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.
This passage may be taken as characteristic of the manner of M. Clemenceau in his most reflective mood, in the "style bref, mais clair et vibrant," which Octave Mirbeau commended. This way of writing would err on the side of rhetoric, were it not so concise and rapid, so full of the gusto of life even in its celebration of death. For, in the pages of La Mêlée Sociale, M. Clemenceau shows himself interpenetrated by the sorrows rather than sustained by the possibilities of the tormented inhabitants of earth. Recent events, in his own life and in the history of the French nation, had impressed on his consciousness the inherent cruelty of human beings to one another. Like Wordsworth, and with a far sharper personal pang, he had good reason to lament what man has made of man. Moreover, the months which had extended between M. Clemenceau's political fall and the publication of La Mêlée Sociale had been marked by violent unrest and by a succession of political crimes. Anarchism, hitherto more a theory and a threat than a practical element in the existence of the people, had taken startling prominence. In quick and formidable succession the crimes of Vaillant, of Emile Henry, of Caserio and others, had filled the minds of men with alarm and horror. These events, and the strikes in various trades with their attendant sabotage, and the unrest among the miners, and the earliest germination of that new disease of the State, syndicalism, – all these and many other evidences of renewed bitterness in the struggle for life created in the mind of M. Clemenceau an obsession which is reflected in every chapter of La Mêlée Sociale. As a physician, no less than as a publicist, he diagnosed the "misère physiologique" of the age, and he railed against those in power who touched with the tips of their white kid gloves the maladies which were blackening the surface and substance of human society. In the memory of the attempt made last February to assassinate M. Clemenceau, a special interest attaches to his discussion of this class of murders, of which he gave a remarkably close and prolonged analysis, little conceiving, of course, that he would live to be himself the object of a crime at which the whole world would shudder.
The reader who wishes the literary aspect of M. Clemenceau's mind to be revealed to him in its greatest amenity may next be recommended to turn to the preface of the volume entitled Le Grand Pan, which appeared in 1896. The book itself consists of seventy little essays, reprinted from the Figaro, the Echo de Paris, and other newspapers. These have nothing or very little to do with Pan, but they are eked out and given determination by a long rhapsody in honour of the goat-foot son of Callista, treated as the symbol of natural, as opposed to supernatural science. Everybody knows the famous passage in Plutarch which describes how Thamous the pilot, sailing out of the Gulf of Corinth towards the Ionian Sea on the eve of the crucifixion of Christ, heard a voice announce that "Great Pan is dead!"
And that dismal cry rose slowly
And sank slowly through the air,
Full of spirit's melancholy
And eternity's despair!
And they heard the words it said —
Pan is dead – Great Pan is dead —
Pan, Pan is dead.
In a passage of rare picturesque beauty M. Clemenceau reproduces the animated and mysterious scene. He had himself lately returned from a visit to Greece, which had deeply stirred the sources of his sensibility. He recalled how the sun, in a transparency of pale gold, sank behind the blue mass of Ithaca, tinged with rose-colour the crags of the Echinades, and bathed the mountains and the sea in the delicate enchantment of sunset. He was sensitive to the paroxysm of pleasure such an experience produces, and he conceived himself standing by the side of the grammarian, Epitherses, on board the merchant-vessel, at the very moment when there sounded three times from the shore the name of Thamous, the Egyptian pilot, who answered at length, and received the mysterious command, "When thou art opposite Palodes, announce that the great Pan is dead!" The recesses of the mountains, the caves on the island, the solitude of the drear battle-field of Actium, took up the hollow cry and reverberated it in a thousand accents of despair, with groans and shrieks of sorrow and confused bewailing, while all nature united in the echoing lamentation, "Pan, great Pan, is dead!"
