P. J. PROUDHON—PUBLICATION OF THE ‘VOIX DU PEUPLE’—CORRESPONDENCE—THE
SIGNIFICANCE OF PROUDHON
After the June barricades had fallen the printing-presses fell too. The
panic-stricken journalists held their peace. Only old Lamennais rose up
like the gloomy shadow of a judge, cursed Cavaignac—the Duc d’Alba of the
June days—and his companions, and gloomily told the people: ‘And you be
silent: you are too poor to have the right to speak!’
When the first alarm at this state of siege was over and the newspapers
began coming to life again, they found themselves confronted, not with
violence, but with a perfect arsenal of legal quibbles and judicial
traps. The old baiting, _par force_, of editors, the process in which the
ministers of Louis-Philippe so distinguished themselves, began again.
Its method was to exhaust the guaranteed fund by a series of lawsuits
invariably ending in prison and a money fine. The fine is paid out of
the fund; until that is made up again, the paper cannot be published;
as soon as it is made good, there is a new lawsuit. This game is always
successful, for the legal authorities are always hand in glove with the
government in all political prosecutions.
At first Ledru-Rollin, and afterwards Colonel Frappoli[76] as the
representative of Mazzini’s party, contributed large sums of money, but
could not save _La Réforme_. All the more outspoken organs of socialism
and republicanism were destroyed by this method. Among these, and at the
very beginning, was Proudhon’s _Le Représentant du Peuple_, and later on
_Le Peuple_. Before one prosecution was over, another began.
One of the editors—it was Duchesne, I remember—was three times brought
out of prison into the law-courts on fresh charges; and every time
was again sentenced to prison and a fine. When on the last occasion
before the ruin of the paper the verdict was declared, he said to the
prosecutor: ‘_L’addition, s’il vous plaît!_’ As a matter of fact, it
amounted to ten years of prison and fifty thousand francs fine.
Proudhon was on his trial when his newspaper was suppressed on the 13th
of June. The National Guards burst into his printing-office on that day,
broke the printing-press, dispersed the type, as though to assert, in the
name of the armed bourgeois, that the period of the utmost violence and
police tyranny had come in France.
The irrepressible gladiator, the stubborn Besançon peasant, would not
lay down his arms, but at once contrived to publish a new journal, _La
Voix du Peuple_. It was necessary to obtain twenty-four thousand francs
for the guarantee fund. E. Girardin would have been ready to give it,
but Proudhon did not want to be dependent on him, and Sazonov suggested
that I should contribute the money. I owed a great deal to Proudhon in my
intellectual development, and, after a little consideration, I consented,
though I knew that the fund would soon be gone.
Reading Proudhon, like reading Hegel, cultivates a special faculty,
sharpens the weapon, and furnishes not results but methods. Proudhon is
pre-eminently the dialectician, the controversialist of social questions.
The French seek experimental solutions in him, and, finding no plans of
the phalanstery nor of the Icarian community, shrug their shoulders and
lay the book aside.
It is Proudhon’s own fault, of course, for having put as the motto on
his _Contradictions_: ‘_Destruo et ædificabo_’; his strength lay not in
construction but in criticism of the existing state of things. But this
mistake has been made from time immemorial by all who have broken down
what was old. Man dislikes mere destruction: when he sets to work to
break things down, he is unconsciously haunted by some ideal of future
construction, though sometimes this is like the song of a mason as he
pulls down a wall.
In the greater number of sociological works the ideals advocated,
which almost always are either unattainable at present or lead to some
one-sided solution, are of little consequence; what is of importance
is that, in working up to them, the _problem_ is stated. Socialism has
to deal not only with the solutions of the old empirically religious
tradition, but also with the conclusions of one-sided science; not only
with the juridical deductions resting on traditional legislation, but
also with the deductions of political economy. It is confronted with the
rational system of the epoch of guarantees and of the bourgeois economic
regime, as its immediate predecessor, just as political economy is
related to the theoretically feudal state.
It is in this denial, this destruction of the old social tradition, that
the great power of Proudhon lies; he is as much the poet of dialectics as
Hegel is, with the difference that the one rests on the calm heights of
the philosophic movement, while the other is thrust into the turmoil of
popular passions and the hand-to-hand struggle of parties.
Proudhon is the first of a new set of French thinkers. His works mark
a transition period, not only in the history of socialism but also in
the history of French logic. He has more strength and freedom in his
argumentative tenacity than the most talented of his fellow-countrymen.
Intelligent and single-minded men like Pierre Leroux[77] and
Considérant[78] do not grasp either his point of departure or his method.
They are accustomed to play with ideas as with marked cards, to walk
in a certain attire along the beaten track to familiar spots. Proudhon
often presses on without hesitating to crush anything on the way, without
fearing to destroy or to go too far.
He has none of that sensitiveness, that rhetorical revolutionary
chastity, which takes the place of Protestant pietism in the French ...
that is why he remains a solitary figure among his own people, rather
alarming than convincing them.
People say that Proudhon has a German mind. That is not true; on
the contrary, his mind is absolutely French: he has that racial
Gallo-Frankish genius which appears in Rabelais, in Montaigne, in
Voltaire, and in Diderot ... even in Pascal. It is only that he has
assimilated Hegel’s dialectical method, as he has assimilated all the
methods of Catholic controversy. But neither the Hegelian philosophy
nor the Catholic theology furnished the content nor the character of
his writings; for him these were only weapons with which he tested his
subject, and these weapons he mastered and adapted to his own purposes
just as he adapted the French language to his powerful and vigorous
thought. Such men stand much too firmly on their own feet to be dominated
by anything or to allow themselves to be caught in any net.
‘I like your system very much,’ an English tourist said to Proudhon.
‘But I have no system,’ Proudhon answered with annoyance, and he was
right.
It is just that that puzzles his fellow-countrymen, accustomed to a
moral at the end of the fable, to systematic formulas, to classification,
to abstract binding precepts.
Proudhon sits by a sick man’s bedside and tells him that he is in a very
bad way for this reason and for that reason. You do not help a dying man
by constructing an ideal theory of how he might be perfectly well if he
were not ill, or by suggesting remedies, excellent in themselves, which
he cannot take or which are not to be had.
The external signs and manifestations of the financial world serve him,
just as the teeth of animals served Cuvier as a ladder by which he
descends into the mysteries of social life; by means of them he studies
the forces that are dragging the sick body on to decomposition. If after
every such observation he proclaims a new victory for death, is that his
fault? In this case there are no relatives whom one is afraid to alarm:
we are ourselves dying this death. The crowd shouts with indignation:
‘Remedies! Remedies! Or don’t speak of the disease!’ But why not speak of
it? It is only under despotic governments that we are forbidden to speak
of crops failing, of epidemic diseases, of the numbers slain in war.
