THE REAL FRANC 
 
 LAURENCE JERROLD
 
 Southern Branch 
 of the 
 
 University of California 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
 L ! 
 
 33.1 
 3"4& 
 
 ./
 
 
 This b 
 
 ook is DUE on the last date stamped below 
 
 I |y 
 
 
 ?| 
 
 m 2 3 1935 
 
 APR 2 4 ^ 35 
 
 nitf 1 
 
 2 A93* 
 
 \<S 
 
 
 31* 
 
 
 5 t972 
 
 Form L-9-15w-8,'26 

 
 THE REAL FRANCE
 
 THE REAL FRANCE 
 
 BY LAURENCE JERROLD 
 
 LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 
 NEW YORK : JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMXL 
 
 83395
 
 ■ ' 
 
 WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH
 
 3 
 
 I thank the Proprietors of The Fortnightly Review, 
 The Contemporary Review, The Monthly Review, Temple 
 Bar, and The Chap Book, for permission to publish 
 portions of the matter in this volume.
 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 
 "7 
 
 •v. 
 
 I- 
 
 k/5 
 
 CHAPTER PAGK 
 
 I. The Real France ....... 8 
 
 II. Realism in Politics — 
 
 I. M. Clemenceau and M. Briand ... 30 
 
 II. M. Briand 46 
 
 III. Socialism and People ...... 71 
 
 IV. England, France, and Socialism .... 87 
 V. Strikes and Alarums ...... 101 
 
 VI. The Symbolism of M. Fallieres . . . .113 
 
 VII. The Fall of Theophile Delcasse . . . .126 
 
 VIII. The Fall and Rise of Georges Clemenceau . . 13'J 
 
 IX. The Second Fall of Georges Clemenceau . . 151 
 
 X. In the Black Country : Courrieres . . . 165 
 
 XI. In the VVhite Country : Lourdes .... 173 
 
 XII. " Les Jeunes " : 1897 : The Literary Pilgrimage 
 
 and the Youth's Progress .... 182 
 
 XIII. Ten Years After: The Last of "Les Jeunes '' . 193 
 
 XIV. The Heirs of "Les Jeunes'' — 
 
 I. The Passing of Mysticism .... 208 
 
 II. Young Realists ...... 221 
 
 XV. The French Stage of To-day — 1 248 
 
 II. Playwrights ....... 257 
 
 III. Players 275

 
 THE REAL FRANCE

 
 THE REAL FRANCE 
 
 I. The Real France 
 
 THE new-comer in England sees our solidity ; the 
 new-comer among the French is dazzled by their 
 mobility. Afterwards he is surprised to find 
 us sometimes less slow than he thought ; but 
 he is amazed to discover a France with great firm feet 
 of clay. This new amazement is an old pleasure to 
 all who have lived long in France. Before it has ap- 
 peared, we wait for it ; soon we watch it growing, and 
 in six months we enjoy it at the full. As long as the 
 fresh observer has not got beyond the boulevards and 
 Montmartre, the Boul. Miche. and Montparnasse, it does 
 not appear and he is dazzled still. The number of those 
 whom the glitter of Paris has drawn and still draws is 
 infinite. Their enthusiasms are pleasing and natural. The 
 air of Paris in spring and summer is as clear as crystal, and 
 outlines of majestic buildings and of majestically composed 
 masses of buildings are defined like clean and bold steel 
 engravings. The life of Paris rippling along the boulevards 
 is easy and bright, and one could be buoyed up by it for 
 ever ; who would ever want to live away from the boule- 
 vards and to leave them for Anglo-Saxon cares and solemn 
 energy ? Frivolous it may be ; but must we always be in 
 deadly earnest, and does not the Parisian, who knows how 
 always to live gaily, even so take life as seriously as the 
 serious-minded ? — and our new-comer snaps his fingers 
 with an "Eh bien ! " and is your true Parisian. He takes
 
 The Real France 
 
 us up to Montmartre and rejoices at the honest and 
 polished immorality of it all. The Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon 
 mind and manners could not do this : they would be un- 
 easily concerned with paying Virtue its public tribute, or 
 in private would be too easily unconcerned with veneering 
 their vices amiably. But this indeed is the real thing, this 
 is the tradition handed on through centuries of pleasant 
 living, which knew no puritanism, from the most civilized 
 court of Europe down through the days that laughed and 
 were pleasurable while the tumbrils passed to the guillotine. 
 He takes us across the water to the Boul. Miche. and 
 rejoices over careless and intelligent Bohemianism. Murger's 
 Grisettes may be dead, and a new " Vie de Boheme " have 
 arisen, but the same light wine is pressed out of life, it is 
 the same high vitality, the same bright living, blended with 
 the same artistic dash of pleasantly keen thinking. 
 
 Only in Paris life sparkles like that, free from extinguish- 
 ing cares, responsibilities, conventions, prejudices, and 
 commonplaces : it dazzles for months, then the amazing 
 discovery begins — the finding of a*solid Paris, a Paris of 
 the old earth, with roots in deep custom, a Paris of rock-like 
 consistency and iron faithfulness, a simple, straight, 
 ordered, long-headed, and earnest Paris. The Latin 
 Quarter may let the fresh stranger into its original life, the 
 life from which the student came and to which he returns 
 when he has done "studying"; the boulevards may in- 
 troduce him to its mothers and wives, or he may find out 
 that at Montmartre scarcely one in ten pleasant rakes is a 
 Parisian or even a Frenchman. At all events he makes 
 the discovery somehow. The most picturesque way is 
 over the boulevardier's threshold — the boulevardier who 
 knocks about from the last Parisian cafe to the Dutch 
 liqueur bar, seems to do his business over his cups on a 
 marble table, to nurse his social connections through head
 
 The Real France 
 
 waiters and the lady behind the desk, and to thrive in a 
 whirling world of pointedly civilized thoughts and primi- 
 tively uncomfortable things, making a brilliant home of a 
 cafe corner. Cross some boulevardier's real threshold — but 
 it often takes years to pass them — and the boulevard world 
 disappears. Cross it with the boulevard manner and you 
 will at once be incongruous and startling. This is another 
 world which seems never to have heard of the boulevards : 
 here cafe intimates of ten years' standing to whom life 
 confessions were made over a milk and Vichy are strangers 
 held at arm's length ; here things may not be very luxuri- 
 ous yet, but thoughts are comfortable, easy, and satisfied, 
 and the brilliant Parisianisms have no point left, the 
 scandals no sting, and the jokes no salt. Let us make the 
 wild supposition that the foreigner after six months has 
 crossed the boulevardier's threshold — it would really take 
 him ten years to do it — and imagine his amazement. He 
 is immeasurable miles from the boulevards now, almost 
 further than if he were at Tooting. He is in a tiny castle, 
 battlemented and guarded against boulevardism. The daily 
 scandals of journalism, the hourly intrigues of politicians, 
 and of the army of political camp-followers swarming in 
 the Chamber lobbies, the squalid or puerile machinations 
 of actors, actresses, critics, and theatreuses, the frantic 
 jealousies and scrambles and elbo wings of the men of letters 
 who are getting on : that was what he called Parisian life. 
 In the tiny castle, Papa, who is a famous journalist out of 
 doors, lifts gently the curtain of the cot where the little 
 crumpled-faced, black-haired baby sleeps, looks with a 
 great tenderness and without a shade of the Englishman's 
 " mauvaise honte " and says quite honestly and purely and 
 without the smallest sense of the ludicrous : ' Mon cher, 
 believe me, there is the best page I ever wrote." Parisian- 
 ism sweeps round that tiny castle in furious gusts, but only
 
 6 The Real France 
 
 a few filtered breaths of it are ever let in. Moralizing play- 
 wrights like M. Brieux are perpetually discovering that the 
 father and the mother and the child are a sacred trinity. 
 The foreigner who was trying to be " Parisian " in boule- 
 vard cafes finds across the boulevardier's threshold no 
 more subtlety and complication than that. The mother 
 and the father, when they go out, reel off, till he can hardly 
 follow it, that peculiar Parisian small talk, the character- 
 istic of which is that it touches with a light but audacious 
 finger upon essential things. " Chez eux " it is they who 
 seem to him to be the simple beings, and he it is who feels 
 complicated. It is the Frenchman's flat that is his tiny 
 castle, and will remain the last refuge of simplicity in a 
 complicated world. 
 
 The boulevardier and his wife, the student and his 
 mother, Montmartre and home reflect France in their small 
 ways. Every people is a people of contrasts, but this is a 
 people of one constant and pervading contrast. The 
 boulevardier who squanders not deliberate wit but treasures 
 of light humour strolling along the asphalt or leaning his 
 elbows on a marble cafe table, and goes home to help his 
 wife button up her dress behind and to dandle their one 
 precious boy while she takes a final taste of the simmering 
 '' pot-au-feu " ; the student who blows penny horns down 
 the Boul. Miche. and breaks plates and steals china match- 
 boxes at the d'Harcourt with ladies as polyandrous as he 
 is polygamous, and who spends Sunday with his long- 
 headed, far-seeing, great-hearted mother who smooths and 
 orders his life for him, to whom he listens as he listens to no 
 mentor of the Sorbonne, and who teaches him not only a 
 woman's and a mother's world, but a man's world and the 
 world ; Montmartre going mad in a dozen night cafes, 
 and Paris up and out at dawn to work from homes neat as 
 band-boxes : these arc miniature images of France. Every
 
 The Real France 
 
 people plays and works, but none plays as furiously and 
 works as quietly as the French ; the fever of the game of life 
 runs through their character, but beneath it plods every- 
 where the labour of living. It is no mere accidental contrast 
 between Montmartre on the one hand, its white-haired 
 jesters in pink paper caps, its wrestling girls, its women in 
 baby frocks, its Saturnalia with the occasional flash of a 
 knife, and on the other, Paris homes calm as sleepy villages, 
 and as ignorant as they of any Montmartre ; the intellec- 
 tual frivolity of the boulevard or the vivacious Bohemianism 
 of students, cheek by jowl with the level -headedness of 
 continual plodders and rock-like respectability, are not two 
 mere pictures side by side ; it is not a plain case of play 
 versus labour, rakes against prigs, nor the common and old 
 misunderstanding between the world which amuses itself 
 and the world which doesn't, often because it can't. On 
 the contrary, there is generally no misunderstanding at all, 
 and the two moods of the French temper understand each 
 other quite well. For it is a question of two moods and 
 even of two permanent compartments of the mind. It can 
 be said that the national French trait is the combination 
 of mobility with solidity — mobility of thought and feeling 
 with solidity of character — and the nice balance between 
 the mobile modes and the solid substance of French life. 
 Such equilibrium is not an equally essential characteristic 
 of any other nation ; we have steadiness and we have 
 imagination, but we rarely possess a compound of the two. 
 Our pillars of Society are as solid as they make 'em, 
 warranted never to yield at the capital or wobble at the 
 base. They are the safest men in Europe, and they chiefly 
 are what the Europe which knows us only collectively 
 admires us for. But they are not men of moods, and one 
 shrinks even from supposing that they ever had fancy. 
 They do not belong to that class which has it, and they
 
 8 The Real France 
 
 keep strictly clear of any such class whose whereabouts 
 they may happen to hear of. They are the solid structure 
 of the nation and neither forget it nor let you forget it, nor 
 allow any vein of national imaginativeness to creep into 
 their build : the pillars of our Society are homogeneous 
 through and through and all over, and there are no ara- 
 besques and chiselled scrolls about them. Yet perhaps more 
 than any other people, we have had poetry and imagina- 
 tion, have dreamt dreams and sung the music of words. 
 To the fervour and freedom of some of our dreamers' 
 dreams and to the music of some of our words, no other 
 people has attained, and the French not more than any 
 other. By the side of our poets the French are prose 
 thinkers ; compared with our pillars of Society the French 
 is a people of poets. We keep prose and poetry neatly 
 apart. Our solid men are solid, but our poets have no feet 
 of clay. Our imagination when it begins flies to amazing, 
 dizzy worlds, and discovers the most splendid, sometimes 
 unearthly countries of the mind. It can be divine and it 
 can also become inhuman ; as for the pillars of our Society, 
 they don't even know it started on its voyage. Nor is 
 imagination only in our poets, and we have dreamt other 
 dreams than in the music of words. Some of them have 
 been not at all musical nor humorous nor very intelligent, 
 but they were truly imaginative dreams all the same. We 
 may proudly say that no people has produced more faddists 
 than ours : they are great dreamers and prove our imagina- 
 tiveness. Be it predestination, hell fire, the big drum of 
 salvation, anti- vivisection, anti- vaccination, or whatever 
 the cudgels be taken up for or against, the spirit of it all is 
 ideal and what realization there is, ordinarily unearthly. 
 This is real imagination that leaves behind, brushes away 
 humanity : we have it and no one else has it to the same 
 degree, certainly not the French people which never shakes
 
 The Real France 9 
 
 off the common human bond. Between the pillars of Anglo- 
 Saxon Society and the Anglo-Saxon dreamers, be they poets 
 or reformers or charming old ladies with a fixed idea, whole 
 worlds lie, a difference not of degree but of kind. Between 
 the greatest French dreamers and the " bourgeois " of 
 France there is a kinship, however distant : the dreamer 
 still belongs to the earth, the " bourgeois " may see 
 glimmers of the sky. 
 
 The French have dreamt high, but rarely unearthly 
 dreams, and when they have kept close to the earth 
 perhaps they have also looked up. Perhaps one can say of 
 them, in the line of their own poet, that they deserve 
 " ni cet exces d'honneur ni cette indignite." We have at 
 times risen to excessive honours and also been at times 
 unworthy ; the French move less far from the middle way. 
 Their solidity keeps them from impossible, curious, or 
 ridiculous dreams, and from some beautiful dreaming as 
 well ; but, on the other hand, their mobility preserves 
 them from crystallization. They are too completely and 
 serenely human to harbour cranks, and so human, indeed, 
 that they stop short of some poetry ; but they are alive 
 from top to toe — to the toes of their feet of clay — and even 
 the pillars of their Society are human. These have not the 
 impervious stubbornness of ours, but throw out some feelers 
 into the other world, the world of imagination and fancy. 
 The French " bourgeoisie " for all its solidity knows that 
 there are such other worlds, may fear them, but often mixes 
 some admiration with its alarm. By itself, also, it has 
 if not dreams at least inklings, doubts, and questionings. 
 It has not the miraculously impenetrable self-assurance of 
 our " bourgeoisie " brought up to set certain questions of 
 the world — most of those that matter most — into a sealed 
 thought-tight compartment once for all never to be 
 opened. It casts, or has at moments of its life cast, quick,
 
 10 The Real France 
 
 fearful glances into the casket of Psyche, and by that has 
 lost the power of that perfect complacency, so hard and 
 smooth that no diamond point of a questioning can scratch 
 it. Yet, for all that, the pillars of French Society are solid 
 through and through, and stand on deep foundations. 
 Nor are only the pillars of French Society solid ; or rather, 
 almost every Frenchman and woman is a pillar of Society. 
 Even dreamers as well as realists, those who soar and those 
 who plod, the philosopher and the poet with those whose 
 thinking the daily prose confines, are men and women who 
 hold to a serious and unshakable faith in life by ancient 
 roots put forth by past generations bred in the same faith. 
 They take life as it is for granted once for all, and in judging 
 any new thing, posit first their faith in life as the one 
 firmest basis to reason from. Thus such dreams, curious, 
 ridiculous, generous, pathetic, not tragic, as much of our 
 public, not our political life, is made of, could have no 
 attraction for them. The Salvation Army can never do 
 any harm, and does little good in France. Hyde Park 
 orators there would have no hearers, and old Exeter Hall 
 would have remained empty day after day. There is no 
 " We speak for those who cannot speak for themselves " 
 written up in the 'buses of selfishly and self-centredly 
 human Paris. A French conscientious objector to vaccina- 
 tion does not exist. French total abstainers are a handful, 
 and of the others not one in a hundred ever gets drunk. 
 Cowper-Templerism, the confusion of compromise, scruples, 
 vested rights, in which English primary education is 
 involved, is unthinkable in France, where such things are 
 serenely swept away to make room for a blandly and ruth- 
 lessly logical system. The strength of Non- conformity is 
 a force of which France has no conception. French Protes- 
 tantism is to a certain extent a political power, but the only 
 religious social power in France is the Church of Rome, and
 
 The Real France 11 
 
 the average Frenchman will either accept a Christian 
 church which for nineteen centuries has been bound up 
 with human history and has bound itself up with un- 
 numbered human compromises, or will have no Christian 
 church at all, and does not understand churches that have 
 started afresh from bare principles and reason. If you 
 want a Christianity you have one ready-made at Rome 
 which has proved its lastingness, if you don't want that you 
 need no Christianity : that is the French logic. The French 
 feeling is that the only human church is that of which the 
 foundation is the Unknowable and the ancient and mighty 
 edifice a structure of contingencies, and that any church 
 started without mystery, on the will to know, and built up 
 by the will to force the relative into line with the absolute, 
 is inhuman : if you want to know leave all churches. 
 Religious dreams great and small which have tortured or 
 amused the English mind, leave the French unwrung, or 
 uninterested. Pascal, in so far as he was inhuman, stands 
 almost alone in French literature, and there are hardly any 
 French mystics. Intellectually restless and always ready 
 for the spring, the French mind is, at the same time, 
 kept to the earth by bonds that almost never snap ; 
 the alertest and quickest of minds, it is hardly ever 
 pure mind, and it neither tries nor feigns to break away 
 from the flesh from which it always remembers that it 
 came. It is probably, on an average, a more intelligent 
 mind than any other ; it soars less than many others, 
 or if it soars, does not lose sight of the earth. Our imagina- 
 tion has played in fads and triumphed in glorious dreams, 
 but the pillars of our Society have no imagination. The 
 French mind has been too human for faddism, and too 
 human for the greatest poetry ; but even the pillars of 
 French Society have intelligence. 
 
 The contrast between the boulevards and the boulc-
 
 12 The Real France 
 
 vardier's home, Montmartre and hard-working Paris, 
 student life and the student's family life, is of a piece with 
 French dualism in bigger things. The mood that plays 
 wild games at Montmartre, flutters pleasantly on the boule- 
 vards, and larks on the Boul. Miche., is a small aspect of 
 national vivacity, which in its largest is a broadly intelli- 
 gent outlook upon the world ; and the daily labour mixed 
 up with the games of Montmartre, the simplicity of the 
 homes which lie behind boulevardier frivolity, and the 
 earnest family background to Latin Quarter Bohemianism 
 are all parcels of the great instinctive French faith in life, 
 which in big things brakes the whirling wheel of political 
 changeableness, compensates social instability, and counter- 
 balances philosophic doubt, as in the smaller it steadies 
 feather-brained heads, and constantly leavens the pleasant 
 corruption, which the superficial onlooker sees, with a 
 severe healthiness, which escapes him : to him the France 
 of to-day is a long riddle in consequence, and he ever 
 wonders why, always going to the dogs, she never seems to 
 get there, and from what store she replenishes the vital 
 forces of which he perceives only the spending. 
 
 From the heights of Montmartre to the depths of meta- 
 physical speculation, the same saving balances the same 
 spending. Politics and Society, laws and customs, public 
 and private life, the community and the individual, collec- 
 tive relations, and the intercourse of man to man, show the 
 same equipoise. Throughout it all, thought is like quick- 
 silver, but the solid sense of life is immovable. No mind 
 more than the French enjoys thinking for the sake of think- 
 ing, and intellectual games for the sake of the play. None 
 certainly has such practice in youth, and such eager early 
 years of intellectual riotousness. The French boy with 
 brains gets drunk with thinking at nineteen or twenty, and 
 remains steeped in a debauchery of the intellect until he is
 
 The Real France 13 
 
 twenty-five or so. It can be said deliberately that his 
 counterpart in English boys is a child in mental develop- 
 ment by his side. The wonder often is that in after life the 
 English boy does what he does — and sometimes also that 
 the French boy has not done more than he has. He begins 
 life certainly with an incomparable understanding and 
 enthusiasm of the mind. English college debates would 
 seem to him — apart from the actual debating manner 
 which he does not possess — child's play in subject and in 
 treatment. Their philosophy he would smile at, though as 
 a speaker he might cut a poor figure in them, and the 
 political spirit constantly cropping up would not interest 
 him much. The mere game of party politics is too easy for 
 him, and the political science itself too immediately practi- 
 cal. He jumps at once to the essential problems and 
 discovers the world in itself at one leap. No fact of 
 intellectual development is noteworthier or more stimulat- 
 ing than he. He feels a young god, just born into a 
 marvellous world of ideas, he has the young god's fervour 
 and divine perception, he fires the listener with his fervour 
 and satisfies him with his intelligence. I remember con- 
 claves of young Frenchmen in their early twenties, to which 
 one can look back with experience as with regret, but not 
 with indulgence. There was nothing to forgive them for 
 except their enthusiasms ; their intelligence was not 
 callow. They were fresh to the world, but not greenhorns. 
 They were hasty and violent, inexperienced and intolerant, 
 but what they were least tolerant of was a dull understand- 
 ing. Their enthusiasms were always hyperbolical and 
 sometimes absurd, but never unintelligent ; they damned 
 as they extolled with impertinent and funny cocksureness, 
 but never stupidly. Their sensibility was furiously biassed, 
 but their understanding was clear and acute. They cam- 
 paigned for ideas, started monasteries for meditation,
 
 14 The Real France 
 
 published magazines either to regenerate or to spurn the 
 world, wrote volumes of new philosophy, brought out un- 
 playable philosophic plays among themselves, plunged 
 furiously now and then into current events, with a demon- 
 stration always on the side of Don Quixote, they read 
 feverishly everything most remote, they accumulated great 
 quantities of peculiar, out-of-the-way, and practically use- 
 less erudition, they spent all their pocket-money on their 
 ideas, they built for themselves a little fever-heated, eager, 
 truth-hunting world of their own, and lived in it with 
 passionate sincerity. 
 
 All thinking young France passes through this phase of 
 intellectual wild oats. The ferment in the brain of the 
 rising generation is livelier in France than in any other 
 country. To the heated and romantic picture, drawn 
 with extraordinary intensity by Alfred de Musset in the 
 beginning of the Confessions (Pun Enfant du Steele, a 
 counterpart could be found in many ages of history and 
 certainly in the present, with essential differences, but with 
 one essential likeness. To-day the picture would have 
 nothing of Musset's lyric passion or of his gush, little of his 
 sentiment and nothing of his sentimentality, neither the 
 simplicity of his Byronic despair, nor the naivete of his 
 revolts and of the world-grief over which he weeps, nor the 
 child-like candour of his yearnings, but it would show the 
 same eager young spirit, trying, as it sets out on its journey, 
 to read the world's very best riddles. It is often repeated 
 by the French themselves, that their boys to-day set out 
 at once to " arrive " and are at twenty worldly and at 
 twenty-five either young conquerors or young victims, 
 already winning or already beaten in the Parisian battle 
 with the weapons of a society which bows only to success. 
 But " arriviste " French youth is not thinking French 
 youth — and in that lies sometimes something of a tragedy.
 
 The Real France 15 
 
 It is something of a tragedy also that so much of thinking 
 French youth almost disdains to arrive. Unselfish intellect 
 and disinterested enthusiasm imagines that to be practical 
 is to be weak, and in the days of the " jeunes revues " it 
 would have been almost a disgrace to have been paid for 
 one's contributions. The same spirit grows up, and many 
 of France's thinkers who have had no thought of worldly 
 success, despise, not from jealousy, but on principle, others 
 who have succeeded, who perhaps may have thought just 
 as originally, but who were damned with the fatal instinct 
 of getting on in spite of their originality. In youth, con- 
 tempt is naturally stronger, and the young man whose 
 father made money enough to allow him to think originally 
 within his means, blushes for his money-making papa, 
 spurns money-making for himself, and will hardly shake 
 hands with the youth who wants to get on. Yet the 
 " arriviste," the ferocious, flippantly vulgar, vilely " cute " 
 arriviste, is in his way also an example of French vitality. 
 The young arriviste of to-day — and he never was as 
 prevalent as to-day — is for the matter of that a wonderful 
 person. One meets him particularly in the political world. 
 Two, four, or half a dozen years ago he clung by his eye- 
 brows to the fringe of journalism, went to those Press 
 banquets for which the reporting journalist has no time, 
 and others have no inclination, and borrowed five francs 
 of anybody who would lend it him, on the strength of no 
 introduction at all in the smoking-room. He disappeared 
 for an interval, and one thought he had gone under ; he 
 suddenly reappeared private secretary to a Cabinet 
 Minister, how or why appointed, no one knew, perhaps the 
 Cabinet Minister least of all. The young arriviste has no 
 talents whatever, and no money, and no more family 
 influence than a thousand others, and had not the ghost 
 of a social position. He has impudence and incredible
 
 16 TJie Real France 
 
 push, he was always in the doorway when the future 
 Cabinet Minister went in and out of political ante-rooms, 
 he always said the vigorous platitudes which impose upon 
 public men, he was there, of course, when the Cabinet 
 Minister was looking for a " chef de Cabinet," he was there 
 assertive and elbowing everybody else out, and he was 
 appointed. Now he represents the Minister and represents 
 the Government of the French Republic at all the cere- 
 monies which the Minister can contrive to shirk. He pins 
 medals on the coats of faithful servants who have been 
 meek and hard-working for fifty years, he bestows, " in the 
 name of the Government of the Republic," green ribbons 
 of the " agricultural merit " on hard-handed peasants who 
 have tilled the earth and created the riches of France for 
 half a century, and in supreme moments of triumph dubs 
 hard-headed, canny, and solid country mayors Knights of 
 the Legion of Honour. He is less than nothing himself, he 
 has neither toiled nor spun nor thought ; and he is arrayed 
 in honours ; he is incompetent and uncultured beyond 
 conception, but he has the will to " arrive," and he is 
 " arriving." The only gift which he must have is that of 
 the gab ; he talks to everyone and on everything with the 
 same glib ignorance and empty speciousness. He was 
 plucked in every exam at school and college, he understands 
 " not the first word " of any subject ; but he talks on social 
 reform and the progress of mankind, on financial laws and 
 agricultural depression, on Morocco and Macedonia, with 
 the same cheerful flow of words that mean nothing to those 
 who think, but overwhelm the simple-minded. He is 
 altogether a marvellous person. One sits and listens to him 
 with amazement. The men of France who have studied 
 and who know sit also astounded, while he leaps over their 
 heads, on his way to a public post in which he will lord it 
 over them. One must admire his impudence, but he surely
 
 The Real France 17 
 
 is a danger to his country. The young French arriviste is 
 the most alarming French phenomenon of to-day. 
 
 Probably only the United States can boast his equal in 
 self-assurance ; but American push has not the finish 
 and polish of his audacity. The former flounders at once 
 the moment it gets away from mere money-making. The 
 arriviste swims confidently in all waters. He does not, as 
 a rule, combine American business capacity with his 
 American instinct of getting on, but there is incomparably 
 more variety, flexibility, and intelligence in his, than in any 
 American or English impudence. He adapts the method 
 of his pushfulness to half a dozen different classes of men 
 and walks of life at will with equal ease ; his audacity is as 
 much at home in literature, and science and art, where 
 " Americanism " feels itself nonplussed, as in business and 
 politics, and that is his superiority. If the world of the 
 stage will help him to get on, he knows how to use it ; he 
 talks to the actresses as they love to be talked to, critics 
 have willy-nilly to listen to him criticizing, and playwrights 
 find themselves learning from him how to write plays : in 
 three months he becomes a first-night celebrity. If the 
 world of letters can serve him, he is soon in it by sheer 
 Jostling ; none knows what he is doing in it, but none has 
 the moral courage to turn him out. Half a dozen literary 
 catchwords caught up, as many damningly authoritative 
 Judgments learnt by rote, are all his equipment, but they 
 are enough for him, and once in a literary set he sticks 
 there, listened to by men who wonder when he is gone why 
 they listened to him, but will listen again when he returns, 
 and classed after a month or two, by lazy public opinion, as 
 a somebody in the world of letters. In art, if art can be 
 of use to him, he merely steals a dozen opinions from the 
 proper quarter and is acknowledged a judge, or he may 
 even be industrious enough to envelope a few truisms in a
 
 18 The Real France 
 
 cloud of verbosity, publish the stuff as a magazine article 
 and impose himself as the inventor of a new ^Esthetic. 
 Science may also serve him ; if so, he is careful to confine 
 himself to " applied " science, plans an aeroplane or a 
 motor brake, on paper, and thenceforward treats the 
 greatest thinkers of French science as his equals, patroniz- 
 ing them slightly as theoreticians. No men in France, as 
 elsewhere, are as modest as the greatest ; but even so the 
 onlooker is astounded by the ease with which the arriviste 
 " arrives " among them, and gains a hearing and standing 
 among artists in words, in colour, or in marble, who humbly 
 confess that their Art is greater than they and that the work 
 of their lives has never come up to their desires, and among 
 men of science who have learnt for a lifetime and meekly 
 acknowledge that they know little. He knows and he is 
 satisfied, and he is taken, if not at his word, at least with 
 amazing seriousness. He is totally a sham, but he never 
 seems to be found out, or not until too late. By that time 
 he has got on and has kicked away whatever ladders he 
 climbed ; no matter now how he rose, whether through 
 local politics or " world politics " — in which he is as com- 
 petent as in anything else — or by the indirect ways of the 
 boulevards, literary Bohemia, Academic salons, influential 
 studios, or the strange human medium which is agglo- 
 merated round motor-cars and flying machines and which 
 will serve as well as any other for pushing your true 
 arriviste on. 
 
 The arriviste's gift is the debased form of French intel- 
 lectual mobility. At the opposite pole is the mature 
 thought of France, but that is to be opposed also to what 
 itself was in the green. In no country has frivolous audacity 
 such chances of success, but in none will it meet with deeper 
 contempt from serious minds. In no country do the brains 
 of the nation sow their intellectual wild oats so wildly, but
 
 The Real France 19 
 
 in none do they settle down in riper years to such solidity 
 of thinking. The very " jeunes " who played the most 
 feverish games of the mind, and held no principle too sacred 
 and no idea too fundamental to juggle skilfully and con- 
 fidently with, are the same that a decade later lend all 
 their wit to the support of the solidest philosophies. In 
 metaphysics, the average French philosophic mind comes 
 round in the long run after all its skirmishes and excur- 
 sions to either dualism or idealism. In letters, the revo- 
 lutionary spirit nine times out of ten finds an eventual 
 harbour in classicism. In Sociology, the mellowed Anar- 
 chist ends by elaborating theories of a strengthened social 
 order. The University of Paris still expounds two or three 
 official philosophies : form and substance, matter and 
 mind, the phenomenon and the thing in itself are yet, in 
 the doctrines of the majority of Sorbonne teachers, the one 
 essential antithesis of the universe ; the young man never- 
 theless will be allowed the bold venture of proclaiming for 
 pure Idealism, but modern Monism is a heresy and 
 even Leibnitz continues to be held rather " subversive " ; 
 Materialism and Positivism, in the country of Condorcet 
 and Comte and the country which, many an ingenuous 
 Christian observer will tell you, has driven God from the 
 popular mind, the official philosophies of the Sorbonne 
 abhor ; it is not so long since they deliberately ignored 
 Herbert Spencer, and it will still be a bad mark against a 
 candidate for the Ph.D. that in his thesis he should, having 
 posited the Unknowable, thereupon leave it alone. The 
 French Academy is the one bulwark of literary conservat- 
 ism in the world, and in no other country is there any 
 preserving force in the least like it. The " jeunes," and 
 some of their elders, laugh at the Academy, but it holds 
 on, the same steady brake on the wheel as ever. A quarter 
 of a century of contemporary French poetry rushes with
 
 20 The Real France 
 
 eager vitality through a dozen revolutions, Decadentism, 
 Symbolism, Naturism, and successive meltings and re- 
 casts of the form of its verse ; the Academy hardly even 
 looks on and to this day ignores the so-called " vers 
 libre." Thus — but it is a weakened comparison — a British 
 Academy to-day might enforce exclusively the standard 
 of Pope's or Addison's versification. The cast steel mould 
 of French Alexandrine verse is the same to-day as in the 
 seventeenth century except for one minute change. A 
 " license " now allowed sparingly is the division of the line 
 into three equal parts by two caesuras instead of in half by 
 one. But the syllables, pronounced or not as twelve, 
 remain inexorably twelve to the eye ; a mute E before a 
 consonant is in theory a full syllable as ever, though spoken 
 in a quarter of the time ; pairs of masculine and feminine 
 rhymes must invariably alternate ; and a line with an 
 hiatus between two words, the first ending and the second 
 beginning with a vowel (an H before the latter may make 
 all the difference), is dismissed as "not poetry " by the 
 French Academy. To this day " tu aimes " must not be 
 written in an Alexandrine line ; " tu hais " may because 
 the " h " is said to be aspirated, i.e. the hiatus is required, 
 the French aspirate being merely an hiatus. But " tu 
 herites " again is forbidden. In " vers libre," either freed 
 from some of such conventions, or built upon experiments 
 new to French versification, at least since the Renaissance, 
 in quantity, assonance and tonic accent, much intelligent, 
 sensitive, delicate, subtile, refined, and some great French 
 poetry has been written in the past twenty-five years : the 
 French Academy dismisses it all as not poetry at all. The 
 amount of intelligence spent upon every " ism " of the 
 " jeunes," from Decadentism and Symbolism to Naturism, 
 sometimes wasted but more often invested profitably, is 
 enormous and larger than any contemporary movement
 
 The Real France 21 
 
 in other countries can show : to the French Academy it 
 all is as if it were not. Never was such intellectual mobility- 
 allied to such intellectual stability in a nation. In Soci- 
 ology, the most important French contributions to the 
 science are conservative. To justify the ways of Society 
 to man is the aim of the schools, much more than to justify 
 man to Society. Few of their thinkers and writers are 
 individualists ; the majority bring each their prop to stay 
 the social order. They are not even much concerned with 
 regenerating Society and building a new order. They work 
 on traditional ground, it is to the old order they bring their 
 bricks, and the chief theoreticians of the various and con- 
 tradictory forms of Socialism, Collectivism, Anarchist 
 Communism and so on, are not to-day to be sought among 
 them. French Sociology devotes an immense amount 
 of industry on the contrary to Social preservation. The 
 social doctrines of French official bodies of learning are 
 more conservative than in any other country : a suspicion 
 of Socialism still shocks the Academy of moral and political 
 science exceedingly. 
 
 The deep instinct which steadies the mind of France, as 
 the " stabilizer " steadies her aeroplanes, rarely fails to 
 seize and to sober her acutest brains at some stage of their 
 cultivation, whatever field of activity they may think in. 
 Few countries, for example, possess so curious a growth 
 as Anarchism turned Nationalism ; it is almost common 
 to-day on French soil. M. Maurice Barres is not alone in his 
 faith. In that creed, an old aesthetic individualism which 
 was ground down to the point of a refined literary cruelty, 
 has become through extraordinary transformations an 
 ingenuously conservative social doctrine, confusedly aiming 
 at reaction, and harking for its purpose back to generalities 
 which are opposed alike to the individualist and to the 
 socialist tendencies usually observed in modern com-
 
 22 The Real France 
 
 munities. The passage in a decade or so from a " cultiva- 
 tion of the ego " which became a blatant though ingeni- 
 ously upheld affectation, to a vaguely primitive political 
 creed, which clings to only one solid article of faith, 
 parochial patriotism of the soil and of " little fatherlands," 
 and on the strength of that callow principle alone endeav- 
 ours to build up a " Nationalism " — self -contradictory for 
 it should obviously consist on the contrary of a number of 
 perhaps conflicting small nationalisms — in opposition 
 simultaneously to French Radicalism and to French 
 Socialism, has been the strange Sociological evolution of 
 many " jeunes " : a clique of fastidious literary Anar- 
 chists has in ten years become a party which spends an 
 immense amount of brains and energy upon wreathing 
 with every flower of rhetoric, every literary ornament and 
 every intellectual art, a political doctrine, which, being 
 stripped, is reduced to a few catch-words fit for yokels. 
 No young men elsewhere after such furious thinking ever 
 came to such raw conclusions. The conversion of exquisite 
 Anarchists to a " Nationalism " for simple souls, has been 
 the most prominent phenomenon in the social theorising 
 of young thinking France. In literature the old classicism 
 will out, the probably indelible stamp of the seventeenth 
 century reappears constantly from under the impressions 
 left by a score of passionate and thoughtful revolutions. 
 The most wildly free young poet has never really lost 
 respect for his cast-off fetters, and an uneasy consciousness 
 of the immorality of an hiatus or a thirteen syllable line. 
 In the midst of furious symbolism and frantic decadence, 
 behind the rapture always lurked the dim faith that in the 
 final analysis taste and measure are the only real gods of 
 art, that the highest beauty is the clearest, that mystery 
 cannot be highly beautiful, and that real sublimity is the 
 perfection of precision and force, preferably antithetical,
 
 The Real France 23 
 
 divested of any of the stuff that dreams are made of, the 
 sublimity to which those delicious foot-notes of Voltaire 
 point, in his edition of Corneille, as in Cinna : " Aemilie : 
 Tu m'oses aimer et tu n'oses mourir. Note : ' Tu m'oses 
 aimer et tu n'oses mourir' is sublime (Voltaire)." " Take 
 eloquence and wring its neck," said Verlaine,in that wonder- 
 ful wayward song of his which he called with sweet irony 
 "Art poetique," but even the worst French enemies of Victor 
 Hugo's eloquence have not yet accepted Verlaine as perhaps 
 their truest poet. The admirably prosaic French mind can 
 rarely be brought to believe that poetic beauty lies less in 
 saying things than in not saying them. No modern genera- 
 tion has plunged more fervently into mysteries and dreams 
 than the French, wild dreams and fantastic mysteries, yet 
 it emerges from its transports still clear-eyed and cool- 
 brained. That is an admirable, almost a fatally admirable 
 balance of mind. The " jeunes " who " discovered " 
 Blake and reeled with delight, returned after all to Racine. 
 He is naturally nearer to them as he is nearer to us all. 
 But in no other country after such mystic voyages could 
 there be such a home-coming back to resolutely human 
 things. Our few young mystics have never come back at 
 all ; the most eagerly adventurous French literary mind 
 in perilous seas and fairy lands forlorn, always hears the 
 bell to call him back, not to his sole self, but to mankind. 
 He really had never forgotten that he had left mankind. 
 All the French philosophizing of passionate young pilgrims 
 discovering the world also has its feet of clay. Nowhere 
 has the mystic spirit from Plotinus to Novalis been explored 
 so eagerly. But it has almost always been the same return 
 in the end to the haven whence the eye of healthy reason 
 and sane flesh looks out and around steadily upon human 
 affairs. From all the wild excursions of impetuous travel- 
 lers, who seemed to be zealots and bigots into every deeply
 
 24 The Real France 
 
 or curiously inhuman faith, ancient and modern mysticisms 
 on the one hand, amusing perversities like Satanism on the 
 other, no sects have remained, but only a plentiful experi- 
 ence. Anywhere else so much furious adventure of souls 
 would have left a dozen schools sprouting up on the way. 
 In France almost every soul comes home enriched by 
 experience, not essentially converted or perverted. Floods 
 of metaphysics pass over the French philosophic mind 
 like water off a duck's back, the only difference is the duck 
 has learned the better to swim. 
 
 This intellectual dualism, this capacity for riding the 
 storm without losing the bearings by which the still harbour 
 will be reached again, is repeated in political life. A dozen 
 contemporary events have proved it. What other country 
 could have lived through and lived down the Dreyfus case ? 
 Where else could the Church have been dis -established, torn 
 up from ancient roots in a year by the State and no hurt 
 done to either State or Church ? What other nation to-day 
 has funked so thoroughly or bucked itself up so well ? 
 What other has been as gushing and as sensible ? In the 
 history of the Dreyfus case the most remarkable page was 
 the epilogue, before which exhausted readers generally 
 shut the book, and the events that had most meaning in 
 them were those that happened after it was all over and 
 the world had wearied of it. If the victim, his persecutors, 
 and his champions alike rightly astonished the world, the 
 nation at the close of it all should have astonished it still 
 more. Such a crisis has rarely, such a recovery has never 
 been known. If one look back ten 3-ears one rubs one's 
 eyes and wonders whether it be the same people that was 
 torn then with as furious passions as ever beset a community, 
 the same that purged its passions by sheer will, that righted 
 wrongs and punished wrong-doers as far as could be, and 
 that at last emerged serenely, not weaker, but stronger, out
 
 The Real France 25 
 
 of the hurly-burly. History will remember not so much 
 that France had a Dreyfus case as that she settled it. Dis- 
 establishment, as the French State carried it through, was 
 an undertaking which pre-supposed in the people the same 
 combination of rashness and steadiness, the same venture- 
 someness and stability. It seemed a mad enterprise to 
 uproot in one year a national Church older than the nation, 
 and to draw up a brand-new Constitution for the Church in 
 France, her ' ; eldest daughter " ; to take up the gauntlet 
 which Rome, by rejecting that constitution, threw down, 
 seemed an even more dangerous folly, inviting civil war. 
 The amazing venture succeeded. French levelheadedness 
 suddenly came to the rescue of French audacity ; a re- 
 sourceful commonsense stepped quietly in to set the pace 
 where only impetuous Dogmatism seemed to be rushing 
 headlong. In a week or two, after a j-ear of dry imperious 
 theorising, a modus vivendi was found upon which 
 Church and State could comfortably live, and do. Out of 
 the deadlock sprang, almost naturally, a few neat measures 
 of compromise and unravelled the inextricable. Civil war 
 melted in a day or two into cheerful peace. The State came 
 out strengthened by national approval ; the Church came 
 out strengthened by self-reliance. Xow, re-establishment 
 is unthinkable, and the Church has more power than ever. 
 So incautious a political revolution never ended in so solid 
 a settlement. In foreign relations, French policy shows a 
 deceptive capriciousness, preserving in truth a steady head 
 for business. France appeared to make herself ridiculous 
 over the alliance with Russia in the honeymoon days ; 
 when the partner fell on hard times, she neither gushed any 
 more nor nagged, but held her own quietly ; she now reaps 
 the double reward due to constancy in need and to the 
 superior person who stood by the partner in his weakness. 
 In the history of the Entente Cordiale, it was we whose
 
 26 The Real France 
 
 vivacious enthusiasms were Gallic, and the mobile French 
 people, before accepting them, looked them carefully over, 
 sneered at them for a time, priced them, weighed them, and 
 finally did strike the bargain. It was a perfectly business- 
 like bargain on the side of France, and having struck it she 
 stuck to it ; but there never was a better proof of her cool 
 head for business. She lost it once very badly in her 
 relations with Germany. When Delcasse was kicked out, 
 it was the France of spasmodic impulses and fits of nerves, 
 the traditional France in the opinion of other countries, that 
 did it, and her fit of nerves was a fit of cowardice. No 
 other great nation has had such a funk in modern times. 
 Three years later she answered Germany as no other Power 
 has dared answer the present German Empire since it was 
 founded. In that time she had, without a word, re- 
 tempered her spirit ; it was the other France that did that, 
 the France of the deep strata below the surface. 
 
 The social facts of France, either lasting or passing, all 
 fall into an antithesis. They show the national character 
 almost in skeleton form, and the extreme contrast between 
 surface variations and underlying permanency. The history 
 of her Socialism in particular, and of her labour movements 
 in general has been one continuous antithesis. All recent 
 labour agitations might be examples invented ad hoc to 
 illustrate the dualism of France. Her labour movements 
 and ours have followed almost opposite roads. Ours came 
 or are coming from practice to theory ; hers began with the 
 theory. In England Trade Unionism is an old institution ; 
 in France Parliamentary Socialism is the parent. In one 
 country the Unions are the Conservative wing of the Labour 
 Party ; in the other they are the Revolutionary vanguard. 
 In the one, Unions send members to Parliament ; in the 
 other Socialist deputies try to promote Unions. In the one, 
 the Union men who have paid their weekly pence and have
 
 The Real France 27 
 
 for years put together their business and their brains, as 
 well as their cash, are the power ; in the other the Socialist 
 party in Parliament has long had the power, and the leaders 
 counted long before those whom they led were of any 
 account, often before they had any number of men worth 
 speaking of to lead. In a sense, thus, the divine average 
 has pushed Socialism in England, and intellectual aristocracy 
 has advanced it in France. Nothing has been more 
 characteristically French than the social development of 
 France. The leaders really lead, the followers really 
 follow ; our leaders have generally been led by their 
 followers. The leaders are the motive force, the followers 
 the brake on the wheel ; the leaders rush and the followers 
 sometimes find themselves whither they had not bargained 
 to be led. French Socialism is almost an ancient institution ; 
 its Parliamentary Party is the oldest, and if not the most 
 numerous, certainly the most powerful socialist party in 
 any European Parliament. French Socialists are newer to 
 socialism and a great deal less strong in it than the men 
 they elect. The leaders are variations of type, the followers 
 are the permanent elements of national character. It is 
 true that of late the Parliamentary Socialist Party has been 
 somewhat left behind by some other Socialist nuclei, but 
 that development has merely reproduced the same dis- 
 tinction in different ways. The Parliamentary leaders felt 
 so sure of their lead that they dropped their followers 
 and ignored Trade Unions altogether. Another vanguard 
 sprang up, the " C.G.T." and the old leaders found them- 
 selves being led. But the distinction remains the same, is 
 even sharpened. The " C.G.T." is a yet wider variation of 
 type than the Parliamentary Socialist Party, and its dim 
 followers are by comparison yet more completely on the 
 permanent level. In all French labour movements the 
 imagination at the head has run on, the body, in spite
 
 28 The Real France 
 
 of spasmodic forward bursts, has in the main Jogged its 
 level way. All recent labour agitations have proved really 
 only one thing, the stability of the deep waters under a 
 mobile surface. A few impressions remain of these May 
 days and general strikes and Wine Wars : the middle-aged 
 rosetted gentleman drinking his bock slowly on a cafe 
 " terrace " behind half a dozen policemen ready to keep off 
 Anarchists ; furious scribbling from politicians who have 
 lost all sense of the meaning and strength of words, and 
 conversations of liberal-minded Conservatives saying 
 honestly, " There was no doubt a time when the individual 
 had rights, in the present situation we cannot afford to let 
 him have any, we must all sacrifice ourselves to save France 
 toppling on the brink of annihilation " ; workingman papa, 
 his only son by the hand, placidly reading wall posters 
 which called for France to rise and stab the bloodiest 
 Government of modern times ; postmen and clerks on strike 
 to obtain a Government -guaranteed "status of function- 
 aries " which should raise the civil servant and employee yet 
 a little higher and settle him yet a little more firmly in the 
 great fabric of French society ; wine growers who rebelled 
 because their wines would not sell, small freehold landlords 
 whose love for their plots and vines was an almost primeval 
 patriotism. The revolutionist whose world is his vineyard, 
 the " functionary " who rebels that his " function " may 
 be more strongly assured in the State, the " Socialist 
 Radical " deputy, who is returned by wealthy Conservative 
 peasants, because Social Radicalism is the governing label, 
 the " Unified Socialist " member, returned to Parliament 
 by the cautiously individualist mechanic who has never 
 made up his mind to pay his subscription to a Trade Union, 
 even if he joined one, because he fights instinctively shy of 
 the subversive co-operation of Labour against Capital, 
 the solidest " bourgeosie " in the world trembling in
 
 The Real France 29 
 
 fear of fancied cataclysms, and the most strongly-knit 
 society known in history bracing itself together to ward off 
 an imaginary peril of imminent dissolution, are all, like the 
 Anarchist shoemaker who refused to allow himself to be 
 arrested until he had well and truly finished the pair of shoes 
 he had in hand for a fastidious customer, among the con- 
 tradictions of the pleasant land of France which make it 
 pleasanter.
 
 II. Realism in Politics 
 
 I — M. Clemenceau and M. Beiand 
 
 MCLEMENCEAU said of M. Jaures that you 
 can always tell his speeches because every 
 # verb is in the future tense. I can imagine 
 M. Briand reflecting with some sardonic 
 satisfaction that the tense of M. Clemenceau's political 
 verbs is now the past. If M. Clemenceau was a great 
 realist in power, he found a greater to succeed him. I 
 remember, in a conversation on English constitutional 
 politics, M. Briand being reminded that we are an essenti- 
 ally illogical people and that political logic is peculiarly 
 French. "Ah, la logique ! " his soft eyes shone and his 
 mouth went up on one side in a smile, " ' la logique ' in 
 politics, one believes in it, then one comes back from it." 
 He had at that time been Prime Minister not much over 
 six months. Eight years before he had been an Anarchist. 
 His is the pattern of those French minds that grasp 
 realities. They do not always, perhaps they seldom, go 
 in for politics. The logician in politics is at least equally 
 French, and the doctrinaire has cut off heads to satisfy his 
 passion for logic. But when a French politician is a realist, 
 he cannot be beaten for realism. 
 
 M. Clemenceau had a political doctrine and principles of 
 politics ; he never made any attempt to act up to the 
 former or to carry out the latter, but at all events he had 
 them. M. Briand enjoyed the strong advantage over him 
 that he had them not. He is the pure realist. When M. 
 Clemenceau was already an old man, an old dogmatic 
 
 3°
 
 Realism in Politics 31 
 
 fearless liberal who had not yet learned the terrors of 
 power, M. Briand was an Anarchist and anti-militarist. He 
 had not even stopped to take in socialism pure on the way, 
 but had leapt from studentship to Anarchist-Communism, 
 which is at once the only pleasant and the only logical 
 scheme of a future society and which requires but one 
 postulate that men become worthy of it. When M. 
 Clemenceau took office for the first time, M. Briand had 
 already begun " realizing " himself, had already travelled 
 all the way from Anarchist-Communism to the ante-room 
 of the Cabinet. Mr. Lloyd- George and Mr. John Burns 
 have, intellectually at least, covered each a quarter of a 
 mile at a snail's pace by comparison. M. Clemenceau has 
 had one of the careers in Europe which have the most 
 picturesque outline ; there is no curiosity of outline in that 
 of M. Briand, except the shooting trajectory of a sky rocket 
 still in the sky, but the picturesqueness has been inward, 
 the tempest has been in the mind. His suave manner on 
 his rough face shows no sign of it, but the storm must have 
 been there, for one cannot become such a realist without 
 some inner struggle. 
 
 " Go to battle with voting papers, if you think fit, I will 
 not object. Go to battle with pikes, swords, pistols, rifles : 
 far from blaming you, I will hold it my duty, if you do so, 
 to take my place in your ranks. One may advocate a strike 
 of the army, one may even try to bring it about. And then, 
 if the order were still given to fire, if an obstinate officer 
 persisted in trying to curb the troopers' will. . . . Well, no 
 doubt the rifles might go off, but it might not be in the 
 direction ordered," was what Aristide Briand told the 
 General Congress of French Socialist organizations in 
 December, 1899. From that speech, from the petty 
 lawyer's defence of an anti- militarist, from the rising 
 Anarchist-Communist leader's plans for a general strike,
 
 32 The Real France 
 
 in seven years or so (he was first returned to Parliament in 
 1902) to Prime Minister of France (in July, 1909), whose 
 words tamed all parties, from the wild Left to the rabid 
 Right, and whose actions doggedly aimed at only one thing, 
 preserving the steady level of French life, when he presided 
 over the elections which have been the most matter of fact 
 held under the Third Republic, is a journey which no mind 
 can accomplish without some tempests in itself on the way 
 and some amazement when it looks back. 
 
 Not wholly dishonest, still less entirely sincere, I imagine, 
 was, like many other men and statesmen in particular, the 
 Prime Minister under whom France elected her present 
 Chamber. He was not a complete cynic when he confided 
 engagingly that he had " adapted himself " ; he can never 
 have persuaded even himself that his " adaptation " was 
 intellectually or even morally honest. He was not the 
 perfect hedonist, though he could spend his four thousand 
 a year seeing life behind the scenes as well as you or I. He 
 was still less the callow freshman convinced that his 
 services were worth every penny of his salary. He neither 
 forgot a fillip of scepticism in his cup of triumph, nor failed 
 to enjoy his drink, nor pretended that it was an unwhole- 
 some drink or that he did not think it was right that he 
 should quaff it. Another's " adaptation " might have been 
 the cool quackery of ambition, the solemn convertion of 
 an honest wiseacre, or a mixture of the both called the fruits 
 of experience. His was none of these things, at least none 
 of them entirely. He said to himself neither " Premiership 
 is worth a Mass," nor, " I am obviously the Heaven sent 
 saviour of my country," nor "Ah, the Idealism of my 
 youth ! One lives and learns." To begin with, it does not 
 appear that he had lived and learned much, nor that he 
 pretended to have stopped living and learning ; in the 
 second place, when he has spoken most like a statesman he
 
 Realism in Politics 33 
 
 has always preserved precisely that snap of scepticism 
 which so rarely freshens the flat speeches of public men ; 
 and in the third he has never been hypocrite enough to be 
 charged with mere self-seeking. 
 
 Had he advertised political principles on taking supreme 
 office, we might have called him cleverly grasping or 
 obtusely sincere, and probably we could have called him 
 both rightly. But he came to power honestly unprincipled : 
 that was, and may continue to be, the beauty of M. Briand. 
 Others scheme for the enjoyment of power in the name of 
 a great cause, enjoy power for the sake of the cause ; 
 M. Clemenceau held to a political doctrine while squeezing 
 all the satisfaction he could out of power, and smacked his 
 lips over the sweets of office while professing his faith. 
 M. Briand never pretended not to enjoy power, but never 
 patted himself with the conviction that he was enjoying 
 it in defence of a creed. At the same time he did not enjoy 
 cynically, or even as violently as many men of the highest 
 political principles. He took the fun and the work, the 
 profits and the self-spending, as all in the day's chance. 
 A more honestly unprincipled statesman no country has 
 ever known. The most characteristic thing about him is 
 that while no one can call him blind, even those who have 
 watched his career will not say he is a cynic : that so quick 
 and thorough a turn-coat should have been acknowledged 
 to be neither complacently unconscious nor knavishly self- 
 seeking was M. Briand 's triumph. 
 
 His adaptation was neither hypocrisy nor self-delusion 
 nor honest conversion. He did not pretend to others or to 
 himself, and he did not believe, that he had changed con- 
 victions. For aught I know, he may be an Anarchist- 
 Communist still, probably is. In " adapting " himself, he 
 merely shifted his focus : he found he had to do it, looking 
 at things under another angle. He suddenly came close to
 
 34 The Real France 
 
 realities, his point of view changed, and he adapted himself 
 to it. He did not either knavishly or ingenuously change 
 his philosophy to suit his new prosperity ; all he did was 
 that having been suddenly transported himself into a 
 profitable and solid reality from a dream world, ineffec- 
 tual and impecunious, he brought into his new world of real 
 politics a philosophy of bland realism, which, taught him 
 by his own sudden removal, seemed as strangely fresh to 
 that world, as that old world seemed fresh to him. 
 
 He was a rare realist in French public life because he 
 simply and easily carried into French politics the realism 
 of French life. He came to power, and had no high words 
 to sound, no principles to lay down. The key of his first 
 speech as Prime Minister was that he was a man who 
 had adapted himself to his function. He came, among 
 the Unified Socialists, looking ahead, though enjoying the 
 present, round the acid prophet M. Jules Guesde and the 
 mellow M. Jaures, ever orotundly building the city of 
 the future ; among the Royalists and the Bonapartists, 
 touchingly rallied round a shadow ; among the Progres- 
 sists, who are the Conservatives and vow the country has 
 gone to the dogs ; among the so-called Social Democrats 
 and the equally so-called Socialist Radicals, who are all 
 moderates and live upon watch-words from the days when 
 the Third Republic was young and required swaddling. 
 He came without a watch-word of his own, without a 
 principle, a battle-cry, an ideal. A French politician with- 
 out an ideal seemed marvellous. He came a mere man, and 
 said he was only that, a man called to the governing func- 
 tion who had adapted or meant to adapt himself to it : a 
 mere man among watch-words and battle cries. The 
 mellifluous audacity of the man as he spoke, with his rich 
 voice, seemed marvellous : to come without a heavenly call 
 to save and regenerate, without a panacea, without even a
 
 Realism in Politics 35 
 
 policy, except for to-morrow morning at latest, to come 
 with hands empty of all these things and merely ready to 
 do what was to be done next. The astonishment was so 
 great that when the mere, plain, unprincipled man came, 
 the battle cries suddenly staled. He said he was merely a 
 man adapted to his function, he seemed suddenly to be 
 merely an organ, to have appeared merely because the func- 
 tion called him into use. But what other definition is there 
 of the man of the hour ? He ceased to exist as a politician, 
 a builder of better things for other men, a pastor. He was 
 only the instrument of the nation for the moment's work, 
 he was just the tool the hand had looked for. He came 
 blandly, almost calling himself a tool. He dropped his old 
 dreams without compunction, his old friends without a sigh, 
 he adapted himself. The Prime Minister was no longer a 
 constructor of policies, a leader of battle, the incarnation of 
 a cause. He was the organ fulfilling its functions ; but it 
 was strongly and suddenly felt that the function had been 
 waiting, and that this was the organ it expected, that the 
 right man had come for the right job at the right moment. 
 The realism of French life and the idealism of French 
 politics have always gone hand in hand. The more soaring 
 the politics the steadier the life, seemed almost the rule. 
 When the business of politics has been the most squalid, the 
 mental gymnastics of political theorizing had been the most 
 dizzy. When political fancy built the most towering castles 
 in the air, the will to live clung most doggedly to the earth. 
 Those who lived the most steadily chose the highest flying 
 political dreamers to represent them. The political zealot 
 was the most reasonable citizen. The anarchist paid his 
 rent on the nail, and it was the staunch Conservative who 
 lived in Bohemia. Political corruption did not make for 
 political materialism, politicians separated public and 
 private life, taking bribes in the one while they pursued
 
 36 The Real France 
 
 ideals in the other, and the era of the Panama scandals was 
 not one in which the " watchwords of democracy " were 
 least zealously obeyed. The Third Republic has passed 
 through more political crises than most regimes of any kind 
 anywhere ; it has lived through them with less change to 
 its own real life than the most politically steady common- 
 wealth has undergone elsewhere in the same period. Panama 
 scandals ran off it like water off a duck's back ; it lay down 
 to be walked upon by a general with a golden beard, and 
 when the general fled to his mistress's tombstone where he 
 shot himself, got up again refreshed and feeling fitter than 
 ever ; it was cut in two by a court-martial sentence which 
 nearly brought civil war, then revised the sentence, dealt 
 out justice and retribution, and united again ; it tore up 
 by the roots the most ancient Church in Europe, then 
 planted it again by a settlement which in a twelvemonth 
 was made probably as solid as the old charter of centuries. 
 The Third Republic did or bore all this because its real life 
 throughout remained untouched. A man may be a dare- 
 devil safely outside, if his home go on its wise level way. 
 The homes of the Third Republic have gone on wisely and 
 with a crafty cautiousness. 
 
 Out-of-doors, in the political world, experiments were 
 made, dangers courted, crises invited, mad games played 
 and risky feats tried : politics were sport for idealists, not 
 a business for realists. Not a politician so low as to seem 
 practical. To this day, plain words sound cynical in the 
 French rostrum. To aim at to-morrow's job is a paltry and 
 sordid policy ; reform must be for all time and final. 
 What is done must be done under the aspect of eternity, 
 and to-morrow, if needs be, can wait until what is done be 
 done perfectly, logically, definitely and for ever. Patching 
 up and muddling through, dear to our English tempera- 
 ment, are a horror to the classic French political mind.
 
 Realism in Politics 37 
 
 At every moment of the world's journey the course must 
 be shaped towards the ultimate goal of perfection. To-day 
 is nothing ; we are working for posterity. In our hum- 
 drum lives, let us, as much as you like, think only of to-day 
 and to-morrow, and of putting by the baby daughter's 
 dower. In public life we are handing on the torch, we are 
 heirs to a great inheritance and bear a great burden of 
 responsibility. We do not plan for ourselves, better indeed 
 let ourselves be uncomfortable for a while, if thereby we 
 can plan the better for the ages to come and with the more 
 perfect finality. Better in fact, on reflection, merely to talk 
 about what we are going to do, than to do it in haste 
 imperfectly. Thus the policies of sounding words and 
 magnificent formulae (usually barbarous philologically) 
 proceed much less from hypocrisy than from idealism. 
 The aversion from rule-of-thumb politics is genuine and 
 deep-rooted ; to be able to talk of great constructive 
 policies and unable to carry them out is human. To talk 
 high politics and to take bribes is also human. The handful 
 of corrupt politicians in France (whose simple methods the 
 merest town-councillor in the United States could put to 
 shame) are not the less honest idealists because their palms 
 itch. They also plan all things for all time. A deplorable 
 neediness compels them to be on the make in the mean- 
 while. But that is no reason why their principles should 
 be any the less abhorrent from makeshift temporizing 
 policies. 
 
 The Third Republic has been more idealist in its politics 
 than any other regime except the short-lived generous dream 
 of the Republic of 1848. Contempt for the squalid hand- 
 to-mouth policy of the Second Empire was in the blood of 
 statesmen after 1875. Guizot's " enrich yourselves " of 
 the earlier monarchy was still remembered and quoted 
 with loathing. The Third Republic has been as realist in 
 
 83895
 
 38 The Real France 
 
 its life as any other regime. What it has politically lived 
 through, it survived because it lived steadily ; what it has 
 politically accomplished, it achieved because the will to live 
 realized the needful out of the speculations of the will to 
 build castles in the air and talk about them. The Third 
 Republic is perhaps at the beginning of a great revolution ; 
 it may be making up its mind to inoculate the idealism of 
 its politics with the realism of its life. 
 
 Perhaps M. Briand will be the doctor. He was preparing 
 the needle when he presided over the elections. A decade 
 had led up to that moment, a decade of settling down, of 
 waning theories and waxing matter-of-factness. The 
 Dreyfus case was the latest outburst of political and public 
 idealism in France, and it may prove to have been the last 
 for some time to come. I do not think the Third Republic 
 will wed an Idea again yet awhile, and the chances are that 
 it will be M. Briand who, priest as well as surgeon, will 
 affiance her to Fact. A war would not give the lie to this 
 forecast, for it would be very much a practical war, a war 
 precisely to defend the cherished facts of the people's life. 
 The Dreyfus case was the latest idea which won the people. 
 No great popular upheaval was ever so far removed from 
 the solid earth of the people's interest, and no two sides in 
 a civil war ever fought so furious a game for love before. 
 From Emile Zola to the day labourers who did battle to 
 free and clear a moneyed Jew officer, not one Dreyfusard 
 stood to win anything, but had everything to lose ; from 
 Paul Deroulede to the placid "petite bourgeoisie" which 
 wrecked its peace of mind to uphold the " honour of the 
 army " represented by a bare half-dozen of utterly insignifi- 
 cant officers, no more anti-Dreyfusards than Dreyfusards 
 had aught to gain. The Dreyfus case died, it died long 
 before Dreyfus himself had been cleared and reinstated, and 
 nothing is as dead as the Dreyfus case now. It died, and a
 
 Realism in Politics 
 
 new temper came over the people, a temper which may 
 mean that " 1' Affaire " will have been the last national 
 idea. No more such causes as the duel of justice and 
 patriotism. Realism began when the armies fell to pieces, 
 when the tithe of Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards on the 
 make neatly threw the rest over and joined forces to grab 
 what they could of the spoils of the war which others had 
 fought. That we may politely call individual realization, 
 and was an insignificant factor. The growing realism of the 
 people was the meaning sign. The adventure of the 
 Socialist Parliamentary Party was probably the most 
 characteristic episode of the time, when the Socialists, not 
 then unified, were welded into the famous bloc and became 
 an element of a very practical working majority. They 
 were not only an element in it, but a most active and most 
 practical element. Idealists proved remarkable realists : 
 that neither the party nor the country has forgotten. 
 ' Unification " came in 1905, and cutting three-quarters 
 of the French Parliamentary Socialist Party off from the 
 bourgeois bloc, drew it back into idealist isolation again, 
 but the party kept the taste of power and remembered the 
 lessons of practice, and the country retained the impression 
 of a Socialist Party that had shown how efficiently it could 
 pull together with a governing majority. The country 
 learned to take, not Socialism, but Socialists seriously, since 
 they had proved realists when they had had the chance. 
 The party had had that taste of realities which is never 
 forgotten. It was a double defeat of idealism which must 
 have lasting effects. " Unification " notwithstanding, the 
 Socialists can never forget that their theory was once 
 tainted with the practice of power, and that they enjoyed 
 the taint ; the country remembers that whatever the city 
 of the future may be the Socialist Party once played an 
 exceedingly shrewd part in the city of the present, and
 
 40 The Real France 
 
 when the country votes Socialist it does so with that 
 recollection at the back of its mind. What the party has 
 gained, it gained in spite, not because, of " unification " 
 and because the country took its idealist isolation less 
 seriously than its realistic alliance. The adventure of the 
 Socialist Party with the bloc did not advance Socialism, 
 but promoted Socialists to the rank of at least occasional 
 realists. Both that adventure and the effect it had upon 
 the country were signs of the times. 
 