In this strange way M. Clemenceau opens an essay in defence of a purely positivist theory of human existence. He describes the doctrine of the pagan divinities, under the tyranny of Christianity, and he predicts their resurrection under clearer and calmer auspices. For M. Clemenceau, Pan is the symbol of life in its harmonious and composite action, and science is the intelligent worship of Pan. This despised and fallen god, who seemed for one dark moment to be dead, survives and will return to his faithful adorers, has indeed returned already, and turns the tables on his priestly persecutors. The apparent death of Pan was but a sleep and a forgetting; the spirit of humanity, dominated for a moment by superstition and ignorance, seemed to be lying bound and mute, but it is vocal again, and its powers prove to be unshackled. The Orphic hymn, in dark numbers, had pronounced the sky and the sea, earth the universal and fire the immortal, to be the limbs of Pan. Under the early sway of Christianity the office and meaning of the pagan gods faded into mist; they seemed to disappear for ever. Darkness gathered over the sweet natural influences of the physical world, and reality was bartered for a feverish dream of heaven and hell.
But the gods were only preparing in silence for their ultimate resuscitation. Lactantius said that "Idols and religion are two incompatible things"; in his famous De Origine Erroris, conscious of the necessity of recognizing a central force of energy in nature, the earliest Christian philosopher repulsed the notion of polytheism, and insisted that piety can exist only in the worship of the one God. He, like the Christian Fathers before him, shut up the spirit of man in a prison from which there seemed no escape. But the polytheists, thus violently Christianized against their will, remained pagan in essence, and they escaped, as by a miracle, from the furies of the Gospel and the Koran. The revolt was held in check through the Middle Ages; in the Renaissance it became victorious, and the first activity of man in liberty was an unconscious but none the less real restitution of the old liberating deities. The shepherds of Arcadia saw the blood come back into the marble face and hands of their dead god. Pan was moving on the earth once more, for he had triumphed over the sterile forces of dissolution. Pan, as ancient as social order itself, radiant master of the beneficent powers of light, has once more become the supreme deity. This, put briefly, is the thesis of M. Clemenceau.
The influence of Renan is manifest through the whole of this rhapsody, which is unique among the writings of its author. M. Clemenceau had followed the track of Pan through the valleys of Arcadia, and up the rocky pathways that rise abruptly from the stony bed of Alpheus. An actual visit to Greece, the date of which I have not verified, appears to have influenced his imagination; he says, "je l'ai voulu chercher, moi-même; au dépit de Thamous, près des antiques sources dolentes," and he tells us how an avalanche of falling stones and a clatter of cloven hoofs overhead often made him fancy the deity almost within his grasp. In these passages M. Clemenceau reveals himself more plainly than anywhere else as an imaginative positivist, who permits his fancy to play with romantic and even fantastic visions, yet who is none the less essentially emancipated from everything but reality. He is never the dupe of his own symbol. He rejects natural religion no less firmly than revealed religion, and he will not submit his conscience to any supernatural authority. The reader, if he has the patience to do so, may follow the close parallelism of the purely intellectual positivism of the author with the charming, supple, elusive philosophy of Renan in his L'Avenir de la Science.
In no other of his writings is M. Clemenceau quite so emancipated from the prejudice of the moment as he is m the preface to Le Grand Pan. His central idea is one of satisfaction in the survival of the spirits of the dead gods, to whom, of course, he gives his own formula of definition. Nothing in history seems to affect him more painfully than the tragedy of the massacre of the sacred statues under Theodosius, when, as Gibbon has so eloquently described, the most high gods were exposed to the derision of the crowd, and then melted down. Where M. Clemenceau's emotion seems to be slightly deficient in logic is the parallel between these ancient gods who retain his sympathy, and the strictly impersonal forces of which he acknowledges them a symbol. He delights in Apollo, Pan, and Jove, and speaks of them almost as though they were individuals, yet he admits no sentimentality with regard to what they represent. On the whole, his attitude is not one of benignity. He confesses that nature reveals nothing but a system of forces interacting upon one another; it is not moral and it is not beneficent. Here the tone of Le Grand Pan becomes identical with that of La Mêlée Sociale. But we demand a clear definition of the central symbol. What does M. Clemenceau really mean us to understand by Pan? We push him up into a corner; we refuse to let him take refuge in his Renanesque imaginations, and we extract an answer at last. Pan is the source of all moral and intellectual action:
Pan nous commande. II faut agir. L'action est le principe, l'action est le moyen, l'action est le but. L'action obstinée de tout l'homme au profit de tous, l'action désintéressée, supérieure aux puériles glorioles, aux rémunérations des rêves d'éternité, comme aux desespérances des batailles perdues ou de l'inéluctable mort, l'action en évolution d'idéal, unique force et totale vertu.