The remedy, it seems, is not easily to be found; they have made plenty
of experiments on France since the days of the copious blood-letting of
1793; they have tried victories and violent exercise with her. Setting
her marching to Egypt and to Russia, they have tried parliamentarianism
and _agiotage_, a little republic and a little Napoleon—and has anything
done any good? Proudhon himself once tested his pathology and came
to grief over the People’s Bank—though in itself his idea was good.
Unluckily, he did not believe in magical formulas, or else he would have
been singing out to everybody: ‘League of Nations! League of Nations!
Universal Republic! Brotherhood of all the World! _Grande Armée de la
Démocratie!_’ He did not use these phrases, he did not spare the Old
Believers of the revolution, and for that reason the French look upon him
as an egoist, as an individualist, almost as a renegade and a traitor.
I remember Proudhon’s works, from his reflections _On Property_ to
his _Financial Guidance_; many of his ideas have changed—a man could
hardly live through a period like ours and whistle the same duet in A
minor like Platon Mihailovitch in _Woe from Wit_. What is so startling
in the midst of these changes is the inner unity that holds them all
together, from the essays written as a school task in the Besançon
Academy to the _carmen horrendum_ of Stock Exchange depravity, which
has lately appeared; the same order of thought developing, changing in
form, reflecting events, runs through the _Contradictions of Political
Economy_, and through his _Confessions_, and through his _Journal_.
Inertia of thought is characteristic of religion and doctrinarianism;
they presuppose a persistent narrowness, a finished limitedness, living
apart or in its own narrow circle, rejecting everything new that life
offers ... or at any rate not troubling about it. The real truth must be
found under the influence of events, must reflect them, while remaining
true to itself, or it would not be the living _truth_, but an eternal
truth, at rest from the agitations of this world in the deadly stillness
of holy stagnation.[79] Where, and in what case, I have sometimes asked,
was Proudhon false to the fundamental principles of his philosophy? I
have always been answered that he was so in his political mistakes, his
blunders in revolutionary diplomacy. For his political mistakes he was,
of course, responsible as a journalist; but even in that case he was not
false to himself: on the contrary, some of his mistakes were due to his
believing more in his principles than in the party to which he, against
his own will, belonged, with which he had nothing in common, and with
which he was only associated by hatred for a common foe.
It was not in political activity that his real strength lay; it was
not there that he found the basis of the thought which he clad in
all the armour of his arguments. On the contrary, it is everywhere
clearly evident that politics in the sense of the old liberalism and
constitutional republicanism were, in his eyes, of secondary importance,
as something half over, passing. He was not greatly concerned over
political questions, and was ready to make compromises because he did
not attach special significance to the forms, which in his view were
not essential. All who have abandoned the Christian point of view take
up a similar attitude to religious questions. I may recognise that the
constitutional religion of Protestantism is somewhat freer than the
autocracy of Catholicism, but I cannot take to heart any questions in
regard to church and denomination; probably I should make mistakes, and
concessions in consequence, which the most ordinary graduate in divinity
or parish priest would avoid.
Doubtless, there was no place for Proudhon in the National Assembly
as it was constituted, and his individuality was lost in that den of
petty-bourgeois. In the _Confessions of a Revolutionary_ Proudhon tells
us that he was completely at a loss in the Assembly. And indeed, what
could be done there by a man who said of Marrast’s constitution, that
sour fruit of seven months’ work of seven hundred heads: ‘I give my vote
against your constitution, not only because it’s bad, but because it’s a
constitution.’
The parliamentary dregs greeted one of his speeches: ‘The speech to the
_Moniteur_, the orator to the madhouse!’ I do not think that in the
memory of man there had ever been such parliamentary scenes from the days
when the Archbishop of Alexandria brought to the Œcumenical Councils
monks armed with clubs in the name of the Virgin, up to the days of the
Washington senators who proved the benefits of slavery on each other with
sticks.
But even there Proudhon succeeded in rising to his full height, and
in the midst of the wrangling displayed a brilliance that will not be
forgotten.
Thiers in rejecting Proudhon’s financial scheme made some insinuations as
to the moral depravity of the men who advocated such theories. Proudhon
mounted the tribune, and with his stooping figure and his menacing air
of a sturdy field-worker said to the smiling old creature: ‘Speak of
finance, but do not speak of morality: I may take that as personal,
I have told you so in committee. If you will persist, I—I will not
challenge you to a duel’ (Thiers smiled); ‘no, your death is not enough
for me—that would prove nothing. I challenge you to another sort of
contest. Here from this tribune I will tell the whole story of my life,
fact by fact—any one can pull me up if I forget or omit anything; and
then let my opponent tell the story of his!’ The eyes of all were turned
upon Thiers; he sat scowling, with no trace of a smile on his face, and
made no answer either.
A hostile Chamber sank into silence while Proudhon, looking
contemptuously at the champions of religion and the family, came down
from the platform. That was where his strength lay. In his words one
hears clearly the language of the new world with its new standards and
its new penalties.
From the revolution of February Proudhon foretold what France had come
to; to a thousand different tunes he kept repeating, ‘Beware, do not
trifle; “this is not Catiline at your gates, but death.”’ The French
shrugged their shoulders. The skull, the scythe, the hour-glass—all the
trappings of death—were not to be seen. How could it be death?—it ‘was
a momentary defeat, the after-dinner nap of a great people!’ At last
many people discerned that things were in a bad way. Proudhon was less
downcast than others, less panic-stricken, because he had foreseen it;
then he was accused of callousness and even of having invited disaster.
They say the Chinese Emperor pulls the Court star-gazer’s hair every year
when the latter announces that the days are beginning to draw in.
The genius of Proudhon is really antipathetic to the rhetorical French,
his language is offensive to them. The revolution developed its own
special puritanism, narrow and intolerant, its own obligatory jargon;
and patriots resent everything not written in the official form, just
as the Russian judges do. Their criticism stops short at their symbolic
books, such as the _Contrat Social_ and _Declaration of the Rights of
Man_. Men of faith, they hate analysis and doubt; conspirators, they
do everything in common and turn everything into a party question. An
independent mind is hateful to them as a disturber of discipline, they
dislike original ideas even in the past. Louis Blanc is almost vexed
with the eccentric genius of Montaigne.[80] It is upon this Gallic
feeling, which seeks to subject individuality to the herd, that their
partiality for _equalising_, for the dead level of military discipline,
for centralisation—that is, for despotism—is based.
