In the days of July 1848, after the first terror and stupefaction of
victors and vanquished, a thin, austere old man stepped forward as the
embodiment of their stings of conscience. With gloomy words he cursed
and branded the men of ‘order’ who had shot hundreds without even asking
their names, had banished thousands untried, and had held Paris in a
state of siege. When he had ended his anathema, he turned to the people
and said: ‘And you, be silent, you are too poor to have the right to
speak.’
This was Lamennais. They were on the point of seizing him, but were awed
by his grey hair, his wrinkles, his eyes, in which the tears of old age
were quivering, and which would soon be closed for ever.
Lamennais’ words passed, leaving no trace.
Twenty years later, other austere old men appeared with their stern
words; and their voice too was lost in the wilderness.
They had no faith in the force of their words, but their hearts would not
let them keep silent. Isolated in their banishment and their remoteness,
these judges of the court of Vehm, these Daniels, pronounced their
sentence, knowing that it would not be carried out.
They to their sorrow saw that this ‘trifling cloud obscuring the
grand dawn’ was not so trifling; that this historical migraine, this
drunkenness after revolution, would not pass off so quickly: and they
said so.
‘In the worst days of the ancient Caesarism,’ said Edgar Quinet at the
Congress in Geneva, ‘when every one was dumb except the sovereign, there
were men who left their refuge in the wilderness to utter a few words
of truth in the face of the fallen peoples. For sixteen years I have
been living in the wilderness, and I in my turn should like to break the
deathly silence to which our age has grown accustomed.’
What news did he bring from his mountains, and in the name of what did
he lift up his voice? He lifted it up to tell his fellow-countrymen
(whatever a Frenchman may be talking about, he always speaks of France):
‘You have no conscience ... it is dead, crushed under the heel of the
mighty, it has disowned itself. For sixteen years I have been seeking
traces of it and have not found it.
‘It was the same under the Caesars in the ancient world. The soul of
man had vanished. The peoples aided their own enslavement, applauded
it, showing neither regret nor remorse. As the conscience of mankind
vanished, it left an emptiness which was felt in everything as it is now,
and to fill it a new god was needed.
‘Who will in our day fill the abyss opened by modern Caesarism?
‘In place of the worn-out, abolished conscience has come night; we wander
in the darkness not knowing whence to seek aid, to whom to turn. All have
helped to bring about our fall: church and law-court, the nations and
society.... Deaf is the earth, deaf conscience, deaf the peoples; right
has perished with conscience; only might rules....
‘What have you come for, what are you seeking in these ruins of ruins?
You answer that you are seeking peace. Whence do you seek it? You are
lost among the broken ruins of the fallen edifice of justice. You seek
peace, you are mistaken, it is not here. Here is war. In this night
without a dawn, nations and races are doomed to combat and destroy each
other at hazard in obedience to the will of the rulers who have fettered
their hands and their minds in bondage.
‘The nations will rise again only when they are conscious of the depth of
their fall!’
To diminish the horror of the picture the old man flung a few flowers for
the children. His listeners applauded him. Even then they did not know
what they had done. A few days later they went back on their applause.
Two months before these gloomy words rang out at the Geneva Congress, in
another Swiss town another exile of old days wrote the following words:—
‘I have no more faith in France. If ever she rises again to a new life
and recovers from her terror of herself, it will be a miracle; no sick
nation has risen up again from so deep a fall. I do not expect miracles.
Forgotten institutions may be born again—but the spirit of the people,
once quenched, will not revive. An _unjust_ providence has not given me
even that consolation which it so liberally deals out to make up for
poverty to all exiles: perpetual hope and faith in their dreams. Nothing
is left me from all I have passed through but the lessons of experience,
bitter disillusionment, and an incurable weariness (_énervement_). There
is ice in my heart, I have no more faith in right or human justice or
common sense. I have turned away from it into indifference as into the
tomb.’
The Girondist Mercier, with one foot in the grave, said at the time of
the fall of the First Empire: ‘I live only to see how it will end!’ ‘I
cannot say even that,’ added Marc Dufraisse. ‘I have no special curiosity
to know how the epic of the emperors will end.’
And the old man turned to the past, and with profound melancholy held
it up to its degenerate successors. The present was strange, alien,
revolting to him. From his cell rises the breath of the tomb, his words
send a shiver through the listener.
Sayings of one, writings of another—all slid off, leaving no trace.
Hearing them, reading them, the French had no ‘ice in their heart.’ Many
were openly indignant: ‘These men rob us of our strength and drive us to
despair.... What salvation, what comfort is there in their words?’
It is not a judge’s duty to comfort; he must unmask, must convict of
sin, where there is no consciousness and no penitence. It is his work
to stir the conscience. He is a judge and not a prophet, he has no
Messiah in reserve for comfort in the future. He, like those he judges,
belongs to the old religion. The judge stands for the pure and ideal side
of it, while the masses represent its practical, evasive, attenuated
application. While he condemns, the judge is practically forced to attack
the ideal; while defending it, he proves its one-sidedness.
