In portraying the physical discomforts of poverty, the racking coughs, raging thirsts, aching bones, the nights without shelter or sleep, the days without food, the tears that scald and the tearlessness that deadens, Jehan Rictus has only done what has been done a score of times in prose and verse. Surely, an empty heart keeps close company, more often than not, with an empty stomach, and it is in portraying vividly the mental and spiritual aspects of poverty that his work is fresh and unique. The humiliation of poverty"s uniform,-unkempt hair, missing shirt, drafty shoes, outlandish and threadbare garments,-of the pavement bed, of the paroxysms of hunger attributed to intoxication, of the unsuccessful search for work, of debarment from places of public resort, of silent submission to insult and gibe; the disgust with filth, vermin, vulgar noise, endless monotony, enforced celibacy, patronising pity, petty deceits improvised to hide dest.i.tution, and hilarity improvised to keep back tears; the hatred of those who practise injustice and hypocrisy; the scorn of those who bestow and those who accept charity; the incipient madness of starvation, at once impelling to a shedding of the blood of the guilty and raising a horrid dread of confounding the innocent with the guilty; the regret for loss of respectability, courage, ambition, energy, talent, faith; the oppressive lonesomeness; the yearning for fresh distractions, innocent joys, cleanly living, for kindly words, sympathetic hand-clasps, kisses, caresses, companionship, friendship, love, precious responsibility; the stolid indifference to death,-all these, the underlying sentiments of poverty, have never before been given in poetry, at least not without the blight of palpable literary effort or fact.i.tious emotionalism.
Equally unique and equally powerful with the exhibition of the multiform woes of the dest.i.tute is the poet"s satirical exposure of the inconsistencies, insincerities, vanities, and refined cruelties of the various sorts of people who exploit the dest.i.tute. With an ironical pretence of rendering deserved homage to poverty, he elaborates the important part it plays in the social scheme. Thanks to it, the employees of the _a.s.sistance Publique_ are able to maintain their families in comfort; magistrates to attain a rotund and tranquil old age; economists (deferring to it as a dignified ent.i.ty) to win professional chairs and academic honours; politicians to get the public ear; socialistic and anarchistic bawlers to finish out their careers as dawdling, alcoholic deputies; poets, painters, and novelists to swim in glory and good wine, and found luxurious establishments for their offspring.
The arrival of winter, which clots the blood of one cla.s.s, stimulates the circulation of all the others. Then reputable benevolence drums a reveille on hollow stomachs; burial companies wax radiantly bustling; salons, languishing for want of something to talk about, revive promptly; the tourist in the Midi and the bourgeois, smug and snug by his fireside, daily commiserate suffering-after dinner-in a manner both magnificent and ample; society gambols at charity fetes and b.a.l.l.s; the press "rediscovers distress"; journalists sob, weep, and implore-at three sous a line. In a word, pitying the unfortunate is a profession like another; and, if the day should ever arrive when there were no more poor in the world, "many people"-to render idiom for idiom-"would be badly in the soup." Such satire stings and routs by virtue of the moral force behind it: it is the whip of small cords plied by the man with a soul.
Satire broadens to rollicking humour in depicting the abject terror of a conscience-stricken bourgeois shopkeeper before the embarra.s.sing spectre of a hungry man:-
"_Avez-vous vu ce miserable?
Cet individu equivoque?
Ce pouilleux, ce voleur en loques, Qui nous r"gardait manger a table?
Ma parole! on n"est pus (plus) chez soi, On ne peut pus digerer tranquille- Nous payons l"impot, gn"a (il y en a) des lois!
Qu"est-ce qu"y (ils) font donc, les sergents d" ville?_"
I laughed almost to tears when I came upon this picture, because I knew that same bourgeois shopkeeper-in Boston-during the historic famine winter of 1893-94, when a great press formed a syndicate for the dissemination of lies, when the authority of a great state was appealed to, and a great governor received congratulatory despatches from the confines of a great country for prompt and decisive action in a great emergency, and all because a few half-starved devils took a notion to show themselves without washing their hands and faces or changing their clothes.