The blasphemy of the French, their sweeping judgments, are more due
to mischief, caprice, the pleasure of mockery, than the craving for
analysis, than the scepticism that frets the soul. The Frenchman has
an endless number of little prejudices, minute religions, and these he
will defend with the persistence of a Don Quixote, the pertinacity of
a _raskolnik_. That is why they cannot forgive Montaigne or Proudhon
for their free-thinking and lack of reverence for generally accepted
idols. Like the Petersburg censorship, they permit a jest at a titular
councillor, but you must not touch a privy councillor. In 1850 E.
Girardin printed in the _Presse_ a bold and new idea, that the principles
of law are not eternal but go on evolving in different forms with the
development of history. What an uproar this article excited! The campaign
of abuse, of cries of horror, of charges of immorality begun by the
_Gazette_ of France was kept up for months.
To assist in restoring such an organ as the _Peuple_ was worth a
sacrifice; I wrote to Sazonov and Hoetsky that I was ready to supply the
guarantee fund.
Until then I had not seen much of Proudhon; I had met him twice at the
lodgings of Bakunin, with whom he was very intimate. Bakunin was living
at that time with A. Reihel in an extremely modest lodging at the other
side of the Seine in the Rue de Bourgogne. Proudhon often went there
to listen to Reihel’s Beethoven and Bakunin’s Hegel—the philosophical
discussions lasted longer than the symphonies. They reminded me of the
famous all-night arguments of Bakunin with Homyakov at Tchaadayev’s and
at Madame Yelagin’s, also over Hegel. In 1847, Karl Vogt, who also lived
in the Rue de Bourgogne, and often visited Reihel and Bakunin, was bored
one evening with listening to the endless discussions on phenomenology,
and went home to bed. Next morning he went round for Reihel, as they
were to go to the Jardin des Plantes together; he was surprised to
hear conversation in Bakunin’s study at that early hour. He opened the
door—Proudhon and Bakunin were sitting in the same places before the
burnt-out embers in the fireplace, finishing their brief summing-up of
the argument begun overnight.
At first, afraid of the humble rôle of our fellow-countrymen, of being
patronised by great men, I did not try to become more intimate even
with Proudhon himself, and I believe I was not altogether wrong there.
Proudhon’s letter in answer to mine was courteous, but cold and somewhat
reserved.
I wanted to show him from the very first that he was not dealing with
a mad _prince russe_ who was giving the money from revolutionary
dilettantism, and still more from ostentation, nor with an orthodox
admirer of French journalists, deeply grateful for their accepting
twenty-four thousand francs from him, nor with a dull-witted _bailleur
de fonds_ who imagines that providing the guarantee funds for such a
paper as the _Voix du Peuple_ is a serious business investment. I wanted
to show him that I knew very well what I was doing, that I had my own
definite aim in it, and so wanted to have a definite influence on the
paper. While I accepted unconditionally all that he wrote about money,
I demanded in the first place the right to insert articles, my own and
other people’s; secondly, the right to superintend all the foreign part,
to recommend editors, correspondents, and so on for it, and to insist on
payment for the latter for articles inserted. This last may seem strange,
but I can confidently assert that the _National_ and the _Réforme_ would
open their eyes with astonishment if any foreigner ventured to ask to
be paid for an article. They would take it for impudence or madness, as
though for a foreigner to see himself in print in a Parisian paper were
not
‘_Lohn der reichlich lohnet_.’
Proudhon agreed to my conditions, but still they made him wince. This
is what he wrote to me in Geneva on the 29th of August 1849: ‘And so
the thing is settled: under my general direction you have a share in
the editorship of the paper; your articles must be accepted with _no
restriction_, except that to which the editors are bound by respect for
their _own opinions_ and fear of legal responsibility. Agreed in ideas,
we can only differ in deductions; as regards the criticism of foreign
events, we leave that entirely to you. You and we are missionaries of
one idea. You will see our line in general discussion, and you will have
to support it: I am sure I shall never have to _correct your views_; I
should regard that as the greatest calamity. I tell you frankly, the
whole success of the paper depends on our agreement. The democratic
and social question must be raised to the level of an undertaking by a
European League. To presuppose that we shall not agree means to assume
that we have not the essential conditions for publishing the paper, and
that _we had better be silent_.’
To this severe missive I replied by the despatch of twenty-four thousand
francs and a long letter, quite friendly, but firm. I told him how
completely I agreed with him theoretically, adding that, like a true
Scythian, I saw with joy that the old world was falling into ruins,
and believed that it was our mission to announce to it its speedy end.
‘_Your fellow-countrymen are far from sharing these ideas._ I know one
free Frenchman—that is you. Your revolutionists are conservatives. They
are Christians without recognising it, and monarchists fighting for a
republic. You alone have raised the question of negation and revolution
to a scientific level, and you have been the first to tell France that
there is no salvation for the edifice that is crumbling from within, and
that there is nothing worth saving from it; that its very conceptions of
freedom and revolution are saturated with conservatism and reaction. As a
matter of fact, the political republicans are but one of the variations
on the constitutional tune of which Guizot, Odilon Barrot, and the rest
play their several versions. This is the view that should be followed
in the analysis of the latest European events, in attacking reaction,
Catholicism, monarchism, not in the ranks of our enemies—that is
extremely easy—but in our own camp. We must unmask the mutual guarantees
existing between the democrats and the powers that be. Since we are not
afraid to attack the victors, let us not from false sentimentality be
afraid to attack the vanquished also.
‘I am thoroughly convinced that if the inquisition of the republic does
not kill our newspaper, it will be the best newspaper in Europe.’
I think that even now. But how Proudhon and I could imagine that
Napoleon’s government—they never stood on ceremony—would put up with a
paper like that, it is difficult to explain.
Proudhon was pleased with my letter, and wrote to me on the 15th of
December from the Conciergerie: ‘I am very glad to have been associated
with you in the same work. I, too, wrote something in the nature of a
philosophy[81] under the title of the _Confessions of a Revolutionary_.
You will not perhaps find in it the _verve barbare_ to which you have
been trained by German philosophy. Do not forget that I am writing for
the French, who, for all their revolutionary ardour, are, it must be
confessed, far inferior to their rôle. However limited my view may be,
it is a hundred thousand times higher than the loftiest heights of our
journalistic, academic, and literary world. I have enough in me to be a
giant among them for another ten years.
