Laurent Tailhade is a less natural and wholesome poet than Jean Richepin, perhaps, but he is certainly a more distinguished one. As a chiseller of poetic cameos and medallions, he has few, if any, superiors among his contemporaries. His Vitraux and Jardin des Rêves are particularly relished by artists and littérateurs and by his brother-poets.
Tailhade’s prose is as finely chiselled as his poetry. It is almost invariably lyric; and—although he is caustic and cruel therein to the verge of cut-throatism, and although he has at his command the most extensive vocabulary of invective of any person in France, not excepting M. Henri Rochefort—it is always, like his poetry, distinguished. His cult for the classic French and Latin authors and his scrupulous care for art save him from vulgarity and commonplaceness, even in his most questionable literary undertakings and even in the simple diatribes which he contributes to the most insignificant, the least scholarly, and the least artistic propagandist sheets. “He is a lettré,” says M. Ledrain, conservator at the Louvre, “who knows admirably his Latin and his Sixteenth Century, and who has formed thus a particularly savoury style which we all admire.”
Tailhade has unblenchingly defended nearly every anarchist attempt that has occurred in Europe since he came to manhood. He characterised the assassination of Humbert by the Italian Bresci as “un geste qui console et qui revive nos espoirs”; and Sophie Perowskaïa, Hartmann, Rysakoff, Caserio, Angiolillo, Henry, and Ravachol were all eulogised by him. He has been prominently before the public on four occasions during the past decade: at the time of the attempt of Vaillant, by reason of his striking epigram, “Qu’importe le reste, si le geste est beau”; a little later, when he was himself the victim, at the Restaurant Foyot, of an anarchist—or anti-anarchist?—beau geste which nearly cost him his eyesight and permanently disfigured him; in the autumn of 1901, at the time of the second visit of the czar, when he was tried and sentenced to a 1,000-franc fine and a year’s imprisonment for having reaffirmed “the venerable theory of regicide[125] which has traversed history” in a remarkable prose poem published by Le Libertaire, and entitled “Le Triomphe de la Domesticité”; and lastly, in 1903, when he was mobbed in Brittany for his diatribes against the local clergy, on which occasion he rendered himself ludicrously guilty of inconsistency by appealing to the protection of the police.
The incriminated passage in “Le Triomphe de la Domesticité,” above referred to, is as follows:—
“Quoi, parmi ces soldats illégalement retenus pour veiller sur la route où va passer la couardise impériale, parmi ces gardes-barrières qui gagnent neuf francs tous les mois, parmi les chemineaux, les mendiants, les trimardeurs, les outlaws, ceux qui meurent de froid sous les ponts en hiver, d’insolation en été, de faim toute la vie, il ne s’en trouvera pas un pour prendre son fusil, son tissonnier, pour arracher aux frênes des bois le gourdin préhistorique, et, montant sur le marchepied des carrosses, pour frapper jusqu’à la mort, pour frapper au visage, et pour frapper au cœur la canaille triomphante, tsar, président, ministres, officiers, et les clergés infames, tous les exploiteurs qui rient de sa misère, vivent de sa moelle, courbent son échine, et le payent de vains mots! La rue de la Ferronerie est-elle à jamais barrée? La semence des héros est-elle inféconde pour toujours?
“Le sublime Louvel, Caserio, n’ont-ils plus d’héritiers? Les tueurs de rois sont-ils morts à leur tour, ceux qui disaient avec Jerôme Olgiati, l’exécuteur de Galéas Sforza, qu’un trépas douloureux fait la renommée éternelle? Non! La conscience humaine vit encore.”[126]
At the banquet offered him by sympathising littérateurs and artists immediately after his trial, Tailhade proposed a toast which illustrates capitally the scope of his emancipating ardour. It was:—