But to return to France. Jehan Rictus loves the white apparitions of the "first communicants," loves sunshine, lilacs, and watercress, birds and little children. Mrs. Browning"s memorable "Cry of the Children" is feeble and conventional by the side of his "_Farandole des Pauv"s "t.i.ts Fan-Fans_." Charles Lamb was not sweeter, tenderer, daintier, in his tear-compelling reverie, "Dream Children," than Rictus in dealing with his dream loves,-his "cemetery of innocents" he calls them, his "poor little heap of dead."
"_Et la vie les a ma.s.sacres, Mes mains les ont ensevelis, Mes yeux les ont beaucoup pleures._"
His "_Espoir_," in which he dreams of a sweetheart, is a veritable Eugene Carriere in verse.
Another poem containing much of the same sad, tender beauty, strangely commingled with piquant malice, mischievous _esprit_, broad humour, and bitter satire; a poem which, in spite of startling liberties of vocabulary, rhythm, and rhyme, is said to have brought honest tears to the eyes of the impeccable De Heredia, is "_Le Revenant_." The "_Revenant_" is Jesus Christ. The appearance of Christ in nineteenth-century Paris is a much-worn _motif_ in French literature and painting; but the slum poet"s handling of it is so new, bold, and strong that it seems to be altogether fresh.
"_Le Revenant_" is in three parts.
Part I. is a query as to what would happen if Jesus Christ should come back, and introduces a summary of the princ.i.p.al events of his career and a strikingly original appreciation of his personality and character. He is the "man of the beautiful eyes and the beautiful dreams, whose heart was larger than life." But he is also "the anarchist," the "Galilean tramp," the "carpenter on a strike," the "boon companion of thieves,"
the "quack hated by the doctors," the "duffer who wore another cross than that of the Legion of Honour, who boxed the bourgeois shop-keepers, and who wasn"t over-polite to the m.u.f.fs of his time,"-phrases through whose vulgar, uncouth, seemingly sacrilegious envelope are plainly visible intense love and admiration, and which accurately represent the religious att.i.tude of the submerged, who, proverbially, applaud the name of Christ while they hiss the barest mention of his professed followers and his church.
In Part II. Jesus Christ suddenly appears on a corner of one of the exterior boulevards. The surprised poet greets him with bluff good-nature, laments drolly his inability to do the proper thing by him in the matter of drinks, and overwhelms him with eager, nave questions.
Then, touched to the heart by his dazed look and apparent helplessness, he a.s.sumes a kindly superiority, taking him under his protection, as he might a lost infant, warning him against many things, especially against the police, who will be certain to arrest him as a vagabond if he falls within their view. Finally, he discovers that the figure he has taken to be that of the Christ is his own figure mirrored in the window of the wine-shop before which he has been standing.
Part III. is the after-thought, what the poet would most wish to have said to Jesus Christ if he really had returned and he had been the first to greet him. Necessarily a repet.i.tion at many points of Parts I. and II., its excuse is the following declaration of faith:-
"_Chacun a la Beaute en lui, Chacun a la Justice en lui, Chacun a la Force en lui-meme.
L"Homme est tout seul dans l"Univers.
Oh! oui, ben seul, et c"est sa gloire, Car y n"a qu" deux yeux pour tout voir._
"_Le Ciel, la Terre, et les Etoiles Sont prisonniers d" ses cils en pleurs.
Y" n" peut donc compter qu" sur lui-meme, J" m"en vas m" remuer qu" chacun m"imite, C"est la qu"est la clef du Probleme.
L"Homme doit et" son Maitre et son Dieu._"
and the following threat:-
"_Donnez-nous tous les jours l" brich" ton (pain) regulier, Autrement nous tach"rons d" le prendre._"
It was probably this downright and direct threat that led Jules Claretie, writing for _Le Temps_, to say: "The poetry of the lean Jehan Rictus is the Fronde of to-day. Far better that it mutter in the cabaret than in the street." The majority of the press critics, ignoring this single unequivocal threat and numerous indirect but slightly veiled anathemas, have p.r.o.nounced his work "gentle and refined." Both interpretations are, in a measure, right.
