Desiring revolt with his whole soul, and sure of the righteousness of it, he is likewise so sure of its entire uselessness that he deprecates it far oftener than he proclaims it. A better state of things, in even the most distant future, is to him but a dubious “perhaps.” From kings, presidents, councils, parliaments, nobles, bourgeois, popes, priests, economists, reformers, and philanthropists he expects nothing. From his own down-trodden class he expects no more. They are stupid cattle, waiting patiently to be bled. Enfeebled by hardship, cowed into spiritlessness by police and magistrates, ready to share with the dogs the crumbs that drop from rich men’s tables, to cringe and fawn before the faintest prospect of a bone; ready to sell themselves outright for two bars of music, three sous of absinthe, or a couple of rounds of tobacco; blinded by the dazzling fiction of universal suffrage: they are only fit, at the moment a Bastille ought to be taken, to take the tram-car of that name, and generally show more signs of reverting to the type of the ourang-outang than of ushering in that era of universal affection, when all men will be as brothers, and all nations of one speech and one mind.
His prayers are despairing cries to a half-credited God,—a God at best so old, deaf, blind, unconcerned, and far away that his interference is not much to be counted on.
He conjures Jesus Christ into the world only to chaff him for his faith in man, to characterise his teachings as the beautiful soliloquies of an unfortunate, and, finally, to warn him to make good his escape, if he would keep out of the clutches of nineteenth-century Judas Iscariots and Pontius Pilates.
The prophets and teachers who have tried radically to better the world have always been treated as criminals, and always will be. It is vain to struggle to make things over. Man is a muff by nature, and nature will never change. The kilogramme of iron falsely called a heart will never be anything more than a kilogramme of iron. The bank of love “assigned” centuries ago. Modern civilisation is organised distress. These are his sober and reasoned conclusions.
But ever and anon, when pain grows too great to be borne, the blind instinct of self-preservation overtops reason. Then he swears to be his “own good God all alone,” taking “his own skin for a banner, since that is the only thing he has in the world.” Even so his words are less the rallying cry of a reformer who believes in success than the desperate defiance of a Prometheus chained to a rock; and recoil is speedy to his habitual sentiment reiterated so often as to be a veritable refrain, “It’s only life, after all: there’s nothing to do but to weep.”
“Jehan Rictus,” said a writer in the Gil Blas, “has definitely fixed a new poetic sob in the cacophony of eternal human suffering.” Needless to add, a sob was not his choice. Fate chose for him. His is no case of “wilful sadness in literature.” Sweet, tender, affectionate by nature, enamoured of sunlight, he might, under happier conditions, have given a smile, a cheer, a pæan even, to the world. In giving a sob, he gave what life gave him,—his all.
He is the perfect nihilist, who fails to be the perfect anarchist only because he has no faith. His Paris underworld is an Inferno. “All hope abandon ye who enter here,” is the burden of his message from the submerged; and it is this, probably, that led Laurent Tailhade to call him “the Dante of la misère.”
Jehan Rictus is at present preaching his gospel of blended defiance and despair in prose, in a journal called L’Ennemi du Peuple. His journalism, however, rises very little above the commonplace. He is growing fat and fashionable, and it is to be feared that his days of significant poetical productiveness are over.
Montmartre participated actively in the revolution of 1830, and was the seat of the Club de la Montagne in that of 1848. Of the period immediately preceding the Commune one of its old residents writes: “There, insurrection held its drums and its guns always ready. The right to live free was the most precious of all things to the hearts of all.” It seems to have been the order to seize the cannons which the Gardes Nationaux had transported to Montmartre after the capitulation of Paris that precipitated the Commune; and it was at Montmartre that the generals Lecomte and Clément Thomas were executed.
Louise Michel—and who should know better?—in her fascinating Mémoires testifies to the revolutionary prestige of Montmartre. She says, referring to the siege of Paris:—