Ils marchaient pleins de foi, pleins d"amour, et l"histoire Absoudra, comme Dieu, qui sut aimer et croire._"
_Au jour de la vengeance, Si l"opprime s"egare, il est absous d"avance._"
He predicts a general cataclysm, declares his intention of doing all in his power to bring it on,-
"_J"ameuterai le peuple a mes verites crues, Je prophetiserai sur le trepied des rues,_"-
and exults in the prospect,-
"_Et moi, j"applaudirai; ma jeunesse engourdie Se rechauffera bien a ce grand incendie._"
Pierre Dupont (peer almost of Burns in his simple country songs), who died disgraced by reason of his toadyism towards the government of the Third Napoleon, which had banished and then pardoned him, displayed a fine revolutionary fervour in 1848, before his banishment. His "_Chant des Ouvriers_" and his poem-
"_On n"arrete pas le murmure Du peuple quand il dit, j"ai faim, Car c"est le cri de la Nature, Il faut du pain, il faut du pain,_"
will be recited and sung by the people of France as long as there is such a thing as hunger within its borders.
At the same epoch, Alfred de Vigny distilled bitterness against society in his _Destinees_ and _Journal d"un Poete_; and Leconte de Lisle vented his acc.u.mulated scorn as follows:-
"_Hommes, tueurs des Dieux, les temps ne sont pas loin Ou, sur un grand tas d"or, vautres dans quelque coin, Vous mourrez betement en emplissant vos poches!_"
Victor Hugo"s _Chatiments_ (destined to become the favourite reading of Caserio, the a.s.sa.s.sin of Carnot) was the supreme cry of revolt of the Second Empire. In such lines as these Hugo proclaimed the anarchist ideal without, however, recognising it as such:-
"_Les temps heureux luiront, non pour la seule France, Mais pour tous....
Les tyrans s"eteindront comme des meteores....
Fetes dans les cites, fetes dans les campagnes!...
Ou donc est l"echafaud? Ce monstre a disparu....
Plus de soldats l"epee au poing, plus de frontieres, Plus de fisc, plus de glaive ayant forme de croix....
Le saint labeur de tous se fond en harmonie....
Toute l"humanite dans sa splendide ampleur Sent le don que lui fait le moindre travailleur....
Radieux avenir! Essor universel!
Epanouiss.e.m.e.nt de l"homme sous le ciel!_"
Eugene Vermesch was the fiercest, though by no means the greatest, poet of the Commune. Laurent Tailhade and Jean Richepin, among the living, have achieved renown as poets of revolt.
Richepin[124] is as complete a nihilist of the open, rollicking, devil-go-lucky order as Anatole France is of the subtle, Jehan Rictus of the plaintive, and Zo d"Axa of the fantastic orders. Like them, he commits himself to nothing and credits nothing, not even the faiths and formulas of revolution; and, like them, he is nevertheless a formidable revolutionist.
In the introduction to _Les Blasphemes_ he proclaims his intention of "scandalising the devout, the Deists, the sceptics, the materialists, the scientists, the worshippers of Reason, the prosperous and the unprosperous, in a word, the rout of fools and hypocrites who fancy it their duty to save Law, Property, the Family, Society, Morals, etc." "In the defence of these conventions, of which I do not recognise the binding force," he adds, "I shall hear all the geese of the Capital clack."
Book X. of _Les Blasphemes_ is ent.i.tled "_Dernieres Idoles_." The "_dernieres idoles_" are Nature, Reason, Progress. Richepin treats them in the most cavalier fashion:-
Nature:
"_Farce amere!_"
"_Carca.s.se qui n"a ni cur, ni sang, ni lait!_"
"_Toi qui fais des vivants pour amuser la Mort, Ton ensemble n"est rien qu"un melange sans art._"
Reason:
"_Impudente drolesse dont l"homme se croit le valet!_"
"_Coureuse de chimeres, Faiseuse de vux clandestins!_"
"_Reine fanfaronne, Servante du corps qui t"exhale!_"
Progress:
"_Voici qu"un Dieu nouveau nous ronge: le Progres._"
"_Le Progres! Oui, grand fou, sous ce t.i.tre nouveau C"est toujours Dieu qui vient te hanter le cerveau, C"est toujours la sterile et dangereuse idee Dont ton ame d"enfant fut jadis obsedee.
Sans le savoir tu crois encor._"
In another part of this volume he exalts, beginning with Satan himself, the princ.i.p.al _revoltes_ of mythology and history. The following ringing stanzas are taken from "_Les Nomades_":-
"_Oui, ce sont mes aeux, a moi. Car j"ai beau vivre En France, je ne suis ni Latin ni Gaulois.
J"ai les os fins, la peau jaune, des yeux de cuivre, Un torse d"ecuyer, et le mepris des lois.
Oui, je suis leur batard!_
_Leur sang bout dans mes veines, Leur sang, qui m"a donne cet esprit mecreant, Cet amour du grand air, et des courses lointaines, L"Horreur de l"Ideal et la soif du Neant._"
The "_Marches Touraniennes_" conclude as follows:-
"_Plus de lois, de droits, plus rien!
Plus de vrai, de beau, de bien!
Ces Aryas!