Desiring revolt with his whole soul, and sure of the righteousness of it, he is likewise so sure of its entire uselessness that he deprecates it far oftener than he proclaims it. A better state of things, in even the most distant future, is to him but a dubious "perhaps." From kings, presidents, councils, parliaments, n.o.bles, bourgeois, popes, priests, economists, reformers, and philanthropists he expects nothing. From his own down-trodden cla.s.s he expects no more. They are stupid cattle, waiting patiently to be bled. Enfeebled by hardship, cowed into spiritlessness by police and magistrates, ready to share with the dogs the crumbs that drop from rich men"s tables, to cringe and fawn before the faintest prospect of a bone; ready to sell themselves outright for two bars of music, three sous of absinthe, or a couple of rounds of tobacco; blinded by the dazzling fiction of universal suffrage: they are only fit, at the moment a Bastille ought to be taken, to take the tram-car of that name, and generally show more signs of reverting to the type of the ourang-outang than of ushering in that era of universal affection, when all men will be as brothers, and all nations of one speech and one mind.
His prayers are despairing cries to a half-credited G.o.d,-a G.o.d at best so old, deaf, blind, unconcerned, and far away that his interference is not much to be counted on.
He conjures Jesus Christ into the world only to chaff him for his faith in man, to characterise his teachings as the beautiful soliloquies of an unfortunate, and, finally, to warn him to make good his escape, if he would keep out of the clutches of nineteenth-century Judas Iscariots and Pontius Pilates.
The prophets and teachers who have tried radically to better the world have always been treated as criminals, and always will be. It is vain to struggle to make things over. Man is a m.u.f.f by nature, and nature will never change. The kilogramme of iron falsely called a heart will never be anything more than a kilogramme of iron. The bank of love "a.s.signed"
centuries ago. Modern civilisation is organised distress. These are his sober and reasoned conclusions.
But ever and anon, when pain grows too great to be borne, the blind instinct of self-preservation overtops reason. Then he swears to be his "own good G.o.d all alone," taking "his own skin for a banner, since that is the only thing he has in the world." Even so his words are less the rallying cry of a reformer who believes in success than the desperate defiance of a Prometheus chained to a rock; and recoil is speedy to his habitual sentiment reiterated so often as to be a veritable refrain, "It"s only life, after all: there"s nothing to do but to weep."
"Jehan Rictus," said a writer in the _Gil Blas_, "has definitely fixed a new poetic sob in the cacophony of eternal human suffering." Needless to add, a sob was not his choice. Fate chose for him. His is no case of "wilful sadness in literature." Sweet, tender, affectionate by nature, enamoured of sunlight, he might, under happier conditions, have given a smile, a cheer, a paean even, to the world. In giving a sob, he gave what life gave him,-his all.
He is the perfect nihilist, who fails to be the perfect anarchist only because he has no faith. His Paris underworld is an Inferno. "All hope abandon ye who enter here," is the burden of his message from the submerged; and it is this, probably, that led Laurent Tailhade to call him "the Dante of _la misere_."
Jehan Rictus is at present preaching his gospel of blended defiance and despair in prose, in a journal called _L"Ennemi du Peuple_. His journalism, however, rises very little above the commonplace. He is growing fat and fashionable, and it is to be feared that his days of significant poetical productiveness are over.
Montmartre partic.i.p.ated actively in the revolution of 1830, and was the seat of the _Club de la Montagne_ in that of 1848. Of the period immediately preceding the Commune one of its old residents writes: "There, insurrection held its drums and its guns always ready. The right to live free was the most precious of all things to the hearts of all."
It seems to have been the order to seize the cannons which the _Gardes Nationaux_ had transported to Montmartre after the capitulation of Paris that precipitated the Commune; and it was at Montmartre that the generals Lecomte and Clement Thomas were executed.
Louise Michel-and who should know better?-in her fascinating _Memoires_ testifies to the revolutionary prestige of Montmartre. She says, referring to the siege of Paris:-
"The Eighteenth Arrondiss.e.m.e.nt was the terror of the selfish, plundering jobbers, and others of their breed. When it was rumoured, "Montmartre is coming down" ("_Montmartre va descendre_"), the reactionaries scampered to their holes like hunted animals, deserting in their panic the secret storehouses in which provisions were rotting while Paris was starving to death."
