‘_Hail to Light!_
_Hail to Reason!_’[75]
Russians who have no mountains near simply say that the _domovoy_
choked them. It is perhaps a truer description. It certainly seems as
though some one were choking you; your dream is not clear, but is very
terrible; it is hard to breathe, yet one wants to draw deep breaths, the
pulse is quicker, the heart throbs fast and painfully.... You are being
hunted; creatures, not men, not visions, are just on your heels, you
have glimpses of forgotten images that recall other years and an earlier
age.... There are precipices, abysses, your foot slips, there is no
escape, you fly into the void of darkness, a scream breaks unconsciously
from your breast and you wake up. You wake up in a fever, drops of sweat
on your brow; choking for breath, you hasten to the window.... Outside
there is a fresh bright dawn, the breeze is carrying away the mist, there
is the scent of grass and the forest, there are sounds and calls ...
everything that is ours and earthly.... And, comforted, you drink in deep
draughts of the morning air.
The other day I had such a nightmare, and not in my sleep, but awake,
not in bed but in a book, and when I tore myself from it to the light, I
almost cried aloud: ‘Hail to Reason! our simple earthly Reason!’
Old Pierre Leroux, whom I have been used to loving and respecting for
thirty years, brought me his last work and begged me to be sure to read
it, ‘the text at least; the commentary will do afterwards, any time.’
‘The Book of Job, a Tragedy in Five Acts, composed by Isaiah and
translated by Pierre Leroux.’ And not merely translated but applied to
contemporary questions.
I read the whole text, and, overwhelmed with sadness and horror, made for
the window.
What was the meaning of it?
What antecedents could have produced such a brain and such a book? What
land gave birth to such a man, and what is its destiny? Such madness
can only be that of a great mind; it is the last stage of a long and
frustrated development.
The book is the delirium of a poet-lunatic, whose memory still retains
facts and order, hopes and images, though no meaning is left; who has
kept memories, feelings, forms, but not kept reason; or, if reason has
survived, it is only to regress, to dissolve into its elements, to pass
from thoughts into fancy, from truths into mysteries, from deductions
into myths, from knowledge into revelation.
There is no going beyond it; the next stage is catalepsy, the stupor of
the Pythian prophetess, of a Shaman, the frenzy of a dancing-dervish, the
frenzy of twirling tables....
Revolution and miracle-working, socialism and the Talmud, Job and
George Sand, Isaiah and Saint-Simon, 1789 B.C. and A.D. 1789, all flung
pell-mell into a cabalistic furnace—what could come out of these strained
antagonistic combinations? The man has fallen ill with this undigested
food, he has lost the healthy feeling for truth, the love and respect for
reason. What is it that has driven him so far from his true course in his
old age—a man who once stood among the leaders of the social movement,
full of love and energy, whose words of indignation and sympathy for
his poorer brethren moved our hearts? I remember those days. ‘Peter the
Red’ (so we used to call him in the ’forties) ‘is becoming my Christ,’
Byelinsky, always carried to extremes, wrote to me. And here this
teacher, this living, rousing voice, after fifteen years of seclusion
in Jersey, appears with the Grève de Samarez and with the Book of Job,
preaches some sort of transmigration of souls, seeks the solution in the
other world, has no more faith in this one. France and the Revolution
have deceived him; he pitches his tabernacle in the other world, in which
there is no deception, and, indeed, nothing else, so that there is the
more room for fantasy.
Perhaps it is an individual illness, an idiosyncrasy? Newton had his Book
of Job, Auguste Comte his special madness.
Perhaps ... but what is one to say when one picks up a second, a third
French book, and always it is a book of Job, clouding the mind and
weighing upon the heart? All set one seeking light and air, all bear the
traces of spiritual turmoil and sickness, of something lost and gone
astray; we can hardly put much of it down to individual insanity. On the
contrary, we have to look for the explanation of the individual case in
the general aberration; it is just in those who most fully represent the
French genius that I see these traces of sickness.
These giants are lost, plunged in a heavy sleep, in long, feverish
suspense, worn out with the woes of the day and burning impatience; they
rave, as it were, half-asleep, and try to persuade us and themselves that
their visions are reality and that real life is a bad dream, which will
soon pass, particularly for France.
