Aspects and Impressions

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 noble 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 passion for ideas. He founded the Revue des Idées, 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 Littéraires, 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 Gérard 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 Problème du Style (1902), Remy de Gourmont remarks in his aphoristic way, "Il y a une forme générale de la sensibilité qui s'impose à tous les hommes d'une même période." 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 analyse this condition or fashion of taste, since, although it has already passed 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 æsthetic, 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 ætherial 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 passed 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 Vendée, 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 assented. 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, Sébastian 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 clustered 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 Lycée. It was at the hospital at Nantes that his first introduction to medicine was made. Thence he finally departed in 1860, another déraciné, 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 Génération des Eléments 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 répondre," is quoted from it, and again the characteristic statement, "Nous ne sommes pas de ceux qui admettent avec l'école positiviste que la science ne peut fournir aucun renseignement sur l'énigme des choses." The thesis dealt, moreover, according to M. Pierre Quillard, who has had the courage to unearth and to analyse it, with "les organismes rudimentaires des néphélés, des hirudinées 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 américaines: c'étaient de libres et délicieuses chevauchées, des excursions charmantes au long des routes ombreuses 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 équipées" 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 employés 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 Provençal 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 pronounced 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 documents, forged by the notorious mulatto, Norton, which they pretended had been stolen from our embassy 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 Provençal constituents, 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 nonentity, and his career as a member of parliament ended.7

These circumstances, 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, class 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 Dépêche de Toulouse he contributed articles which presupposed a wider horizon and depended less on the passion 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 God 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 Mêlée 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 Mêlée 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 mass 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 passion of vitality the more vehemently flourishes the instinct of destruction.

The imagination of the author of La Mêlée 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 massacre 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.

It will be seen that the new author approached literature definitely from the scientific side, but also that he placed himself almost exclusively under the direction of English minds. M. Clemenceau, in that intense and unceasing contemplation of life which has been his most remarkable characteristic, has always been inspired by English models. In his early youth he was deeply impressed with the teaching of J. S. Mill, and in later years he was manifestly under the successive sway of Sir Charles Lyell and of Herbert Spencer. But by the time he collected his essays in La Mêlée Sociale, he was completely infatuated by the system of Darwin. He had long been familiar with The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man; the death of Darwin in 1882 had deprived him of a master and, as it seemed, a friend, while the publication of the Life and Letters in 1887 had given a coherency and, we may say, an atmosphere, to his conception of the illustrious English savant. When, therefore, M. Clemenceau put together the material of La Mêlée Sociale, he did so in the quality of an advanced Darwinian, and he produced his first book almost as a tribute of affection to the memory of the greatest exponent of the tragedy of natural selection. But the habit of his mind, and no doubt the conditions of his own fortunes, led him into a field more tragical than any haunted by the spirit of the placid philosopher of Down. Charles Darwin refrained from pushing his observations to such sinister conclusions as this:

La mort, partout la mort. Les continents et les mers gémissent de l'effroyable offrande de massacre. C'est le cirque, l'immense Collysée de la Terre, où tout ce qui ne pouvait vivre que de mort, se pare de lumière et de vie pour mourir. De l'herbe à l'éléphant, pas d'autre loi que la loi du plus fort. Au nom de la même loi, le dernier né de l'évolution vivante confond tout ce qui est de vie dans une prodigieuse hécatombe offerte à la suprématie de sa race. Point de pitié. Le pouce retourné commande la mort. L'âme ingrate répudie l'antique solidarité des êtres enlacés en la chaîne des générations transformées. Le cœur dur est fermé. Tout ce qui échappe au carnage prémédité, voulu, s'entretue pour la gloire du grand barbare. La splendeur de la floraison de vie s'éteint dans le sang, pour en renaître, pour y sombrer encore. Et le cirque, toujours vidé, s'emplit toujours.