 The Dreyfus case was the last popular idealist cause. 
 The Dreyfus case made M. Clemenceau, or rather put him 
 together again after the old scandals which had knocked 
 him to pieces. He rose to power on the wings of that idea ; 
 M. Briand was not heard of till that idea was as dead as the 
 dodo : nothing better marks the difference between the 
 temperaments, the careers, the fortunes of the two men, 
 and between the parts they played and may, one of them 
 indeed will, still play in the affairs of the nation. M. 
 Clemenceau became the man of the hour because he had 
 been the man of an idea ; he rose as the champion of an 
 abstract cause. He had defended the idea of justice with 
 all his wit, and the country called him to rule. No ideal 
 cause set M. Briand upon the throne ; on the contrary, 
 rising, he shed the abstractions of his first political years, 
 and dropped his early idealist friends, the Anarchist- 
 Communists. He precisely rid himself of what dreams had 
 filled his past : it was precisely one of the dreams of M. 
 Clemenceau 's past that bore M. Clemenceau to power. 
 M. Clemenceau in office acted up to none of his ideals, but 
 he had had them ; M. Briand was chosen on the strength 
 of no principle, he may have been chosen because he had 
 not any. He thus enjoyed the superiority that having used 
 no ideal ladder to climb by he could not be accused of 
 having thrown one down when he had got to the top. But
 
 Realism in Politics 41 
 
 that is a personal incident in a career, and the national fact 
 is that the nation in choosing M. Briand chose for the first 
 time in many years a man not on principle but for practice, 
 not the man of an idea but a handy man. Will M. Clemen- 
 ceau prove to have been the last man the Third Republic 
 chose ideally ? It is certain that already he was an instru- 
 ment of transition and that he knew it. In the time of his 
 power I described him once as a great realist ; I did not 
 know that a greater would follow. He did grasp realities 
 suddenly, after having been raised to power as an idealist. 
 He grasped M. Jaures, building the city of the future, 
 wrestled with the honey-lipped prophet, threw and crushed 
 him beneath the weight of the Present, accounted for 
 and justified. That joust was what he began his tenure 
 of office Avith. Ever after when M. Jaures again cried, 
 ' Behold what shall be," he answered, " Look at things as 
 they are," and the tip in the lobbies was that if Jaures 
 " interpellated " a vote of confidence in Clemenceau was a 
 sure thing. M. Clemenceau in power dropped principles, 
 battle cries and dogmas, though chosen because of them. 
 He kept the country down to facts, and Parliament kept 
 him in office accordingly. No such bearer of standards 
 in opposition furled them with such alacrity in power. 
 Impotent enemies called M. Clemenceau cynical ; he was 
 only learning to know a new temper in the nation, and it 
 was his way of " adapting himself," though he did not hit 
 upon M. Briand's bland way of putting it. The fatal flaw 
 in his adaptation of course was that he had had principles 
 and that they had brought him to power. They paralysed 
 his motion, and he could never appear honestly unprin- 
 cipled, but was the man with an ideal who had gone back 
 upon it, always an ungrateful part to play. In this, the 
 only national fact that counted was that, whether to his 
 own advantage or not, M. Clemenceau, having been chosen
 
 42 The Real France 
 
 for his principles, dropped them for the sake of his 
 practice. 
 
 The Dreyfus case was the latest outburst of idealism in 
 France. What after that was to have been a great ideal 
 cause of the Third Republic was diverted into the channels 
 of the matter-of-fact. Disestablishment had long been a 
 goal for theoreticians. From wind-bags to prophets, all 
 had looked forward to the freeing of the State from an 
 official allegiance to Rome (the Reformed and Jewish 
 Churches being left out of count) as to a splendid deliver- 
 ance. " Separation " was a catch-word for political quacks 
 with their tongues in their cheeks, and a gospel for men 
 entirely compounded of moral principles like those honest 
 austere zealots, M. Henri Brisson and the late Ranc. The 
 Church of Rome after the death of Leo XIII did appar- 
 ently all she could to intensify the struggle and to give it 
 the halo of a war of ideas. A politic church would have 
 done every possible thing to level it down to a conflict of 
 interests. " Separation " came in with the glamour of a 
 great ideal cause — and went out reduced to a parochial 
 measure. What had happened in the interval ? M. Briand, 
 but he was only an instrument, or an organ, the instrument 
 of a new mood, the organ of a new function, in the nation. 
 Not many social and political facts observed recently in 
 any country are as curious as this change of national 
 attitude during the process of Disestablishment in France. 
 It was a passage from philosophic enthusiasm and pious 
 fanaticism to businesslike rule of thumb, compromise and 
 cheerful matter-of-fact accommodation, as the reform 
 itself, or the revolution, passed quickly from a high and 
 distant cause, reaching to the furthest truths and " putting 
 out the lights of Heaven " (M. Viviani, Minister of Labour), 
 down to a local act for the adjustment of various ecclesi- 
 astical matters, and one might say without exaggeration
 
 Realism in Politics 43 
 
 for the better settlement of certain relations between 
 Church and State. Secularization of the State had been 
 a great cause of the Third Republic. It was at hand and 
 at last the great cause was to come off ; M. Briand took 
 it in hand at his first appearance in parliamentary life as 
 " reporter " on the bill, took it in hand gently, gently 
 fashioned it, gently shaped it, and when the great cause 
 was ripe, it had become under his gentle treatment a quiet, 
 sober, practical, pleasantly-turned measure, rather less 
 shocking to the bourgeois French mind than the still pro- 
 posed income-tax. The French Church looked placidly on 
 the measure, the " green cardinals " headed by Ferdinand 
 Brunetiere recommended its adoption. Rome made very 
 nearly half a dozen successive endeavours to embitter the 
 struggle, but vainly. M. Briand (but he was only an instru- 
 ment) was still bland. Rome would not have the " associa- 
 tions cultuelles " ? Very well, the churches remained open 
 to priests backed by no associations. Rome would not have 
 the " declarations of meetings " ? Very well, the churches 
 remained open to priests without any further formality. 
 " Me minister, not a church in France shall be closed," said 
 M. Clemenceau ; M. Briand wrought bill after bill and 
 circular after circular (without which no French bill is 
 comprehensible), but both Briand and Clemenceau were 
 only instruments. They were mere expressions (what more 
 could a statesman hope to be ?) of the nation's new temper. 
 Where was the great cause, the putting out of the lights of 
 Heaven now ? All that was left was accommodation, 
 business-like settlements, a tradesman's adjustment of his 
 affairs with his neighbour's — what was left was realism. 
 Realism indeed Rome had no doubt counted upon. The 
 Vatican's policy of peace at no price was not the mere 
 fanaticism it seemed, and its no-compromise campaign was 
 pushed on because it knew that compromise would come
 
 44 The Real France 
 
 from the other side. Had Rome not read the national tem- 
 per aright, had separation proved the great idealist cause 
 it was to have been, the Vatican would undoubtedly have 
 accepted some terms, perhaps even the associations of the 
 original bill of 1905. But the French nation had set its 
 mind upon keeping to real facts and sacrificing none for any 
 of the theories on which French politics had thriven so long. 
 Rome could hold out quite safely. What therefore seemed 
 on the surface impolitic, high -principled downrightness, was 
 an ingenious calculation, which after all succeeded. It was 
 the French State, interpreting the national temper, that 
 compromised at several successive steps, not the Church of 
 Rome, and the price paid by the Church of France (in 
 loss of property which would have devolved upon associa- 
 tions of worship, and of payments for terms to ecclesiastics, 
 the life pensions having been maintained) was one that did 
 not affect Rome much. Rome had read aright with some 
 acuteness the new French national mood. Disestablish- 
 ment, before the law of 1905 was framed, was to have been 
 one of the great idealist causes of the Third Republic, to be 
 carried through at the point of the sword, in the name of 
 philosophy and the betterment of mankind. The laws of 
 1905 and 1907 have proved to be the most business-like, 
 practical and matter-of-fact, as they have been the swiftest 
 and most radical, revolution of modern times. 
 
 Under M. Clemenceau's Premiership M. Briand's gentle, 
 dexterous, and softly strong hand was shaping Dis- 
 establishment. No one marked him very attentively. M. 
 Clemenceau went on doing picturesque things and saying 
 sharp ones, trying them on once, but only once, at M. 
 Briand's expense. He continued also steadily on the road 
 to realism strewing quips all the way ; unfortunately, the 
 realist Clemenceau almost irresistibly meant Clemenceau 
 the cynic to the popular mind. Even M. Gustave Herve did
 
 Realism in Politics 45 
 
 not call M. Briand a cynic — liar and assassin if you like, but 
 not cynic. M. Clemenceau fell stupidly, and the country 
 let him tumble with the most candid determination to feign 
 no regret ; a greater realist was known to be waiting in the 
 wings. But before he fell he did at least one real thing, 
 for which the country might have thanked him more ; it 
 was the only real thing he did in office, it was one of the 
 most real things the nation did, it was perhaps the sharpest 
 sign of the new political realism of the Third Republic. 
 Under his Premiership France in November, 1908, retrieved 
 July, 1905 :* that was a stroke of realism that counted. 
 
 It was a good omen for a new period in which France may 
 transfuse into her politics some of the realism of her life. 
 There was nothing idealistic about that retrieval ; war, if 
 it had come, would have been a matter-of-fact, sordid, 
 interested, selfish war, that is to say the only war honour- 
 ably to be waged, a war in defence of the solid facts and 
 real things of plain life. If France pulled herself together 
 in November, 1908, it was not for glory, feats of arms or a 
 dash a Berlin ; it was in mere animal self-preservation, the 
 noblest cause to fight for. M. Briand's luck, which is the 
 luck of all capable statesmen, arranged that France should 
 have pulled herself together just in time for him to get into 
 the saddle. There was no better way for her to begin an era 
 of political realism ; M. Clemenceau having been thrown, 
 the best man, the perfection of realists, an Anarchist who 
 had " adapted " himself, was by to take his seat. 
 
 * See Chapter IX.
 
 46 The Real France 
 
 II — M. Briand 
 
 M BRIAND showed what a realist he is by 
 being quiet, and letting who would be clever. 
 # M. Clemenceau never could resist being 
 brilliant ; M. Briand perhaps never had 
 the temptation to face, he certainly never gave way to it. 
 The former completely enjoyed only the picturesqueness 
 of life and was a realist only because he felt he had to be ; 
 the latter at least never showed that he cared for anything 
 but things as they are without ornament. M. Clemenceau 
 went on being picturesque and saying things that became 
 household words ; M. Briand never said anything that 
 stuck or even that anybody marked. During all the 
 preparation for Disestablishment, it was the former who 
 said the words, but the latter who did the things, and he 
 did do them. M. Clemenceau, I believe, did not understand 
 completely until the last that all the while he was bril- 
 liantly talking his Minister of Public Instruction was 
 placidly doing. He showed that he did not understand at 
 an earlier stage, at all events, by trying upon him one of his 
 famous gibes which he was a little surprised to have to take 
 back, when, in the midst of M. Briand's silent efforts at 
 readjusting a constitution of the Church which the Vatican 
 had noisily rejected, he burst out with " We are in incoher- 
 ency. I did not put myself there. J'y suis, j'y reste," in 
 the House, and had to depart into the lobbies to pacify the 
 silent but nettled M. Briand who had got up and strode out. 
 He was also a little surprised at the end to find how ex- 
 tremely thorough and intelligent a realist had come up 
 quietly and quickly to take his place, when he lost it
 
 Realism in Politics 47 
 
 through one of his wanton wiles, which proved a bad 
 blunder. 
 
 Nothing was wanton about M. Briand m public life. He 
 had his fling of imaginativeness, when he was cheerfully 
 and eagerly willing to take up " pike, sword, pistol, rifle " 
 with the rest and go into battle against the bourgeoisie, 
 when he laid methodical plans for general strikes, when he 
 advised troopers in such cases to shoot down their officers, 
 not the strikers. It certainly was a handsome fling, and a 
 great many fine realists have not begun so imaginatively. 
 But very soon after 1902, when he was first returned for 
 Parliament, the hunger for realities came upon him. He 
 showed keen ingenuity in feeding it during the long debates 
 upon the Disestablishment Bill on which he was " reporter." 
 Both the supporters and the opponents of the Bill thirsted 
 fiercely for idealism : was not Disestablishment one of the 
 great ideas of the Third Republic, and would it not indeed 
 have been the latest of its great idealist causes had not 
 precisely M. Briand had it in hand ? The opponents of Dis- 
 establishment, the clerical Royalists, Bonapartists, " Pro- 
 gressists " who were the extreme Conservative wing of the 
 nominal Republicans, generally yearned for the martyrdom 
 of the Church (not the churches, for the reformed and 
 Jewish Churches were never taken the slightest notice of 
 politically) ; the supporters, with increasing intensity as they 
 ranged from Radicals to Socialists, all burned to defend the 
 Republic against the monster of clericalism. Between the 
 two idealisms stood M. Briand, and managed to find him- 
 self with extraordinary dexterity a steady diet of facts. 
 The extreme Right alternately called the heavens to 
 witness that the faith of its forefathers was being trampled, 
 and refused to vote concessions to its faith, for fear of its 
 not being trampled upon enough for political capital. The 
 extreme Left alternately cried that Rome must be strangled
 
 48 The Real France 
 
 or would strangle France, and that an anti-clerical state 
 was the only free state in which all faiths could live side 
 by side. M. Briand the realist played off patiently, per- 
 sistently and long one idealism against the other and the 
 contradictory illusions or hypocrisies of both sides against 
 one another. He obtained the vote of liberal and practical 
 clauses from an anti-clerical majority, by urging upon them 
 that it was impolitic to pander to the thirst for martyrdom 
 of the clericals, and from the latter he obtained, not only 
 their consent to, but often their collaboration in, several 
 particular measures, by hinting that their adversaries would 
 be better pleased by opposition because it would the 
 better justify oppression. He did not care one atom for the 
 great anti-clerical cause on the one side or the great cause 
 of Rome on the other. All he meant was to do his best to be 
 known afterwards as the man who framed a real Dis- 
 establishment Bill that would work. He saw where the 
 wind would come from some near day, and that Dis- 
 establishment was not going to be one of the great idealist 
 causes of the Third Republic, but if it were to be at all 
 would be a mere poor humdrum practical arrangement, 
 and must in fine be worked out with no loftier aims than 
 the assuring of the least possible inconvenience to all con- 
 cerned. That a great reform should be squalidly adjusted 
 to the comfort of the men whom it affects was a conception 
 entirely new then and still rather new now. All great 
 French parties devoted to the welfare of humanity, from 
 the convinced Roman Catholic Conservatives to the Unified 
 Socialists, would still never shrink from throwing the 
 nation into the greatest possible discomfort for the nation's 
 good. But the nation (though it has as usual added to the 
 ranks of the latter party) seems growing less inclined in 
 actual fact to let any such party ever try anything on. The 
 Chamber of 1902, for example, still battled for and against
 
 Realism in Politics 49 
 
 Disestablishment, as a great idealist cause to be fought for 
 or against on principle, not on sordid grounds of daily 
 convenience. The Chamber of 1906, adjusting Disestablish- 
 ment once accomplished, talked remarkably little, almost 
 not at all, about principles, but was prosaic enough to 
 resort — a rare thing in French politics — to rule of thumb 
 for expediency sake : in the interval M. Briand had come 
 to the front. The Chamber of 1910 has under his Premier- 
 ship been elected on no principles whatever, but only for 
 practice : so much did his realism achieve. 
 
 During the Chamber of 1906 he realized at least as effectu- 
 ally as during that of 1902. The Pope's move gave him 
 openings, such as he might have planned himself, for being 
 realistic. A succession of catastrophes or absurdities, or of 
 both, threatened the country as the result of the Pope's 
 successive refusal of measures which his own partisans in 
 France had generally accepted, or even in several cases had 
 themselves proposed. One day there was to be no mass said 
 more in France, on another the entire Roman Catholic 
 clergy of the country was to be summoned before police 
 magistrates regularly every Monday morning, on a third 
 the Faubourg St. Germain was to motor out to barns on 
 deserted moors for divine service, after that a priest of 
 demoniacal worship was to be legally qualified to celebrate 
 the black mass in Notre Dame. For a little while the 
 militant Church looked to an advertisement from early 
 Christian martyrdom, and those other incorrigible idealists, 
 the atheist anti-clericals, clamoured to inflict it upon them. 
 But that sort of joke was beyond what the nation was 
 prepared to stand. M. Briand was not alone in reading the 
 country's temper — M. Clemenceau indeed put in his " Me 
 Minister . . ." — but he read it the most effectually, and 
 saw that the country wanted to be rid both of martyrs and 
 of persecutors, and rid of both quickly, and he rid it of
 
 50 The Real France 
 
 them rapidly and effectually. Whether the would-be 
 martyrs stand to gain is an open question, the persecutors 
 have certainly gained nothing, which is precisely the 
 country's gain. M. Briand once more cared not an 
 atom for the principles of either side, but fed, and fed 
 the country, on realities. Whatever compromise served, 
 he used ; if one " circular " would not do, a new bill came 
 along ; if the bill was not enough, more " circulars " helped 
 it. Realism never was so shameless ; political idealism 
 was too much shocked to look. The country on the surface 
 has forgotten it all, in its sub-consciousness it remembers. 
 No one who observes the French Church to-day can help 
 remembering. Almost every Roman Catholic Church in 
 France is national or communal property and was taken 
 back by the State at Disestablishment ; on the order from 
 Rome the clergy nowhere complied with the requirements 
 of the law which would have ensured their tenure of the 
 churches ; another law made them " occupants " — and 
 occupants they are. They occupy, and they rule, as they 
 should, in the churches ; not an iota of their spiritual 
 dominion and of its material signs has changed. The 
 Church may have lost much, or gained something, which is 
 political freedom for any agitation, her dignitaries being 
 no longer servants of the State, but which is a new 
 privilege she has as yet been chary of using ; all the 
 country cares about is that it no longer pays for public 
 worship, and that whoso wishes to worship worships 
 exactly as he did before. The idealists both of martyr- 
 dom and of persecution have been defeated, political 
 realism reigns. 
 
 So did M. Briand, quite naturally, having come up on no 
 wings either of high principle, afterwards belied, or of bril- 
 liant sayings that must fade, but on the mere bare back of 
 facts. Of course if the country had happened to want
 
 Realism in Politics 51 
 
 winged men at that moment he would be still an Anarchist- 
 Communist politically, but he was the realist of the moment, 
 and he answered. He disposed easily of his past Anarchist- 
 Communism by his engaging " adaptation," and he began 
 realizing in office. Like most statesmen he found that the 
 best way of realizing is to tell others how to do it, and at 
 Perigueux in October, 1909, he told all Frenchmen to make 
 France still more pleasant. In that speech, and another at 
 St. Chamond in April, 1909, was contained all his reali- 
 zation up to the election of the present Chamber, but 
 the two speeches, though limited, often parochial, in 
 scope, drew the traits of a people and marked the signs of 
 its times. 
 
 By a piquant coincidence a French Prime Minister drew 
 a suave picture of the pleasant land of France, which he 
 urged all Frenchmen to make yet pleasanter, on the 
 morrow of one of the fiercest outbursts of an English 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer, which gave no amiable idea 
 of what the pleasant language of England in public speak- 
 ing was coming to. The " adapted " Anarchist-Communist 
 melodiously sang of the charms of to-day and of the mother 
 soil, and there was not the single jarring note of a hint that 
 the mother had ever disinherited any of her sons or that 
 this present day could ever be really and essentially bettered 
 by any day to come. It was a cooing, comfortable song of 
 contentment for all, a song of realizations to be enjoyed, 
 a song of peace, prosperity, living and letting live, the 
 hymn of a realist if ever there was one. Where were the 
 idealist causes, the great reforms, the march of progress, 
 the ever onward trend ? Not a note of these trumpets was 
 heard. It was all a soft and honeyed carpe diem — and 
 M. Briand's both songs echoed pleasantly through the 
 country as no paeans of reformers had done for years. The 
 " adapted " Anarchist-Communist did talk about reforms —
 
 
 52 The Real France 
 
 such revolutionary reforms as " moralizing " the electorate 
 and the elections, instituting the status of functionaries, 
 steadying trades unions. Members of Parliament were no 
 longer to be the purveyors of favours to their constituents. 
 To that end proportional representation might be intro- 
 duced, but with the proviso that the existence of parlia- 
 ments be prolonged and perhaps partial elections be held, 
 the Chamber being renewable for instance by thirds. But 
 the immediate and apparently the most efficacious remedy 
 was to be the strengthening of the local authorities of 
 government to render them " independent of pressure " 
 from Members of Parliament : i.e. such local authorities, 
 already directly dependent upon the Home Office, were to 
 be freed from the meddling of local members and the 
 Napoleonic system of centralized government * was to be 
 if possible yet more firmly knit. The long advertised 
 " status of functionaries " was to be established : that is to 
 say, in exchange for the foregoing by civil servants of one 
 single very doubtful right, the right to strike, the privileged 
 position of functionaries in the country, in which they are 
 already a nation within the nation, was to be further 
 endowed and strengthened ; no French statesman has ever 
 thought of answering the agitation of civil servants by 
 curtailing instead of increasing their privileges and weaken- 
 ing instead of strengthening their fortress-like State within 
 the State. Trade Unionism was to be steadied by the 
 wonderfully bold process of a legal measure to empower an 
 union to own an account at a bank, or otherwise to possess 
 property, a privilege yet unheard of for French Syndicates. 
 Such were the reforms sketched by the " adapted " Anar- 
 chist-Communist : they pleased and satisfied the country. 
 A strange adventure happened to an extra reform — so 
 revolutionary a proposal as that, already talked about with 
 
 * See Chapter IX.
 
 Realism in Politics 53 
 
 bated breath for several years, of instituting an income-tax. 
 It appeared in the first reports of one of the speeches (that 
 at St. Chamond), but there was no trace left of it in the final 
 and official version. Was the startling reform mentioned 
 or was it not ? Was it considered on mature reflection by 
 the great realist to be too revolutionary to appear in 
 official print ? The other " reforms " were enough for a 
 realist country — a country which as a matter of fact asks 
 for no reforms at all but wants to be let alone, a country 
 which wanted precisely not a reformer but a realist. 
 
 More than speeches, the public welcome paints a public 
 man. This " adapted " Anarchist-Communist was received 
 by the country as the champion of the bourgeoisie, the man 
 of no substantial past and of no substance was accepted as 
 their representative by the most traditional and substan- 
 tial middle class in the world, without his having even so 
 much as asked the favour of representing them. The public 
 mind seemed to form M. Briand after its own image. He 
 had little to do but to sit and have his portrait taken. He 
 had not even to go to the pains of recanting, beyond saying 
 that he had " adapted " himself. He never indeed specifi- 
 cally renounced Anarchist-Communism, and for aught the 
 public heard him say, might be at heart an Anarchist- 
 Communist still. He made no confession, advertised no 
 principles, never put up as the champion of the realist 
 bourgeoisie. The latter took him at its own, not his own, 
 estimation ; he had the luck of never being called upon to 
 estimate himself. It was done for him, perhaps before he 
 knew, almost before anyone knew. Never so calmly and 
 naturally did a man become a representative man before, 
 and a man representative of things and ideas which he 
 certainly by personal experience, and apparently by 
 temperament, knew nothing about. He was a man of only 
 the smallest bourgeoisie himself, without family substance
 
 54 The Real France 
 
 or family traditions, which in France have a money value, 
 and his experience had been Anarchist-Communism. The 
 French bourgeoisie took him as their symbol. He stood as 
 a sign for their steadiness, their solidity and their realism. 
 He was their safe man — whom in other circumstances they 
 might have called an adventurer — and they depended upon 
 him : such is the power of a personality that strikes the 
 public imagination. He had not struck it in any dramatic 
 way as M. Clemenceau did, but he had had the power to 
 impress an image upon the public mind, the image of the 
 out-and-out realist. The public had painted its own 
 portrait of him : he once nearly blundered by over-acting 
 up to that portrait, when on May Day he turned Paris into 
 an armed camp against absent revolutionists, but the usual 
 ineffectualness of the revolutionists saved him before 
 the elections. The portrait may or may not have been 
 truly lifelike, but for public men what they actually are 
 is less important than what the public makes them out 
 to be. 
 
 M. Briand the " adapted " Anarchist-Communist stood 
 for everything that is solid and quiet in France, when the 
 country went to the polls. The portrait which the country 
 had drawn of him after its own image hovered all over the 
 elections. None were ever more peaceful or more stolid, 
 and they afforded one more remarkable proof of the 
 conservatism of a nation which has made more revolutions 
 than any other. The parties which live — poorly — by 
 agitation argued that the country voted peacefully out of 
 general disgust with everything, but never could explain 
 why a disgusted country, supposing it no longer had the 
 heart to hope for regeneration from the parliamentary 
 system, should take the trouble to vote at all. The country, 
 which lives serenely in spite of agitations, presented the 
 most remarkable picture ever seen of equanimity at the
 
 Realism in Politics 55 
 
 polls. At the elections of 1906 walls were covered with 
 sanguinary curses. The public strolled up, read them 
 carefully from the first frantic word to the last, and strolled 
 off again. " The bloodiest Government of modern times. 
 ..." " The rape of our liberties and the murder of our 
 rights. ..." " Cut out buttonholes in the bellies of the 
 bourgeois, . . ." the working-man holding his eldest boy 
 by the hand read on the walls, and went off without even 
 shrugging his shoulders to treat himself to a black currant 
 syrup and vermouth mixed and his boy to a pomegranate 
 syrup with seltzer. In 1906 the contrast between the 
 brimstone language of politicians and the syrup and water 
 demeanour of the electorate was ridiculous. In 1910 there 
 was not even that contrast left. The 1906 candidate who 
 had called his opponent an assassin called him merely a 
 bounder in 1910 ; the 1906 liar became a person whose 
 opinions we will not qualify in 1910 ; in electoral language 
 1910 was the merest shadow of 1906. The public read on 
 with the same equanimity, unchanged ; whatever candi- 
 dates' language be, whether furious or polite, measured or 
 beyond bounds, the public always reads on with the same 
 equanimity. But the change in canvassing language was 
 important ; if the public read peacefully of political lying 
 and assassination, with how much more stolidity did it not 
 take mere equivocation and manslaughter ? If public 
 peaceableness remain the same, the subsiding of political 
 fury must be the more significant. The general elections 
 of 1910 were the quietest and most conservative France has 
 held under the Third Republic. The bland face of the 
 " adapted " M. Briand smiled throughout over them. He 
 had announced that Government pressure through the 
 Prefects upon the electorate would be abolished, and it is 
 believed that he did his best to that end. But Government 
 pressure at election times is to a great extent an ancient
 
 56 The Real France 
 
 myth. Constituents when they bear the burden of such 
 pressure, bear it after all chiefly because they like it ; the 
 pressure for the most part is the pressure of their own 
 imiate worship for authority, and it is conceivable even 
 that they might throw off the Napoleonic prefectoral 
 system if they really wanted to. Anyhow, whether Govern- 
 ment pressure were removed or not, France voted exactly 
 as if it had not been removed. The 1910 elections were the 
 most peaceable and the most conservative yet held under 
 the Third Republic, because they were the most realistic, 
 and M. Briand presided over them as the great realist. 
 He might have offered, and the country might have asked 
 for, a thousand dreams ; not one Avas asked for or offered. 
 The men and the parties who were returned were those who 
 actually made the fewest promises. The jokes of the Paris 
 boulevards, about the sops thrown to a hungry public by 
 deputies ready to offer the moon, have no relation what- 
 ever to the temper of the country. The country never 
 asked less for the moon than at the last election. The only 
 genuine difficulty is to determine whether it really did ask 
 for anything, save to be let alone ; that it unmistakably 
 did ask. No country politically so idealistic in the past ever 
 showed such contempt for ideas in the present, and the 
 France of so many theoretical revolutions had never before 
 proved so realistic. 
 
 Parties and programmes showed the same complete 
 stability. A comparison of the state of parties * shows 
 
 Bloc 353. 
 
 * Chamber elected in 1902 :— 
 
 
 Socialists .... 
 
 45 
 
 Socialist Radicals. 
 
 135 
 
 Radicals .... 
 
 90 
 
 Republicans of the Left 
 
 83 
 
 Progressists 
 
 97 
 
 Nationalists .... 
 
 55 
 
 Reactionaries 
 
 85 
 
 1 vacant seat 
 
 1 
 
 
 591 
 
 Opposition 237.
 
 Realism in Politics 
 
 57 
 
 that the only change of any importance was the increase 
 of the Unified Socialists by twenty odd seats, but that does 
 not imply any change whatever in the mood of the country. 
 It would of course be a very ill-informed student of France 
 who would in general conclude that the return of Socialist 
 Members of Parliament means the Socialism of their con- 
 stituents. In the particular case of 1910 the increase of the 
 Unified Socialist Party actually proved in a sense the Con- 
 servatism of the country, though hardly the honesty of the 
 Conservatives. Almost without exception the additional 
 Unified Socialist members were returned by a coalition of 
 the Socialist constituents with Royalist, Bonapartist, and 
 other anti- Republican voters. The latter, who do not of 
 
 Chamber elected in 1906 : — 
 
 
 
 Unified Socialists . 
 
 . 54 
 
 
 Independent Socialists . 
 
 . 20 
 
 
 Socialist Radicals 
 
 . 135 
 
 ( Working majority 
 
 Radicals 
 
 . 116 
 
 | 361. 
 
 Republicans of the Left 
 
 . 90 
 
 
 Progressists . 
 
 . 68 
 
 
 Nationalists . 
 
 . 30 
 
 
 Reactionaries 
 
 . 78 
 591 
 
 
 Chamber elected in 1910: — 
 
 
 
 Unified Socialists . 
 
 . 75 
 
 
 Independent Socialists . 
 
 . 24 
 
 
 Socialist Radicals 
 
 }258 
 
 Probable working 
 
 Radicals 
 
 majority 350. 
 
 Republicans of the Left 
 
 . 78 | 
 
 
 Progressists . 
 
 . 70 
 
 
 Reactionaries 
 
 . 90 
 
 
 2 vacant seats 
 
 . 2 
 597 
 
 
 For convenience, I give in brief a description of the above parties. 
 The Socialists during the Chamber of 1902 were in the governing 
 majority called the bloc. The " unification " of Socialism at the 
 Amsterdam Congress of 1904 divided French Parliamentary 
 Socialism in 1905 into two unequal fractions, the larger " Unified "
 
 58 The Real France 
 
 course really represent French Conservatism except nomin- 
 ally, followed as usual a dog-in-the-manger policy of giving 
 their vote to no substantial party of Government at all, 
 where they could not command an anti-Republican 
 majority. Instead, on their old principle of the 'politique du 
 pire, they plumped for the Unified Socialists to spite the 
 Republic. This was done openly in dozens of constituen- 
 cies. The Unified Socialist Party, being always at the poll, 
 and frequently in the House, not at all a party of principle, 
 socialist or otherwise, as M. Jules Guesde would have it, 
 but essentially, to the delight of M. Jaures, a practical 
 business party, everywhere accepted the compact com- 
 placently. Anti-Republican voters had thus the satisfac- 
 tion of increasing the Unified Socialist Party in the Chamber 
 by twenty odd members, out of spite to the Republic. The 
 increase may have some effect in parliamentary tactics, 
 but it obviously means nothing as a sign of the temper of 
 
 Socialist Party pledged to support no " bourgeois " government, and 
 the smaller miscellaneous party of Independent Socialists and Social 
 Democrats who remained with the majority. The Socialist Radicals 
 and Radicals have for long past formed the bulk of the majority. 
 The Republicans of the Left (Waldeck-Rousseau Party), repre- 
 sented chiefly by the " Democratic Republican Alliance," which was 
 founded in 1901, and is now forming a larger party, the " Democratic 
 Republican Left," are usually, but not invariably, included in the 
 majority. The Progressists (Meline Party) are Reactionaries who 
 are officially Republican, but half of whom would accept a Royalist, 
 Bonapartist, or other Reactionary revolution. The parties of the 
 Independent Socialist and combined, and now undistinguishable, 
 Socialist Radicals and Radicals, of the latter and the Republicans 
 of the Left, of the latter and the Progressists, of the latter and the 
 Liberals, respectively overlap on one another, and the above figures, 
 accordingly, are only approximate, as far as those parties are con- 
 cerned. The Reactionary Party includes (1) the Liberals (M. Jacques 
 Piou's Party), who are the party of the Church of Rome ; (2) the 
 Nationalists, who, in part nominally Republican, are the " patriotic " 
 party formed during the Dreyfus case by anti-Deyfusards ; (3) the 
 Bonapartists ; (4) the Royalists.
 
 Realism in Politics 59 
 
 the country. The country has never been less socialistic 
 than it proved itself at the last election. In fact, the real 
 wonder in France is that Socialism makes so little progress. 
 The only genuine majority in the most recently elected 
 French Parliament is the party of realists. Most of the 
 names of the French Parliamentary parties are misnomers, 
 among which one of the most marked is the name of the 
 Socialist Radicals who are hardly radical and not in the 
 least socialist. One need only look at who elected them, 
 one need only observe the elections at Moyenneville en 
 Brie, which are described on another page,* to understand. 
 Independent Socialists, Radicals, Democratic Republicans 
 are the real Conservatives of the Third Republic. Some 
 way off, yet next in Conservatism, come the Unified 
 Socialists, whose idealism, when all is said and done, aims 
 at changing, not abolishing, the Republic. The real 
 Revolutionists are the Reactionaries ready for any leap in 
 the dark out of the present state of things. Nobody knows 
 why the fractions of parties described as simply Republican 
 are not described also as Socialist, like the Socialist Radicals : 
 they are neither more nor less Socialist. The socialism of 
 Unified Socialists does not mean much, the socialism of 
 Socialist Radicals means less, and the plain Republican 
 parties might call themselves socialist for all it would hurt 
 their principles. It is indeed quite certain that they will 
 call themselves socialist some near day, by when probably 
 the entire French Parliament will be socialist, barring 
 the Royalists and other Clerical conservatives, Christian 
 socialism never having caught on in France. The most 
 perplexing thing in French politics is the self -labelling of 
 most of the parties with the wrong labels. The labels in 
 1910 were the same as in 190G, but a degree more mislead- 
 ing. The great un-named party of realists may be said to 
 
 * Chapter III.
 
 60 The Real France 
 
 include the so-called Independent Socialists or Social 
 Democrats, the co-called Socialist Radicals and Radicals, 
 the so-called Republican Democrats, and sometimes the 
 Progressists ; the idealist minority includes at the one end 
 the Unified Socialists and at the other the Royalists, 
 Bonapartists, " Liberals," Nationalists, and usually the 
 " Progressists." Most of the latter parties are idealist by 
 necessity, as there is not the slightest prospect of any of the 
 causes which they defend acquiring a solid existence in fact, 
 no probability, for instance, that the d'Orleans or the Bona- 
 partes will ever again reign in France, none that the Church 
 of Rome will ever again recover temporal power in France, 
 little that French patriotism will be ex-acerbated again 
 into a picturesque jingoism for some time to come. At the 
 other idealist pole, the Unified Socialists continue of course 
 to be idealists on principle. It would be as much as their 
 doctrinal position is worth to be openly and publicly 
 practical, when any dramatic debate is on, or any political 
 question strikes the popular imagination, and M. Guesde 
 ever has an awful reproof ready for M. Jaures, if the latter's 
 innate inclination for the facts of life gets the better of his 
 acquired dogma of integral Socialism. Yet Unified Socialist 
 theorism is still riddled with lurking yearnings for facts. 
 The day when it tasted real power has not been forgotten ; 
 the day when it revelled in realities will return. The taste 
 of power is never lost, and the memory of the days of the 
 " bloc " still remains at the back of the Socialist mind. 
 Whenever such days return, the Unified Socialists will be 
 found quite ready for realization. Since " Unification " 
 they have kept aloof from bourgeois governments, but they 
 have often itched to hold the latter's places. If ever they 
 attain by themselves to government — or rather, when they 
 do, for they certainly will — theirs will not be the most 
 idealistic government of modern times. A Unified Socialist
 
 Realism in Politics 61 
 
 Cabinet in office will, when it gets there, give points to any 
 other political school of realism. 
 
 The great realist party is the majority, but it is not 
 merely realist because it is the majority, it is above all the 
 majority because it is realist. Any majority anywhere 
 clings to facts, having the handling of the substance of 
 political power and political profits ; but the great realist 
 party was returned in a majority, because it was realist 
 when it went to the polls. It represents precisely the grow- 
 ing hunger of the country for plain, immediate facts, instead 
 of the theories of to-morrow. It was returned in a majority 
 because it had no theories. Socialist Radicals, Radicals, 
 Democrats, etc., came in because they had no ideals ; they 
 were deliberately elected by the country because they had 
 not the ghost of a programme among them. 
 
 This would seem a quite natural way of electing a Parlia- 
 ment in England, where the essential and oldest traditions 
 of politics are matter-of-fact, and where the traditional 
 character of the political man is that of a public servant 
 employed in the nation's everyday business. In France 
 it is a new conception, or one at least that had been hardly 
 heard of since the First Revolution. Political idealism 
 which does not do the nation's mere daily business but 
 brings up the nation the way it should go, which is not the 
 country's servant but the country's mentor, dies hard. It 
 will take a long time to die in France, and will retain at least 
 the appearance of health during the four-year life of the 
 present Chamber. The very realists elected because they 
 had no programmes will continue feigning from force of 
 habit that the nation has a thirst for ideals and will call 
 upon succeeding Governments to slake it. " The nation 
 craves for ideals. Has the Government satisfied it ? France 
 wants high causes. The Government must give her them 
 or go," will be the song of the Opposition when any Cabinet
 
 62 The Real France 
 
 seems unsteady on its legs. The country does not in the 
 least crave for high causes, but a hallowed tradition has it 
 that if it doesn't it ought to. Successive Governments will 
 be objurgated in the same way, and the continuous policy 
 of each will be at once to appease the idealism of politicians 
 and not to irritate the realism of the nation, to keep 
 theorists busy and not to disturb the practical life of the 
 country, to give the former food enough for their imagina- 
 tion without taking from the facts on which the latter feeds, 
 to bring in measures that will satisfy the hungriest idealists 
 in Parliament yet at the same time will not interfere with 
 the nourishment of realists with the largest appetite in the 
 country. M. Briand with singular shrewdness inaugurated 
 this policy. " What does the public want ? " he solemnly 
 considered. He sent out every few days earnest little 
 paragraphs to the papers : " The Government is studying 
 the wishes of the Nation, the Government has caused the 
 programmes of the elected Members of Parliament to be 
 tabulated and classified. The Government will proceed 
 thoroughly and without haste ; but the Government is 
 determined not to appear before Parliament without a 
 serious and definite programme of reforms for the country. 
 The country and Parliament will judge the Government 
 upon its merits, but at all events will have a bold and 
 decisive programme to judge it by, one on which it will 
 stake its fortunes." To read the earnest paragraphs one 
 might have supposed France was entering upon a new era 
 of essential reforms, of great upheavals, regenerating 
 probably but certainly fundamental. The tabulation and 
 classification of the electoral "professions of faith " of the 
 Members of Parliament returned was a wonderful operation, 
 performed with admirable method and logic, and it pro- 
 duced wonderful results. It disclosed, for instance, that 284 
 deputies " did not allude to social reform " in their elec-
 
 Realism in Politics 63 
 
 tioneering campaign out of a total of 597 ; that 380 of them 
 approved an income-tax, which the majority of their con- 
 stituents, as far as the observer can judge, detest ; that 416 
 advocated the reform of the " Administration," the last 
 thing that ever will be reformed in France ; that 375 upheld 
 the " status of functionaries," and only one had the daring 
 to disapprove of it ; that 201 opposed a State monopoly of 
 alcohol and 212 one of insurances, only 75 supporting the 
 former and 101 the latter * ; and that 271 were in favour 
 of Proportional Representation. 
 
 This was the first time in history that such an index of 
 the country's desiderata, expressed through the electoral 
 ' platforms " of the members successful at the polls, had 
 been drawn up. M. Briand must have had his tongue in his 
 cheek when he gave the order to draw it up. Never was a 
 Government so eager to give a nation all the reforms, the 
 most fundamental and the most radical, it wanted ; the 
 Government yearned for reform, chafed with impatience to 
 begin. What does the public want ? We have hastened 
 earnestly to find out, here are the great causes we will strive 
 for, or perish in the attempt : proportional representation, 
 administrative reform, the " status of functionaries," 
 Trade Union ownership, an income-tax. It was an 
 amazing programme. A Prussian junker would have some 
 difficulty in calling any article of it revolutionary. As a 
 matter of fact, what the French bourgeois objects to in it as 
 a vile, new-fangled, unheard of, socialistic, subversive and 
 calamitous piece of revolutionism is the income-tax, and 
 some good pieces of gold will be poured yet into the French 
 woollen stocking before any come out of it to pay an 
 income-tax. The " R.P." will precede it in the list of great 
 idealist causes, and " R.P." will not alter much in Parlia- 
 
 * " Etatisme" is not making much headway after all. See Chap- 
 ter IV.
 
 64 The Real France 
 
 mentary politics, a turnover of from 20 to 30 seats being, 
 according to calculations, the maximum change which 
 would be effected in the present Chamber were it " pro- 
 portionately representative." " Administrative reform " 
 is expressly not to " break the framework of our administra- 
 tive system," dating from Napoleon I. No reform ever 
 will break that system. M. Briand's will merely group the 
 Departments of France by fours or fives into regions, for 
 purposes of " simplification " and a modest measure of 
 " decentralization " : as every region will have its Prefect, 
 the latter will be four or five times less numerous, but four 
 or five times more powerful, than now, the Home Office will 
 have reduced, but strengthened, its corps of divisional 
 commanders, and the measure of decentralization will be 
 modest indeed. The status of functionaries is to safeguard 
 their rights against " favouritism," while defining their 
 liberties : i.e. the fortress of officialdom will become wholly 
 inexpugnable, favouritism being at present the only 
 weapon, if an unsatisfactory one, of public opinion against 
 " functionarism." An influential M.P. to-day has, or had 
 yesterday, some power over an official, which he might, or 
 he might not, use for the public weal ; in future even he 
 will be powerless. " Judicial reform " is diffidently hinted 
 at. Trade Union Ownership and the co-operation of capital 
 and labour through wage-profit shares are to make for 
 social conservatism, a truth just discovered. The income- 
 tax is not to be " vexatious " — oh, pleasant land of 
 France ! 
 
 The labour denoted by the earnest little paragraphs was 
 portentous ; the programme brought forth was rather a 
 small mouse. M. Briand gained his first and decisive 
 majority in the new Parliament (with that other smart 
 realist, King Ferdinand of the Bulgarians, listening and 
 clapping) by a speech which, licking the mouse into shape,
 
 Realism in Politics 65 
 
 made it smaller still. The " R.P." was to be merely a very 
 careful experiment, the status of functionaries was above 
 all not to undermine the head and font of power, the 
 income-tax was to be even less vexatious and gentler than 
 ever, the only thing that really was to be decisive and bold 
 was the strong arm of authority. The House took this 
 vigorous realism like a lamb. The adapted Anarchist- 
 Communist seemed to intend realizing with a vengeance, 
 realizing the Republic into Toryism, when he pictured 
 himself as the general of a victorious army crying to his 
 men, " Enough, no further." If the victorious Republic 
 went back, she might fall into the arms of friends who 
 would make short work of her. The Tory friends of the 
 Republic would soon bury her decently if they could. But 
 the great realist was only seeing how far he could play with 
 power and keep it, only testing his own personal power. A 
 deft twist or two of parliamentary legerdemain, and behold 
 him with his great realist majority, not reduced, but 
 increased by the " Progressists." No matter now when he 
 may lose that majority ; he will anyhow have taught a 
 stiff lesson in realism. 
 
 The fact of course is that when M. Briand solemnly set 
 out to find what the French public wanted he knew per- 
 fectly well it wanted little else but to be left alone. It is 
 not indifferent to politics, it takes indeed, and has always 
 taken, a lively interest in the political game. But it pre- 
 cisely has always held politics to be a game, one of the 
 amusements in which, for instance, is when you are a dried - 
 up, close-fisted, gnarled, old Balzacian farmer to return a 
 Socialist member. The great idealist causes of the past 
 were a part of the game ; they never affected the serious 
 business of life, which is living. But one may have too 
 much of the best of games. The French nation has hitherto 
 put little of the realism of its life into the idealism of its
 
 66 The Real France 
 
 if- 
 
 politics, but Disestablishment, which might have been the 
 last of the great theoretical reforms of the Third Republic, 
 and has been the first of her essentially practical compro- 
 mises, may prove to have marked the beginning of a new 
 era. 
 
 France may be learning to adapt to her political affairs 
 the sense of reality which governs her life, precisely at a 
 moment when the English people seems to be learning 
 to govern its politics by a new theoretical sense, which 
 never before governed its politics or its life. A critic, no 
 doubt imbued with the traditional idea of a mercurial 
 France, was once good enough to describe a study of mine 
 upon the parallel development of English and French 
 Socialism as " one long paradox." Perhaps he will call the 
 statement that political France is growing more practical as 
 political England grows more theoretical a short paradox. 
 The French mind has always been theoretical and ideal- 
 istic, more in politics than in life ; the English mind has been 
 idealistic occasionally in life but never in politics, and has 
 never been theoretical either in life or in politics. A political 
 spirit which seeks precise constitutional definition in black 
 and white, where the elastic unwritten law of custom 
 sufficed before, and the assertion and limitation in legal 
 texts of rights and privileges which rested upon and were 
 bounded by tradition, is new in England, but a very old 
 political spirit in France. A House of Lords which, in the 
 interest, as it holds, of social preservation, challenges an 
 unwritten popular right, over-reaches itself, must give in, 
 then turns to reforming itself, does a remarkable thing in 
 England, but one which would have been done long ago in 
 France, where no Chamber of Peers would ever have re- 
 spected an unwritten popular right for a week ; the only 
 truly English part of the performance was the delightful 
 self -stultification of the belated self -reform. A House of
 
 Realism in Politics 67 
 
 Commons which out of revenge is not content with victory 
 de facto, but must rub it in de jure, and pursue it up to the 
 conquest of fresh power, not merely understood but em- 
 phasized in categorical words, is also doing a comparatively 
 new thing in England, but one which would have been done 
 long before in France, where in the political world no 
 sudden conflicts or long rivalries of classes, interests and 
 powers were ever patched up by bargains and compromises, 
 and where political rights and duties have always been 
 precise and defined, or lapsed and were shirked. French 
 opinion dramatized the conflict of Lords and Commons, 
 just because methods new to England were hailed by it as 
 familiar, and because it at once on the strength of them 
 jumped to conclusions based on its theoretical and precise 
 political standard. The Lords were the old regime ; the 
 Commons were a Constituent assembly as in 1789. The 
 Lords with all their faults had " made England," and it was 
 grievous to think that they were to be overthrown, even 
 when one acknowledged that the job for the sake of the 
 Rights of Man had to be done. Nay, the Lords were doing 
 it themselves, and a new night of the Fourth of August was 
 approaching, when, like the French nobility, they would 
 stand up in the Assembly and of their own will forego their 
 privileges. French opinion had no conception of the 
 innumerable and infinite fictions beneath which the reality 
 of English politics comfortably moves on, and heard 
 incredulously that the Lords are not what they seem to 
 outsiders. One great amazement, for instance, was their 
 voting the Budget of 1910 without a murmur after all, and 
 tacitly promising never to throw out a Budget again. What 
 had happened to the well defined drama, and where was 
 the neat, straight conflict ? The latter if it continue upon 
 broad issues of principle will remain dramatic and interest- 
 ing ; if it tails off into practical British compromises it will
 
 68 The Real France 
 
 begin to bore French opinion. The French (rather naturally) 
 will never be able to understand the pure realism of English 
 politics, and the delicate and complicated governing instru- 
 ment of Crown, Commons and Lords which has grown not 
 been made, which rests on no principle but on practice, and 
 has no raison d'etre except to do its ordinary daily work 
 satisfactorily, any more than they can understand how a 
 people can possibly remain still far less military than they, 
 that buries with solely military pomp a king Avho earned 
 the name of peace-maker, and that a people which not only 
 accepts but welcomes the mediaeval stage setting of the 
 proclamation of his successor should yet be at least as 
 democratic in reality as they. 
 
 These, and the whole British attitude towards the Crown, 
 the snobbishness and the independence, the fulsome 
 adulation and the patronizing advice and criticism, are 
 mysteries to the French people, which if it ever take unto 
 itself a king again, will either worship him in person or cut 
 his head off after a time, and will most probably do both in 
 quick succession. In the same way it is an equal mystery 
 to the British mind that the French people which has 
 been the most theoretical, idealistic and revolutionary in 
 its politics can remain the most practical, realistic and 
 conservative in its life. 
 
 Yet it is true that both peoples seem to be taking a leaf 
 from each other's books. The one is learning theory, the 
 other practice, in politics. If political Britain is learning to 
 tliink imperially, political France is learning to think of 
 realities. British Imperialism might easily have been 
 invented by the theoretical French mind, and is in the 
 nature of scientific hypotheses such as are peculiarly 
 endeared to the latter. If it had not yet been thought of, 
 the British people would be the last people in the world we 
 should expect to think of it. A theoretical doctrine of the
 
 Realism in Politics 69 
 
 kind would be considered quite foreign to the English 
 political mind. The custom of the latter has almost always 
 been to depend upon facts and to ignore principles. Whither- 
 soever we have been led in politics, facts have led us, not 
 principles, and when, rarely, we have taken sudden 
 determinations and entered suddenly upon new courses, 
 political realities of the moment prompted us, not theories 
 of general application. When France fecit saltus it has 
 always been for the sake of principles, not of facts ; she 
 leapt at theories, she did not jump at new realities. Political 
 England has looked at theories from the ground of fact ; 
 political France has looked at facts from the eyries of 
 theory. When our facts seem to shift, we have no tried 
 theories to look up to ; the ground we think feels shaky, 
 and we make a wild dash at Tariff Reform. France in 
 politics has usually been shaken only by her theories, and 
 she has sometimes lost sight of her political facts. But she 
 may be learning to keep them more closely in sight, as we 
 perhaps are learning to project our political imagination 
 beyond facts to theories. Thus France will be narrowing 
 the distance between her politics and her life, the separation 
 between which makes the idealism of the former and the 
 realism of the latter seem perhaps even more marked 
 owing to the sharp contrast than they are, while we on the 
 contrary shall be drawing a new boundary line between our 
 life and our politics, between which there is little contrast. 
 Our public and collective spirit is at least as realistic as our 
 private and individual ; indeed, one might find on examina- 
 tion that it is a good deal more so. If we do put some new 
 idealism into our politics, we might indeed find the where- 
 withal in our lives. The French public and collective spirit 
 is decidedly more idealistic than the private and individual, 
 and the new realism in French politics will be derived from 
 French life. But in the long run, living being generally
 
 70 The Real France 
 
 looked upon as a practical thing everywhere, the result for 
 both countries will be that in England life will tend to be 
 divorced from politics, which have hitherto been perhaps 
 the most realistic thing there was in England, and that on 
 the contrary in French they will be brought together. Such 
 theory as Imperialism in England and such practice as 
 Disestablishment in France are examples which seem to be 
 pointing the way. A political theory which is peculiarly 
 un-English, in that it does not spring from facts but forces 
 facts into line with it, which has been made, and has not 
 grown as all other English political ideas have, and which 
 has acquired strength and solidity from artificial building 
 up and elaboration, not from instinctive development, is one 
 to delight the French political mind. Political practice 
 which takes a radical and up-rooting reform, and in the 
 face of every apparently insurmountable obstacle, applies 
 it as a measure of pure expediency, which meets every 
 difficulty with compromise, dodges every plain issue, 
 defeats all wrecking attempts by judicious surrender, and 
 sacrifices every principle to rule of thumb, because the only 
 end to be sought is a practical working arrangement, is a 
 typical English method : French Disestablishment was 
 conceived on entirely French lines of pure political theory, 
 it was carried out by the ancient purely British process of 
 successfully muddling through. Some day M. Briand, 
 otherwise the most un-English statesman I ever met, may 
 be remembered as the man who first taught modern France 
 to put realism into her politics.
 
 III. Socialism and People 
 
 SOCIALISM is a power in French politics, not in 
 French life. Its pledged battalion in Parliament 
 often rules Governments ; it has raised men to 
 Cabinet rank, and at least its name is the password 
 for an army of politicians. The " Unified Socialist " party 
 in the Chamber is over seventy strong, half the governing 
 Radical party calls itself " Socialist Radical," and no 
 Republican majority could be formed now against the name 
 of Socialism. Collectivism, expropriation, with or without 
 compensation, nationalization, State purchase of railways 
 as a preliminary step, national monopolies, and State 
 ownership of mines, of vineyards, and of docks, and of 
 wheatfields to come, national confiscation of land and 
 capital, have been in the political air for years. Political 
 leaders have played every variation on the tunes, and their 
 hearers know them by heart. In no country is Socialism 
 so much of a household word and such a political power ; 
 yet probably in none is it less a household thing and less of 
 a social power. France is more easy to know superficially, 
 but perhaps even less easy to know deeply, than England. 
 We have our glorious inconsistencies in the manner of our 
 national life, and rejoice in them jealously, but we are un- 
 commonly practical in our politics. We have many kinds 
 of imagination, but not the political. The French people 
 has political imagination supremely, but remains deeply 
 practical and logical in its real life. We are constantly 
 surprising foreigners by the contrast between our level- 
 headed, occasionally dull politicians, and our own some- 
 
 7i
 
 72 The Real France 
 
 times wayward selves. Our public men are intensely sober, 
 but has not English individual thought been as gloriously 
 drunk as any in Europe ? We seem to keep our politicians 
 to sober us ; France chooses hers imaginatively. She 
 amazes observers by the opposite contrast between the 
 sobriety of herself and the intoxication of her politicians- 
 Perhaps the English minds given to drink do not go into 
 politics ; the French do : France likes them to do so. She 
 keeps public men to satisfy her imagination, and she thinks 
 her wildest political thoughts through them. They are 
 never the drag upon her ; she always remains the drag upon 
 them. When we go to the polls we brace ourselves up, or 
 rather down, and if we have perchance been flying high 
 before, tell ourselves that now we must keep to the earth. 
 The Frenchman soars when he goes to vote, dreams of the 
 millennium, loves his dream, and is often at the top of his 
 flight when he drops the paper into the ballot box. Then 
 he goes home to his own level, practical, solid everyday life. 
 Nor does he constantly repent at leisure. He naturally 
 grumbles at his deputy after he has elected him. Of course 
 he pesters him with requests for favours : one may call 
 granting them the useful function of the deputy, while the 
 ornamental is to satisfy his elector's imagination, who likes 
 watching a political arena upraised above the ordinary 
 earth on which he moves and great political struggles in the 
 air. His idea is that some good may come of them in the 
 long run. He has a feeling that it is not worth while 
 paying Members of Parliament merely to do the dull 
 business of the nation — though, it is true, he does call it 
 paying rather high when they raise their own salaries from 
 £.360 to £600 a year. We keep ours, without paying them, 
 to the grindstone, but the French would prefer that theirs 
 should give the nobler spectacle of a battle of ideas. Thus 
 a great forensic encounter between M. Jaures, champion of
 
 Socialism and People 73 
 
 Socialism, and M. Clemenceau, tilting at him under the 
 pennant of Individualism, rejoices the French electorate. 
 The Chamber disappoints its constituents, not because, 
 doing almost nothing at all, it does nothing practical, but 
 because it does nothing ideal. Doing just as little, it might 
 satisfy the electorate were it more often a ring for such 
 tournaments of ideas, and in the public estimation a certain 
 squalor in some of its debates might be compensated more 
 easily by more frequent excursions into abstract sociology 
 than by greater attention to plain business. Who can 
 imagine such a duel as that of Socialism versus Individual- 
 ism in the House of Coininons, or picture the feelings of the 
 British taxpayer if any such ever were to come off ? English 
 politics can be studied through English politicians, for it is 
 generally safe to say that these are not soaring above the 
 heads of their countrymen. The politics of France must be 
 studied with one eye constantly on the French people itself, 
 which gives its public men rope into regions far away from 
 its own surroundings. 
 
 Watch small borough constituencies, somewhere in the 
 oldest part of real France, the He de France, Champagne, or 
 along the Loire, on the two successive ballot Sundays at a 
 fortnight's interval during the process of returning " Social- 
 ist Radical ,; deputies. The leading chemist, true to 
 Flaubert tradition, is " advanced " and eloquent. The 
 business genius of the place who startled Moyenncville-en- 
 Brie last year by his enterprise in the opening bazaar " At 
 the City of Paris," which is killing all the little old shops, is 
 a " Collectivist " — in politics. The " Receiver in Registra- 
 tion " has of late added " Socialist " to his former Radical 
 label. The " Keeper of Mortgages " is inclining that way, 
 but still makes reservations. Dry, old, blue-smocked " Pere 
 Baigne-dans-le-beunv," whose nickname thus vividly tells 
 the local belief, which lie strongly deprecates, that he is
 
 74 The Real France 
 
 rolling in money, hum's and ha's mysteriously over political 
 questions, but drops terse hints that, after all, one must go 
 with one's time, and that Balandreau (the chemist's 
 candidate) seems a man of the age. The Sub-Prefect can 
 be left out of account, distraught as he is between his 
 official instructions from the Home Office for the elections 
 and the suspicion that behind them lurk other unofficial 
 meanings, and wondering in agony whether he be not 
 expected to canvass secretly for this man while openly 
 pushing that other, and how far he may not blunder, either 
 by lukewarmness or by too much zeal. The parish priest 
 may also be passed over, as he is bound hand and foot to the 
 local Royalist squire, who has the estates but no longer the 
 influence of a squire, and to a lost cause. When he was 
 a servant of the State he could afford sometimes to be a 
 Republican and even a Radical. But the Republic by 
 Disestablishment has made a present of him to her oppo- 
 nents, and now he must go against the Republic to make a 
 livelihood, even if he had been on her side before, which, 
 indeed, he seldom was. 
 
 The "Socialist Radical" candidate is returned, the Caf6 
 du Commerce rejoices, the chemist and the business genius 
 of Moyenneville exult at dominoes, the Receiver in Regis- 
 tration and the Keeper of Mortgages are less exuberantly 
 satisfied, as becomes their official position, the Pere Baigne- 
 dans-le-beurre nods his head and utters short, sage remarks, 
 which, without committing him, may be understood to 
 imply that, although (possibly) he may not have actually 
 plumped Socialist Radical, yet the new deputy may, since 
 he now is the new deputy, count upon his prudent approval 
 and support, with certain mysterious reservations which 
 nothing will persuade the Pere Baigne-dans-le-beurre to 
 state in so many words. Politically, the net result of it all 
 is that Moyenncville-en-Brie has sent a Socialist Radical to
 
 Socialism and People 75 
 
 the chamber, who will form one of the links between the 
 Government majority and the Unified Socialist party in a 
 chain which often snaps but is constantly being mended 
 again, and that is all the political world cares about. But if 
 we continue to keep an eye on Moyenneville, shall we find 
 the social result to be that Moyenneville has taken one step 
 towards Socialism ? The chemist has gone back to his drugs, 
 the business genius to his " City of Paris," and Pere Baigne- 
 dans-le-beurre to his vines and his beets, and vines, beets, 
 bazaar, and drugs now rule their thoughts and order their 
 lives, and promotion in registration and in mortgages is the 
 sovereign care of the officials in those branches. The drug- 
 gist's is probably a safe and steady business the world over ; 
 but in no country in the world can Moyenneville-en-Brie be 
 equalled for the skill and ingenuity with which the " City 
 of Paris " is conducted, the miraculous thrift and tireless, 
 jealous, and adoring care with which the Pere Baigne-dans- 
 le-beurre tends his fields and his farm, and the conscientious- 
 ness and integrity, on tiny salaries and in walks of life which 
 lead nowhere, of the Receiver in Registration and the 
 Keeper of Mortgages. That is the social fact, by the side of 
 the political ; the rock-like steadiness of French life com- 
 pared with the rocket-like flashes of French politics. Even 
 the volcanic South, in its latest upheavals, did not really 
 disturb that solid social fact. The Midi wants only to sell 
 its wine : it aims at no newer goal than that. The con- 
 servatism of its purpose, in fact, dismayed French Socialists. 
 They barely concealed disdain for a country wedded to so 
 low an ideal and so utterly estranged from high political 
 theories, and could not overcome alarm at the discovery 
 that they were held of so little account, not even the matter 
 of a pitcher of rough wine, in the thoughts of the South. A 
 wordy proclamation of the Unified Socialist party urged the 
 South to renounce its fatal unionism — fatal to Socialism —
 
 76 The Real France 
 
 and to resort to " class war." Yet the South precisely has 
 long returned Socialists and Socialist Radicals to Parlia- 
 ment. It is no paradox to argue that the " wine war " 
 actually proved how steadily French life runs beneath the 
 troubled surface of French politics. In much tragedy, the 
 scene of burlesque was played by the deputies of the South, 
 much against their will. Only one could venture down to 
 his constituency ; the others either retreated before volleys 
 of vegetables and some stones, or remained safely away, 
 content to telegraph messages from a distance. The Midi 
 in health sends men to Parliament whose professed mission 
 is to reform society ; the Midi falls into a sickness — surely 
 the ripe moment for regenerating the world, if you believe 
 in your nostrum — and instead of trying the remedy, kicks 
 out the physician for a quack. Never had politicians in 
 France had such a blow. Freethinkers and Catholics and 
 Protestants, Royalists and Bonapartists and Republicans, 
 Conservatives and Socialists stood side by side in the South. 
 The Midi in need drops politics ; it wants only to sell its 
 wine. It wants precisely to preserve the old order, not to 
 try a new. M. Jaures, proposing the " nationalization " of 
 vineyards, raised a howl of laughter, and his own newspaper, 
 I'Humanite, had to confess that Marcelin Albert was no 
 Socialist. The troops which mutinied, mutinied not at all 
 through anti - militarism, notwithstanding gleeful asser- 
 tions of the General Labour Federation to the contrary, but 
 through primitive allegiance to their soil and their kindred* 
 an instinctive local patriotism. For years political France 
 has fought in the air ; the first real fight on firm earth since 
 the Commune has been one in which the army of revolt 
 refused even the alliance of any political party. There 
 never was a better proof how weak Socialism is in French 
 life. 
 
 Socialists in France have gone the right way about to
 
 Socialism and Peojile 77 
 
 wrest power in French politics, but not to coax vitality for 
 their cause from French life. Our Labour Parties have been 
 social first and political afterwards ; French Socialism has 
 been, and still is, political first and foremost. England 
 began with Trade Unionism, France with Parliamentary 
 Socialism ; there lies a radical difference. The French 
 Socialist party in Parliament " unified " itself in the latter 
 years of the 1902 chamber, and arrived " unified " in that 
 of 1906, having ejected M. Millerand (thus a French 
 forerunner of John Burns) because he had taken office under 
 Waldeck-Rousseau, and retained by the skin of his teeth 
 M. Jaures, who had supported the Combes Cabinet. The 
 party since the Dreyfus case multiplied tenfold its political 
 power. Under the Dupuy administration it was a worry- 
 ing wing, far from " unified," of the extreme left opposition. 
 During M. Brisson's short Government it sank all social 
 questions, and stood for the Republic. Under the Waldeck- 
 Rousseau administration it was pledged, forsaking all 
 theory, to the defence of the Republic. While M. Combes 
 was in power it remained in allegiance, and M. Jaures 
 constantly " saved the Republic," though Socialism was 
 already then beginning to fret and to threaten " unifica- 
 tion." Socialism has " unified " itself, M. Jaures has been 
 bound down to the shibboleths of the party, no-com- 
 promise M. Guesde, not in the previous chamber, was 
 returned at the General Election of 1906, and under the 
 Clemenceau administration, after M. Sarrien's short-lived 
 and colourless Cabinet — save for the colour which M. 
 Clemenceau put in it — the party made a great show of 
 independence. But the virtue, or the taint, of power 
 remains. The Parliamentary Socialist party, now " uni- 
 fied," once helped, when it was a unit in the Republican 
 defence party, to rule the Republic, and that it cannot 
 forget. It has acquired for itself a comparatively new self-
 
 78 The Real France 
 
 confidence which must last, and in the country the reputa- 
 tion of a statesmanlike party which it has not lost. In a few 
 years Socialism in French politics has passed from an eccen- 
 tric and flying position to a central and stable standing. 
 Has it made any corresponding gain in French life ? The 
 United Socialist party has won reputation with the indi- 
 vidualist middle classes, but it has lost as much among the 
 Socialists of the masses. It has won power, but the power 
 has accrued to the political party, not to Socialism. It 
 has conquered its political position, not because it was a 
 Socialist party, but because it was a political party ; not 
 because it had Socialist ideals, but because it had political 
 cleverness. The middle classes have learnt to admire its 
 Parliamentary strategy and to respect the qualities of 
 statesmanship which it showed while in league with the 
 Waldeck-Rousseau and Combes Cabinets, but have learnt 
 to ignore its Socialism. Having won power, it has imposed 
 on all on whom power imposes. But the sort of power which 
 it has won is precisely that which ought to defeat its own 
 professed Socialist ideals. The Socialists, its constituents, 
 presuming they were sincere, could not admire it for the 
 power which others found admirable, and must become 
 suspicious as others became trustful. Socialist working 
 men believed in the Parliamentary Socialist party less as 
 politicians believed in it more, and one can almost say that 
 Socialism lost in the country what it gained in the political 
 world. 
 