‘I completely share your opinion of the so-called republicans; of course,
they are only one species of the genus doctrinaires. As regards these
questions there is no need to convince each other; you will find in me
and my colleagues men who go hand in hand with you....
‘I too think a peaceful methodical advance by imperceptible transitions,
as the political economists and philosophical historians would have it,
is no longer possible for the revolution; we must make terrible leaps.
But as journalists foreseeing the coming catastrophe, it is not for us
to present it as something inevitable and just, or we shall be hated and
kicked out; and we have got to live....’
The paper was a wonderful success. Proudhon from his prison cell
conducted his orchestra in masterly fashion. His articles were full of
originality, fire, and that irritability which prison inflames.
‘What are you, _M. le Président_?’ he writes in one article, speaking
of Napoleon; ‘tell me—man, woman, hemaphrodite, beast, or fish?’ And we
still imagined that such a paper might be kept going!
The subscribers were not numerous, but the street sales were large;
thirty-five thousand to forty thousand were sold per day. The circulation
of particularly attractive numbers—for instance, of those in which
Proudhon’s articles appeared—was even larger; fifty thousand to sixty
thousand were printed, and often on the following day copies were being
sold for a franc instead of a sou.[82]
But for all that, by the 1st of March—that is, in six months’ time—not
only was there no cash in hand, but already part of the guarantee fund
had gone in payment of fines. Ruin was inevitable; Proudhon hastened it
considerably. This was how it happened. On one occasion at his rooms in
Ste. Pélagie I found D’Alton-Shee and two of the editors. D’Alton-Shee,
that peer of France who scandalised Pacquier and frightened all the
peers by answering from the platform the question, ‘Why, are you not a
Catholic?’ ‘No! and what’s more, I am not a Christian at all, and I don’t
know whether I am a deist.’ He was saying to Proudhon that the last
numbers of the _Voix du Peuple_ were feeble: Proudhon was looking through
them and growing more and more morose; then, thoroughly incensed, he
turned to the editors: ‘What is the meaning of it? You take advantage of
my being in prison, and go to sleep there in the office. No, gentlemen:
if you go on like this I will refuse to have anything to do with the
paper, and will publish the grounds for my refusal. I don’t want my name
to be dragged in the mud; you need some one to stand behind you and
overlook every line. The public takes this for my newspaper: no, I must
put a stop to this. To-morrow I will send an article to efface the ill
effects of your scribbling, and I will show how I understand what ought
to be the spirit of my paper.’
Seeing his irritation, it might well be anticipated that the article
would not be the most moderate, but he surpassed our expectations: his
_Vive l’Empereur!_ was a rhapsody of irony—malignant, terrible irony.
In addition to a new action against the paper, the government revenged
itself on Proudhon in its own way. He was transferred to a horrible
room—that is, given a far worse one than before: the window was half
boarded up so that nothing could be seen but the sky; no one was admitted
to see him, and a special guard was put at the door. And these measures,
unseemly for the correction of a naughty boy of sixteen, were taken seven
years ago against one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Men have grown
no wiser since the days of Socrates, no wiser since the days of Galileo;
they have only become more petty. This disrespect for genius, however, is
a new phenomenon that has reappeared during the last ten years. From the
time of the Renaissance talent has to some extent become a protection;
neither Spinoza nor Lessing was shut in a dark room or stood in a
corner. Such men are sometimes persecuted and killed, but they are not
humiliated in trivial ways; they are sent to the scaffold, but not to the
workhouse.
Bourgeois imperial France is fond of equality.
Though persecuted, Proudhon still struggled in his chains; he still made
an effort to bring out the _Voix du Peuple_ in 1850; but that attempt was
soon crushed. My guarantee money had been seized to the last farthing;
the one man in France who still had something to say had no choice but to
be silent.
The last time I saw Proudhon in Ste. Pélagie, I was being turned out
of France, while he still had two years of prison. We parted gloomily;
there was no trace of hope in the near future. Proudhon maintained a
concentrated silence, whilst I was boiling with vexation; we both had
many thoughts in our minds, but no desire to speak.
I had heard a great deal of his roughness, _rudesse_, and intolerance;
I never had any experience of it in my own case. What soft people call
his harshness was the tense muscle of the fighter; his scowling brow
showed only the intense workings of his mind: in his anger he reminded
me of a wrathful Luther or of Cromwell jeering at an opponent. He knew
that I understood him, and, knowing, too, how few did understand him,
appreciated it. He knew that he was considered an undemonstrative man;
and hearing from Michelet of the unhappy death of my mother and Kolya,
he wrote to me from Ste. Pélagie, among other things: ‘Is it possible
that fate should attack us on that side too? I cannot get over the shock
of this terrible accident. I love you, and carry your image deep here in
this heart which so many think is of stone.’
After that I did not see him:[83] in 1851, when, thanks to Léon Faucher,
I visited Paris for a few days, he had been sent away to some central
prison. A year later, when I was passing through Paris in secret,
Proudhon was ill at Besançon.
Proudhon had his weak spot, and there he was incorrigible; there the
limit of his character was reached, and, as is always the case, beyond it
he was a conservative and a follower of tradition. I am speaking of his
views of family life, and of the significance of woman in general. ‘How
lucky is our friend N.!’ Proudhon would say jestingly; ‘his wife is not
so stupid that she can’t make a good _pot-au-feu_, and not clever enough
to discuss his articles. That’s all that is wanted for domestic bliss.’
In this jest Proudhon expressed, laughing, what was the serious basis
of his views on woman. His conceptions of family relations were coarse
and reactionary, but they betrayed, not the bourgeois element of the
townsman, but rather the stubborn feeling of the rustic paterfamilias,
haughtily regarding woman as an inferior, and a servant, and himself as
the autocratic head of the family.
A year and a half after this was written, Proudhon published his great
work on _Justice in the Church and Revolution_.
This book, for which France, sunk into barbarism, condemned him again to
three years’ imprisonment, I read through attentively, and I closed the
third volume weighed down by gloomy thoughts.
It is a terrible ... terrible time!... The atmosphere of decomposition
stupefies the strongest....
