In one of his criticisms of Montesquieu--and on no French cla.s.sic has he been more constantly felicitous--f.a.guet speaks of the faculty possessed by that prince of intelligence of wandering among souls, and of studying their spiritual experience "comme un anatomiste etudie le jeu des organes." The author of the _Esprit des Lois_ took wide views and surveyed a vast expanse of society, but he was equally apt to map out a square inch of mossy rock at his feet. "Il a du reste beaucoup ecrit, _comme en marge de ses grands livres_." These words remind us of a section of Emile f.a.guet"s writings which is peculiarly stimulating and useful. It is ill.u.s.trated to great perfection in what is perhaps the most fascinating specimen of his vast and various production, the volume called _En lisant les Beaux Vieux Livres_, which he published so lately as 1911. This was followed by _En lisant Corneille_ in 1913 and _En lisant Moliere_ in 1914. If the war had not intervened and if his own health had not failed him, it is probable that f.a.guet would have extended and developed this section of his work, which exhibited the ripest fruit of his subtle and vigorous criticism.
The method which he adopted in these treatises was to take a portion of a well-known book or a short poem, and read it with his imaginary audience exactly as though they, and he, had never met with it before.
In _En lisant les Beaux Vieux Livres_ he takes a score of such pa.s.sages, and a.n.a.lyses them without pedantry, eagerly, curiously, cordially. He explains what the author meant, shows how he has succeeded in expressing his meaning, points out the ingenuities of thought and the felicities of language, and in short exhibits the piece of hackneyed prose or verse as though it had just been discovered. The process may sound perfunctory and pedagogic, but, conducted as f.a.guet conducts them, these little excursions are not less delightful than original. He takes things that everybody knows--such as Montaigne on Friendship, or Bossuet on the Romans, or a couple of La Bruyere"s portraits; he takes a long poem, like Alfred de Vigny"s _La Maison du Berger_, or a short lyric, like Victor Hugo"s _Le Semeur_; he takes the character of Severe in _Polyeucte_ or a landscape out of the memoirs of Chateaubriand, and he illuminates these familiar things until the reader not merely sees in them what he never saw before, but has gained a method of reading by which he will in future extract infinite new pleasures from re-reading old familiar books.
In this system of a.n.a.lysis by conversation consists the chief originality of f.a.guet"s criticism. The idea of it was not entirely new; so long ago as the seventeenth century Descartes said that "la lecture est une conversation continue avec les plus honnetes gens des siecles pa.s.ses." But it had not been planned on a practical basis until f.a.guet sketched out these enchanting books of his, in which we seem to see him seated, smiling, at a table, the volume open before him, expounding it to an eager circle of intelligent young people. In these conversations, f.a.guet had not the weight of Brunetiere or the sparkle of Lemaitre; he was simpler than the one and soberer than the other. He achieved the dream of the teacher when he discovered how to write books which please and are useful at the same time. He avoided, by a whole continent, the vapid dreariness of the usual English manual, which looks upon the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley as fit only to be pressed between sheets of blotting-paper in a _hortus siccus_. f.a.guet is always in earnest, although he sometimes indulges in immense humour and vivacity, not of the Parisian variety, but highly exhilarating. When he suddenly confesses to us that Balzac had "the temperament of an artist and the soul of a commercial traveller," or when he sums up an entirely grave summary of Pindare-Le Brun by telling us that "c"etait un homme de beaucoup d"esprit, d"un caractere tres meprisable, et excellent ouvrier de vers," it is no schoolmaster that speaks to pupils, but a friend who takes his intimates into his confidence.
It has been the habit to depreciate the style of f.a.guet, which indeed does not set out to be exquisite, and cannot compare with those of several of his great predecessors. He has been charged, in his zeal for the matter of literature, with a neglect of its form. It is true that his phrases are apt to be curt; he gives little attention to the conduct of a sentence, further than to define in it his precise intention. But his criticism has a great purity of design, which is in itself an element of style. It sets forth to accomplish a certain purpose and it carries out this aim with the utmost economy of means. No writer less than f.a.guet, to use a vulgar expression, "slops about all over the shop." He has at least this negative beauty of writing, and he adds to it another, the gift of discussing great authors in a tone that is in sympathy with their peculiarities. An instance of this, among a hundred, may be cited from his _Dix-huitieme Siecle_; summing up what he has to impress upon us about Marivaux, he defines that author in these terms; "C"est un precieux qui est a.s.sez rare et qu"on s"interdit de cond.a.m.ner au moment meme qu"on le desapprouve, parce qu"on n"est pas sans en jouir dans le moment meme qu"on en souffre." It would hardly be possible to put more of critical value into so few words, but moreover it is said as Marivaux himself might say it.