 From the Socialist point of view it seems likely that the 
 return of a large party of members with Socialist or 
 Socialist Radical labels by constituents who do not take 
 Socialism seriously advances the cause less than the return 
 of a smaller party by constituents who take Socialism in 
 deadly earnest. A seat won for " Socialist Radicalism " in 
 Moyenneville hardly means a gain for Socialism in the
 
 Socialism and People 79 
 
 country. Of course, the Socialist Labour vote also goes to 
 the Socialist, or in default sometimes to the " Socialist 
 Radical " candidate, as before, but it is given with cooling 
 enthusiasm, and the days of fervent fellowship between the 
 labouring man and the Labour Member seem to be over. 
 The Socialist party " unified " itself with the idea of 
 rekindling the old fires of faith in a Parliamentary phalanx 
 pledged to regenerate the world. M. Jaures challenged 
 M. Clemenceau constantly for the same purpose, with an 
 eye on the Socialist electorate. The party secedes from the 
 Government majority still with the same end in view. But, 
 in spite of all endeavours, little is achieved, and an original 
 blunder mars everything : the breach between Parlia- 
 mentary Socialism and Trade Unionism in France. The 
 former is much older than the latter, and worked its way 
 independently. Trade Unionism arose and grew also in 
 independence. Neither honestly helped the other, and both 
 mutually upbraided one another for their aloofness. The 
 Parliamentary party, having got on very well without the 
 syndicates, betrayed a disposition to go on doing without 
 them, until it discovered one day lately that it could not. 
 The Unions followed exactly the same line of thought, but 
 have had no such rude awakening, for they are, on the 
 contrary, still of a mind to dispense with the Parliamentary 
 party. The latter is now running after them, and they 
 make not one step towards a meeting. Distrust between 
 Labour parties and Labour unions is old history in England 
 also, but arises from almost exactly converse causes. In 
 France the syndicates — which owe their legal existence to 
 Waldeck-Rousseau's law of 1884, but were disabled from 
 owning property of any kind by that same law — represent 
 not vested rights, comparatively old traditions, strong and 
 systematic organization, and the cast of mind which long- 
 established social solidity gives, but, on the contrary, raw
 
 80 The Real France 
 
 and rough material, hasty and floating combination, 
 irresponsibility, juvenile impulsiveness, and the temper of 
 the man who has little to lose, and possibly much to gain, 
 in any venture or adventure which the occasion may set 
 before him. In fact, French Trade Unionism is peculiarly 
 un-French, and has strangely few roots in the solid earth of 
 French life ; the very men who seem to think that no 
 scheme is too wild for the policy of their syndicate certainly 
 manage their own work and lives on far more business-like 
 lines. Thus it is the Parliamentary party which has the 
 traditions, the organized system, and the balance. But it 
 has never troubled to bring up the Trade Unions the way 
 they should go, and now they go their own gait, with the 
 Parliamentary party, despairingly and against its better 
 judgment, running after. The spectacle of M. Jaures, 
 leader for the present of the " Unified " Socialist party, 
 panting in pursuit of the C.G.T. (the General Labour 
 Federation), inwardly cursing it for putting on such pace, 
 and outwardly making believe that it is not really going 
 as fast as all that, at once fearing to be left behind, and 
 dreading whither he is being taken, is quaint but undigni- 
 fied, with the severe M. Jules Guesde — who partly owing to 
 illness has lately left the running, such as it is, to M. Jaures, 
 though a cordial detestation has long flourished between 
 them — silently and sardonically looking on. The C.G.T. , 
 in which a sham union of thirty members may, for instance, 
 have a vote, and another of twenty thousand have only 
 another vote, does not represent French Trade Unionism 
 fairly. But the Parliamentary Socialist party represents 
 it still less, and the Unions, even when they distrust the 
 C.G.T., appear to distrust the Parliamentary party quite 
 as much. The latter for years attempted alternately to 
 ignore or to " boss " them. The quarrel, for instance, over 
 the contention upheld by the Parliamentary party that a
 
 Socialism and People 81 
 
 Labour Member should attend Trade Union congresses on 
 a par with Union delegates, his constituency being con- 
 sidered equivalent to a Union, is an old one. Nowadays 
 the Unions can be neither ignored nor controlled by the 
 Parliamentary party, and it looks very much as though the 
 latter were to be controlled by them. In all the recent 
 Labour agitations the " Unified " Socialist party, in its turn, 
 has been ignored. Everything has been done over its head, 
 and it has been placed in a ridiculous position. Strikes 
 came one after the other, and surprised Socialists in the 
 Chamber as much as Conservatives. Yet the former in the 
 House could not give themselves away, and were forced to 
 feign perfect knowledge of all that was happening and about 
 to happen, while inwardly wondering what on earth the 
 C.G.T. would do next. They could not disapprove openly 
 without betraying the absurdity of their own position, yet 
 approval pledged them to action which they could not 
 control, which already alarmed them, and the eventual 
 possibilities of which alarmed them still more. Their 
 predicament continues and seems like to continue. The 
 C.G.T. enjoys itself thoroughly the while, and publicly 
 derides the Parliamentary party. " General strikes," 
 " Down with the army," " Turn your rifles against your 
 officers, troopers," " Rip up the bourgeois, workers, and 
 spike his machinery," " Sabotage," " direct action," and 
 so on, are so many squibs thrown into the " Unified " 
 Socalist party which make it jump, and possibly to the 
 C.G.T. a distracted " Unified " Socialist party is a more 
 thoroughly amusing sight than an alarmed bourgeoisie, 
 which is not really so very deeply alarmed after all. 
 
 A noisier cracker than the rest is " anti-patriotism," 
 invented by the delightful M. Gustave Herve, podgy, jovial, 
 generally on the broad grin, whom French Socialism and 
 M. Jaures, through fatal simplicity and almost childish
 
 82 The Real France 
 
 waywardness, the Governmental parties with some dis- 
 ingenuousness, and Reactionary politicians for their own 
 far-reaching pet purposes, have done the invaluable service 
 of taking seriously. French " Unified " Socialism, meeting 
 in congress, passed, by a small majority, a resolution 
 which in its concluding sentence pledged the party to oppose 
 war by every means, " even unto a general strike of workers 
 and insurrection." International Socialism in congress 
 drew the line at mutiny in war time, and German leaders 
 said they would fight for their country. French Socialism 
 found itself in a quandary, and is still there. To war against 
 war by desertion and mutiny is obviously a game at which 
 two must play. " Unified " French Socialism has been 
 landed in an absurdity by M. Jaures running helter-skelter 
 after M. Herve, who is a nobody in the party. All the 
 Reactionary political world is naturally delighted, the 
 Government majority of Radicals and " Socialist Radicals ' : 
 scores by the facile appeal of a profession of patriotism to 
 the most patriotic nation in the world, and the cruellest cut 
 of all is that the C.G.T. and the Trade Unions still look on 
 sardonic and silent. It is hard indeed that even " anti- 
 patriotism " should not have won over the C.G.T. M. 
 Herve, who has no responsibility, representing only him- 
 self, shouts ; M. Jaures, with amazing recklessness, shouts 
 louder to the same tune ; the very earth of France, compact 
 of patriotism, is shocked ; all opponents of Socialism 
 rejoice, having won half a battle without a fight ; the 
 Government alliance with Socialism snaps, temporarily at 
 least, over the plausible cause of patriotism ; a gross blunder 
 in political tactics is committed — and the C.G.T. still turns 
 a deaf ear. It has not given a sign that it has heard 
 M. Jaures and not lifted a voice to applaud his latest cry. 
 We shall be next having the C.G.T. turn patriot to spite 
 M. Jaures and the Parliamentary Socialist party.
 
 Socialism and People 83 
 
 It has been said already that the C.G.T. is not really what 
 it is supposed to be — a genuine representative federation of 
 Labour unions. But the question is what side the bulk of 
 the Unions themselves will take when they have had enough 
 of watching the game as at present. Whether it be not too 
 late now for the " Unified " Socialist party to obtain a hold 
 over Trade Unionism which was long left completely to 
 itself, and the most enterprising leaders of which have been 
 allowed to get completely out of hand, will be seen. But it 
 seems likely that the Parliamentary Socialist party will in 
 no other way be able to win power in the country. If it be 
 relegated finally to the position of a mere political clique, 
 Socialism in French life will be represented only by a small 
 and explosive parcel of firebrands. These might or might 
 not set light to Trade Unionism generally. Thus one may 
 put it to opponents of Socialism, which they would prefer, 
 an organized, statesmanlike, and businesslike working 
 Socialism, which might be enlightened, but would still be 
 Socialism, or a Socialism of mere fireworks, which might 
 blow itself up, but might also blow other things up 
 with it. 
 
 Explosions in France generally clear the way sooner or 
 later for a strengthened fabric of authority and a yet more 
 powerfully centralized Government, and that is the reason 
 why the cue of French Reactionary political parties (only 
 while in opposition, of course) always has been to feign 
 violently that explosions are imminent. If explosions 
 threatened now, the course of events would be plain. As it 
 is, the future of Socialism in France is a much more complex 
 and interesting problem. The national French character 
 seems in some ways cut out to realize Socialism, and in 
 others bred to stultify it. There is one form of Socialism 
 to which ancient French political instinct seems to tend, 
 but it is precisely one from which the best modern French
 
 84 The Real France 
 
 thought is averse. The promotion of a certain kind of 
 Socialistic State, if undertaken, would be furthered naturally 
 by some of the strongest and most solid elements in French 
 life, but would then be opposed by many of its most en- 
 lightened and vital forces. On the other hand, the Socialism 
 which these might work for would have against it the dead- 
 weight of many deep national characteristics. There is, in 
 fact, a rooted French political instinct which might easily 
 make for a form of State Socialism, but at the same time a 
 fresher growth of thought is perhaps all the more hostile to 
 State Socialism, because of the affinity between the latter 
 and the old etatisme of the French political system. The 
 Frenchman's worship of the State is an ancient but still 
 hardy survival. He barely understands himself what a 
 naturally governable man he is, and how instinctively he 
 craves to feel that he is part of a highly organized social 
 order. When the wildest words are flying about, and the 
 air is full of forebodings of anarchy and imprecations against 
 upsetters of society, society still stands firm as a rock ; the 
 anarchist himself in private life looks up to the State ; 
 salvation from calamities overwhelming whole provinces is 
 to come, not from the stricken people themselves, but from 
 the State ; and the inner purpose of revolution is under- 
 stood often to be merely the substitution of another State 
 for the present. It is not many steps, then, from etatisme 
 to State Socialism. The Russian autocracy, for instance, 
 has long looked with a kindly eye upon State Socialism. 
 Other things equal, the most solid elements of French life 
 might be accommodated to a Socialistic State, and one can 
 imagine the law-abiding French citizen rejoicing in his 
 solidarity with such a State, his respectability as a part of 
 it, and his significance as a factor of an all-owning and all- 
 managing collectivist order of Society, by the time that had 
 become the solidly established order. The obvious obstacle
 
 Socialism and People 85 
 
 is the vital instinct of proprietorship in the peasant who 
 loves his land as much as his own flesh and blood ; in the 
 salaried artisan who puts by to be a master, however 
 humble, in his turn one day ; in the small shopkeeper who 
 nurses a tiny business with almost passionate love and the 
 unremitting care of three-quarters of a lifetime. But there 
 is a higher and perhaps still stronger force against State 
 Socialism. The present thinking generation in France has 
 been through the cruder forms of Socialism and come out 
 the other side. The political Socialist party is curiously 
 and totally out of touch with intellectual France. It 
 appears not to understand how its shibboleths were sifted 
 by all thoughtful Frenchmen these many years, and how 
 long ago the grain was separated from the chaff. It is a bad 
 sign for " Unified " Socialism that it is estranged from the 
 men who create the ideas of to-morrow. Among these will 
 not be, as far as one can tell, the fetish of the State. A 
 small set may be reviving sociology a la Hobbes, but the 
 majority put the man first and society afterwards. No 
 social revolution which might swamp the individual would 
 escape the strenuous opposition of thinking Frenchmen. 
 Intellectual anarchism, a few years ago, was an exaggera- 
 tion of individualism. Nowadays, Socialism, if it became 
 State Socialism, would certainly throw intellectual France 
 into the arms of any opposing power, were it reactionary. 
 Thinking Frenchmen have long ago accepted all that is 
 liberal in Socialism, and would fight for that sifted and 
 broadened Socialism. But they will not have etatisme 
 still, under the name of Socialism, and they watch, rather 
 hopelessly, the political Socialist party for signs of com- 
 prehension which do not appear. 
 
 Thus what Socialism by drifting into the narrow channel 
 of State Socialism may gain from the support of the French 
 instinctive attachment to a strong State, even grand-
 
 86 The Real France 
 
 motherly to the extent of a benevolent despotism, it will 
 lose through the opposition of that French thought which 
 calls etatisme the enemy, and would prefer mild anarchy to 
 a benign tyranny. But, on the other hand, any free and 
 broad form of Socialism which the modern minds might 
 advocate would find arrayed against it all the solid tra- 
 ditional elements of French life in one hard block, the 
 instinct of proprietorship with the instinct of orderliness, 
 the deep social love for a strongly organized State with 
 individual ambition and dogged self-interest. A Socialism 
 resting on free combination of energies, on the association 
 of common interests in small forces, and the larger grouping 
 of these till the whole nation were embodied, any such 
 Socialism, safeguarding Individualism, would be opposed 
 by State Socialists as well as by an ti- Socialists. Free com- 
 bination would seem subversive to the State- worshipper, 
 association of interests would appear quixotic to the 
 intelligent self-seeker. Yet any such Socialism is the only 
 form which the open modern mind can accept. The 
 dilemma is interesting ; the easier way for Socialism is to 
 State Socialism, but is not the harder the only right way ? 
 It will be interesting to watch how in France Socialism will 
 shape its course.
 
 IV. England, France, and Socialism 
 
 THE Englishman who had been abroad found on 
 returning that the British middle classes had 
 " discovered " Socialism since the General Elec- 
 tion of 1906. The Frenchman returning to his 
 country after a rather longer absence would find that the 
 bourgeoisie in the interval had been " discovering " Indi- 
 vidualism. This no doubt is as it always is, and perhaps as 
 it should be. The two peoples have often been called 
 complementary of one another. In many ways they develop 
 along reverse lines, and whither one is travelling thence the 
 other hastens, both persuaded that they are on the road of 
 progress, rightly, perhaps, as there is more than one road. 
 When both halt, turn round, and look at each other, 
 criticism on both sides is commonly and very naturally of 
 the old mote-and-beam sort. Admirable advice is given 
 to the British people by French critics, and every one 
 knows how generously British opinion champions some 
 French causes. Counsel and enthusiasm might often be 
 just as useful at home, but at home " one sees things 
 differently." The intelligent and informed foreigner can be 
 a wonderfully acute judge ; he may also be an illuminating 
 encomiast. While he surprises us by finding fault with our 
 pet foibles, he may delight by praising everyday virtues by 
 which we set no store ; he even reveals gold in our vices. 
 Many Frenchmen admire John Bull precisely for that which 
 in him annoys his critical sons, and English observers are 
 constantly celebrating French characteristics which critical 
 France is trying to get rid of. The variety of such inter- 
 
 87
 
 88 The Real France 
 
 national views is invaluable ; they may be often crooked, 
 and no one could expect them to be always straight, but 
 they are rarely dull. 
 
 England is not more surprised to find France discovering 
 Individualism than is France to find England discovering 
 Socialism. In fact, the two countries agreeably surprise 
 each other. The rights of the individual are as old as the 
 hills here and a burning topic there ; here the theory of 
 Socialism is still a subject to talk about, there it is worn 
 threadbare ; here an agrarian question exists, there a 
 question exists how long district civil servants directly and 
 solely answerable to the Home Office are to continue law- 
 fully to wield judicial powers which are a negation of habeas 
 corpus. 
 
 On the subject of Socialism, the Englishman in the street 
 has latterly learnt a cheerful glibness, though a boy of 
 twenty can easily remember when a Socialist with a 
 vermilion tie was a lunatic, harmless if British to the back- 
 bone, dangerous if tainted with foreign ideas. Who fears 
 to speak Socialism or meet Socialists now ? Of course, 
 these, ipso facto, have ceased to belong to the smart set, 
 but the man in the street is now familiar with them. Any 
 one can hear him reasoning gently with them on the tops of 
 motor 'buses, or hear them holding forth with all the fresh- 
 ness of neophytes. Nationalization of the soil, the un- 
 earned increment of capital, natural wealth versus artificial 
 wealth, and so on, are all " in the air " — in the street air. 
 They have even penetrated into the City man's suburban 
 home, where ten years ago you might as well have put a 
 bomb on the hearthrug as have thrown out some sugges- 
 tions that labour alone produces wealth, or even some 
 milder one than that. The thinking young generation is 
 still jumping at the theory of Socialism with an eagerness 
 which seems very fresh to any one who has lived latterly
 
 England, France, and Socialism 89 
 
 abroad. One finds the subject still perfectly alive and wild 
 in literary sets, the equivalents of which on the Continent 
 have long since either killed and buried it, or stuffed and 
 preserved it, or caged and tamed it. Of course, England 
 has been in many ways, like M. Jourdain speaking prose, 
 creating Socialism all the time without knowing it : a part 
 of England has been creating it, perhaps more practically 
 than other countries, and the rest of England did not know, 
 or pretended not to know. Any Englishman among his 
 acquaintance in the sturdy middle classes can point to a 
 score of the sturdiest pillars on whom the 1906 General 
 Election brought down a bolt from the blue, bringing down 
 Socialism from the region of mad dreams to reality, wrong 
 or right, but still a reality henceforth to be reckoned with. 
 There has been no such recent discovery in France. The 
 Frenchman in the street, as a rule, long since either has 
 walked in step with the army of Socialism or has tired of 
 the crusade altogether, and smiles happily, or wearily jeers, 
 when the host goes marching by him. The prosperous 
 bourgeoisie either refuses to think of the cause otherwise 
 than as of that of dangerous fanatics whose faith has long 
 ago been proved absurd, and refuses to consider their argu- 
 ments at all, or else has called and proclaimed itself 
 Socialist these ten years, usually for politic reasons. The 
 " aristocracy of the intellect " has for twenty years past 
 turned the subject over and over unto weariness and 
 scepticism. The old " Ivory Tower " of the poet, seer, 
 mystic, and egoist has crumbled, and left its denizens 
 standing open to the modern world. But the old castle in 
 the air of the altruist, reformer, and regenerator has large 
 rents in its vaporous sides too. Either a great scepticism 
 or a great mellowness has come over the jeunesse pensante, 
 which looks all round Socialism and other things. The 
 jeunes " are all Socialists now," of course, but none are
 
 90 The Real France 
 
 " Unified " Socialists of the Parliamentary party. Social- 
 ism may have gained by losing good intellectual haters, 
 but also has lost fervent intellectual enthusiasms. 
 
 Enthusiasm, in fact, goes more to individualism. The 
 " cult of the ego " has died, but not the cultivation of 
 personality. The old conflict between the person and the 
 State is still acute, and if the Socialism of the future is to 
 absorb the individual, thinking young France will fight it. 
 The contradiction in that enlightened Socialism which aims 
 at levelling and at raising, at subjecting the one man to the 
 many, and yet at exalting the one man, disturbs minds. 
 Reconciling contradictories would be no new thing, and 
 might be a mere matter of one more nice adjustment of 
 social forces, but it would be nice to a hair's breadth in that 
 Socialism of the future. At all hazards, State Socialism is 
 condemned, unless the individual is to perish, and with 
 State Socialism modern philosophizing France will have 
 nothing to do on any account. It has come to that definite 
 conclusion, at any rate, after many years of wondering. 
 
 The middle classes have reached the same conclusion, 
 after less meditation, through practical experience. The 
 French people in the main is opposed to State Socialism, 
 knowing what etatisme means. In England, the average 
 man's idea of Socialism is State Socialism, and if he has any 
 leanings towards Socialism he will not object to giving 
 State Socialism a trial, as has been done already by now. 
 Many to whom one mentions Socialism quote instantly 
 municipal undertakings, as though these were the be-all and 
 end-all of it, and to them the antithesis of Socialism is non- 
 interference of the State. The fact is, that with us the 
 State had so long learnt non-interference as to drive re- 
 formers appealing to its arms. The French State has never 
 learnt non-interference, and France's best Governments 
 have been the most grandmotherly. The people's instinc-
 
 England, France, and Socialism 91 
 
 tive yearning for tutelage still remains, and " functionar- 
 ism " is as rampant as ever. But the best business men of 
 the country are learning independence and enterprise, and 
 are becoming fractious children under an over- centralized 
 Government which controls them at every turn, all for their 
 good. They are looking more and more to England for 
 lessons in self-defence and self-advancement. The British 
 business instinct, which it is something of a fashion to cry 
 down in England, is constantly cracked up in France. Thus 
 prosperous and enterprising France is an enemy of State 
 Socialism, whereas business Englishmen could do, or think 
 they could do, with, at all events, a few mild instalments of 
 it. Busy France is in the same regard distrustful of Social- 
 ism in general, while it has, to a great extent, called itself 
 Socialist these ten years. Instalments are accepted because 
 Labour clearly insists upon them ; but the middle classes, 
 even when advertising their adherence to Socialism, are 
 preoccupied with the need of safeguarding individualism. 
 The French governing mind will always be ready enough to 
 govern in and out of season ; it will be only too ready to 
 adopt principles of benevolent despotism and to allow 
 freedom to take care of itself. The enterprising leaders of 
 the bourgeoisie feel that theirs must be the reverse function. 
 State Socialism may succeed only too easily in France ; 
 their care must be for that safeguarding of the individual 
 at which an enlightened Socialism, if Socialism there is to 
 be, must simultaneously aim. In this way is the French 
 bourgeoisie " discovering " individualism. 
 
 In Parliamentary life, French and English Labour 
 parties, or Socialist parties — to use the everyday English 
 and French terms, which are practically equivalent — are 
 travelling in opposite directions for the present. The most 
 obvious difference is superficial and passing. Union on one 
 side and division on the other are due to difference of age
 
 92 The Real France 
 
 in Parliamentary political existence. The old English 
 political parties, of course, began long ago splitting up ; the 
 French Parliament did long ago split up. But the Labour 
 movements in both countries are doing exactly the reverse. 
 If French Socialism is now " unified," it was for years 
 divided into factions. Unlike most of the other political 
 parties in France, it has in its evolution not forgotten but 
 learnt party discipline. But it began by scorning discipline 
 on principle, and the various English Labour parties have 
 apparently made the same beginning. Barring accidents, 
 the evolution will continue logically. It is not a rash fore- 
 cast to imagine that, while the historic English parties go 
 on splitting up, the present Labour factions will in their turn 
 reach the stage at which " unified " Socialism has arrived 
 across the Channel. Possibly then the other disjecta membra 
 of Liberals and Conservatives will be " unified " also ; even 
 the City man foresees a day when there will be only two 
 parties left at Westminster, the unified Socialists and the 
 unified anti-Socialists, for and against Labour as one side 
 will put it, against and for Society as the other will. The 
 bourgeois of Paris has long since mused on the coming of 
 such a day in his country, though accidental and passing 
 cares have often diverted his meditations in the interval. 
 The contrast between the " unified " state of Socialism in 
 France and the multiplicity of more or less antagonistic 
 Labour parties in England is a difference, not of kind, but of 
 degree, in evolution. There is a deeper difference in present 
 policy. With boyish assertiveness English Socialism, young 
 in Parliamentary life, is agog for independence. It yearns 
 to stand alone and burns to prove as often as possible that 
 it is a real independent party, having no connection with 
 the old political forces, and able to walk and talk and vote 
 by itself. But the one great fact in the otherwise almost 
 uneventful history of French Socialism during the past few
 
 England, France, and Socialism 93 
 
 years has precisely been its alliance with " Bourgeoisism." 
 One incident has its almost exact counterpart in England. 
 M. Millerand, then a Socialist, took office as Home Secre- 
 tary in the Waldeck-Rousseau Cabinet, in which the 
 Minister of War was General the Marquis de Galliffet, 
 who fought against the Commune. M. Millerand, having 
 been solemnly excommunicated by the Socialist party, 
 cheerily turned moderate Republican, and one might now 
 call him a sort of Whig. Mr. John Burns, still in the early 
 Millerand stage of evolution, has already been slanged. 
 But with this incident the likeness between the present 
 Parliamentary positions of the parties in the two countries 
 ends. The same incident has occurred in divergent develop- 
 ments. French Socialism has been " unified," well and 
 good, but it has not unified itself away from contact with 
 " Bourgeoisism," and what the purists of the party call the 
 stain remains. The Waldeck-Rousseau Government was 
 the time of open and unblushing alliance with " Capitalist " 
 parties. M. Jules Guesde, the prophet, was then out of the 
 Chamber, but lifted an awful voice now and then in the 
 country. After the Millerand excommunication M. Jaures 
 continued more gingerly the alliance. Suspected of 
 Millerandism — and no one knowing him doubts that, other 
 things being equal, if he were offered office in a sufficiently 
 Radical Cabinet, he would perceive no danger to Socialism 
 in his acceptance — he narrowly escaped excommunication 
 in his turn, saved himself with a mea culpa, and was 
 " unified," only a few minor men besides M. Millerand, then 
 far outside the pale, being refused " unification." (All 
 French politicians, and the most advanced in particular, 
 lack a sense of language and rejoice in a spurious coinage of 
 words.) But the stain remains on M. Jaures himself and on 
 the party. He made a sudden elicit which betrayed haste 
 to take up his stand as an unsuiled prophet and uucom-
 
 94 The Real France 
 
 promising theorist of Socialism, in a great speech which was 
 deplorably crude in parts. The effort proved only that he 
 can never be anything but a practical politician. The great 
 fact of the recent history of French Socialism precisely is 
 that by joining the Bloc of Republicans against the adver- 
 saries of the Republic it descended to practical politics. Its 
 influence upon the country at large was almost doubled 
 thereby. Having " unified " itself, it advertised itself 
 ostentatiously in the new Chamber, no longer as a wing of 
 the Bloc, but as an independent Bloc. But once a practical 
 politician, always a practical politician ; power and effec- 
 tual influence in the government of a country once tasted, 
 the taste will not be lost. French Socialism may " unify " 
 itself as much as it likes, it cannot forget that when it was 
 of the Bloc it was such a vital force among the ruling forces 
 of the nation as it never had been before. Its high dream 
 of distant regeneration will always be tainted by recollection 
 of the time when it was a power of the day, not a possible 
 power of some day ; one can also say that its utopianism 
 will henceforth be corrected by an element of practical 
 sense. " Pure " Socialism across the Channel is tainted. 
 
 Our Socialists, though still much variegated, are, as is 
 easy to see, slowly growing purer and purer ; they are 
 still obviously far from a " unified " state, but that is 
 the ideal at which all their purest leaders aim. These, as 
 jealously as possible, guard against every fleck of " capi- 
 talist " influence, in the House and at the polls. Thus it can 
 be seen how the two countries play at cross purposes in 
 Socialism as in some other things. The English Labour 
 movement looks to the continental countries, and par- 
 ticularly to France, in many respects as to the advance 
 guards of Socialism in the world. It is usual to hear 
 contrasts drawn between the solid phalanx of the party in 
 the French Chamber, a power in Parliament, already with a
 
 England, France, and Socialism 95 
 
 history at its back, and the young beginnings of groups at 
 Westminster, and these look up to that. But you find that 
 very " unified " party in France looking up in the same 
 degree, though for other reasons, to the English Labour 
 movement. In fact, French Socialism is, not altogether 
 consciously, busy learning from England much that our 
 Labour parties are busy unlearning, and vice versa. The 
 Mother of Parliaments is still reverenced abroad, even by 
 those to whom a Parliament is a bourgeois institution. 
 French " unified " Socialism is now not only completely at 
 peace with Parliamentarism to all practical intent, but fast 
 learning to enjoy the game of Parliamentary tactics and to 
 play it with skill. The day was when at international 
 Socialist congresses half the representatives of France were 
 dogmatically and violently opposed to the Parliamentary 
 system, and carried principle into practice by paralyzing 
 discussion, to the horror and anger of punctilious English 
 chairmen and English delegates well drilled in the discipline 
 of public meetings. That was at a time when the Labour 
 Party at Westminster was a handful which ultimately 
 dwindled to one member. Now " unified " French Socialism 
 is an official Parliamentary party ; English Labour members 
 sit in numbers at Westminster, but desire it to be under- 
 stood that they are in the capitalist Parliament but not of 
 it. On the contrary, in France, " unification," a stroke of 
 genius, has handicapped the movement against Parlia- 
 mentary representation. The " unified " party is pledged 
 to representation ; opponents of the latter are reduced to 
 being free lances. The " unified " party has learnt the 
 power of Parliamentary action and the practical use of 
 Parliamentary discipline, and having tasted government, 
 likes it ; and all that it has learnt from England. English 
 Labour parties, trained for Parliament from infancy, like 
 all public groups of Englishmen, aim at the independence
 
 96 The Real France 
 
 and solidarity of French "unified " Socialism, and look up 
 to it precisely as to the State of the future, standing by 
 itself and untrammelled in the "capitalist" State of the 
 present. 
 
 Each people looks on the other with fresh eyes. The 
 English Labour member envies France her " unified " 
 Socialism ; the French Socialist envies England her Trade 
 Unionism. The old distinction between theoretical France 
 and practical England is always true with qualifications, 
 and is substantially true of the Labour movement in both 
 countries. Trade Unionism with us is leading, or has led, 
 to Socialism ; French Socialism is developing " Syndical- 
 ism," i.e. Trade Unionism. The very words picture the 
 contrast, as do those of " unified " Socialism and Labour. 
 French Trade Unionism is in its infancy compared with the 
 historic English movement. It makes much noise, but has 
 relatively no money ; it could not dream of sending mem- 
 bers to Parliament and paying them even a pound a week ; 
 it has since recent laws an official status, but it has not yet 
 a universally acknowledged standing in the country ; it 
 has outbursts of revolutionary effervescence unknown in 
 England, and has carried incursions into regions forbidden 
 by national prudence and State reasons ; but among the 
 nation and against national customs it still struggles where 
 British Trade Unionism has long since conquered ; its 
 present conflicts with employers read like past episodes of 
 English social history ; it fights still over questions which 
 British Trade Unions long since settled, and now treat with 
 the solemn authority of official bodies ; it has small hold 
 over the labouring classes themselves, which often either 
 fight shy or wax sceptical. In France " unified " Socialism 
 is the parent, and Trade Unionism a wayward offspring, 
 wayward because young and still weakly. This condition 
 of things works out into curious results. In English Labour,
 
 England, France, and Socialism 97 
 
 Trade Unionism stands for the staidest and soberest 
 element, often is the drag on the wheel, and sometimes the 
 very bar blocking the way for Socialistic doctrine. Such a 
 position is unthinkable in France, where the Parliamentary 
 Socialist Party has the weight, and Syndicalism drags 
 it ahead if it can. French Labour organized earlier to 
 send deputies to the Chamber than to assert its own im- 
 mediately practical interests, and a result has been that 
 Socialist opposition to Parliamentary representation, though 
 it has somewhat died down, survives chiefly among the 
 Syndicates, the same opposition when it exists in English 
 Trade Unions being due to exactly contrary reasons. When 
 a British union holds aloof from the Labour Representation 
 Committee, it does so through a national conservatism ; 
 it is an old-established institution, with vested interests, 
 and compared with it the Labour Representation Com- 
 mittee is something of an upstart. French Syndicates, 
 for whom vested interests are possessions hitherto un- 
 dreamt of, chafe at omnipotent " unified " Socialism, and 
 would ever be rushing ahead, because, not having the 
 weight to drag, they can act effectually only by careering 
 on. The Confederation Generate du Travail is merely a 
 federation of Trade Unions ; call it that, and it has a harm- 
 less, respectable, almost bourgeois air ; but in France the 
 bourgeoisie looks upon it as a wild anarchist host, and the 
 federation itself rejoices in fostering the idea. 
 
 French Labour, with a " unified " Socialist party over 
 seventy strong in the Chamber, besides Independent Social- 
 ists, is still clamouring for rights or privileges many of which 
 have been granted years ago in " Conservative " England. 
 To this day open-air meetings are forbidden, and public 
 opinion on the whole approves of their being dispersed 
 instantly by armed force. I have seen three workmen 
 knocked down and carried kicking away by the Paris police
 
 98 The Real France 
 
 on the deserted Place de la Concorde because some strike 
 committee had announced a meeting there. In the coal- 
 mining districts of Northern France one heard for years at 
 strike times mystic and childish chants of " Bou, bou, bou 
 ye ye ! ' The explanation was that " Vive la greve ! " 
 until a few years ago was a " seditious " cry, rendering the 
 utterer liable to some six months' imprisonment, so the 
 men translated the words into a gibberish of their own 
 invention. Now " Vive, vive, vive la greve ! " is tolerated, 
 while dragoons, hussars, and mounted gendarmes look 
 grimly on, pouncing every few moments on rassemblements 
 of three or four men arm-in-arm, " dispersing " them, and 
 running them in if they " commit rebellion," which they 
 always do. The argument of " strong " French Govern- 
 ments is that French Labour has not learnt responsibility 
 in freedom, and it certainly has not ; but it never has had 
 the chance of learning. Kept under the gendarme's eye, the 
 striker has one idea — to throw a brickbat when the eye is 
 not looking. The right to strike at all has only recently 
 been acknowledged and is still contested by the majority 
 of employers, though they accept it de facto when they 
 cannot help themselves. Any organization of wage-earners 
 at all is still opposed tooth-and-nail by a large section of 
 the French middle classes, which take the view that Trade 
 Unionism makes, not for responsible association, but for 
 irresponsible agitation ; and the more the view prevails, 
 the more it will be justified : the more the Syndicates are 
 denounced as revolutionary, the more revolutionary they 
 will become. Picketing is illegal in France, and " persua- 
 sion " is almost invariably considered by the courts as an 
 " infringement of the right to work." The result is that 
 strikers, knowing that in spreading a strike it is ten to one 
 on their breaking the law, break it deliberately, and smash 
 blacklegs' cottages. Finally, there never has been a " Taff
 
 England, France, and Socialism 99 
 
 Vale decision " question across the Channel, for the simple 
 reason that no French Trade Union ever had power enough 
 to inflict any lasting damage on a trade, or has ever pos- 
 sessed by a long way capital enough to be held usefully 
 liable. This in a country where " unified " Socialism is 
 a power in Parliament. French Labour looks up in awe 
 to British Trade Unions as to powers in the land. 
 
 French Labour has little more to gain by theorizing, but 
 much by practice. A vague and crude " Collectivism " has 
 many adepts ; the rights of Labour are fewer than in 
 England. In the future, French Socialism will by a curious 
 anomaly be supported by the country in practice and 
 opposed in theory. It is only apparently paradoxical to 
 say that French Socialism will be popular inasmuch as it 
 makes for individualism. In any struggle for such con- 
 quests as the right of meeting, it will gradually gain the 
 support of a great part of the nation, as now popular 
 sympathy, in opposition to many employers, maintains 
 the right to strike. In any attempt to narrow, instead of 
 broadening, social life, and to tighten the grip of the State 
 in the name of the social weal, it will have the nation against 
 it. Circumstances which could arise only in France gave 
 Socialists these latter years a part to play, and one stroke 
 of active policy did more for them in the country than 
 much propaganda. Their alliance with the Bloc of the 
 Republicans against the " White " Revolutionists, from 
 Royalists of a Jacobite turn of mind to mere adventurers, 
 and all more or less under the rule of Clericalism, the 
 bugbear of France, proved them public-spirited and ready 
 to join with the hated bourgeois for the sake of their com- 
 mon freedom ; proved them practical as well as Utopian, 
 individualists as well as Socialists. The bourgeoisie has 
 looked upon them with human sympathy ever since. One 
 cannot suppose that English Socialism will ever have a
 
 100 The Real France 
 
 similar part to play. It has its own stalking-horses in lieu 
 of the " defence of the Republic/' and of a totally different 
 breed — the questions of the unemployed and of the lati- 
 f undia of England, the first of which has not for the present, 
 and the second of which cannot have, any counterpart in 
 France. These special British problems give to British 
 Socialism a particular twist of its own, and here comparison 
 is impossible. But our Labour may yet have something to 
 learn from Socialism in France. The French bourgeoisie 
 has " discovered " individualism ; our individualism can 
 for the present be left to itself. But France has learnt 
 already to foresee that any " pure " Socialist State which 
 may ever come about will have to rediscover the individual.
 
 V. Strikes and Alarums 
 
 THE neat and prosperous elderly gentleman, with 
 the rosette of the Legion of Honour in his button- 
 hole, reading peacefully, at a cafe " terrace," 
 the latest and most furious article in Social 
 War of M. Gustave Herve, the bloodthirsty opponent 
 of all wars save civil war ; two fierce-looking policemen 
 standing by to protect the cafe against any anaemic and 
 weakly waiter on strike who might attempt picketing all 
 by himself ; dragoons riding up and down every half hour 
 looking for invisible rebels ; papa, on Sunday afternoon, 
 between his dame and their demoiselle, standing to read in 
 a vermilion bill on a hoarding of the Avenue de 1' Opera that 
 the Government has prostituted the Republic under the 
 foul yoke of a bloody despotism ; the plump little major in 
 uniform learning, over his absinthe, from the cafe's Figaro 
 that France will next week at latest be eaten up by the 
 dragon of anarchy unless a Perseus of a Dictator come before 
 to save her ; the dreadful Bousquet of the Confederation 
 Generale du Travail (afterwards arrested) marshalling his 
 men imperiously at the word of command and destroying 
 M. Lepine's occupation by keeping a martinet's order 
 among the strikers while the Prefect and his police stood 
 feverishly by, fidgeting to re-establish it by " dislocating ' : 
 demonstrations ; Delale, the bootmaking orator of the 
 C.G.T., refusing to go with the police when the warrant was 
 brought to him, as well as to Bousquet and Levy (also of 
 the C.G.T.), until he had finished to his liking a pair of boots 
 for a customer, doubtless a bourgeois : all these give us 
 
 IOI
 
 102 The Real France 
 
 characteristic pictures of France seething with revolution. 
 The neat elderly gentleman will tell you so if you ask him. 
 He points out to begin with that under the state of things 
 which the Government has brought about, partly through 
 criminal complicity and partly through abject cowardice, 
 he, a citizen of repute, cannot take his appetizer in peace 
 at his own customary cafe unless shielded by a strong force 
 of police and military. Look at the Mounted Republican 
 Guards riding past ; they are there because, were they not, 
 heaven knows what might not happen to him, an honest 
 citizen of some substance, sitting at his cafe. Is this a 
 normal and orderly condition of society ? He is a moderate 
 and liberal man ; but when it comes to unbridled anarchy 
 terrorizing society, and red rampant revolutionism tyran- 
 nizing over honest folk, then he draws the line, then he 
 protests, and calls for ruthless repression. A pale waiter, 
 disguised as a man about town in a morning coat finished 
 off by his professional broadcloth trousers, enters the cafe 
 and whispers to a blackleg serving. A flash of fury runs 
 round the place. Out with him. Manager, assistant- 
 manager, head waiter, blacklegs and customers hurl them- 
 selves against the dangerous man and throw him out, head 
 foremost, hitting the swing door before he lands sprawling 
 on the pavement, whence the two policemen gather him 
 up and carry him off to be charged with " intimidation and 
 rebellion." The neat, elderly gentleman is triumphant ; 
 his case is proved. H France were ruled by a Government 
 with any shadow of strength in its marrow, would such 
 scandalous scenes be allowed, and would dangerous Anar- 
 chists, probably armed with daggers for all you know, thus 
 penetrate murderously into peaceful cafes to threaten 
 respectable customers and intimidate honest workers ? 
 The hydra of anarchy has thriven on the guilty weakness 
 of the State ; it must be not scotched but killed, or France
 
 Strikes and Alarums 103 
 
 is doomed. The fat little major might cry " hear, hear," 
 if he were not in uniform. But you will find the neat elderly 
 gentleman echoed crescendo any number of times in 
 drawing-rooms as well as in cafes. 
 
 Contradiction is impossible, and it is really dangerous 
 to suggest that the country is not going to the dogs ; you 
 would be hounded out of the room yourself instantly. 
 Comfortable elderly ladies, old men and young, charming 
 ladies dressed marvellously, all are violently certain after 
 a perfect dinner that the country is doomed. Hearth and 
 home, family and property, religion, morality and money, 
 have fled. We dined, it seems, in terror of the revolution 
 knocking at the door, pike in hand ; we are taking liqueurs 
 while we may, for who knows what to-morrow will bring ? 
 The nation is honeycombed with anarchy, and the C.G.T. 
 rules a cowed Government. A dictator might save France 
 if he came instantly and were ruthless enough. No pity, no 
 quarter, no " sickly sentiment " for criminals sapping order 
 to blow up honest folk. A year of good, wholesome martial 
 law applied at once might save the country. Have you 
 heard Salome ? and in little screams of the ladies' delight 
 over the shudders and wails of the orchestra while John the 
 Baptist's head is being cut off down below in the pit, the 
 plight of France is forgotten. But in another part of the 
 room one " who knows " tells how Fallieres has filled 
 his pockets with the spoils from altars and sacred 
 treasures. 
 
 ; ' Down with the Republic ! If the old Royalist parties 
 had any marrow in their bones, they might sweep away the 
 Republican clique and not one of us would raise a finger for 
 it, so loathsome has it become to a great part of the working 
 classes, the peasantry and small functionaries." " There 
 never was a Government so despicable as the syndicate of 
 greed, conceit and ambition which is in power under the
 
 104 The Real France 
 
 trading name of Clemenceau and Co." " Clemenceau has 
 fallen into a sad decrepitude. His clowning is turning not 
 only to softening of the brain, but to delirium tremens. All 
 symptoms show that he is ripe for a madhouse." "Hear, 
 hear," cry fashionable drawing-rooms, till they find that 
 the speakers are precisely their enemies. Of the three 
 quotations above, the two first are taken from M. Gustave 
 Herve, in the Guerre Sociale, and the third from the Voix 
 du Peuple, the paper of the C.G.T. They might just as well 
 have come from politicians of the smart set yearning for a 
 dictator. On both sides the politic is a politic of frenzied 
 imagination, and both have equally lost the sense of 
 language. Extremists have no idea left of the meaning of 
 words, and politicians who stand between them have not 
 much more. Orators of the C.T.G. talk of " cutting button- 
 holes in the bellies of the bourgeois," a strange metaphor, 
 and of pouring vitriol into cough mixture, kneading pounded 
 glass into the bread, tampering with steam-engines to 
 produce explosions, and so on, the latter processes being 
 generally called sabotage. The bourgeois is thrilled, but 
 otherwise words bring no result in facts, luckily. The 
 cooks on strike went lyrically mad : " Warm breezes gave 
 nature the signal of re-awakening, with the rising sap our 
 energies increase, with the buds bursting from the power- 
 less bark our impulsion lifts the winterly tombstone, with 
 the flowers blooming balmily freedom salutes our pesti- 
 ferous graves." Delicious cooks ! we love them. The 
 manifesto goes on to say that like the budding leaf and the 
 rising sap, the cooks yearn to assert themselves. They will 
 rise from their graves where it appears they lie, and which 
 for an unexplained reason are pestiferous. What does it all 
 mean ? That the honest cooks are infected by bad litera- 
 ture, and that the C.G.T. 's cutting of buttonholes in the 
 bellies of the bourgeois is of a piece with the bursting of the
 
 Strikes and Alarums 105 
 
 buds and the lifting of winterly tombstones. It is all an 
 incontinence of words. 
 
 A manifesto of the Unified Socialist party said on the 
 eighth of May, 1907 : " Paris is in a state of siege, under 
 the heel of an audacious and cynical police," and the party 
 of law and order cries in the Figaro: "The moral and 
 material crisis which we are passing through reveals to the 
 least clear-sighted eyes the abysm which our country is daily 
 nearing," describes the law allowing associations as having 
 been transformed into a "blackmailing and terrorizing 
 law," and calls for " the mysterious tamer who already 
 haunts the dreams or the nightmares of millions of 
 anxious minds," and the " strong man who will bring us 
 back authority " ; the C.G.T. " pursues as its object the 
 destruction of the regime bourgeois and the advent of com- 
 munism," whereas every good Frenchman, according to a 
 Corsican Bonapartist gentleman, M. Leandri, must join his 
 ; ' League of Social Defence," formed on account of the 
 apparent signs of " the supreme and imminent catas- 
 trophies," to take arms against the " rising tide of anarchy," 
 to " recreate the mentality of the country," to establish in 
 Paris and the Provinces " centres of resistance and combat" 
 and " counter-revolutionary sections in every Paris ward," 
 to " answer violence with violence, war with war," and 
 lastly to prove that " at the hour of the supreme melee 
 . . . the hostages who will be stood to the wall and shot 
 down will not be those you think they will be." Con- 
 gratulations to M. Leandri. This is as good stuff of its kind 
 as the mctaphoric buttonholes in bourgeois bellies of the 
 C.G.T. It is all blood and thunder on both sides. The 
 amazing thing is how gentle and peacefully the country 
 goes on living all the same. If words were facts all political 
 France would have exterminated itself long ago, like the 
 warriors who sprang from the dragon's teeth. But all
 
 106 The Real France 
 
 Labour Day afternoon, the middle class Frenchman with a 
 small, quiet business, who is innumerable, played dominoes 
 or the mysterious game of cards called " Manille," and 
 looked through the cafe window at the Dragoons. During 
 the waiters' strike he sat at his cafe and peacefully read that 
 his country either was the prey of anarchy or lay writhing 
 under the heel of tyranny, according to his newspaper. 
 During the bakers' strike, fresh bread never missed even on 
 a single Sunday morning, or Paris would have thought the 
 promised end had come. Through it all, Paris lives, like 
 Sieyes, but it is not a Terror, except of words. I often 
 wonder how, when the social revolution does come, France 
 will find words in which to write about it ; all her strongest 
 are already used up. When, if ever, the French workman, 
 who, if unskilled, works harder, for longer hours and less 
 pay than any of ours, and is far less strongly associated 
 with his fellows, does turn resolutely to revolution, and 
 when the skilled French artisan, in many crafts more skilled, 
 better paid on the whole than ours, and more of a man of 
 substance — with a small pile at the bank — also decides for 
 social war, if ever his keen mind see a profitable way 
 thereby, what will those who cried " Wolf ! " find to cry ? 
 Observers who live in France, and many who follow French 
 affairs from England, are daily told that revolutionism has 
 riddled France. The revolution might come and France be 
 so weary of hearing about it for years that she might let it 
 come. 
 
 The C.G.T., a federation of Trade Unions, formed on 
 January 1st, 1903, is accepted popularly as the spark which 
 will set the country afire with the social revolution. Its 
 objects include the abolition of the wage-earning and wage- 
 paying classes — how is not stated. Its tactics include 
 " direct action," boycotting and sabotage, and general 
 strikes. It includes about 3000 unions nominally, but
 
 Strikes and Alarums 107 
 
 probably can command effectually only a far smaller 
 number. Its income from subscriptions during the two 
 years ending June, 1906, amounted to £2406, plus £1504 
 which went to the strike fund. A total average annual 
 income of £1955 seems hardly enough for financing the 
 great social revolution. 
 
 I have already explained how the Trade Union movement 
 in France has been delayed, how it has grown slowly, 
 opposed by public opinion, how, far from promoting 
 Parliamentary Socialism, it has followed it, how it has not 
 even been supported, but has been secretly withstood, by 
 the Socialist Party in Parliament, and how, being con- 
 firmed neither heartily by public opinion nor ungrudgingly 
 by the State nor generously by Parliamentary Socialism, 
 it has been naturally driven to extremism. The C.G.T. is 
 a natural product of French trade union evolution. If it 
 did not talk revolution it would be ignored. It keeps itself 
 before the public mind merely by inflated rhetoric because 
 it has little real substance, in fact, to fall back upon if it 
 gave up talking. French Trade Unionism is incomparably 
 less powerful than ours, its funds are absurdly small, its 
 hold on the workers is weak, its standing with the State, 
 with employers and with public opinion is still uncertain, 
 and it is looked upon very generally as a natural enemy by 
 the parties of law and order. Open air meeting is of course 
 completely illegal and has never on one single occasion been 
 tolerated. Private meetings in closed buildings are watched 
 by detectives in plain clothes, and speakers are subsequently 
 indicted for their speeches. An absolutely centralized 
 Government has instantaneous means of control through 
 its prefects, sub-prefects and thousands of minor nominees, 
 directly appointed by the Home Office, over the entire 
 country, such as are unknown in England, and an immense 
 standing army in which disaffection among the men even
 
 108 The Real France 
 
 in the hardest trials is almost unknown. France, French- 
 men tell us, is riddled with anarchy ; it is the most strongly 
 organized country, from the head downwards, in the world. 
 What counts even more than the organism of Government 
 is the instinct of the people. It is strictly true that the 
 prosperous and successful French workman still fights shy 
 of combination with his fellows. " Syndicalism " has a bad 
 odour with the " respectable " artisan. He has still a lurk- 
 ing suspicion that union is a revolutionary method, and the 
 law which made it legal over twenty years ago has not 
 made it reputable. Everyone who has talked to his baker, 
 his butcher, his carpenter, his cafe waiter, in Paris, knows 
 the familiar answer that " a man must have nothing to do 
 to belong to a syndicate," or at best that " syndicates are 
 good enough for the young fellows who have no wives and 
 children." The reply is always partly meant to please you, 
 for no French workman who comes into contact with the 
 bourgeois can imagine him ever to be favourable to Trade 
 Unions, and half the time, even if the worker be a Union 
 man, he will not " let on " to the man who wears a black 
 coat and is supposed to bear a bourgeois heart beating 
 beneath it. Often the worker is a bourgeois at heart too, 
 and suspicious of changes. It is not the attitude of that 
 Englishman who is content to " know his betters when he 
 sees them," and who shuns Unions because he depends 
 directly and personally upon an employer. It is a natural 
 and ingrained respect, not so much of persons and personal 
 authority as of the impersonal and abstract order of society. 
 The French artisan who has got on in the world feels deeply 
 that he is part of that order, a link in the chain ; his one 
 shame would be to fall out and to know that he was no longer 
 a wheel in the machine, but out of it all, an outcast, a pariah 
 having no longer a " social position." The landlord of a 
 tiny wineshop, every Parisian concierge, the official who
 
 Strikes and Alarums 109 
 
 sweeps the streets, the waiter who has served years in one 
 cafe, the lady who has sold newspapers in the same kiosk 
 for a decade, all ground their obscure and subconscious 
 philosophy of life on the deep knowledge that they have a 
 " social position." The fierce men of the C.G.T., who 
 talk fire and brimstone at the Labour Exchange, have 
 usually in their heart of heart the same conviction. Do 
 you suppose that Bousquet or Levy of the C.G.T., in- 
 dicted for seditious utterances, or Delale the bootmaker, 
 against whom no bill was found, or any other of these 
 upsetters of society and plotters of the great revolution, 
 ever forget to pay their rent and tip their concierge ? You 
 may do almost anything in France — outside Bohemia, 
 which is a very small province — rather than not pay the 
 rent on quarter day and tip the concierge on the Jour de 
 Van. None of these fierce Revolutionists are one whit 
 Bohemian. They are bourgeois at home, put so much by 
 daily for the rent, pay their tradesmen's bills cash down, 
 balance their domestic budgets weekly, and occupy a solid 
 " social position." They have the instinct like the rest. 
 I should not be surprised to find that the Parisians who do 
 live from hand to mouth are chiefly Bonapartists, yearning 
 for a " dictator." French Revolutionists and Anarchists 
 arrange their lives more methodically than most British 
 workmen ever have done, practical though the latter be in 
 politics. If it be true that we must go to men's real lives, 
 not to the outward show they make of them, for the key to 
 their own actual meaning in the world, it surely is signifi- 
 cant that this or the other fierce foe of property pays his 
 rent with deadly regularity. I can never forget Delale 
 keeping the police, come to arrest him, waiting while he 
 finished conscientiously a pair of boots for an infamous 
 bourgeois. He is an illuminating symbol. And drawing- 
 rooms talk of France putrid with the rot of disaffection,
 
 110 The Real France 
 
 when this social instinct permeates the nation more strongly 
 than any other. No man more than a Frenchman feels his 
 liability to society and his solidarity with society. We are 
 not half such social animals as the French. 
 
 Never did such a pother on the surface disturb so little 
 the still waters beneath ; never have strikes and alarums 
 made so much noise in a nation and so little ruffled the real 
 national life. One watches with amazement smart Paris 
 amusing itself furiously, hard-working Paris working hard 
 and apparently always finding work, the middle classes at 
 their business with perpetual thrift and care, the peasantry 
 clinging as closely and as tightly as ever to their beloved 
 soil, in the midst of all this storm of speeches and writings 
 from a fiery Revolutionism and a savage Reaction. Yet it 
 seems impossible that the storm should remain for ever 
 superficial. Politicians on one side calling for a despot to 
 behead Socialism, and on the other for a Revolution to rip 
 up the bourgeoisie, cannot for ever rant in a wilderness. 
 They must get a hearing some day ; it does not appear that 
 the rulers of the country are going the right way about to 
 discredit them. The proposal to break up forcibly the 
 C.G.T., which no one can deny to be a perfectly legal organi- 
 zation, was one of the strangest errors of statesmanship, 
 fortunately renounced just in time by M. Clemenceau, under 
 pressure from MM. Viviani and Briand, then his Socialist 
 colleagues, whom the " Unified " Socialist party is always 
 busy cursing. But the prosecutions of C.G.T. leaders 
 for seditious utterances at private meetings may end as 
 disastrously as prosecutions against vague and obscure 
 plotters on the charge of conspiracy against the safety of 
 the State. The State in France, more strongly armed than 
 most others, is perpetually anxious, or feigning to be 
 anxious, for its safety. The timid middle classes are un- 
 fortunately inclined to the same anxiety for the safety of
 
 Strikes and Alarums 111 
 
 the State. One wonders whether, if the State left the 
 people alone, and the people left the State alone, the 
 experiment would not answer well for all concerned. 
 Combination has always been opposed for State reasons, 
 openly or secretly. The result has been the C.G.T. The 
 C.G.T. is undoubtedly a nuisance, but whose is the original 
 sin ? What party in France has ever favoured rational and 
 business-like organization among workers ? The propertied 
 classes opposed it strenuously, gave the right grudgingly, 
 and resent its being used. Governments long looked upon 
 all associations as revolutionary, and cannot make up their 
 minds not to keep either a grandmotherly or stepmotherly 
 eye upon all common action of citizens. The Socialist party 
 in Parliament has always played a double game with Trade 
 Unionism in France, and is still at it. The party ignored 
 the Trade Unions, its juniors, until it could not help recog- 
 nizing them, and then it tried to patronize them. Now it 
 is violently distraught — and may split — over the dilemma 
 whether to take bodily the lead of " Syndicalism," assum- 
 ing all the responsibilities which that implies, or to break 
 with it. M. Jaures, as usual, frantically tries to re- 
 concile contradictories. But when the Socialist party 
 endeavours to take the lead of the C.G.T., which, having 
 been completely ignored, has gone its own gait and got out 
 of hand, the leaders find themselves led, none knows 
 whither. On the other hand, a break with the C.G.T. may, 
 for all the Parliamentary Socialist party knows, mean a 
 break with Trade Unionism altogether, and then the party 
 may find itself between two stools. The dilemma is a pretty 
 one, but awkward. The fatal mistake has been to ignore 
 Trade Unionism, which may result in " Syndicalism " 
 ignoring all else. For there were, and there are, admirable 
 materials even in the C.G.T. It has organized itself with 
 spirit, with enterprise, and with intelligence. It talks too
 
 112 The Real France 
 
 much, but that is a safety valve — for the present. On the 
 marvellously solid foundation of French society combina- 
 tion could, and can, be grounded with fine results. Take 
 the spirit, even the purple eloquence, of the C.G.T., mix it 
 judiciously with the individual intelligence, the strong 
 social instinct, and the solidity of the French artisan, and 
 the compound will be worth having. But if France con- 
 tinues talking of violent remedies, they will at last be 
 wanted. The savage cure will bring on the disease. There 
 is the making of great things in French " Syndicalism," but 
 also possibly of dire things.
 
 VI The Symbolism of M. Failures 
 
 I WAS just back home in Paris from the Presidential 
 elections of February 18, 1899, at Versailles, when 
 a French friend, who was one of the jeunes of those 
 days, and whom "politics disgusted" a fortnight 
 before, burst in shouting " Live the Republic ! " and we 
 shook hands. A French cavalry officer who was in the 
 room at the time looked sour. I said nothing about my 
 having just seen M. Loubet drive away from Versailles 
 palace to the railway station in a shower of stones and mud 
 and a storm of " Mort a Loubet ! " " Panamiste ! " " Mort 
 aux juifs ! " from a flying column of patriotic cyclists riding 
 as hard as they could after his carriage. The officer 
 might have chuckled, and the jeune who had suddenly 
 sloughed the " cult of the ego " and appeared as a friend 
 of public liberty, might have called him out there and 
 then. Those were stirring days. January 17, 190G, seemed 
 tame indeed by comparison. No jeunes cried "Live the 
 Republic ! " and the Republic did not even pretend that 
 she required saving. There were no stones in the air, the 
 mud was left to lie peacefully on the pavement, and no one 
 shouted death to anybody. The nearest approach to cries 
 of " Mort ! " consisted of a few of " Vive Doumer ! " In the 
 sloppy streets and under the iron-grey sky ninety-nine 
 persons out of a hundred called " Vive Fallieres ! " It was 
 a dull day, and all of M. Loubet 's doing. He must have 
 smiled to himself as he sat in the Elysee before the tele- 
 phone which had just told him the result of the election. 
 Only six years and eleven months : it was a short time for 
 i 113
 
 114 The Real France 
 
 such a falling off from storm and stress to ditchwater dull- 
 ness, from emotion to equanimity, from the excitement 
 of adventure to hopeless common sense. It certainly was 
 all, or nearly all, M. Loubet's doing. At any rate he "lived 
 through it," and that is saying a great deal. There is a 
 legend, naturally fabricated, that on reaching the palace of 
 the Elysee from Versailles on the day of his election, M. 
 Loubet said, " I come in here like a whipped dog." Of 
 course, he said nothing of the kind, but the point is that 
 such a saying could be invented and believed. The excite- 
 ment did not at all end with the throwing of stones at 
 Versailles. Mud was flung, metaphorically, for months. I 
 remember papers being cried in the streets of Paris for 
 about a year, containing the full history, with or without 
 pictures, of " Panama Premier's " shameful life, from 
 infancy upwards, almost comparable with that of Tiberius 
 Caesar. One line out of the hundreds of thousands written 
 in the style would have sufficed in Germany to ensure the 
 conviction of the author, publisher, printer, and vendor 
 for Majestats-Beleidigung. M. Loubet's Presidency will 
 always be remembered as supplying fine arguments for 
 freedom, and there never was such a case of imperturbable 
 " living it down." Perhaps there was a dash of heroism, 
 too, in the example, when one comes to think of it. In the 
 storm and stress the one calm place was the Elysee, and 
 " Papa Loubet " came up smiling every time in public. 
 In private he set his teeth and told himself " I will win " — 
 and he did. That is why that dull January day of 1906 
 at Versailles, and the comparatively even tenor of the 
 Parisian way in these realistic times, were in great part 
 his doing. One still remembers the Opera Bouffe con- 
 spirators who took themselves with immense seriousness 
 and would have been accepted with the same solemn earnest- 
 ness had they succeeded, and the High Court trial by the
 
 The Symbolism of M. Fallidres 115 
 
 Senate, presided over by M. Fallieres ; the Auteuil steeple- 
 chase day, when a " real gentleman " bashed in M. Loubet's 
 top-hat and narrowly missed hitting Countess Tornielli, 
 wife of the Italian Ambassador ; and the Grand Prix day, 
 a week later, when a Socialist army wearing scarlet button- 
 holes went to the races — most of the men for the first time 
 in their lives — spoiling for a fight with the Royalists, who 
 stayed away. Those stirring times seem to the Parisian of 
 to-day to have happened in the year one. It must be an 
 age since the jeune threw away his red buttonhole and 
 returned to literature for its own sake, leaving politics to 
 politicians. He has a faint recollection of having in his 
 youth saved the Republic. Generations, surely, have 
 elapsed, since the Due d'Orleans and Princes Victor and 
 Louis Napoleon Bonaparte fell back into their accustomed 
 oblivion. One cannot really tell how long it is since the 
 last public movement for a " plebiscitary " President of the 
 Republic. Where are the nightly riots of the Dreyfus case 
 and Jew-baiting times, compared with which the Church 
 rows after Disestablishment were merely pleasant demon- 
 strations of playfulness in which mere handfuls of the 
 population took part, with the rest looking on ironically ? 
 To not one man in a hundred were the battles of 1899 
 indifferent, and the veriest stay-at-homes thirsted for the 
 fray. The Parisian is astounded to reflect, when he does, 
 how much ferment M. Loubet's seven years saw rise, 
 effervesce, and fall flat. It all belongs to another age — 
 an age when the Tsar still travelled and when he came for 
 the second time to Paris, an age before King Edward had 
 come officially to Paris, and half a dozen other Kings in 
 his wake ; before Presidents of the Republic had visited 
 London, Rome, and Madrid — and brought back from 
 London the final pledge of the entente cordiale. The 
 Third Republic in a few years matured into a comfortable
 
 116 The Real France 
 
 lady, " betwixt two ages," with a spark of waywardness 
 still, now and then, when on a holiday, but long-headed 
 and sedate at business — just such a portly lady as sits 
 enthroned, in black silk, behind a Paris cafe desk, counting 
 the profits, keeping the ledger, and collecting from each 
 waiter the brass tallies for each drink. 
 
 January 17th, 1906, I really believe, closed the chapter 
 of the lady's gadabout days. She will not have fancies now 
 for eloping with plebiscitary pretenders, and no gallant 
 with feather and sword thinks of abducting her. M. 
 Loubet could safely hand her over to M. Fallieres. No 
 more romance, flirtatiousness, and dashing adventure, and 
 no need to draw swords to save the lady. She was well 
 able to look after herself, and her match with comfortable 
 M. Fallieres was just the proper marriage of convenience 
 for a person of her sobered temperament and at her time of 
 life. The Dreyfus Case may prove to have been her last 
 nutter of really dramatic excitement, for Disestablishment 
 never bore the fruits the parties of agitation hoped it would 
 yield. Champions of great idealistic causes spoiling for 
 rows have gone on spoiling for a number of years ; prophets 
 of noble and glorious upheavals calling upon the country 
 to drag itself out of the slough of miserable contentment 
 and leap to lofty aims of national adventure, still call in 
 the wilderness. 
 
 Yet, at the election of M. Loubet's successor there 
 seemed to be a chance for noble ideals and a hope that 
 the mob would leave the muddy rut for the royal road 
 to greatness. At all events, the idealists worked pro- 
 digiously hard for weeks before that fatal victory of low 
 materialism. The only idealist who lay idle was M. Paul 
 Deroulede. Even he appeared to have become infected by 
 the contagion of common sense, and he retired to his 
 country place while the battle of the big minds against the
 
 The Symbolism of M. Fallidres 117 
 
 petits esprits raged in Paris. The first rule of a recipe 
 for an imaginative policy in France is to catch your hero. 
 M. Paul Deschanel, whose neat person and comely face all 
 who wanted to save France in 1899 had hoped to see at the 
 Elysee, had unfortunate lapses afterwards into level- 
 headedness, sandwiching proper high falutin' speeches with 
 others which were tainted with sordid sense, so he Avas done 
 for. There remained M. Paul Doumer, or rather he was 
 abruptly discovered to be the heaven-sent man. He is the 
 son of a railway navvy, was born in a garret, was a rough 
 apprentice who educated himself in odd hours with admir- 
 able perseverance, and managed, by dint of night school 
 classes and reading in bed when he ought to have been 
 asleep, to take his degrees of Bachelor and later of Licen- 
 tiate. He is a freethinker, was married only by M. le 
 Mayor, and has not had one of his eight children christened. 
 He was in a few days chosen as the champion of political 
 Churchmen, and of the combination of Royalists, Bona- 
 partists, Plebiscitists, vague " patriots," Nationalists, who 
 yearned to revise the Constitution, i.e. to upset it some- 
 how, which formed the party of imagination. M. Fallieres 
 is a small landowner ; sells 500 casks a year of his own 
 Loupillon, a petit vin, but pleasant ; belongs to a very 
 petite bourgeoisie family of two generations standing, 
 and therefore is, if in a very small way, still a bourgeois, 
 and never was a proletaire like M. Doumer ; had both his 
 children christened, and has a daughter who was on the 
 point at one time of entering a nunnery, but married 
 instead. Several times in the Cabinet, and once Premier for 
 twenty-four days, he was always a " Moderate," though 
 he did bring in a bill, which failed, to control the Religious 
 Orders ; he never was a Radical, still less a Socialist, and 
 he forbade, as usual, the red flag of Trade Unions — that 
 red rag to a bull, with every Frenchman in office in the part
 
 118 The Real France 
 
 of the bull. In a few days he was the candidate of uncom- 
 promising Republicanism, Radicalism, anti-Clericalism, and 
 Socialism. This is an example of the beauties of French 
 politics. Another is the fact that the party which ranges 
 from Radicalism to Socialism, and which the other side 
 calls Anarchist, or at least Revolutionist, is in France 
 almost entirely the party of dull, plodding common sense. 
 It is, in fact, a sort of Conservative party. It really wants 
 few novas res, or wants them only gradually. It was 
 anti-Clerical, of course, but anti-Clericalism is a very old 
 thing in France — where some Churchmen have always 
 been anti-Clerical. I remember the vicar of one of the most 
 fashionable churches in Paris who not only was, but told 
 you he was, an anti-Clerical. When the mild church riots 
 broke out, at his church in particular, he retired instantly 
 into the country, leaving his curate in charge of the rioting. 
 To-day Radicalism is hardly even anti-Clerical, the work- 
 ing out of Disestablishment having deprived anti-Clericals 
 of their cause, as it has shorn the Church of the chance of 
 martyrdom. In 1906, anti- Clericalism was still an " actu- 
 ality." The moderate little bourgeois who sells his wine 
 and whose women folk are pious was the candidate elect of 
 Republicans, Radicals, Socialist Radicals and Independent 
 Socialists, who are all innately Conservative. 
 
 His only rival, who was to save France from him and 
 sordid materialism and raise her to some idealist adventure, 
 such as" a new Boulangism, M. Paul Doumer, had been a 
 Radical, but had thrown the Radicals over, had been a 
 Colonial Proconsul, and had done little more than that, 
 except once to beat the venerable M. Brisson, known rightly 
 as the incorruptible and dreary, in the election for the 
 Presidency of the Chamber of Deputies, and also to write 
 a Book, if one can call the Livre de mes fils written. Other- 
 wise it is a grandiose work, in the sublimely simple style.
 
