Paris and the Social Revolution Part 42

_The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes But Here or There as strikes the Player goes; And He that tossed you down into the Field, He knows about it all-HE knows-HE knows!_"

Rubaiyat of OMAR KHaYYaM.

"_A man finds he has been wrong at every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right. Mankind, after centuries of failure, are still upon the eve of a thoroughly const.i.tutional millennium. Since we have explored the maze so long, without result, it follows, for poor human reason, that we cannot have to explore much longer; close by must be the centre.... How if there were no centre at all, but just one alley after another, and the whole world a labyrinth without end or issue_?"-ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

"_Avec tous nos points de reperes, Te voyons-nous mieux que nos peres, O fond, fond qui nous desesperes, Fond obscur, fond mysterieux?

Pour avoir fait glose sur glose, Nous croyons savoir quelque chose; Mais la Cause de tout, la Cause, Qui donc la tient devant ses yeux?_"

JEAN RICHEPIN.

"_I mean to say that if, in the pitiful comedy of life, princes seem to command and peoples to obey, it is only a piece of acting, a vain appearance, and that really they are both conducted by an invisible force._"

ANATOLE FRANCE, in Les Opinions de M. Jerome Coignard.

The wisest words, probably, that were ever heard in a court-room were uttered by Gamaliel, the Pharisee, at the trial of Peter and John: "Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of G.o.d, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against G.o.d."

To a similar purport, Montaigne wrote:-

"'Tis a very great presumption to slight and condemn all things for false that do not appear to us likely to be true, which is the ordinary vice of such as fancy themselves wiser than their neighbours. I was myself once one of these; and if I heard talk of dead folks walking, of prophecies, enchantments, witchcrafts, or any other story, I had no mind to believe.... I presently pitied the poor people that were abused by these follies, whereas I now find that I myself was to be pitied as much at least as they; not that experience has taught me anything to supersede my former opinions, though my curiosity has endeavoured that way; but reason has instructed me that thus resolutely to condemn anything for false and impossible is to circ.u.mscribe and limit the will of G.o.d and the power of nature within the bounds of my own capacity, than which no folly can be greater. If we give the names of monster and miracle to everything our reason cannot comprehend, how many such are continually presented before our eyes! Let us but consider through what clouds and, as it were, groping through what darkness, our teachers lead us to the knowledge of most of the things we apply our studies to, and we shall find that it is rather custom than knowledge that takes away the wonder, and renders them easy and familiar to us; ... and that, if those things were now newly presented to us, we should think them as strange and incredible, if not more so, than others.... He that had never seen a river imagined the first he met with to be the sea, and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge we conclude to be the extremes that nature makes of the kind."

To have pondered and appropriated these words of the far-sighted Pharisee and the sage of Perigord is to have stricken the word _impossible_ from one's vocabulary, to have lost the desire to emit shrieks of anger or dismay before new views of life and society, and, without "mockings or arguments," to simply "witness and wait."

The philosophic doubt which no one more than Montaigne has approved-the "_Que scais-je?_" which forbids the swearing of unconditional allegiance to unproved theories-is, of course, always in order; but doubt becomes most pernicious dogmatism when it a.s.sumes the role of denial. It plays its proper part when, and only when, it produces a willingness to "leave great changes," as Stevenson happily puts it, "to what we call great blind forces, their blindness being so much more perspicacious than the little peering, partial eyesight of men."

"_La folie d'hier est la sagesse de demain_" has been said so long, and accepted so long, that there is no tracing it to its origin; and yet we go on diligently disregarding it, seizing every fresh occasion to "kick against the p.r.i.c.ks," quite as if the stupidity of the practice had not been demonstrated a thousand times over, quite as if the stones rejected by the builders had never become the heads of the corners, and the first had never been last, and the last first.

"_Vieux soldats de plomb que nous sommes, Au cordeau nous alignant tous, Si de nos rangs sortent des hommes, Tous nous crions: A bas les fous!

On les persecute, on les tue, Sauf, apres un long examen, A leur dresser une statue Pour la gloire du genre humain._"[143]

"If we came from a globe where there was some semblance of rule and order," says Georges Clemenceau, "the spectacle of our planet would appear to us a pure abomination." In the interests of clearness, M.

Clemenceau has exaggerated, perhaps. Nevertheless, there is an element of truth in what he says. Our society is abundantly open to criticism; and that we chance to be inimical to panaceas and suspicious of Utopias is no valid reason for calling the black of our society white, and blandly treating its absurdities, illogicalities, injustices, and cruelties as infallibilities and amenities. Because the reformer commits the folly of dogmatising in one direction does not excuse us for committing the counter-folly of dogmatising in another. Suppose we hold with Omar that

"_the first Morning of Creation wrote What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read,_"

and suppose we are p.r.o.ne to take at the letter these lines of Walt Whitman,-

"_There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or h.e.l.l than there is now,_"-

is it, therefore, necessary for us to shut our eyes to the most obvious facts of the present and to all possibilities for the future?