f.a.guet had his prejudices, as every honest man may have. He adored the seventeenth and he loved the nineteenth centuries, but he had almost an aversion from the eighteenth. He put Buffon first among the writers of that age, and Montesquieu next; so loyal a spirit as f.a.guet"s could not but be cordially attracted by Vauvenargues. But the lack of poetry, and, as he a.s.serted, the lack of philosophy of the Encyclopaedists annoyed him, and for their greatest name, for Voltaire, he had a positive hatred. f.a.guet found it difficult to be just to Diderot, and difficult to tolerate Rousseau, but to love Voltaire he made no effort whatever; he acknowledged that feat to be impossible. He did not fear to contradict himself, and about Rousseau his opinion grew steadily more favourable, until, in 1913, he positively published five independent volumes on this one writer alone. But f.a.guet could never persuade himself to approach Voltaire with any face but a wry one. Yet, even here, his antipathy is scarcely to be perceived on the surface. f.a.guet always leaves the judgment of his reader independent. He puts the facts before him; his own irony marks the line of thought which he suggests; but he is careful never to attempt to bully the reader into acceptance.
Brunetiere is apt to be vociferous in persuasion; f.a.guet never raises his voice.
In 1899, being called upon to sum up the qualities of the leading French critics from 1850 onwards, f.a.guet found himself confronted with his own name and work. It was characteristic of his candour and simplicity that he did not shrink from the task of describing himself, and that he undertook it without false modesty or affectation. When he comes to describe Emile f.a.guet he is as detached, as calmly a.n.a.lytic, as he is when he speaks of Theophile Gautier or M. Rene Doumic. He defines the qualities, acknowledges the limitations, and hints at the faults of his subject. I do not know a case in all literary history where a writer has spoken of himself in terms more severely judicial. He closes this remarkable little study with words which we may quote here for their curious personal interest no less than as an example of f.a.guet"s style:
Laborieux, du reste, a.s.sez methodique, consciencieux, en poussant la conscience jusqu"a etre peu bienveillant, ou en ne sachant pas pousser le scrupule consciencieux jusqu"a la bienveillance, il a pu rendre et il a rendu des services appreciables aux etudiants en litterature, qui etaient le public qu"il a toujours vise. Sans abandonner la critique, qu"il est a croire qu"il aimera toujours, il s"est un peu tourne depuis quelques annees du cote des etudes sociologiques, ou c"est a d"autres qu"a nous qu"il appartient d"apprecier ses efforts.
In this connexion a phrase of the great critic may be recalled. When the war broke out in 1914, someone who knew f.a.guet"s absorbing love of books sympathized with him on the blow to literature. He responded, in a tone of reproof, "L"avenir national est une chose autrement importante que l"avenir litteraire."
Those sociological interests were steadily emphasized. f.a.guet became, not less in love with great books, but more inclined to turn from their technical to their ethical value. He became himself a moralist, after having in so many eloquent volumes a.n.a.lysed the works and the characters of the politicians and teachers of the nineteenth century. He possessed a finished faculty for amusing and pleasing while he instructed, and it was remarkable that in these treatises of his late middle life he addressed a much wider public than he had ever reached before. His _Commentaire du Discours sur les Pa.s.sions_ was a link between the earlier purely literary treatises and the later a.n.a.lyses of psychological phenomena, but it was highly successful. Even more universally popular were the little books on _Friendship_ and _Old Age_, which enjoyed a larger circulation than any other contemporary works of their cla.s.s. f.a.guet was pleased at his popularity, and felt that he was recognized as belonging to that "vieille race de moralistes exacts et fins" of whom La Rochefoucauld had been the precursor. Of these moral studies, the most abundantly discussed was that which dealt with _Le Culte de l"Incompetence_ (1910), a book which bears a very remarkable relation to the state of France when war broke out.
Towards the end of his life, f.a.guet became a great power in France. He exercised, from that book-bewildered room in the Rue Monge, a patriotic, amiable, fraternal influence which permeated every corner of the French-speaking world. But his health, which had long been failing, gave way under the strain of the war. He had never given himself any rest from perpetual literary labour, and he had always said that he knew that before he was seventy years of age he should be "buried and forgotten."
A third stroke of paralysis carried away the greatest living friend of literature in France on the 7th of June, 1916, in his sixty-ninth year.
Buried he is at last, to their sorrow, but his compatriots will not readily forget him.