 The Symbolism of M. Fallieres 119 
 
 A friend of mine, aaIio is an acute critic and does not belong 
 to the politically imaginative party, but is an old and 
 intimate friend of M. Paul Doumer, did not say much about 
 the latter's Book. "II y a des verites bonnes a dire," is 
 all he would commit himself to. It is a fine remark, and 
 would do for the Book's epitaph. Beneath it could be 
 graven some of M. Doumer 's best things : " Action is life ; 
 thought and will are nought unless they serve action. 
 Action, activity, work are necessary for the moral and 
 physical equilibrium of man." " The active man is the 
 useful man." " Action is movement, activity ; that is, 
 life." "Inertia, indolence, are immobility, and immobility 
 is death." One is strongly reminded of Mr. Roosevelt. 
 ' Young man, learn to act." " Be active, laborious." 
 " All action is not work." " It suffices not to apply one- 
 self to action ; one must also devote oneself to work." 
 " Work elevates and ennobles man." " Work is a necessity 
 for the great majority and a duty for all. If the march of 
 humanity be viewed, it will be seen that work has always 
 been the condition of its existence and the instrument of its 
 progress . " " Civilization is the daughter of work . " " Work 
 creates virtue. Idleness begets vice." " Work preserves 
 life ; idleness paralyses and kills. Iron left unused rusts. 
 Brains and limbs unemployed become atrophied." " Work, 
 work incessantly. Never be inactive, never be idle." And 
 thus, ad libitum, for hundreds of pages. I did not find 
 " Waste not, want not," " Honour thy parents," " Neces- 
 sity is the mother of invention," " Honesty is the best 
 policy " in the Book, but they must be there. On patriot- 
 ism : "La Patrie c'est la Prance . . . c'est la mere com- 
 mune de tous les Francais. Elle est notre mere a tous, et 
 c'est comme une mere que vous devons l'aimer." Justice 
 could not have been done to the above in a translation. 
 The poet continues : " The corollary of the duty of love
 
 120 The Real France 
 
 of country is the duty of serving the country." On love : 
 " Young men, love, it is your duty ; learn to love with all 
 your heart and all your soul. Love, young men ; choose 
 well, then learn to love." On character : " To be true, 
 simple, and natural conduces to being (which is equally 
 necessary) sincere and frank, loyal and righteous." " Be 
 tolerant, be chaste, be strong, be honest." Perhaps the 
 finest observation is : " France more than ever needs men 
 of action. She does not lack men of words." She does not 
 indeed, discovering in M. Doumer one more wordy son — 
 wordy to the extent of some 300 pages. For all his words, 
 M. Doumer appears unaware of the value of words, 
 and in his mind the meanings of words are loose, vague, 
 and interchangeable. The Book, which had been timed 
 to come out a few days before the Presidential election, 
 was too much for some minds in the party of imagination, 
 which does not necessarily lack taste, and the papers of the 
 other side quoted largely and gleefully from it. Some of M. 
 Doumer's journals were annoyed, and one of them, though 
 particularly and vividly imaginative in politics, roundly 
 said : " The man who wrote such gibberish may to-morrow 
 represent France, the country of Voltaire, of Beaumarchais, 
 of Renan ! " 
 
 Still, having caught your great man, you must stick to 
 him. "Agir, c'est vivre," and "l'inertie, c'est l'immobilite" 
 notwithstanding, Paul Doumer went to Versailles a great 
 man. The Figaro said that the new President's duty, 
 whoever he were, would be to " give back to our national 
 genius the place which belongs to it." It sounded like an 
 aphorism from the Book. What other could act up to such 
 soulfully vague words than Paul Doumer ? ' We lay in 
 the mud during the seven years of Loubet. We shall be 
 condemned to go on thus wallowing if no one gives us a 
 hand to pull us out, and if Fallieres comes in. The men of
 
 The Symbolism of M. Failures 121 
 
 hate, the envious, and the Franco -Germans have placed 
 M. Doumer in a position such that he alone is now qualified 
 to extricate us from putrefaction. It would be guilt in him 
 to refuse to do so," wrote Henri Rochefort. One often 
 feels tempted to wonder that Signor Rochefort will still be 
 writing, for nobody marks him, but that is the dull English- 
 man's delusion, for he still is marked. His words on mud 
 and putrefaction completely summed up the political 
 programme of the imaginative party. Edouard Drumont 
 also wrote expressively that " this regime, like certain 
 venomous animals, defends itself by its own poison ; it 
 protects itself by the putridity which it begets." Save us, 
 Doumer, no matter how, but we want to be saved, was 
 the cry. The party is ever calling on somebody to save 
 itself and France. No further details of its programme are 
 obtainable. Let us first be saved, then we shall see what 
 we shall see. Canvassing for M. Doumer before the election 
 consisted only of the cry " He will save us." ; ' Ha, a step 
 nearer to the abyss," said a prominent lady of the party on 
 first hearing of M. Fallieres' election. With such a pro- 
 gramme, intrigue in favour of M. Doumer was plain sailing. 
 All deputies and senators who were considered wobbly were 
 buttonholed and adjured to save France. " Are you good 
 Frenchmen and true ? Vote for Doumer. Fallieres is 
 death, Doumer is life. Shall France die ? " As a matter of 
 fact, the other side occasionally told its men : ; ' Save the 
 Republic." Even the common-sense party cannot help 
 being imaginative sometimes, but it went in for melodrama 
 much less than seven years before. Under the circum- 
 stances the canvassing of January, 1906, offered little 
 variety. Really only one incident A\as curious — the per- 
 sistent flight of the canard that M. Loubet would seek re- 
 election. Every day, for weeks, one was told that foxy 
 Eoubct was fooling the field. Francois Coppee informed a
 
 122 The Real France 
 
 friend of mine that he knew exactly Loubet's game. A 
 song, " Ne t'en va pas, Mimile," was printed, and an enor- 
 mous edition offered for sale on the boulevards. The exact 
 purpose of the move remained obscure. Probably the 
 party foresaw defeat, and thought that the election of 
 M. Fallieres would mean a much worse beating than the 
 re-election of M. Loubet, backed by prestige. 
 
 The idealists lost heart as the election drew near. The 
 other side sobered down into solid confidence. The cry 
 " Save the Republic ! " raised again now and then, dropped, 
 and that was a sure sign of success. When French poli- 
 ticians can afford to dispense with melodrama, one knows 
 that one can safely plump for their cause. A steady wave 
 of common sense was creeping up again, the wave which 
 has flooded so much high falutin' in French politics in the 
 past ten years. It bore M. Fallieres to the " First Magis- 
 tracy of the State." Like M. Paul Dourner, M. Fallieres 
 stood as a symbol, and is in part the man that opinion has 
 made him. He might easily have been pitted by moderate 
 Republicans against Socialists, opposed as a small holder 
 of the soil and a tiny capitalist to the wage-earners, and 
 held up by Radicals as the type of the true and original 
 Conservative element in French country life. But it was 
 no time for the niceties of theoretical politics, however dear 
 to the forensic mind. Differences were sunk in the course 
 of common sense. M. Fallieres stood as a champion — the 
 St. George to slay the dragon of rhetoric. It may be that 
 he can spout with the rest, and possibly he could even 
 write a Book, though I doubt whether he would, if he could. 
 But circumstances made him the champion of levelheaded- 
 ness, whatever capacities for political romance he might 
 have, in common with most Frenchmen. Yet he was not 
 entirely the man made by the moment. He certainly has 
 more levelheadedness than M. Doumer has imagination,
 
 The Symbolism of M. F oilier es 123 
 
 and he is a safer man naturally than Paul Doumer is a great 
 man. 
 
 Almost immediately after his election, I watched M. 
 Fallieres during one of the half a dozen congratulatory 
 ceremonies which he had to go through in the evening. 
 M. Rouvier, screwing up and unscrewing his eyes behind his 
 glasses, his face twitching, his shoulders going up and down, 
 and his arms and hands playing about jerkily, buzzed round 
 the President-elect. Other ministers, members of Parlia- 
 ment one after the other, official after official, came up and 
 buzzed also. M. Fallieres, burly and comparatively tall, 
 his rather rugged face red against his very white hair, stood 
 firm to receive compliments. His eye wandered now and 
 then, and what it said plainly was, " The heat in here is 
 unbearable. I do wish they would open a window." His 
 very first attitude, on being raised to the highest dignity 
 in France, seemed to say that he had come into office not 
 to attitudinize. Few French politicians would have 
 escaped, or could have resisted, the temptation to be 
 dramatic at such a moment. The new President was not 
 at all dramatic. Nor had he been before his election, nor 
 has he been since. No authentic record is discoverable of 
 his having, during his entire public career, yet struck an 
 attitude. That is his power which raised him to eminence. 
 He did not canvass before the election, except that he 
 made one speech at a public meeting in the South, in which 
 he did not even announce that, if chosen, he would save 
 the Republic. Such restraint would have been utterly 
 beyond the powers of many French politicians, and of 
 some among the sincerest. He said merely that if the 
 Republican Party wanted him, he was ready, and that, if 
 chosen, he would do his duty according to the Constitution. 
 Rather an obvious statement it sounds to English ears, but 
 it came with refreshing simplicity to M. Fallieres' followers,
 
 124 The Real France 
 
 while his adversaries called it a base profession of flabby 
 soullessness. M. Doumer was ready to bring up the Con- 
 stitution in the way it should go. President Fallieres had 
 no intention of playing any heroic pranks. That was the 
 grievance against him and his party. The President of the 
 Republic has great powers, some of which have fallen into 
 abeyance since Marshal MacMahon tried to drive a coach 
 and four through the Constitution. The results were 
 disastrous to himself, and would have been disastrous to 
 the Third Republic had he succeeded. M. Doumer was 
 prepared to drive an 80 h.p. motor through any constitu- 
 tion, in order to " save France," and that was his own 
 particular raison d'etre. From what France would have 
 been saved is unknown. The imaginative party considers 
 it debasing to be practical, because vague theory covers 
 a multitude of contradictions. Whether the country will 
 ever follow it into the region of soaring imprecision again 
 remains to be seen, and the national love of eloquence may 
 one day give it fresh chances. But, so far, the potency of 
 big words has dwindled, not grown, in France, and that 
 has been the foremost change in French politics during the 
 last ten years, as it was the chief lesson taught by the 
 election of M. Fallieres. 
 
 After election, he remained rigidly faithful in office to 
 the matter-of-fact policy of which he was chosen as the 
 symbol. He has been the most derided President of the 
 Third Republic, not excepting even Jules Grevy, for his 
 predecessor M. Loubet lived down obloquy and ridicule, 
 and M. Fallieres has not outlived ridicule yet. He has been 
 derided for his face, his bulk, his clothes, his ties. When a 
 cafe waiter out of work plucked his beard in the street, 
 Paris drawing-rooms, showing not the least sense of national 
 dignity or even of mere humanity, enjoyed the joke up- 
 roariously for a week. When Edward VII died, Parisians
 
 The Symbolism of M. Fallieres 125 
 
 talked as if they had lost a sort of uncrowned King of Paris, 
 beside whom their own President of the Republic counted 
 neither as a head of the State nor as a Parisian. M. Fallieres 
 in office has not achieved either greatness or popularity, 
 yet he has been true to his trust. He might have been a 
 little more decorative in his presence, he could not have 
 been safer as a man. When he was elected, France would 
 not have wanted a General Boulanger if she could have had 
 one for the asking. The election of M. Fallieres was one of 
 the signs of the growing political realism of the country. 
 It would have been difficult to make a less picturesque 
 choice, it would have been impossible to make one more 
 realistic.
 
 VII The Fall of Theophile Delcasse 
 
 A NY stick was good enough to beat the unfortunate 
 J_\ M. Delcasse with in his own country, any stone 
 I %, served for pelting him. Never was there such a 
 fall since Jules Ferry fell over the defeat of Lang 
 Son. French public opinion did not make a pretty show in 
 this circumstance. None so poor for the time being to do 
 reverence to the Minister who was a great man to two- 
 thirds of France during nearly seven years of office — traitor 
 though he were according to the remaining third. Of all 
 the Paris papers, only the Debats had the decency, at least, 
 to give him one consolatory pat on the back, when he was 
 kicked out — for kicked out he was. Every other helped in 
 the kicking with shameless gusto. Some turned against 
 him in a night. The Paris press has hardly ever before 
 during the Third Republic been so well agreed in any one 
 purpose as it was in rending M. Delcasse. Once he was the 
 one French statesman in the view of millions of Frenchmen, 
 probably the majority of the people. He alone held the 
 threads of France's foreign policy. Not another man living 
 was supposed to be capable of disentangling them. He was 
 supreme and unapproachable. To nearly all the Republican 
 press he was the great augur. He hinted, and was obeyed 
 on the instant. If a paragraph displeased him, patriotism 
 immediately commanded that it should be blue-pencilled, 
 or, if already published, apologized for. In the Chamber 
 and Senate his word was law. Not even the most truculent 
 Royalist or the most iconoclastic Revolutionary Socialist 
 ventured to have an opinion when he had spoken. He 
 
 126
 
 The Fall of TMophile Delcasse 127 
 
 incarnated France, his voice was France's, and true French- 
 men bowed their heads listening to the oracle. To the 
 general public he was the one Cabinet Minister who knew 
 his business. The average citizen — not of course the 
 Nationalist suffering from hypertrophy of the patriotic 
 fibre, nor, more recently, the Socialist of the Jaures shade, 
 or the Clemenceau-coloured Radical, but the plain, Divine 
 Average — conceded to you that all the rest of the Cabinet 
 might be, and probably was, more or less incompetent. 
 " But we have Delcasse. He knows his business — he 
 knows ! ' M. Delcasse's reputation was impressive, he had 
 been the one French Minister for many years who has 
 impressed the foreign observer. He fell ; not the least 
 pretence of diplomatic indisposition was put forward, the 
 Premier coolly aimounced that, the Cabinet having unani- 
 mously dropped M. Delcasse, he had been got rid of ; and 
 all France jumped upon him with fierce glee. 
 
 A dozen different political influences meeting, practically 
 for the first time, at one same point, brought about M. 
 Delcasse's downfall. Had the conjunction not occurred, 
 he would have remained a great man. Different parties 
 attacked him for totally different, often contrary, reasons 
 for years, and he flourished. Morocco suddenly provided 
 the common ground on which opposite factions met to join 
 against him, and, meeting, drew behind them the majority 
 which had looked upon them as mere minorities before. 
 Consistency then was of no importance so long as M. 
 Delcasse were " disembarked." Politicians who had cursed 
 him long for one failing now cursed him louder for an 
 opposite fault. His former supporters, who were ready to 
 champion him to the death twenty-four hours earlier, 
 instantly closed up the ring round him, on any pretext. 
 The President of the Republic, his last stand-by, had to let 
 him go, and he went, in a storm of execration, with hardly
 
 128 The Real France 
 
 two or three voices even of damning faint praise. The 
 story of the conjunction of political influences which over- 
 threw M. Delcasse is one of the most intricate chapters of 
 modern French public life, and not an edifying one. When 
 a public man is denounced for a rabid Revolutionist by one 
 critic and damned as a hidebound, toadying Tory by 
 another, there must be some flaw somewhere in the judg- 
 ment of either of the two critics, and probably of both. 
 When both shake hands and make friends to fall upon the 
 public man together, one is driven to have serious doubts 
 of their honesty as well as of their sense. That is the exact 
 story in simplified outline of the hounding of M. Delcasse. 
 The actual facts were, of course, much more complicated. 
 Not two opposite parties, but a dozen all in varying degrees 
 at daggers drawn with one another, joined against him. 
 But any one party should in honesty have stood by him 
 through thick and thin, if what the eleven other parties said 
 of him had been true. That precisely was the humour of 
 the situation. One man told you, " Down with Delcasse, 
 autocracy's henchman " ; another cried, " Impeach the 
 traitorous Radical Delcasse," and you were bewildered to 
 find the two shouters agreeing that their two shouts 
 amounted very much to the same thing, and that their 
 conflicting views for any practical purpose coincided. 
 What the practical purpose was the unhappy Delcasse 
 soon learnt. Yet to the ordinary mind the proposition that 
 M. Delcasse was sold either to England or to Russia seems 
 a fairly rigorous dilemma. That proposition sums up in 
 their two extreme terms the political opinions under which 
 he fell, innumerable shades of difference being set aside. 
 The views even of some of the level-headed among his 
 enemies inclined to one or other of the two extreme terms. 
 That M. Delcasse had long thriven on the modern equivalent 
 of " Pitt's money " had been, of course, repeated in print
 
 The Fall of Thdophile Delcassd 129 
 
 daily since he took office. Of late the other side said, though 
 it did not actually publish, that he took Russian money 
 over the Baltic Fleet neutrality affair. To estimate how 
 far such pleasing fanciful assertions are believed in by those 
 who make them, and to determine who among the outside 
 public takes them to contain one grain of truth, is a nice 
 study for the assiduous and long-practised student of 
 French life. In the present case the two extreme terms are 
 stated only for the purpose of " clearing the situation," 
 and of planting at least two plain sign-posts in a bewilder- 
 ing maze. As for that, the common French mind, fond of 
 simplicity, is often led to believe in such straightforward 
 propositions as that which accounts for a public man's 
 actions by his having been bribed, precisely because of its 
 love of a good, honest, logical fiction and repugnance for the 
 subtleties and inconsistencies of reality. Hence even the 
 more acute minds in French politics either honestly hanker 
 after such finely simple explanations or disingenuously 
 assume them to approximate the truth, so that their more 
 ingenuous readers or hearers may have "some plain fact to 
 go upon " — plain facts of the kind being generally fables — 
 and that is why the scandalous dilemma mentioned repre- 
 sents the two poles between which the influences which 
 overthrew M. Delcasse oscillate. 
 
 The Nationalists, for whom M. Anatole France found the 
 delicious name of " les Trublions," and whom every enemy 
 of the French people ought to support heartily, branded 
 M. Delcasse as a traitor for abandoning the allied Russian 
 Government in its hour of need. The Radical-Socialists 
 held him up to execration for having truckled to the effete 
 Russian autocracy. Royalists called him stingingly a 
 worthy Minister of the Republic and a worthy colleague in 
 a Cabinet which had torn down the pillars of society and 
 generally " disorganized everything." Socialists denounced 
 
 K
 
 130 The Real France 
 
 him as a worshipper of despotism in his heart who rode 
 rough-shod over the elected representatives of the people. 
 M. Delcasse must still laugh rather bitterly when he reviews 
 it all. The game of contradictions was carried on with the 
 greatest elaborateness. Nationalists for years, of course, 
 called M. Delcasse " Fashoda Delcass6." As he did not get 
 France into, but got her out of, the Fashoda morass, the 
 assumption must be that he ought not to have got her out 
 of it, but to have then stood for war instead of peace. But 
 the greatest grievance against him afterwards was precisely 
 that he did not give in to Germany. When the Franco- 
 Italian understanding was formed, largely through M. 
 Delcasse's policy, little was said by the Nationalists. Later 
 it was discovered to be his worst blunder, because the 
 Triple Alliance was, it seemed, suddenly remembered, and 
 the failure of the late Minister's great political scheme of 
 detaching Italy, as a step towards isolating Germany, was 
 ridiculed. The Anglo-French understanding was first 
 received with mysterious warnings of " We fear the Greeks. 
 . . ." It was afterwards accepted by Nationalist politicians 
 because popular feeling forced them to accept it. Then 
 came the cry, " We told you so. Delcasse gave the sub- 
 stance for the shadow ; worse, gave up comfortable rights 
 in Newfoundland and Egypt (of all places !) for a hornets' 
 nest in Morocco." Had he done the reverse, and allowed 
 Great Britain a free hand in Morocco, one shudders to think 
 what the Nationalist outcry Avould have been. Finally, 
 ever since the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, the 
 fallen Minister had been called upon to " stand loyally by 
 the ally " — how, was never explained — and told daily that 
 the yellow peril threatened French Indo-Chinese posses- 
 sions ; was cursed loudly for " leaving Russia in the lurch," 
 and scorned for truckling to the Rising Sun. One-hundredth 
 part of the patriotic advice given to M. Delcasse would,
 
 The Fall of TMophile Delcassd 131 
 
 if he had followed it, have brought on general war instantly. 
 Bat at last he fell because he was thought to have offended 
 the German Kaiser. So much for Nationalists. 
 
 Radical Republicans, Socialist Radicals, and Socialists 
 pure were not much more self-consistent, apart from the 
 fact of the utter contradiction between their grievances 
 and those of the Nationalists against M. Delcasse. Nearly 
 all the purely Republican party frankly welcomed the 
 understanding with Italy and more particularly that with 
 England. The hostility of the pure Socialists was against 
 " le Delcasse du knout " ; and it grew as Russian defeats 
 accumulated. After Liao-Yang they had no hesitation in 
 branding M. Delcasse as a traitor to his own country for not 
 denouncing the Russian alliance instantly. After the Hull 
 outrage, he was told that he was a Macchiavellian firebrand, 
 burning for war. He was underhandedly fanning the 
 desperate desire of the Russian Government to drag any- 
 body and everybody, and first of all England, into the 
 conflagration. When Japan protested in the question of 
 French neutrality, he was instantly condemned for having 
 slyly and determinedly connived at helping along the halt- 
 ing Baltic fleet. When that fleet was no more, he was asked 
 what his unfairness had served, except a Japanese triumph. 
 All the while he was being held up to opprobrium by all true 
 sons of freedom for having done his best to support the 
 Russian Government against its Russian enemies, the 
 Liberals and Revolutionists, by putting pressure on the 
 French Home Office to increase police supervision by the 
 Surete Generale, acting with the Russian secret police in 
 France, of Russian exiles in Paris. In short, " Delcasse 
 and his little father the Tsar " were throughout coupled 
 together, in thickly humorous satire, at the very time when 
 another party was railing at " Delcasse the Anglomaniac." 
 What sort of a figure France would have cut had she coolly
 
 132 The Real France 
 
 dropped the Franco-Russian alliance in the midst of the 
 war, Socialists never stopped to inquire. Whether her 
 position later would have been a very comfortable one, 
 without the Entente Cordiale, Nationalists never stopped 
 to inquire. 
 
 The Minister continued to reign over the Quai d'Orsay 
 with apparently ever blander serenity. Between the two 
 opposite poles of political opinion the Moderates wobbled as 
 weakly as the Extremists in their attitude towards the awe- 
 inspiring Foreign Secretary. Now pacific penetration into 
 Morocco was an idea worthy of a Richelieu ; now it was 
 fatuous folly. On this point, Socialists only, headed by 
 M. Jaures, were consistent, and opposed M. Delcasse's 
 Moroccan policy. But Nationalists, Royalists, Moderates, 
 even quite steady heads, never could decide whether to call 
 him rash for going too far in the enterprise, or pusillanimous 
 for not going far enough. When all the political influences 
 met and the Minister fell, all agreed to jump on him, each 
 for an essentially different motive. It was an extraordinary 
 and, as already observed, not a pretty sight. 
 
 Was the man's own personality a factor in the strange 
 product ? He had a breakneck fall, but after a giddy rise. 
 The amiable and active journalist, with a serious turn of 
 mind, who had trotted about the lobbies of the Chamber of 
 Deputies, and had been at intervals a conscientious 
 Colonial Secretary, was suddenly called to the helm and, 
 piloting France, weathered the worst storm which had ever 
 threatened her since 1871, for the Schnaebele incident was 
 naught compared with the Fashoda crisis. The history of 
 Fashoda days is so well known that it is almost forgotten, 
 but in an instant, in every mind, the two pictures can be 
 called up and contrasted, of France's position in Europe 
 then, and of her position now. Everyone in Europe knows 
 that the contrast proves what M. Delcasse was worth. None
 
 The Fall of Thdophile Belcassd 133 
 
 knew it better than himself, and he showed that he knew it. 
 His rule over France's foreign policy was Olympian. 
 During four or five years he was a deity in the clouds to the 
 rest of France. There had never been such sovereignty in 
 his country under the Third Republic before. 
 
 Of course at the Quai d'Orsay he was prophet, and few 
 Foreign Secretaries have ever been so devoutly looked up to 
 by la carrier e as this ex- journalist who was not of it, and 
 who had once trotted about the " Hall of Lost Footsteps " 
 at the Chamber. He acquired the diplomatic mind with 
 immediate and brilliant ease. Outwardly he never learnt 
 or attempted to learn the diplomatic manner, and the 
 merest attache could give him points on that score. Out- 
 wardly, also, he always remained simple of bearing, and 
 still reminded one of the " little journalist " who used to 
 buttonhole Messieurs les Deputes in the lobbies and con- 
 verse with them in a grave whisper. But morally and 
 mentally he set an example which the whole carriere 
 felt it safe to admire and to imitate. No one was a more 
 devout and jealous believer in State secrets than he. 
 Diplomacy became a religion to him, and no one was ever 
 more loyal than he to his faith. Trickery he had a gentle- 
 manly objection to, like most really convinced diplomatists. 
 His religion was that of faith in the far-seeing and lofty 
 diplomatic brain which plans policy like a game of chess, 
 but always plays the game. It is no secret that some 
 curious moves of the Russian Foreign Office, generally 
 inspired, if not commanded, by some other office of the 
 infinite bureaux of the Russian Administration, distressed 
 him. Of late he learnt to like having to do with Downing 
 Street, because it does play a good, honest, solemn game. 
 But he insisted on being the independent champion of 
 Fiance at the board. He knew the secrets of State, he 
 must order each move unadvised, not even spoken to. Not
 
 134 The Real France 
 
 one Cabinet Minister, in the five successive Cabinets to 
 which he belonged, was ever allowed more than an out- 
 sider's glimpse into M. Delcasse's mysteries. He treated 
 with Sovereigns like a Sovereign. He was the ideal Great 
 High Diplomatist in the eyes of la carriere. Parliament 
 to him was an article for home consumption only. No one 
 who has not followed foreign policy debates closely in the 
 Chamber and Senate can imagine the hushed awe which 
 fell on either House when M. Delcasse spoke. Again and 
 again a Nationalist or a Socialist made ferocious efforts to 
 " interpellate " him, and succumbed in the religious, 
 paralysing atmosphere which enveloped the Foreign 
 Secretary. Nothing was more delicious than to watch 
 the " interpolator's " bounce and to hear his big words 
 when he had (which was seldom) succeeded in drawing 
 M. Delcasse into accepting a question. The member 
 would walk down from the tribune bursting with pride. 
 Up would walk little, eyeglassed M. Delcasse, and in a plain 
 voice would " make a declaration," often read, always 
 written out beforehand, in which the interpolator's question 
 was severely ignored. A lofty allusion to certain matters 
 of France's foreign policy which it would have been inex- 
 pedient to divulge, a stereotyped patriotic passage, and the 
 House was dumbed, passed meekly to the Order of the Day, 
 and once more consecrated M. Delcasse. When, for the 
 first time in the House, M. Delcasse was actually heckled, 
 in the mildest way, and M. Rouvier had to, or thought he 
 had to, speak after him, it was the beginning of the end. 
 M. Delcasse never forgave M. Rouvier or the House. 
 
 What the general public thought of the great prophet of 
 the Quai d'Orsay was simple enough. The man in the 
 street looked upon M. Delcasse as an Olympian in the 
 clouds utterly beyond his ken. The Foreign Secretary 
 passed through the Dreyfus case, the first Nationalist crisis,
 
 The Fall of TMopMe Delcassd 135 
 
 the sixth or seventh Deroulede affair, the anti-Loubet 
 campaign, the burlesque conspiracy and the High Court 
 trial, and the Church v. State, or State v. Church fever, and 
 preserved his majesty unscathed, his ethereal fastness 
 inviolate. The man in the street saw only what he took 
 to be the tangible results of M. Delcasse's high works, King 
 Edward's visit, King Vittorio Emanuele's visit, and 
 approved. Hardly a word in editorial or in Parliamentary 
 report ever enlightened him as to the inner workings of the 
 Foreign Secretary's policy. 
 
 Then Morocco, and the Kaiser's cruise to Tangier : it was 
 a thunderbolt. England talked of French neutrality in the 
 Far East ; nobody cared a rap about that in France. Placid 
 elderly ladies in their drawing-rooms looked perturbed. 
 " What was thought in political circles of the situation ? 
 Very grave, was it not ? " One hoped the Baltic Fleet 
 would clear out of Kamranh Bay. " Oh, not that — that is 
 a detail. But Morocco — ah, Morocco ! — and the Kaiser ! " 
 The general public in Paris thus thought, and often still 
 thinks, in fearful interjections with shakes of the head. 
 The Kaiser would be delightfully surprised to learn what 
 a great man he is to the Parisian in the street. Under the 
 Linden he is often looked upon as a joke, occasionally grim. 
 On the boulevards he is always taken seriously, as a big, 
 brainy, far-sighted statesman, with frequent flashes of 
 genius. The haste with which M. Delcasse was hounded 
 off because he was considered to have annoyed the Kaiser, 
 the funk — there is no other word for it — inspired by the 
 idea that the Kaiser was annoyed, were not pretty phe- 
 nomena in French psychology. They were due to various 
 distinct mental causes, besides circumstances. The main 
 outside circumstance, of course, was the pricking of the 
 bubble of Russian might. The psychological causes were 
 many and conflicting. Nationalism, a morbid growth of
 
 136 The Real France 
 
 patriotism, was one. The Nationalist burthen was and is 
 that France^has gone to the dogs. She has no army — it 
 has been systematically destroyed ; she has no navy — 
 it has been deliberately ruined ; she has no power, 
 influence, or credit worth speaking of. The average public 
 has so often been told all this that a percentage — say a 
 third — has come to believe it, and to believe that France 
 would be instantly smashed by Germany in an armed 
 conflict. The unprejudiced foreign observer is not at all 
 so sure on the point, nor is, to all appearances, the German 
 Headquarters Staff. In short, anyone wanting to know 
 the lowest opinions held in the world at the present day of 
 French military power must read the French " patriotic ' : 
 press. This kind of patriot will apparently stick at nothing 
 to prove his point. If he be logical, he would rejoice to see 
 France defeated by Germany, because the Nationalist party 
 is at present in opposition. Hence his indecent joy at the 
 downfall of M. Delcasse. Exactly two Nationalist leaders 
 (MM. Paul Deroulede and Marcel Habert) discovered, after 
 the event, that Germany had scored, and tried, vainly, to 
 restrain their partisans' exultation. The only wonder is 
 that the average civilian and the average army officer in 
 France have remained, take them for all in all, cool-headed 
 and sensible. If every French officer joined a " Lay-down- 
 your-arms " Peace Society, he would be hardly more handi- 
 capped in his calling than if he were to yield at last to the 
 persuasions of the party which tells him that, whenever he 
 does fight, he is bound to be beaten. 
 
 The second psychological reason why the French public 
 was thrown off its balance by the mere idea of the German 
 Government's displeasure is almost the exact contradiction 
 of the former. The level-headed Frenchman who thirsts for 
 good, sound, sensible actions in tune with the sound sense 
 which he himself possesses naturally loves peace in the first
 
 The Fall of Thdophile Delcassd 137 
 
 place. But there is a further cause for his objection to a 
 disagreement with Germany. He worships efficiency, and 
 nothing will get out of his head the notion that the Kaiser 
 and German organization incarnate efficiency. For sheer 
 admiration of the Kaiser and of his beneficent, enlightened 
 rule, go not to Russia, where he is laughed at, not to 
 England, not to the German professional and business 
 middle classes, but to France. Seen from the boule- 
 vards, the German railways are perfect, the German 
 Post Office is perfect, German trade is perfectly managed. 
 The army must be an equally perfect organization, 
 and the navy for its size must be the most perfectly 
 organized in the world. Organization : that is the average, 
 level-headed Frenchman's shibboleth, and Germany stands 
 for it. " We have dash, we have brains, we have money, 
 but where is our organization ? " he asks. " We could not 
 stand against German method and system." What he 
 would say of British systems and methods it is impossible 
 to imagine, if he knew them, but he does not. He looks 
 only at British private enterprise and activity and takes 
 them to be the fruits of far-reaching organization. Towards 
 Germany his attitude often works out at much the same 
 thing as that of the Nationalists, of whom he is properly 
 afraid, but it comes from different, almost opposite causes. 
 For he deplores the wild fancies of some patriots among his 
 countrymen as much as anybody. Yet he was as wild as 
 the rest in excommunicating M. Delcasse. That is because 
 he thought he found the late Minister out in a high-flying 
 attempt at " adventurous policy," and of such ho has by 
 now a holy horror. M. Delcasse's unfortunate foible for 
 mystery, and his shrouding himself in a cloudland far above 
 the eye even of Parliament, had something to do with the 
 sudden turning of the average sensible French public round 
 to rend him when he descended from the clouds in a bit of
 
 138 The Real France 
 
 a fix, from which, however, the country might have success- 
 fully extricated him if it had loyally backed him. 
 
 The psychology of the ordinary level-headed Frenchman 
 was the surest pledge that M. Delcasse's fall could not have 
 dragged down with it a single brick of the Entente Cordiale. 
 Wild adventure is exactly what the quietly thrifty, active, 
 workaday majority of his countrymen do not want, and it 
 is the last thing the understanding with Great Britain 
 could bring.
 
 VIII. The Fall and Rise of Georges 
 Clemenceau 
 
 WHEN at last M. Clemenceau became Prime 
 Minister in esse, he had long been Premier in 
 posse already, and one wondered that M. 
 Sarrien would still be speech- making ; nobody 
 marked him. Everyone hung on M. Clemenceau's words 
 and watched for his deeds. M. Clemenceau has that rare 
 gift which if the solidest statesmen lack they never will be 
 called great ; he can always, when he pleases, strike the 
 public imagination, and he pleases often. Whatever he 
 does or says has that one quality : he sends out a circular to 
 the Prefects, the thousand and first which has reached 
 them from the Home Office, and a phrase in it catches the 
 fancy, compelling public attention, though no one outside 
 the Civil Service, and possibly few in it, ever thought of 
 reading a line of the thousand circulars of his predecessors ; 
 he reforms his department, cutting down a few hundred 
 pounds expenses, and everyone admires, though the Home 
 Secretaries who went before might reform and nobody 
 cared ; he has his study at the Place Beauvau Ministry 
 re-upholstered, and the public rejoices to learn that he has 
 done away with heavy hangings, let in sunlight, and had the 
 Gobelins cleaned ; he tours his native province forensically, 
 and his luck lias it that his fellow-countrymen are Chouans, 
 that the tour takes on a picturesqueness of which other 
 statesmen's political raids on rural districts are bare, and 
 that speaking, he a freethinking Republican Vendeen, to 
 
 i39
 
 140 The Real France 
 
 Vendeen Catholics and Royalists, he finds words, honeyed 
 or pungent, on love of country and on love of freedom — 
 freedom spelling in the Vendee faithlessness towards 
 " throne and altar "—which soothe or rankle, stir friendly 
 or hostile passions, but at all events stir something, while 
 other Ministers may make speeches in their native villages, 
 and who minds them ? because neither they nor their 
 surroundings strike the imagination. This doubtless is 
 talent as well as luck in M. Clemenceau, but it is partly luck. 
 Not only has he imagination, but there seems to be imagina- 
 tiveness in the things, circumstances, and events in which 
 he moves. Euck of this sort is a sign of an arresting person- 
 ality. Other Ministers go to Carlsbad, but Paris cares not ; 
 other Ministers may visit German picture galleries in their 
 holidays, but M. Clemenceau, in a tweed suit, with a bag 
 perhaps containing a Baedeker, " doing " the Berlin 
 museums and avoiding Embassy dinners because he brought 
 no dress clothes, interests Parisians, as Waldeck-Rousseau 
 interested them. Other Ministers have had gay pasts, may 
 have lolled in the ballet-girls' green-room at the Opera and 
 have ridden in the Bois of mornings ; have even been 
 Hellenists as well and kept a Plato by their bedside o' 
 nights ; but M. Clemenceau has done or does these things 
 with a peculiar picturesqueness of his own, and they are 
 remembered of him, while other men behave similarly amid 
 general indifference. M. Clemenceau never is indifferent. 
 The first fall of Clemenceau is one of the adventures that 
 made the man. Few public men ever fell as heavily ; 
 none ever recovered from such a fall. In 1908 he was at 
 the top of a public career; fifteen years before 
 he had fallen, like Lucifer— and he was the arch- 
 fiend to the Opportunists. From Panama days, the 
 days of M. Millevoye's ludicrous libel, based on the 
 half-caste Norton's forged evidence of some absurd purchase
 
 Fall and Rise of Georges Clemenceau 141 
 
 of Clemenceau by British Secret Service money, and 
 suggested apparently by the fact of M. Clemenceau's speak- 
 ing English, but the days also of the historic Bournemouth 
 invalid and buyer-up of political consciences, Cornelius 
 Herz, whose hold on him Clemenceau could not deny, and 
 from the final crash at the General Elections in August and 
 September, 1893, when Clemenceau was hounded out of his 
 constituency in the Var by a mob yelling " Oh ! yes," and 
 meaning thus to prove that some mud always sticks — from 
 that fall to this eminence, a wonderful journey was covered, 
 more wonderful because half of it was trodden in dogged 
 retirement, steadily tramped without bluff or advertise- 
 ment. If Clemenceau went down in thunder and lightning, 
 he rose again quietly and without noise. That is one more 
 picturesque touch to his career. Other men, if they rise 
 from a fall, start up again meteorically as they fell ; there 
 are few examples of cast-out politicians coming in again by 
 any other means than a sudden political change. No such 
 abrupt turn of fortune brought Clemenceau in ; he was 
 indeed brought in again hardly by political fortune at all. 
 What public man has ever sought, or having sought carried 
 out, the same method of redemption ? Clemenceau the 
 politician, and purely a politician as far as the public could 
 see, revelling in political intrigue and unsparing in political 
 warfare, draining the cup of political power and enjoying 
 without compunction every benefit, down to the very 
 pickings, which political influence can give, fell, was kicked 
 out of politics savagely, and with what delight only those 
 who knew his opponents remember. I can recall a diplo- 
 matist in a high position, now dead, who had been a faithful 
 henchman of Gambetta, gloating ferociously over Clemen- 
 ceau 's fall, when I met him at the time. There was no pity 
 for the man, as he had had no pity for the statesmen whom 
 he had overturned ; there was no pretence at believing the
 
 142 The Real France 
 
 Norton forgeries, but no shame, if not in using them as a 
 weapon, at least in exulting that they with the Herz scandal 
 had killed the arch-enemy : Clemenceau was down, what 
 mattered it how he went down ? He would not have spared 
 a foe, and he was not spared. The fall of Delcasse was a 
 trifling tumble compared with the crash with which 
 Clemenceau fell. The man himself well measured his fall 
 and must have reflected at once that there could be no 
 climbing up the same path again ; he chose another, having 
 imagination. Clemenceau, the wily, unscrupulous, worldly 
 politician was heard of no more ; two years later Clemen- 
 ceau the philosopher, Pantheist and praiser of life aston- 
 ished a totally different world which had hardly spoken his 
 name before. I have his " la Melee Sociale " and " le grand 
 Pan " (1895), with dedications to me as one of the editors 
 of a delightfully absurd little magazine which existed to 
 praise Life and is long since dead. Such a detail shows the 
 picturesqueness of the man ; conceive the smart politician, 
 hurled from the politician's paradise to the bottomest hell 
 of unpopularity, sitting calmly down to praise the god Pan, 
 and under the symbol of Pan, the very life of this day and 
 this world, to justify the ways of modern life to philo- 
 sophical youth, when modern life had played him so scurvy 
 a trick. It was delightful and it charmed les jeunes of 
 literary Paris who had not abhorred, but, worse, ignored 
 Clemenceau up till then. Surely no damned statesman ever 
 before sought such a path of salvation ; few politicians 
 in France or anywhere are capable of following 
 such a path if they tried. Clemenceau, step by step, 
 clambered his way, and it led him circuitously where 
 he was but yesterday ; after winning les jeunes he forced 
 himself gradually upon the public imagination again, 
 book by book, with leading articles day by day, steadily 
 working from philosophy towards public affairs afresh,
 
 Fall and Rise of Georges Clemenceau 143 
 
 through the Dreyfus case, Church and State, and the 
 Franco- German crisis, and he stood at last in public life 
 again on a higher eminence than he had ever reached 
 before. 
 
 There are (let us not say there were) thus three 
 Clemenceaus, all three picturesque. He was the tom- 
 beur de ministeres, Radical leader, the essence and 
 marrow of a politician, and seemingly nothing else ; he 
 slew Cabinet after Cabinet when he wished ; he had only to 
 say the word and Governments tumbled. Not one stood 
 against him, and he was dreaded and hated more than any 
 other Opposition leader then or now. He joyed in triumph 
 and power insolently. Foes watched him ride by, smart, 
 dapper, quiet, and with the subdued distinguished air, in 
 the Bois of a morning, and ground their teeth to see him 
 nonchalant, careless and easy, a couple of hours before he 
 was due at the Chamber to smash them with a biting, 
 horribly acute speech that picked out all the weak points 
 in their fabrics of policy, summoned with a few happy words 
 a general onslaught, and upset the Cabinet like a house of 
 cards ; then to go off smiling to dinner with a party of stars 
 of the opera ballet and to the Foyer de la Danse afterwards, 
 there to entertain the ladies with stories of the light side of 
 politics. No wonder he was hated ; he might have been 
 forgiven his successes in the Chamber, not his successes in 
 green-rooms ; he had " the chic," what Lavedan has called 
 " the manner," and Cabinet Ministers had it not. That was 
 the first of the three Clemenceaus. 
 
 The second vanished from public sight totally for a time, 
 gave up politics, green-rooms and riding, returned quietly 
 to his retreat in a countrified part of Paris and to his Greek. 
 The political world said he was morally dead, the literary 
 world discovered him as a strangely strong and direct 
 stylist, and the public slowly learnt to look to Clemenceau
 
 144 The Real France 
 
 the leader writer after hearing wonders of Clemenceau the 
 thrower of Cabinets. He had conquered young literary- 
 Paris, then, in the middle of the nineties, waking up to a 
 Whitmanish worship of modern life, which partly meant 
 that it was learning, as it has since learnt very well, to be 
 practical after the idealism of the years before. But young 
 literary Paris was little to him, and he passed on, had to 
 pass on, to reconquer the great and big public that makes 
 quick reputations for elderly men in a hurry. His paper, 
 La Justice, after support from Cornelius Herz, had died in 
 painful throes. The Aurore rose, and a few days after its 
 rising began the " Dreyfus is innocent ! " campaign. Jaures 
 led the speech-making tours with the three words for a 
 war-cry. But Clemenceau was one of the first to start the 
 campaign in print, and he kept it up with a pertinacity, a 
 variety and a freshness which astound anyone who knows 
 what daily writing is. There are no Saturdays for French 
 daily journalists ; Clemenceau continued the campaign 
 without a break for, I think, something like two years, and 
 his last leader was as strong as the first. By this time he 
 was a public man again. The Franco-German crisis of 1905 
 crowned him. He was — who was not ? — one of those who 
 trampled on Delcasse, but he trod on the Kaiser's toes also. 
 M. Jaures strove and sweated and split straws to prove that 
 if Germany was wrong France was not altogether right, and 
 that if there were six words to say for France over Morocco 
 Germany had half a dozen to say on her side. M. Clemen- 
 ceau bluntly plumped for patriotism, recalled 1870-1, and 
 " bucked up " France. His influence was the strongest 
 reagent upon the sudden funk of the country in the summer 
 of 1905, and summoned a rather tardy, but still timely, 
 front of confidence. Thence dated his great war with Jaures. 
 Thenceforward he was once more a political leader ; he had 
 been elected a Senator of the Var, which had before thrown
 
 Fall and Rise of Georges Clemenceau 145 
 
 him out of the Chamber where he had long sat as its 
 Deputy. A few more passages of arms against the " anti- 
 patriotism " propaganda — with which M. Jaures coyly 
 plays, now taking it up, now letting it drop — and M. 
 Clemenceau was ripe for office ; ripe at last after many 
 years, for the thrower of Cabinets had never before even 
 been offered Cabinet rank. 
 
 It was only fair that the Bloc should bring the third 
 Clemenceau to power, since the first Clemenceau had in- 
 vented the name, years before the thing and many of the 
 men — M. Combes, for instance — had been thought of by the 
 public mind. On the withdrawal from the Comedie 
 Francaise, by Government order, after one performance, 
 of M. Sardou's Thermidor, never since played in Paris, 
 Clemenceau in the Chamber exclaimed that the Bloc of the 
 men who made the First Revolution, from first to last, was 
 intangible, and that the Third Republic was not to dis- 
 criminate between this man and that, nor to accept the 
 inheritance of one party and reject that of another ; the 
 First Revolution must be taken as a whole Bloc or not at all. 
 The word had a strange fortune, remaining " in the air " 
 for years, till caught by the alliance of Republicans against 
 Church and Reaction which grew out of the Dreyfus case. 
 Like Gambetta, Clemenceau has been one of the few public 
 men whose phrases have stuck ; others coin watchwords 
 by the score and nobody remembers them. 
 
 In his first years of office the third Clemenceau was as 
 picturesque as the earlier two. If, in fact, one were asked 
 to find one salient quality in his administration, it Mould 
 be difficult to find another than picturesqueness. He was 
 neither consistent — indeed, cheerfully inconsistent — nor 
 remarkably politic, nor particularly strong ; but he began 
 by being picturesque. Taking office on March 14th, 190G, 
 four days after the Courrieres catastrophe, he was plunged 
 h
 
 146 Tlie Real France 
 
 at once into events which might have dismayed another, 
 not him. At Lens in the midst of strikers whom incredibly 
 callous employers had, by behaviour suggesting almost 
 malice prepense, driven from grief to anger, he abruptly cut 
 adrift from Prefect, Mayor, Deputy, General commanding 
 troops, and sought a barbarously decorated dancing-hall 
 through a smelly passage behind a dirty taproom, to talk 
 to the possibly revolutionist and certainly unconciliating 
 leaders of the extreme wing of the miners, and to tell them 
 that they must learn to deserve freedom. The thin, grey 
 Minister with the sharp eyes and heavy moustache, in plain 
 suit and bowler, stood in the crowd of loud and rough men 
 and louder and rougher women, with clouds of tobacco 
 smoke and a faint smell of mawkish beer rolling over them, 
 and when he could be heard, talked to them of the responsi- 
 bilities of liberty. That was just like Clemenceau. Little 
 came of it all, the terrible and mild little Broutchoux, 
 supposed to be the ringleader of the Red Syndicate, was run 
 in for pushing two gendarmes, literally carted away at dead 
 of night, and shut up for six months. Strikes spread, 
 strikers broke windows, an army of troops was poured into 
 the district, M. Clemenceau washed his hands of it all, a 
 lieutenant was thrown from his horse in a scrimmage on to 
 a stone pavement and killed, and M. Clemenceau was called 
 a criminal by some Conservatives for not having had 
 strikers shot down, and a tyrant by some Socialists for 
 having sent troops to the mines at all. He did not care a 
 rap what he was called and that also was like Clemenceau. 
 He had tired of all the strike business, and thenceforth let 
 his Prefect and the troops manage it among them, though 
 moderating their zeal now and then. Of course the strike 
 died down and the strikers went back to the mines, having 
 gained nothing at all. M. Clemenceau had slipped out of 
 the whole business with eel-like dexterity. But he had had
 
 Fall and Rise of Georges Clemenceau 147 
 
 his chance of a picturesque touch at the start. In one great 
 1st of May hoax, M. Clemenceau was cheerily inconsistent, 
 and outwardly at least impolitic and. weak ; he allowed the 
 Prefect of police to play into the hands of the scaremongers 
 and to help them to befool Paris as Paris never was befooled 
 before. Presumably all the time the Minister had his tongue 
 in his cheek and thought that if Paris chose to make a fool of 
 itself he would let it ; anyhow, the Prefect could be held 
 responsible. The Minister merely created a diversion at 
 which he must have chuckled to himself, by having private 
 houses searched, without warrants, in the absence of the 
 tenants, to obtain evidence of a combined Royalist and 
 Anarchist plot, to which nobody ever after heard even a 
 reference made, the whole counterhoax having been dropped 
 with astounding coolness. M. Clemenceau 's total unscrupu- 
 lousness in politics is one of his charms ; a few weeks before 
 taking office he had himself brought in a Bill, which long lay 
 before the Senate, teeming with fine protections for indivi- 
 dual liberty, in particular against domiciliary police visits. 
 M. Clemenceau never blundered by attempting self- justifica- 
 tion, but let the matter drop as quickly and quietly as 
 possible, and continued to be picturesque in other ways. 
 His great tournament at the rostrum with Jaures was a 
 stroke of genius. Who won, is neither here nor there, but 
 the mere fact of a Home Secretary utterly ignoring his 
 Prime Minister and delivering what was a philosophical 
 thesis on Individualism, varied by side hits at practical and 
 personal questions, was interesting : anti-Socialist opinion 
 in the country joyed, and loved Clemenceau for a week. 
 Other Ministers have answered the usual Jaures " interpella- 
 tions," but their answers have not lived more than a sitting 
 of the House. M. Clemenceau saw the moment's oppor- 
 tunity and took it, to strike the public imagination. Of 
 course, he struck forcibly and with those keen thrusts that
 
 148 The Real France 
 
 make an adversary wince. But other speakers are as 
 eloquent as he ; he had the cleverness, or the successful 
 audacity, to leap immediate issues, on which other Ministers 
 would have dwelt, and to aim directly at wider and higher 
 range, because he felt that at the moment public opinion 
 would answer the appeal. Public opinion certainly did not 
 resist him. The Home Secretary grew steadily larger in the 
 public eye than the Premier ; even at Carlsbad he went on 
 growing. 
 
 While M. Clemenceau was away, M. Briand, then 
 Minister of Public Instruction and Public Worship, was 
 given something of a chance by the Encyclical Gravissimo 
 officii munere, and took it with a zest, positively insisting 
 on being " interviewed " right and left. But M. Clemenceau 
 came back jauntily via German art galleries, and M. 
 Briand soon afterwards said, " I will not speak another 
 word on Church and State." M. Clemenceau, for plain 
 reasons, said few words on the question, because neither 
 he nor anyone else really and exactly knew what was 
 to come of it, but he uttered one phrase that has stuck, 
 while none of M. Briand's have, turning on a picturesque 
 ablative absolute. " Me minister, not a church in 
 France shall be closed." The " me minister " was just like 
 Clemenceau. 
 
 One last picture of the man : the renegade Vendeen, 
 come back to his native Vendee, Minister in a Government 
 against which the Pope declared war, and himself one whose 
 deadly, clear-headed reason did more to bring about Dis- 
 establishment than the passions of unphilosophical atheists, 
 speaking among the Chouans, descendants of the " Blancs," 
 himself grandson of a " Bleu " ; the renegade Vendeen 
 painting in charming words to the faithful, who have clung 
 to the soil as to the faiths of their country, the cornfields 
 and soft skies and green marshes of their own Vendee, and
 
 Fall and Rise of Georges Clemenceau 149 
 
 the lover of those marshes, skies, and fields then breaking 
 away to talk the blasphemous gospel of freedom, freedom 
 from their old faiths, and to tell them with cruel kindliness 
 that in time they also will learn what he has learnt — free 
 thought ; old Chouans shaking hands with him for the sake 
 of the Vendee, pious old Vendeennes bringing flowers to the 
 impious son, because he is a son of their soil : picturesque 
 moments which M. Clemenceau must have enjoyed as an 
 artist. 
 
 " You can always tell an article of Jaures' because 
 every verb is in the future tense." M. Clemenceau 
 is always in the present. He is nothing if not a 
 realist. Theories, scruples, policy are thrown to the 
 winds for one interesting fact ; he may be suspected of 
 finding each moment in his own life the most interesting 
 fact going. Possibly he is picturesque not because he tries 
 to be, but because, an artist of life, to his own self at least 
 he is true. He has been Premier — and while he was, we 
 thought, perhaps we hoped : "He will be dropping 
 politics suddenly to dive into his Odyssey again, or 
 running off to have a look once more at the Parthenon, 
 because for the moment he felt that way." Did not the 
 man seem to be pictured in two most characteristic Clemen 
 calisms, heard in his Var constituency on October 
 14th, 1906 ? " The function of public men is secon- 
 dary, and is merely to construe into acts more or less well 
 adapted to the general state of minds social truths brought 
 
 by thinkers out of the chaos of human motions 
 
 A stick floating on water, a Minister is nothing at all, I 
 can tell you, or next to nothing .... You can never 
 thank us too much that we do not more harm than we 
 do." 
 
 Alas, he did not drop politics, they dropped him ; it was 
 not because " he felt that way " that he went the way of all
 
 150 The Real France 
 
 Prime Ministers ; he did not remember that a Minister 
 is " a stick floating on water," and he thought that he 
 alone of all Prime Ministers was an institution ; he did 
 not trip out, he blundered out : for once he was not 
 picturesque.
 
 IX. The Second Fall of Georges 
 Clemenceau 
 
 THOSE who admired the fall and rise of M. Clemen- 
 ceau were disappointed by his second fall. We 
 knew that he would not fall in a great cause, and 
 we were glad that he did not fall in any such 
 sham great one as might very well have overthrown a man 
 of his brains. But we had hoped he would fall with intelli- 
 gence and picturesqueness. He should have thrown 
 himself with a quip, and a knife thrust at men of middle 
 sense, sneering, "You don't understand. I have thought 
 down to your level all this while. Now I leave you. Good- 
 bye. Chew the cud well." Or he could have walked out 
 because he had enough of it : "I have made myself a 
 motley to the view. I am tired of playing it. Find another 
 clown." In fact, we had pictured for M. Clemenceau a 
 telling exit and a good curtain. He should not have lamely 
 slipped, the man who rose as he did : the strong man of 
 opposition, who threw Cabinet after Cabinet with his little 
 finger, thrown himself by stupid calumny, — stupider 
 because it invented where it might have found some truth 
 to go upon, but not less deadly for that, — pelted with 
 rotten eggs and politically killed ; then, not bounding on 
 some similar popular wave, but working with brain and 
 will up again ; forcing himself steadily upon thinking men, 
 who had ignored Clemenceau the Cabinet killer, but awoke 
 delighted to the fresh Clemenceau ; proving amazingly 
 
 151
 
 152 The Real France 
 
 in a book or two that, all the while he had been making 
 politics and living on the boulevards, he had thought also ; 
 thus coming back to popularity through the brains of the 
 nation, a rare return; and at last, after his marvellous 
 Dreyfus campaign, and a brilliant outburst of patriotism 
 when France having kicked out Delcasse most needed 
 consolation, coming to power borne up as well by the men 
 who think as by those who vote : a fall and a rise perhaps 
 unprecedented, a fine drama. 
 
 As it was, he slipped — because he slipped. He thought 
 his foot was sure, and he tumbled when he least expected 
 it. Had he run for a fall we would have cheered him ; had 
 he invited a throw from that other well-flung French 
 politician, M. Delcasse, there would have been sport in the 
 wrestle, and he would have fallen game. But what was so 
 flat in it all was that he never at all meant it. 
 
 This time his eye for human drama seems for once to 
 have failed him ; he did not see that together Delcasse 
 and he — he at the height after such a rise, Delcasse rising 
 from what a fall ! — were a fact of life worth all the reforms 
 which his Administration never brought off — he of all men 
 born to feel such picturesqueness : Delcasse facing Clemen- 
 ceau, the one hoisting himself up from the pit into which 
 a country in a funk had flung him, the other at the top, 
 having pulled himself up thither from an abyss of popular 
 spite. 
 
 He never saw it at all. He took M. Delcasse merely for 
 the little, eye-glassed, persistent, voraciously ambitious, 
 narrowly intelligent man he is, and never understood him 
 to be, not a man at all, a little keen ferret of a man, but a 
 symbol and a great sign. Of all men, one thought M. 
 Clemenceau would have understood. But he went for 
 M. Delcasse as if he had been merely the burrowing quiet 
 schemer of a rival which he of course was, and not feeling
 
 The Second Fall of Georges Clemenceau 153 
 
 that he was more, that he is almost a nonentity, but 
 wrapped in tragedy, that his name stands, not for himself, 
 but for a moment of French history. A Carlyle should 
 brush and slash out the picture of that moment and the 
 portrait of M. Delcasse who exists only because of it. 
 
 M. Clemenceau 's imagination for once was dull, and he 
 answered merely the man Monsieur Delcasse. He an- 
 swered him, and drew the tragedy about his ears. He 
 thought only of his patient rival who had slowly wormed 
 his way up through a long standing Naval Reform Com- 
 mitte with a heavy task before it, and had come out at last 
 on top, peering down upon the Government benches from 
 the tribune and from the perch of a critic crowing over 
 the writhing body of Admiralty red tape, long since 
 unanimously condemned to death however hard to kill. 
 He only lost his temper to see the man whom he knew to 
 have been long stealthily dogging him, to catch him 
 tripping and to step into his shoes, championing unfairly 
 against him a cause which he could have just as fairly 
 championed himself — but did he always in his wrestling 
 days throw Cabinets by fair means ? — and playing the 
 disingenuous game of party politics — which he himself had 
 played so often and with such skilful disingenuousness. 
 He was annoyed to see a lesser man climb vindictively and 
 ravenously up to liim, and he thought to tweak him down 
 with a snap of the fingers, then kill him with one thrust 
 He forgot how much Delcasse meant as a sign, though 
 meaning little by himself, and his imagination suddenly 
 failed to see himself and Delcasse as others saw them. 
 The picture flamed up before the House, there was an 
 instant of tragedy, and the essence of the tragedy was 
 that Clemenceau seemed blind as a wall to it. Delcasse, 
 hounded out of the Foreign Office which had almost become 
 his property in the summer of 1905 and kicked as he lay
 
 154 The Real France 
 
 by every politician running by and away from the German 
 boot, now after long patient inch-by-inch climbing almost 
 up again and against Clemenceau, face to face ; Clemenceau 
 at an insolent height of power reached after a longer and 
 rockier climb from an earlier headlong flinging in a shower 
 of curses and charges of corruption that crush a man like 
 stones, now facing Delcasse's long-planned front attack, 
 but parrying it wildly, as if he remembered nothing and 
 had nothing learnt. The past of the two men was in every 
 mind and made the duel tragic, but Clemenceau understood 
 nothing, saw nothing that went on in other minds. His 
 own past he might have forgotten, and yet carried the day ; 
 Delcasse's should have haunted him as it haunted the 
 House and haunts every reflecting Frenchman. Facing 
 Delcasse he should have pinched himself every moment 
 and said, " Let me not forget what this man stands for, let 
 me not touch upon it more heavily than upon a live coal, 
 there is fire in this." He walked straight at the bars and 
 seemed surprised because he burnt himself. The House 
 watched him going with amazement. " Does not the man 
 understand ? " it thought. "Does not he feel how the whole 
 old bitter history is tasting stale and more bitter in our 
 mouths and will turn us up ? Does not he see himself and 
 what he is doing as we do ? Of all men he should have read 
 us with a look, should have imagined the tragedy of such 
 a moment before it happened. But he goes blundering on 
 —he, Clemenceau, blundering like a boor— and he does not 
 see that the instinct is rising in us and that in five seconds 
 we shall start up and rend him." He saw nothing, and see- 
 ing but the man Delcasse used against the latter 's ambi- 
 tions a weapon of which in a saner moment he would have 
 felt, because of the thing the name Delcasse stood for, the 
 deadly double edge. " This man wants my place. Why 
 should he have it ? He humbled France, I did not." It
 
 The Second Fall of Georges Clemenceau 155 
 
 was not much more than that, but enough. It was enough 
 to kill Clemenceau. The fall of M. Delcasse ! Did Clemen- 
 ceau really not understand ? Had he then really never 
 understood ? He had not been the worst at kicking 
 Delcasse, but the worst kick then was not quite as bad as 
 this kick at his country four years after. 
 
 II 
 
 Did three years of office spoil M. Clemenceau's imagina- 
 tion ? His administration achieved probably no more 
 than any other administration, but few do ; it was reviled 
 perhaps more than any other administration, still many 
 others run it close ; the most serious thing is that it was 
 often inartistic. Though it deserves the credit of having 
 smoothed over the first years of Disestablishment which 
 were to have rent and ruined France and have left her as 
 whole and as alive, and the Church as powerful, as ever, 
 it brought in no great reform, but to do that is a rare 
 privilege of Governments. It was hated honestly as well as 
 dishonestly by many enemies, but these, according to rule, 
 alternately attacked it for being " reactionary " or de- 
 nounced it for " Anarchism," or joined, which is also in the 
 rules of the game, in cursing it for having done the things 
 which they would have done had they been in power. The 
 really grievous thing is that M. Clemenceau's Government 
 was not always as picturesque as it might have been. He 
 began freshly enough as Home Secretary : he rushed down 
 to the black country to parley with supposed Anarchists 
 held to be exceedingly dangerous, after the Courrieres 
 catastrophe ; as an effective opening to a Parliamentary 
 session, he took M. Jaures by the horns, and instead of 
 dodging him, as had every other statesman in office, gave
 
 156 The Real France 
 
 him back for one of his torrent-like apologies of Socialism 
 and the City of the Future, a ruthlessly critical justification 
 of the Present and of Individualism, raising Parliamentary 
 debates to a level seldom reached ; he crystallized Dis- 
 establishment and the quarrels of Church and State with 
 one another in a phrase which in the popular mind summed 
 up for ever the whole question, for that " Me minister " 
 will have to be applied to himself by each of M. Clemenceau's 
 successors. The picturesqueness of that Clemenceau seems 
 now to belong to a time when he was much more than three 
 or four years younger. He was seldom again as pictur- 
 esque. He discovered four or five Royalist or Anarchist or 
 Popish plots, and a month after each was forgotten could 
 not have told you himself which charge of sedition had 
 fitted which plot, all having been dropped with calm un- 
 concern ; he expelled at one moment right and left, the 
 semi-official Papal Nuncio, for instance, Monsignore 
 Montagnini, whose conspiring never seems to have gone 
 beyond eating good dinners with Royalist ladies who look 
 confidently to the Vatican to bring the d'Orleans back 
 to France, or to the d'Orleans to reinstate the Pope in 
 Rome. In half a dozen labour agitations he contradicted 
 his own principles as a man, contradicted his own policy as 
 Premier, and complicated his contradictions by erratic 
 returns to principles and policies which he had just before 
 stultified. He pandered to revolution scares so unblush- 
 ingly that one wondered for whom he was working. Did he 
 fill Paris, empty of Revolutionists, with horse and artillery, 
 and turn the town into an armed camp, to persuade the 
 bourgeoisie that the bogey was real and that he was the 
 strong man needed to save France ? Did he exaggerate 
 the social peril and the power of those who caused it, to 
 play into their hands, that he might eventually find 
 support from them, if the bourgeoisie should definitely
 
 The Second Fall of Georges Clemenceau 157 
 
 drop him to go over to Reaction ? Did he come out armed 
 to the teeth against anti-Parliamentary Socialism, now 
 dragging the Unified Socialism of Parliament in its train, 
 to let the Socialist parties see that though they might very 
 well find it to their advantage to treat with him, it was 
 certainly not going to pay them to split with him ? " You 
 don't know what you lose [perhaps his message was meant 
 to run] by not being nice with me. As it is, I am going to 
 smash your open-air meetings and processions (freedom 
 for which I always of course advocated vehemently before 
 I took office) much more shortly and sharply than any of 
 my predecessors did. See if I don't." And he did. The 
 only discernible principle of the Clemenceau policy in 
 labour agitation was to let it have its head, if not whip it 
 up, until it kicked the shafts to pieces, then to pull it in 
 viciously and thrash it. No other rule of government 
 appeared in M. Clemenceau's handling of the agitation 
 which produced riots at Draveil Vigneux and Villeneuve 
 St. Georges in June and July, 1908, and after which he 
 had the leaders of the C.G.T. arrested on charges of con- 
 spiracy, dropped later, as usual, and forgotten, and of the 
 two postal strikes of March and May, 1909, his treatment 
 of which was particularly typical. In March, bland laissez- 
 faire ; in May, when everybody knew that the strike was 
 a foregone failure, a tremendous clenched-fist policy and 
 a facile victory. In May the hopelessness of the strike 
 and the certainty of Government victory was so obvious 
 that the particular set of Paris politicians which is more 
 observant than active and which delights in interpreting 
 in terms of dark Machiavellism the perhaps simpler events 
 unfolded before them, swore that Clemenceau had himself 
 set up the strike to knock it down. At least it is quite 
 possible that he did nothing to stop the second agitation in 
 the beginning, knowing that it could be but a house of cards
 
 158 The Real France 
 
 which he could triumphantly kick over, with great glory 
 and no damage to himself. 
 
 As early as in the drama of wine and politics, during the 
 first twelve months of his administration, in the spring of 
 1907, he seemed to have shaped to his own satisfaction his 
 policy of alternate laxity and violence. Yet he seized one 
 dramatic opportunity like an artist. Marcelin Albert, the 
 lean and feverish prophet of the rebellious south, for whom 
 a hundred thousand peasants would have given their lives, 
 slipped up to Paris by the night train and walked in the 
 morning from the Gare d'Orsay to the Ministry of the 
 Interior. Another Home Secretary and Prime Minister 
 might have weighed pros and cons. M. Clemenceau had 
 him shown in, and Premier and Prophet remained closeted 
 an hour. That was like the old Clemenceau, thirsting for 
 realities and real men. One pictured the sallow, bright- eyed 
 Prime Minister looking into the vague, fixed eyes of the 
 Prophet, to find what the elements were of a man who, 
 raw and untaught, led thousands of men. It was also like 
 Clemenceau to ask Marcelin Albert how his purse stood 
 and to lend him a hundred francs. Poor, candid, innocent 
 Prophet Marcelin took the £4. One thought then of the 
 bright, knowing eyes looking into the Prophet's innocent 
 face, and as they looked, gleaming to know he was ruined 
 with those who would have died for him. £4 from 
 Clemenceau ! It was cruel — but it was picturesque. It 
 was fair after all ; never let us quarrel with the statesman 
 who, finding the chance, takes it, even inhumanly.
 