The career of M. Clemenceau has been marked throughout by sudden and spasmodic crises, rather than by slow evolution of events. If this is true of his political history, it is repeated in his literary record. We need not, therefore, affect surprise at finding him, at the age of fifty-seven, and in the midst of the most bewildering distractions, produce his one and only novel, a modern story deliberately conducted to its close in four hundred pages. When Les Plus Forts was published, in 1898, its author was extremely out of the fashion, and it passed almost unobserved from the press. Not a single Parisian critic, so far as I have discovered, gave it any serious attention, and it sank at once into an obscurity out of which the immense recent vogue of M. Clemenceau has only lately drawn it. Les Plus Forts was issued at the darkest moment of the statesman's reversal, when he was repudiated by the great majority of those who adore him to-day. He had actually gone so far as to speak of his own as a "vie manquée," when a fresh opportunity of perilous service to the State fell in his way.
In October, 1897, M. Ernest Vaughan, who had laid by a very considerable sum of money for the purpose of founding an efficient social and literary newspaper, approached Clemenceau with the offer of the editorship in chief. The famous L'Aurore came into existence, and it set sail at once in the stormy waters of the Dreyfus affair. Terrific was the clash of passions around the name of the mysterious Jew, whose exact character and definite purpose will perhaps never be completely elucidated. M. Clemenceau did not hesitate to throw the weight of his pen into the unpopular scale. When Esterhazy was acquitted he almost lost his self-control; with furious irony and snarling invectives he lashed the populace into a frenzy. Then followed (on the 13th of January, 1898) the famous intervention of Zola, in a manifesto which rang from one end of the civilized world to the other. This was J'accuse, the admirably effective title of which, so M. Maurice Le Blond assures us, was the invention of Clemenceau. Next month, at the Zola trial, Clemenceau defended the cause of justice in the teeth of enemies who did not refrain from threatening his very life, and for two years L'Aurore, in the midst of the frenzied Dreyfus hurly-burly, was unflagging in its attacks and its rejoinders.
At such a moment M. Clemenceau sat down to write his solitary novel. It would be fulsome to represent Les Plus Forts as a masterpiece of fiction, though in the present flush of the author's celebrity some have dared so to describe it. As a matter of fact it owes the interest which it possesses almost entirely to the light which it throws on the character of its author. As a mere romance, Les Plus Forts suffers from the fact that its author, gifted in so many other directions, is not an effective narrator. As Dr. Johnson mischievously said of Congreve's one novel, Incognita, it is easier to praise Les Plus Forts than to read it. The scene is laid in a village deep in the heart of Poitou, and commentators have recognized a close reproduction of Mouilleron-en-Paradis, the hamlet near Fontenay where M. Clemenceau was born. At the moment of his fiercest struggle in Paris, his thoughts turned back to the cool woods and the still waters of his old home in the west, to the land of hollow valleys, and to the inexpressive sixteenth-century château which the doctor's child learned to regard as the symbol of rapine and tyranny in the past.