It is not easy to find common terms in which to describe f.a.guet and his remarkable contemporary, Remy de Gourmont. Their two circles of influence were far-reaching, but did not touch. In the very extensive literature of each the other is perhaps never mentioned. We may suppose that it would be almost impossible for a French observer to review them together without allowing the scale to descend in favour of this name or of that. But here may come in the use of foreign criticism, which regards the whole field from a great distance, and without pa.s.sion. The contrast between these two writers, both honest, laborious and fruitful, both absorbed in and submerged by literature, both eager to discover truth in all directions, was yet greater than their similarity. We have briefly observed in f.a.guet the university professor, the great public interpreter of masterpieces. In Remy de Gourmont, on the other hand, we meet the man who, scornful of mediocrity and tolerant of nothing but what is exquisite, stands apart from the crowd, and will scarcely share his dream with a disciple. f.a.guet, like a Lord Chancellor of Letters, is versed in all the legislation of the mind, and lives in a perpetual elucidation of it. Gourmont, standing in the outer court, attracts the young and the audacious around him by protesting that no laws exist save those which are founded on an artist"s own eclecticism. Together, or rather back to back, they addressed almost everyone who was intelligent in France between 1895 and 1914.
We have seen in Emile f.a.guet a typical member of the middle cla.s.s. Remy de Gourmont was an aristocrat both by descent and by temperament. He was born on the 4th of April, 1858, in the chateau of La Motte, near Bazoches-en-Houlme, in the Orne; during his childhood his parents moved to a still more romantic little manor-house at Mesnil-Villement. These Norman landscapes are constantly introduced into Gourmont"s stories. His race was of considerable antiquity and distinction; his mother traced her descent from the great poet, Malherbe; a paternal ancestor was that Gilles de Gourmont who printed in France the earliest books in Greek and in Hebrew character. A pa.s.sion for the Muses, like a fragrant atmosphere, surrounded the boy from his cradle. He arrived in Paris at the age of twenty-five, provincially instructed, but already of a marvellous erudition. He was appointed a.s.sistant librarian at the Bibliotheque Nationale, where for eight years he browsed at will on all the secret and forgotten wonders of the past, indulging to the full an insatiable literary curiosity. In 1890 he published a novel, _Sixtine_, a sort of diary of a very complicated mind which believes itself to be in love, but cannot be quite sure. It was "cerebral," without action of any kind, an absurd book, but ingeniously--too ingeniously--written. The historic interest of _Sixtine_ rests in the fact that it led the reaction against the naturalism of Zola and the psychology of M. Paul Bourget. Gourmont now achieved a single English reader, for _Sixtine_ was read by Henry James, but with more curiosity than approval.
Although hardly a book of permanent value, _Sixtine_ had a lasting effect on the career of its author. It expressed with remarkable exact.i.tude the sentiments of the group of young men who were now coming to the front in France. Gourmont became the champion of the "vaporeux, nuance et sublimise" literature which started about 1890. He accepted "symbolism," and he became the leader of the symbolist movement, of which his stern mental training and curious erudition permitted him to be the brain. He was the prophet of Mallarme, of Verlaine, of Maeterlinck, of Huysmans, and at the same time he welcomed each younger revolutionary. All this, of course, was not done in a day, but reconciliation with the intellectual conventions was made impossible by a fact which must not be ignored in any sketch of Remy de Gourmont, and indeed ought to be faced with resolution. In 1891 he was dismissed from the public service and from the Library, for an article which he published ent.i.tled _Le Joujou Patriotisme_, in which he poured contempt upon the Army, and openly advocated the abandonment of any idea of the "Revanche." The chastis.e.m.e.nt was a severe one, and had an effect on the whole remainder of Gourmont"s life. About the same time his health gave way, and excluded him from all society, for he was invaded by an unsightly growth in the face. His hermitage was high up in an old house in the Rue des Saints Peres, near the quay, and there he sat, day in, day out, surrounded by his books, in solitude, a monk of literature.
For the next eight or nine years, Gourmont, abandoning politics, in which he had made so luckless an adventure, devoted himself exclusively to art and letters. He joined the staff of the _Mercure de France_; and under its director, and his life-long friend, M. Vallette, he took part in all the symbolist polemics of the hour. He defended each new man of merit with his active partisanship; he wrote ceaselessly; verse, art criticism, humanism, novels, every species of fantastic and esoteric literature flowed from his abundant pen. These books, many of them preposterous in their shape, "limited editions" produced in conditions of archiepiscopal splendour of binding and type, possess, it must be admitted, little positive value. They are blossoms in the flower-garden of that heyday of sensuous "symbolism," of which we had a pale reflection in our London _Yellow Books_ and _Savoy Reviews_. The most interesting of the publications of Remy de Gourmont during these feverish years is the little volume called _L"Idealisme_ (1893), in which he sought to restore to the word "ideal" what he called its "aristocratic value." A pa.s.sage may be quoted from an essay in this elegant and ridiculous treatise, on the beauty of words, irrespective of their meaning:
Quelles realites me donneront les saveurs que je reve a ce fruit de l"Inde et des songes, le myrobolan,--ou les couleurs royales dont je pare l"omphax, ou ses lointaines gloires?