When Victor Barrucand, a few years ago, put forward his scheme for free bread ("_le pain gratuit_"), he was not treated as a visionary in any important quarter. The semi-bourgeois journals showed themselves, in several instances, rather friendly; and the opposition he encountered from the straight bourgeois press was of quite a different sort from that which is evoked by a preposterous proposition. M. Clemenceau, one of the few radicals who has never for a moment lost his balance, supported him warmly.

"It is high time we knew," said Clemenceau, "whether, at the degree of civilisation to which we have attained, we can continue to tolerate that men, women, and children die of want-in a few months from the exhaustion induced by insufficiently remunerated work or in a few hours from downright hunger. Our republican and monarchical conservatives-all excellent Christians-answer, 'No,' but continue to act 'Yes.'... I just remarked that M. Barrucand did not propose revolution to us. I ask myself now if I did not go a bit too fast. Yes, eighteen hundred years after the Christ, it is a revolution for Christians to prevent the death of their fellows by slow and rapid starvation. Well, then, let us inaugurate this revolution!"

"_Le pain gratuit c'est le futur_," said Jules Lermina at the same moment. And, really, is it so unreasonable that every one should be given enough to eat, when slaves have been, and domestic animals are, so provided for, and when every one is given the privilege of learning to read and write? Is it not rather surprising that a person should be permitted, nay, forced, to acquire reading and writing, and should be supplied at the public expense (without apparent opposition from any source) with fresh air, lights, pure water, paved streets, and parks, and should not be provided with bread; that he is ent.i.tled to food inspection and is not ent.i.tled to food itself; that he is a.s.sured proper disposition for his waste and is not a.s.sured a sufficiency of supply; that he can count on a burial and cannot count-supreme irony!-on a living; has the right to a grave-plot and has not the right to a loaf?

Is illiteracy so much more dangerous to society than dest.i.tution? Is everything as merry as it might be when death thus lords it over life; when a man asks for bread, and is given a coffin?

[Ill.u.s.tration: A CONTRAST IN FUNERALS]

A republic with manhood suffrage and generally disseminated book-knowledge would probably have seemed as chimerical to the minds of our not very remote ancestors as the community of the socialist or anarchist dream seems to us. It would not be more remarkable if wage-earners should disappear than it was that serfs and slaves disappeared; if the factory system should disappear than it was that it once appeared; if alms-giving should be replaced by a recognition of the right to work than that charity from being a fine, spontaneous human impulse has become an unwieldy, soulless machine; if private property should be transformed into collective property than that private property was evolved out of the tribal possessions; if the church should cease to be an inst.i.tution of the state-indeed it has already ceased to be in America-than that it ever became one; if _l'union libre_ should supersede marriage (with the loss of the latter's chief sanctions, private property and the already much-enfeebled authority of the church) than that monogamy has superseded polygamy; if woman should be emanc.i.p.ated than that man has, up to a certain point, been emanc.i.p.ated.

Furthermore, it would be no more extraordinary if the _tiers etat_ (the present dominant _bourgeoisie_) should be evicted by the _quatrieme etat_ (the proletariat) than it was that the _tiers etat_ evicted the n.o.bility and clergy in 1789; if a social republic (under which without knowing or, at least, without admitting it we are already half installed) should follow close upon the heels of a simple republic than that a simple republic followed close upon the heels of a monarchy and a monarchy close upon the heels of a feudal system; if nations should pa.s.s as political ent.i.ties by being merged in an _Internationale_ than that they emerged out of the seeming chaos of the Middle Ages; if there should be one tongue over all the earth[144] than that there has come to be one tongue over any entire people; if there should be general peace than that there has been general war.

No, there is nothing inherently incredible or absurd about the ideas and ideals of the contemporary revolutionists; nothing more transcendental or more visionary than there was, for their day and their generation, in the ideas and ideals of the Encyclopedists, and of the innovators and reformers of all the past.

It may have been a mistake for the cla.s.ses to impose book-learning on the ma.s.ses, to compel them to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which makes men as G.o.ds; but, having given their wards to eat thereof, having deliberately stimulated them to think, the privileged must let them follow out their thinking to the logical-perhaps, also, to the bitter-end. There is no alternative.

There is no such thing as staying them midway in their course, since with growing knowledge has come growing desire.

If the cla.s.ses did not wish the ma.s.ses to drink deep of the Pierian spring, they should have had the sense to keep them away from it altogether instead of ingenuously leading them up to sip. As it is, the people have become mentally and morally incapable of blind submission.

They cannot be hoodwinked by fine phrases as of yore. Their roused and trained intelligence is rapidly penetrating the shams, puncturing the frauds, and stripping off the shows of republicanism. They will not much longer be put off with the mere forms and formulas of liberty and well-being which satisfied them at the start. They are now beginning to demand the things themselves, and they have at last the minds and the manhood necessary to enforce their demand. The illogical, hypocritical, plutocratic republic which they find themselves under disgusts and exasperates them quite as much as would a monarchy. They have resolved to have out-and-out democracy instead of the miserable makeshift for democracy that has been thrown to them as a sop; and have it they will!