The inexhaustible wealth of their long years of civilisation, the
vast stores of words and images, glimmer in their brains like the
phosphorescence of the sea that lights up nothing. The whirlwind that
comes before an approaching cataclysm has swept up and floated into these
gigantic memories the fragments of two or three worlds, without cement,
without connection, without science. The process by which their thought
is developed is unintelligible to us; they pass from word to word, from
antinomy to antinomy, from antithesis to synthesis, without solving them;
the symbol is taken for the reality, the desire for the fact. There
are vast yearnings with no practical means, no clear aims, unfinished
outlines, thoughts half worked out, hints, approximations, prophecies,
ornaments, frescoes, arabesques.... They have none of the clear coherence
of which France boasted of old, they are not seeking the truth, it is so
terrible in real life that they turn aside from it. False and strained
romanticism, swollen and over-exuberant rhetoric have spoilt their taste
for everything simple and sane. Proportion is lost, the perspective is
false.
And it is not so bad as long as it is a matter of souls journeying
about the planets, of the angelic settlements of Jean Reynaud,[76] of
Job talking to Proudhon, and Proudhon to a dead woman; it is not so bad
as long as a fairy-tale is made out of the Thousand and One Nights of
humanity, and Shakespeare from love and respect is buried under pyramids
and obelisks, Olympus and the Bible, Assyria and Nineveh. But what are we
to say to it when, on the very brink of shame and ruin, this rigmarole
breaks into real life, throwing dust in the eyes and shuffling the
cards in order to prophesy with them ‘the nearness of happiness and the
fulfilment of desire’? What is to be said when putrefying wounds are
plastered over with the glittering rags of past glory, and syphilitic
spots on the flabby cheeks are passed off for the flush of youth?
The old poet humbles himself in the dust before fallen Paris at the
least pitiful moment of her degradation, when, pleased at the wealthy
livery and lavishness of her alien masters, she carouses in the market
of the world. He greets Paris as the guiding-star of humanity, the heart
of the world, the brain of history; he assures her that the bazaar on
the Champs-de-Mars is the beginning of the brotherhood of nations and
universal peace.
To intoxicate with praise a generation that has grown shallow,
insignificant, complacent and conceited, pleased with flattery and
self-indulgent, to maintain the pride of futile and degenerate sons and
grandsons, veiling their paltry, senseless existence with the approval of
genius, is a great sin.
To make of contemporary Paris the saviour and deliverer of the world,
to assure her that she is great in her downfall, that she is not really
fallen, is like the apotheosis of the divine Nero or the divine Caligula
or Caracalla.
The difference is that the Senecas and the Ulpians were strong and
powerful, while Victor Hugo is an exile.
Together with the flattery, one is struck by the vagueness of the
conception, the confusion of the tendencies and the immaturity of
the ideals. Men who walked in the van leading others are left behind
in the twilight with no poignant yearning for the dawn. Talk of the
transformation of humanity, the transmutation of all that exists ... but
of what and into what?
That is equally obscure in the other world of Pierre Leroux and in this
world of Victor Hugo:—
‘In the twentieth century she will be a marvellous land, she will be
great, and that will not hinder her from being free. She will be famous,
rich, profound in thought, peaceable, friendly to all the rest of
mankind. She will possess the mild ascendancy of an elder sister.
‘This central land which gives light to all, this model farm of humanity,
on the pattern of which all the rest is moulded, has its heart, its
brain, whose name is Paris.
‘This city has one disadvantage: the world belongs to him who rules
her. Humanity follows her lead. Paris toils for the commonwealth of the
earth. Whoever thou mayest be, Paris is thy master ... she sometimes
goes astray, she has her optical illusions, her errors of taste ... and
it is the worse for the sense of all the world: the compass is lost, and
progress gropes its way.
‘But the true Paris, I think, is different. I do not believe in that
Paris—it is a phantom, and, moreover, a passing shadow is as nought in
face of the vast radiance of the dawn.
‘None but savages fear for the sun in an eclipse. Paris is a lighted
torch; the lighted torch has will.... Paris will purge herself of all
impurity; she has abolished the death penalty, so far as that lay in her
power, and has transferred the guillotine to La Roquette. Men are hanged
in London, in Paris they can no more be guillotined; if the guillotine
were set up again before the Hôtel de Ville, the very stones would rise
up. To kill in these surroundings is impossible. It remains but to cast
out of the law what has already been cast out of the city!