We are introduced to M. Henri, marquis de Puymaufray, a man of over sixty, solitary, a confirmed bachelor, not so good a shot as he used to be. The lonely old man comes back, defeated by life, to his château in Poitou. The mise-en-scène is lugubrious in the extreme, punctuated by the shrieking peacocks at noon and the hooting owls at night. When this impression has been sketched in, we turn back to the hero's early history, and follow the adventures of a young buck of the Second Empire, brought up to despise science, modern thought, the action of democracy in every form. He begins as a pontifical zouave in bondage to Rome; he ends as a sort of anarchist. The biography of the young and stupid nobleman is thus made a peg on which to hang dissertations on all the principal maladies which affected French society a quarter of a century ago. There is an exaggerated forceful woman, the Vicomtesse de Fourchamps, who plays a sustained but obscure part in the intrigue. What does she want? It is difficult to say; she is always "preparing for the battle" or attempting to "conquer" somebody. "Il faut conquérir," she incessantly repeats; she is a kind of tigress, and she seems to be, in petticoats, a type of every social and political movement of which M. Clemenceau disapproves.
The Parisian scenes in M. Clemenceau's novel are not very amusing, and, oddly enough, they are weighed down by a sort of heavy gorgeousness, somewhat in the mode of Disraeli not at his best. All the characters preach, and the reader comes to sympathize with the vicomtesse when she declares herself "agacée des sermons du marquis." The young girl, Claude Harlé, is a somewhat shadowy heroine. She passes as the daughter of a rich industrial, but she is in reality the child of Puymaufray, who was the lover of her mother, since deceased. It is easy to understand that M. Clemenceau has taken this pathetic and tremulous figure as representative of what is chimerical in the society of the day. In her original condition, he puts into her mouth the crude sentiments which are supposed to be nurtured by the enemies of democracy. Claude calmly states that "the good God has instituted two classes of human beings, the rich and the poor, and it is our duty to maintain our inferiors in the practices of religion." A good deal of art is required to remove from such speeches as these the crude appearance of falsity; and it may be remarked that the pious characters in Les Plus Forts are not more like real human beings than are the atheists in M. Paul Bourget's later romances.
What is of extraordinary interest in Les Plus Forts is not the story itself, which is thin, nor the conduct of the adventures, which is stilted, but the temper and attitude of the writer. If we ask ourselves what is the principal characteristic of this novel, the answer must be – the intensity of action of the personages; they seem to have springs of steel in their insides; they run when other people walk, and cannot move without leaping in the air. "Il faut aux conquérants la pleine sécurité de leur corps. Où l'âme conduit, la bête doit suivre." The book is full of strange utterances of this order, which reveal the violence of the author's temperament in flashes of odd light. The episodes, the conversations, are little more than a series of irregular theses on various aspects of the struggle for life. The world is regarded as simply "le syndicat des plus forts," and this idea underlies the title of the book. We are not allowed to forget it, even when our attention is being switched away to the discipline of little Chinese children in a missionary settlement, or to the importance of encouraging a manufacturer of paper in Ceylon.
What is perhaps the most characteristic passage of M. Clemenceau's single novel may be quoted as an example both of his philosophy and of his style. It occurs in the course of a long conversation between father and daughter.
Certes non, l'argent n'est pas tout. Il est trop, simplement. L'argent n'est pas tout, mais il a le genre humain pour clientèle, car il est devenu, de force libératrice, l'egoïsme tangible en rondelles de métal. Voilà pourquoi tout cède à l'universelle attraction qui n'est pas suffisamment contre-balancée par d'autres. L'argent n'est pas tout. Pourtant autour de lui se rassemblent toutes les autres puissances sociales, et celles-là même qui s'annoncèrent protectrices des hommes, aussitôt installées, par lui se sont agglomérées en tyrannie. Il a remplacé la force brutale, dit-on … à la condition de l'exprimer par d'autres signes. Contre l'expression du monde, il y avait Dieu autrefois, a dit quelqu'un. Peut-être. J'ai toujours trouvé Dieu du côté des plus forts.