Quelle musique est comparable a la sonorite pure des mots obscurs, o cyclamor? Et quelle odeur a tes emanations vierges, o sanguisorbe?
Stevenson--the R.L.S. of "Penny plain and Twopence coloured"--would have delighted in this.
Gourmont became tired of symbolism rather suddenly, and he buried it in two volumes which were the best he had yet published: the _Livres des Masques_ of 1896 and 1898. These have a lasting value as doc.u.ments, and they mark the beginning of the author"s permanent work as a critic of letters. In them he insisted on the warning not to let new genius pa.s.s ungreeted because it was eccentrically draped or unfamiliarly featured.
These two volumes are a precious indication of what French independent literature was at the very close of the nineteenth century, and it is interesting after twenty years of development and change to note how few mistakes Remy de Gourmont made in his characterization of types. He took a central place among these symbolists, grouping around him the men of genuine talent, repulsing pretenders who were charlatans and discouraging mere imitators; marshalling, in short, a ferocious little army of genius in its attack upon the conventions and the traditions of the age. Time rolls its wheel, and it is amusing to notice that several of these fierce young revolutionaries are now members of the French Academy.
At the close of the century Remy de Gourmont abandoned symbolism, and the world of ideas took possession of him. He plunged deeper into the study of philosophy, grammar, and history, and he explored new provinces of knowledge, particularly in the direction of ethnography and biology.
In the midst of this acquisitive labour he was stirred to the composition of one remarkable work after another, and to this period belong the four successive publications, which, in the whole of Gourmont"s vast production, stand out as the most interesting and important which he has written. His reputation stands four-square on _L"Esthetique de la Langue Francaise_ (1899), _La Culture des Idees_ (1900), _Le Chemin de Velours_ (1902), and _Le Probleme du Style_ (1902). During the thirteen years which followed he wrote incessantly, and the widening circle of his admirers always found much to praise in what he produced. But now that we see his life-work as a whole it seems more and more plain that he revealed his genius freshly and fully in these four books of his prime, and in a world so crowded as ours the reader who has much to attract him may be recommended to these as broad and perhaps sufficient exponents of the character of Gourmont"s teaching.
It has been said by one of his earliest a.s.sociates, M. Louis Dumur, that Gourmont was always "le bon cha.s.seur du mensonge humain." This is a friendly way of describing his intellectual dogmatism and his restless habit of a.n.a.lysis. He took nothing for granted, and, whether he desired to be so or not, he was a destructive force. He describes himself, in one of his rather rare paragraphs of self-portraiture, as "un esprit desinteresse de tout, et interesse a tout," and this very accurately defines his att.i.tude. He strikes us as ceaselessly hovering over hitherto uncontested facts in the pa.s.sionate desire of proving them to be fallacies. The epithet "paradoxical," which is often misapplied, appears to be exactly appropriate to the method of Remy de Gourmont, which starts by denying the truth of something which everybody has taken for granted, and then supporting the reversed position by rapid and ingenious argument. He is unable to accept any convention until he has resolutely turned it inside out, examined it in every hostile light, and so dusted and furbished it that it has ceased to be conventional. He was indefatigable in these researches, and so ingenious as to be often bewildering and occasionally tiresome.
He has left no book more characteristic than _Le Chemin de Velours_, which he called a study in the dissociation of ideas. He chose a very illuminating tag from Pascal as his motto: "ni la contradiction n"est marque de faussete, ni l"incontradiction n"est marque de verite." The whole treatise is a comparison between the Jansenist and the Jesuit system of morals, as revealed in the _Provincial Letters_. Like many Frenchmen of recent years, Remy de Gourmont liked religion to be championed, but never by a believer. Neither Port Royal nor the Society of Jesus would thank him for his disinterested support, but he defends them, alternately and destructively, with an immense fund of vivacity.
No one has defined more luminously the evangelical doctrine of Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, and for a while the reader thinks that the balance will descend on the Jansenist side. But Gourmont is scandalized to see Calvinism banging the door of salvation in people"s faces, while he applauds the humanity of the Jesuits in holding it wide open, and in spreading between birth and death a velvet carpet for delicate souls. He a.n.a.lyses the works of Sarrasa, a Flemish Jesuit, who in 1618 produced an _Ars semper gaudendi_ which was, according to Gourmont, neither more nor less than a treatise on the way to make the best of both worlds.