Par le fer et par le feu, Place au Neant, place au Dieu Des Parias!_"
For his _Chansons des Gueux_, Richepin was fined five hundred francs (and costs) and kept in prison thirty days. In this volume he acclaims all the outlaws and outcasts, all the flotsam and jetsam of modern civilisation in both country and town,-thieves, tramps, gypsies, beggars, thugs, drunkards, foundlings, panders, and prost.i.tutes; "the halt, the maimed, the blind," the reckless, the defiant, and the scoffing, the uncontrolled and the uncontrollable, with a vigour of language, a genuineness of accent, a picturesqueness of phrase, an audacity in imagery and epithet, a poignancy of emotion, a naturalness, a freshness, a breeziness, or rather a tempestuousness, that bespeak the master. He lays bare the thoughts and the pa.s.sions of his disreputable personages, portrays their starvation and their gluttonies, their enforced abstinences and their debaucheries, and makes them speak in their own weird tongues, sing their own ribald songs, and dance their own maddening dances. For lyric savagery and savage lyrism these _Chansons des Gueux_ have no counterpart, so far as I know, in modern literature.
"I love my heroes, my lamentable vagabonds," wrote Richepin, in an extraordinary preface.... "I love this something, I know not what it is, which renders them beautiful, n.o.ble, this wild-beast instinct which drives them into adventure,-a rash and sinister instinct, granted, but an instinct characterised by a fierce independence. Oh, the marvellous fable of La Fontaine about the wolf and the dog! The errant wolf is mere skin and bones. The dog is fat and sleek. Yes, but the chafed neck, the collar! To be tied! "So you can"t run when you wish?
No? Good-bye, then, to your free meals. To the wood! To the wood! Everything at the point of the sword!" And Master Wolf is off: he runs still. He runs still, and will always run, this wolf, this tramp; and I love him for it. And every soul a bit above the common will love likewise this voluntary pariah, who may be repugnant, hideous, odious, abominable, but who has greatness,-a superb greatness, since his whole being voices the heroic war-cry of Tacitus: _Malo periculosam libertatem_.
"_Periculosam!_ my brave vagabonds! _Periculosam!_ do you hear, you coddled worldlings, all of you who have your soup and your kennel-and also your collar? Have I then committed a great crime in revealing the brutal poetry of these adventurers, of these braves, of these stubborn children to whom society is almost always a stepmother, and who, finding no milk in the breast of the unnatural nurse, bite the flesh itself to calm their hunger?"
Laurent Tailhade is a less natural and wholesome poet than Jean Richepin, perhaps, but he is certainly a more distinguished one. As a chiseller of poetic cameos and medallions, he has few, if any, superiors among his contemporaries. His _Vitraux_ and _Jardin des Reves_ are particularly relished by artists and litterateurs and by his brother-poets.
Tailhade"s prose is as finely chiselled as his poetry. It is almost invariably lyric; and-although he is caustic and cruel therein to the verge of cut-throatism, and although he has at his command the most extensive vocabulary of invective of any person in France, not excepting M. Henri Rochefort-it is always, like his poetry, distinguished. His cult for the cla.s.sic French and Latin authors and his scrupulous care for art save him from vulgarity and commonplaceness, even in his most questionable literary undertakings and even in the simple diatribes which he contributes to the most insignificant, the least scholarly, and the least artistic propagandist sheets. "He is a _lettre_," says M.
Ledrain, conservator at the Louvre, "who knows admirably his Latin and his Sixteenth Century, and who has formed thus a particularly savoury style which we all admire."
Tailhade has unblenchingly defended nearly every anarchist attempt that has occurred in Europe since he came to manhood. He characterised the a.s.sa.s.sination of Humbert by the Italian Bresci as "_un geste qui console et qui revive nos espoirs_"; and Sophie Perowskaa, Hartmann, Rysakoff, Caserio, Angiolillo, Henry, and Ravachol were all eulogised by him. He has been prominently before the public on four occasions during the past decade: at the time of the attempt of Vaillant, by reason of his striking epigram, "_Qu"importe le reste, si le geste est beau_"; a little later, when he was himself the victim, at the _Restaurant Foyot_, of an anarchist-or anti-anarchist?-_beau geste_ which nearly cost him his eyesight and permanently disfigured him; in the autumn of 1901, at the time of the second visit of the czar, when he was tried and sentenced to a 1,000-franc fine and a year"s imprisonment for having reaffirmed "the venerable theory of regicide[125] which has traversed history" in a remarkable prose poem published by _Le Libertaire_, and ent.i.tled "_Le Triomphe de la Domesticite_"; and lastly, in 1903, when he was mobbed in Brittany for his diatribes against the local clergy, on which occasion he rendered himself ludicrously guilty of inconsistency by appealing to the protection of the police.
The incriminated pa.s.sage in "_Le Triomphe de la Domesticite_," above referred to, is as follows:-
"_Quoi, parmi ces soldats illegalement retenus pour veiller sur la route ou va pa.s.ser la couardise imperiale, parmi ces gardes-barrieres qui gagnent neuf francs tous les mois, parmi les chemineaux, les mendiants, les trimardeurs, les outlaws, ceux qui meurent de froid sous les ponts en hiver, d"insolation en ete, de faim toute la vie, il ne s"en trouvera pas un pour prendre son fusil, son tissonnier, pour arracher aux frenes des bois le gourdin prehistorique, et, montant sur le marchepied des carrosses, pour frapper jusqu"a la mort, pour frapper au visage, et pour frapper au cur la canaille triomphante, tsar, president, ministres, officiers, et les clerges infames, tous les exploiteurs qui rient de sa misere, vivent de sa moelle, courbent son echine, et le payent de vains mots! La rue de la Ferronerie est-elle a jamais barree?