M. Clemenceau did not pause, meanwhile, from his journalistic labours, and he continued to offer to the public of Paris successive selections from the mass of his productions. On each of these occasions a preface, composed with more than usual care, gave the keynote to the series of essays, or rather suggested a tone of mind in which the reader would do well to study them. In the introduction to the volume of 1900, called Au Fil des Jours, the author returned to his favourite theme, the struggle against the universally destructive forces of Nature. The life of man is concentrated on resistance to the persistent attacks upon it made by an army of inimical forces. The pride of existence is humbled by the inevitable fatality which governs the fortunes of the Olympian gods themselves. And it is useless to appeal, with the sentimental pantheists, to the beneficence of Nature, for Nature is the most relentless, the most indomitable of our enemies. In that extraordinary little tragedy of Victor Hugo, Mangeront-ils, the vain appeal is made:
Est-ce pas,
Nature, que tu hais les semeurs de trépas,
Qui dans l'air frappent l'aigle et sur l'eau la sarcelle,
Et font partout saigner la vie universelle?
With the clairvoyance of the biologist, M. Clemenceau divines the vanity of these remonstrances, and from the terrible cruelty of Nature he sees no relief save in vigorous action. "Toute âme haute veut être de la mêlée." The most troublous epochs are battles for the ideal, even at their worst moments. The only way to resist the destructive fatality of Nature is to strive for an amelioration of the lot of the human race. In all this, the texture of which is occasionally a little stretched when it is made to cover newspaper articles on the lighting of Paris or a show of prize pigeons, M. Clemenceau displays his eager wish to subordinate all his writing to a set of philosophical ideas. He has always held that the general impulses on which our daily existence depends reach us through the channels of thought. He is, therefore, a philosopher by determination, and he bases his own intellectual system on Pasteur and Spencer, on Darwin and J. S. Mill, on Taine and Renan. I have already spoken of the immense influence evidently exercised on Clemenceau by Renan's early and least ripe work L'Avenir de la Science. No doubt it was the reading of that remarkable book which led Clemenceau, already biassed in favour of materialism, to transfer to science all the passion which an earlier generation, and since his middle age a later generation, gave to religion. It must be understood that he does not belong in habit of mind or intellectual aspiration to the characteristic French tradition of to-day.
The great merit of M. Clemenceau, in the agitated years when he wielded a pen that was like a rapier, consisted in his fearless and disdainful audacity. He fought in literature exactly as he has always fought in politics, with the air of one who had no wish to conciliate his opponent, but always to browbeat him, to crush him by the weight of his argument, and then run him through the body with his irony. When we turn over the pages of his books, which suffer an inevitable loss from the fugitive nature of the themes on which they mainly expatiate, we are astounded at the ceaseless agility of the lucid, restless brain of the man. He is an acrobat, incessantly flinging himself with aerial lightness into some new impossible position. An article a day for twenty-five years – what an expenditure of vital force that seems to sum up; and yet to-day, at the age of seventy-eight, the indefatigable brain and body seem as elastic as ever! The fullness of the material in M. Clemenceau's articles has always been a matter of amazement to those who know how much clever journalism is of the kind Francisque Sarcey described when he said, "You may turn the tap as much as you please; if the cistern is empty, nothing but wind comes out!" But M. Clemenceau seemed always full, and copious as was the output, the reader had always the impression that there was much more behind.
We may regret that while the great politician was chiefly engaged in writing, namely between 1893 and 1903, he was obliged by circumstances to expend so much of his experience and his condition upon occasional issues. In turning over his pages, we must not forget that he wrote, not in the calm retirement of a study, but out in the street, in the midst of the battle and heat of the day. His insatiable appetite for action drove him forth into the madding crowd. There has always been something encyclopædic about his passion for knowledge, for practical acquaintance with the actual practice of life. He has cultivated a genius for observation, and his feverish career has been spent in pursuing knowledge day by day, without giving himself time to arrange the trophies of his pursuit. He has published no systematic scheme of his philosophy, but has left us to gather it as well as we may from his prefaces, and most of all from Le Grand Pan. As an author, we may sum him up as the latest, and in some respects the most vigorous and agile, of the disciples of the Encyclopædists. Like them, through a long and breathless career, he has ceaselessly striven to struggle upward into the light of knowledge.
1919.