Gourmont was endlessly amused by the indiscreet admissions of Father Sarrasa.
Nevertheless, the Jesuit type shocked him more than the Jansenist. He admired the logical penetration of Pascal, his rigidity of thought, his unalterable ideal of duty, more than the easy-going casuistry of his opponents. He thought that Protestantism, which rests on abstraction, was a purer type of religion than the mitigated and humanized Christianity of Catholicism. But he was irritated by the way in which Port Royal pushed their spiritual logic to extremes, and he dared to suggest that Pascal would have been a better and a more useful man if he had consented to be less holy. Gourmont speculated ingeniously what would have been the future of philosophical literature if Pascal, instead of retiring to Port Royal, had joined Descartes in Holland. On the whole he decides against the Jansenists, because although he sees that they were n.o.ble he suspects them of being inhuman, and of laying intolerable and needless burdens upon the spirit of man. Remy de Gourmont considered evangelical Christianity an Oriental religion, not well fitted for Latin Europe. In all the schisms and heresies of the churches he thought he saw the Western mind revolting against a dogmatism which came from Jerusalem. The Jansenist is a pessimist; the Jesuit, on the other hand, cultivates optimism; he pretends, at all events, that the soul should be free and joyous, to which end he rolls out his velvet road towards salvation. Remy de Gourmont concludes that the final effect of _Les Provinciales_ is to make the reader love the Jesuits, and when he comes to sum up the matter he is on the side of the Society, because nothing wounds a civilized man so deeply as the negation of his free will. It will be seen that neither party gains much from his sardonic and fugitive approbation.
After 1902 a further transformation began to be visible in the genius of Remy de Gourmont. An improvement in his health permitted him to mingle a little with other human beings, and to become less exclusively an anchorite of the intellect. Having pushed his individualist theories to their extreme, he withdrew from his violent expression of them, and he took a new and pleasing interest in public life. He continued to seek consolation for the disappointments of art in philosophy and science, and he developed a positive pa.s.sion for ideas. He founded the _Revue des Idees_, which had a considerable vogue in the intellectual world. But his chief activity henceforward was as a publicist. His incessant short essays, mainly published in the _Mercure de France_, became an element in the life of thousands of cultivated readers. They dealt briefly with questions of the day, concerning all that can arrest the attention of an educated man or woman. The author collected them in volumes which present the quintessence of his later manner, four of _Epilogues_, three of _Promenades Litteraires_, three of _Promenades Philosophiques_, and so forth. These dogmatic expressions of his conception of life were written in a style more fluid, more buoyant, and less obscure than he had previously used, and they achieved a great popularity, especially among women. Meantime, as a critic, he showed less and less interest in the exceptional and the unwholesome, of which he had been the fantastic defender, and more in the great standard authors of France. In 1905 he opened with an anthology from Gerard de Nerval a series of _Les Plus Belles Pages_, which he continued until the war with admirable judgment.
The war found Remy de Gourmont not totally unprepared. He had always unflinchingly avowed himself an aristocrat and an anarchist; it was his way of expressing his horror at vulgarity and tyranny. He had chosen to be disconcerting in his vindictive pursuit of sentimentality and folly.
He had thought it fitting to be a determined enemy to militarism. It was difficult for a critic with so fine an ear as his to tolerate patriotic verses which did not scan. But the ripening years had sobered him, and he made after 1911 a much more careful examination of the destiny of his country. He saw that with all his scepticism he had been the dupe of Teutonic culture, and he repudiated the Nietzsche whom he had done so much to introduce to Parisian readers. From August, 1914, Remy de Gourmont put aside all his literary and scientific work, and devoted himself wholly to a patriotic comment on the war. His short articles in _La France_ form an admirable volume, _Pendant l"Orage_, by which all his petulance in times of peace is more than redeemed. The anguish of the struggle killed him, as it had killed so many others. Remy de Gourmont was seated at his writing-table, with a protest against the outrage upon Reims half-completed before him, when a stroke of apoplexy put an instant period to his life. This was on the 29th of September, 1915.