Neither Edgar Quinet nor Marc Dufraisse really knows of a solution, and
they call us back to the past. It is no wonder that they do not see it;
they stand with their back to it. They belong to the past. Revolted by
the dishonourable end of their world, they seize their crutch, appear,
uninvited guests, at the orgy of the haughty, complacent people, and tell
them: ‘You have lost all, you have sold all, nothing insults you but the
truth. You have neither your old sense nor your old dignity, you have no
conscience, you have fallen to the lowest depth, and, far from feeling
your slavery, you insolently claim to be the deliverer of nations and
nationalities. Decked with the laurels of war, you want to wear the
olive-branches of peace. Take thought and repent, if you can. We, the
dying, have come to call you to repentance, and if you do not, to break
our rod upon you.’
They see their army retreating, deserting its flag, and with the scourge
of their words try to drive it back to its old position, and cannot. A
new banner is needed to rally them, and they have it not. Like heathen
high priests they tear their garments, defending their fallen shrine. Not
they, but the persecuted Nazarenes, bring tidings of a new birth and the
life of the world to come.
Quinet and Marc Dufraisse sorrow over the defilement of their temple, the
temple of representative government. They sorrow not only for the loss
in France of freedom and human dignity, they grieve at the loss of the
foremost place, they cannot resign themselves to the fact that the Empire
did not prevent the unity of Germany, they are horrified that France has
sunk into the background.
The question why France, in whom they do not themselves believe, should
have the first place never once presents itself to their minds.
Marc Dufraisse with exasperated humility says that he does not understand
the _new problems_, namely, the economic ones; while Quinet seeks a god
to come and fill the emptiness left by the loss of conscience.... He has
passed by them, they did not know him and let him be crucified.
* * * * *
_Postscript._—As a commentary on our sketch there comes Renan’s strange
book on ‘Contemporary Questions.’ He too is frightened by the present.
He sees that things are going badly. But what pitiful remedies! He
sees a sick man, rotting with syphilis, and advises him to study well,
especially the classics. He sees the inner indifference to everything
except material profit, and weaves out of his rationalism some sort of
religion—catholicism without a real Christ and without a pope, but with
mortification of the flesh. He sets up disciplinary, or rather hygienic,
fences for the mind.
Perhaps the most important and boldest thing in his book is his saying
about the Revolution: ‘The French Revolution was a grand experiment, but
it was an experiment that has failed.’
And then he presents the picture of the destruction of all the old
institutions, which, though oppressive on the one side, did serve as a
means of resistance against an all-devouring centralisation, and in their
place man left weak and defenceless before an oppressive, all-powerful
State and a Church that survived intact.
One cannot help thinking with horror of the union of this State and
Church which is being accomplished before our eyes, and which goes so far
that the Church is restricting medicine, taking doctors’ diplomas from
materialists, and trying to decide questions of reason and revelation by
decision of the Senate, to decree _libre arbitre_, as Robespierre decreed
_l’Être Suprême_.
To-morrow, if not to-day, the Church will capture education—and what then?
The French who have survived the reaction see that, and their position
in regard to foreigners becomes more and more disadvantageous. They have
never put up with so much as now, and from whom? From the Germans in
particular. Not long ago an argument between a German _ex-refugié_ and
a distinguished French _littérateur_ took place before me. The German
was ruthless. In old days the Germans had a sort of tacit agreement of
tolerance for English people, who were always allowed to say absurd
things, out of respect and the conviction that they were a little
crazy, and for Frenchmen, from affection for them and gratitude for
the Revolution. These amenities have only survived for the English;
Frenchmen find themselves in the position of elderly beauties who have
lost their looks and have for years failed to observe that their charms
have diminished, and that they have nothing more to expect from the
fascinations of their beauty.
In old days their ignorance of everything that lay outside the frontiers
of France, their use of hackneyed phrases, their tawdry tinsel, their
tearful sentimentality, their aggressive domineering tone and _les grands
mots_, were all allowed to pass—but now all this indulgence is over.
The German, setting his spectacles straight, slapped the Frenchman on the
shoulder, saying: ‘_Mais, mon cher et très cher ami_, these are stock
phrases that take the place of criticism, of attention, of understanding;
we know them by heart; you have been repeating them for thirty years;
they prevent you from seeing clearly the real position of affairs.’
‘But anyway,’ said the literary gentleman, obviously desirous of
finishing the conversation, ‘you, my dear philosopher, have all bowed
your heads under the yoke of Prussian despotism. I quite understand that
you look upon it as a means, that the Prussian domination is a step....’
‘That is just where we differ from you,’ the German interrupted him,
‘that we take that bitter path, hating it and submitting to necessity,
with an object before our eyes, while you have reached that position as
though it were a haven of refuge; for you it is not a step towards the
goal, but the goal itself—and besides, the majority likes it.’
‘_C’est une impasse, une impasse_,’ observed the Frenchman gloomily, and
changed the conversation.
Unluckily he began speaking of Jules Favre’s speech in the Academy; then
another German turned grumpy and said: ‘Upon my soul, can that empty
rhetoric, that verbosity, hypocrisy, please you? It is hypocritical,
and false to everything; how can a man deliver a panegyric for two
hours on that pale Cousin? And what business had he to defend orthodox
spiritualism? And do you suppose that such opposition will save you? They
are rhetoricians and sophists. And how absurd is the whole procedure
of speech and answer, of having to praise one’s predecessor, all this
mediaeval battle of words!’
‘_Ah bah! Vous oubliez les traditions, les coutumes._’