Again, apropos of her discharge from custody in the early part of the insurrection, she writes:-
"The four _citoyens_, Th. Ferre, Avronsart, Burlot, and Christ, came to demand my release in the name of the Eighteenth Arrondiss.e.m.e.nt. At the first word of this phrase,-terror of the reaction,-"Montmartre is coming down," I was given into their hands."
Still again, in a letter to Rochefort and Pain, on her return from exile:-
"I am writing to Joffrin at the same time as to you on the subject of the meeting of Montmartre, before which I cannot go to any other. It was at Montmartre I marched formerly: it is with Montmartre I march to-day."
It was to the Montmartre of the _indigenes_, the Montmartre of the workingmen, the Montmartre then regarded as a twin of Belleville, which was known as le _cratere de la revolution_, that Louise Michel paid these tributes of affection and esteem. The invasion of the hordes of arts and letters, who hold the _Vache Enragee_ above the Golden Calf, far from weakening the revolutionary fervour of the b.u.t.te, has strengthened it. Montmartre is none the less a hot-bed of revolution for having become a shrine of the Muses. On the contrary, its present revolutionary spirit is the spirit of the old Montmartre and of the new Bohemia fused into one; and it makes the "selfish, plundering jobbers, and others of their breed," quake more than ever.
At every cloud on the munic.i.p.al horizon no bigger than a man"s hand, at every suggestion of disturbance in the political atmosphere, at every slightest rumble presaging the rising of the ma.s.ses, the cla.s.ses peer nervously and timorously in the direction of the beetling Montmartre, regretting from the bottom of their hearts that the offer Rothschild is said to have once made, to raze the b.u.t.te at his own expense, was not accepted by the government.
The relations between the aboriginal workingmen and the artistic and literary colonists of Montmartre are of the most cordial sort. There is a genuine solidarity between them (wherein is a profound lesson for the social settler), because they have common sufferings, common hatreds, common apprehensions, and common hopes; because they faint from the same hunger, shiver from the same frost, dread the same rent-bills, are liable to the same evictions and the same police _rafles_, and are under the same temptation, when houseless, to commit a petty misdemeanour in order to get stowed away for the night.
Artists may help the poor working people about them-without that effort of will, that compulsion of duty, which inevitably involves patronage, and which is the bane of all the attempts of the well-to-do to "elevate"
the poor-because, poor themselves, they often accept help from them in return and _in kind_, and because they are neither mysteries nor objects of envy to any.
Nowhere in Paris, certainly, is the ident.i.ty of interests and sentiments of the simple proletariat and the _proletariat litteraire_ so graphically presented and the much-prated alliance between brain and brawn, labour and intellect, so completely realised. Nowhere this side of heaven, probably, is social democracy so real and so devoid of pose.
It is not to be supposed that these poor devils of painters and poets, ardent-eyed and beauty-loving, are inwardly submissive because they rail outwardly at their misfortunes; that they pardon either the individuals who victimise them or the society which allows individuals to victimise them. Revolt is none the less revolt for perpetrating and relishing a joke.
The note of social revolt in the cavalcade of the _Vache Enragee_ and in the mock ceremony of the marriage of the _Rosiere_; in the more than unconventional daily life, with its contemptuous disregard of ordinances of state and sacraments of church; in the political and social satire of the _chansonniers_, who sing indifferently in the _soirees_ of the socialist and anarchist groups and in the _cabarets artistiques et litteraires_; and in the coa.r.s.e derision of the bawlers of the _cabarets brutaux_,-is not to be ignored on the ground that it bears a semblance of mirth. The child"s play theory is absolutely untenable in this connection. These jolly Bohemian dogs of Montmartre are capable of corroding rancours and terrible wrath. And, if that descent from Montmartre which the conscience-stricken bourgeois feel in their bones will come, ever does come, it will not be the simple proletariat that will inaugurate and lead it, but the rollicking _proletariat litteraire_.
[Ill.u.s.tration: LES CORBEAUX]