In one of his best books, _Le Probleme du Style_ (1902), Remy de Gourmont remarks in his aphoristic way, "Il y a une forme generale de la sensibilite qui s"impose a tous les hommes d"une meme periode." This is excessive in its application, but it is sufficiently true to be a useful guide to the historian. Between 1890 and 1905 there was exhibited, not merely in France and England, but all over Europe, a "general form of sensibility" of which Gourmont was the ablest, the most vociferous, and the most ingenious representative. It is important to try to a.n.a.lyse this condition or fashion of taste, since, although it has already pa.s.sed into the region of things gone by and of "les neiges d"antan," it has not ceased to be memorable. Our comprehension of it is not helped by ticketing it "decadent" or "unhealthy," for those are empty adjectives of prejudice. What was really involved in it was a revolt against sentimentality and against the tendency to repeat with complacency the outworn traditions of art. This was its negative side, worthy of all encouragement. What was not quite so certainly meritorious was its positive action. It was a demand for an exclusively personal aesthetic, for an art severely divorced from all emotions except the purely intellectual ones, the sensuousness of this school of writers being essentially cerebral. It descended in England from Walter Pater, in France from Baudelaire, and it aimed at a supreme delicacy of execution, an exquisite avoidance of everything vulgar and second-hand. The young men who fought for it considered that the only thing essential was to achieve what they called a "personal vision" of life. In the pursuit of it they were willing to be candid at the risk of perversity, while they obstinately denied that there should be any relation between art and morals. But Remy de Gourmont, who had been their leader in aiming at an impossible perfection, lived long enough to see the whole intellect and conscience of France pressing along a path to greatness which he and his disciples had never perceived in all the excursions of their imagination.
1916.
THE WRITINGS OF M. CLEMENCEAU
In the year 1893, after a succession of events which are still remembered with emotion, M. Clemenceau fell from political eminence, not gradually or by transitions of decay, but with theatrical suddenness like that of a Lucifer "hurled headlong flaming from the aetherial sky."
His enemies, rewarded beyond their extreme hopes, gazed down into the abyss and thought that they discerned his "cadavre politique" lying motionless at the bottom. They rejoiced to believe that he would trouble them no more. He had pa.s.sed the age of fifty years, and all his hopes were broken, all his ambitions shattered. They rubbed their hands together, and smiled; "we shall hear no more of _him_!" But they did not know with what manner of man they were dealing. What though the field was lost? All was not lost:
The unconquerable Will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield; And what is else not to be overcome?
So brilliant an array of mingled intelligence, pertinacity, vigour, and high spirits have rarely been seen united, and the possessor of these qualities was not likely to be silenced by the most formidable junta of intriguers. As a matter of fact, he turned instantly to a new sphere of action, and became the man of letters of whom I propose to speak in these pages. But for his catastrophe in 1893, it is probable that M.
Clemenceau would never have become an author.
A brief summary of his early life is needed to bring the series of his published works into due relief. Georges Clemenceau was the second son of a family of six; he was born on the 28th of September, 1841, and was therefore a little younger than Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Morley, and a little older than Sir Charles Dilke. His birthplace was a hamlet close to the old and picturesque town of Fontenay-le-Comte, in the Vendee, where his father practised as a doctor. There can be no doubt that Benjamin Clemenceau, an old provincial "bleu," materialist and Jacobin, exercised a great influence on the mind of his son, who accepted, with a docility remarkable in so firm an individual, the traditions of his race and family. We are told that the elder Clemenceau "communicated to his son his hatred of injustice, his independence, his scientific worship of facts, his refusal to bow to anything less than the verdict of experiment." There was also a professional tradition to which young Georges Clemenceau a.s.sented. For three hundred years, without a break, his forebears had been doctors. I do not think that any of his biographers has observed the fact that Fontenay-le-Comte, though so small a place, has always been a centre of advanced scientific thought.
It has produced a line of eminent physicians, for Pierre Brissot was born there in the fifteenth century, Sebastian Collin in the sixteenth, and Mathurin Brisson in the eighteenth. There can be little doubt that these facts were in the memory of the elder Clemenceau and were transmitted to his son.
Fontenay-le-Comte is on the western edge of the Bocage of Poitou, not to be confounded with the delicious woodland Bocage which lies south and west of Caen. The Poitou Bocage is a more limited and a more remote district, little visited by tourists, a rolling country of heatherland cl.u.s.tered with trees, and split up by little torrential chasms. It is often to be recognized in M. Clemenceau"s sketches of landscapes, and is manifestly the scene of part of his novel, _Les Plus Forts_. The natural capital of this Bocage is Nantes, lying full to the north of Fontenay, and thither the young man went at an early age to study at the Lycee. It was at the hospital at Nantes that his first introduction to medicine was made. Thence he finally departed in 1860, another _deracine_, to fight for his fortunes in Paris. He brought little with him save a letter of introduction from his father to Etienne Arago. For five years he worked indomitably at his medical studies, refreshing his brain occasionally by brief holidays spent at his father"s rough and ancient manor-house of Aubraie, in his native Bocage.