This ‘brilliant fighter,’ too, could not resist it, and was broken: in
his last work I see the same controversial power, the same mighty stroke;
but it brings him now to preconceived results—it is no longer free in the
very fullest sense. Towards the end of the book I watched over Proudhon
as Kent watched over King Lear, expecting him to recover his reason, but
he talked more and more wildly—there were the same fits of intolerance,
of unbridled speech, as in Lear; and at the same time ‘_every inch_’
betrays talent, but ... a talent that is ‘_touched_’ ... and he runs
with the corpse, not of a daughter but of a mother, whom he takes to be
living.[84]
Latin thought, religious in its very negation, superstitious in doubt,
rejecting one set of authorities in the name of another, has rarely gone
further, rarely plunged more deeply _in medias res_ of reality, rarely
freed itself from all tangles, with such dialectic boldness and certainty
as in this book. In it, not only the crude dualism of religion but the
more subtle dualism of philosophy is cast off; the mind is set free not
only from heavenly phantoms but from those of the earth, it passes beyond
the sentimental apotheosis of humanity and the fatalism of progress, has
none of the everlasting litanies of brotherhood, democracy, and progress,
which are so pitifully wearisome in the midst of rancour and violence.
Proudhon sacrificed the idols and the language of revolution to the true
understanding of it, and put morality on its only real basis—the heart of
man, recognising no idols, nothing but reason, ‘if it.’
And after all that, the great iconoclast was frightened of human nature
being set free; for, having freed it abstractly, he fell back again
into metaphysics, endowed it with _incredible will_, could not manage
it, and led it to be immolated on the altar of the cold, inhuman God of
_justice_—the God of equilibrium, of stillness and peace, the God of the
Brahmins, who seek to lose all that is personal and to be dissolved, to
come to rest in an infinite ocean of annihilation.
On the empty altar scales were set up. This would be a new Caudine Forks
for humanity.
The ‘justice’ which is his goal is not even the artistic harmony of
Plato’s Republic, the elegant equilibrium of passion and sacrifice; the
Gallic tribune takes nothing from ‘anarchic and frivolous Greece’; he
stoically tramples personal feelings under foot, and does not seek to
harmonise them with the demands of the family and the commune. His ‘free
man’ is a sentry on guard, and a workman who can never rise; he must
serve and stand on guard until he is relieved by death; he must stifle
in himself all personal passion, everything outside duty, because he is
not himself: his meaning, his essence, lies outside himself; he is the
instrument of justice; he is predestined, like the Virgin Mary, to bear
the idea in suffering and to bring it into the world for the salvation of
the state.
The family, the first embryo of society, the first cradle of justice,
is doomed to everlasting, hopeless toil; it is to serve as the means of
purification of the personal; in it the passions are to be stamped out.
The austere Roman family in the workshop of to-day is Proudhon’s ideal.
Christianity has softened family life too much for him: it preferred Mary
to Martha, the dreamer to the housewife: it forgave the sinner and held
out a hand to the penitent, because she loved much; but in Proudhon’s
family, just what is essential is to love little. And that is not all:
Christianity puts the individual far higher than his family relations.
It says to the son: ‘Forsake father and mother and follow me’—to the son
who in the name of Proudhon’s _realisation of justice_ must be put back
into the fetters of absolute paternal power, who in his father’s lifetime
can have no freedom, least of all in the choice of a wife. He is to be
inured to slavery, to become in his turn a tyrant over the children who
are born without love through duty for the continuation of the family. In
this family marriage will be indissoluble, but it will be cold as ice.
Marriage is simply a victory over love; the less love there is between
the cook-wife and the workman-husband the better. And to think that I
should meet these old shabby bogeys from the Hegelianism of the right
wing in the writings of Proudhon!
Feeling is banished, everything is frozen, the colours are gone, nothing
is left but the dull, exhausting toil of the proletariat of to-day,
the toil from which the aristocratic family of ancient Rome, based on
slavery, was at least free: gone is the poetic beauty of the Church,
the delirium of faith, the hopes of paradise; even poetry in those days
‘will be written no more,’ so Proudhon asserts. On the other hand,
labour will become ‘more severe.’ For individual freedom, for the right
of initiative, for independence, one may well sacrifice the lullabys of
religion; but to sacrifice everything for the realisation of the idea of
justice—what nonsense!
Man is doomed to toil, he must labour till his hand drops and the son
takes from the cold fingers of the father the plane or the hammer and
carries on the everlasting work. But what if among the sons there happens
to be one with a little more sense who lays down the drill and asks: ‘But
what are we wearing ourselves out for?’ ‘For the triumph of justice,’
Proudhon tells him. And the new Cain answers: ‘But who made me the keeper
of the triumph of justice?’ ‘Who?—why, is not your whole vocation, your
whole life, the realisation of justice?’ ‘Who has set up that object?’
Cain will answer. ‘It is too stale; there is no God, but the Commandments
remain. Justice is not my vocation; work is not a duty but a necessity;
the family is not for me the fetters of life but the setting for my life,
for my development. You want to keep me in slavery, but I rebel against
you. I revolt against you, against your steel-yard, just as you have been
revolting all your life against bayonets, capital, and Church, just as
all the French revolutionists rebelled against the feudal and Catholic
tradition. Or do you imagine that after the taking of the Bastille,
after the terror, after the war and the famine, after the bourgeois
king and the bourgeois republic, I am going to believe you when you
tell me that Romeo had no right to love Juliet because those old fools
of Montagues and Capulets kept up an everlasting feud, and that, even
at thirty or forty, I must not choose the companion of my life without
my father’s permission, that a woman who has been unfaithful must be
punished and disgraced? Why, what do you take me for with your justice?’
And in support of Cain we would add, from the dialectical side, that
Proudhon’s whole conception of an _aim_ is utterly inconsistent. This
teleology is also theology; this is the republic of February—that is, the
same as the monarchy of July, but without Louis-Philippe. What difference
is there between predetermined teleology and providence?[85]
After emancipating human nature to the last limit, Proudhon took
fright looking at his contemporaries, and, that these convicts, these
_ticket-of-leave men_, might do no mischief, he catches them in the
rat-trap of the Roman family.
The doors of the restored _atrium_, free from _Lares_ and _Penates_,
have been flung open; but not Anarchy, not the annihilation of authority
and the state, is seen seated in the midst, but stern Order, with
centralisation, with regulation of family relations, with inheritance
and deprivation of it as a punishment; and with these things all the old
Roman sins peep out of every crevice with the dead eyes of statues.
The family of antiquity naturally implies the ancient conception of the
fatherland with its jealous patriotism, that ferocious virtue which has
shed ten times more blood than all the vices put together.