‘1866 has been the year of the clash of nations, 1867 will be the year
of their concord. The Exhibition in Paris is the great peace congress;
all obstacles, all drags, all brakes on the wheels of progress will be
shattered and fly into atoms.... War is impossible.... Why are dreadful
cannons and other weapons of war exhibited?... Do we not know that war
is dead? It died on the day on which Jesus said: “Love one another!” and
has only lingered on like a ghost; Voltaire and the revolutionists slew
it once more. We do not believe in war. All the nations have fraternised
at the Exhibition, all the nations, flocking to Paris, have been France
(_ils viennent être France_); they have learned that there is a city that
is the sun of the world ... and are bound to love her, to desire her, to
submit to her rule!’
And, moved to devotional tenderness before the nation which is
evaporating in brotherhood, whose freedom is the testimony to the
maturity of the human race, Hugo exclaims: ‘Oh France! farewell! thou
art too grand to be my fatherland! One must part from a mother who has
become a goddess. Another step and thou wilt vanish transformed; thou
art so great that soon thou wilt not be. Thou wilt not be France, thou
wilt be humanity; thou wilt not be a land, thou wilt be universality.
Thou art destined to pass out in light.... Boldly take up the burden of
thy infinity, and, as Athens became Greece, Rome became Christianity, be
thou, oh France, the World!’
As I was reading these lines there was a newspaper lying before me, and
in it a simple-hearted correspondent had written as follows:—
‘What is taking place now in Paris is extraordinarily interesting, not
only for contemporaries, but for succeeding generations. The crowds
that have gathered for the Exhibition are carousing.... All bounds are
overstepped: there are orgies going on everywhere, in restaurants and
private houses, most of all at the Exhibition itself. The arrival of the
monarchs has finally intoxicated every one. Paris presents the spectacle
of a colossal _Descente de la Courtille_. Yesterday (June 10) this
intoxication reached its climax. When the crowned heads were feasting in
the palace, which has seen so much in its day, the crowds thronged the
surrounding streets and squares. Along the embankment in the rue Rivoli,
rue Castiglione and rue St.-Honoré, as many as three hundred thousand
people were feasting after their own fashion. From the Madeleine to
the Théâtre des Variétés a most disorderly and unceremonious orgy was
going on; big, open waggonettes, improvised omnibuses and chars-à-bancs,
drawn by exhausted broken-down nags, moved at a snail’s pace along
the boulevards through the dense masses of heads. These vehicles were
packed to overflowing: in them men and women with bottles in their
hands were standing, sitting, and most often lying at full length in
every conceivable attitude; laughing and singing, they talked with the
crowds on foot; uproar and shouts met them from the crowds in cafés
and restaurants, which were full to overflowing; sometimes the songs
and bawling were interspersed with the savage oaths of a cabman or the
friendly wrangle of drunkards.... Men were lying at the street-corners
and in the back-alleys, dead drunk; the police themselves seemed to have
retreated before the impossibility of doing anything. “Never,” writes the
correspondent, “have I seen anything like it in Paris, and I have lived
there for twenty years.”
‘This was in the street, “in the gutter,” as the French express it, but
what was being done within the palaces, illuminated by more than ten
thousand lights ... what was done at the banquets on which millions of
francs were squandered?
‘The sovereigns left the ball given by the city at the Hôtel de Ville
about two o’clock’—the official chronicler of the Emperor’s festivities
records. ‘The carriages could not reach the building in time, nor drive
home the eight thousand visitors. Hour after hour passed; the guests were
weary, ladies sat down on the stairs, others simply lay down in the halls
on the rugs, and fell asleep at the feet of the lackeys and _huissiers_,
while gentlemen stepped over them, catching their spurs in their lace and
flounces. When by degrees the rooms were cleared, the carpets could not
be seen; they were all covered with faded flowers, broken beads, rags of
blonde and lace, of tulle and muslin, torn from the ladies’ dresses by
the swords, hilts and stiff gold lace of the men.’
And behind the scenes the spies were catching men who shouted: ‘_Vive
la Pologne_,’ beating them with their fists and passing them off for
thieves, and in two instances the court condemned the latter to prison
for _hindering_ the spies from lawlessly, informally, arresting them with
blows.
I purposely mention only trifles: microscopical dissection gives a better
idea of the decay of the tissue than a big piece cut off a corpse.
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