_Gare a vous_, nave, short-sighted bourgeois, who with your reading and writing started them on their quest for the new, if you attempt to place obstructions in their path!

The people have a startling way of getting, in the long run, the specific things they set their hearts on. And one may admit-without the slightest prejudice to his intellectual independence or the slightest abdication of his preferences-that the specific things the revolutionists of Paris and the world at large are striving for may sooner or later be theirs.

A successful social revolution, one day or another, is neither an inconceivable, an impossible, nor even an improbable event. The time may come, at least for all that we can reasonably affirm to the contrary, when there will be no more governments, no more great fortunes, no more private property, no more poverty, no more "marrying and giving in marriage," no more wars, no more armies, no more patriotism, and no more diversity of tongues.

This is not saying that the individual life will be fuller, richer, and sweeter then than it has been and is, nor that the world will be enormously better and happier than it is and has been. Apples of the most golden seeming have been known to turn to ashes in the plucker's hand; and, when the time comes-if it does come-that the revolutionists' present cravings have all been satisfied, the millennium will still, in all likelihood, be as far as ever away.

Change, incessant change, is the law of the universe; but change, though inevitable, and hence never really bad and never really to be regretted, is not synonymous with progress,-not in the sense, at least, in which the latter word is generally understood.

"_Partout de l'astre a l'etincelle, Partout la vie universelle, Se fond, tourbillonne, et ruisselle, Et tout pa.s.se, et rien s'en va._"

It is as big a piece of dogmatism to be c.o.c.k-sure the world is growing better all the time and all along the line, simply because it is perpetually changing, as it is to be c.o.c.k-sure it is constantly growing worse, and as big a piece of credulity to look forward confidently to a Golden Age in the future as to revert-unhumorously-to a Golden Age in the past. Every system of society which has existed thus far is now admitted to have had its qualities and its defects,-what is more, the defects of its qualities. Our period of machinery, universal suffrage, and diffused book-knowledge (factors from which our fathers expected miracles to spring) has its blemishes as well as the periods of illiteracy, blooded aristocracy, and hand labour. Our new woman-we are reminded every day-is as antipathetic and inept in some ways as she is charming and useful in other ways; and, while we cannot be sure that every future period will "depress some elements of goodness just as much as it will encourage others," we have, alas! no adequate guarantee that it will not do so.

It may be that it is again to be the mission of France to redeem (or appear to redeem) the world by a sort of vicarious atonement. The cult of revolution is not dead there, and the impulse that demolished the Bastille has by no means spent itself. Or it may be that for Russia, where the provocation is greatest, or for America, where there is most initiative and the most accelerated rate of change, is reserved this fearsome role. But, wherever the Social Revolution begins and wherever it reaches, the well-balanced man, who has won through stress and travail to a sane outlook and to an enthusiasm for life; he who can say with Kipling's "Tramp Royal,"-

"_Gawd bless this world! Whatever she 'ath done- Excep' when awful long-I've found it good.

So write before I die, ''E liked it all!'_"-

will await its arrival with complete equanimity.

"_Think, then, you are To-day what Yesterday You were-To-morrow you shall not be less._"

Friendships and loves-the only things really worth while to seasoned natures-have always been. Under all regimes, men have had friends and sweethearts and little ones for the greater glory of their souls; and friends and sweethearts and little ones-the boldest innovators do not a.s.sert otherwise-they are likely to have while time is.

These loves and these friendships have found such beautiful expression already that there is little to hope from the future. On the other hand, so far as they are concerned, there is nothing to fear.

What matters, then, in the last a.n.a.lysis the march of public events,-monarchy, republic, social republic, or anarchistic commune,-so that we bear the brunt together, heart to heart, and the great elemental things abide?

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Eternal Realities]

"_Of the possibility of a free communistic society there can really I take it be no doubt. The question that more definitely presses on us now is one of transition-By what steps shall we, or can we pa.s.s to that land of freedom?_

"_We have supposed a whole people started on its journey by the lifting off of the burden of Fear and Anxiety; but in the long slow ascent of Evolution no sudden miraculous change can be expected; and for this reason alone it is obvious that we can look for no sudden transformation to the communist form.

Peoples that have learnt the lesson of 'trade' and compet.i.tion so thoroughly as the modern nations have-each man fighting for his own hand-must take some time to unlearn it. The Sentiment of the Common Life, so long nipped and blighted, must have leisure to grow and expand again; and we must acknowledge that-in order to foster new ideas and new habits-an intermediate stage of Collectivism will be quite necessary.

Formulae like the 'nationalisation of the land and all the instruments of production,' though they be vague and indeed impossible of rigorous application, will serve as centres for the growth of the sentiment. The partial application of these formulae will put folk through a lot of useful drilling in the effort to work together and for common ends._"-EDWARD CARPENTER.