Progress:
“Voici qu’un Dieu nouveau nous ronge: le Progrès.” “Le Progrès! Oui, grand fou, sous ce titre nouveau C’est toujours Dieu qui vient te hanter le cerveau, [365] C’est toujours la stérile et dangereuse idée Dont ton âme d’enfant fut jadis obsédée. Sans le savoir tu crois encor.”
In another part of this volume he exalts, beginning with Satan himself, the principal révoltés of mythology and history. The following ringing stanzas are taken from “Les Nomades”:—
“Oui, ce sont mes aïeux, à moi. Car j’ai beau vivre En France, je ne suis ni Latin ni Gaulois. J’ai les os fins, la peau jaune, des yeux de cuivre, Un torse d’écuyer, et le mépris des lois. Oui, je suis leur bâtard! Leur sang bout dans mes veines, Leur sang, qui m’a donné cet esprit mécréant, Cet amour du grand air, et des courses lointaines, L’Horreur de l’Idéal et la soif du Néant.”
The “Marches Touraniennes” conclude as follows:—
“Plus de lois, de droits, plus rien! Plus de vrai, de beau, de bien! Ces Aryas! Par le fer et par le feu, Place au Néant, place au Dieu Des Parias!”
For his Chansons des Gueux, Richepin was fined five hundred francs (and costs) and kept in prison thirty days. In this volume he acclaims all the outlaws and outcasts, all the flotsam and jetsam of modern civilisation in both country and town,—thieves, tramps, gypsies, beggars, thugs, drunkards, foundlings, panders, and prostitutes; “the halt, the maimed, the blind,” the reckless, the defiant, and the scoffing, the uncontrolled and the uncontrollable, with a vigour of language, a genuineness of accent, a picturesqueness of phrase, an audacity in imagery and epithet, a poignancy of emotion, a naturalness, a freshness, a breeziness, or rather a tempestuousness, that bespeak the master. He lays bare the thoughts and the passions of his disreputable personages, portrays their starvation and their gluttonies, their enforced abstinences and their debaucheries, and makes them speak in their own weird tongues, sing their own ribald songs, and dance their own maddening dances. For lyric savagery and savage lyrism these Chansons des Gueux have no counterpart, so far as I know, in modern literature.
“I love my heroes, my lamentable vagabonds,” wrote Richepin, in an extraordinary preface.... “I love this something, I know not what it is, which renders them beautiful, noble, this wild-beast instinct which drives them into adventure,—a rash and sinister instinct, granted, but an instinct characterised by a fierce independence. Oh, the marvellous fable of La Fontaine about the wolf and the dog! The errant wolf is mere skin and bones. The dog is fat and sleek. Yes, but the chafed neck, the collar! To be tied! ‘So you can’t run when you wish? No? Good-bye, then, to your free meals. To the wood! To the wood! Everything at the point of the sword!’ And Master Wolf is off: he runs still. He runs still, and will always run, this wolf, this tramp; and I love him for it. And every soul a bit above the common will love likewise this voluntary pariah, who may be repugnant, hideous, odious, abominable, but who has greatness,—a superb greatness, since his whole being voices the heroic war-cry of Tacitus: Malo periculosam libertatem.
“Periculosam! my brave vagabonds! Periculosam! do you hear, you coddled worldlings, all of you who have your soup and your kennel—and also your collar? Have I then committed a great crime in revealing the brutal poetry of these adventurers, of these braves, of these stubborn children to whom society is almost always a stepmother, and who, finding no milk in the breast of the unnatural nurse, bite the flesh itself to calm their hunger?”