 The Second Fall of Georges Clemenceau 159 
 
 in 
 
 " We are in incoherency," said M. Clemenceau in 
 the early months of his administration, during a debate 
 on Church and State, vexing M. Briand thereby nearly 
 into resigning, and the phrase stuck. Perhaps M. 
 Clemenceau prophetically judged his own administra- 
 tion. His administration could scarcely be called an 
 Administration at all. In all respects but one it was 
 a great game, which by the chief players was tremen- 
 dously enjoyed, perhaps only moderately by the others. 
 M. Clemenceau in power cared for only two things, and one 
 was power. That was no great originality in him, but the 
 size of his appetite and the means by which he gratified 
 it were almost new and remarkable. During his adminis- 
 stration, it was his deliberate purpose and consistent 
 practice to take no interest whatever in any but two 
 departments of his Cabinet, the Home and Foreign Offices, 
 and to give heed to the former solely in so far as he could 
 feed his love of power upon it. Not only did he profess 
 cheery ignorance of Finance, Law, Public Works, Agri- 
 culture, but in Home politics he cared for the means, not 
 the end, for the methods, not the politics : it was no 
 internal policy, but a Home ferule that amused him. The 
 twenty years' champion, before he took office, of de- 
 centralized government and of autonomous authorities 
 within a State weakened at the head but organically 
 stronger, he derived his utmost satisfaction during his three 
 years and four months' tenure of the Home Office and two 
 years and nine months of Premiership from the determined 
 reinforcement of central command at the expense of the 
 body politic. No other Minister ever ruled the Ministry of 
 the Interior with such an iron hand, and none ever drew so
 
 160 The Real France 
 
 tightly the marvellous network of administrative control 
 through Prefects and Sub-Prefects invented by Napoleon. 
 No other country in the world possesses such complete 
 and finished, such flexible and strong machinery of State 
 domination, and M. Clemenceau used it for all it is safely 
 worth. In spite of centralized Government, France has 
 considerable habits of freedom, and the machinery of 
 despotism may not be worked in its full power without risk 
 from the temper of the country. It would be an ideal 
 instrument for the German Empire, where it could be made 
 the most of. M. Clemenceau in France could not use it to 
 the utmost, but he sailed very near the wind. Prefects, 
 each of whom is in practice governor of his Department, 
 little hampered by the Council General, which " emits 
 wishes," are appointed directly by and answerable only 
 to the Home Office ; they are so many — 82 — fingers of 
 one hand, the Ministry of the Interior. They are in- 
 vulnerable to direct public censure or pressure, and the only 
 method by which the nation can take action against a 
 Prefect backed by his Minister is by a vote of censure 
 upon the Cabinet in Parliament. Their power is even 
 more practical than theoretical. With wide - spreading 
 legal authority, reaching through the Sub- Prefects and 
 battalions of minor officials down even to some of the 
 smallest details of borough and village life, they unite 
 overwhelming political influence, being the very ears of the 
 Minister, through which alone he listens to what the nation 
 is supposed to be saying and thinking, in each town and 
 hamlet, trusting only them and on principle never heeding 
 other informants ; not least, in a country where social 
 custom counts for much more than the shifting surface of 
 fleeting legal forms, they enjoy great social prestige every- 
 where, except in small knots of irreducible Royalists, who 
 of course scoff at the Prefect not at all because he is a
 
 The Second Fall of Georges Clemenceau 161 
 
 Prefect, but because he is a Prefect of the Republic, and 
 who would outdo all others in bowing to him, were he a 
 Prefect of a Monarchical or Imperial Government. The 
 rooted strength of Napoleon's machinery of centralized 
 government has no exact equivalent in any other 
 country. M. Clemenceau 's handling of the instrument was 
 masterly. 
 
 It may easily be imagined what can be made of the 
 Prefectoral system by an overriding Minister of the 
 Interior. A timid one may be the tool of his Prefects ; M. 
 Clemenceau 's Prefects were blind, dumb, and deaf tools 
 in his hands. While he lorded it over his Cabinet, shutting 
 this and that colleague up, deriding them in public and 
 stinging them with insolent sallies, like the nickname, 
 " calf in a china shop," which he adapted from the anglic- 
 ism for an Under-Secretary of State whom it happened 
 to fit rather well, he cowed his battalions of the Interior. 
 A Prefect used to playing his own game in his chief town 
 soon lost that habit. M. Clemenceau would telephone him 
 up to Paris by the night express, and after a ten minutes' 
 talking to, send him down back by the next day one. No 
 Prefect, or even Sub-Prefect, for he would often deal 
 directly with subordinates, knew a day's or night's peace 
 under M. Clemenceau. He might always be at one 
 end of the telephone wire, and they were expected 
 always to be at the other. The Prefectoral system 
 was a machine of which he pulled every separate 
 wire immediately from his study. But he not only 
 worked the machine, he also depended upon it. The 
 former champion of fair and free play, he slid into 
 the practice of a cramped and onesided scrutiny of 
 the nation. He made the common mistake of French 
 statesmen in office, into which it was extraordinary that 
 he should fall, and into which he fell more thoroughly 
 
 M
 
 162 The Real France 
 
 than any of his predecessors, of drawing a fence round 
 officialdom and building " functionarism " into a fortress 
 from which he surveyed the nation. That peculiarly 
 French policy of Government, which he, who had always 
 in theory leant to the other extreme of British laissez alter, 
 brought to perfection, holds civil servants to be, not 
 functions in an organized nation, but the only organs in an 
 indefinite inorganic national mass, and rules by dividing 
 the one from the other. M. Clemenceau carried to an 
 extreme this method of government by division ; after 
 spasmodic endeavours to get into touch with the nation, 
 he gave up the attempt and fortified himself in his Home 
 Office, with his spider's web of telephone threads having a 
 Prefect at every end. Such a policy of aloofness seems 
 amazing ; it is still more remarkable that M. Clemenceau 
 should have so thoroughly carried it out. After a few 
 months of office he ceased to know France except through 
 his official feelers. In a dozen circumstances, he trusted 
 only to his telephone wires to know the spirit of the nation, 
 he hung upon the receiver, asked, what does Bordeaux ? 
 what does Lyons ? what does Lille think ? and took a 
 shivering Prefect's report for gospel. One can imagine 
 how impartially a Prefect would report to a martinet- 
 Minister. One of M. Clemenceau's achievements in office 
 was to perfect within the State a State trained in perpetual 
 antagonism towards the larger State, for the greater glory 
 of the junta ruling the whole. M. Clemenceau's administra- 
 tion at home was a game he played for its own sake. The 
 wire-pulling of his eighty-two puppets in Prefectures and 
 some four hundred in sub- Prefectures was perhaps his chief 
 amusement. He cannot himself have honestly supposed 
 that not to take the trouble when he came to power of 
 elaborating any other method of government than a 
 brazen exaggeration of the very system which he had
 
 The Second Fall of Georges Clemenceau 163 
 
 always been the first to condemn out of office was serious 
 statesmanship. 
 
 IV 
 
 Yet he did not always and entirely make a game of 
 government. The Place Beauvau and its telephone wires 
 with a Prefect dangling at every far end were his pastime ; 
 the Quai d'Orsay just across the Seine was perhaps the only 
 place of Government which he took seriously. Contradic- 
 tory, hedging, time-serving, giving the lie to his own 
 professions, he yet was not always incoherent. In Novem- 
 ber, 1908, Germany suddenly demanded an apology for the 
 Casablanca affray of two months before. M. Clemenceau 's 
 Government answered that it would give no apology. Very 
 well, said Germany, then we won't ask for one any more. 
 That was all, but it was a great deal. When Kaiser 
 Wilhelm landed at Tangier on the last day of March, 1905, 
 he said, Dismiss Delcasse, and dismissed Delcass6 was in 
 June. In November, 1908, France retrieved June, 1905, 
 and at her retrieval it was Clemenceau who spoke for her. 
 That is a thing that speaks for Clemenceau. In November, 
 1908, he had all France behind him, but he also stood for 
 France. He was indeed, though not in his usual way, 
 picturesque then ; he was quite quiet and unepigrammatic, 
 he merely was the spokesman of his country, and his 
 country and he knew it. France hereafter will forgive him 
 much incoherence for that moment of simplicity. It seems 
 the more astonishing that he should have fallen dully, 
 because facing Delcasse who was sacrificed in 1905, he 
 through whom in 1908 France retrieved 1905 did not under- 
 stand what he and Delcass6 meant, and that the scapegoat 
 of humiliation should have been sacred to him, the instru-
 
 164 TJie Real France 
 
 ment of redemption. But a blindness of the twelfth hour 
 should not wipe out the clear and true-sightedness of the 
 eleventh. The Clemenceau administration, if it be 
 remembered, will be known as that which governed France 
 in November, 1908.
 
 X. In the Black Country : Courrieres 
 
 EVERYTHING seemed dumb and without colour 
 in that tragic country when I reached it after the 
 disaster, not a sound anywhere, and everything 
 drab. Lens stretched its rows of dull brick houses. 
 Its Grand' Place tried to be Flemish round the ugliest 
 imitation Renaissance church ever built. The black, bleak 
 waste of the Place de la Bepublique spread out endlessly 
 from a line of gloomy houses to a coalblack canal. Then, 
 the drive through the mining villages, all of dirty red brick 
 cottages built on exactly the same plan, with their only 
 saving grace in tiny gardens which had not long ago been 
 trimmed and weeded. All the " corons," as the miners' 
 villages are called, are a dirty brown under the leaden sky, 
 and all are silent. Through Sallaumines, Mericourt, and 
 Billy-Montigny, past pits four, three, and two, at the bottom 
 of which the dead lie in heaps, and still the same horrible 
 silence. Black crosses — two sticks roughly nailed one to 
 the other and daubed with pitch — hang on every other 
 house. Here and there a door is ajar, and one sees women 
 in bare rooms rocking themselves slowly from side to side, 
 without a sound. Children in black whisper among them- 
 selves. Then, at the end of the most depressing drive 
 anyone ever took, the pit-yard and the charnel-house. This 
 sight is too horrible to be touching. The survivors peer 
 carefully at indescribably distorted bodies. There is hardly 
 a cry, even when a boy finds his father dead, a woman her 
 man. The bodies in deal coffins lie in a shed. Everything 
 is mean and grim, and still horribly .silent. Only now and 
 
 165
 
 166 The Real France 
 
 then a shriek splits the deadly silence, and one almost 
 welcomes it. A rough, uncouth woman's grief has burst 
 suddenly out into a frenzy, and she has to be torn away, 
 clinging like an infuriated beast to her dead young. Then 
 silence again, and back through the village, dead and 
 tragically still. 
 
 The second impression, when I recall it now, seems like a 
 vision — a vision at first of nothing but whiteness. The 
 snow fell so thickly that an opaque white sheet hung before 
 one's eyes. Out of the whiteness now and then emerged 
 black forms in long cloaks huddled against the storm, all 
 trooping in one direction. Across more distant fields black 
 dots appeared in rents torn in the white sheet, swarms of 
 black dots, all hurrying towards the pits. The silence was 
 more impressive than ever, as the snow fell softly for hours. 
 It was almost an unreal scene, this scene of death and white 
 peace everywhere. At the gates of two of the pit yards the 
 crowd, all in black, snow lying like thick white fur on their 
 heads and shoulders, pressed silently. Within, scores of 
 yellow deal coffins lay on trestles under an iron-roofed shed. 
 The mourners clung round the coffins closely till these were 
 lost to sight. It was still an intolerably silent scene. More 
 biers were brought, the lids covered with snow, more 
 mourners filed in. The first sound that broke the silence 
 after half an hour was a mad laugh from a widow hysterical 
 with grief. Most of the other women sobbed low to them- 
 selves, or came up to you whispering incoherent tales of 
 their dead sons. At No. 3 pit, the Minister of the Interior, 
 the Bishop, the Prefect and a swarm of officials attended 
 the funerals. The Bishop was unctuous, the Minister happily 
 tempered his oratory, and his best eloquence was in his 
 eyes, when he broke down and cried. Oratory awoke 
 mourners from mute to demonstrative sorrow. Funeral 
 services and speeches were accompanied throughout by a
 
 In the Black Country : Courrifrres 167 
 
 threnody of women's wailing which, beginning low, rose to 
 shrieks. Then, the procession through the snow to the 
 common grave dug in a field ; the crowd of officials and 
 mining folk in such confusion that one knocked up against 
 coffins ; and the burial in the trench full of snow. More 
 speeches, but no unctuousness this time — fierce fury against 
 the company, against the " capitalists," the miners, who, 
 with hat and lamp, had carried the biers, growling assent, 
 and poor M. le Prefet, in his black and gold- braided uniform, 
 feverishly trying to get the people away that the denuncia- 
 tory trade union delegate might be left speaking in a 
 wilderness. 
 
 Back to Lens, away from the terrible odour of death, the 
 sound of wailing women and the fury of men — back to the 
 town and whatever it may provide. It gives the miner 
 weird diversions from the weary grimness of his life. Two 
 rival " concerts " vie to charm him from seven to eleven 
 of an evening. In one of them, which has ambitions, two 
 enormously stout ladies with very thin voices warble. I 
 preferred the other which has no pretensions and is nearer 
 to the rank simplicity and ingenuous licence of these men of 
 the earth and the coal seam. The people who run the place 
 have no suspicion how exquisitely strange they are. Miners 
 sit on wooden benches round a low room drinking three - 
 halfpenny " chopes " of watery beer, and the company in 
 turn sings to them hideous songs. The star, poor girl, is 
 nineteen, depraved and guileless. The second star is not 
 quite sane, laughs constantly, with a wild look in her eyes, 
 wears ball dresses fashioned by her own hand which make 
 one feel like to cry, and sings terribly. The " comic," almost 
 a skeleton, with large dabs of rouge on cheeks and nose, is a 
 weaver from Roubaix who took to art a year or two back. 
 He puts on his comic nose or Englishman's side whiskers 
 in a cupboard, on the front panel of which is painted a
 
 168 The Real France 
 
 mediaeval castle in the very far distance, just above the 
 
 piano which is backed against the cloth. The comic's great 
 
 scene — given only on Sundays, when miners come early 
 
 in numbers and stay till closing time — is the " confession/' 
 
 He does the priest, in white surplice to heighten the colour, 
 
 and his wife the penitent, confessing in innuendoes, while 
 
 he wriggles with pleased shame. The scene would never be 
 
 allowed in Paris. The comic's wife — poor thing ! — ought to 
 
 be looking carefully after a respectable, modest home. 
 
 That is her dream. Their little girl sings risky songs with 
 
 an angelic face. Between turns, the comic asks for news of 
 
 the Algeciras Conference which preoccupies him incessantly. 
 
 The eldest daughter of the landlord is a perfect Madonna, 
 
 with the beautiful oval of her face, when her liquid dark 
 
 eyes look at her baby son, as she gives him beer, cognac, or 
 
 bitters to sip, or a fried potato to munch from the street 
 
 travelling stall. Another daughter, beneath the beautiful 
 
 hair, shading from blond cendre to pure gold, which so many 
 
 women have in this country, has a wise woman's face — in 
 
 which many things are read, until the girl of fourteen begins 
 
 to talk, and talk like a child, for all her upbringing in the 
 
 midst of this ingenuous vice. The poor, pathetic concert 
 
 goes on, the stars pass a cockleshell round, making about a 
 
 shilling of an evening, while the comic family can count 
 
 upon four shillings for the three of them, until at eleven the 
 
 policeman taps at the window. Closing time, and the signal 
 
 for friends of the family to withdraw into the back kitchen 
 
 and drink apple- wine champagne, while the stars tell their 
 
 ingenuously wicked stories, the comic thirsts for information 
 
 on the haute politique, the daughter with the enigmatically 
 
 wise face, who keeps all the accounts, calls for forfeits and 
 
 baby games, papa, who never does a thing but lets his 
 
 family do everything, sits smoking his clay by the red-hot 
 
 kitchen range, and mamma smiles placidly. It appears
 
 In the Black Country : Courridres 169 
 
 that in this strange town of Lens every cafe — and every 
 house has its cafe — has just such a back kitchen. I despair 
 of making clear with what rough and winning comradeship 
 one is welcomed in those back kitchens. I have been all 
 over France, in out-of-the-way corners, but there is only one 
 Lens. I leave real friends there. The merest gentleness of 
 manner wins these rough people. Their own language is 
 frightful. Talking innocently of innocent things, they use 
 terrible oaths. Speak to them with the slightest shade of 
 kindliness and deference, and they love you. They are 
 lovable themselves, though morally they are dumb, 
 primitive creatures. Widows of miners lost in the cata- 
 strophe were, many of them, consoled by survivors before 
 their husband's bodies had been recovered from the deadly 
 pits. But when their husbands were at last buried, there 
 was nothing feigned in their wild grief. One widow I 
 noticed sobbing as if her heart would break, and stopping 
 only to curse the engineers who had murdered her husband. 
 "My corporal," said a lieutenant of gendarmes, "found 
 that stricken widow none too cruel." 
 
 After this comedy, thick melodrama : the descent to the 
 bottom of the burning pit is a sensation recommended to 
 the jaded. It is literally a burning pit, and the fire, they 
 say, may go on there for thirty or forty years more. No 
 extinguishing apparatus has so far had the slightest effect 
 upon it. I went down with the Paris 'pompiers, who had 
 never been in a mine before, but were naturally used to fire. 
 There was little that one could remember of the first part 
 of the journey, save a breathless scramble in galleries two 
 feet high, through pools of coal-black ooze a foot deep, past 
 caverns where the smell of carrion was unbearable, over 
 horrible, soft, yielding piles of cloths, under which there 
 was one does not like to think what. The pompier would 
 not say, and urged us along, running or crawling, and nearly
 
 170 The Real France 
 
 splitting our heads against the roof. Don't lean too heavily 
 against that wooden prop, was the advice now and then. 
 The prop supports the roof, and if it gave way we should 
 be buried, so we lean lightly and hurry on. It is getting 
 hotter and hotter as the pompier hastens us, and I feel like 
 Alice Through the Looking-glass when the Red Queen 
 said, " Faster and faster." One's mind becomes a total 
 blank in this heat, and one rushes on blindly-. We are near 
 the fire now. Two minutes' rest, for heaven's sake, and we 
 sink down in the burning mud. Then on again, and we are 
 next to a heavy mass of wet cloths hanging on a string. 
 This keeps the heat away to a certain extent from the other 
 galleries. We draw the curtains and are in a furnace. A 
 glimmer from our lamps is all the light, but behind the black 
 walls of coal we hear the fire burning brightly — happily 
 crackling away, like a good, honest fire on an honest, homely 
 hearth. Hose play upon it incessantly, but only liven it up. 
 There are 32 metres broad of it, and eight or nine hundred 
 bodies, out of the twelve hundred men whom it has slain, 
 still lie around us. But the only thing I can think of next 
 to the fire is that, if I remain, my head will burst. It is a 
 strange sensation, but not one to be long enjoyed. We are 
 soon on the safe side of the wet cloths again, and hurtling 
 back through the galleries like mole-holes, to air and sun- 
 shine again. 
 
 Thirteen men lived twenty, and a fourteenth twenty- 
 five, days in that hell. That is the most dramatic episode 
 in this tragedy of the earth. One grew used to looking at 
 the dead. When I saw the living recovered from the dead, 
 I suddenly found myself wet-eyed. No man could look 
 coolly at the mothers feeding their eyes on their poor, lean 
 sons, just brought up from three weeks of darkness in a 
 living grave. Fortunately, Neny, the Barnum of the 
 thirteen, saved us from overwhelming pathos. He has the
 
 In the Black Country : Coumires 171 
 
 Cross of the Eegion of Honour, but he ought also to have a 
 few thousand a year from an American music-hall as 
 advertising agent. To see him negotiating business terms 
 with impresarii, strange journalists, bioscope managers, and 
 signing picture postcards furiously at the rate of five a 
 second for admirers, was a lesson in the art of getting 
 on. Neny is only a miner, but he is a miner from the 
 " Midi," that is his secret. 
 
 My last impression of this tragic country is that of a poem 
 of sublime fury. As I drove up to the gates of one of the 
 pits, an old hag sprang at me, shook her fist under my nose, 
 shrieking, " Who are you ? Are you a friend of Ravaur ? " 
 I hastened to disown any acquaintance with the Courrieres 
 Company manager. " Are you in league with the mur- 
 derers 1' I said I certainly was not. But entrance was 
 impossible. " If any, journalists or no, are let in, we storm 
 the gates," the crowd howled. " Our dead sons are there ; 
 we, if any, have a right to enter." I could not help agreeing, 
 and at last entered only after stratagems and by skirting 
 the furious crowds for several miles. Within the pit-yard, 
 where the fourteenth man who had spent twenty-five days 
 below had just been recovered, a thousand women were 
 howling like furies. As this pit had been blocked up for over 
 three weeks by order of the engineers, and as the latter had 
 with difficulty been restrained from flooding the mine, 
 popular anger could hardly be blamed. I saw two or three 
 engineers and one priest run the gauntlet of the mad 
 women. They were white and showed funk, but bore it 
 pluckily on the whole. The women closed round them like 
 wolves. I thought all was over witli them. But they were 
 only a little scratched and ran in time to cover. The priest 
 was peculiarly unattractive, with oily black ringlets round 
 a sallow face. He was in no way responsible, of course, for 
 the catastrophe, but these mining folk, while religiously
 
 172 The Real France 
 
 making the sign of the cross when the crucifix is borne by at 
 a funeral, hate priests. The Courrieres and other companies 
 are extremely Catholic, the chief shareholders being pillars 
 of the Roman Catholic political church party in France. 
 In certain villages which I visited a sort of censorship has 
 long been exercised over the miners. A man reading a 
 Radical newspaper soon loses his job, for the warder of the 
 " coron " is there to report. Perhaps this explains that 
 strange confession scene in the Lens concert.
 
 XL In the White Country: Lourdes 
 
 EMILE ZOLA and Joris Karl Huysmans have 
 described Lourdes, but the picture is not finished 
 yet, if it ever can be. One comes away from a day 
 at Lourdes amazed, dazed, and horror-stricken. 
 I saw no miracle, but the certainty of one would not draw 
 me to Lourdes again. It must be a callous and a blank soul 
 that can dwell in the place. A few hours of it almost 
 terrify anyone who feels and thinks. The most sceptical 
 approach it with some reverence, and come away in pain ; 
 one goes with an open heart, ready to take in any impres- 
 sion of piety, however primitive, however childish, and 
 comes away with the heart empty : one hungered there for 
 a crumb and there was not one. Not one touch of faith 
 that thrilled, though the sceptic went to Lourdes perhaps 
 more receptive than the faithful ; not one moment 
 to stir the common religiousness of all men : only one 
 instant that moved deeply, and that was with purely 
 human pity. 
 
 A street of penny-bazaar-like shops leads from the town 
 to the Basilica of Lourdes on a slight hill. The bazaars, a 
 hundred of them, owned (it is said) chiefly by Jews, sell 
 pious mementoes. Piety here fosters ugliness. Many pic- 
 ture postcards in other tourists' haunts give adequately (if 
 the coloured kind be avoided) bits of landscape, a mountain 
 scene, the view, or details, of a lovable old church. Lourdes 
 has not even a picture postcard worth buying. The most 
 fervent believer with a scruple of taste could not buy a 
 single one of these pious mementoes. If a person most dear 
 
 173
 
 174 The Real France 
 
 to us had been cured by a Lourdes miracle, it would still be 
 a heavy penance to carry off an " illuminated Virgin 
 warranted to light up," a reduction of the statue opposite 
 the Basilica. Statuettes, images, pictures, trinkets induce 
 the conviction that those who give orders for Lourdes 
 objects of piety (and for all modern church ornaments in 
 France) resolutely and carefully suppress any faint trace 
 of good taste when they see it, and with single-minded 
 persistence cultivate squalid, vulgar, and inane ugliness. 
 Not a child's toy of to-day but has more art in it than the 
 pious mementoes of Lourdes. One runs the gauntlet of 
 these saddening bazaars before approaching the Basilica. 
 Dreadful waxen figures, from an inch or two high to life- 
 size, painted with unbelievable crudeness, and heart- 
 rending chromos pursue you ; tin cans of all sizes, all of 
 the same oval shape, that of the French trooper's cam- 
 paigning cans, and all coloured the same sky-blue with 
 clumsy designs, hang from nails at shop windows, wait- 
 ing to be filled with Lourdes water by pilgrims, and every 
 shop advertises " Lourdes lozenges," made with Lourdes 
 water. The street of bazaars does not prepare the mind 
 for devotion. 
 
 Yet were one to come straight in view of the Shrine of 
 Lourdes from the glades and brooks of the Pyrenees around, 
 the first impression would perhaps be worse. In a bare, 
 dusty, and sandy square garden stands a monument of 
 granite erected as a token of gratitude by Breton piety ; 
 a clumsy hand has sculptured it without accent and 
 without an energetic line, and it might have been shaped 
 with a slovenly touch out of soft mould. At the gates 
 of the garden old women, mournfully draped in black 
 cloth from cloaked head to foot, sit silently all day selling 
 coloured wax candles, and men hawk bundles of vanilla. 
 At the far end of the garden an immense statue of the Virgin
 
 In the White Country : Lourdes 175 
 
 turns her back to the oncoming visitor. One walks on and 
 turns to look, and finds that the Brittany monument was 
 a strong work by comparison. The face of the figure is 
 vacant and meaningless, and expresses nothing but a 
 sugary, washed-out, flabby ineptitude. It is horrible to 
 think of thousands worshipping at the foot of this monu- 
 ment of vulgar senselessness. One cannot rightly say that 
 if it do no good it does no harm. Four women, as I stand by, 
 kneel in the gravel, face in hands, humbly prostrate before 
 the atrocious figure. It must hurt minds to associate that 
 face, beside which the dullest human living face is bright 
 and endlessly meaning, with divinity, and to worship 
 stupidity in a statue. Who was guilty of the monument ? 
 Let us hope he was as inane as his work ; if not, he was 
 criminal. The statue casts a premonitory horror over the 
 visitor. It is wound round with strings of coloured electric 
 bulbs, lit up at night. 
 
 The Basilica, theatrically upraised over the grotto, on a 
 platform to which a huge horseshoe staircase leads ; two 
 churches piled one on the other, the Basilica on the Church 
 of the Rosary, with a terrace, at the top of the steps, 
 severing them : the whole an amazing monument of garish, 
 ill-proportioned, absurd architecture, not even barbaric, 
 hardly even degenerate — for from what could it have 
 degenerated ? Look at it, and wonder. What does it mean ? 
 It expresses only one thing : the determined purpose to 
 appeal to the worst taste by the cheapest means. The huge 
 stone staircase built in a ridiculously awkward curve is 
 cheap grandeur for the helplessly untrained eye ; the 
 brutal gilding and shrieking mosaics are to seem rich to the 
 poor in knowledge of beauty ; such details as completely 
 useless pillars, on the platform at the top of the steps, 
 shaped like piles of miniature sham embattled towers, 
 given a corkscrew twist by an added devilry of vicious taste,
 
 176 The Real France 
 
 are meant for ornaments to capture pathetically ignorant 
 admiration. 
 
 From the lower church go round the corner to your left 
 and come suddenly, unprepared, on such a scene of half- 
 consciously sordid tragedy as no other place in the world 
 can show. A crowd, a dull crowd with blank faces, lines a 
 railing marking off an open square against a wall with two 
 doors. The crowd does not seem to speak, but one hears 
 it strangely murmuring. Within the square stand six 
 surpliced priests in a row. One calls in a loud expression- 
 less voice, " Dear Virgin, heal our sick. Beloved Virgin, 
 you can do it if you will. Mother of God, we implore you. 
 Heal our sick. If you will, you can do it." The crowd 
 repeats in a monotone, " Heal our sick." Another priest 
 takes it up, " Holy Virgin, you are blessed and the fruit of 
 your bowels is blessed." The same colourless voice from 
 the priest and the same monotone chorus from the crowd. 
 Recovered from the first strange impression one looks 
 closer and sees within the railings beyond the crowd 
 huddled shapes in bath-chairs, silent and still figures sitting 
 in rows, pain in some faces, but in most no expression at all. 
 The priests in turn go on calling. They neither cry nor 
 chant nor speak ; they call as one would call the most 
 trivial message across a distance of a hundred yards or so. 
 One might feel that Heaven is not far, but one does not : 
 one feels further than ever from Heaven. The priests go on 
 imperturbably. One (who has led hither a pilgrimage from 
 Rouen) is stout, imposing, with a large fleshy face, a thick 
 arched nose, and a fat chin. He is handsome, but subtly 
 unpleasant. The features are fine, but dulled by overgrown 
 flesh, and the eye is shifty. The voice is worse, and each 
 sound of it jars in one's head, a terribly bland and callous 
 voice, a voice that might be saying, " How d'ye do ? " and 
 is calling on the Mother of God, a voice I hear still now
 
 In the White Country : Lourdes 177 
 
 when I think of Lourdes. The imposing priest is blown, 
 and a thin and withered old priest takes up the call, 
 " Blessed Virgin, heal our sick. You can, if you will, 
 Mother of God. . . ." His face is more sympathetic, a 
 furrowed face that has suffered, but he puts on a sugary 
 voice which turns bitter in one's ear. At intervals the other 
 priests repeat the spokesman's words. Attitudes are 
 extraordinary. One bends his head on one side and shuts 
 his eyes : he is doing it for the gallery. Another looks rapt 
 and still does not convince. The spokesman priest calls, 
 "Arms crosswise " (les bras en croix), and all stand with 
 outstretched arms, still calling, now the same words, 
 now the litanies to the Virgin, now the Lord's Prayer. The 
 crowd follows suit, every man and woman stands with 
 arms outstretched, repeating the Lord's Prayer, then 
 calling, " Blessed Virgin, heal our sick," then litanies to the 
 Virgin. One more priest steps forward from the row of six 
 and takes up the call and the monotone goes on. Not a 
 break of half a minute, not even a moment's rest : the 
 same perpetual call of the priest's uninterested voice to the 
 Virgin and the same dull chorus from the crowd. I looked 
 into faces which were speaking the same short phrases of 
 prayer over and over again rapidly, and tried to read them : 
 not a sign of feeling, not a thrilling glance in any eye — all 
 dull and drab matter-of-factness. 
 
 The sensation becomes horrible, one would go mad if one 
 long gazed at those lack-lustre faces and listened to the 
 perpetual dull echo. 
 
 In and out of the railed-off space three or four almost 
 over-dressed youths — over-dressed in such surroundings ! 
 — and neat elderly gentlemen marshal the blind and the 
 halt, women to the right of the onlooking public, men to 
 the left. The wall opposite the crowd has two curtained 
 doors leading to the men's and women's baths of miraculous 
 
 N
 
 178 The Real France 
 
 water. The sick are wheeled, carried, or led, up in batches, 
 then wait their turn in the railed-off courtyard. A stout 
 matter-of-fact doctor in a velvet skull-cap stands at the 
 door of the baths. Matter-of-fact priests busy about. Every- 
 one is matter-of-fact, and the impression overwhelming 
 the fresh observer is that if real mysticism is to be found 
 anywhere it is not here, and that the ecstasy of faith is the 
 last thing anyone dreams here of feeling. It is all a busi- 
 ness, practical and methodical. The one inscription seen 
 on every wall in large letters is " Veillez a vos porte- 
 monnaie " — considerate but uninspiring. One watches the 
 priests standing in the figure of the cross, perpetually 
 repeating the same words in the same voice, the expression- 
 less echoing crowd, the silent invalids, some half stupefied, 
 some seemingly half dead — one looks away and reads 
 " Beware of pickpockets " — the only words to be read on 
 the walls. The priests go on calling, the crowd echoing, 
 the sick are methodically taken in to the baths in turns, 
 after hours of waiting. The one true miracle so far is the 
 total absence of emotion. The onlooker stands as if in a 
 dreamland. No one around him seems to feel anything. 
 It might all be a long methodical ritual among passionless 
 shades, the shades that have kept the semblance of men 
 but know human joy and pain no more. He seems to him- 
 self the only living man among imperturbable ghosts and 
 can hardly help shouting out, crying any word of human 
 feeling to wake up this cold world of dead imaginations. 
 He roams restlessly about looking for a face that shares his 
 emotion and finds none. The priests go on calling calmly 
 to Heaven, the crowd goes on echoing dully, the sick are 
 taken in and brought out of the baths, and no one seems 
 to have eyes to see, ears to hear, or a heart to feel. The 
 sick lie patiently for hours on their backs on stretchers 
 waiting their turn. Nearly all are dazed, some are im-
 
 In the White Country : Lourdes 179 
 
 beciles, some are monstrosities, some were hale and lusty 
 and have been struck down suddenly ; one once strong 
 man lies on his back without moving a muscle, his face a 
 grey-green, terrible to see ; two boys on their backs look so 
 rosy and comfortable that they might (as a sceptical com- 
 panion suggests to me) be sham invalids waiting to afford 
 the safe chance of a certain miracle ; but the suspicion is 
 unfounded, for no miracle is announced that day. The 
 only true miracle is the whole scene of unnatural tragedy in 
 which not one of the actors sees the tragedy. It unfolds 
 itself in endless repetition and one can bear it no longer, 
 when suddenly one divine touch of humanity clutches 
 the heart. A poor, stout, homely, ugly petite bourgeoise, 
 old to be the mother of a child of eight or nine, in her 
 pathetic best Sunday dress, comes into the courtyard help- 
 ing her thin, weak-legged boy to walk to the baths. She 
 sees nothing but him and feels nothing but her love for the 
 ill-grown, dull-looking boy. Her arm gently holds him, she 
 bends over him rapt and fearful, watches every movement, 
 and listens as he whispers. The stout and clumsy figure 
 is all motherhood, a sublime statue of motherhood. A 
 mother's love was never more tender nor more passionate. 
 It seems to light up and inspire the whole scene suddenly. 
 The visitor, wrought upon by hours of isolation in this 
 petrified crowd, cannot keep the tears from his eyes, look- 
 ing at the ungainly mother, exquisite in her tenderness, the 
 only living soul there. She stands out from the crowd, a 
 shining figure in the dark — she with her ugly boy. One 
 can never forget it : the sudden stroke of emotion going to 
 the heart after hours of searching in the dull crowd for a sign 
 of feeling, till a mad desire to shout almost overcame one. 
 Not another onlooker seems to notice the ungainly mother 
 and her ugly boy, but the visitor now does not care. He 
 has seen her and felt something which he will always prize,
 
 180 The Real France 
 
 and the tears in his eyes have eased him. Yet the divine 
 which he sought at this shrine is still nowhere, the human 
 only has been found : worth rinding, indeed. 
 
 Screams of children, terrible to hear, come from the baths : 
 no one heeds them, for the wretched children are being 
 bathed for their souls' as well as their bodies' sakes. The 
 priests go on calling unconcernedly on Heaven, the crowd 
 calmly mumbling. The ugly mother clasps her boy more 
 closely when she hears screams from the icy baths. 
 
 After four or five hours, during which the priests in relays 
 have not stopped calling on the Virgin and the crowd has 
 not ceased echoing them with no more emotion than they, 
 at last the strange play ends and another begins. The 
 sick are brought out in bath-chairs and on stretchers and 
 formed accurately in two lines flanking the gravelled space 
 opposite the Basilica. The healthy crowd stands close 
 behind the rows of invalids and women squabble for places. 
 A wait, the doors of the Basilica open, and the Host is borne 
 out, first round to the grotto, then back up between the 
 lines. The priest slowly walking raises the Host aloft, all 
 kneel as it passes, the crowd repeats the same litanies with 
 furious rapidity over and over again as fast as the words 
 can come out. Another priest chants suddenly with a 
 beautiful voice (in French), "I am the Resurrection and 
 the Life " : it is the only emotional moment in the scene. 
 The rest is blankness, and horrible dry dulness. The Host 
 uplifted, the crowd prostrate : one should feel the symbols 
 of sublimity and meekness, but one feels nothing. The 
 expressionless faces of the crowd mean nothing to the eye, 
 the voices droning with incessant unintelligence the same 
 prayer fall dull on the ear. There never were minutes when 
 one might have felt so much and when one felt so little. 
 The sonorous voice chanting the romantic words give one 
 sudden moment's thrill and that is all. The visitor leaves,
 
 In the White Country : Lourdes 181 
 
 passes the flaccid Virgin with a shudder, the woolly Breton 
 monument with a sigh, and runs the gauntlet of the wax 
 taper-selling old women and the men with vanilla. Go to 
 Lourdes as a sightseer only ; do not go with an open heart 
 expecting religious emotion. Go in a train of jolly pilgrims 
 who lark at every buffet where the train stops. Yet the 
 ugly mother with her boy was exquisitely worth going to 
 Lourdes to see.
 
 XII " Les Jeunes" 
 
 1897 — The Literary Pilgrimage and the Youth's 
 
 Progress * 
 
 IN taking count of to-day it is possible to over- 
 estimate the documentary value of yesterday ; the 
 clue to the man is not always furnished by his 
 father, the child. But in the study of contem- 
 porary French ideas, the method that will best apply is 
 that of a literary embryology. The French mind of to-day 
 is elusive, yet it has so regularly evolved that the youth 
 very accurately makes the man. Too often the man ceases 
 to make himself. The literary life is based on a few 
 wonderful years of early manhood. The way to know 
 where the French man of letters has arrived is to begin 
 
 • it 
 
 Les jeunes ! " They were a delightful moment of French life. 
 It is past, and the "jeunes" are gone, and they went not merely as 
 the raspberry tarts of Thackeray's youth faded away. Frenchmen 
 can still be young, but the funny thing is that young Frenchmen 
 are called no more "les jeunes." They are not young in the way 
 they were young a dozen years ago. The ferment is there still, but 
 it does not breed the same kinds of fever. Are the microbes of 
 mental enthusiasms now more practical? Has the "arriviste" in 
 arriving disturbed the "jeunes "of to-day who are no longer called 
 "jeunes," and are intellectual wild oats now rather invested than 
 spent? The youth's pilgrimage of a dozen years ago was nothing 
 if not disinterested. Only a moment of French life is described 
 here by one who was in it when he wrote ; but it was a moment that 
 is still perhaps worth remembering for half an hour. " Les jeunes " 
 who went on that pilgrimage say they have no successors, not merely 
 because they themselves are a dozen years older, but because young 
 France of to-day has not carried on the torch, though it may have 
 lit others. 
 
 182
 
 "Les Jewries" 183 
 
 by finding out how he arrived. In his country there 
 is a fairly regular literary pilgrimage, and it is not difficult 
 to trace the Youth's Progress. The man may be a failure ; 
 the youth cannot be, while he has his staff and scrip. 
 Besides, the great man's privilege of dozing has been so 
 much extended since Homer's time that it often is only fair 
 to suppose that the successful men of letters were more 
 interesting with their travel-stains, in the stress and while 
 the storm blew. 
 
 Indeed, a certain storminess is the charm of the 
 literary pilgrimage. The Youth makes a tremendous start, 
 and begins at the heroic stage. He is refreshingly intolerant 
 and an exquisite zealot. The Philistine grows amusingly 
 indignant with him, and the experienced and kindly are 
 delightedly amused. For it is generous not to exclaim, 
 ; ' A pose ! ' The Youth's impulse may work out into 
 affectations, but it springs genuinely, and is so largely made 
 up of the element of devotion that it must command some 
 sympathies. It is the ungrudged expression of welcome 
 influences, the reflection of a light that illumines the Youth's 
 first steps. Only precise cavillers mind if the rays return 
 distorted. The men and the causes the Youth burns to die 
 for half the world cares too little about to attack. Yet the 
 Youth's ill-adapted generosity is worth more than a sneer. 
 To the right-minded it is a delight to see him enthusiastically 
 drag the tail of his coat, and only mean spirits will tread on 
 it ill-temperedly. 
 
 The period of flamboyant simplicity and simple-minded 
 pose dates from the Youth's initiation. He hears for the 
 first time what is the modern heroic cry in letters, and 
 exults in echoing it. His pilgrimage begins with revelations 
 which he burns to share with the world. The wonderful 
 g arden of letters is new : let all come and wonder with the 
 n ovice at the fruits and the flowers in his hands. A primeval
 
 184 The Real France 
 
 appetite has prompted him to pluck those whose grand 
 colour and rich perfume appealed most to his instinct. 
 There is the splendid melancholy of Alfred de Vigny ; 
 Baudelaire's strength*; the wilful art of Edgar Allan 
 Poe ; Villiers de l'lsle Adam, whose insight goes deep, and 
 whose thought soars to superb heights ; Barbey d'Aure- 
 villy, heady and magnificent. He crushes them all into 
 his cup with a boy's carelessness of mixing. Add some 
 Hugo, imbued already into the child, a rather faint 
 remembrance of Lamartine, a mere dash of Musset's Nuits, 
 and the charm is made whole. No wonder heads of nine- 
 teen are turned and views of life are kaleidoscopic, if you 
 consider how such a wine must work on sensitive brains. 
 This is the magic of letters which makes thought a wanton. 
 It flies to the ends of art and harks back to metaphysics, 
 dallies with subtle artificialities and reverts to primitive 
 passions, steeps in tragedy, plays with satire, and is in dead 
 earnest all the while. In which lies its gain. Not the facts 
 of a case or a philosophy, but its emotion and a mood, are 
 the fruits of the Youth's first experience : a mind not yet 
 provided with an aim, but already tempered to pursue one. 
 Axel, the Fleurs du Mai, the Diaboliques, the Conies Cruels, 
 Poe's tales, Vigny's poems, are among what the Youth first 
 plucked in the garden. What he breathes in with their 
 scent is the heroic and passionate spirit of letters. 
 
 The Youth has now a will. It remains but to find the 
 way. A few more discoveries in this wonder- world of his 
 lead him to it. He has still a giant or two to cope with, 
 having hewn his path through the fairy forests of his own 
 country. Faust entangles him a while, but he passes on to 
 Carlyle, where he finds more to gather. Congenial Hero- 
 Worship he grasps and devours ; it is all, however, except 
 a choice flower or two of irony from the Pamphlets, yet it is 
 enough, since Heroes are his religion. But his course is now
 
 : ' Les Jewries" 185 
 
 shaping itself, for Carlyle soon has too plain a taste. Shelley 
 and Emerson, an intoxicating find, lie before him, and he is 
 beginning to understand that his thirst is for the trans- 
 cendental. He drinks long and deep at Epipsychidion and 
 the Oversoul. Having drunk, he sees his way, stretching 
 above him to perilous heights. But the heroic lesson of 
 Axel bears up his strength. Besides, from Emerson onward, 
 the turning-point, his way at least lies clear, however steep. 
 The Youth's pilgrimage is now the scaling of idealism. 
 
 Maeterlinck has taken up the thread of Emerson's 
 philosophy. So the " Belgian Shakespeare " is one of the 
 Youth's revelations. It comes first from the Princesse 
 Maleine, and the Seven Princesses, or Pelleas and Melisande, 
 but makes sure its hold with the preface to the Ornement des 
 Noces Spirituelles de Euysbroeck le Venerable. The Tresor 
 des Humbles, more clearly Emersonian, would have 
 proved as potent had it been brought out in time. 
 But the seed of mysticism had been sown already, or 
 rather the mystic instinct had been awakened. At this 
 stage the Youth is a very absolute pilgrim, and climbs 
 the glaciers of things in themselves. Plotinus and the 
 Neo-Platonists are bidden to strengthen the impulse the 
 modern mystic gave. The heroic appetite the Youth began 
 with is less for the art of letters now than for the literature 
 of metaphysics, but every wit as keen. Along with the 
 Alexandrian Greeks, Novalis is set upon and devoured, but 
 other Germans prove too tough ; Schelling, who would gasp 
 if he knew, too matter of fact. The logic of sublime sound 
 is more to the Youth's taste. Parsifal, more, however, 
 from a literary than a musical standpoint, is discovered, 
 and many a pilgrim must emulate Der reine Thor. It would 
 be an unkindness to inquire how deep this spirit springs 
 from below the surface, and it is only fair to keep to the 
 evidence of personal appearances and of print. There is
 
 186 The Real France 
 
 plenty of it. If there be aught in a name, the editors of such 
 magazines as Le Saint Graal, Psyche, Le Lotus, L'Annoncia- 
 tion, Le Reve et Vldee, are mystics, or were till the leaflets 
 withered. The assumption is borne out by the fact that 
 several, one Saint-Georges de Bouhelier for instance, adver- 
 tised their periodicals as pages d 'amour et de reve entierement 
 redigees by themselves, or found a variety of other ways of 
 expressing the same mystic one-man one-magazine principle. 
 Further, were the Youth at this stage to have feigned 
 realism, which he did not, his looks, even more, would have 
 given him the lie. He may be said to have worn his soul 
 upon his sleeve. I dried, pressed, and kept carefully an 
 impression gathered once at Bailly's, who published occult 
 letters in the lively broad daylight of the Chaussee d'Antin, 
 of a wan and pink-haired spirit that floated in, prayed in 
 faded accents for a copy of Le bosquet de Psyche, and melted 
 away. There can be no doubt that this was a vision of the 
 Pilgrim Youth. 
 
 It is very certain the Neo-Platonists' " ecstasis " can be 
 but a poor straw to catch at in this latter day, with so many 
 realities to grasp and hold or go under. The Youth felt this 
 obscurely. Among the clouds he grew homesick for the 
 earth. The suspicion came that ideals were meant to be 
 realized. Two impulses stirred dimly in his mind. There 
 was Baudelaire's bitter outcry echoed against "a world 
 where Doing is no kin to Dreaming." There was also a 
 lurking desire to enter into the organized system of human 
 forces which time has long since sanctioned and set in work- 
 ing order. The outcome was the Catholic revival, which, 
 however, as far as the Youth is concerned, ended but 
 in more thorough death. In point of historical fact, 
 Neo-Catholicism began at a banquet in 1890, when the 
 Vicomte de Vogiie, who also proved his mysticism by found- 
 ing the " Bock ideal " society, toasted the alliance of Church
 
 "Les Jeunes" 187 
 
 and young France, and was cheered by the Association des 
 Etudiants his host, and echoed by M. Henri Berenger the 
 chairman. The then new spirit of the Roman Church, as 
 shown in Papal encyclicals, fed the alliance ; the influence 
 of the American Catholic clergy, and the enlightened 
 doctrine of Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishop Ireland, were 
 hailed with enthusiasm. Free-thinking at heart, young 
 France applauded the Parliament of Religions. How short- 
 lived the alliance was to be is shown by M. Henri 
 Berenger 's statement a few years later that French youth 
 "is henceforth uncompromisingly anti-clerical." But 
 for a space the Pilgrim Youth's literary way lies through 
 austere cloisters, and follows the ancient and established 
 road that leads to Rome. He enters on holy war armed 
 with a magazine of his own which he may call La Lutte, 
 revue d'art catholique, if he likes, there being a precedent. 
 Or, like the San Peladan, he makes an offering to the Holy 
 See of all his works (ever since he left the heroic stage he has 
 been strewing his path with MSS.), undertaking to burn 
 whatever the Council of the Index Expurgatorius may 
 object to. Notwithstanding which he never gets to Rome. 
 L'Art et la Vie, founded by Henri Berenger and Firniin Roz 
 with the idea of carrying their Emersonianism into practice 
 by upholding what was called Neo-Catholicism, and was a 
 kind of French Puseyism and Newman movement combined, 
 commits itself solely to the " religion of the inward life," 
 outwardly hostile to the clergy. L'Ermitage, once a very 
 monastery in the hands of its first editor, Henri Mazel, an 
 unflinching Catholic, becomes a mere temple of letters 
 with M. Ducote as high priest. 
 
 On leaving the Church, the Youth goes over to the 
 religion of the literary man. So far there has been an ethical 
 element in his faith. He was in turns heroic, mystic, a 
 politician even, literary pilgrim though he be. But now the
 
 188 The Real France 
 
 love of letters shall be his only care. Like Mallarme at 
 Oxford he exclaims, " La litterature seule existe ! " and 
 disregards Verlaine's contemptuous cry, " Et tout le reste 
 est litterature." In the heroic stage he almost laughed at 
 the craft of letters. What his heroes said was all he cared 
 for. How they said it is his occupation now, and he studies 
 technique, who snapped his fingers at it. That alone exists. 
 The Parnassians, in whose eyes perfection of verse was the 
 height of poesy, and who suffered contumely for thinking 
 so at the hands of the Youth, did not bide their time in vain. 
 The Youth builds a new Parnassus as exclusive as Theophile 
 Gautier's. Only it is built, not of alexandrines and other 
 traditional metres, but of vers libres. How many and how 
 subtle artes poeticae of the new vers libre are sketched 
 out in conversation is impossible to say. That none is 
 written is explained, the Youth says, when the stupen- 
 dousness of such an attempt is considered. That the 
 beauty of lawless verse is a thing of the spirit the Youth fails 
 to see, and he labours to acquire the spontaneity of Viele- 
 Griffin. There is more hope for him in the study of Stuart 
 Merrill (two of the most typical of French men of letters 
 of the day are Americans), who gives less free a rein 
 to his verse. At all events the Youth's ambition is to 
 publish in the Mercure de France, where no ethical element 
 disturbs the serenity of letters, and he emulates Mercurians, 
 past and present : Henri de Regnier, apostle of the new 
 technique, and fit son-in-law to a Parnassien ; Paul Fort, 
 who is literary in artfully naive ballads ; Gustave Kahn, 
 who is naively complex ; Pierre Louys, erudite in letters ; 
 Albert Samain, whom the new technique hardly influenced, 
 the old, however, considerably ; and a hundred others 
 who borrow the pattern of the French Mercury's wings. 
 The Youth at this stage seems wedded to letters for 
 good.
 
 "Les Jeunes" 189 
 
 But his way grows even narrower. Paris is less than 
 Parnassus, even the new Parnassus, less than the poet's 
 " Ivory Tower," which jeering jeunes build up again half 
 unconsciously on a plan of their own. For Paris it is that 
 besets now the pilgrim Youth. The spirit of the most self- 
 centred set in the world becomes his religion, and the Youth's 
 new " ism " is Parisianism, which is as marked a phase of 
 thought as any other. This is not the atmosphere of the 
 boulevards ; the man in Piccadilly is not the last thing in 
 Londoners. The Youth breathes a compound air with a 
 dash only of the traditional boulevardier's atmosphere, but 
 his ideas are unmistakably tinged. He takes a peculiar 
 delight in the blending of reflection and flippancy, breadth 
 of thought and whimsical prejudice, such as Paris has the 
 knack of. This literary conversing of Paris, where life in its 
 aspects of greatest complexity seems so deftly and easily 
 handled, and where what men look upon as its light sides 
 appear to gain a new seriousness from being unexpectedly 
 viewed through philosophical methods, will put his ideas in 
 proper trim and teach him how to work them. So he strains 
 his brain to fit it into the Parisian mould, prunes off pitilessly 
 every tendency Paris considers tiresome, and studiously 
 acquires all the little absurdities of mind Paris is so 
 proud of. 
 
 The Youth's return to Paris, which he first wished for 
 wings to fly from, and to the boulevards, which he would 
 in his heroic stage have blasted for a sink of flippancy, 
 follows upon his literary period not altogether uncon- 
 nectedly. It is not a far cry from the poses of a craft to the 
 affectations of a set, and the Youth is apt to fall into both. 
 As a fact, in what ho worshipped as pure letters he might 
 already have detected much the interest of which was well- 
 nigh only Parisian. M. Pierre Louys revives the Greek 
 decadence with what seems exquisite literary erudition, and
 
 190 The Real France 
 
 his style is delusively Alexandrian, but the truth is his 
 Aphrodite, and his Chloris, even Bilitis whose song he first 
 sang (and his voice has never been as true since), are to be 
 seen at L'CEuvre of an evening and driving in the Bois by 
 day. Again, just as only a Parisian can catch the full mean- 
 ing of what M. Louys's Greek hetairae say, so it is quite 
 impossible, outside of Paris to appreciate, M. Ernest 
 Lajeunesse. 
 
 That Parisianism catches youth is shown by the 
 mushroom-like rapidity with which M. Lajeunesse 
 springs into fame. An ironical turn of mind, adapted with 
 marvellous suppleness to its environment, and an astound- 
 ing cocksureness, such as are exhibited in Les Nuits, les 
 Ennuis, et les Ames de nos plus notoires contemporains, a 
 book of parodies, where the irony is dazzling, and L' Imita- 
 tion de Notre Maitre Napoleon, where the cocksureness is 
 even more remarkable, were bound (as M. Lajeunesse no 
 doubt well knew) to win over youths tired of being "intense." 
 Others play the same strain, like Jean de Tinan, who 
 exemplifies the Parisian knack of playfully, but half 
 seriously, entering into mountainous considerations of a 
 molehill of an idea by treating at length of Mile. Cleo de 
 M erode, de V Opera, consider ee comme symbole populaire. 
 But the worst of it is, the thing gets overdone, and the 
 Pilgrim Youth all at once finds himself in the land of the 
 Palais Royal farce, which in any case is not the form of 
 Parisianism he ever meant harking back to. 
 
 On the brink of the boulevardier spirit, an abysmal habit 
 of mind from which no one recovers, the Youth, whose 
 pilgrimage is a series of shocks, has a rude awakening. The 
 voice that calls him is one no Parisian can understand, and 
 one which the Youth himself only dully hears, but he obeys 
 it. There is something so utterly foreign and new to the 
 Parisian youth in Walt Whitman, that, being still un-
 
 u Les Jewries" 191 
 
 Parisian enough to welcome new impressions, he gasps, 
 having welcomed this one, and. plucks leaves of grass the 
 rest of the way. He will cast literature and dogma and 
 Paris to the winds and be the Divine Average. With this 
 prompting he finds nearer home a nucleus of new 
 " Naturalists." They may derive indirectly from the 
 old, and from Emile Zola who made the name, but they 
 disown the connection, and this propitiates the Youth. 
 He must have a new world around him at each new 
 revelation. For that matter, there is originality enough in 
 Emile Verhaeren to make a new world, as far as new worlds 
 in this sense go, although he is quite content to be only a 
 poet, and plays no part in the christening of the new literary 
 three-decker. Nor, indeed, does the teller of strange tales, 
 George Eekhoud, albeit nothing loth to get on board and 
 take a hand at the helm. This is enough to show the 
 craft is Belgian, but it sails in French waters. The 
 Youth follows, Whitman in hand, in its wake. Others come 
 also. But their tack differs — by the length of a syllable. 
 " Naturists," not New " Naturalists/' are M. Maurice 
 Leblond, who, on the strength of his twenty summers, writes 
 with quite an experienced pen concerning the value of 
 spring-tide and the worth of love, and M. Saint-Georges de 
 Bouhelier, already mentioned, whom M. Leblond avers to 
 have " inherited Beethoven's rustic pipes " (though he only 
 writes, and writes in prose), and who converts the 
 introspective mysticism of his earlier years (say seventeen) 
 into a mystic philosophy of nature, set forth in the most 
 startling and obscure of styles. Le Rive et I'Idee, their first 
 joint periodical venture, accordingly becomes Documents 
 sur le Naturisme. 
 
 Perusing these documents the Youth " returns to 
 Nature." Fortunately, he has others. He even has a leaf 
 or two from Edward Carpenter, those that have been
 
 192 The Real France 
 
 translated. Being, however, a literary pilgrim, he does not 
 go back literally to nature. That is quite another question. 
 His point is that he has discovered Whitman, mixed with 
 Verhaeren, and added to his pilgrim's scroll. 
 
 By this time the Youth is fitted for the man's journey.
 
 XIII. Ten Years After: The Last of 
 
 " Les Jeunes" 
 
 WHEN la Revue blanche died "les Jeunes " were 
 no more, for the Mercure de France has reached 
 middle age. The death of the last of the 
 " Jeunes revues " closed an epoch in Paris. 
 It was an absurd, delicious, perverse, naive, and much- 
 misunderstood epoch, a time of virulent pose and blazing 
 affectation, of fascinating simplicity and charming boyish- 
 ness, of twopenny-halfpenny cynicism and sterling gold 
 sincerity ; on the whole a lovable time, which will have 
 left little behind it, but which one loved while it lasted, and 
 which one cannot dismiss without an indulgent tear. 
 
 It all seems so long ago, now that it is quite dead. The 
 mystic became anti-clerical. The transcendentalist was 
 appointed secretary to a rising politician, and is now a 
 rising politician himself. Hermits of the literary religion 
 pulled down their Ivory Tower and frequented academic 
 salons. The anarchist became a nationalist, and knew the 
 exact price paid to General Andre and M. Delcasse by 
 England to betray France. The art-for-art idealist demon- 
 strated in the streets against an anti-religious and tyran- 
 nical Government. The Carlylean hero-worshipper also 
 demonstrated, on the other side. The youth who used to 
 be an inspired poet in irregular metre joined the staff of a 
 boulevard daily and did picturesque reporting. The law 
 student studied the laws and passed his examinations. 
 
 The old delightful days were over. Hair was cut, and 
 lace ties, soft collars, velvet lapels, riding-crops for walking- 
 o 193
 
 194 The Real France 
 
 sticks, were as bygone as Gautier's red. waistcoat. Serious 
 periodicals with advertisements and a circulation invaded 
 the Odeon bookstalls. The new Parisian generation 
 appeared at the Theatre Francais, read the papers, heard 
 of the Balkan peninsula and of Mr. Chamberlain's fiscal 
 policy, took sides in its own home politics, voted at the 
 elections, put Victor Hugo, Zola, Dumas fils, Alphonse 
 Daudet in its library, and forgot what a " revue Jeune ,; 
 was, or what a world of meaning there once was in the 
 term. The last " revue Jeune " died because there were 
 no more of " les Jeunes " left. 
 
 It was a heroic, strenuous, magnificently ridiculous time. 
 It was, rather naturally, unknown outside Paris, though 
 its echoes were faintly heard in London in the days of the 
 Dome, the Knight Errant, the Pageant, and the early Yellow 
 Books. But when the Savoy came out, it was already with 
 us in Paris the twilight of the Jeunes. " Les Jeunes " were 
 not heard of outside Paris because you had to be among 
 them to make anything of them. The boulevard itself 
 knew nothing about them, or very little, and that little was 
 wrong. " Les Jeunes " held it a cardinal principle not to be 
 known except among themselves. Moreover, they never 
 actually did anything, they hardly had time. Besides, not 
 to " arrive " was another of their cardinal principles, now 
 as dead as the rest of their eternal maxims. But though 
 they never did do anything, there was really some genius in 
 the way in which they talked about what they would do ; 
 and the schemes which were never carried out, and the 
 ideas which never came to anything, and the thinking 
 which was got through and never got further, would have 
 provided occupation for several generations. " Les Jeunes " 
 crammed more thinking into less time, and left less 
 behind them to show for it, than any other generation in 
 literary history.
 
 The Last of " Les Jeunes " 195 
 
 They did their best to be misunderstood outside their 
 own circle, and they certainly were. In Paris, the boule- 
 vards, influential green-rooms, literary salons, leading 
 newspaper offices, the " serious " reviews, not merely 
 ignored the ferment going on in a section of young Paris, 
 but were ignorant of it. When the Jeunes were first 
 mentioned in a paper with a circulation, it was to be 
 anathematized in the Figaro by Zola for an effete race of 
 impotent poseurs. London criticism was almost as insular 
 as that of the boulevards, and when it heard of the Jeunes, 
 thought of absinthe-drinking, Latin Quarter bocks and 
 amours, Henry Murger, Romanticism, Trilby, and other 
 properties of stage Bohemia and British traditions of the 
 " gay " city. 
 
 Young America made such herculean efforts as only 
 America is capable of to get in tune with the Jeunes, and to 
 reach the pitch of smartness which she supposed needful, and 
 the Chapbook died of it. The Jeunes continued to be mis- 
 understood. They were not smart, they were not Bohemian, 
 they were not Romanticists, they did not drink absinthe, 
 they did not talk about epater le bourgeois, they did not 
 frequent the Cafe d'Harcourt in the Boul' Mich', still less 
 Montmartre and the Moulin Rouge, they were never seen 
 at Bullier's ball ; they did not on the other hand cultivate 
 le spleen, they were not neo-Byronic, they had not a broken 
 heart among them, they were not wearied of life ; in fact, 
 they were nothing which they ought to have been, and they 
 did not really pose so very much. 
 
 80 far as I can remember, we began by being mystics. 
 Before that, the Revue independante was merely brilliant 
 and brilliantly written, with some " Symbolism " that was 
 more of a style than a genuine "ism." But the Revue 
 independante preceded and announced the actual era of the 
 Jeunes. After it had died in distress — a complete collection
 
 196 The Real France 
 
 of it now is a valuable property — there was a pause, after 
 which the Mystic Rose flowered. The Inner Life was 
 revealed, the Ivory Tower loftily piled up. Saintliness, 
 claptrap, Peladan and the Pose-Croix, Emersonianism, 
 transcendentalism, the Oversoul, the religion of art, the 
 mystic science of religion, Neo-Platonism, a dash of Hegel, 
 some Novalis, much Maeterlinck of the earlier manner, 
 Nietzsche and the Overman subsequently : it was all an 
 exquisite jumble of ideas into which the youth plunged 
 with perfervid spiritualism and a perfect fever of thirst for 
 high thinking. 
 
 Mysticism became literary. The Poet was the Seer, and 
 a perfect line was a religious revelation. The Poet had a 
 right to shut himself up in his Ivory Tower to write it. Or 
 literary craftsmanship was only the hand-maiden of mysti- 
 cism. Only the Oversoul was worthy of being written about. 
 In fact, so long as one was mystical, it mattered little 
 which way one took one's mysticism. As for that, of course 
 one could not go on taking it in any one way long. A hot- 
 house plant, it developed rapidly, and under the forcing 
 process threw out new shoots of unexpected types. 
 
 One natural but weakly growth which withered in a 
 season was the Neo-Catholic revival, a sort of Puseyism. 
 Just the same mysticism also grew to anti-clericalism. 
 Translate mysticism into life ; life is transcendental ; life 
 is a mystic oneness ; priestcraft oppresses life : there you 
 have mystic anti-clericalism. Another offshoot was a sort of 
 Early Victorian education-of-the-people movement with a 
 mystic strain running through it of course, humanity 
 becoming the transcendental entity. On one branch of 
 mysticism Carlyleanism was grafted with a daring hand, 
 hero-worship was a religion, the leading of peoples was a 
 mystic mission, the Poet was Prophet. Transcendentalism 
 worked back again to art for art, only this time there was no
 
 The Last of " Les Jewries" 197 
 
 Ivory Tower, only a den of bookishness ; the man of letters 
 gave up missions, he was wedded to stjde, a mystic bride, as 
 he proved by the absoluteness of his adoration : it was but 
 the familiar religion of the literary man over again, and it 
 did not last. It degenerated into Parisianism of the boule- 
 vards, and that was the beginning of the end of that set of 
 the Jeunes. 
 
 Another set went through a last metamorphosis before 
 death. Idealism, art for art, mysticism were all renounced, 
 and Nature alone remained. But le Naturisme remained 
 exceedingly transcendental. You felt Nature and were 
 saved, or you did not and were lost. If you had grace, you 
 were a Naturist ; if the demon of doubt, that is, the critical 
 spirit, retained one finger of hold upon you, you were outside 
 the pale. It was during this last phase that the memorable 
 reconciliation took place between Zola, who had not the 
 least idea what the Naturists meant, and the Jeunes, who, 
 as Naturists, were at the opposite pole of le Naturalisme and 
 of realism in literature — but then, of course, Zola never was 
 a realist. 
 
 Now the Jeunes are dead. They lived some twenty years, 
 they flourished full-blown only for about ten, from 1890 to 
 1900. Their latter decade at all events was representative 
 of their whole history. The Jeune who had just left his 
 teens in 1890 practically lived through all the phases of the 
 Jeunes' existence. The Jeune who was already nearing 
 thirty in 1890 lived them all over again. It was during the 
 decade a sort of pilgrimage at express speed from new 
 religion to new religion, a voyage of discovery at a hundred 
 new beliefs a year. Perhaps a thousand boys in Paris went 
 on the journey. They were fresh from their first University 
 degree, and fresh from an extra University course of 
 Baudelaire and Verlainc, Emerson and Carlyle, Novalis and 
 Plotinus, Edgar Allan Poe and Barbey d'Aurevilly, Villiers
 
 198 The Real France 
 
 de l'lsle Adam and Shelley, Whitman and Mallarme ; in 
 short, a very varied course. 
 
 It was a wonderful journey — will there ever be such a 
 wonderful journey again ? " Americas were discovered " 
 at every turn, and they were all new, and everybody rushed 
 ashore and explored with exquisite enthusiasm. It was 
 in walks home from University lectures, spurred by large 
 contempt of the lecturers, or in microscopic dens, on the 
 wings of excited philosophizing, heightened by tea and 
 cigarettes from midnight to 4 a.m., that the marvellous 
 journeys were made. Some pilgrims tramped the streets 
 all night, without having a single bock at a cafe, to avoid 
 the atmosphere of gross minds, and also on account of the 
 expense. One seer of seventeen — in spite of his compara- 
 tive youth, he had already written two thick mystic volumes 
 — held a peripatetic academy nightly in the Pare Monceau, 
 at which disciples gathered to discuss spiritual problems in 
 mythical symbols. Many contemplated retiring from the 
 world and converting a Normandy farm-house or a Pro- 
 vencal stone cottage into a monastery for a small brother- 
 hood, to live in meditation, among books, and in the 
 communion of intellects ; and some got as far as putting 
 money by to purchase the monastery. 
 