Man bound in serfdom to the family becomes again the bondslave of the
soil. His movements are restricted, he puts down roots into his land;
only upon it he is what he is: ‘the Frenchman living in Russia,’ says
Proudhon, ‘is a Russian, and not a Frenchman.’ No more colonies, no more
settlements abroad; every man must live where he is....
‘Holland will not perish,’ said William of Orange in the years of terror;
‘it will go aboard ships and will sail off to Asia, and here we will lift
up the sluices.’ It is people like that who are free.
The English are like that: as soon as they begin to be oppressed, they
sail over the ocean and there found a younger, freer England. And yet
nobody could say of the English that they do not love their country, or
that they are lacking in national feeling. Emigrating in all directions,
England has peopled half the world; while France, lacking in vitality,
has lost one set of colonies and does not know what to do with the rest.
She does not need them; France is pleased with herself and clings more
and more to her centre, and the centre to its master. What independence
can there be in such a country?
On the other hand, how can one abandon France, _la belle France_? ‘Is
not she even now the freest country in the world, is not her language
the finest language, her literature the finest literature, is not her
syllabic line more musical than the Greek hexameter!’ Moreover, her
universal genius absorbs the thought and the literature of all ages and
all countries: ‘has not France made Shakespeare and Kant, Goethe and
Hegel her own?’ And what is more: Proudhon forgot that they corrected
them and dressed them up, as landowners dress up the peasants when they
take them to Court.
Proudhon concludes his book with a Catholic prayer adapted to socialism;
all he had to do was to secularise a few Church phrases and to put
the Phrygian cap in the place of the mitre, for the prayer of the
‘Byzantine’ bishops to be the very thing for the bishop of socialism.
What a chaos! Proudhon, emancipated from everything except reason, still
wants to remain not only a husband after the style of Bluebeard, but also
a French nationalist—with his literary chauvinism and his unlimited power
of the father; and so behind the strong, vigorous words of a free thinker
one seems to hear the voice of the savage old man, dictating his will,
and trying now to preserve for his children the decrepit temple he has
been undermining all his life.
The Latin world does not like freedom, it only likes to struggle for it;
it sometimes finds the force for setting free, never for freedom. Is it
not melancholy to see such men as Auguste Comte and Proudhon setting up
as their last word, the one a sort of mandarin hierarchy, the other his
domestic penal servitude and apotheosis of an inhuman _pereat mundus,
fiat justitia_!
Appendix
(To Chapter 41)
I
... On the one hand we have the Proudhon family, irrevocably welded
together and nailed down, indissoluble marriage, the absolute power of
the father—a family in which for the sake of society all the persons
except one are brought to misery, the savage marriage in which unchanging
feeling, the magic power of a vow, are assumed; on the other hand, the
theories that are coming into vogue, in which marriage and the family are
no longer binding, the irresistible force of passion is assumed, the past
is thought to lay no obligations, and the complete independence of the
individual is asserted.
On the one hand we have woman almost stoned for faithlessness; on the
other, jealousy itself put _hors la loi_ as a morbid, abnormal feeling of
egoism and ownership and the romantic distortion of healthy and natural
ideas.
Where is the truth ... where is the middle line? Twenty-three years ago I
was already seeking a way out of this forest of contradictions.
We are bold in denial and always ready to fling any of our idols into
the river, but the gods of home and family are somehow ‘waterproof’—they
always rise again. Perhaps there is no sense left in them, but there is
still life in them; it seems as though the weapons used against them have
simply glided over their snaky scales, felled them, stunned them ... but
have not killed them.
Jealousy ... Fidelity ... Infidelity ... Chastity ... Dark forces,
menacing words, thanks to which rivers of tears, rivers of blood have
flowed—words that set us shuddering like the memory of the Inquisition,
of torture, of the plague ... and yet they are the words under the
shadow of which, as under the sword of Damocles, the family has lived and
is living.
There is no turning them out of doors by abuse or by denial. They remain
round the corner, slumbering, ready at the slightest call to ruin
everything near and far, to ruin us ourselves....
It seems as though we must abandon the excellent intention of
extinguishing these smouldering embers and confine ourselves humbly to
mitigating and humanely directing the destructive fire. You can no more
bridle passions with logic than you can justify them in the law-courts.
Passions are facts and not dogmas.
Moreover, jealousy has always enjoyed special privileges. In itself a
strong _absolutely natural_ passion, it has hitherto only been encouraged
instead of being restrained and softened. The Christian doctrine making,
through hatred of the body, everything fleshly of extraordinary value,
and the aristocratic worship of blood, of purity of race, have developed
to the point of absurdity the conception of insulted honour, of a blot
that cannot be effaced. Jealousy has received the _jus gladii_, the
right of judgment and revenge. It has become a duty of _honour_, almost
a virtue. All that will not stand a moment’s criticism—but yet there
still remains at the bottom of the heart a very real insurmountable
feeling of pain, of unhappiness called jealousy, a feeling as elementary
as the feeling of love itself, resisting every effort to deny it, an
‘irreducible’ feeling.
... Here again are the everlasting limits, the Caudine Forks into which
history drives us. On both sides there is truth, on both there is
falsehood. The bold asking for a clear alternative will lead you nowhere.
At the moment of complete denial of one of the terms, it comes back—just
as after the last quarter of the moon the first appears on the other side.
Hegel removed the boundary-posts of human reason, by rising
to the _absolute spirit_; in it they did not vanish but were
_transformed_—_fulfilled_, as the German theological philosophy expresses
it: this is mysticism, philosophical theodicy, allegory, and reality
purposely mixed up. All religious reconciliations of the irreconcilable
are won by means of _redemption_—that is, by sacred transmutation, a
sacred deception, a solution which solves nothing but rests on faith. Can
anything be more opposite to free-will than necessity?—but by faith they
are easily reconciled. Man will accept without a murmur the justice of
punishment for an action which was pre-ordained.
Proudhon himself, in a different range of questions, was far more
humane than German philosophy. From economic contradictions he escapes
by the recognition of both sides under the restraint of a higher
principle. Property as a right and property as a theft are set side by
side in everlasting balance, everlastingly complementary, under the
ever-growing dominance of _justice_. It is clear that the argument and
the contradictions are transferred to another sphere, and that it is the
conception of justice we have to criticise rather than the rights of
property.
The simpler, the less mystic, and the less one-sided, the more real and
practically applicable the higher principle is, the more completely it
brings the contradictory terms to their lowest denomination.
