body be considered there are not many among you who are wise, or strong,
or noble. But He has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound
the wise; and He has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the
strong: and He has chosen the vile things of the world and the despised
things, and the things that are not, to the destruction of those things
that are...."_
And yet, whatever may be the Master who orders all things,--(Reason or
Unreason),--and although the social organization prepared by syndicalism
might constitute a certain comparative stage in progress for the future,
Olivier did not think it worth while for Christophe and himself to
scatter the whole of their power of illusion and sacrifice in this
earthy combat which would open no new world. His mystic hopes of the
revolution were dashed to the ground. The people seemed to him no better
and hardly any more sincere than the other classes: there was not enough
difference between them and others. In the midst of the torrent of
interests and muddy passions, Olivier's gaze and heart were attracted by
the little islands of independent spirits, the little groups of true
believers who emerged here and there like flowers on the face of the
waters. In vain do the elect seek to mingle with the mob: the elect
always come together,--the elect of all classes and all parties,--the
bearers of the fire of the world. And it is their sacred duty to see to
it that the fire in their hands shall never die down.
Olivier had already made his choice.
A few houses away from that in which he lived was a cobbler's booth,
standing a little below the level of the street,--a few planks nailed
together, with dirty windows and panes of paper. It was entered by three
steps down, and you had to stoop to stand up in it. There was just room
for a shelf of old shoes, and two stools. All day long, in accordance
with the classic tradition of cobbling, the master of the place could be
heard singing. He used to whistle, drum on the soles of the boots, and
in a husky voice roar out coarse ditties and revolutionary songs, or
chaff the women of the neighborhood as they passed by. A magpie with a
broken wing, which was always hopping about on the pavement, used to
come from a porter's lodge and pay him a visit. It would stand on the
first step at the entrance to the booth and look at the cobbler. He
would stop for a moment to crack a dirty joke with the bird in a piping
voice, or he would insist on whistling the _Internationale_. The
bird would stand with its beak in the air, listening gravely: every now
and then it would bob with its beak down by way of salutation, and it
would awkwardly flap its wings in order to regain its balance: then it
would suddenly turn round, leaving the cobbler in the middle of a
sentence, and fly away with its wing and a bit on to the back of a
bench, from whence it would hurl defiance at the dogs of the quarter.
Then the cobbler would return to his leather, and the flight of his
auditor would by no means restrain him from going through with his
harangue.
He was fifty-six, with a jovial wayward manner, little merry eyes under
enormous eyebrows, with a bald top to his head rising like an egg out of
the nest of his hair, hairy ears, a black gap-toothed mouth that gaped
like a well when he roared with laughter, a very thick dirty beard, at
which he used to pluck in handfuls with his long nails that were always
filthy with wax. He was known in the district as Daddy Feuillet, or
Feuillette, or Daddy la Feuillette--and to tease him they used to call
him La Fayette: for politically the old fellow was one of the reds: as a
young man he had been mixed up in the Commune, sentenced to death, and
finally deported: he was proud of his memories, and was always
rancorously inclined to lump together Badinguet, Galliffet, and
Foutriquet. He was a regular attendant at the revolutionary meetings,
and an ardent admirer of Coquard and the vengeful idea that he was
always prophesying with much beard-wagging and a voice of thunder. He
never missed one of his speeches, drank in his words, laughed at his
jokes with head thrown back and gaping mouth, foamed at his invective,
and rejoiced in the fight and the promised paradise. Next day, in his
booth, he would read over the newspaper report of the speeches: he would
read them aloud to himself and his apprentice: and to taste their full
sweetness he would have them read aloud to him, and used to box his
apprentice's ears if he skipped a line. As a consequence he was not
always very punctual in the delivery of his work when he had promised
it: on the other hand, his work was always sound: it might wear out the
user's feet, but there was no wearing out his leather....