 There were gathering-places, even in worldly Paris, the 
 Parisianism and the boulevardism of which filled every 
 Jeune with nausea, for the meeting of souls that understood 
 each other. There was the 2-franc gallery at the Lamour- 
 eux and Colonne concerts, where listening to the proper 
 kind of music was a religious rite. When it was not the 
 right kind, when, for instance, Sarasate played acrobatics 
 on one string, the gallery was a raging heaven of gods in 
 fury, hissing, stamping — and rather relieved to work off the 
 mystic mood physically. The stalls would weakly try to 
 hit back, but soon subsided under contumely. They were
 
 The Last of " Les Jeunes" 199 
 
 unutterably despised, and the few young gods who could 
 have afforded to pay 12 francs would have been excom- 
 municated by their brethren if they had. There were also 
 the performances of the Sar Peladan, whose clap-trap took 
 in the Jeunes most successfully, those of l'CEuvre, where 
 none but contemptible " grocers " — I don't know why 
 grocery was always considered a peculiarly ignominious 
 trade — paid for their seats, and where young Paris learnt 
 Ibsen and Bjornsen. There were also the mornings at the 
 Bibliotheque Nationale, in front of desks piled up with 
 mystics and writers on necromancy, the Brahmapoutra and 
 Whitman, Confucius and Browning, and a dozen other poets 
 and philosophers, the more conflicting the better, so long as 
 they were not modern cut-and-dried relativists, and into 
 volume after volume the Jeune plunged till his brain reeled. 
 But to talk it all over was after all the essential thing. It 
 was a Bacchanalian orgy of words at night where the Jeunes 
 gathered. It was really almost their only dissipation. They 
 were too clean-minded and boyishly pure for the Latin 
 Quarter and Montmartre amours in which some as a matter 
 of course assumed them to be steeping themselves, yet they 
 were not quite the prigs others took them for. They merely 
 had overheated brains. They had uncontrollable desires to 
 work out a fresh system of philosophy every night. Their 
 one way of getting drunk was on metaphysics. Towards 
 three in the morning, a roomful of Jeunes discussing 
 reached actual intoxication of the intelligence. Verse- 
 spouting, hair-splitting, and mystic rhapsodizing for hours 
 brought on genuine frenzy. Everyone had by then re- 
 generated the world or come face to face with the Absolute. 
 Of course they all thought themselves geniuses, and felt 
 that they were of the same stuff as the geniuses of mankind, 
 those at least whom they accepted and worshipped. Others 
 they damned with violent contempt. Naturally they cither
 
 200 The Real France 
 
 hated or adored. Where they worshipped, it was with 
 touching boyish passion. 
 
 If they thought themselves geniuses, there was as a 
 matter of fact some inchoate genius among them, though 
 it does not seem yet to have come to anything. There was 
 a marvellous amount of intellectual comprehension floating 
 about in the atmosphere of the Jeunes. Many of them had 
 extraordinary artistic facility, and there was anyhow no 
 dullness among them. Naturally quick brains had been 
 trained by furious mental gymnastics to a lightning rapidity 
 of thought. Not to understand, even once, meant perpetual 
 degradation, as not to adore the right gods, every one, 
 meant eternal perdition. The fever of the brain from which 
 Jeunes manifestly suffered certainly did not make them 
 dull boys, and when they forgot to be mystical, they could 
 show keen mother wit, though, of course, one of the things 
 they most abhorred was " esprit." The Jeunes were an 
 amusing generation, not altogether unconsciously. 
 
 The life of the Jeunes was reflected solely in the " Jeunes 
 revues " of which the last is now dead. The papers and the 
 " revues sinenses" as they were called with cutting irony 
 by the Jeunes, naturally never noticed the Jeunes' existence. 
 Literary men who had " arrived " never ventured among 
 them, as young prophets were careful to make enemies of 
 most writers with established reputations by truculent and 
 — what was worse — sometimes almost impishly clever 
 criticism. Stephane Mallarme received the Jeunes and 
 dreamily talked literary craft to them, but of course he was 
 a Jeune himself to his death, and totally uninfluential. So 
 the Jeunes wrote and read about themselves in their own 
 reviews published by themselves for the world. One or two 
 timid ventures followed the Revue independante after a 
 pause for a few years. The number grew progressively by 
 scissiparity. One editor held that literature should describe
 
 The Last of " Les Jeunes " 201 
 
 Life considered as a harmonious whole, while the other's 
 conscience forbade his accepting MSS dealing with any but 
 the Inner Life, so one of them would found another review. 
 
 The " revues jeunes " thus multiplied rapidly. In the 
 beginning of the nineties they swarmed. Each philo- 
 sophical school of two or three followers, or one, had 
 its own " organ." All the organs exchanged with each other 
 and reviewed each other at length bitingly or rhapsodi- 
 cally ; and the serious reviews, the first nights at the 
 Francais, the novels of Zola, Bourget, Marcel Prevost, 
 Abel Hermant, Paul Hervieu, even Huysmans, Rostand's 
 Cyrano, and before them, Daudet, and actually Maupas- 
 sant, were to the " Jeunes revues " as if they had never 
 been. The " Jeunes revues " existed for regenerating the 
 world, and, looking at it sub specie aetemitatis, could not 
 stop to notice transient phenomena. Each Jeune, the 
 moment he had an idea, started a review. He and a few 
 disciples contributed monthly sums to pay for the printing, 
 and moreover it is a fact every " Jeune revue " found some 
 subscribers, sometimes half-a-dozen, sometimes nearly a 
 hundred. While the periodical lasted, it was the editor's 
 life-work. The patient labour and practical energy 
 expended on the " Jeunes revues " were as remarkable as 
 the passionate idealism with which the task was under- 
 taken. Pocket-money and time and exquisite enthusiasm 
 went to proving Neo-Platonism monthly in sixteen pages 
 between paper covers with the sign of a lotus, the seal of 
 Solomon, a rising sun, or any other symbol more or less 
 geometrical and therefore cheap to print. 
 
 It is to be feared that a complete documentary history 
 of the Jeunes can never be written. Months of research 
 among the halfpenny odd boxes on the Quais would not 
 enable one to draw up a full list of all the young reviews. 
 Unfortunately the Jeunes themselves generally threw away
 
 202 The Real France 
 
 their collections, no one of which indeed could ever possibly 
 have been complete, when they gave up Neo-Platonism for 
 picturesque reporting and the return to nature for secretary- 
 ships to rising politicians. The history of the Jeunes could 
 merely be outlined in a fragmentary bibliography of their 
 reviews. As far as can be recalled, mysticism was the most 
 profitable phase for the small printers, usually in out-of-the- 
 way sleepy provincial towns, who turned out the periodicals 
 and sent them up in bundles to the Parisian editor's hotel 
 meuble, where they blocked up his bedroom, and whence he 
 carried them himself in parcels of three, six, or nine to the 
 booksellers who consented to put them in the window. 
 
 The Odeon stalls always took enormous consignments, of 
 at least thirty copies a month. They were not generally 
 sold, but when returned, the thumb-marks showed that the 
 seed had been sown in the minds of young France, and the 
 editor felt that he had not been unworthy of his mission. In 
 the early part of the decade the Odeon bookstalls were 
 mystic from end to end, from L'Annonciation to Le Saint 
 Graal, and taught the gospel of the inner life just 
 opposite the terminus of the big yellow 'bus, which 
 is the main link that binds Paris together, for it connects 
 the Latin Quarter with Montmartre. Conductors and 
 drivers would occasionally turn over the mystic leaves. 
 The editors stood by trembling. If the seed were to be 
 sown even in these untilled minds ! 
 
 Le Beve et Videe was an exactly square, large-sized 
 publication. Its cover changed hues according to the 
 monthly mood of its editors — now dreamily pale green, 
 now passionately blood-red, now purely white. If my 
 recollection is right, it was edited by the prophet of seven- 
 teen who held a peripatetic academy in the Pare Monceau 
 at nights. Afterwards he concluded that in the 
 culture of the inner life each must stand alone, since
 
 The Last of u Les Jeunes" 203 
 
 the ego is one and impenetrable, and he published 
 a periodical exclusively devoted to introspection in which 
 no one but himself was allowed to write. It is 
 difficult to recall what the leaves of the mystic periodicals 
 contained. What they chiefly taught was that you must 
 be mystical somehow, and must express your mysticism 
 in magnificent language. The style really was splendid. 
 Sentences full of majesty even now re-echo in the ears of 
 those who lived among the Jeunes. There was one sublime 
 period which culminated in the thundering close : " Et les 
 megalosaures sont morts," reverberating like a knell. No 
 one ever knew what it meant, but all who were once Jeunes 
 remember having repeated it, even those who were already 
 then dropping mysticism for smart stylism. A contributor 
 to most of the " revues Jeunes " prepared his readers for 
 appreciation by calling himself So-and-so — like Lorenzo — 
 ' The Magnificent." You thus knew what to expect. 
 
 In the midst of mysticism, Carlyle and Emerson had 
 an immense influence on the Jeunes. Gradually Plotinus 
 was dropped. That " doubt ceases with action " was 
 suddenly discovered, and the discovery roused enthusiasm. 
 To do something at any hazard was one of the new creeds. 
 To translate transcendentalism somehow into life was 
 another. Various " movements " were developed and 
 " leagues " formed as well as reviews. A Catholic revival 
 was the first practical effort. The alliance of the Church of 
 Rome and Young France was toasted at a banquet in 1890. 
 and the Association of Students responded to a man. But 
 " Neo-Catholicism " died most suddenly ; the chairman of 
 the Association of Students at that banquet, M. Henry 
 Berenger, became one of the leaders of the militant 
 political anti-clerical party. 
 
 Neo-Catholicism, however, did not become anti-clerical- 
 ism without intermediate phases, for it must always be
 
 204 The Real France 
 
 borne in mind that the Jeunes were remarkably sincere. 
 A strenuous humanitarianism inspired by Carlyle, whose 
 influence recurred constantly in unexpected ways, was 
 an early development. To lead mankind : that was 
 the mission. Hero-worship was mathematically worked 
 out into a philosophy. A smart professor of philo- 
 sophy at the Lycee Condorcet discovered that man- 
 kind is an organism of which geniuses are the brain, 
 and gathered round him disciples to make up the 
 brain. He had for several years a devoted following 
 which would have conquered the world for him if he had 
 asked it ; he had the golden gift of persuasion, though 
 he is suspected of having had his tongue in his cheek all the 
 time. Nothing, as usual, ever came of his " Cite Moderne " 
 — the title of his huge volume — and his young brain-makers. 
 An offshoot was a " league of moral action " — very vague 
 moral action — with an " organ " which died rapidly. 
 
 The decade ended with a third phase after various moral 
 actions with which doubt was to have ceased. Doubt 
 returned fortified by the experience to a faction of the 
 Jeunes, who proceeded to snap their fingers joyfully at the 
 Everlasting No and to re-echo Mallarme's rather ghastly 
 cry that only literature exists. The theory of the vers libre 
 was pounded at. Nothing mattered once more but the 
 colour of a vowel or the case of assonance versus rhyme. 
 L'Ermitage ceased to be even a temple of letters and 
 became a writingman's workshop — in which only shop 
 is talked. The Mercure de France throughout had 
 remained staidly faithful to mere letters, judging the 
 world from the sole point of view of what can be 
 written about it, for instance, through the crooked but 
 keen eyes of Remy de Gourmont, one of the greatest 
 artists in causticity who ever wrote, and the master of a 
 fairly diabolical irony. M. de Gourmont afterwards started
 
 The Last of u Les Jewries" 205 
 
 the eagerly modern Revue des idees, and secured articles on 
 radium from competent scientific contributors, another 
 sign of the end of the Jeunes. The Mercure de 
 France steadily grew in influence and in size. It is 
 now a huge bi-monthly volume and a " Jeune revue " 
 no longer, but a " serious," overwhelming compendium of 
 contemporary literature. The Revue blanche, started in a 
 semi-mystical mood, developed the literary spirit, then took 
 on a political temper which degenerated into rather dry-as- 
 dust socialism and anarchism. L'Humanite nouvelle, which 
 continued the Societe nouvelle of Brussels, the first literary 
 and libertaire review, would have been highly shocked to 
 be called a " Jeune revue," and never was, belonging to a 
 later period. For that matter, it thrived until lately and 
 provided a compendium like that of the Mercure, with 
 pohtics thrown in. Now it also is dead. The Mercure, the 
 Revue blanche, and the Plume, with the Societe nouvelle, 
 were the leading " revues Jeunes." They have either died 
 or ceased to be Jeune. The day is well remembered when 
 it was announced for a fact that the shares of the 
 Mercure, which for years were a pleasant fiction, for the 
 first time had paid a dividend. It was not wholly a 
 glad day. 
 
 While in this third phase one section of the Jeunes, 
 disgusted with action, abjured writing for a purpose alto- 
 gether, another, on the contrary, grew more intensely 
 purposeful than ever. Whitman was the guide this time. 
 Walt was discovered by the Jeunes early in the decade. 
 The Magazine international translated all the most Whit- 
 manish of the " Leaves of Grass " and from thence started 
 to vindicate Life. The religion of life was believed in as 
 fervently as the faiths of the Inner Life or of the Ivory 
 Tower had been a few years before. The shibboleth was : 
 Life is wholly sublime. The critic who carped at a single
 
 206 The Real France 
 
 detail of life was excommunicated. One was allowed to find 
 not one crumpled rose leaf. 
 
 It was all quite absurd, but delightful. The Jeunes tried 
 spasmodically to live with peasants, to buttonhole 'bus 
 conductors and other Divine Averages. One returned to 
 nature, knowing little about her, as all were town-bred. 
 In flannels and wideawakes, the Jeunes tramped field and 
 forest and dreamt of establishing a Walden in the suburbs 
 of Paris, studied birds, flowers, trees, with pathetic zeal, for 
 hardly one of them could name a bird from its song or 
 recognize more than half a dozen species of flora. " Le 
 Naturisme " was gradually evolved out of the religion of 
 life. Besides the Magazine international, which started the 
 Praise of Life, Pan in Germany raised a magniloquent voice. 
 Munich and Paris were of course at the time furiously 
 pantheistic. Brussels was also praising life vehemently. 
 
 L'Art jeune, which still had a sneaking liking for the 
 religion of letters, was succeeded by the fierce and flam- 
 boyant Coq rouge, which crowed triumphantly in purple 
 stories of the violent amours of Walloon and Flemish 
 peasants, who are quite close to nature. La jeune Belgique, 
 a once representative review, had by then long since been 
 tabooed as old, effete, and " not alive." The last qualifica- 
 tion was the supreme insult. It sounds remarkably like 
 American journalism, but the similarity is misleading. The 
 Jeunes were never less practical or more exclusive and 
 contemptuous of " arriving " than while they were praising 
 life and refusing to acknowledge that there is a single 
 ignoble speck on its glorious face. 
 
 After the Magazine international died, from a sudden and 
 immediately fatal ambition to develop from a Jeune into 
 a serious review, the deliciously named Documents 
 8ur le Naturisme, afterwards pruned down to Revue 
 naturiste, continued the creed with some unimportant
 
 The Last of " Les Jeunes" 207 
 
 variations of doctrine. It was the last " Jeune revue " of 
 the Religion of Life, which was the last phase. Through its 
 editors took place the memorable reconciliation between 
 Zola and the Jeunes, to the honour, indeed, of both parties, 
 for it was entirely brought about by Zola's brave dash into 
 the battle of the Dreyfus case, and by the headlong, un- 
 calculating enthusiasm which it aroused among the majority 
 of the Jeunes. Zola the " Naturalist " henceforth led that 
 quite other "ism," "Naturism," and the Jeunes adored 
 with remarkable, or perhaps not at all remarkable, lack of 
 discrimination. 
 
 Before the Dreyfus case, the Praise of Life had produced 
 a specialized " movement." This aimed at teaching the 
 masses to praise life and at revealing to the Divine 
 Average that it is divine. The Theatre Civique 
 acted Moliere and sang Schumann up at Montmartre, to 
 audiences of workmen and workwomen, whose willingness 
 was pathetic and whose appreciation was on the whole 
 remarkably keen. " Jeunes revues " more or less connected 
 with the movement were L'Aube and L'Enclos, the latter 
 being, as a matter of principle, not sold but given away. 
 
 Meanwhile, the religion of the literary man of the other 
 section of the Jeunes drifted into the creed of boule- 
 vardism, and that was the beginning of the end. The 
 priests of the cult of style became clever and brilliant. 
 Simultaneously, mystics, naturists, pantheists, anarchist- 
 communists, became politicians, for and against the Combes 
 Cabinet. The Jeunes arc dead, and, for the present, no new 
 Jeunes can claim their inheritance.
 
 XIV. The Heirs of '" Les Jewries" 
 
 I. — The Passing of Mysticism 
 
 THE Jeunes who died ten years ago did leave 
 heirs, but they are not Jeunes. They are pictur- 
 esque reporters, " theatreux " who patronize 
 " theatreuses " old enough to be their mothers, 
 playwrights of twenty-five who had two succes d'estime and 
 one paying one before they were twenty, poets of nineteen 
 at a premium in Duchesses' drawing-rooms, politicians 
 of eighteen busy overturning the Republic, politicians of 
 seventeen who slap their masters for doubting the divine 
 inspiration of Joan of Arc, important secretaries of twenty- 
 four to Socialist Radical Cabinet Ministers who will sit in 
 Parliament as soon after they reach twenty-five (the 
 minimum legal age) as possible, and will be Ministers in 
 their turn at thirty ; they are even real poets, poets who 
 write poetry and real writers who write, merely because 
 they like it ; they are even young philosophers and young 
 enthusiasts and young artists and young discoverers of the 
 world, as their elders were : but they are not Jeunes. 
 They have talent, cleverness, ideas, they may even 
 have creeds, convictions, and shibboleths as their 
 elders had, and they apparently have a good deal more 
 ambition, but they lack the something that made the 
 Jeunes what they were, that ran in the blood of the old 
 Jeunes. They have come too late or too early into the 
 world, like Verlaine's " pauvre Gaspard " (though most 
 certainly like him in no other way), to be the Jeunes of 
 to-day. To-morrow in France may have its Jeunes as 
 
 208
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jeunes" 209 
 
 yesterday had ; to-day has them not. To-day has a great 
 many other things, but none of them exactly like that 
 generation of yesterday. It might be curious for a French- 
 man to consider whether the same change has not happened 
 in England and whether the London Jeunes of ten years ago 
 have not also died handing the same torch on to no direct 
 heirs. Perhaps everywhere the same way of being young 
 jumps a day, and to-morrow will be young again after the 
 manner of yesterday, though to-day is not. 
 
 The heirs of the Jeunes have creeds and shibboleths, but 
 they have fewer and less violent, that perhaps is one of the 
 changes. What things have died in ten years ? Mysticism 
 is one of them. The Jeunes rediscovered mysticism ; they 
 derided Ferdinand Brunetiere for announcing the " bank- 
 ruptcy of science," but while science had not failed, religion, 
 or at least the religious spirit, was equally solvent. Their 
 fathers had been brought up Positivists ; they awoke won- 
 dering to a mysterious world. They dwelt in mystery, they 
 insisted upon being surrounded by mystery, they would on no 
 account accept a world without mystery. Their plain and 
 strenuous fathers looked upon them in amazement : boys 
 feeding on fairy-tales at twenty were beyond them. The 
 boys considered their fathers indulgently, whose horizon 
 had been circumscribed by the artificial hard line of a self- 
 deluded positive knowledge. They knew that the un- 
 knowable was beyond, and the unknowable was always 
 with them. They looked at all things under its aspect. 
 They read, they wrote, they dreamt, they played mysti- 
 cally. They discovered Plotinus, Novalis, they penned 
 never a sonnet as mere literature, but threw out a feeler 
 into world mysteries with the last tiercet ; they never laid 
 plans for this life without an eye upon the next, and they 
 loved talking of death over bocks in the Boul' Mich' ; they 
 never made up to a girl of the Latin Quarter without asking
 
 210 TJie Real France 
 
 themselves " What is the mystery of passion ? " before, and 
 " Have we been one with the mystic universe ? " after- 
 wards. Were they young asses or young prigs ? Neither. 
 They were most sharply intelligent and exceedingly genuine 
 and fresh. The wave that swept over their generation 
 came from a natural upheaval. It drenched them with curi- 
 ous questionings, religion and no dogma, yearnings and no 
 one faith, a restless anxiety of the soul, a desire for the 
 truth and no truth. The wave passed away before the 
 heirs of the Jeunes came upon the strand, and they remain 
 high and dry without a drop of mysticism upon them. 
 What they know they learnt by experience, the philoso- 
 phies they hold they came to by reason, when they doubt 
 they doubt rationally, and when they believe they can tell 
 you why. The Jeunes said that you never could explain 
 the why of anything ; you felt it or you did not, if you did 
 not you were damned. There was not one truth, there were 
 many truths, each one absolute. The co-existence of an 
 infinity of absolutes was one of the contradictions of being 
 which was among the most absolute truths. You felt 
 several truths at once or successively by divination, direct 
 perception and ecstasis. No intelligent man but what in 
 his day seized thus at least a dozen truths. No proper 
 truth could be conceived otherwise than by immediate 
 perception. What was the beauty of words, line, colour, 
 or sound ? An absolute truth for divination. Literary 
 criticism, art criticism, musical criticism were the almost 
 blasphemous makeshifts of low minds, and not a Jeune 
 condescended to be a critic. Comment upon the sublime 
 having felt it, if you liked ; reasoning upon it was absurd. 
 Real criticism could never be half-way between worship 
 and execration. Life, death, love, nature, mankind, morals, 
 society, faith, were all so many fields in which absolute 
 truths grew by the thousand for him to pluck who had grace.
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jewries" 211 
 
 Those who had it not, those for whom the mystic rose had 
 not bloomed, were not even objectionable, they were not. 
 Most absolute fools ! But the Jeunes were not fools. They 
 knew a very great deal about literature, art, music, meta- 
 physics — less perhaps about life — for their age. They 
 pretended the knowledge had come to them by intuition ; 
 the fact was they had worked hard for it, and the first real 
 qualification required for admission into their mystic circle 
 was to have a busy brain. Ostensibly the sole gift which 
 could admit you was a divine perception. 
 
 We look at the heirs of the Jeunes remembering our 
 divine perceptions and smile. We smile at ourselves but 
 we smile a little sadly at the heirs. Our absolute foolish- 
 ness left us a something which keeps us out of touch with 
 them. They have no absolute foolishness, the wise gods 
 forbid ! It may come hereafter to their heirs again but 
 they are terribly free from it. At fifteen or even only ten 
 years' interval, for the Jeunes had a dying kick of mysticism 
 left in them still towards 1900, mind to mind has become 
 totally uncomprehending and this mental outlook gazes at 
 that blankly. No doubt the Jeunes were far enough away 
 from their elders (if the writer could remember the latter), 
 but they could not have been further than they arc from 
 their heirs. Where are the mystics now ? The Jeunes in 
 their sporting pursuit of the unknowable even went in 
 sometimes for table-turning, though with a shrewd eye for 
 the distinction between the data and the quackery of 
 psychical research. About the only young mystics left 
 to-day are the victims of some such forms of quackery who 
 therefore don't count, a handful of unrepresentative 
 acolytes of dead " little religions " founded on nothing 
 stronger than charlatanism, that pays the charlatans well. 
 To such a pass have absolute truths fallen. No boy to-day 
 has the divine perception of the absolute ; not onejmows
 
 212 The Real France 
 
 the state of ecstasis ; not one conies face to face with God, 
 not one even has had an intuition of the Riddle of Universe. 
 Is there a Riddle of the Universe ? the boy asks. We 
 never doubted it. If he grant there be one, he will explain 
 it to you. More probably he holds that there is none, and 
 will explain why there can't be. The Jeunes considered it 
 an alternate blasphemy, either to deny the riddle, or, 
 affirming it, to understand it otherwise than by immediate 
 divination of the Essence. He considers that they wasted 
 time by putting a riddle into a Universe which is perfectly 
 plain to him. Everything is clear and certain to him ; he 
 does not doubt, or, having doubts, clears them up with 
 vigorous reasoning. The Jeunes were absolute always, and 
 absolute also in their questionings. He is not absolute, he 
 is rational ; his questionings come to his brain, not his heart. 
 He does not believe where he cannot prove, he does not 
 even doubt what he cannot prove, he lets it be. He does not 
 even deny mystic faith, worse than that, he accepts it as a 
 fact to take count of. He is the deadliest young piece of 
 clear and cold-eyed brain any age ever brought forth. If 
 he were sceptical or had just a redeeming touch of cynicism 
 the Jeunes whom he has succeeded might feel with him. 
 They in their day could be Montaignes in the intervals of 
 mysticism, or could rail at the gods passionately when not 
 communing directly with them. But the terror of him is 
 that he knows scepticism is absurd and cynicism shallow. 
 He cannot say with jesting Pilate, What is truth ? He 
 knows there is truth and that he is finding it out, if he has 
 not found it out already . He cannot curse the gods with 
 Renan or with Gloster in King Lear, he has weighed the 
 gods and found them on the whole not wanting. He cannot 
 be optimist or pessimist, for to be either is absurd. He 
 cannot give way to passion or trample passion under, for 
 passion is an excellent thing when it does not interfere with
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jeunes" 213 
 
 one's work. He cannot even be wholly reasonable, for he 
 clearly perceives that everything cannot be accounted for 
 by reason. 
 
 The death of mysticism has altered completely the 
 pilgrimage on which the youth of to-day goes. Perhaps to 
 be a real Jeune one must be a bit of a mystic. One must be 
 mystic in one's metaphysics and mystic in one's love 
 making. One must find some mystery in one's pen, ink, 
 and paper as well as in the running brooks, one must 
 wonder a little at the mystery of one's self, and a great deal 
 at the mystery of the mistress's eyebrow. One cannot be 
 sure that anything has nothing mysterious about it. If 
 one writes a five-act tragedy, or an essay bludgeoning a 
 rival Jeune Review editor, if one grubs away in the 
 Bibliotheque Nationale or picks daffodils all one sublime 
 day with the dearest girl in the world, if the dearest girl 
 throws one back upon the resources of sombre man-talk 
 about the few really essential things in the world over cups 
 of tea in darkened chambers, or one considers the crimin- 
 ality of mankind in the abstract, in fact if one does any- 
 thing at all, or nothing, one should do it with the abiding 
 sense of mystery. The heirs of the Jeunes, I fear, do all these 
 things without it. Therefore they are not Jeunes. They do 
 not feel the world is their oyster, or if it is, an oyster they 
 opened long ago with a jolly sharp knife. They do not 
 wonder at the world, they accept it ; what is more they do 
 not wonder at themselves. The world does not perplex 
 them ; precise problems in the world perplex them, and 
 they get into as horrible scrapes as ever, one is glad to think, 
 but the great, whole, terrible world does not look at them 
 with its one unfathomable eye, as it fixed the Jeunes. They 
 have ordered their lives properly and pigeon-holed their 
 world problems sensibly and logically ; they live no longer 
 in the same whirl of different but equally absolute faiths
 
 214 Tlie Real France 
 
 They are not more settled, but more practical intellectually, 
 than the Jeunes were. The latter had not only some settled 
 faiths but a great number, and each one was so certainly 
 settled that you cut a man for ever, if you did not knock 
 him down, for blowing the foul breath of scepticism upon 
 any one of them. But they had not ordered and classified 
 their intellectual lives, each absolute was as good as another, 
 and you had no sooner settled one than a totally contrary 
 one troubled you. You could not adopt the literary man's, 
 the philosopher's, the artist's, the lover's faith, or the 
 faith of the young man in a hurry to get on, solely, and 
 stick to it. You had to hold them all successively, or, 
 better, simultaneously. You had to get on, but you must 
 love ; you had to philosophize as well as love, and if you 
 were religious or political or sociological and not at the 
 same time an artist and a man of letters to the same degree, 
 you were damned. In fact the great one eye of the whole 
 fearful world was constantly looking at the Jeunes and they 
 could not get away from it. Their heirs seem to have 
 classified themselves and mapped out the world more 
 practically. This is only saying that the thing that is most 
 dead to them is mysticism. To the Jeunes the world was 
 whole and mystic ; for their heirs parts of it may be still 
 quite uneasy to understand, but to consider the whole 
 curiously as one riddle is, owing to the pressure of matter on 
 the space of life, a waste of time, which it certainly is if you 
 don't enjoy wasting time in that way. 
 
 The Jeunes believed in metaphysics ; perhaps they 
 believed in metaphysics first of all. Don't talk to their 
 heirs about metaphysics. The only fashionable metaphysi- 
 cal science is that of Professor Bergson which kills the old 
 metaphysics. The Jeunes enjoyed finding a metaphysical 
 basis for everything. The commoner the thing, the greater 
 the delight in tracing it to its essential root. Metaphysics
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jeunes" 215 
 
 have gone the way of mysticism, both having flourished 
 together, like the sisters they are. Their twin revival was 
 one of the marks of the Jeune period ; their decline now is 
 certain and no less marked. Who now enjoys the romance 
 of the Critique of pure reason or the fun of Schopenhauer's 
 Four-fold Root ? Not the heirs of the Jeunes who are only 
 bored by them under compulsion at college. Not one takes 
 the trouble to read even his own important self meta- 
 physically, as his elders always did, to seize himself, for 
 instance, at 9-25 a.m. this day and determine what at that 
 particular moment of the mode called Time his bearing 
 was to the substance of the Universe, to consider — besides 
 himself — the boulevards, his office, his father and mother, 
 his friends and his sweetheart, essentially. This was the 
 constant practice of the Jeunes who had lost a day if they 
 had not once in it contemplated the essence of something. 
 They considered a charming little music-hall dancing-girl 
 in her relation to Eternity, and wrote about her accord- 
 ingly. They even examined the bourgeois as being neces- 
 sarily after all a very distantly relative mode of some 
 absolute substance, and dissected the Philistine to find 
 with a microscope the atom of essential entity within him. 
 Their heirs do not look upon such mental exercises as 
 a serious occupation, and call them mere pastimes and a 
 by-play to the business of life ; they have determined that 
 metaphysics are a mere game of the intellect, as mysticism 
 is only an indulgence of the sensibility. This of course is a 
 most reasonable view, but it was not that of the Jeunes. 
 The latter spent their pocket-money printing magazines of 
 metaphysics ; in the magazines managed by their heirs, a 
 great number of which are published by real publishers, and 
 are actually sold by real booksellers, you will not find one 
 page of metaphysics a month. The absolute died with the 
 Jeunes.
 
 216 The Real France 
 
 Religion a yet stranger fate than death befell. As they 
 were mystical, the Jeunes were religious normally. They 
 had no religion, but many religions, which is the normal 
 condition of all naturally religious persons. They naturally 
 also hated a great number of religions, they hated indeed 
 any particular one you could name, as they had the normal 
 instinct of pious minds. They were insolent, iconoclastic 
 and blasphemous, as all truly religious people are. The 
 churches delighted them by calling them atheists and 
 cynics, and they went on their way religiously rejoicing, 
 pious at every single step. They aimed at never doing 
 aught otherwise than piously, and they hoped that religion 
 was their daily food. Prayer was not for Sundays but for 
 every hour of the week. They prayed when they went up 
 to Montmartre to see the sun rise, or when they went to a 
 lecture at the Sorbonne. They read religiously, they wrote 
 religiously, they played, they larked, they played the fool, 
 they worked, and they talked, all religiously. The only 
 unpardonable sin among them precisely was to deny the 
 religious meaning of any one instant in time or thing in 
 space ; they made a daily food of religion and hated all 
 churches. Their heirs look back upon this callow fresh- 
 ness with indulgence. Their heirs know very well the worth 
 of religions, having estimated it carefully, they know they 
 are good not only for the multitude but for a large number 
 of suitable temperaments among the few. They quarrel 
 with no one for his religion, they force theirs upon no one. 
 They cheerfully accept all churches, each in its place, 
 having classified them as other things. They are not 
 ingenuous enough to call priests henchmen of the Ever- 
 lasting No ; they accept the creeds and their ministers. 
 The Roman Catholic revival of to-day more than anything 
 else shows the curious fate that has befallen religion. 
 
 For a month or so the Roman Catholic Church had
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jeunes" 217 
 
 entertained hopes of capturing the Jeunes. The leader 
 of the short-lived neo-Catholic revival of twenty years 
 ago afterwards became one of the chief political supporters 
 of M. Combes in his anti-clerical campaign. The Jeunes 
 were too religious — too religious all round — to be of much 
 use to the Church. They terrified political churchmen, and 
 the churchmen put them off. They soon hated churches 
 again with that hatred which only deeply religious people 
 can feel. Very few of them ever professed any established 
 and conventional faith, and in all the " isms " which they 
 promoted Roman Catholicism never found a place. Their 
 magazines, pamphlets, and small paper volumes almost 
 always attacked churches with religious violence. They 
 mixed religion up with everything and were still ready to 
 subscribe to Gambetta's Clericalism, that is the Enemy, if 
 put in less stump-oratorical language. Their heirs do not 
 mix wines ; when they feel like religion they ask for a 
 standard classified brand ; when they do not, they drink 
 some quite different growth. Among them a recent Roman 
 Catholic revival has appeared, which seems a good deal 
 stronger than that of twenty years ago, but they have 
 entirely dropped the callow habit of being religious out of 
 church. Many of them are in close touch with the political 
 Church of Rome in France ; many are by up-bringing, 
 confirmed by conviction, devout church-goers, whereas 
 those of their elders who had been educated in a strict 
 Christian faith invariably broke away from it, and those 
 who rediscovered Christianity had generally come from 
 free-thinking surroundings. They hold, in fact, through an 
 important minority, by close ties to the Church, to which 
 they are of certain usefulness. Many of their magazines 
 and books make a public and official profession of obedience 
 to the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church, a demonstra- 
 tion unknown in the days of the Jeunes. Thus bound to
 
 218 The Real France 
 
 churches through the close ties of a minority, they are not 
 for the rest occupied in the least degree with religion. The 
 ardent magazines of the Jeunes, each of which was a 
 flaming sermon, never came out unkindled by religious fires. 
 You could not in any one get an article accepted that had 
 not at least one paragraph of religious enthusiasm. The 
 Editor's notes on green tissue paper at the end of the 
 number were never without it, and the condemnation of a 
 hostile poet or the praise of a friendly one was always based 
 finally on essential religious grounds. The young maga- 
 zines of to-day praise and condemn on literary grounds 
 simply. They adopt polite society's rule — which aroused 
 the greatest loathing in the Jeunes — that religion shall be 
 left out of discussion : to bring, or drag, it invariably in 
 was the Jeunes' rule. They call a rival poet a bad poet, not 
 an evil prophet, and a friendly one a good one, not a thinker 
 whose inspiration is an enharmonic of the universal 
 Essence. They certainly are more restrained critics than 
 the Jeunes, yet one misses the latter's fire. They have put 
 away into a compartment the incorrigible religiousness 
 which made the Jeunes what they were, and they have 
 many magazines which officially reserve religion from dis- 
 cussion, a limitation which to the Jeunes would have been 
 unthinkable, just as the latter had no official Roman 
 Catholic groups among them with " organs " of their own. 
 The Jeunes were constantly preoccupied with religion and 
 were most intolerant of religions ; their heirs have formed 
 among them definite religious groups, and in the mass do 
 not trouble about religion. 
 
 The anti-clerical Jeunes were troubled with religious 
 doubts. Their heirs, among whom a clerical party exists, 
 seem not to know such doubts. The presence of that party 
 in their midst appears to act in their estimation as a 
 lightning conductor ; it draws off the doubts which they
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jewries" 219 
 
 might feel. If they want religion they join the clerical party, 
 if they don't they don't. They have classified human 
 activities much better than the Jeunes ever did. They are 
 either sons of the Church or detached from religion. The 
 Jeunes never could make up their minds to believe solely 
 in literature, in art, in politics, or in science ; the religious 
 dream haunted them and specialized religions left them 
 unsatisfied. With the religion of the literary man, the 
 artist's creed of beauty, the politician's faith in progress, 
 the credo of science, they could not help mixing a more 
 general religiousness. They might hold to any one of those 
 faiths, but they asked for more ; they might believe in good 
 verse, in a beautiful picture, in the reform of mankind, in 
 a perfect theorem, yet they still asked for more. Their 
 heirs do not ask for much more. They have scientific, 
 political, artistic, especially literary groups, each group has 
 its faith, its followers and its periodical, and no group 
 trespasses except by polite permission on another. A young 
 man of to-day belongs to one group or to several, and does 
 not mix one up with another, as a member of several clubs 
 does not introduce a dozen men from one club to the men 
 of another. To-day is wise enough to have many relative 
 creeds and therefore has few doubts. The Jeunes tried to 
 have absolute faiths, and were perplexed accordingly ; 
 their groups did not apologize for intruding upon one 
 another, but trampled upon one another vigorously ; they 
 never pretended to acknowledge that each one might see 
 one aspect of many-sided truth, but each claimed to have 
 a vision of the whole truth and consequently condemned 
 the other. Seeking the whole truth, the Jeunes were 
 therefore always in doubt. Their heirs arc content with 
 parts of the truth and accordingly feel secure. The Jeunes 
 went through terrible crises, called to Christianity for help, 
 and commonly finding none (for the churches were singu-
 
 220 The Real Frame 
 
 larly unhelpful to them) were thrown back upon the only 
 faith they had to cling to, the faith that there was some 
 faith in which all things met. Their heirs are lucky posses- 
 sors of greater stability, lucky to be born in a time of 
 securer if less spacious faiths. They do not seem to know 
 those pathetic doubts which made their elders in boyhood 
 try to pray to a Christian, a Buddhist, some personal god, 
 then turn away and rail, afterwards turn back and pray 
 more fervently and with yet more touching simplicity, 
 seek a divine sign in everything they did, read religion into 
 their everyday lives, behave sometimes like dark dramatic 
 puritans and narrow zealots — Parisians, keen-witted, sharp 
 and intolerantly intelligent though they were. They seem 
 too busy, these heirs of theirs, too busily employed in doubt- 
 tight compartments, ever to cry out in the dark. They are 
 litera^, artistic, scientific, political, and religious, in batches, 
 which may overlap but do not clash. They show amazing 
 activity in each compartment, and may leave more precise 
 work behind them than the Jeunes. They have formed 
 religious organizations which the Jeunes certainly did not 
 possess ; they have succeeded in political engineering such 
 as the Jeunes never dreamt of ; they have sometimes 
 specialized in science as the Jeunes never could ; and they 
 have carried artistic and literary criticism to a point of 
 precision and refinement which the Jeunes never had time 
 to attain : they neither doubt nor believe as the Jeunes 
 did, and the wave of questioning faith and devout scepti- 
 cism which swept over the latter has left them high and 
 dry.
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jewries " 221 
 
 II. — Young Realists 
 
 fk S dead as mysticism are Symbolism, Decadentism, 
 A\ Naturism, and Anarchism. In fact the only actual 
 £ J^ "ism "now alive seems to be "Arrivism." All these 
 things died with mysticism because they were in 
 part born of it and in part fed upon it. In art and 
 in life, the things that are dead now died because mysti- 
 cism died, and what replaces them owes its existence 
 to the killing of mysticism ; at the time of the Jeunes 
 almost everything that lived was mystically born. De- 
 cadentism then already had one foot in the grave and 
 Symbolism was on the brink, but neither was yet quite dead 
 and both were kept partially alive in different degrees, the 
 latter more than the former, by the mystic element there 
 was in them. Both were literary " movements," but it was 
 the philosophy in both that appealed to the Jeunes more 
 than the literature. Decadentism was already very nearly 
 dead, it survived no longer as a system, literary or philo- 
 sophic, the literary cult of far-fetched things and curious 
 stale beauty or the philosophy of decay and perversion, but 
 merely as a literary and philosophic fad with some interest- 
 ing character of its own. In literature the fad was valuable 
 because of the strange and rare flowers which it had pro- 
 duced, but its real value was its mystery. Something of 
 Decadentism was preserved by the Jeunes because the 
 fashion with all its pose and silliness touched one mystic 
 truth, the faint beauty of dying things. Decadentism 
 cared for nothing that was alive and the Jeunes were very 
 much alive, but they had a keen perception of the interest- 
 ing things of this world. They saw that Decadentism had 
 rediscovered the picturesqueness of decay, and so much 
 they retained of Decadentism. That was their mysticism
 
 222 The Real France 
 
 at work, for to them dying things were wonderful because 
 of the life that was leaving them. Decadentism grubbed 
 about in decay, the Jeunes took on a particle of the 
 Decadentism bequeathed to them and philosophized 
 gorgeously upon the mystery of decay. The Decadents 
 (who preceded the Jeunes, but not immediately) only 
 played with dying things ; the Jeunes in their magnificent 
 way read sermons in corruption. The Decadents were 
 picturesque and amazingly clever, the Jeunes always 
 remembered to be religious as well as clever. 
 
 Symbolism, which was flourishing when the Jeunes came 
 of age, was retained to a greater extent than Decadentism 
 by them, but on the same principle. Nobody has yet 
 determined exactly and completely what Symbolism was. 
 As a literary system it propounded the not very new 
 principle that the highest poetic thoughts, having no 
 adequate correlative in words, must, to be represented in 
 words, be expressed by the most fitting images of them 
 which can be put into words : no real poet of course has 
 ever written real poetry otherwise. As a philosophy 
 Symbolism was much vaguer ; it might extend to a 
 metaphysical pure idealism, or it might be whittled down 
 to the mere commonplace of the interpretation of truth by 
 parable. The Jeunes retained more of Symbolism than of 
 Decadentism. They liked symbols and loved their mystic 
 meaning ; they remembered in the enormous literary out- 
 put of Symbolism much that was real poetry, but what they 
 remembered chiefly in Symbolism was an aspect of it 
 to which the Symbolists themselves paid little attention. 
 The latter were literary beyond everything, and they really 
 cared for their symbols almost solely as instruments for 
 renewing poetic language. The methods of the Parnassiens 
 had been worked for all they were worth and more. The 
 study of symbolic language for its own sake, and the
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jeunes" 223 
 
 elaborate cultivation of figure rather as an end unto itself 
 than as a means of representation, provided relatively new 
 poetic machinery, which was set going with enthusiasm 
 and in its turn eventually worked itself out. The mere 
 literary technique of Symbolism did not interest the Jeunes 
 overmuch, and it was already wearing out when they came 
 along. What interested them most in Symbolism was 
 something which for a great part they put into it them- 
 selves. The idea of Signs must always fascinate mystically 
 inclined minds ; either to look upon the world itself as a 
 Symbol or to represent that Symbol by twice removed 
 interpretation in symbols of their own choosing must 
 delight them. The possibility of such mental exercises, 
 which the Symbolists themselves, busy with a new toy of 
 literary technique, scarcely heeded, was what chiefly 
 interested the Jeunes in Symbolism. The Symbolists who 
 succeeded the Decadents were not really mystics at all, 
 they were artists who had found a relatively new material 
 to work in, and they used it with delight. The Jeunes, 
 always remembering to be religious, read a religion into 
 Symbolism, the religion of Signs (which may be the 
 definition of all religions), and what they retained of that 
 " ism " was what was mystical in it, or was the mysticism 
 which they themselves had put into it. The only thing 
 that was alive in Symbolism when the Jeunes flourished 
 was that mystic element ; when the Jeunes and mysticism 
 died, Symbolism died instantly, and it is much more dead 
 now than Classicism. 
 
 The Jeunes were very active while they lasted and 
 played strenuously with a vast number of ideas, but they 
 did not actually invent more than one "ism," Naturiam, 
 and that has died the deatli of mysticism. It of courso 
 owned to no relationship with literary "Naturalism" 
 which was ignored by the Jeunes ; it was a philosophy to
 
 224 The Real France 
 
 regenerate the world, a religious worship of life, a mystic 
 return to nature. It is wholly dead now, killed by the 
 slaughter of mysticism. The heirs of the Jeunes may still 
 reform the world (though with less proselytizing convic- 
 tions), enjoy life, and take an interest in nature, but they 
 no longer spell Nature and Life with capitals ; they do not 
 spend a spring day in the woods with the feeling that pluck- 
 ing a daffodil is a religious rite, or tell themselves constantly 
 that their own little lives are part of the great oneness of 
 things, they do not worship life as a mystery and nature as 
 its symbol, as the Jeunes did. Naturism also has been 
 killed with mysticism. 
 
 In art and in life the Jeunes were mystics. What they 
 retained in their art of Symbolism and Decadentism was 
 the mystic side of both, and Naturism in art was a religious 
 faith. In life, Naturism was for the purpose of their own 
 lives a mystic interpretation of the joy of living ; towards 
 the lives of others the only particular attitude of the Jeunes 
 was Anarchism, and that also was mystic, and that also is 
 dead completely. The Jeunes paid no heed to the practice 
 or even the theory of politics, and had the greatest con- 
 tempt for sociology ; the only doctrine governing the 
 relations of men was Anarchism, not applied with any 
 rigour or even talked about often with much keenness, but 
 understood as a matter of course and deduced from the 
 dogma of the essential religiousness of all things. Anar- 
 chism is as dead as Decadentism, Symbolism, and Natur- 
 ism, and all died when mysticism flickered out. All the 
 interests in art and in life upon which the Jeunes nourished 
 were derived from mysticism ; all the new things with 
 which their heirs have replaced those dead things are 
 explained by the passing of mysticism. Neither in art nor 
 in ' k life is there anything mystical about the heirs of the 
 Jeunes. In art, they have set up, in the place of Decadent-
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jeunes " 225 
 
 ism, Symbolism, Naturism and all other " isms," a 
 doctrine of craftsmanship, which at the best produces 
 extreme specialized culture and high technical skill, and 
 at the worst makes for " shop " and literaturitis ; in life, 
 for themselves, instead of Naturism and a mystic faith in 
 existence, they have only one official and actual doctrine, 
 Arrivism, the doctrine of getting on, and for others, instead 
 of mystic Anarchism and Individualism, they have definite 
 political programmes and active political organizations. 
 The two things that most mark the difference between the 
 Jeunes and their heirs is the revival of an exclusively 
 literary spirit and the revival of the purely political spirit : 
 both revivals are proofs of the death of mysticism. 
 
 Young realists of to-day have no time for mystery in art 
 or in life. In life they are young boulevardiers (the Jeunes 
 had shaken the dust of the boulevard asphalt off their feet), 
 young politicians (the Jeunes had the greatest contempt 
 for politicians of all ages), " Camelots du Roy " (the Jeunes 
 would have preferred bomb- throwing to pasting up por- 
 traits of the Duke d'Orleans in public lavatories as propa- 
 ganda), or Arrivists (the Jeunes, many of them, have 
 " arrived," but while they were young they dreamt other 
 dreams than getting on). In art they are above all perfect 
 young men of letters. All the old philosophies (they seem 
 ancient now) of the Jeunes have turned to literature. 
 Mallarme's cry, at an Oxford lecture, " la litt6raturo 
 seule existe," echoed for a while, began to seem 
 already ghastly to the Jeunes a few years after 
 he had uttered it, though many of them were his 
 disciples. If he could repeat it to-day, it would sound 
 quite natural and up-to-date. The mistake was often 
 made of taking the Jeunes to be purely literary, to be young 
 prigs of literary snobbishness. Even the Symbolists before 
 them and the Decadents before the Symbolists were not
 
 226 The Real France 
 
 slaves to the literary craft. All thought they were doing 
 something by writing, the Jeunes thought of course they 
 were doing most ; none of them, the Jeunes least of all, 
 looked upon the world solely as copy. The exclusively 
 literary standpoint was seldom as often and as narrowly 
 taken, except in the clique of the Parnassiens, as it is among 
 the young men of to-day. It is a fact that the heirs of 
 the Jeunes never write for the purpose of regenerating 
 mankind ; the Jeunes hardly ever wrote to any other end. 
 When they were most absurd, when they rioted in strange 
 and shoddy Babylonian splendour of falsely picturesque 
 language and hastily vamped-up Rosicrucian lore with the 
 Sar Peladan, or revelled in prose poems about sex after 
 Whitman, who would have shuddered if he had known 
 what his lush innocence had been turned to, they were 
 still absurd for a cause, they held the fate of mankind in their 
 hands, and either the glorification of sex or the worship of 
 the rose and cross were the only salvation. Their heirs are 
 very rarely absurd and all they have retained of the 
 absurdities of their elders is material for pleasant and 
 accomplished writing. In the place of all the " Jeunes 
 revues " are magazines almost all grown up and quiet, the 
 the most important of which all teach almost solely the 
 religion of the literary man. The former preached nearly 
 every imaginable other religion, preached in the best 
 literary style available, but preached. The latter have far 
 too much taste to preach. The chief young men's maga- 
 zines of to-day * are rigidly and exclusively confined to 
 belles-lettres and actually have no other purpose. The 
 editors positively do not care what their contributors' 
 
 * Vers et Prose, for instance, which is purely literary, and the now 
 almost venerable Mercure de France, which prides itself on wide and 
 recondite learning, as well as on a strict and impartial devotion to the 
 literary spirit.
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jeunes" 227 
 
 religion or philosophy may be ; if the paper has literary 
 value they print it, if not it is rejected. So extraordinary 
 an editorial policy was unknown in the days of the Jeunes. 
 The first thing a Jeune editor asked was what an intending 
 contributor thought upon world mysteries. If his religion 
 were that of the magazine his paper was then considered ; 
 if not it could not even be looked at. In a Naturist review, 
 for example, founded for the praise of life, the greatest 
 poem in the language could not be printed if it praised 
 ceasing upon the midnight with no pain. To-day many 
 editors actually exist to whom life or death are indifferent 
 as literary themes and to whom the way the poem is 
 written is the only thing that matters : such literary 
 bigotry would have revolted the Jeunes. Their heirs have 
 quietly squeezed all the literary religions of their pre- 
 decessors and extracted from each with much sagacity 
 what drops it had of purely literary essence. They do not 
 hate past literary religions as the Jeunes did, they have 
 adapted them. They look up with an equally wise eye on 
 Symbolism, Decadentism, even upon the Parnassiens, even 
 upon the French Romantics, and their eclecticism not only 
 embraces, but welcomes French Classicism. Out of 
 Symbolism and Decadentism, considered as literary 
 methods, they have selected much valuable matter, daring 
 imagery, and many free and happy metres invented by the 
 Symbolists, the only inventors in that field. Many of the 
 Jeunes' hatreds are dead to them. The Parnassiens were 
 particular foes of the Jeunes, hated by them and hating 
 them, fearing them also, for the Jeunes could have had the 
 patronage of the Parnassiens for the asking, but received 
 all overtures with nastily satiric jibes which were cleverer 
 than anything of the kind the Parnassiens, on tin' whole an 
 ingenuously literary school, had ever themselves thought of. 
 The Parnassiens have left no enemies behind them among
 
 228 The Real France 
 
 the heirs of the Jeunes. These do not go quite so far as to 
 call more than a few lines of what Frangois Coppee wrote 
 poetry, but the memory of poor Coppee, who was the butt 
 of the Jeunes, is not execrated. They are too wise in these 
 days to execrate anyone : they take everyone's measure 
 and will sift every man's work for you with diabolical 
 husbandry. Victor Hugo, whose verse most Jeunes re- 
 garded as the negation of poetry, an opinion fairly well 
 justified in respect to about half of it, has been reinstated 
 in the last few years, and the astounding thing was seen 
 lately of a representative young writer proclaiming that 
 the most beautiful poem in the French language is the 
 " Legende des Siecles." Ten years ago such an opinion 
 would have killed its man, relegated him among the 
 Philistines. But the heirs of the Jeunes have judged 
 French Romanticism as all other " isms " with a cool eye, 
 and found a soul of good in things evil, some poetry in a 
 great deal of bombast. Their elders could not be spoken to 
 on the subject of the Romantiques, Victor Hugo fifteen years 
 ago was seldom read by a self-respecting literary youth, the 
 preface to " Cromwell " was a good joke and Victor Hugo's 
 " Shakespearean " dramas bad jokes, as they certainly are ; 
 anti-Hugolatry became a religion, the unfortunate grand 
 old man of French verse ten years or so after his death was 
 torn down from his pedestal and lacked to bits, and hardly a 
 line he wrote was spouted save in derision. The successors 
 of these absolute young men are more indulgent. They 
 make allowances for the foibles of the French Romantics 
 as for those of everyone else, and they willingly acknow- 
 ledge that there is some good to be got out of them. As 
 they have extracted some imagery and some fancy from 
 Symbolism and Decadentism, so they have kept what the 
 Parnassiens could give them of neat realism in careful 
 verse, throwing away the platitudes, and have had their
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jeunes " 229 
 
 profit of the Romantiques' ingenuous imagination and 
 unsophisticated fire, writing off the rhetoric as dead loss. 
 They practise an admirably balanced economy, and have 
 come after a time that had a religious hatred of balance. 
 In art, they promise to be the careful heirs of all the ages of 
 French literature, and that probably will remain the mark 
 of their day. They are producing the most eclectic all- 
 round purely literary young generation of writers yet 
 known since the seventeenth century, one that will never 
 lose its head over a cause, but will always ask itself, " Is it 
 one we can write artistically about ? " and will never be 
 thoughtless enough to be religious, enthusiastic, and 
 passionate at the expense of taste, as the Jeunes were who 
 considered that taste had a dash of the Everlasting No 
 about it. They have not only drawn up a careful estimate 
 of their near predecessors, but have gone back to French 
 Classicists and overhauled them also with an eye to busi- 
 ness. Their immediate predecessors had wiped out the 
 French seventeenth century almost entirely, except La 
 Fontaine who is for all time in France, and Moliere who is 
 for all time everywhere, and retained nothing of Corneille, 
 and not much more of Racine than did Theophilc Gauticr 
 who pretended to believe that his most beautiful line was 
 " La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae." They have solemnly 
 discovered Racine, who has been reinstated in the last ten 
 years to something like the place he held for a century and 
 a half. There are hopes that they will discover Corneille 
 also in time ; Racine is already back again in his place as 
 a pattern of the "classic" French poet — the very term 
 roused anger in the Jeunes. They do not aim at being classic 
 French poets, having learnt also what other schools, from the 
 Romantiques to the Parnassiens, had to teach them, but 
 they always keep the seventeenth century " classic; " ideal 
 in view among others, and half an eye on Racine. The
 
 230 The Real France 
 
 rugged and passionate splendour of an Emile Verhaeren 
 has admirers, luckily for the admirers, but they also turn 
 with satisfaction to the cool restraint and intelligently 
 sober imagination of Racine. Jean Moreas, who after 
 sowing his Symbolist wild oats became almost a second 
 Racine, would never have died in the same circle of fame 
 from young men as well as academicians had he died ten 
 years ago, having done the same work. He was something 
 of a prophet of the New Classicism ; he would have 
 polished delicate verse in the wilderness among the 
 Jeunes. All the work that brought him fame was 
 purely classic, in the French seventeenth-century sense. 
 It was accepted as master work by the heirs of those 
 Jeunes who would have called it effete and bloodless ; 
 its not too loudly swept strings even sounded fresh 
 and sweet to ears long struck by the crash of poetries 
 that each were prophecies of faith. Perhaps in truth 
 the heirs of the Jeunes grew up tired of strenuously 
 ideal sincerity and turned with relief to self-conscious 
 art whose greatest sincerity is in its technique. Their 
 elders, young and rash, were a little impatient of tech- 
 nique, prose poems were dashed off and the fury of 
 inspiration could not stop to polish, the pure gold in a Walt 
 Whitman might have shone less true had he taken pains to 
 refine his false coinage of words. Their elders were a great 
 deal younger than ever they have been, they have a ripened 
 and sober literary taste. All the old battles for " free " 
 versification have died out, and all the revolutions in French 
 prosody, all the magna opera which were to have drawn up 
 the charter of the indefinable and uncontrollable vers libra 
 are out of date. Some licenses invented in the vers libre have 
 passed into current usage : rhyming for the ear alone and 
 not also " to the eye " (e.g. a singular rhyming with a plural 
 having an unsounded "s") assonance instead of rhyme,
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jeunes " 231 
 
 the omission in scansion of terminal mute "e" syllables 
 followed by a consonant, the combination of lines of various 
 lengths. But " free " versification is now only optional, 
 whereas ten years ago it was compulsory. No Jeune would 
 have dared to compose a regular Alexandrine line; the Jeunes' 
 successors look with favour again upon the traditional 
 and rigid Alexandrine verse of the seventeenth century and 
 as often as not write it according to strict rule by prefer- 
 ence. The other day the vers libre was heard for the first 
 time in history at the Comedie Franchise — last spring in an 
 act by M. Henri Bataille — but that is only a proof of its 
 having gone out of fashion. With the return of a purely 
 literary spirit, the capacity for enjoying the particular 
 pleasures of strictly regular French verse has come back. 
 The law-loving Parnassiens who tremblingly ventured upon 
 one license, the division of a twelve-syllable line into three 
 equal parts by two caesuras instead of in two by one, have 
 not yet been reached again in the reaction, but the taste 
 for the amusement of moulding into a few definite and 
 precise forms the infinite material of poetry has been 
 reacquired. It had been completely lost and was despised 
 by the Jeunes, who were infinitely more occupied with the 
 infinity of poetic material than with finite forms. Their 
 heirs have reawakened for instance to the particular and 
 purely literary joys of the sonnet, the rigid French sonnet. 
 A Jeune never wrote a sonnet, the idea of having to write 
 fourteen lines because you had to and of fitting them with 
 five rhymes because five rhymes there were to be, was to 
 him absurd, and to obey rules formed without regard for 
 the convenience of his poetic material, which might be sucli 
 as to require expression in a thirty-odd syllable poem of 
 Japanese form or might run to an epic, seemed to him 
 monstrous ; poetry was a religion in which the spirit was 
 everything, the form a detail. The purely literary pleasure,
 
 232 The Real France 
 
 a highly civilized and perhaps rather decadent pleasure, of 
 playing with the difficulties of severe technical laws, the 
 more strictly observed that the pleasure may be the greater, 
 has been completely rediscovered. The vers libre, more or 
 less amorphous — chiefly because the tonic accent in the 
 French language is often uncertain and almost always 
 slight — is of course still written, but the honoured old 
 Alexandrine is in its honoured place again ; ten years ago 
 it was never to be heard more ; now it is as much as ever 
 a question whether it will not outlive all vers libres 
 eventually. 
 
 Form and thought breed one another ; with the Alex- 
 andrine line have returned the " classic " ideals of litera- 
 ture in the French sense. " I call classics the poets of 
 reason," " Reason is infallible ..." " The universal and 
 immutable poetic ideal consists in uniting the sublimity of 
 reason with the wonders of speech," "Reason endows poetry 
 and criticism with the character of that which is divine," 
 " Criticism seeks, poetry paints, reality," "The French alone 
 in the modern world have attained to the height of the poetry 
 of reason," are axioms I quote from a successor * of the 
 Jeune reviews of old, though it is infinitely more grown-up 
 than those ever were. Such sage sayings would have been 
 impossible ten or fifteen years ago. Such worship of the 
 goddess Reason would have been unthinkable — and in 
 writing of poetry too ! The Jeunes would have thanked no 
 one for congratulating the French nation upon having 
 attained to the height of the poetry of reason, whatever 
 that poetry may be. These maxims, no doubt without 
 having at all set out to perform the duty, make curiously 
 representative watchwords for the literary heirs of the 
 Jeunes. Not one word in them (those quoted or the rest 
 of the collection) of mystery in poetry : mystery is dead, 
 
 * Vers et Prose, Vol. XIX, 1909.
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jeunes" 233 
 
 not so much as a word for its decent burial, and a decade 
 ago young literature lived on mystery. Poetry to-day is 
 the " painting of reality " and " the sublimity of reason," 
 and the latter will no doubt soon be rediscovered in 
 Corneille as the former has been in Racine. Poetry is a 
 sane art of well-thought-out measure and nice taste, a clear- 
 eyed rational art, a thinking moral art, but no religion. 
 The heirs of the Jeunes are the most literary generation 
 France has known for a long time, but they may be losing 
 something by lacking the mysticism of their elders, and 
 they may be missing the wood for the trees : the poetry 
 which is the sublimity of reason may find itself without that 
 indefinable something which is not reason and which makes 
 poetry. Some very valuable pages in Mr. Arthur Symons's 
 perversely named work * might be given out as a text-book 
 to the heirs of the Jeunes by any one who had the teaching 
 of them, if they allowed anyone to teach them, which is in 
 the last degree improbable. They might learn again the 
 sense of mystery, which the Jeunes had, if they had nothing 
 else. If they do get completely rid of it, they may do 
 infinitely more for letters than the vague and absolute 
 Jeunes ever did, but there will be less poetry in their 
 achievements than there was in the latter 's dreams. 
 
 Art has no mysteries left for the heirs of the Jeunes. In 
 literature they are sagacious critics, historiographers, 
 bibliographers, and their periodicals, from the Mercure de 
 France to the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, are full of the 
 intelligent siftings of their research work which for origi- 
 nality and thoroughness puts the Academy of Inscriptions 
 and Belles-Lettres to shame ; upon the graphic and plastic 
 arts they write compendiously and learnedly — one is glad to 
 say, however, with violent prejudices as far as contem- 
 porary art is concerned ; in musical criticism they have 
 * The Romantic Movement in English Literature.
 
 234 The Real France 
 
 long since thrown over literary and philosophic impres- 
 sionism, and only a belated and effete Jeune nowadays 
 ventures to be untechnical : in all the arts they unite 
 specialization with eclecticism, specialization of indi- 
 vidual practice and eclecticism of general taste, and in 
 no art have they the gorgeously vague religiousness of the 
 Jeunes. The advancement of learning is greatly to be 
 admired, but one cannot help a tender feeling for the 
 truculent enthusiasms that are gone. 
 
 In life, as in art, the psychology of the heirs of the Jeunes 
 Is explained by the passing of mysticism ; everything in 
 their practice for their own lives and in their theory for the 
 lives of others is accounted for by the same cause. In the 
 management alike of their own affairs and of other people's, 
 they are determined young realists. No dreams, individual 
 or social, for them : no dreams in their own lives, no 
 Utopias for mankind. They want reality for themselves 
 and will allow only reality to others ; they do not ask to 
 get out of the world, they do not want to fade away into 
 the forest dim, and they cannot therefore see why they 
 should indulge such vague emotion in others. The death 
 of mysticism has produced Arrivism in the individual and 
 political realism in his attitude towards society. In life, 
 the Jeunes were not essentially ambitious and were essen- 
 tially not politicians and their heirs are essentially both. 
 