The absolute, ‘all-embracing’ spirit of Hegel is replaced in Proudhon
by the menacing idea of justice. But the problem of the passions is not
likely to be solved by that either. Passion is intrinsically unjust;
justice is remote from the personal, it is impersonal—passion is only
individual.
The solution here lies not in the law-courts but in the humane
development of individual character, in its escape from lyrical
self-centredness into the light of day, in the development of common
human interests.
The radical elimination of jealousy implies eliminating love for the
individual, replacing it by love for woman or for man, by love of the
sex in general. But it is just the personal, the individual, that is
attractive; it is just that which gives colour, tone, intensity to the
whole of our life. Our emotion is personal, our happiness and unhappiness
are personal happiness and unhappiness.
Rationalism with all its logic is as little comfort in personal sorrow as
the consolations of the Romans with their rhetoric. Neither the tears of
loss nor the tears of jealousy can be wiped away, nor should they be, but
it is right and possible that they should flow humanely ... and that they
should be equally free from monastic poison, the ferocity of the beast,
and the wail of the man robbed of his property.[86]
II
To reduce the relations of man and woman to a casual sexual connection
is just as impossible as to exalt and distort them into marriage
indissoluble to the grave. The one and the other may be met at the
extreme of sexual and marriage relations, as a special case, as an
exception but not as a general rule. The casual relation will be broken
off or will continually tend to a closer and firmer union, just as the
indissoluble marriage will tend to grow more and more free from external
bonds.
People have continually protested against both extremes. Indissoluble
marriage has been accepted by them hypocritically, or in the heat of the
moment. Casual relations never have had complete recognition; they have
always been concealed, just as marriage has been a subject of boasting.
All attempts at the official regulation of brothels, although aiming at
their restriction, are offensive to the moral sense of society, which
sees in organisation, recognition. The scheme elaborated by a gentleman
in Paris, in the days of the Directorate, of establishing privileged
brothels with their own hierarchy and to on, was even in those days
received with hisses and overwhelmed by a storm of laughter and contempt.
The normal life of man is as remote from the monastery as from the
cattle-yard; from the sexlessness of the monk, which the Church esteems
above marriage, as from the childless gratification of passion....
Marriage is for Christianity a concession, an inconsistency, a weakness.
Christianity regards marriage as society regards concubinage. The monk
and the Catholic priest are condemned to perpetual celibacy by way of
reward for their foolish triumph over human nature.
Christian marriage in general is gloomy and unjust; it establishes
inequality against the teaching of the Gospel, and delivers the wife
into slavery to the husband. The wife is sacrificed, love (hateful
to the Church) is sacrificed; after the Church ceremony it becomes a
superfluity, and is replaced by duty and obligation. Of the brightest and
most joyous of feelings Christianity has made a pain, a weariness, and a
sin. The human race had either to die out or be inconsistent. Outraged
nature protested.
It protested not only by acts followed by penitence and stings of
conscience, but by sympathy, by rehabilitation. The protest began in
the very heyday of Catholicism and chivalry. The terrible husband, the
Bluebeard in armour with the sword, tyrannical, jealous, and merciless;
the barefoot monk, sullen, senseless, superstitious, ready to avenge
himself for his privations, for his useless struggle; jailers, torturers,
spies, ... and in some cellar or turret a sobbing woman, a page in
chains, for whom no one intercedes. All is darkness, savagery, blood,
bigotry, violence, and Latin prayers chanted through the nose.
But behind the monk, the confessor, and the jailer, who, with the
terrible husband, the father, and the brother, guard the sanctity of
marriage, the folk-legend is forming in the stillness, the ballad is
heard carried from place to place, from castle to castle, by troubadour
and minnesinger—it champions the unhappy woman. The judge condemns,
and the song absolves. The Church hurls its anathema at love outside
marriage, the ballad curses marriage without love. It champions the
love-sick page, the fallen wife, the oppressed daughter, not by argument
but by sympathy, by pity, by lamentation. The song is for the people its
secular prayer, its other escape from the cold and hunger of life, from
spiritual misery and heavy toil.
On holidays the litanies to the Madonna were replaced by the mournful
strains _des complaintes_, which did not heap shame on the unhappy
woman, but wept for her, and set above all the Virgin of Sorrows,
beseeching Her intervention and forgiveness. From ballads and legends
the protest grows into the novel and the drama. In the drama it becomes
a force. In the theatre outraged love, the gloomy secrets of family
injustice, find their tribune, their court of appeal. The hearing of
their case has moved thousands of hearts, wringing tears and cries of
indignation against the serfdom of marriage and the forcible bondage of
the family. The jury of the stalls and the boxes have over and over again
acquitted individuals and found institutions guilty.
Meanwhile, in the period of political reconstructions and secular
tendencies in thought, one of the two strong props of marriage is
beginning to break down. As it becomes less and less of a sacrament—that
is, loses its ultimate foundation—it has leaned more and more on the
police. Only by the mystic intervention of a higher power can Christian
marriage be justified. There is a certain logic in that, senseless,
but still logic. The police-officer, putting on his tricolor scarf and
celebrating the wedding with the civil code in his hand, is a far more
absurd figure than the priest in his vestments, surrounded by incense,
holy images, and miracles. Even the First Consul, Napoleon, the most
bourgeois politician in matters of love and the family, perceived that
marriage at the police-station was a poor affair, and tried to persuade
Cambacérès[87] to add some obligatory phrase, some moral sentence,
particularly one that would impress upon the bride her duty to be
faithful to her husband (not a word about his) and to obey him.
As soon as marriage emerges from the sphere of mysticism, it
becomes _expédient_, an external arrangement. It was introduced
by the panic-stricken ‘Bluebeards’ (shaven nowadays, and changed
into ‘blue-chins’) in judges’ wigs, and academic coats, popular
representatives and liberals, the priests of the civil code. Civil
marriage is simply a state measure of economy, freeing the state from
responsibility for the children and binding men more closely to property.
Marriage without the intervention of the Church became a contract for
the bodily enslavement of each to the other for life. The legislator
has nothing to do with faith, with mystic fantasies, so long as the
contract is fulfilled, and if not he will find means of punishment and
enforcement. And why not punish it? In England, the traditional country
of juridical development, a boy of sixteen, made drunk with ale and gin
and enrolled in a regiment by an old recruiting sergeant with red ribbons
on his hat, is subjected to the most horrible tortures. Why not punish a
girl? Why not punish with shame, ruin, and forcible restoration to her
master the girl who, with no clear understanding of what she is about,
has contracted to love for life, and has permitted something _extra_,
forgetting that the season-ticket is not transferable. But these new
Bluebeards too have been attacked by the troubadours and novelists.
