Equally unique and equally powerful with the exhibition of the multiform woes of the destitute is the poet’s satirical exposure of the inconsistencies, insincerities, vanities, and refined cruelties of the various sorts of people who exploit the destitute. With an ironical pretence of rendering deserved homage to poverty, he elaborates the important part it plays in the social scheme. Thanks to it, the employees of the Assistance Publique are able to maintain their families in comfort; magistrates to attain a rotund and tranquil old age; economists (deferring to it as a dignified entity) to win professional chairs and academic honours; politicians to get the public ear; socialistic and anarchistic bawlers to finish out their careers as dawdling, alcoholic deputies; poets, painters, and novelists to swim in glory and good wine, and found luxurious establishments for their offspring.
The arrival of winter, which clots the blood of one class, stimulates the circulation of all the others. Then reputable benevolence drums a réveille on hollow stomachs; burial companies wax radiantly bustling; salons, languishing for want of something to talk about, revive promptly; the tourist in the Midi and the bourgeois, smug and snug by his fireside, daily commiserate suffering—after dinner—in a manner both magnificent and ample; society gambols at charity fêtes and balls; the press “rediscovers distress”; journalists sob, weep, and implore—at three sous a line. In a word, pitying the unfortunate is a profession like another; and, if the day should ever arrive when there were no more poor in the world, “many people”—to render idiom for idiom—“would be badly in the soup.” Such satire stings and routs by virtue of the moral force behind it: it is the whip of small cords plied by the man with a soul.
Satire broadens to rollicking humour in depicting the abject terror of a conscience-stricken bourgeois shopkeeper before the embarrassing spectre of a hungry man:—
“Avez-vous vu ce misérable? Cet individu équivoque? Ce pouilleux, ce voleur en loques, Qui nous r’gardait manger à table? Ma parole! on n’est pus (plus) chez soi, On ne peut pus digérer tranquille— Nous payons l’impôt, gn’a (il y en a) des lois! Qu’est-ce qu’y (ils) font donc, les sergents d’ ville?”
I laughed almost to tears when I came upon this picture, because I knew that same bourgeois shopkeeper—in Boston—during the historic famine winter of 1893-94, when a great press formed a syndicate for the dissemination of lies, when the authority of a great state was appealed to, and a great governor received congratulatory despatches from the confines of a great country for prompt and decisive action in a great emergency, and all because a few half-starved devils took a notion to show themselves without washing their hands and faces or changing their clothes.
But to return to France. Jehan Rictus loves the white apparitions of the “first communicants,” loves sunshine, lilacs, and watercress, birds and little children. Mrs. Browning’s memorable “Cry of the Children” is feeble and conventional by the side of his “Farandole des Pauv’s ‘tits Fan-Fans.” Charles Lamb was not sweeter, tenderer, daintier, in his tear-compelling reverie, “Dream Children,” than Rictus in dealing with his dream loves,—his “cemetery of innocents” he calls them, his “poor little heap of dead.”
“Et la vie les a massacrés, Mes mains les ont ensevelis, Mes yeux les ont beaucoup pleurés.”
His “Espoir,” in which he dreams of a sweetheart, is a veritable Eugène Carrière in verse.
Another poem containing much of the same sad, tender beauty, strangely commingled with piquant malice, mischievous esprit, broad humour, and bitter satire; a poem which, in spite of startling liberties of vocabulary, rhythm, and rhyme, is said to have brought honest tears to the eyes of the impeccable De Hérédia, is “Le Revenant.” The “Revenant” is Jesus Christ. The appearance of Christ in nineteenth-century Paris is a much-worn motif in French literature and painting; but the slum poet’s handling of it is so new, bold, and strong that it seems to be altogether fresh.