 The young Arrivist in general deserves a place of honour 
 or at least of eminence in any gallery of French types of 
 to-day, and he has been described on an earlier page. He is 
 not always an heir of the Jeunes, but a particular variety 
 of him is, which is characteristic both of his type and of his 
 times. He had very few forbears among the Jeunes, for the 
 latter have had in after years to confess that their minds in 
 their twenties Mere not much troubled about getting on. 
 They were so busy regenerating the world that they often
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jewries " 235 
 
 forgot to conquer it, and they talked as if the world were 
 at their feet for them to shatter and remould, but often 
 found out afterwards that it wasn't at all. All the heirs of 
 the Jeunes are not arrivists and all arrivists are not heirs 
 of the Jeunes by any means, but the spirit of Arrivism has a 
 vigour about it to-day which it never had in the days before 
 the word was invented. It first showed signs of healthy 
 growth towards the end of the Jeunes' era, and of all the 
 " isms " of the latter Naturism by an apparent paradox 
 first fostered it. " Returning to nature " and " arriving " 
 seem contradictory ; but you returned to nature to praise 
 life, to praise life you had to have plenty of it in you, and 
 to prove that you had plenty you had to assert yourself. 
 Of course the Jeunes asserted themselves mystically, an 
 exceedingly ingenuous method of push, and an Arrivism 
 which attacks effete philosophies and corrupt ideals with 
 truculent professions of faith does not practically arrive 
 very far. They have improved methods vastly in these 
 days. First conquer your world, is the maxim of a far 
 abler procedure, and it sometimes is, first catch your world. 
 Do not tilt at it as the Jeunes did with the arm of faith and 
 clamours of wrath and hope ; humour it, play with it, play 
 up to it, play down to it, above all be of the world. The 
 Jeunes never were, and generally looked upon it as an 
 enemy, if not the enemy ; their heirs as a rule consider it 
 kindly, and the arrivists among them eye it with genuine 
 affection. The}^ have in not much more than a decade 
 returned to a great number of things which their elders had 
 forsaken, from which in fact they had turned with loathing. 
 They have rediscovered the boulevards, Parisianism, the 
 play, the salon, rediscovered Paris in fact. The Paris of 
 Parisianism was hated by their elders, whom few amiable 
 remarks from a friendly foreigner could vex more than his 
 praise of Parisianism. That was as dead as the vie de
 
 236 The Real France 
 
 boheme of the Latin Quarter. The vie de boheme is still as 
 dead as ever, but Parisianism has been revived by the heirs 
 of the Jeunes. They are seen on the boulevards, where 
 there is a cafe or two which they do not avoid as the sinks of 
 sceptical levity that corrupts faith ; they go to boulevard 
 plays (where indeed are the evenings of l'CEuvre's famous 
 symbolic performances, when in corduroys and Florentine 
 robes the audience roared its rapture at a symbol and 
 always wound up by hooting " Uncle Sarcey," who never 
 could understand a symbol ?) — and they put on evening 
 dress ; they do not even at all mind, in fact they like, being 
 asked into newspaper offices, and they actually take their 
 hats off to influential journalists, whom their elders looked 
 upon as the more pernicious minions of the Everlasting No 
 the more influential they were ; they go into Society and 
 recite poems in Duchesses' drawing-rooms, never having 
 heard of the anathema pronounced a decade or so ago upon 
 the art, the literature, the philosophy, the religion, and the 
 soul of " the world." They are in the " monde " as they 
 are of the world, they no longer live in an isle of their own 
 (that of the Jeunes seemed sometimes to them enchanted) 
 cut off from the men who have succeeded and the men who 
 are struggling, from the men who have captured the public, 
 the men who are earning their bread, and those who have 
 bread to give. There is no more talk of fervent monasteries 
 where brotherhoods of the Jeunes were to retire, think, and 
 create o' week-days, possibly reserving the Sabbath for 
 relaxation, and it might be for the society of ladies, who in 
 those times were not admitted to the sports of the intellect 
 because they did not think mystically. There are no more 
 brotherhoods such as communed over tea and ideas, 
 gathered round a philosophic thought, and were held 
 together by faith ; each of which cultivated a mystic 
 sympathy and shut out all but a dozen elect at most, among
 
 Tlie Heirs of " Les Jewries" 237 
 
 whom two words were enough to express a metaphysical 
 truth and half a sentence ample for an entire doctrine, and 
 each of which believed it was remaking the world. There 
 seems to be less comradeship among the heirs of the Jeunes, 
 or at all events their friendships are much more sensible 
 affairs. They do not swear high compacts against the 
 world, for the very good reason that they generally want to 
 have the world with them. Most of them are decided young 
 men of the world, who mean to get on, and do. To-day even 
 the young philosopher, the young idealist, the pious young 
 Christian, the exquisite young poet want to get on, and they 
 show great ability to do it. They are not common arrivists 
 with an amazing genius for bluff; their ability, their 
 accomplishments, their intellectual equipment are genuine. 
 They do not try to get on by false pretences, and they have 
 every right to get on ; the difference between them and 
 their elders is that the latter, generally as well armed 
 intellectually, bore flaming banners into the bargain, and 
 often thought more of waving them than of winning. The 
 heirs of the Jeunes are bent first of all on winning the battle. 
 The most developed type of intellectual arrivist is perhaps 
 even more remarkable, though sometimes perhaps less 
 remarkably successful, than the common arrivist or bluffer. 
 He has specialized of course in one or two particular 
 subjects — perhaps Annamite architecture and the anec- 
 dotal history of French literature from 1815 to 1850 for 
 example — upon which nobody can beat him, but he has 
 also clear and precise notions of almost every other under 
 the sun. There is no topic at all events in which he can be 
 caught napping. He has something at least sensible and 
 often judicious to say upon everything. His elders had 
 ideas upon everything, but it is hardly enough to say that 
 they jumped to conclusions ; they considered only the 
 conclusions of all things, and whatever they had to say
 
 238 The Real France 
 
 upon anything quickly worked round to an argument in 
 proof of a faith, just as for the ingenious theologian there is 
 naught in nature, even to the quarters of an orange, which 
 is not evidence of Divine design : they had ideas upon every 
 subject under the sun, but they swept all subjects into their 
 faiths without bothering about the inessential details of 
 knowledge. The frightening thing about the young intel- 
 lectual arrivist of to-day is that he knows : no convenient 
 generalities and a priori belief for him. He has got up in 
 its essentials every subject on which he has anything — and 
 there are few on which he has nothing — to say, and with due 
 caution and reserve can hold his own against an expert. 
 He has " placed " every subject a good deal more effectu- 
 ally as a rule than the expert has, and you can spring no 
 idea upon him which he has not already fitted into his 
 practical scheme of the universe. What he says, moreover, 
 he says extremely well : he has a command of precise, 
 fluent, exact, and adequate language which would stagger 
 his English contemporary just down from Oxford. He is 
 never at a loss, he is never carried away, he never gives 
 himself away, he is never ingenuous or bumptious or rash ; 
 he never advances an argument without having another to 
 back it, never speaks on trust, is never tempted by the 
 adventures of paradox, he does not lay down the law, he is 
 always modest, definite and clear. He never shows off, 
 always shows to the best advantage, and always cuts just 
 the figure that will best help him on in the world. He is the 
 most finished young sage there ever was : one almost 
 prefers, sometimes, his brother the bluffer, the common 
 arrivist who at least is picturesque. There are moments 
 when the intellectual arrivist strikes one as hardly human, 
 as only a machine for getting on. He is not even merely an 
 intellectual prig, and he knows that bookishness never won 
 the real world he wants to win. That is why he has gone
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jeunes" 239 
 
 back to the boulevards, where he can talk quite well down 
 to the level of the boulevardier, to the play where he has 
 as good a manner for an actress's dressing-room as any of 
 the young millionaires who keep her, into society where it 
 is far more necessary to be seen in certain drawing-rooms, 
 after you have brought out a book, than to have written 
 the book. There is no accomplishment of use to him from 
 erudition to small talk which he does not use with great 
 skill. If he does not get on nobody will. What he will get 
 on to, the future will show ; in the meantime, France has 
 in him a remarkable type of a remarkable generation, a 
 pattern of young man of exceedingly sharp intelligence and 
 uncommonly comprehensive and penetrating intellect, 
 exceptional cultivation, brilliant talents, vitality as strong 
 as his ambition, and no enthusiasm. 
 
 The heirs of the Jeunes have killed mysticism in their 
 own lives, and in their theories for the lives of others as 
 well. Their rules for the management of their own lives 
 and the principles on which they would take society in 
 hand do not correspond exactly, but have one character 
 in common — realism. A characteristic of the generation 
 which had not gone up to college ten years ago is the 
 revival of the political spirit. Politics for young men of 
 parts have become a creditable occupation and interest 
 only within the last decade or so. The accepted idea that 
 French public life is on the down grade is in this respect at 
 all events the contrary of the truth. In the days of the 
 Jeunes a taboo lay on the political world, among young 
 men with the slightest pretension to intelligence and 
 culture ; its ideas, its men, and its activities were ignored. 
 The subject of the day's politics was barred in conversa- 
 tion, parliamentary leaders were hardly ever known by 
 name, and the entire activity of the political world was 
 held to be not of the smallest interest or importance. The
 
 240 The Real France 
 
 Jeunes would have been amazed to be told that their heirs 
 would follow parliamentary debates, busy themselves about 
 M. Clemenceau or M. Briand, and discuss proportional 
 representation. They looked always beyond the mere 
 practice of politics. The latter they considered to be 
 carried on squalidly in actual fact, but to be also squalid 
 business by nature. The average politician's want of 
 intelligence exasperated them and the spuriousness of his 
 ideals revolted them. If they had any political doctrine at 
 all, it was Anarchism. The morning after Vaillant threw 
 his unoffending bomb into the Chamber of Deputies, I 
 remember meeting a representative party of the Jeunes in 
 exultation : here was a man who had done something, not 
 enough, but something. They lived in an ecstatic fever of 
 hope that at last the great cataclysm was coming, out of 
 which society would emerge more beautiful, or less hideous. 
 Throughout the period of Anarchist bomb-throwing, the 
 bomb-throwers absolutely carried with them the sympathy 
 of young intellectual France, and Laurent Tailhade's 
 " What matter a few vague humanities, if the gesture be 
 beautiful ? " when a bomb cut off half a dozen such vague 
 human lives, was derided afterwards — especially after 
 Eaurent Tailhade himself had been nearly blinded by 
 another bomb when dining in an expensive restaurant — 
 but it was applauded when it was said. Politically the 
 Jeunes cared only for dreams, which were generous dreams, 
 though they sound rather bloodthirsty and very absurd, 
 and their heirs care only for realities. Their heirs are far 
 too sensible to be Anarchists, and by a coincidence which 
 may not be accidental — for the moods of a nation are 
 traversed by curious currents of sympathy running from 
 soured and fanatical tramps to young B.A.'s of the 
 bourgeoisie — Anarchism throws no more bombs. They 
 have only a superior pity for Utopias. They have re-
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jeunes" 241 
 
 discovered practical politics ; they have rediscovered the 
 balance of European power, the need for armaments, the 
 value of alliances, they have rediscovered patriotism, a 
 sensible matter-of-fact patriotism, whereas their elders 
 were anti-patriots and anti-militarists. Anti-militarism 
 and anti-patriotism have not increased but greatly dimin- 
 ished in France since some working men's associations took 
 them up, for they have ceased to exist among the educated 
 youth. The latter are too practical politicians not to 
 accept military service, which their elders derided and 
 cursed as a degradation and a slavery, and peace societies 
 which had a following among the Jeunes have next to none 
 among their heirs. 
 
 The heirs of the Jeunes have re-fashioned for 
 themselves a practical political spirit. They include 
 in their midst several political types none of which 
 were known to their elders. The young international 
 politician solemnly engrossed in world politics, the young 
 sociologist who has discovered that sociology is a science, 
 the young political man of action who has been in the thick 
 of it since he was sixteen, are all new types which make the 
 once Jeunes feel very old. The first is a magnificent young 
 wiseacre ; he has primed himself in the Balkans, the Near 
 East, the Dual monarchy, the Far East, the Future of the 
 Latin races, English budgets, the Trend of American 
 thought, and inclines to taking Mr. Roosevelt seriously. 
 He has it all at his finger-tips, and he has the greatest faith 
 in it all. The oldest fictions of diplomacy have not forfeited 
 his respect ; the most involved and most often violated 
 treaties are familiar to him, and he knows exactly when 
 and how they were violated. He really has absorbed an 
 enormous mass of documentary learning which he has 
 digested and assimilated. When he starts writing on world 
 politics in the Press, he is the terror of pleasant attach6s at 
 
 R
 
 242 The Real France 
 
 the Quai d'Orsay, whom he consults in theory but in 
 practice instructs, and who alternately fret at being taught 
 much more diplomatic history than they at all want to learn 
 and dread it being discovered by him that they don't take 
 themselves seriously. He is a very accomplished young 
 man whose only fault is that he takes world politics 
 and himself in dead earnest, but it is one he may grow 
 out of. 
 
 The second type has the same sort of mind. He has not 
 only discovered sociology, but has ascertained that it is a 
 science. For dreamers from Bakunin to William Morris he 
 entertains sometimes a pitying, sometimes a furious con- 
 tempt ; thus the poetry of News from Nowhere must 
 without doubt excite in him particular indignation, for 
 imagination has no business in social science. He is 
 scientific beyond everything. He studies the mob, pluto- 
 cracy, aristocracy, the upper intellectual strata of mankind, 
 in the abstract. He proceeds regularly by induction and 
 deduction, and builds a theory ; it is essential that he 
 should have built at least one of his own by the time he is 
 twenty-five. He develops it rigorously in severely close and 
 logical language, supplemented by copious diagrams, curves, 
 and tables. He achieves the difficult feat of writing dully 
 in stodgy French about the most interesting traits in the 
 French people, and some of the young reviews of to-day are 
 filled with sociological studies of his, which are almost 
 German in their weighty compendiousness. He also 
 is a young man of remarkable parts, but he is not 
 amusing. 
 
 The third type of politician is. He is the young politician 
 militant, who has sprung up almost mushroom-like not in 
 a decade, but in half, and is a growth of which the Jeunes 
 had never dreamt. He is even more precocious in politics 
 than the Jeunes were in mysticism, and if a muscular boy,
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jewries" 243 
 
 has sometimes begun his active career at sixteen by hitting 
 his history master for having spoken disrespectfully of 
 Louis XV, for instance, or in extenuation of the French 
 Revolution. The " manifestation " instantly gets into the 
 papers, the Conservative Press drags the master through 
 the mire and interviews the young patriot, who thereupon 
 leaves school to begin a political career. After a " King's 
 hawker " has been demonstrating for years, one learns that 
 he has just gone up for the conscription, that is to say he 
 is one-and-twenty. It is characteristic of a generation that 
 has killed mysticism that the young politician militant is 
 never on the unsafe side. He never does battle for generous 
 dreams, which were the only form the political spirit ever 
 took among the Jeunes ; he is most militant in the cause 
 of reaction. He battles for the downtrodden classes 
 oppressed by the masses, for martyred Roman Catholic 
 financiers groaning under the tyranny of Jews who are 
 making more money than they, for patriots ground under 
 the heel of traitors : he is the young champion of safe 
 causes, those which are advertised by political parties with 
 nothing to do but to keep up agitation at any price, and 
 which are perfectly safe because they never will be advanced 
 beyond the agitation stage and never will cost their 
 defenders their lives, liberties, or comforts. The perhaps 
 unprecedented spectacle is seen of militant political youth 
 devoting their animal spirits to the defence of the social 
 order which nobody threatens ; hitherto the natural thing 
 had been for youth to threaten it. The Roman Catholic 
 revival among the heirs of the Jeunes is no less realist ; 
 practical the young political militant cannot properly be 
 said to be, for it seems unlikely that any of his campaigns 
 will ever win him any plunder, but idealist he certainly is 
 not, for what he aims at, on his own behalf or on behalf of 
 his cause, is the plunder, though it is a hundred to one
 
 244 The Real France 
 
 against his ever getting it. The religious young man of 
 to-day among the heirs of the Jeunes has killed mysticism 
 perhaps even more effectually even than his fellows. The 
 Roman Catholic revival of a month or two among the 
 Jeunes sprang from their natural religiousness, and it died 
 because they found the political church to be considerably 
 less religious than they ; the present undoubtedly strong 
 Roman Catholic revival among their successors came the 
 other way about. Its derivation is purely political and the 
 political Church of Rome in France leads it. Sincere piety 
 is of course not rare, but the difference is that the Jeunes 
 were religious naturally though violently unorthodox, 
 whereas their heirs were naturally irreligious when the 
 political spirit moved many of them towards religion, whom 
 the Church of Rome then took in hand. Not naturally 
 religious, the young Roman Catholic party is violently 
 orthodox according to the tenets of the political church of 
 to-day. The primitive Christian counsel against ostenta- 
 tious prayer is rigorously discountenanced. On church 
 festivals pious youths assemble, motor in battalions to the 
 Madeleine, and march, through an admiring crowd on the 
 steps, in to pray. They come out aggressively, as who 
 should say, " We have indeed prayed, and if any infidel 
 objects, we will learn the reason why." There is not even a 
 French Freemason on the steps to object, unfortunately, 
 and the secret grievance of the young church party is that 
 no one does prevent their praying. After Mass they 
 reassemble in the upper room of some old and demure cafe 
 of the Boulevard St. Germain mysteriously, and there plot 
 darkly against the Republic, speaking often in coded 
 language for fear of Freemasonry. It would be quite 
 needless to spy on them of course, if anyone wanted to, for 
 the entire cafe knows exactly what they are doing. What 
 are they doing ? Their darkest schemes are one for
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jeunes" 245 
 
 invading the " right bank " in a column over a hundred 
 strong, to the cry of " Vive le Roi ! " and another for pasting 
 portraits of the Duke d'Orleans in all the lavatories of 
 socialist Belleville at the same moment. They do not 
 appear to be a serious danger to the Republic. Yet it is a 
 remarkable, and it might be a serious, thing that the 
 militant politicians among the heirs of the Jeunes should 
 all be on the side of reaction.* No doubt Republican youth, 
 
 * Among twenty or so small magazines of to-day, which have 
 succeeded the reviews of the Jeunes and are no longer called "jeunes 
 revues," at least half are more or less Reactionary in politics, and 
 more or less closely allied to the political church party. Le Sillon is 
 (or was, for the Vatican has just rewarded its promoter by a 
 tart rebuke and a peremptory order, meekly obeyed, to disband 
 his forces and hand them over to the sole authority of the clergy) 
 the "organ" of a young political group of the same name, which 
 consisted of M. Marc Sangnier first and foremost and his followers 
 humbly in the background, and which in the pursuit of a shadowy 
 goal of Roman Catholic democracy, vaguely democratic but rigorously 
 Roman Catholic, affected to hold the Royalist and other reactionary 
 parties at arm's length and tried to coquet with labour parties, 
 succeeding only with skeleton workmen's unions built up labori- 
 ously by go-ahead militant churchmen. La Plume politique et 
 sociale, which has taken and improved the name of the dead Plume 
 (which was a much more important, purely literary magazine of the 
 Jeune period and before), affects to be purely literary, but is political 
 and reactionary, with "patrons" drawn from militant Royalists. 
 Les Entretiens idealistes is Roman Catholic, but opposed to " 1' Action 
 Francaise," the daily newspaper of the most truculent young Royalists, 
 M. Leon Daudet, for instance, and the " Camelots du Roy," and 
 appears to be connected with " 1 Action liberate," not a newspaper, 
 but a Parliamentary party of Roman Catholic Conservatives who do 
 not profess to be against the Third Republic. La Revue critique, 
 under cover of loftily impartial social criticism, is Royalist, and 
 supports the " Action Francaise." Les Gutpes look literary, but print 
 twelve times a year on their yellow cover a demonstration of the guilt 
 of Major Dreyfus. Les Flcehes affect to have a dig at every party, 
 including the truculent Conservatives who advocate Anarchist 
 methods, but the magazine has evidently reactionary sympathies 
 and is Roman Catholic. " Traditionalism " and " Neo-Classicism " in 
 literature appear often to go hand in hand with Reactionary politics.
 
 246 The Real France 
 
 if a danger arose, would rise also and meet it, and in a fight 
 I think I should back the Republicans. But for the time 
 being Republican youth makes no attempt to rise, nor 
 indeed any motion at all, leaving the field entirely to 
 revolutionary young Royalists and violent young champions 
 of " social order." The latter have done no one any harm 
 so far and will no doubt continue quite harmless, yet if they 
 go on canvassing unopposed they may canvass with success, 
 and in the end the majority of cultivated young France 
 may be won over at least to the same ineffectual, and 
 perhaps to a more efficient, political reactionarism. The 
 militant political youth of to-day is thus twice removed 
 from the Jeunes : the latter in politics despised the matters 
 of fact and cared only for the dreams, but there was a 
 method in their dreams, for these were always on the side 
 of greater freedom and greater humanity ; their political 
 heirs ignore dreams, asking only for realities, and reality to 
 
 La Revue libre and Les Rubriques nouveUes champion ' ' Traditional- 
 ism" in literature and in life, the former being more positively 
 reactionary in politics than the latter. Only Pan, very slight for its 
 name, is politically "advanced." Le Centaure is a relic of Naturism, 
 and sadly publishes recollections of that strenuous movement. The 
 rest of the "young reviews" of to-day that are no longer "jeunes 
 revues " are purely literary, like Vers et Prose, the most important of 
 them, and in fact hardly a " young review " at all, La Nouvelle Revue 
 francaise, which may be said to rank next, La Phalange and the 
 obscure Occident, all the latter three having, however, vague Roman 
 Catholic, or at all events, decidedly anti-Voltairian leanings, the sedate 
 Revue du temps present, Les Actes des Poetes, the sensible Re Sonnante, 
 despite its name, the insignificant Renaissance romantique, which 
 affords only too clear a proof that French Romanticism is dead, 
 L' Art libre, and Le Beffroi ; or, like Le Spectateur, aim at scientific 
 sociology, as do Le Mercure de France, though principally literary, 
 and La Revue des Idies, mostly philosophic, neither of which are 
 " young reviews " at all. One or two of them, La Renaissance 
 conlemporaine, for instance, and especially (though published at 
 Marseilles) Le Feu, are purely " Parisian," as no "jeune revue" of 
 old ever was.
 
 The Heirs of " Les Jewries" 247 
 
 them is the reaction of the social order against life, of 
 tradition against new aspirations, and of authority against 
 liberty. 
 
 In the heirs of the Jeunes France has a new generation 
 which in art and in life is exceedingly able and informed, 
 and cultivates both with talent and industry ; which has 
 carried the literary life and the art of getting on to an 
 equally high degree of advancement, and has improved the 
 literary spirit and rediscovered the political spirit, but a 
 generation which is not one of great faiths.
 
 X V. The French Stage of To-day 
 
 A NOTHER book on France ? " said a French friend who 
 / % was a " Jeune" ten years ago. "I tell you what. Call 
 X j^ it ' In the Chantecler Country.' " This was really 
 meant as a gibe even more at M. Edmond Rostand 
 than at me. The strangest fate that a play ever knew 
 befell " Chantecler." Where foreign opinion extolled, 
 French opinion damned. Not a Frenchman in a hundred, 
 critic or shopkeeper, had a good word to say for it, and the 
 more typically French the shopkeeper or the critic was, the 
 more he " slated " " Chantecler." It was kept going on the 
 bills solely by French people who, having read it, wanted 
 to see it to be able to run it down with better knowledge, 
 and by foreign visitors of whom one-tenth at most could 
 follow it. No play was ever so universally condemned in its 
 own country. Its faults are as glaring as its puns, but 
 French judges deliberately shut their eyes to its merits. 
 It only rarely approaches real poetry, and its heroic speeches 
 of ten fall into the fustian of rhetoric. But is M. Rostand's 
 " Cyrano de Bergerac," the biggest French dramatic success 
 of modern times, real poetry, and is not every modern 
 French drama in verse, from Victor Hugo to Francois 
 Coppee, overladen with bombast ? The very Frenchmen 
 who called the delightful verbal games of " Cyrano " poetry, 
 and whom the claptrap of " Pour la Couronne " stirred, 
 condemned the euphuism and high falutin' of " Chante- 
 cler." The same who triumphantly discovered real poetry 
 in " Cyrano " found the same thing in " Chantecler " and 
 
 248
 
 The French Stage of To-day 249 
 
 called it false. There is little real poetry in the former, but 
 there is not less in the latter, and the brilliant and pleasant 
 playing with words which gives value to the one gives as 
 much to the other, though hardly one French judge will say 
 so. The qualities as well as the faults of " Chantecler " are 
 peculiarly French, and French judges deny the former. 
 French drama in verse has very rarely at any time been 
 poetic, but the versified drama of no other nation has been 
 as neat, deft, ingenious, and effective. Those are the very 
 qualities which make " Chantecler " interesting. They 
 appeal to the English spectator (when he understands 
 them) precisely because they are peculiarly French. No 
 English dramatist in any age has played so nimbly and 
 prettily with words as some French dramatists have ; the 
 game is one at which the best among us are awkward. The 
 ejaculatory dialogue of hens and chicks pecking at worms, 
 the cock's fine conceit, the truculent hooting of the owls, 
 the spiteful grumbling of the toads are all the factitious 
 tricks of a juggler with words, but they are performed with 
 superior skill, and they should amuse us as they amused 
 him. This is not in the least the poetry and humour of 
 nature — of The Jungle Book — but it is exceeding neat 
 fooling, and exceeding deft versifying. " Chantecler " has 
 nothing to do with the French drama of to-day, and France 
 is the " ' Chantecler ' country " only because " Chante- 
 cler " proved no prophet in it. But " Chantecler " is 
 peculiarly and essentially French all the same, and the 
 strange fate that befell it means this : that the French 
 spectator of to-day refused to admire one of the best 
 examples of what French dramatic versifiers at all times 
 have done best. 
 
 In the country which is not the " Chantecler " country, 
 the stage has seldom been as interesting as it is to-day, 
 perhaps because, while there have not been very many
 
 250 The Real France 
 
 more interesting days than ours, there has been none to 
 which any stage has as flexibly shaped itself as the French 
 stage to the French to-day. This may not be afterwards 
 called a lofty or a great day ; it is a day full of varied life 
 and full of nice shades and changing motion. The repre- 
 sentative French drama of to-day is not heroic or eloquent 
 drama, nor drama of real poetry, but it is the most repre- 
 sentative of its day. The contemporary English drama 
 that pays and is popular often seems still pleasantly 
 unconscious of contemporary thinking. The German stage 
 has had lyric bursts and spurts of Ibsenism along an even 
 tenour of beaten paths. The Norwegian stage was Ibsen, 
 who was not the whole of to-day. No one can be found to 
 know whether there be an American drama ; at any rate, 
 if there is one, it has not put upon the stage the poetry 
 which Whitman saw in this day. The French stage seems 
 to have missed the poetry of the present, but it has missed 
 little else of its day. The poetic drama, never a French 
 forte, is archaic or forced, rarely the real and natural thing, 
 on the contemporary French stage. Catulle Mendes was 
 dazzlingly euphuistic, had almost genius in affectation, 
 and made the most wonderful paste brilliants ever seen. 
 M. Zamacois has a pleasant daintiness and can turn a 
 roundel better than any man. M. Rostand — even the great 
 Edmond Rostand — has little real poetry in him : he is 
 always at his trick of catching us with a flashy antithesis, 
 his best things do not ring with absolute clearness and 
 truth, and his less good, pleasing though they be, sound false. 
 " Cyrano de Bergerac," which sent all Paris and afterwards 
 literary London mad, is only an amazing glitter ; "l'Aiglon" 
 is a colossal building up of concetti, marvellously finished. 
 " Chantecler," which French judges damned, has peculiarly 
 French qualities, but they are traditional, not original ; 
 it gives the purely artificial pleasure, fresher, perhaps, to
 
 The French Stage of To-day 251 
 
 English than to French ears, of keen verbal sport, which is 
 an old French game, and what real poetry it has is not the 
 poetry of to-day. I am not at all sure that French judges 
 condemned it on that account, or that they at all think of 
 asking the dramatic poet to sing to them the poetry of 
 to-day, but one may as well give them the benefit of the 
 doubt. Some of them appeared to find the poet of to-day 
 in M. Henri Bataille, when he dreamed "A love evening's 
 dream," the chief distinction of which was that when it 
 was brought out the walls of the Comedie francaise, for the 
 first time in history, heard irregular verse, with hiatus, 
 assonance instead of rhyme, and without proper caesuras. 
 But it was a serious error, if not to look to M. Bataille for 
 the poetry of the present, at all events to find it in " Le 
 Songe d'un soir d'amour." Even in his prose, M. Bataille 
 has been travelling towards an archaic romanticism, and 
 further and further away from to-day and from what 
 romance of its own this day may have. " La Vierge folle " 
 took us into an Alfred de Musset country where hearts 
 throbbed and the mind was busy only with counting each 
 beat, where the only moments that existed were the 
 paroxysms of sexual passion, and where men and women 
 of all ages from eighteen to forty-two lived only for the 
 frenzy of love and no one had any sense of humour. If this 
 was the prose, what, then, was the verse? "Lui" was a 
 Byronic man of letters who had slain many hearts, but had 
 been jilted by the one woman who had enslaved him. 
 
 ' Elle " was his new love, and it was their first evening of 
 love, but a dream was all it proved. " L'ombre," the ghost 
 of the lady who had jilted him, came between " Lui " and 
 
 ' Elle," and whenever he tried to make love, the ghost 
 said, " thou shalt not, thou still lovest me only and knowest 
 it," and his courtship failed lamely. The ghost even came 
 and blew out a match — a French match which the hero had
 
 252 The Real France 
 
 lit with difficulty — with which he was about to burn an old 
 letter of hers at the new love's request. This was bad 
 enough of the ghost, but what finished the love dream was 
 the ghost's prompting " Lui " to say, when " Elle " asked 
 him to fly with her at once, " I am afraid I don't love you 
 enough," at which, naturally hurt, particularly as the 
 ghost's existence remained throughout unknown to her, 
 she showed him the door. M. Henri Bataille has not, I 
 think, given us the poetic drama of the present. 
 
 The poetic drama is not the real French drama of to-day, 
 and the French stage has not dreamed and realized the 
 poetry of to-day — nor has any other. 
 
 But Paris on the stage — not in dramatic experiments, 
 but in plays that pay, and pay well — has realized its own 
 to-day, its own every day, marvellously. The French stage 
 has now no " tendencies," no principles, no leading ideas, 
 and does not know whither it is going — but it goes thither 
 full-bloodedly and with keen life in its veins. There has 
 never been more general intelligence on any stage. None 
 has understood everyday men and the ordinary life of its 
 age more truly, or mirrored them more really. None has 
 been in closer relationship with the spirit of its time. Few 
 periods have attained an equal strength of talent in play- 
 writing, or the same level of intelligence in many branches 
 of drama. As much cleverness seldom has been required 
 from the playwright for success, and I am persuaded that 
 the actor never was compelled to go as deeply into his own 
 art as he must on the present Parisian stage. 
 
 The French drama has in this day completely given up 
 trying to be any other thing than itself. It has once for all 
 left the moral standpoint behind. It resolutely sets itself 
 only one duty : to please as drama. Whatever of moral 
 purpose it may have had in the past from Beaumarchais to 
 Dumas fils it now determinedly drops. It has done with
 
 The French Stage of To-day 253 
 
 the satire that chastens and with the castigating laugh, 
 with ridicule that is to kill and with regenerating scorn. 
 It does not whip the effete aristocracy because the crimson- 
 blooded people is growling below, attack a class because 
 Society is in travail, or show us up that we may reform. 
 It has done not only with plain teaching, but with subtle 
 teaching, and has done even with the problem that is set 
 before us merely that we may see. It does not even state 
 questions, does not even ask questions left unanswered. 
 It asks nothing : it satirizes because satire is dramatic, it 
 laughs because laughter is a thing of the stage, it is scornful 
 when scorn tells behind the footlights, and uses ridicule 
 when ridicule serves the theatre. It is drama and only 
 drama ; it is only a spectacle on a stage to move us some- 
 how, by laughter, tears, terror, pity, admiration. It is only 
 an entertainment. But it is not an entertainment for 
 babes or dullards. 
 
 A good play, after all, is all the present French stage, 
 like the stage of Shakespeare, cares for. But there are 
 good plays, and " good plays." Robertson wrote a few, 
 and Victorien Sardou has written a few score, " good 
 plays." There is no difference between M. Sardou's pur- 
 pose and that of modern French dramatists, for they, as he, 
 write to amuse. But there are different qualities of amuse- 
 ment. A man, who expecting a " good play " goes to a 
 good play on the present French stage, will often suffer a 
 bad after-dinner disappointment. The French stage is an 
 entertainment, but not one for sucklings or dozers. The 
 history of the stage seems to show that when the drama 
 has been solely an entertainment, the quality of the enter- 
 tainment has been highest. The Elizabethans sought only 
 to give good plays, and the greatest of them was the most 
 determined entertainer of them all. The French stage of to- 
 day has not given us as good plays as Shakespeare's and he
 
 254 The Real France 
 
 still may amuse us more. But it gives entertainment of 
 higher quality than has been given anywhere for several 
 generations. Not everyone can be amused by it, and its 
 merit is that it cannot altogether amuse everybody. The 
 spectator cannot sit down passively to be amused, but 
 must meet the play half-way. He must have been trained 
 in the hard- won knowledge of how best to amuse himself. 
 Everyone knows that to learn how to extract the finest 
 entertainment out of the world costs pains, and that the 
 game, which is well worth the candle, is no child's play. The 
 fallow mind finds great difficulty in being really amused. 
 A little amuses it, indeed, but not for long, and does not 
 amuse it thoroughly and well. We must learn to be 
 amused. We lose some simple joys, perhaps, but we enjoy 
 more things more keenly. The present French stage 
 requires us to learn to be amused by it, but it amuses us, 
 having learnt, deeply and finely. 
 
 Dialogue has not been more finished, wit more ingenious, 
 invention of situation livelier, study of character more 
 intelligent, or the painting of atmosphere subtler, on any 
 stage for a century, than on that of to-day in Paris. The 
 Paris stage of yesterday fades far away, The good things 
 of " Le monde ou Ton s'ennuie," unique in their time, 
 sound now tame, and Pailleron's satire in " Cabotins " is 
 almost clumsy compared with the keener stuff of the 
 present moment. The ingenuity of Sardou's seventy six 
 plots is cold and shows the works, by the side of the crises 
 in latter-day third acts. Emile Augier's types seem rough 
 silhouettes, without shading, stage-made men without 
 delicate humanity, when the Comedie francaise now puts 
 them again on the boards. The atmosphere of the younger 
 Dumas' plays is theatrical in the wrong sense, his social 
 problems are almost crude, and his moral purpose even 
 ingenuous. To carry the comparison over the Channel
 
 The French Stage of To-day 255 
 
 home, and to set the English drama Avhich was con- 
 temporary with the period from Augier to Dumas fils and 
 Pailleron in France by the side of the French drama of 
 to-day would be cruel. The English stage of to-day, 
 indeed, would not come off very well in a parallel even 
 with the French stage of yesterday. 
 
 The shrewd, delicate, and fierce satire in the drawing of 
 Isidore Lechat in " Les Affaires sont les Affaires " passes all 
 such paintings of character dating back two or three 
 generations. The London stage with child-like simplicity 
 gave itself away by reproducing exactly the skeleton of the 
 play without its flesh and blood, slurring over all the subtle 
 humanity in it and coarsening it all down the page. The 
 humanity of " La Veine," " Notre jeunesse," " la Chate- 
 laine," " les Passageres," the situations of " la Rafale," 
 " le Voleur," " Samson," " le Duel," " 1' Autre danger," 
 " le Dedale," the pathos of " Poliche," the sentiment of 
 " la Massiere," the reality of " les Hannetons," the wit of 
 Maurice Donnay, the terseness of Paul Hervieu, the 
 " atmosphere " of Alfred Capus, the stage instinct of 
 Henry Bernstein, were not equalled in the past century. 
 
 The French stage of to-day has no purpose but one : to 
 catch the fleeting spirit of its day. It is a day of great and 
 delightful confusion. Ideas are broken up and particles of 
 them are in the air. " The old faiths crumble and fall, and 
 the new faiths ruin and rend." What modern man exactly 
 knows where he is ? Classes are merged, the present is in 
 labour, the past is past, and no one is sure that he has even 
 plausible dreams of the future. In France where the order 
 has been more fixed and ideas neater, more steadfast, more 
 clear-cut than elsewhere, the mingling and shading off in 
 the present are more intimate, deeper and subtler than 
 elsewhere. To-day is a fleeting, uncertain, and marvel- 
 lously rich and vivid day. The present French stage is
 
 256 The Real France 
 
 almost as varied and as alive as its day. I never forget 
 the definition M. Capus gave me of " atmosphere " in a 
 modern play. Ideas of the day (he believed) are not in 
 themselves dramatic ; to-day thinks much that can by no 
 means be made into a play. But no play of to-day can 
 afford to ignore what is thought by to-day.. Its scene must 
 be laid in its time and in the thoughts of its time. By no 
 means make a play out of strikes, revolutions, the crum- 
 bling of old faiths ; but the strikes and the revolutions 
 are there, and the old faiths are crumbling in the wings : 
 that we must feel. " No man of to-day has lived without 
 talking of Socialism. When he comes on to the stage, we 
 must feel that he has been talking of Socialism : that is 
 atmosphere." M. Capus' illustration is to the point. We 
 must feel that the modern man is modern. He must not 
 bring his modern thoughts into our play if they are not — 
 and they often are not — thoughts which the stage can use ; 
 but we must know by his other thoughts, his dramatic 
 thoughts, that he has had those other thoughts of his day 
 which we could not use for our purpose. He must bring in 
 the air of the outer world, the world of to-day, on to our 
 stage when he comes. Our stage is a slice of our world, and 
 we must let it be known unmistakably that it is. How can 
 we do it, and how can we create the atmosphere of a play ? 
 M. Capus knows, and has done it. He is not the only one, 
 and the French stage is the essence of to-day. The English 
 to-day is certainly as rich, as diverse, as finely confused, as 
 gloriously inconsistent, as big with the future as the present 
 in France. Why does the English stage so rarely catch the 
 fleeting and vivid spirit of its day ?
 
 The French Stage of To-day 257 
 
 II — Playwrights 
 
 THERE has not often been such a battalion of 
 spies catching for the stage the spirit of their 
 times, as Alfred Capus, Octave Mirbeau, 
 Henry Bernstein, Paul Hervieu, Eugene 
 Brieux, Henri Lavedan, Henri Bataille, Jules Lemaitre, 
 Maurice Donnay. . . . We could in England hardly 
 bring the quarter of such a force into the field. 
 The French stage itself has not known such varied 
 strength for generations. Alfred Capus may be presumed 
 to command to-day, for he is nothing if not of his day. He 
 is smiling modernity, but smiling that it may not wince, as 
 Figaro laughed for fear of crying. He is not only the 
 lighter side of to-day, its brightness, its terror of solemnity, 
 its shrinking from tragedy, its determined laughter and its 
 two or three half jocose tears. He is the light surface of 
 to-day, but he knows the things beneath. What is admir- 
 able in his plays is what they suggest. His men and 
 women come into his play from the world and go out into 
 it again when the play is over. The play itself is gay and 
 light, and the optimism of the favourite Capus hero has 
 become a byword. But you feel that much has passed 
 beneath the levity and has remained in the depths of 
 character, and the optimism is but making the best of 
 things. That our to-day does, and we none of us groan and 
 shout to heaven, but which of us is as gay as our forefathers 
 in the storm and stress period were gay, when the Sturm 
 und Drang had passed by, which it often did ? In the 
 plays of Capus something always runs, near or far away, 
 beneath the surface : that is above all the quality of Capus. 
 He lets us suspect what lies underneath our persistently 
 cheerful to-day. He lets no tragedy rise to the top ; the
 
 258 The Real France 
 
 surface shines and sparkles pleasantly and charmingly. 
 Not a solemn word, and not a tinge of melodrama : every- 
 thing is measured, tasteful, free from violence, and is 
 carried off amiably with a smile. The wit of the play 
 amuses and its cheery humanity warms you ; when it is 
 over, you think of it and it takes on a new gravity. The 
 men and women are with you still and their lives are 
 deeper than you supposed. They were witty and pleasant 
 during the play, as one is cheerful and entertaining (if 
 possible) in company ; but they are not all wit and all 
 cheerfulness. Alfred Capus took them in a bright moment : 
 they had others before and will have them afterwards. 
 They are real men and women and have had their sorrows. 
 Be cheerful, is the Capus philosophy. But you say that 
 only to those who want cheering up. To some, one would 
 say, " for God's sake, be sad for once," but not to Capus' 
 men and women. They must be cheerful, for they have 
 lived, they shall be taught optimism, for they need it, and 
 courage to be bright to the world, for they face the world, 
 not only the footlights. They pass before us in the play, 
 but they lived before the play began. The Capusian 
 optimist rules the play, but making the best of things is 
 not at all a proof that the things are always good to us. 
 Alfred Capus' stage takes the world on the smile, but there 
 have been tears in the wings. No one amuses us more 
 while the curtain is up ; when the footlights go out, we 
 think of what the play suggests and are graver. 
 
 The hero of "La Veine " goes on to conquer because he 
 has the " veine " and the belief in himself ; "la Chate- 
 laine " is brought round to happiness because the man 
 whom she meets knows how to force fate and compel the 
 gods ; simple and indulgent humanity smoothes out the 
 after-problems left by " Notre jeunesse," because a woman 
 has large - heartedness and large faith in life; " Les
 
 The French Stage of To-day 259 
 
 Passagercs," already graver, pass, and the man, less light- 
 hearted, remains, yet strong, because another woman has 
 the large heart and forgiving sympathy. But all these 
 men and women have suffered, although they may not 
 suffer much in the Capus plays : they suffered before the 
 plays began, and that we feel. They do not come naked 
 and lonely into the play, but they come with a life behind 
 them. They are a part of the world outside the stage, they 
 bring its air with them on to the boards : that is " atmo- 
 sphere." Also, it is the atmosphere of to-day. Capus' men 
 and women are of their day, not tragic nor sentimental ; 
 taking things cheerfully and as they come, but remember- 
 ing the undercurrent and moulded by what they re- 
 member ; putting their best leg foremost, but aware that 
 they have not always stepped it so lightly ; optimists, but 
 because they refuse to be pessimists. No other playwright 
 has caught so well this wonderful surface of to-day, 
 suggesting its depth ; none has implied so much so deli- 
 cately. He may have harped upon the brightness and 
 lightness of to-day, but he has given us also whispers of its 
 solemnity. 
 
 Octave Mirbeau seizes this day by the throat and 
 grapples with it. He has not the varied resources of Capus, 
 he is a fighter and he must fight. He is a savage satirist 
 and he assails tooth and nail. But he is not an inhuman 
 Juvenal of the drama or a coldly furious scourge of sins and 
 weaknesses. Even he, a castigator in deadly earnest, is 
 first of all an entertainer. He writes satiric drama because 
 he feels he can make satire dramatic. His " Mauvais 
 bergers " hit out all round at modern men, but in spite of 
 its crudeness was a real play. Isidore Lechat (in the 
 original French of " les Affaires sont les Affaires," of course) 
 is well and honestly alive, and no mere peg to hang vice 
 and foolishness upon. His wife is no mere foil, but ex-
 
 260 The Real France 
 
 quisitely human. The play is not a lampoon, but a play. 
 It whips and plays fiercely, it finds out and unmercifully 
 baits the many Lechats of to-day, but above all it is 
 human and it amuses. 
 
 Henry Bernstein takes by the throat not so much his 
 day as his audience and shakes the breath out of it. He is 
 the champion wrestling dramatist with rules of his own, 
 and not a house has been known to resist him long — for 
 more than an act or two. He does not care how he does it, 
 but he must win and does. He plays with his foe awhile, 
 the house thinks this time it will have Bernstein and 
 rejoices — he never tried to be lovable — but he is only 
 feinting. Some new twist of a muscle, some unexpected 
 jiu jitsu trick, a hit below the belt or a catch against all the 
 rules, and Bernstein has his audience down, beaten again. 
 It picks itself up gasping during the entr'acte. Henry 
 Bernstein has never failed yet. Every repetition generate 
 of a new play of his has brought the same fight with the 
 same finish. Every time the house, warily on its guard, 
 thought now it would hold out — and Paris first-nighters 
 with pleasant friendliness yearn for the evening when 
 Henry Bernstein shall at last fail — and every time he 
 trapped it with a new catch which it had never expected 
 and threw it. He is the champion wrestler, but he is also 
 the essential dramatist, limited to the footlights, for whom 
 nothing seems to exist outside the drama, and nothing 
 exists in the drama but the one dramatic crisis which will 
 knock out his audience. All his plays have been built on 
 the same pattern : preparation, as astute, sly, and foxy as 
 may be ; the crisis with the most violent discords obtain- 
 able ; resolution, necessarily tame, and the briefer the 
 better. The crisis is all the play and all author or audience 
 care about. Character, ideas, surroundings, atmosphere, 
 the author cares for them only as he can use them to work
 
 The French Stage of To-day 261 
 
 up his crisis. The crisis over he has done with his personce 
 and with the world they live in, just as they sprang into his 
 dramatic moment from nowhere, for aught w r e feel. He is 
 essentially thus different from Capus. 
 
 None of his characters have the least importance as 
 characters, or even existence outside the catastrophe for 
 which he uses them. The cleaned-out gambler of a lover 
 in "La Rafale " and the mistress who will save him at any 
 cost to herself are neither new nor renew r ed by fresh observa- 
 tion. In " Le Voleur," no spectator cares to know why the 
 wife is so made that she is capable of being a thief for love, 
 and all w r e know or want to know about the husband is that 
 he loves his wife. " Samson," the strong man of money who 
 rose from the gutter, the haughty, aristocratic wife wiiom 
 he bought, and the amiable blackguard, her lover, would 
 be figures in bald outline, with little accent even of line, in a 
 play of character. The world in which the Bernstein men 
 and Avomen move is also in itself indifferent. They are 
 placed where they are because that position most con- 
 veniently provides the elements of the needful crisis. French 
 society, decayed aristocracy, blustering finance, are not the 
 interests of the play. The crisis would be interchangeable 
 into any other society or people, not without readjustment 
 of detail, but without detriment. The surroundings chosen 
 are chosen merely because they offer the least line of 
 resistance to the catastrophe ; the catastrophe does not 
 depend on them, any more than it arises out of character. 
 Evidently the author's method is to imagine his crisis first 
 and to work back afterwards to character and medium, 
 forming both merely of the bare elements required for the 
 make-up of the crisis. He puts out none of those extraneous 
 feelers into the world outside his play, gives none of the 
 irrelevant touches of pure humanity, which delight in 
 Capus. His play is over when the footlights go out. Going
 
 262 The Real France 
 
 home, if one thinks of it, one thinks of it often with annoy- 
 ance : Bernstein has had us again. The Capus play goes 
 on playing in our minds, the Bernstein play is dead by the 
 time we have gathered up our wraps. 
 
 Henry Bernstein is the dramatist unius dramatis, the 
 entertainer with only one entertainment up his sleeve, but 
 it is an unsurpassed entertainment of its kind. 
 
 No playwright ever before accomplished so well his feat 
 of capturing an audience in spite of itself. With characters 
 which we care not in the slightest about and out of sur- 
 roundings which are not drawn to interest us in any study 
 of manners and of mankind, he builds a situation which in 
 itself is absolute drama. In the last act of "La Bafale " 
 the mistress has sold herself to save her lover. Alone she 
 hates herself, with him she remembers only that she has 
 saved him. He never knows her sacrifice and shoots him- 
 self. She has lost him, and her shame was all for nothing. 
 We have no sympathy for the gambling lover and little for 
 the adoring mistress. But the situation to which the whole 
 play has led is planned and worked out with complete 
 mastery of the drama. We don't care for the woman, and 
 her tragedy moves us. We took not much interest in her 
 passion, and the tragedy of her debasement, which was 
 useless, wrings us at the curtain. Since " La Rafale " Henry 
 Bernstein has put his crises in his penultimate acts and 
 wound them up more or less consolingly in the last. One 
 talks from habit of pain and consolation, but the words are 
 really inapplicable : the emotion which Bernstein gives us 
 is purely of the stage and lasts only while the footlights 
 burn ; he wrings us, but with dramatic excitement, 
 and does not console, but merely quiets us, at the 
 wind up. 
 
 " Le Voleur " is an improved example of the Bernstein 
 manner. We care neither for husband nor for Avife nor for
 
 The French Stage of To-day 263 
 
 their surroundings. Yet the second act grips and holds us. 
 The woman is confessed a thief : the man is revolted. She 
 lures his heart and his senses, and he forgives. A rebound 
 at the lull brings a second and stronger catastrophe : the 
 boy took her guilt upon himself ; what did she pay for his 
 sacrifice ? The man is jealous : she may plead her inno- 
 cence more vehemently than she asked pardon for her 
 dishonesty, but now he does not forgive. For both the 
 change of situation has screwed up the pitch of the crisis. 
 She is innocent now and her seduction has gone : she had 
 rather be guilty and still powerful. He loved her, a thief, 
 and hates her, unfaithful : he would prefer a catalogue of 
 sins against others than one against himself. We may 
 pretend in England that this is cynical, it is horribly 
 natural. But even its damning naturalness is only a side 
 issue : the play's the thing. Realism is used, with a fearful 
 directness, only as a means, and unreality would be used 
 without compunction if it served : the end is the sheer 
 dramatic excitement, and it is attained, for no house holds 
 out against the second act, even bowdlerized. Bernstein 
 drama is drama cut down to its elemental force, but the 
 elemental force is prodigious. 
 
 " Samson " is Bernstein drama strung yet a little higher. 
 We have indeed some sympathy for Jacques Brachard, as 
 we might have for a simple-minded, whole-hearted bull in 
 a china shop, but it is not much, and we have none for any- 
 body else, either the haughty wife or the lover who trades 
 on women. Yet the third act (this time there are two to 
 prepare us) fetches us once more. Samson the strong man 
 of money who loves his wife in vain will pay out his wife's 
 lover. His only weapon is money. He bears the market to 
 ruin the lover ; he bears it so effectually that he will be 
 ruined with the lover. No matter ; let the money which 
 made him all go, if only his foe sink with him : Samson
 
 264 The Real France 
 
 pulls the temple down to bury his enemy and. himself : — 
 and we watched the two men, one holding the other, his 
 muscle conquering here, while his money conquers a 
 quarter of a mile away, and we know the Bourse is dropping 
 and ruining the two, because the one had rather ruin him- 
 self than lose the joy of ruining the other. We care little for 
 either character, but tins is essentially drama. The last 
 act quiets us more effectively than other Bernstein con- 
 clusions : of course the wife is left inevitably to fall in love 
 with the strong man. But Bernstein last acts are a 
 secondary matter : the essential thing is the crisis, and 
 Henry Bernstein is on the French stage, and on any stage, 
 of to-day, the master of dramatic crises. He is the first of 
 all such footlight entertainers. 
 
 It is really thus that he belongs to his day ; for the 
 psychology of his day he cares only in so far as it serves 
 him to strengthen his entertainment, unlike Alfred Capus 
 and Octave Mirbeau who find in the picture of to-day the 
 staple of their entertainment. But Henry Bernstein is of 
 the present because, resolved only to entertain, he is a 
 master at it. Between his and Victorien Sardou's purpose 
 there is no difference, but the younger man is the expert, 
 and the veteran was the novice. He has done us one in- 
 valuable service : henceforth the play of situation must be 
 on the level of his plays, or the Parisian public will not 
 have it. The famous situation in " Theodora " — when 
 Theodora's lover, not knowing she is Theodora, reviles 
 Theodora to her face and discloses his plot against her life, 
 and Theodora cannot make herself known to him without 
 losing his love, and cannot save him without imperilling 
 herself or save herself without compassing his death — is a 
 child's toy compared with the craftsmanship of "Samson." 
 We may prefer drama of character, but we must not cease 
 thanking Henry Bernstein for the intelligence with which
 
 The French Stage of To-day 265 
 
 he has brought the drama of situation up to a standard 
 not before reached. 
 
 No other playwright can or would compete with him in 
 his field. Among MM. Hervieu, Brieux, Lavedan, Bataille, 
 Donnay, Lemaitre, only the first has made excursions into 
 naked and unashamed drama of situation, not always with 
 success. " L'Enigme " was a pretty riddle : to which lady's 
 bedroom did the lover go, while the husbands went a- 
 hunting ? " Le Re veil " yielded two situations : the lover 
 seized, gagged, bound, and spirited away by his angry and 
 Bulgarian father, who persuades the lady that he has had 
 him murdered ; the lover reappearing later and finding the 
 lady, who thought him dead, going out to dinner in ball 
 dress with husband and daughter. But if Paul Hervieu 
 imagined only situations, he would be a mere shadow of a 
 Bernstein. He has drawn characters with a firm hand. In 
 " Le Re veil " the two bare situations are of passing interest 
 compared with the clash of feelings in the woman's mind, 
 a mother of forty who has learnt passion late in the day. 
 She is mistress, but mother still ; the lover supposed dead, 
 she shakes off the mistress, and dresses for her daughter's 
 first ball. The lover turns up alive, and we understand 
 what the woman feels — caught by him decked out for the 
 evening. What the woman feels is all we care about in the 
 play. " Le Dedale " lands a woman in a " maze," but the 
 maze is psychological. It may be more or less true psy- 
 chology, but it is well studied. I do not know whether the 
 first man a woman loved never loses his hold upon her, but 
 it is an axiom worth positing if you can build a good play on 
 it. The gradual recapture of the woman by her first 
 husband, his merely sensual power over her, her yielding in 
 spite of her self-respect and of her regard for her stick of a 
 second husband, the catastrophe when, in the room next to 
 which her child by her first husband lies saved at last after
 
 266 The Real France 
 
 a week passed between life and death, she falls into the 
 man's arms again on a sofa and the curtain falls in the nick 
 of time, are real dramatic stuff, and we have once more 
 from Paul Hervieu a play made of a woman's feelings. The 
 end is sheer melodrama and shows how ingenuous a situa- 
 tion-monger he is. He is a dramatist of crises in sentiment, 
 rather dry and stiff, without Alfred Capus' genial touch, 
 but powerful. " Connais toi " is another delicately handled 
 crisis in sentiment surrounded by a clumsy plot. Neither 
 the starched General nor his weak wife know themselves. 
 One is all indignant virtue, the other all innocence. The 
 erring little woman whom they find out among their inti- 
 mates is accordingly trampled upon. The General begins 
 to learn to know himself when the man whom she erred 
 with turns out to be his son. The General's wife is suddenly 
 revealed to herself when a young lieutenant makes love to 
 her and she not only listens to him but unaccountably falls 
 upon his neck. The General knows himself completely 
 when having entered at that precise moment he ends by 
 not only forgiving his wife, but begging her on his knees 
 not to leave him. The husband of the erring little woman 
 was strongly advised against mercy in the beginning of the 
 play. He did not turn up again until the end, when he was 
 surprised at being as strongly urged to forgive and forget. 
 In the interval all the other characters had learnt to know 
 themselves. The plot is so ingenuous that tragic situations 
 hover on the fringe of comedy. The sentimental crisis in 
 the elderly woman, who learns suddenly what temptation 
 is, is drawn with psychological mastery. 
 
 Of Eugene Brieux the moralist everybody knows every- 
 thing ; but he takes his place in the gallery of French 
 playwrights of to-day as a realist with one play. Nothing 
 was ever more cruelly and impersonally real than " Les 
 Hannetons." London seems to have thought that such
 
 The French Stage of To-day 267 
 
 realism was not worth the doing : have those who think 
 so understood the art in such utter, deadly realism ? A 
 long-suffering professor of natural history and a dear, 
 loving, impossible, maddening girl, are all the play. But 
 the two are drawn as perhaps no characters have been 
 drawn before. Every word they say is what they would say 
 in life ; not one ever calls the hearer back to the footlights, 
 and not one can be imagined which would bring us nearer 
 to life. There is nothing else but the two everyday pitiful 
 persons, nothing but common humanity in the play : those 
 who contemptuously call this mere photographic realism 
 should try their hand at such photography. No one who 
 cannot enjoy supremely the art in " Les Hannetons " has 
 learnt to be a true playgoer. In it Eugene Brieux has 
 caught with genius the fleeting spirit of his and our ordinary 
 human day. 
 
 Henri Lavedan snapshotted very light moments of his 
 day, and a few hundred yards of boulevard asphalt, in 
 plays like "Le Vieux Marcheur," which gave a new tag to 
 Parisian slang ; he took off boulevardiers' follies in "smart" 
 dialogues, himself a double-dyed boulevardier, and he 
 satirized unimprovingly, moralizing with cheerful immor- 
 ality. Called to the Academy, he put on a new earnestness. 
 He had already written " Le Prince d'Aurec " to prove how 
 the gross growth of finance has blighted the fine flower of 
 aristocracy. He set out to please the Academy still better 
 by describing, with the proper bias, no less a " Duel " than 
 that of Science and Religion, after Brunetiere. It was a 
 task a little beyond him, and he moved more easily in the 
 trail of the " vieux marcheur." Yet " Le Duel " deserves 
 to be remembered as a play, not of ideas, but of sentimental 
 psychology. The Duel of Ideas was a humorously un- 
 equal affair : the priest scored off his brother the scientific 
 atheist with pleasant ease. Science, discussing ethics,
 
 268 The Real France 
 
 knew no greater science of argument than to repeat " carpe 
 diem," and, being knocked out every time by a new 
 crushing blow from Religion, got up again and cried "No 
 matter, carpe diem," Religion in the end scorning to score 
 any more and smiling with indulgent superiority. As a 
 matter of fact, Science on the sentimental side has the best 
 of it eventually, as the atheist is left to marry the Duchess, 
 the Duke in the wings having conveniently died of dotage. 
 Before the besotted Duke, heard of not seen, has died, the 
 priest confesses the Duchess and chastens her with suspici- 
 ous vehemence. He is surprised at the business by the 
 scientific atheist. Science on the sentimental side is keen 
 enough and finds the priest out, who had not found himself 
 out. There is too little of the father in the father-confessor : 
 this is no religious fervour. In the same moment that the 
 man of science jumps to the jealous conclusion, it first 
 dawns on the shamed priest that the conclusion is true : 
 this is real, good, thick drama. Both men live on the 
 stage, the scientific lover rather brutally and ingenu- 
 ously, but really, the priest more subtly and more 
 intensely, with equal truth. The one scene alone gives 
 " Le Duel " a high rank in modern plays. The wind-up 
 shades off pleasantly into lighter tones, and we retain 
 agreeable memories of the worldly old Bishop who gently 
 throws lukewarm water on the priest's now exaggerated 
 self-reproach and on the over-zealous piety of the Duchess, 
 hinting strongly that she had much better marry the 
 scientific atheist — who may dilute his atheism for her sake 
 — than go into a nunnery Avhich she might weary of. 
 
 Quite young, Henri Bataille has been much heard 
 already in many strains. For once the Parisian public 
 made a mistake and cold-shouldered his " Poliche," his 
 best character in his best, and a good, play. He had sought 
 a way before in the sentimental strain. " Maman Colibri ' ;
 
 The French Stage of To-day 269 
 
 was the lady of forty who fell in love with the Adonis of 
 twenty, and had to pay for it : she was cured in the last act 
 when she became a grandmother. There was no conscious 
 humour in the play ; but the character of the woman of 
 forty in her Indian summer had delicacy and pathos. One 
 scene is remembered because it epitomized in a dialogue 
 between two women all the tragedy of growing old : one of 
 them is the lady of forty, the other has grown old. " How 
 does it feel ? " says the one ; " Oh, it feels . . . ."shudders 
 the other, and describes. The scene continues on the same 
 artless plan, but carried through with delicate art. " La 
 Marche nuptiale " was the progress of another woman's 
 heart, which took unto itself a poor and underbred music 
 master, casting aside family and social ties for him : but the 
 world and breeding told in the long run, the woman loved 
 another man because he was of her clan and her set, and 
 rather than play her poor music-master false, shot herself 
 — and the piece which began in tremendous passion ended 
 rather snobbishly. All this time Henri Bataille was feeling 
 his way — stumbling among women's hearts. He found his 
 way with " Poliche," which the Comedie francaise public, 
 generally acute, misunderstood strangely. The play is a 
 real thing, sincerely felt and courageously carried out. It 
 touches on one truth, the smile amid the tears, and the 
 elements are well mixed in it. By that it deserves to be 
 called a representative play of to-day. It has passed 
 beyond the categories of the school and is neither comedy 
 nor tragedy, but both : it is a play of our to-day, half 
 laughter and half sobs, a human play. A laugh begins it 
 and it ends in a sigh : perhaps even a Parisian audience, 
 though the quickest in the world, is still slow at under- 
 standing such a descent, or rise, in four acts, from farce to 
 tragedy, however often it may have met such things off the 
 stage. Poliche plays the fool in the first act : he has learnt
 
 270 Tine Real France 
 
 that he never pleases women except when he plays the fool. 
 But his heart's desire is no longer to play the fool : if the 
 woman whom he amuses would take him seriously, he would 
 ask no higher fate. She finds him out and discovers Poliche 
 the sentimental lover. She will forget a lady-killer whom 
 she was hankering after and be happy with Poliche. She 
 bores herself with Poliche, no longer funny and going in 
 fear of his life when he does make a joke because he will be 
 thought to be playing the old fool of a Poliche again. She 
 bores herself so clearly that he lets her go, sees her off at the 
 country railway station whence she takes the train to meet 
 the lady-killer whom she cannot forget after all, and 
 remains behind, a poor, simple Poliche, without the ghost of 
 a joke left in him — for he can't even play the fool to her 
 now — with tears running down his fat cheeks, and begging 
 pardon because he jostled a passenger in a hurry to catch 
 the express. We must love Poliche and we cannot forgive 
 the Paris public for not having loved him : he really lives 
 and the world lives round him. There is a something 
 which gives the play humanity, and part of it is what one 
 calls atmosphere, beyond and around the human character 
 of Poliche. What in the play is the deftly caught spirit of 
 to-day is the natural blending of comedy and tragedy. No 
 other playwright of the day has dared thus to begin in 
 laughter and end in tears. 
 
 With " La femme nue," Henri Bataille began stumbling 
 among woman's hearts again, and the tragedy — for the 
 women — of a man's marrying his mistress and meeting 
 afterwards the woman who should have been his wife, is 
 partly drowned in gush. A woman's heart again, but this 
 time in a situation intended to be a la Bernstein, is " Le 
 Scandale." The pure woman's one lapse is drawn with 
 tender knowledge : her fault remains outside her character, 
 and the good wife and mother was not tarnished when the
 
 The French Stage of To-day 271 
 
 primitive woman in her fell grossly. Her struggles after- 
 wards in a blackmailer's toils are drama of situation which 
 Henry Bernstein would have pieced together with neater 
 theatrical craftsmanship, but his heroine would not have 
 been as human. 
 
 Did M. Henri Bataille find with " Poliche " that humour 
 does not pay ? He has not had any since. " La Vierge 
 folle," his greatest popular success, is furious sentiment- 
 alitj'' taking itself in deadly earnest. Nothing but love 
 exists, not the love made up of many contradictory, great 
 and small, simple and subtle things, not the love of ordinary 
 and real men and women, but love the storm, love the 
 catastrophe, love that lasts for three or four acts, then kills 
 off the lover or the mistress because they could not go on 
 longer loving so, love that demands the poetry of " Tristan 
 and Isolde " — and perhaps the music also — before it can 
 wholly convince any but ingenuously romantic minds. Some 
 French critics hailed the play as the prose " Tristan and 
 Isolde " of to-day. If such a " Tristan " could ever be 
 written, M. Bataille has not written it. The deadly earnest 
 passion of the successful counsel and old married man of 
 forty-two for the Duke's daughter of eighteen whom he 
 seduced, and hers for him, takes itself more seriously than 
 we can take it : that is the most serious fault in the play. 
 Granted the passion, the play follows logically and vigor- 
 ously enough, but it has to be granted, and we have some 
 difficulty in granting it. If the busy barrister, clear and 
 cool-headed (or he would not have got to the top of his 
 profession) really was open to such a love storm as swept 
 him off his feet, well and good ; if the daughter of the Duke 
 and of his delightful Duchess really did find such irresistible 
 fascination in the prosperous laAvyer that she could not help 
 giving herself body and soul to him, we agree that just 
 before the last curtain she plausibly shot herself, having
 
 272 The Real France 
 
 reached the highest happiness, after which everything else 
 must be a come down, of hearing from his own lips before 
 his wife that he loves his mistress better than he ever loved 
 his wife. The spectator of ingenuously romantic tempera- 
 ment can take such floods of passion for granted ; other 
 minds cannot help asking for psychological particulars. The 
 passion reached its paroxysm before the play began and 
 remains at its paroxysm throughout the play. It is a 
 passion without a history and without evolution, an entity 
 of passion, which you must accept without questioning. 
 The characters of the barrister and his mistress are mere 
 abstract passion, unaccounted for and unanalyzed. The 
 wife's character is as elementary, but here the same passion 
 is hungry, not satisfied. We are in a world not of men and 
 women who live their diverse lives, but of unconscious 
 creatures possessed by the sex instinct. The clash of the 
 three passions can, and does, make strong drama of its 
 kind, but it would be stronger if it were less strenuous. 
 Vehement passion, sprung upon us without warning and 
 raging without repose, convinces us less than if it some- 
 times stopped to rest, think, and look at itself. It is 
 difficult for us to take the love affair of the barrister and the 
 Duke's daughter quite as seriously as they take it them- 
 selves, who are casting everybody and everything else to 
 the winds for its sake ; even the betrayed wife's passion we 
 can hardly take as tragically as she takes it, who has not an 
 ounce of dignity to weigh in the balance with it and runs 
 after the runaway couple, to ask him whether at least he will 
 come back to his wife when he is old and tired of his mistress. 
 The sentimental mind calls this the sublime grovelling of 
 passion. The ordinary mind is not completely satisfied 
 either by the woman's frenzy or by her self-abasement. 
 The characters neither explain themselves nor are explained 
 by their setting, they are explained neither from the inside
 
 The French Stage of To-day 273 
 
 nor from the outside. While the psychology of passion is 
 sketchy, atmosphere is absent. The characters come into 
 the play from nowhere and we do not for a moment imagine 
 that any of them go on living after the play is over. The 
 author has not tried in a single line to " place " them in the 
 world. The Duke is rather dismal, the feather-headed Duchess 
 is charming, the priest and confidant is plausible ; the two 
 heroines and the hero are all three mere homogeneous 
 passion. None of them move in a setting which we can 
 feel to be a corner of the real world, either of this or another 
 day. There is no landscape — only three volcanoes of 
 passion. There are none of those subtle tendrils thrown out 
 (as from some of Alfred Capus' plays) which connect the 
 world of the play, though it be but a play, with the world 
 in which we are who are seeing the play. M. Bataille has 
 not dreamt what atmosphere is. For that reason I think 
 the opinion of some French critics that " La Vierge folle " 
 proved him the master of the French stage of to-day will be 
 in time much revised. The "Vierge folle" has rather 
 estranged him from the real modern drama. 
 
 Jules Eemaitre has been perhaps an acuter critic than 
 playwright, certainly an acuter playwright than politician. 
 All rejoiced when he came back from the arena to the stage 
 with " La Massiere," the play of his by which, so far, he 
 ranks. Earlier productions like " Le Depute Leveau " are 
 forgotten, in spite of their good writing and a style full of 
 life. His later play " Bertrade " suffered from a blight of 
 strangely thicklaid snobbishness : perhaps the politician 
 was coming out again. One act of his, besides " La Mas- 
 siere," remains, or ought to remain — " La bonne Helene," a 
 broad and keen farce worthy of Aristophanes. Helen was 
 fair ; is it unlikely that she was as kind as she was fair ? 
 She is kind all round, has not the heart to be cruel to any- 
 one, and she even foresees that she will not be adamant to
 
 274 The Real France 
 
 Astyanax when he grows up. Helen's real character being 
 understood, there is no reason why Greeks and Trojans 
 should not make friends again. 
 
 " La Massiere " is Jules Lemaitre's really human play. 
 It studies with fine gradations to a tragic outburst a crisis 
 in character : an old man's love. The successful painter, 
 who has " arrived " at last, falls in love with his pupil, the 
 " massiere " of his class, without knowing it. His wife, who 
 shared his early struggles and for whom he is the only man 
 in the world, sees the infatuation, and we see it, coming on ; 
 the girl herself grows fearful. Only the old man is blind to 
 himself : his self-deception is drawn with the skill and 
 knowledge of a master psychologist. The son loves the girl, 
 and the crisis comes when the truth breaks upon the old 
 man and he is jealous of his son. It is a tragic crisis, which 
 has slowly ripened since the play began and which now 
 produces its highest possible effect. It is no mere situation, 
 elaborately put and primed to go off at the right moment 
 like a set piece of fireworks, it is an explosion of character 
 which was inevitable, because the character is human and 
 its development natural. If the Gods of the stage had been 
 good, they would have given to Henry Bernstein the same 
 mastery in psychology, or to Jules Lemaitre Henry Bern- 
 stein's marvellous dramatic instinct. 
 
 Maurice Donnay, a better boulevard-amuser than even 
 Henri Lavedan, has like him put his serious self forward in 
 one play — for the Comedie francaise, of course. He enter- 
 tains perhaps more naturally than he moves, and his earlier 
 " Amants," " Lysistrata," and other plays were more 
 amusing than " L' Autre danger " is serious. Yet he found 
 for the latter a good situation a la Bernstein, and treated it 
 well, though not in the best Bernstein fighting style. The 
 " happiest of the three " has avoided the husband peril, 
 but has never thought of the " other danger," and finds
 
 The French Stage of To-day 275 
 
 before he knows it that he has fallen in love with the 
 daughter and she with him. He flies, the girl overhears the 
 truth and is pining away, the mother swears tales told are 
 black libels, and the mother's lover will marry the daughter. 
 It is a pretty situation, though quite independent of 
 character ; Maurice Donnay decorates it, as his other plays, 
 with arabesques of light language. 
 