He took his degree of M.D. in 1865, and presented a thesis _De la Generation des Elements anatomiques_, which was immediately published, and which caused some stir in professional circles. It is said to contain a vigorous refutation of some of the doctrines of Auguste Comte, and in particular to deprecate a growing agnosticism among men of science. The axiom, "Supprimer les questions, n"est pas y repondre," is quoted from it, and again the characteristic statement, "Nous ne sommes pas de ceux qui admettent avec l"ecole positiviste que la science ne peut fournir aucun renseignement sur l"enigme des choses." The thesis dealt, moreover, according to M. Pierre Quillard, who has had the courage to unearth and to a.n.a.lyse it, with "les organismes rudimentaires des nepheles, des hirudinees et glossiphonies," subjects the very names of which are horrifying to the indolent lay reader. The young savant, shaking off the burden of his studies, escaped to London, where he appears to have made the acquaintance, through Admiral Maxse, of several Englishmen who were about to become famous in the world of politics and letters. But perhaps these friendships are of later date; as the memoirs of the mid-Victorians come more and more to light, the name of M.
Clemenceau will be looked for in the record.
He went to the United States in 1866, and took an engagement as French master in a girls" school at Stamford, in Connecticut, a seaside haunt of tired New Yorkers in summer. A little later, Verlaine was under-master in a boys" school at Bournemouth. How little we guess, when we take our walks abroad, that genius, and foreign genius too, may be lurking in the educational procession! M. Clemenceau appears to look back on Stamford with complacency; he accompanied "dans leurs promenades les jeunes misses americaines: c"etaient de libres et delicieuses chevauchees, des excursions charmantes au long des routes...o...b..euses qui sillonnent les riants parages" of Long Island Sound. He declares that the happy and lighthearted years at Stamford were those in which his temperament "acheva de se fortifier et de s"affiner." It was in the course of one of the "suaves equipees" that he ventured to propose to one of the young American "misses." This was Miss Mary Plummer, whom he married after a preliminary visit to France.
For the next quarter of a century Clemenceau was exclusively occupied with politics. In 1870 he was settled in Montmartre, in a circle of workmen and little employes whose bodily maladies he relieved, and whose souls he inflamed with his ardent dreams of a humanitarian paradise when once the hated Empire should fall. Suddenly the war broke out, and the Empire was shattered. The government of defence nominated Dr. Clemenceau Mayor of Montmartre, the most violent centre of revolutionary emotion, where the excesses of the Commune presently began. He represented Montmartre at Bordeaux in 1871, and in 1876 Montmartre, which had remained faithful to its doctor-mayor, sent him again to the Chamber of Deputies as its representative. This is not the occasion on which to enter into any detail with regard to the ceaseless activity which he displayed in a purely political capacity between 1870 and 1893. It is enshrined in the history of the Republic, and will occupy the pens of innumerable commentators of French affairs. We can only record that in 1889, M. Clemenceau, who had refused many pressing invitations to leave Paris for Draguignan, consented to take up his election as deputy for the Provencal department.
The career of M. Clemenceau as deputy for the Var came to an end in 1893, after the explosion of the Panama scandal. On the 8th of August in that year he p.r.o.nounced an apologia over his political life, an address full of dignity and fire, in which the failure of his ambition was acknowledged. His figure was never more attractive than it was at that distressing moment, when he found himself the object of almost universal public disfavour. He had, perhaps, over-estimated the vigour of his own prestige; he had browbeaten the political leaders of the day, he had stormed like a bull the china-shops of the little political hucksters, he had contemptuously exposed the intrigues of the baser sort of political politician. He disdained popularity so proudly, that one of his own supporters urged him to cultivate the hatred of the crowd with a little less coquettishness. But he was a political Don Quixote, not to be held nor bound; he could but rush straight upon his own temporary discomfiture.