Against the marriage of legal contract, a pathological, physiological
dogma has been set up, the dogma of _the absolute infallibility of the
passions and the incapacity of man to struggle against them_.
Those who were yesterday the slaves of marriage are now becoming the
slaves of love. There is no law for love, there is no strength that can
resist it.
With that, all rational control, all responsibility, every form of
self-restraint is effaced. That man is in subjection to irresistible and
overwhelming forces is a theory utterly opposed to rational freedom and
to reason, to that formation of the character of a free man which all
social theories aim at attaining by different paths.
Imaginary forces, if men accept them as real, have as much power as real
ones, and that is because man’s power of response is the same whatever
force acts on him. The man who is afraid of ghosts is afraid in exactly
the same way as the man who is afraid of mad dogs, and may as easily die
of fright. The difference is that in one case the man may be shown that
his fears are groundless, and in the other he cannot.
I refuse to admit the sovereign position given to _love_ in life, I deny
its autocratic power and protest against the pusillanimous excuse of
having been carried away by it.
Surely we have not freed ourselves from every restraint on earth, from
God and the devil, from the Roman and the criminal law, and proclaimed
reason as our sole guide and standard, in order to lie down humbly, like
Hercules at the feet of Omphale, or to fall asleep in the lap of Delilah?
Surely woman has not sought to be free from the yoke of the family,
from perpetual tutelage and the tyranny of father, husband, or brother,
has not striven for her rights to independent work, to learning and the
position of a citizen, only to begin over again cooing like a dove all
her life and pining for a dozen Leone Leonis[88] instead of one.
Yes, it is for woman that I am most of all sorry in this question;
she is hopelessly torn and destroyed by the all-devouring Moloch of
love. She puts more faith in it, she suffers more from it. She is more
concentrated on the sexual relation, more driven to love.... She is both
intellectually more unstable and intellectually less trained than we.
I am sorry for her.
III
Has any one made a serious and honest attempt to break down conventional
prejudices in female education? They are only broken down by experience,
and so it is life and not convention that suffers.
People go round the questions we are discussing, as old women and
children go round a graveyard or a place where a crime has been
committed. Some are afraid of impure spirits, others of the pure truth,
and are left in fantastic disorder and inconsistent chaos. There is
as little serious consistency in our view of sexual relations as in
practical spheres. We are still haunted by the possibility of combining
Christian morality, which starts from negation of the flesh and leads
towards the other world, with the realistic earthly morality of this
world. People are annoyed at the two moralities not harmonising, and,
to avoid spending time in worrying over the solution of the problem,
pick out according to their tastes and retain what they like of the
Church teaching, and reject what they do not care for; just as those
who do not keep the fasts will zealously eat pancakes, and avoid dull
religious services, whilst still observing religious festivities. Yet I
should have thought it was high time to bring more harmony and manliness
into conduct. Let him who respects the law remain under the law and not
break it, but let him who does not accept it show himself openly and
consciously independent of it.
A sober view of human relations is far more difficult for women than for
us—of that there can be no doubt; they are more deceived by education,
and know less of life, and so they more often stumble and break their
heads and hearts than free themselves. They are always in revolt, and
remain in slavery, strive for revolution, while most frequently they are
propping up the existing regime. From childhood the girl is frightened of
the sexual relation as of some _fearful unclean secret_ from which she
is guarded and scared off as though it were a sin that had some magical
power; and afterwards this same monstrous thing, this same _magnum
ignotum_ which leaves an ineffaceable stain, the remotest hint at which
is shameful and sets her blushing, is made the object of her life. As
soon as a boy can walk, he is given a toy sword to train him to murder,
he is promised an hussar’s uniform and epaulettes; while the girl is
lulled to sleep with the hope of a rich and handsome bridegroom, and she
dreams of epaulettes not on her own shoulders but on the shoulders of her
predestined husband.
‘Dors, dors, mon enfant,
Jusqu’à l’age de quinze ans,
A quinze ans faut te réveiller,
A quinze ans faut te marier.’
One must marvel at the fine human nature which is not ruined by such an
education—we might have expected that all the little girls so lulled for
fifteen years would set to work speedily to replace those slain by the
boys who have been trained from childhood with weapons of slaughter.
The Christian teaching imposes the terror of the ‘flesh’ before the
creature is conscious of its sex; it awakens the dreadful question in
the child, instils terror into the adolescent soul, and when the time to
answer it is come—another doctrine, as we have said, raises her sexual
calling to the sought-for ideal for the girl: the schoolgirl becomes the
bride, and the same mystery, the same sin but purified and sanctified,
becomes the crown of her education, the hope of her relations, the goal
of all her efforts, almost a social duty. Accomplishments, learning,
education, intelligence, beauty, wealth, grace, all are devoted to her
_sanctioned_ fall ... to the very same sin, the thought of which was
looked on as a crime but which has now changed its essential nature by a
miracle like that by which the Pope, when held up on a journey, changed a
meat dish into a Lenten dish by his blessing.
In short, the whole training—negative and positive—of a woman remains
a training for sexual relations; round them all her subsequent life
turns. From them she runs, towards them she runs, by them is disgraced,
by them is made proud.... To-day she preserves the negative holiness of
sexlessness, to-day she can only whisper, blushing, of love to her bosom
friend; to-morrow, in the face of the crowd, in glare and noise, in the
light of chandeliers and strains of music, she is flung into the arms of
a man.
Bride, wife, mother, only in old age as grandmother a woman is set free
from sexual life, and then becomes an independent creature, especially
if the grandfather is dead. Woman, struck down by love, does not soon
escape.... Pregnancy, suckling, child-rearing are all the development of
the same mystery, the same act of love; in woman it persists not in the
memory only, but in blood and body, in her it ferments and matures and
rends without breaking its tie.
Christianity breathed with its feverish monastic asceticism, with its
romantic nonsense, upon this physiologically strong, deep relation, and
blew it into the frenzied and destructive flames of jealousy, revenge,
punishment, and insult.
For a woman to extricate herself from this chaos is an heroic feat—only
rare and exceptional natures accomplish it; other women are tortured, and
if they do not go out of their minds it is only thanks to the frivolity
with which we all live without over-subtlety in the face of terrible
catastrophes and misfortunes, senselessly passing from day to day, from
one chance event to another and from one contradiction to another.
What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there
must be in a woman to get over all the fences, all the barriers, within
which she is held captive!
I have seen one such struggle and one such victory....