 Maurice Donnay is one of those who lead a smart host of 
 entertainers. French farce also has its place in to-day and 
 never has held a higher. The fun of to-day on the Paris 
 stage is the funniest and the most intelligent which any 
 stage has known for several generations. There is no more 
 absurd superstition than that of the sadness of to-day, and 
 no less meaning regret in Paris than that for the good old 
 farce. If our to-day is no less amusing, as it is no less 
 serious, than any other day, the present French stage is as 
 adequate to its day as the drama has ever been to any day. 
 
 Ill — Playees 
 
 IET us say only one more thing of Sarah Bernhardt : 
 we saw her re-" create " Victor Hugo's " Angelo, 
 _J tyrant of Padua." It was a wonderful evening. 
 Homodei, the Jesuit spy of Venice, slumbered 
 on a bench with one eye and both ears open. The 
 tyrant of Padua, meekest of men, told us how his 
 palace was alive with informers and honeycombed with 
 treachery : stealthy steps were faintly heard behind the 
 wainscots, no one knew how many secret doors any 
 room hid, walls had ears and tapestries eyes. Lovable 
 Victor Hugo, we loved him more than ever for thinking that 
 he was revealing Shakespearean drama to France. La
 
 276 The Real France 
 
 Tisbe appeared and we gradually forgot Victor Hugo. By- 
 degrees, word by word, intonation by intonation, she put 
 something new into the play. We never completely under- 
 stood how she did it, she did it so easily and without show. 
 Homodei became almost serious and we believed in 
 Angelo's honeycombed palace. Sarah Bernhardt put some- 
 thing into the play which Victor Hugo had forgotten to put 
 in, something that was like real poetry. La Tisbe was the 
 courtezan of original purity, and one believed in her ; by 
 some complication (which we have forgotten, but she made 
 it all clear to us at the time) she was at once the enemy and 
 friend of Angelo and planned at once the death and safety 
 of a lady whose name, we think, was Catarina ; she sat at a 
 table, saw a crucifix on the wall, cried " La croix de ma 
 mere ! " and knew she must save Catarina — and we believed 
 in her. We had supernatural faith in La Tisbe all through. 
 It is impossible to tell how Sarah did it. Imagine any other 
 actress recognizing " the cross of her mother " — Victor 
 Hugo's Shakespearean touch. But Sarah recognized it and 
 compelled us to believe in her. This is not the art of acting, 
 nor nature, nor " living a part " ; it is making gold out of 
 dross, poetry out of fustian. 
 
 Sarah being divine, shall we among the mortals put M. 
 Guitry first ? He will agree to that himself, and not many 
 spectators will disagree. He seems to have ceased to act at 
 all in these last few years. One looks back with amazement 
 to the days when he was Macbeth with some raw force at 
 the Odeon and the witches were ballet-girls, or a sort of 
 Buddha (invented with a fine effort at "la litterature " by 
 the late Armand Silvestre in a respite snatched from tame 
 Rabelaisianism) to Sarah Bernhardt's " Izeyl " — we have 
 forgotten what Izeyl was, but she loved Guitry. The actor 
 to us now is the modern everyday man of Capus, Jules 
 Lemaitre and Henry Bernstein. We think of him no longer
 
 The French Stage of To-day 277 
 
 as an actor ; but the Capusian optimist of "La Veine " and 
 " La Chatelaine," means to the memory Guitry, the old 
 painter in love with " la Massiere " is Guitry, " Samson " 
 is Guitry. Thick-set, heavy, clumsy, bull-necked, he 
 seemed cut out for the optimist who blunders cheerfully 
 through obstacles and comes out delighted. He was made 
 to console and set up and stick to flower-ladies with his faith 
 in "la Veine," or to reassure agonized chatelaines. But 
 afterwards he seemed equally well-made to be the old man in 
 love up to the ears and jealous like a lover of his son : we 
 remember a Guitry — in his shirt-sleeves washing his hands, 
 and as he waved the towel, trying to explain to his meek but 
 canny old wife that it was all nonsense about him and the 
 girl and that he was a father to her — who was a wonder 
 deserving to be remembered. Guitry finding out his wife 
 in the second act of " Le Voleur," Guitry made love to by all 
 the " Passageres " one after the other, Guitry — Samson, 
 the strong man smashing his wife's lover, Guitry the old 
 man in the claws of a woman — " la Griffe " — preyed upon 
 slowly and sinking hideously scene by scene, into moral 
 dotage and final insanity, even Guitry the Duke,Avhose neck- 
 ties are a pattern in " Ber trade " — it seems to be Guitry all 
 the time. But there is no harm in that. The modern actor 
 must play Ms part ; he must give up trying to change — to 
 quick-change — himself. The acting of to-day in no longer 
 deliberate and reflective impersonation : the actor must 
 be himself in his part. Why should there be shame in 
 writing a play for an actor ? It is the only means to a 
 perfect entertainment of the stage. There may never have 
 been an actor who lived Hamlet, but is not reading 
 " Hamlet " perhaps the best entertainment after all ? 
 And Shakespeare, who was the best of entertainers and 
 wrote for the stage, evidently overreached himself and 
 wrote also beyond the stage, in spite of himself. The play-
 
 278 The Real France 
 
 wright of to-day does not write beyond the stage ; other- 
 wise, why should he write plays, having other fields ? If 
 he wants to give us the best footlight entertainment he can, 
 let him write plays for an actor — if he can find a Guitry. 
 No actor was ever so wholly, so absurdly natural on the 
 stage. 
 
 M. de Feraudy runs him close, and he also plays his own 
 parts. The acting of to-day, as the art is improved, 
 becomes less and less actual counterfeit. There would be 
 doubts whether the actor feels more now than he used, 
 even were the old question decided, whether he ought to 
 feel — and onlv a critic in the skin of an actor, hence a mon- 
 strosity, will ever decide it. But the actor of to-day acts 
 more and more his own self. He is given feelings to express 
 which are natural to him, and the expression of which 
 comes naturally to his physique, his features, his attitudes, 
 his voice. Wide versatility is no longer what we require 
 from him, and we shall not thank him for attempting 
 absurd impossibilities. We do not want fat ladies who 
 force their temperament to look thin, and spare and 
 shrivelled men who swell themselves to Macbeth or roar 
 piping voices into Othello's, lovers whom the ladies couldn't 
 love, and tragedians naturally comic : the actor's own 
 ambition of course is to act the part for which he was 
 precisely denied the means by nature. To obtain our best 
 entertainment we must give him only the parts for which 
 he was cut out. Perfection will be attained when he acts 
 himself. Let him be rid of the idea that he has to feign per- 
 petually ; within bounds, let him on the contrary be 
 convinced that he must always be himself. At least cure 
 him of the habit of thinking " Now I am the Emperor of 
 Rome," " Now I am the lover," " Now the jealous hus- 
 band," " Now the villain," and cure him of looking at 
 himself in the parts. The best actor is the actor who is
 
 The French Stage of To-day 279 
 
 most himself, but it is clear that he must be helped by the 
 dramatist. In future our actors and actresses will be con- 
 fined more and more each to a small range of characters 
 and the entertainment of the stage will improve. The 
 individual actor's importance will dwindle as a rule, but that 
 we cannot help ; in some cases we may be giving the actor 
 almost the rank of a creative genius, if being himself he be 
 the greatest characters of the drama. The lady who insists 
 on being the heroine, whether schoolgirl or divorcee, a 
 bundle of passion or a haughty stone, will disappear, and 
 with her the boy-lover of seventy, the comfortable Don 
 Juan, the tragedy King middle-class husband, and dozens 
 of others. The player will no longer be an universal genius, 
 but the right man to be fitted by the playwright into the 
 right place. When the right place is the greatest, the actor 
 will be correspondingly great. We may admire the man in 
 the wrong place who does his best cleverly, but it is absurd 
 to put him there, and his best in it cannot be the best. The 
 kind of playing talent that adapts itself with equal in- 
 genuity to the swashbuckler's part and the faint-hearted 
 lover's achieves only a makeshift, and even the great skill 
 that compels our admiration in the most different and 
 incongruous characters must be squandered shamefully in 
 some of them. It must indeed in the end be wasted all 
 round. After some years of such versatility the greatest 
 actors will lose the power to be themselves ; we end by 
 wondering at them as at Fregolis, but would give all their 
 quick changes to see them act their own parts. All their 
 different " tours de force " are not worth one character in 
 which they would be themselves and therefore the best 
 they can be. 
 
 Guitry and de Feraudy are good actors, not because they 
 play many characters well, but because they live a few. 
 They have acted, not many various parts, but themselves
 
 280 The Real France 
 
 with variations. Isidore Lechat, Lucien Briant in " Notre 
 Jeunesse," Poliche were so many de Feraudys, varied, but 
 the same. The bluff cynicism, ingenuous vanity, obtuse 
 smartness, of the man of " Business is business " were of a 
 piece with the weakness of the man fearful of the conse- 
 quences of his youth, and with the soft simplicity of the 
 sentimental lover who plays the clown. It is not a bull to 
 say that three characters played by the same man are akin, 
 nor absurd to praise an actor for being himself in three 
 different parts. The actor may not thank us for saying so, 
 but he should, if he be intelligent. M. de Feraudy cannot 
 help being himself because he has a personality, and he is a 
 good actor for that reason. The bad actor never is himself 
 on the stage. The good actor will be bad in a part in which 
 he cannot use what personality he has and must do his best 
 to keep it down. The best actor is not the most adaptable 
 man, but the man with a personality which insists on assert- 
 ing itself. In the greatest works written for — and beyond 
 — the stage, the actor's personality may be a nuisance, 
 unless it fit in — but can it ever ? — with the creations of 
 genius, but will the actor without personality be less 
 annoying ? Hence, the greatest works do not as a whole 
 give us the most complete stage entertainment, or rarely. 
 Shakespeare is the greatest entertainer still, but the enter- 
 tainment is never complete ; it is good to see on the stage, 
 but it might always be better. It is real stuff for the stage, 
 but it never satisfies, because it is never completely realized, 
 if it ever could be. Must there not be always something 
 wanting in a stage King Lear ? The play is a real play, but 
 its poetry goes beyond the powers of the stage. In a stage 
 Poliche or Samson or Isidore Lechat there is nothing 
 wanting. There is no annoying poetry, for one thing, and 
 no hampering creation of genius to hinder us and the actor. 
 We are satisfied with our modest little, but we are satisfied.
 
 The French Stage of To-day 281 
 
 When an actor tries to be King Lear, we must be resigned 
 to his mere feigning : he will most commonly then not be 
 himself. When Guitry is " Samson " or de Feraudy is 
 " Poliche," they are themselves, with variations, and the 
 entertainment in itself is whole and perfect. 
 
 Mo unet- Sully is himself and a great actor as King 
 CEdipus. No moment on any stage of to-day is more tragic 
 than that of Mo unet- Sully's rushing out of his palace, 
 blinded by himself. The roar of his voice, crying his guilt 
 and the pain with which he has punished himself, his torn 
 face, his arms outstretched, and the onrush of his body as 
 he goes out to wander, are living horrors. He alone to-day 
 makes us understand what a sublime entertainer Sophocles 
 was. The one part, even were some others, such as Creon 
 in Antigone, left out of account, is enough to make the 
 actor great ; he has failed with characteristic thoroughness 
 in some other parts. One can say little of his Hernani, 
 because one always wonders whether the " lion superbe et 
 genereux " can be called a character at all ; why not after 
 all roar the part as he does ? What would become of it, 
 acted humanly ? But Mounet-Sully's Hamlet remains a 
 warning to all actors. The " doyen " of the Comedie 
 francaise is persuaded of course that he can act anything ; 
 he may not even understand that he has a personality. 
 No doubt his acting is instinct, he lets himself go, and is a 
 King CEdipus who has no equal. He can have little know- 
 ledge and intelligence of himself, having played Hamlet. 
 After years, the suffering of spectators remains acute in 
 their memory ; one mourned not only Hamlet murdered, 
 tortured beyond recognition, turned into a sort of Hernani 
 with a dash of Mephistopheles, but Mounet-Sully wasted. 
 The greatest actors have to be cured of the belief that 
 acting is only making believe, and that they are great 
 enough to feign anything on the stage. M. de Max, who
 
 282 The Real France 
 
 ought to succeed Mounet- Sully, has fortunately never tried 
 Hamlet, that I know of. He has always remained himself, 
 and always picturesque, with his enormous voice, his 
 rolling eye, and his command of coaxing insidiousness as 
 well as flaying fury. He is delicious as either a satisfying 
 villain, a wily prelate, a gently ferocious Grand Inquisitor, 
 a snake-like spy, or even a slyly wheedling sort of Mark 
 Antony. 
 
 M. Le Bargy's ties have been injudiciously advertised 
 beyond their deserts. In spite of them he has often been 
 successfully himself — the lady-killer. He was the only 
 possible Max de Pogis in " Le Dedale." He delighted in 
 snaring dishonourably his former wife married to another. 
 He felt no compunction when he saw her flesh weaken in 
 spite of her will and took her without a qualm for his prey. 
 He talked of fatherhood, but he really was all flesh himself, 
 and only his senses spoke. He was not hateful, as another 
 actor might have been, because the man (as we saw him on 
 the stage) could not help himself. He had lady-killing in 
 the blood and it was no fault of his. He was born to prey 
 on women ; he had driven his wife to divorce ; having lost 
 her he must recapture her, if she were his wife still he 
 would sicken of her. The man may be morally con- 
 temptible, but the man is a real man on the stage : 
 it is all Le Bargy cares about and all we ought to care 
 about. Le Bargy was again himself, with interesting 
 variations, in " Le Duel." The lady - killer as priest : 
 one can imagine the character tempting him. The 
 Duchess is not in love with the priest, but she easily might 
 be, and one feels that the heart beneath the cassock and 
 tenderness in holiness are perversely dangerous. What 
 Le Bargy did amazingly was to show the priest's innocence 
 in his danger. He found out all at once with complete 
 sincerity where the land lay, which we knew all along, and
 
 The French Stage of To-day 283 
 
 what we knew him to have been feeling. When he repented , 
 there was sweetness in his sackcloth and ashes : he had 
 sinned in thought, but it was no trivial sin, it was a sin 
 worth sinning, a sin with an undoubted charm about it. 
 It is subtle acting that draws these nice characters finely 
 yet clearly. 
 
 Some more actors' moments are remembered : Tarride, 
 the boulevard bluffer in " L'Esbroufe," who drew a com- 
 plete and final picture of spurious activity and sham 
 vitality ; Lerand, the abject young millionaire in the same 
 play, a Marneffe in a dramatized " Cousine Bette " who 
 still makes us shudder when we think of him, and the young 
 modern French Jew in a rather absurd "anti-Semitic " play 
 " Decadence," a Jew whose father " arrived " and who 
 " has always worn clean linen," hard, strong, cultured, yet 
 pathetic in the world which he conquers but which slavishly 
 hates him ; Dumeny in a fine bit of " business " at the end 
 of " La Rafale," when he has to be cheerful and loving to the 
 lady and at the same time to settle everything for blowing 
 his brains out when he has got rid of her ; Huguenet 
 explaining deliciously in " Le Tour de main " how he has 
 always made women happy all his life by lying to them ; 
 Grand who will succeed Le Bargy as the Comedie francaise 
 lady-killer and already is the most natural and plausible 
 ladies' darling we know on any stage. 
 
 These are all moments of acting in which the actors are 
 absolutely themselves. The expression that serves gener- 
 ally is that they " lived their parts," but it is truer that they 
 lived their own selves and that the parts fitted them. 
 What can be said of a greater " star's " moments, of the 
 elder Coquelin's million moments ? He was of another 
 school : the school is not the best, but he led it ; one should 
 rather say, he was great in his way, but his way was not the 
 best. We all remember his wonderful voice and enunciation
 
 284 The Real France 
 
 which made the rest of the cast seem to mumble, his go, and 
 his " panache." But he was too often thinking of his 
 acting and letting us see it, preparing his effects, showing 
 the works. A speech that tells — but we caught it in the act 
 of " telling " ; a splendid bit of character-painting — but 
 we saw it being painted, watched the colours being laid on. 
 Perhaps Coquelin was absolutely himself only as Cyrano 
 de Bergerac : he was Cyrano, and there is no more to say, 
 except that there will probably never be another. 
 
 If Sarah be divine, Rejane is human. Everyone remem- 
 bers her in dozens of parts, remembers her coy, petulant, 
 naughty, caressing, humorous. But she has also been 
 tragically great : her Germinie Lacerteux was one of the 
 few real tragedies of to-day on the stage, perhaps the only 
 one. The pitiful " bonne," her face already drawn with the 
 weariness of coming motherhood, serving lovingly her 
 mistress (who must not know) and the party of children at 
 dinner, the woman afterwards standing up to the savage 
 and conquering Jupillon, but yielding after all and giving 
 the bully the last francs which she had saved for the un- 
 born baby : it is squalid but real tragedy. None who once 
 saw Rejane's Germinie Lacerteux can ever forget it. This 
 is great acting ; Rejane and Germinie Lacerteux are 
 identified : she was herself in the part. 
 
 Julia Bartet, " doyenne " of the Comedie francaise, is 
 herself in graceful attitudes, melodious speech, the great 
 lady's simple manner ; she is not really herself in anything 
 else. She acts with perfect art, but she always acts. Her 
 Antigone is pathetic in gesture and moving by the music of 
 the voice, but not an Antigone to strike deep blows at our 
 feelings. In " Le Dedale," one of her famous parts, Mme 
 Bartet plays the agonies of the ex-Mme de Pogis admirably, 
 but always plays them. A small detail which means some- 
 thing was told me by an actor whom I will not give away.
 
 The French Stage of To-day 285 
 
 At the very knot of passion in " The Maze," Mme Bartet 
 carefully curls her little finger, as she hangs her hand with 
 studied, carelessness over the back of the sofa ; it is an 
 elegant attitude, but she should not then think of it. The 
 curled little finger almost paralysed the actor whom I will 
 not mention ; he did his best to feel his part, but the care- 
 fully curled little finger of the hand he was to kiss fascinated 
 him. If she was thinking then how most effectively to 
 spread her well-manicured hand, how could she be swept 
 away by her senses ? He, while his eye was on the care- 
 fully curled little finger, could not possibly sweep her off 
 with his senses. Yet it had to be done — and done quickly, 
 in a gale of passion, or the scene was wrecked — and the 
 curtain was nearly due. So much unwritten tragedy can 
 there be in a little finger. 
 
 Jeanne Granier is always Jeanne Granier and we thank 
 her for it ; she is, indeed, still Jeanne Granier, and we are 
 even more thankful for that — still the playful, perverse, 
 sometimes tender Jeanne Granier. She has never tried to 
 be anything but herself on the stage. Mme Simone reduces 
 our theory that the player must play himself almost to the 
 elemental absurd : she has acted hitherto always one 
 character with trifling variations, a creature more of nerves 
 than of feeling, sensitive but not tender, a woman all 
 trembling on wires, not with a quivering heart. She loves 
 beyond a woman's shame in " La Rafale," beyond common 
 honesty in " Le Voleur," but in both she loves with the 
 brain and the nerves, and presumably the senses, but not 
 with the heart : the author might have asked her to love 
 with her heart, but she does not, she cannot help it. And 
 why should she ? She makes the character five because 
 she is herself when she plays it. In " Samson " there is no 
 one whom she can love truly, but after the play she ought 
 to begin to love her husband the strong man ; yet she will
 
 286 The Real France 
 
 love him only because he is strong — love him only with her 
 mastered nerves. Why should she not be herself ? She 
 always is identically the same Simone, but she is a living 
 thing on the stage, with all her mannerisms, her long 
 waving arms, her expressive upper lip, her jerky movements 
 and twitching hands : she lives on the stage, and we 
 cannot ask for more. 
 
 We recall other women who, less extremely perhaps, are 
 themselves on the stage, and that is why we remember 
 them ; some have had moments, some have a career. 
 Mme Blanche Pierson at the Comedie francaise has been 
 since her hair grew white the perfect dowager, pathetically 
 bourgeoise in " Les Affaires sont les affaires," stiffly pre- 
 judiced for all her humanity in " Le Dedale," unscru- 
 pulously human in "Notre jeunesse," delightfully "grande 
 dame " in " L'Amour vieille." Mme Marie Magnier of 
 miraculous vitality is the humorous dowager, with a 
 gorgeous expanse of humour and rich fun, violent but never 
 common. Mile Marie Leconte and Mile Marthe Regnier 
 were born to charm : let them charm, and they play their 
 right part. Other actresses have had their moments, and 
 will repeat them : Mile Berthe Bady loves and must love 
 to the death, with scarlet passion, black despair, wringing 
 of hands, convulsive claspings, which come to her naturally, 
 and all M. Henri Bataille's distressed heroines are Mile 
 Bady under different names ; Mme Louise Silvain has been 
 a real Electra, all dark vengeance ; Mme Jane Hading 
 must be mournfully in love and decoratively passionate ; 
 Mme Anna Judic (since her singing days are over) has to be 
 the sweet old lady, in whom charm has aged but is still the 
 same charm ; Miles Cecile Sorel and Berthe Cerny are the 
 two " grandes coquettes " of the Comedie francaise (which 
 keeps up still the excellent tradition of the " emploi," the 
 character which " belongs " to each leading member of the
 
 The French Stage of To-day 287 
 
 company) and they both gave us their best moment when 
 pitted against one another in " Poliche " ; Mile Pierat, the 
 improved type of " jeune fille," an " ingenue," but with 
 little nonsense about her, not the absurd " white goose " 
 played by Mile Reichenberg until middle-age, Mile Eve 
 Lavalliere, the " gamin de Paris " in petticoats, Mme 
 Brandes, impassioned and haughty, Mile Darcourt, im- 
 pertinent and soft, Mme Segond- Weber, the real tragedy 
 queen, all have their personalities. We know that all these 
 ladies would like precisely to be admired for what they are 
 not — Mile Lavalliere for depth of passion, perhaps, and 
 Mme Segond- Weber for the light manner — but it is the 
 author's and stage director's business to see that they keep 
 to their natures and act themselves. 
 
 Of all-round stage-managers, Andre Antoine (at the 
 Odeon) and Firmin Gemier (at the Theatre Antoine) are 
 probably at present the best in the world, Their companies 
 pay the penalty, for few of their players stand out and all 
 fit in to the whole performance. I imagine that both 
 managers tell their actors and actresses to be themselves, 
 with variations no doubt, in their parts. Playing together, 
 playing to each other and not to the footlights, playing for 
 the play and not for themselves — all that has been drilled 
 into them as a matter of course. But one imagines that 
 the last and loudest cry of both managers is "In the name 
 of the stage, be natural, be yourselves. If you feel this 
 passage that way, say it that way, and by the gods don't 
 try to say it another way. If that be your reading of your 
 part, read it thus, and by the Deus ex machind, don't read 
 it as you think another would read it or as you think it 
 ought to be read. You may be bad in your part being your- 
 self, but you can't anyhow then be as bad in it as you would 
 be, not being yourself." 
 
 We must not forget to thank those who being themselves
 
 288 The Real France 
 
 make us, or have made us, laugh : Torin, the fat boy, who 
 died suddenly a few hours after the last laugh he drew from 
 us ; Albert Brasseur, always the same Brasseur, whatever 
 his part, whom more than the play we go to see, with the 
 same absurdities, the same mouth like a small " o," and the 
 cat's mustachios ; jolly Guy ; jollier Boisselot (henpecked 
 and rebellious Guitry's henpecked but resigned neighbour 
 in " Les Hannetons," who, when Guitry was furiously trying 
 to throw his lady out of doors, sighed, " No, cher Monsieur, 
 do not try. They never go, / know it," and answered 
 cheerfully, " Yes, dear," to a shrewish voice screaming to 
 him from the flat above), who seemed too jolly to die yet 
 has died ; Germain whose amazements and perplexities 
 are commonly funnier than the plays he plays in ; podgy 
 Mile Cassive, all blond, smiling fun ; and a dozen others 
 who are all useful, for they all amuse us, being true to 
 themselves, to their own naturally amusing selves. We 
 might, if we pursued, be led on almost to lay down that the 
 actor when he is himself makes the play. 
 
 THE END
 
 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICT ION 
 
 BY ARTHUR H. ADAMS. 
 
 GALAHAD JONES. A Tragic Farce. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 With 1 6 full-page Illustrations by Norman Lindsay. 
 
 *** Galahad Jones is a middle-aged bank clerk, with a family. One day, on 
 his way home, a letter falls to his feet from the balcony of a house he is passing. 
 It is addressed " To You," and on reading it he discovers that he is requested 
 to meet the writer in the garden of the house at 10 o'clock that night. In a spirit 
 of knight-errantry, he decides to do so, and learns that the writer a young girl- 
 is kept practically in prison by her father, because of her affection for a man of 
 whom he does not approve. The chivalry of Galahad Jones plunges him into 
 many difficulties, and leads to some very awkward and extremely amusing 
 situations. 
 
 BY FRANCIS ADAMS. 
 
 A CHILD OF THE AGE. Crown 8vo. i/- 
 
 Pall Mall Gasetle — " It comes recognisably near to great excellence. There is 
 a love episode in this book which is certainly fine. Clearly conceived and 
 expressed with point. 
 
 BY JEAN AICARD. 
 
 THE DIVERTING ADVENTURES OF MAURIN. Cr. 8vo. 6/- 
 Translated from the French by Alfred Allinson, M.A. 
 
 Westminster Gazette— Maurin, hunter, poacher, boaster, and lover of women, 
 is i a magnificently drawn type of the Meridional, who is in some ways the Irishman 
 of France. . . . a fine, sane, work. . . . The translation is excellent." 
 
 Morning Leader—" Indubitably laughable. An encyclopaedia of the best 
 form of foolishness." 
 
 MAURIN THE ILLUSTRIOUS . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Translated from the French by Alfred Allinson, M.A. 
 Evening Standard— "If 'he had never done anything else M. Aicard would 
 have earned his seat in the French Academy by his creation of Maurin For 
 Maurin is an addition to the world's stock of fictional characters— to that picture 
 gallery where no restorer is ever wanted." 
 
 BY GRANT ALLEN. 
 
 THE BRITISH BARBARIANS. Crown 8vo. 3/6 
 
 Also Canvas Back 1/6 
 Saturday Rcviezv—" Mr. Allen takes occasion to say a good many things that 
 require saying, and suggests a good many reforms that would, if adopted brine 
 our present legal code more into harmony with modern humanity and the 
 exigencies of its development." 
 
 BY MAUD ANNESLEY. 
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 PaU Mall Gazette—" The story is full of life and interest and the startling 
 denouement is led up to witli considerable skill." 
 
 THE DOOR OF DARKNESS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Pall Matt Gazette—" An enthralling story, powerfully imagined and distin- 
 guished for artistry ol no mean order."
 
 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 ANONYMOUS. 
 
 ELIZABETH'S CHILDREN. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Telegraph— The book is charming . . . the author . . . has a delicate 
 fanciful touch, a charming imagination . . . skilfully suggests character and 
 moods ... is bright and witty, and writes about children with exquisite know- 
 ledge and sympathy." 
 
 HELEN ALLISTON. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 By the author of " Elizabeth's Children." 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette — " The book has vivacity, fluency, colour, more than a touch 
 oi poetry and passion. . . . We shall look forward with interest to future work 
 by the author of ' Helen Alliston.' " 
 
 THE YOUNG O'BRIENS. 
 
 By the author of " Elizabeth's Children," and " Helen Alliston." 
 Saturday Review — " Delightful . . . the author treats them (the Young 
 O'Briens) very skilfully." 
 
 THE MS. IN A RED BOX. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Speaker — "It is that rarest and most welcome of works, a good romance of 
 pure fiction. . . . The use made of local colour and historical incident is one of 
 the author's unknown triumphs. ... In these respects ... it is the best novel 
 that has appeared since ' Lorna Doone.' One of the most exciting books of its 
 own kind that we have ever read." 
 
 BY W. M. ARDAGH. 
 
 THE MAGADA. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette — " 'The Magada' is a store-house of rare and curious learn- 
 ing ... it is a well-written and picturesque story of high adventure and deeds 
 of derring-do." 
 
 Observer — "The book has admirably caught the spirit of romance." 
 Daily Chronicle — "'The Magada' is a fine and finely told story, and we 
 congratulate Mr. Ardagh." 
 
 BY GERTRUDE ATHERTON. 
 
 SENATOR NORTH . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 New York Herald — " In the description of Washington life Mrs. Atherton 
 shows not only a very considerable knowledge of externals, but also an insigbt 
 into the underlying political issues that is remarkable." 
 
 Outlook — "The novel has genuine historical value." 
 
 THE ARISTOCRATS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Also in paper boards, cloth back, at i/6. 
 
 The Times—" Clever and entertaining. . . . This gay volume is written by 
 some one with a pretty wit, an eye for scenery, and a mind quick to grasp natural 
 as well as individual characteristics. Her investigations into the American 
 character are acute as well as amusing." 
 
 THE DOOMSWOMAN . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Morning Post — " A fine drama, finely conceived and finely executed 
 Alhenceum—" Eminently picturesque . . . gorgeous colouring."
 
 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 BY GERTRUDE ATHERTON- continued. 
 
 A WHIRL ASUNDER . Paper Cover. i/- 
 
 Bystander — " It can be recommended as a fine romance. . . . There is plenty 
 of incident." 
 
 Outlook — "The story is a curious achievement in the violently and crudely 
 picturesque style that is peculiar to the author writer." 
 
 BY ARNOLD BENNETT. 
 
 A MAN FROM THE NORTH. Crown 8vo. 3/6 
 
 Black and White — "A work that will come to the jaded novel reader as a 
 splendid surprise." 
 
 Daily Chronicle — " Admirably fresh and brisk, vibrating with a wild, young 
 ecstasy. 
 
 BY EX-LIEUTENANT BILSE. 
 
 LIFE IN A GARRISON TOWN. Crown 8vo. 1/- 
 
 The suppressed German Novel. With a preface written by the 
 author whilst in London, and an introduction by Arnold White. 
 
 Truth — "The disgraceful exposures of the book were expressly admitted to 
 be true by the Minister of War in the Reichstag. What the book will probably 
 suggest to you is. that German militarism is cutting its own throat, and will one 
 day be hoist with its own petard." 
 
 BY SHELLAND BRADLEY. 
 
 EXPERIENCES OF AN A.D.C . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Westminslcr Gazette—" . . , makes better and more entertaining reading 
 than nine out of every ten novels of the day. . . . Those who know nothing about 
 Anglo-Indian social life will be as well entertained by this story as those who 
 know everything about it." 
 
 Times — " Full of delightful humour." 
 
 BY JOHN BUCHAN. 
 
 JOHN BURNET OF BARNS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Truth — " In short, this is a novel to lay aside and read a second time, nor 
 should we forget the spirited snatches of song which show that the winner of the 
 Newdigate has the soul of the poet." 
 
 A LOST LADY OF OLD YEARS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Alhcnatum — " Written in strong and scholarly fashion." 
 Morning Post — " We have nothing but praise for Mr. Buthan. The book 
 of sterling merit and sustained interest." 
 
 Evening Standard — "Stirring and well told." 
 
 BY GILBERT K- CHESTERTON. 
 
 THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 With 6 Illustrations by W. Graham Robertson. 
 
 Daily Mail—" Mr. Chesterton, as our laughing philosopher, is at his best in 
 this delightful fantasy." 
 
 Westminster Gazelle—-" It is undeniably clever. It scintillates that is exactly 
 the right word — with bright and epigrammatic observations, and it is written 
 throughout with undoubted literary skill."
 
 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 BY T. B. CLEGG. 
 
 THE LOVE CHILD . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Truth — " A singularly powerful book. . . . The painful story grips you from 
 first to last." 
 
 Daily Telegraph — "A strong and interesting story, the fruit of careful 
 thought and conscientious workmanship. . . . Mr. Clegg has presented intensely 
 dramatic situations without letting them degenerate into" the melodramatic." 
 
 THE WILDERNESS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Telegraph—" A. really admirable story." 
 
 Athenoeum — "Mr. Clegg claims the gift of powerful and truthful writing." 
 
 THE BISHOPS SCAPEGOAT. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Athenoeum — " Inspired with a deep sense of the beautiful in Nature and the 
 instinctive goodness of the human heart, and the divine meaning of life." 
 
 Daily Mail — " A really good novel. It is so good that we hope Mr. Clegg 
 will give us some more from the same store." 
 
 JOAN OF THE HILLS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Timcs — "Another of Mr. Clegg's admirable novels of Australian life." 
 Globe — "A good story, interesting all through." 
 
 BY FREDERICK BARON CORYO- 
 
 IN HIS OWN IMAGE. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Westminster Gazette— "The book is cleverly written and the author has 
 obviously a very pretty literary talent." 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette — " Always delightful and well worth reading." 
 
 BY YICTORIA CROSS. 
 
 THE WOMAN WHO DIDN'T. Crown 8vo. i/- 
 
 Speaker — "The feminine gift of intuition seems to be developed with uncanny 
 strength, and what she sees she has the power of flashing upon her readers with 
 wonderful vividness and felicity of phrase. ... A strong and subtle study of 
 feminine nature, biting irony, restrained passion, and a style that is both forcible 
 and polished." 
 
 BY A. J. DAWSON. 
 
 MIDDLE GREYNESS. (Canvas-back Library). i/6 
 
 Daily Telegraph — "The novel has distinct ability. The descriptions of up- 
 country manners are admirable." 
 
 MERE SENTIMENT Crown 8vo. 3/6 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette— " There is some clever writing in Mr. Dawson's short 
 stories collected to form a new ' Keynotes ' volume under the title of Mere Senti- 
 ment.' . . . Avery clever piece of work. . . . Mr. Dawson has a pretty style 
 . . shows dramatic instinct."
 
 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 BY GEORGE EGERTON. 
 
 KEYNOTES. Crown 8vo. 3/6 net. Ninth Edition. 
 
 St. James's Gazette— "This is a collection of eight of the prettiest short 
 stories "that have appeared for many a day. They turn for the most part on 
 feminine traits of character ; in fact, the book is a little psychological study of 
 woman under various circumstances. The characters are so admirably drawn, 
 and the scenes and landscapes are described with so much and so rare vividness, 
 that we cannot help being almost spell-bound by their perusal." 
 
 DISCORDS. Crown 8vo. 3/6 net. Sixth Edition. 
 
 Daily Telegraph— "These masterly word-sketches." 
 
 Speaker—" The book is true to human nature, for the author has genius, and 
 let us add, has heart. It is representative ; it is, in the hackneyed phrase, 
 a human document." 
 
 SYMPHONIES. Crown 8vo. 6/- net. Second Edition. 
 
 St. James's Gazette— "There is plenty of pathos and no little power in the 
 volume before us." 
 
 Dailv News—" The impressionistic descriptive passages and the human 
 touches 'that abound in the book lay hold of the imagination and linger in the 
 memory of the reader." 
 
 FANTASIAS. Crown 8vo. 3/6 net. Canvas back, 1/6 net. 
 
 Daily Chronicle— "These ' Fantasias ' are pleasant reading— typical scenes or 
 tales upon the poetry and prose of life, prostitution, and the beauty of dreams 
 and truth." 
 
 BY A. C. FOX DAYIES. 
 
 THE DANGERVILLE INHERITANCE. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Second Edition. 
 
 Morning Post—" Mr. Fox-Davies has written a detective story of which 
 Gaboriau might have been proud." 
 
 Daily Telegraph—" The story is one that, once begun, must be finished. 
 
 THE MAULEVERER MURDERS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Also 1/- net. 
 
 Evening Standard—" An entertaining blend ol the Society novel and the 
 detective story." 
 
 Westminster Gazette— "We heartily recommend this book for a holiday or a 
 railway journey. An exciting and ingenious tale." 
 
 THE FINANCES OF SIR JOHN KYNNERSLEY. 
 
 Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Punch—" I read every word of the book, and enjoyed nearly all of them." 
 Morning Post—" Mr. Fox-Davies' extremely clever and entertaining book." 
 
 BY HAROLD FREDERIC. 
 
 MARCH HARES. Crown 8vo. 3/6. Third Edition. 
 
 Daily Chronicle—" Buoyant, fanciful, stimulating, a pure creation of fancy 
 and high spirits. ' March Hares ' has a joyous impetus which carries everything 
 before it ; and it enriches a class ol fiction which unfortunately is not copious."
 
 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 BY HAROLD FREDERIC— continued. 
 
 MRS. ALBERT GRUNDY. Observations in Philistia. 
 
 F'Cap. 8vo. 3/6. Second Edition. 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette — " Mr. Frederic is at his very best in this light and delicate 
 satire, which is spread with laughter and good humour." 
 
 BY RICHARD GARNETT. 
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS AND OTHER STORIES 
 
 Crown 8vo. 6/- Second Edition. 
 
 Daily Chronicle — " A subtle compound of philosophy and irony. Let the 
 reader take these stories as pure fun — lively incident and droll character — and he 
 will be agreeably surprised to find how stimulating they are." 
 
 Times—" Here is learning in plenty, drawn from all ages and most languages, 
 but of dryness or dulness not a sentence. The book bubbles with laughter. . . . 
 His sense of humour has a wide range." 
 
 BY ELIZABETH GODFREY. 
 
 THE WINDING ROAD . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Literary World—" A carefully written story. . . . Miss Godfrey has the mind 
 of a poet ; her pages breathe of the beautiful in nature without giving long 
 description, while the single-hearted love between Jasper and Phenice is des- 
 cribed with power and charm." 
 
 THE BRIDAL OF ANSTACE . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Westminster Gazette — "An individual charm and a sympathetic application 
 have gone to the conception of Miss Godfrey's book, a remarkable power of 
 characterisation to its making, and a refined literary taste to its composition." 
 
 Truth — " Charmingly told. ... A story in which your interest gains and 
 deepens from the beginning." 
 
 THE CRADLE OF A POET. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 *** The poet is a product of the stone quarry region of Dorsetshire, and the 
 story concerns itself with his development and a conflict between ancient tradition 
 and modern spirit. 
 
 BY A. R. GORING THOMAS. 
 
 MRS. GRAMERCY PARK. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Worhi — •' In the language of the heroine herself this, her story, is delight- 
 fully 'bright and cute.' " 
 
 Observer — " Fresh and amusing." 
 
 BY HANDASYDE. 
 
 FOR THE WEEK-END. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Standard—" Only a woman, surely, would write such deep and intimate 
 truth about the heart of another woman and the things that give her joy when a 
 man loves her." 
 
 A GIRLS LIFE IN A HUNTING COUNTRY. Crown 8vo. 3/6 
 
 Daily News — "A sweet and true representation of a girl's romance." 
 Scotsman— "There are some admirable character sketches in the book and a 
 
 lot of quaint philosophy, whimsical thoughts and quoted verse, all of which 
 
 should greatly entertain the reader."
 
 JOH N LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 BY HENRY HARLAND. 
 
 THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF BOX. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Illustrated by G. C. Wilmhurst. 165th. Thousand. 
 
 Academy— "The drawings are all excellent in style and really illustrative of 
 the tale." 
 
 Saturday Review— ''Wholly delightful." 
 Pall Mall Gazelle—" Dainty and delicious." 
 Times — "A book among a thousand." 
 Spectator — "A charming romance." 
 
 MY FRIEND PROSPERO . Crown 8vo. 6/- Third Edition. 
 
 Times—" There is no denying the charm of the work, the delicacy and 
 fragrancy of the style, the sunny play of the dialogue, the vivacity of the wit, and 
 the graceful flight of the fancy. 
 
 IVorld—'The reading of it is a pleasure rare and unalloyed." 
 
 THE LADY PARAMOUNT. Crown 8vo. 6/- 55th Thousand. 
 
 Times—" A fantastic, delightful love-idyll." 
 
 Spectator — " A roseate romance without a crumpled rose leaf." 
 
 Daily Mail—" Charming, dainty, delightful." 
 
 COMEDIES AND ERRORS. Crown 8vo. 6/- Third Edition. 
 
 Mr. Henry James, in Fortnightly Review— "Mr. Harland has clearly thought 
 out a form. . . . He has mastered a "method and learned how to paint. . .. His 
 art is all alive with felicities and delicacies." 
 
 GREY ROSES. Crown 8vo. 3/6 Fourth Edition. 
 
 Daily Telegraph—" ' Grey Roses ' " are entitled to rank among the choicest 
 flowers of the realms of romance." 
 
 Spectator—" Really delightful. ' Castles near Spain ' is as near perfection as 
 it could well be." 
 
 Daily Chronicle — "Charming stories, simple, full of freshness." 
 
 MADEMOISELLE MISS . Crown 8vo. 3/6 Third Edition. 
 
 Speaker— " All through the book we are pleased and entertained." 
 Bookman — "An interesting collection of early work. In it may be noted the 
 undoubted delicacy and strength of Mr. Harland s manner." 
 
 BY ALICE HERBERT. 
 
 THE MEASURE OF OUR YOUTH. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Evening Standard— "A very human, intelligible book. . . . exceedingly 
 clever and earnestly real." 
 
 Morning Post—" Reveals an unusual clearness of vision and distinction of 
 style and thought." 
 
 BY MURIEL HINE. 
 
 HALF IN EARNEST. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 *** Derrick Kilmarney, the secretary of a famous politician, is a young man 
 with the disposition to take the best that life offers him, and skirk the respon- 
 sibilities. He falls in love with a girl but shudders at the idea of the bondage of 
 marriage. His love is emancipated, unlettered. He is ambitious, politically, 
 allows Tiimself to become entangled with his chiefs wife, and is too indolent to 
 break with her even in justice to the girl he loves. Eventually there comes a 
 time when all the threads have to be gathered together, when love has to be 
 weighed with ambition, and in Kilmarney's case the denouement is unexpected 
 and startling.
 
 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 BY ARNOLD HOLCOMBE. 
 
 THE ODD MAN. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Morning Post — "One of the most refreshing and amusing books that we have 
 read for some months. ... ' The Odd Man ' is a book to put on one's shelves 
 and Mr. Holcombe's is a name to remember.' 
 
 Times — "A clever and competent piece of work." 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette — " The brightness, spontaneity, and constant flow of its 
 humour make ' The Odd Man ' a feast of fun." 
 
 BY WILFRID SCARBOROUGH JACKSON. 
 
 NINE POINTS OF THE LAW. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Manchester Guardian — "The kindly humorous philosophy of this most divert- 
 ing story is as remarkable as its attractive style. There is hardly a page without 
 something quotable, some neat bit of phrasing or apt wording of a truth." 
 
 HELEN OF TROY. NY. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Chronicle— "The story is at once original, impossible, artificial, and 
 very amusing. Go, get the work and read." 
 
 Evening Standard — " There is a rollicking yet plausible tone that carries the 
 reader along." 
 
 TRIAL BY MARRIAGE. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Globe — "Written with all Mr. Jackson's simple, unaffected charm." 
 
 World- " One can confidently promise the reader of this skilfully treated and 
 unconventional novel that he will not find a page of it dull. It is one that will be 
 not only read but remembered." 
 
 BY MRS. JOHN LANE. 
 
 KITWYK. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 A Story with numerous illustrations by Howard Pyle, 
 Albert Sterner and George Wharton Edwards. 
 
 Times — "Mrs. Lane has succeeded to admiration, and chiefly by reason of 
 being so much interested in her theme that she makes no conscious effort to 
 please. . . . Everyone who seeks to be diverted will read 'Kitwyk' for its 
 obvious qualities of entertainment." 
 
 THE CHAMPAGNE STANDARD. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Morning Post — " The author's champagne overflows with witty sayings too 
 numerous to cite." 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette — " Mrs. Lane's papers on our social manners and foibles are 
 the most entertaining, the kindest and the truest that have been offered us for a 
 longtime. . . . The book shows an airy philosophy that will render it ol service 
 to tne social student." 
 
 Athenaeum — " Mrs. Lane treats each subject with such freshness and origi- 
 nality that the work is as entertaining as it is suggestive."
 
 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 BY MRS. JOHN L£K&-continued. 
 
 ACCORDING TO MARIA. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Ttlegraph — "A more entertaining, companionable, good-natured, and 
 yet critical piece of portraiture we have not riad the good luck to encounter these 
 many seasons. . . . 'According to Maria' is as fresh, amusing, and human a 
 book as any man, woman, or girl could desire to bewitch a jaded moment, or drive 
 away a fit of the dumps."' 
 
 Observer — "The world 'according to Maria ' is a most diverting place. She 
 is a delight, and must be secured at once for every home." 
 
 Daily Chronicle — "This delightful novel, sparkling with humour. . . . Maria's 
 world is real. . . . Mrs. Lane is remarkably true to life in that world. . . . Maria 
 is priceless, and Mrs. Lane is a satirist whose life may be indefatigably joyous in 
 satiric art. For her eyes harvest the little absurdities, and her hand makes 
 sheaves of them. . . . Thackeray might have made such sheaves if he had been 
 a woman." 
 
 BALTHASAR AND OTHER STORIES . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Translated by Mrs. John Lane from the French of Anatole France 
 
 Daily Graphic — "The original charm and distinction of the author's style has 
 survivedthe difficult ordeal of appearing in another language. . . . 'The Cure's 
 Mignonette" is as perfect in itselt as some little delicate flower." 
 
 Globe — "Every one of them is interesting." 
 
 BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. 
 
 THE BOOK BILLS OF NARCISSUS. Crown 8vo. 3/6 
 
 Second Edition. 
 
 Daily Chronicle — " One of the most winsome volumes — winsome is surely the 
 one epithet — which have so far been given to us during the last decade of a dying 
 century." 
 
 C. di B. (Mr. Bernard Shaw) in the Star — " I fan unusually fine literary instinct 
 could make it a solid book, Mr. le Gallienne would be at no loss for an enduring 
 reputation . . . Nothing could be prettier than his pleas and persuasions on 
 benalf of Narcissus and George Muncaster." 
 
 THE WORSHIPPER OF THE IMAGE. Crown 8vo. 3/6 
 
 Daily Chronicle—" Contains passages of a poignancy which Mr. Le Gallienne 
 has never before compassed." 
 
 THE QUEST OF THE GOLDEN GIRL. Cr. 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Fifteenth Edition. 
 
 Dailv News — " A piece of literary art which compels our admiration." 
 Mr. "Max Beerbohm in Daily Mail — "Mr. Le Gallienne's gentle, high spirits, 
 and his sympathy with existence is exhibited here. . . . His poetry, like his 
 humour, suffuses the whole book and gives a charm to the most prosaic objects 
 and incidents of life. . . . The whole t>ook is delightful, for this reason, that no 
 one else could have written a book ol the same kind." 
 
 THE ROMANCE OF ZION CHAPEL. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Second Edition. 
 
 St. James's Gazette — " Mr. Le Gallienne's masterpiece." 
 
 Times — " Extremely clever and pathetic. As for sentiment Dickens might 
 have been justly proud of poor Jenny s lingering death, and readers whose hearts 
 have the mastery over their heads will certainly weep over it."
 
 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE— continued. 
 
 PAINTED SHADOWS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Scotsman — " Material and workmanship are of the finest." 
 
 Queen — " Really delightful stories, Mr. Le Gallienne writes prose like a poet." 
 
 LITTLE DINNERS WITH THE SPHINX. Cr. 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Telegraph — " Here is the same delicate phrasing, the same tender revela- 
 tion of emotions, always presented with a daintiness of colouring that reveals the 
 true literary artist." 
 
 Star — "Mr. Le Gallienne touches with exquisite tenderness on the tragedy of 
 things that change and pass and fade." 
 
 BY A. E. J. LEGGE. 
 
 MUTINEERS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Speaker — "An interesting story related with admirable lucidity and remark- 
 able grasp of character. Mr. Legge writes with polish and grace." 
 
 Literary World — "A novel sure to win applause. . . . 'Mutineers' can 
 safely be recommended as a novel well constructed and well written. It gave us 
 two pleasant hours." 
 
 BOTH GREAT AND SMALL. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Saturday Review — "We read on and on with increasing pleasure." 
 
 Times — "The style of this book is terse and witty." 
 
 Spectator — " Full of quiet and clever observation and written with a good deal 
 of descriptive talent." 
 
 THE FORD. Crown 8vo. 6/- Second Edition. 
 
 Standard— " An impressive work . . . clever and thoughtful. 'The Ford,' 
 deserves to be largely read." 
 
 Mr. James Douglas, in Star — " It is full of finely phrased wit and costly satire. 
 It is modern in its handling, and it is admirably written." 
 
 BY W. J. LOCKE. 
 
 DERELICTS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Chronicle — "Mr. Locke tells his story in a very true, very moving, and 
 very noble book. If anyone can read the last chapter with dry eyes we shall be 
 surprised. 'Derelicts' is an impressive and important book." 
 
 Morning Post— Mr. Locke's clever novel. One of the most effective stories 
 that have appeared for some time past." 
 
 IDOLS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Telegraph — " A brilliantly written and eminently readable book." 
 
 Daily Mail— One of the most distinguished novels of the present book season." 
 
 Punch — "The Baron strongly recommends Mr. W. J. Locke's 'Idols' to all 
 novel readers. It is well written. No time is wasted in superfluous descriptions ; 
 there is no fine writing for fine writing's sake, but the story will absorb the 
 reader. ... It is a novel that, once taken up, cannot willingly be put down 
 until finished." 
 
 10
 
 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 BY W. J. LOCKE— continued. 
 
 A STUDY IN SHADOWS. Crown 8vo. 3/6 
 
 Daily Chronicle — " Mr. Locke has achieved a distinct success in this novel. 
 He has struck many emotional chords and struck them all with a firm sure hand." 
 
 Athcnceum — " The character-drawing is distinctly good. All the personages 
 stand out well defined with strongly marked individualities." 
 
 THE WHITE DOVE. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Times — "An interesting story,, full of dramatic Scenes." 
 
 Morning Post — " An interesting story. The characters are strongly con- 
 ceived and vividly presented, and the dramatic moments are powerfully realized.'' 
 
 THE USURPER. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 World — "This quite uncommon novel." 
 
 Spectator — " Character and plot are most ingeniously wrought, and the con- 
 clusion, when it comes, is fully satisfying." 
 Times — "An impressive romance." 
 
 THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE . Cr. Svo. 3/6 
 
 AT THE GATE OF SAMARIA. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Chronicle — "The heroine of this clever story attracts our interest. . . . 
 She is a clever and subtle study. . . . We congratulate Mr. Locke." 
 
 \I timing Post — "A cleverly written tale . . . the author's pictures ot 
 Bohemian life are bright and graphic." 
 
 WHERE LOVE IS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Mr. James Douglas, in Star — " I do not often praise a book with this 
 exultant gusto, but it gave me so much spiritual stimulus and moral pleasure that 
 I feel bound to snatch the additional delight of commending it to those readers 
 who long for a novel that is a piece of literature as well as a piece of life." 
 
 Standard -" A brilliant piece ol work." 
 
 Times— " The author has the true gift ; his people are alive." 
 
 THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE . Cr. Svo. 6/- 
 
 Mr. C. K. Shorter, in Sphere — "A book which has just delighted my heart." 
 Truth. — " Mr. Locke's new novel is one of the most artistic pieces of work I 
 have met with for many a day." 
 
 Daily Chronicle. — " Mr. Locke succeeds, indeed, in every crisis of this most 
 
 original story." 
 
 THE BELOVED VAGABOND. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Truth. — " Certainly it is the most brilliant piece of work Mr. Locke has done." 
 Evening Standard, ■" Mr. Locke can hardly fail to write beautifully. He has 
 not failed now." 
 
 SIMON THE JESTER. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 *_* The central figure of Mr. Locke's new novel is one Simon de Gex, M.P., 
 who having met life with a gay and serene philosophy is suddenly called upon to 
 face Death. This he does gallantly and jests at Death until he discovers to his 
 confusion that Destiny is a greater jester than he. Eventually by surrendering 
 his claims he attains salvation. The heroine is Lola Brandt, an ex-trainer of 
 animals, and an important figure in the story is a dwarf, Professor Anastasius 
 Papadopoulos, who has a troupe of performing cats. The scene of the novel is 
 laid in London and Algiers. 
 
 II
 
 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 BY INGRAHAM LOYELL. 
 
 MARGARITAS SOUL. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Punch. — "There have been a great many ingenues (mock or real) in modern 
 fiction, and doubtless one or two in actual lite ; but there never was one inside a 
 book or out of it who came within a four mile cab radius of Margarita. The book 
 is well worth reading." 
 
 Westminster Gazette. — "A book which does not let the reader's interest flag 
 for a moment. It is full of laughter and smiles, of seriousness, comfortable philo- 
 sophy and a few tears." 
 
 BY A. NEIL LYONS. 
 
 ARTHUR'S. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Times. — " Not only a very entertaining and amusing work, but a very kindly 
 and tolerant work also. Incidentally the work is a mirror of a phase of the low 
 London life of to-day as true as certain of Hogarth"s transcripts in the eighteenth 
 century, and far more tender." 
 
 Punch. — " Mr. Neil Lyons seems to get right at the heart of things, and I con- 
 fess to a real admiration for this philosopher of the coffee-stall." 
 
 SIXPENNY PIECES. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette. — " It is pure, fast, sheer life, salted with a sense of humour." 
 
 Evening Standard. — '" Sixpenny Pieces ' is as good as 'Arthur's', and that 
 
 is saying a great deal.' A book full of laughter and tears and hits innumerable 
 
 that one feels impelled to read aloud. ' bixpenny Pieces ' would be very hard 
 
 indeed to beat." 
 
 BY FIONA MACLEOD (William Sharp). 
 
 THE MOUNTAIN LOVERS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Literary World. — " We eagerly devour page after page ; we are taken captive 
 by the speed and poetry of the book." 
 
 Graphic. — " It is as sad, as sweet, as the Hebridean skies themselves, but 
 with that soothing sadness of Nature which is so blessed a relief after a prolonged 
 dose of the misery of ' mean streets.' " 
 
 BY ALLAN MCAULAY. 
 
 THE EAGLES NEST. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Athenaum. — "We should describe the book as a brilliant tour de force. . . . 
 The story is spirited and interesting. The love interest also is excellent and 
 pathetic." 
 
 Spectator. — "This is one of those illuminating and stimulating romances which 
 set people reading history." 
 
 BY FREDERICK NIYEN. 
 
 THE LOST CABIN MINE. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Alhenaum. — "The book should be read by lovers of good fiction." 
 Westminster Gazette. — " The whole story is told with an amount of spirit and 
 realism that grips the reader throughout." 
 
 THE ISLAND PROVIDENCE. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Graphic. — " Its descriptive power is remarkable. The author 'springs 
 imagination,' to use George Meredith's words, and springs it with no more than 
 the lew words prescribed by that master." 
 
 Academy. — " Vigorous writing." 
 
 12
 
 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 BY FRANK NORRIS. 
 
 THE THIRD CIRCLE. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Mornins; Post.—" As a sketch by a great artist often reveals to the amateur 
 more of his power and skill than a large finished work in which the effect is con- 
 cealed, so in these virile little studies we are made to realise quite clearly what 
 powers of observation and what a keen eye for effective incident Mr. Norris had.'' 
 
 Spectator. — "A series of remarkable sketches and short stories by the late 
 Mr. Frank Norris . . . well worth reading." 
 
 BY F. J. RANDALL. 
 
 LOVE AND THE IRONMONGER. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Telegraph. — ''Since the gay days when Mr. F. Anstey was writing his 
 inimitable series of humourous novels, we can recall no book of purely farcical 
 imagination, so full of excellent entertainment as this first effort of Mr. F. J. 
 Randall. ' Love and the Ironmonger' is certain to be a success." 
 
 Times — " As diverting a comedy of errors as the reader is likely to meet with 
 for a considerable time." 
 
 Mr. Clement Shorter in The Sphere—" I thank the author for a delightful 
 hour's amusement." 
 
 BY STEPHEN REYNOLDS. 
 
 A POOR MANS HOUSE. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Mail— "This is a remarkable book, and we hope it will receive the 
 attention it deserves." 
 
 Athenceum — "A remarkably vivid and sympathetic picture. It is an achieve- 
 ment of conspicuous merit." 
 
 THE HOLY MOUNTAIN. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Puneh—" . . . deserves nothing but praise . . . a clever story well told, and 
 an endlessly amusing caricature of the petty side of life." 
 Westminster Gazette— "Vivid and brilliant." 
 Standard—" Here at last is an honest strong piece of work." 
 
 ALONGSHORE. WHERE MAN AND SEA ARE FACE TO FACE 
 
 Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 BY HENRY ROWLAND. 
 
 GERMAINE. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Aihenamm — "A conspicuously uncommon story.'' 
 
 Daily Chronicle— " A well written story of distinctly original flavour." 
 Outlook—" We have in ' Germaine' a really vital and original book— passion- 
 ate yet pure, full of the deep things of life, yet abrim with whimsical humour." 
 
 BY HUGH DE SELINCOURT. 
 
 A BOY'S MARRIAGE. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Evtning Standard — '* Exceedingly realistic . . . but does not give the impres- 
 sion that anything is expatiated upon for the sake of effect. A daring but sincere 
 and simple book. . . . likely to attract a good deal of attention." 
 
 A thenceum— "The best points in Mr. de Selincourt's novel are his delicacy of 
 treatment and sense of character. ... He has the making of a fine novelist." 
 
 13
 
 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 BY HUGH DE SELINCOURT— continued. 
 
 THE STRONGEST PLUME. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Academy — " An uncomfortable story for the conventionally minded. It deals 
 a deadly blow to the ordinary accepted notions of the respectable." 
 
 Daily Telegraph — " The story is a very commendable as well as a very inter- 
 esting piece of work." 
 
 Daily Mail — " A neat, artistic story." 
 
 THE HIGH ADVENTURE. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Evening Standard. — " A novel for all lovers of the poetry of life ' uttered or 
 unexpressed." 
 
 Morning Post. — " Mr. de Selincourt certainly has a talent for describing rather 
 nice young men." 
 
 Observer. — "A clever and refreshing story.' 
 
 THE WAY THINGS HAPPEN. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Morning Post. — "The book has moments of grace and charm that few contem- 
 porary writers give us." 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette. — " ' The Way Things Happen ' confirms a long-settled con- 
 viction that among the young generation of writers there are few who can compete 
 with Mr. de Selincourt for pride of place." 
 
 Times. — " Reading this book is a surprising and a rare experience." 
 
 BY H. SIENKIEWICZ. 
 
 THE FIELD OF GLORY. Cr. 8vo. 6/- Fifth Thousand. 
 
 Spectator. — "A spirited, picturesque romance . . . full of adventures, related 
 with all the authors picturesqueness of detail and vigour of outline." 
 
 Evening Standard. — "As a vital, humourous and extraordinarily effective 
 
 Presentment of a childish, heroic, lovable race, it deserves to be read and remem- 
 ered . . . worthy of Dumas." 
 
 BY G. S. STREET. 
 
 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A BOY. F'cap. 8vo. 3/6 
 
 Fifth Edition. 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette. — "A creation in which there appears to be no flaw." 
 Speaker. — "The conception is excellent and the style perfect. One simmers 
 with laughter from first to last." 
 
 THE TRIALS OF THE BANTOCKS. Crown 8vo. 3/6 
 
 Westminster Gazette.—' 1 Since Mr. Matthew Arnold left us we remember 
 nothing so incisive about the great British Middle, and we know of nothing of 
 Mr. Street's that we like so well." 
 
 Saturday Review. — " Mr. Street has a very delicate gift of satire." 
 
 Times. — "A piece of irony that is full of distinction and wit." 
 
 THE WISE AND THE WAYWARD. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Mr. W. L. Courteney in Daily Telegraph.— "Mr. Street has given us a novel- 
 of rare distinction and charm. The fineness of his execution yields as much 
 artistic and literary delight as the delicacy of his perceptions and the acuteness 
 of his analysis."
 
 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 BY HERMANN SUDERMANN. 
 
 REGINA : or THE SINS OF THE FATHERS. 
 
 Crown 8vo. 6/- Third Edition. 
 
 A Translation of " Der Katzensteg," by Beatrice Marshall. 
 
 St. James's Gazette. — " A striking piece of work, full of excitement and strongly 
 drawn character." 
 
 Globe. — "The novel is a striking one, and deserves a careful and critical 
 attention." 
 
 BY CLARA YIEBIG. 
 
 ABSOLUTION. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Times. — "There is considerable strength in 'Absolution' . . . As a realistic 
 study the story has mnch merit." 
 
 Daily Telegraph. — The tale is powerfully told . . . the tale will prove absorb- 
 ing with its minute characterisation and real passion." 
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Athenaeum. — " The story is not only of great human interest, but also extremely 
 valuable as a study of the conditions in which a large section of the poorer classes 
 and small tradespeople of German cities spend their lives. Clara Viebig manipu- 
 lates her material with extraordinary vigour. . . . Her characters are alive." 
 
 Daily Telegraph. — " Quite excellent. 
 
 BY MRS. WILFRID WARD. 
 
 THE LIGHT BEHIND . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Athenaeum. — " Qualities of a very desirable kind, united to a quiet moderate 
 manner, do not belong to the common novel. It is perhaps superfluous to say 
 that Mrs. Wilfrid Ward's new story is not a common novel and that it abounds in 
 this pleasing combination." 
 
 Punch. — "This is a book to read, and to keep to read again." 
 
 BY H. B. MARRIOTT WATSON. 
 
 GALLOPING DICK. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Telegraph. — " We have an always attractive theme worked up in an 
 unpretentious but thoroughly effective style." 
 
 AT THE FIRST CORNER . Crown 8vo. 3/6 
 
 Saturday Review. — "Admirably conceived and brilliantly finished ; the book 
 will be read." 
 
 THE HEART OF MIRANDA . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Spectator. — " Mr. Marriott Watson's literary gift is unmistakable." 
 
 BY EDITH WHARTON. 
 
 THE GREATER INCLINATION Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Datlv Tc'.r^iiiph. — "Teems with literary ability and dramatic force." 
 Outlook. — Miss Wharton writes with a sympathy, insight and understanding 
 that we have seldom seen equalled." 
 
 15
 
 JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 BY M. P. WILLCOCKS. 
 
 WIDDICOMBE. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Evening Standard. — " Wonderfully alive and pulsating with a curious fervour 
 which brings round the reader the very atmosphere which the author describes. 
 . . . A fine, rather unusual novel. . . . There are some striking studies of women." 
 
 Truth. — "A first novel of most unusual promise." 
 
 Queen. — " An unusually clever book." 
 
 TH E WINGLESS VICTORY. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 "~7unes. — " Such books are worth keeping on the shelves even by the classics, 
 for they are painted in colours that do not fade." 
 
 Daily Telegraph. — " A novel of such power as should win for its author a 
 position in the front rank of contemporary writers of fiction." 
 
 A MAN OF GENIUS . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Daitv Telegraph. — " ' Widdicombe' was good, and 'The Wingless Victory" 
 was perhaps better, but in ' A Man of Genius ' the author has given us something 
 that should assure her place in the front rank of our living novelists. In this 
 latest novel there is so much of character so much of incident, and to its writing 
 has gone so much insight and observation that it is not easy to praise it without 
 seeming exaggeration." 
 
 Punch. — There is no excuse for not reading ' A Man of Genius ' and making 
 a short stay in the 'seventh Devon of delight." 
 
 Globe. — " Exquisite." 
 
 THE WAY UP. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 %* Michael Strode, the ironmaster, who is the central figure of Miss Willcocks' 
 new novel, devotes his life to the work of showing the Way Out of the economic 
 jungle of poverty by means of co-operative production ; he is prepared to sacrifice 
 everything : he is a fanatic, possessed by an idea. But Strode the thinker is also 
 Strode the man, bound by closest ties to a woman of the oldest type in the world. 
 The siren refuses to lend either her money or herself to further his scheme. The 
 novel is one, therefore, that touches three burning questions of the hour — capital 
 and labour, the claims of the individual against those of the State, the right of a 
 woman to her own individuality. In the clash of passion and duty, blow follows 
 blow, revelation succeeds revelation, till the wrappings that shroud reality are 
 stripped from it and both dreamers awake, but to what reality must be read in the 
 pages of the book itself, which, besides being a picture of a group of modern men 
 and women, is also a study of certain social tendencies of to-day and possibly 
 to-morrow. 
 
 BY F. E. MILLS YOUNG. 
 
 A MISTAKEN MARRIAGE. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette. — " It is a very sincere and moving story. The heroine 
 claims our sympathies from the first, and we follow her fortunes with absorbed 
 interest." 
 CHIP. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Morning Post.—" Original, vivid and realistic." 
 
 Athencenr>i.—"Ata.\e . . . of unusual romantic interest." 
 
 ATONEMENT. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 *** The story, which is laid in South Africa, shows how Harborough, a man 
 of naturally honourable character, becomes entangled with Sylvia Wentworth, a 
 girl who deliberately sets to work to fascinate him while already engaged to 
 Sydney Ainleigh. When Harborough offers to marry her, Sylvia refuses and 
 steadily adheres to her determination to marry her fiance. Harborough meets 
 and falls passionately in love with Naomi Bruce, the beautiful daughter of the 
 farmer on whose farm he is working. How he endeavours to conquer his love, 
 and how circumstances combine to bring him and Naomi together, the tale reveals. 
 Naomi is in ignorance of Harborough's former entanglement at the time ot her 
 marriage. Later he confesses it to her, and she, disillusioned and horrified, leaves 
 him. How the tale ends the reader must find out for himself ; 
 
 16
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
 This book is DUE on the last 
 
 date stamped below. 
 
 [Ml m 3 u 
 
 JAfJ 8 1377J 
 
 lOm-7,'71 (P6348s8)— Z-53
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 AA 000 235 510 5 
 
 ;