The means which his enemies employed to displace him were contemptible in the extreme, but their malice was easily accounted for. He had excited the deep resentment of all the supporters of General Boulanger, who accused him of being the cause of their favourite"s fall, and with having betrayed him in 1888. The fanatics of the Panama scandal endeavoured to prove that his newspaper, _La Justice_, had supported the schemes and accepted the cheques of the egregious Cornelius Herz. The Anglophobes, who unhappily numbered too many of the less thinking population of France at that time, accused him of intriguing with the English Government to the detriment of the Republic, and they went so far as to produce doc.u.ments, forged by the notorious mulatto, Norton, which they pretended had been stolen from our emba.s.sy in Paris. "Qu"il parle anglais," was one accusation shouted at Clemenceau in the Chamber on the 4th of June, 1888. Calamities of every sort, public and private, gathered round his undaunted head. At last he could ignore these attacks no longer, and on a fateful day he rose to put himself right before Parliament. It was too late; his appearance was greeted by an icy silence, and, as he said himself, he glanced round to see none but the hungry faces of men longing for the moment when they could trample on his corpse. Magnificent as was his defence, it availed him nothing against such a combination of malignities; even his few friends, losing courage, failed to support him. The legislative elections were at hand, and the enemies of M. Clemenceau very cleverly organized a press propaganda, which presented him to the French public in an absolutely odious light. He went down to address his Provencal const.i.tuents, and in the little mountain town of Salernes he delivered the remarkable speech to which reference has been made. All in vain: on the 20th of August, 1893, he was ignominiously rejected by the electors of the Var in favour of a local nonent.i.ty, and his career as a member of parliament ended.[7]
These circ.u.mstances, which paralysed for many years the parliamentary activity of Clemenceau, have to be borne in mind when we examine his literary record. Without delay, in that spirit of prompt acceptance of the inevitable which has never ceased to mark his buoyant, elastic character, he threw himself into a new employment. He became, in his fifty-third year, one of the most active and persistent journalists in France. His fiery independence and his audacious vivacity pointed him out at once to editors who had the wit to cater for the better, that is to say for the livelier, cla.s.s of readers. M. Clemenceau, a free lance if ever there was one, became the terror and the delight of _Le Figaro_, _La Justice_, and _Le Journal_, while to _La Depeche de Toulouse_ he contributed articles which presupposed a wider horizon and depended less on the pa.s.sion of the moment. Future bibliographers, it may be, will search the files of these and other newspapers of that day for more and more numerous examples of his fecundity, since he embraced all subjects in what he called the huge forest of social existence. An exhibition of pictures, a new novel, an accident in the suburbs, a definition of G.o.d by M. Jules Simon, a joke by M. Francis Maynard, the effect of champagne upon labour unrest, the architecture of Chicago--nothing came amiss to the pen of a man whose curiosity about life was boundless, and whose facility in expression was volcanic.
But there was a certain group of subjects which, at this critical hour in his career, particularly attracted the attention of M. Clemenceau, and these give a special colour to the earliest, and perhaps the most remarkable, collection of his essays. A student of the temperament of the great statesman, as he has since then so pre-eminently shown himself to be, is bound to give his mind to the volume called _La Melee Sociale_ which M. Clemenceau published in 1895. This was practically his earliest bid for purely literary distinction, since the juvenile theses on anatomical subjects, and the translations from John Stuart Mill, hardly come within the category of literature. Between 1876 and 1885 M.
Clemenceau had printed, or had permitted to be circulated, a certain number of his speeches in the Chamber; I have traced eight of these in the catalogue of M. Le Blond. These formed a very small fraction of his abundant eloquence in Parliament, and they were not particularly finished as specimens of lettered oratory. But between 1885 and 1895 we do not find even such slender evidences as these of the politician"s desire to pose as an author. The publication of _La Melee Sociale_, therefore, was, to speak practically, an experiment; it was the challenge of a new writer, or at least of a publicist who had never before competed with the recognized creators of books.
It is obvious that in making this experiment M. Clemenceau exercised a great deal of care and forethought. The articles reprinted are not presented haphazard, nor without an evident intention of producing the best effect possible. They are selected on a peculiar system from the ma.s.s of the journalist"s miscellaneous output. The collection has a central idea, and this is developed in a very remarkable preface, which remains one of the author"s most philosophical and most elaborate compositions. This central idea is the tragical one of the great vital conflict which pervades the world, has always pervaded it, and must ever remain unaffected by the superficial improvements of civilization. All through the universe the various living organisms are in a condition of ceaseless contest. Everywhere something conquers something else which is conquered, and life sustains itself and ensures its own permanence by spreading death around it. Life, in fact, depends on death for its sustaining energy, and the fiercer the pa.s.sion of vitality the more vehemently flourishes the instinct of destruction.
The imagination of the author of _La Melee Sociale_ broods upon the monstrous facts of natural history. If he traverses a woodland, he is conscious of a silent army of beasts and birds and insects, and even of trees and plants, which are waging ceaseless battle against others of their kind. If he begins to stir the soil of a meadow with his foot, he refrains with a shudder, since millions of corpses lie but just below the surface of the fruitful earth. He peers down into the depths of the sea, only to recognize that a prodigious and unflagging ma.s.sacre of living forms is necessary to keep the ocean habitable for those who survive. Everywhere, throughout the universe, he finds carnage triumphant; and eternal warfare is the symbol of the instinct of self-preservation.