“A la Finlande! A la Sibérie! Aux Juifs Roumains! A l’Arménie! A la Catalogne! A la Sicile!”
In the course of his trial he expounded his attitude, as follows:—
“I know that I am on trial before you for excitation to murder. As an author, it is my duty to express all my thought; as an historian, it is my duty to discuss historic facts; as a philosopher, I have the right to think and to deduce from these facts the philosophical consequence which they warrant. I have availed myself largely of what I consider my right. I accept the entire responsibility of my acts. I even hold that they do me honour. If to-morrow an occasion presented itself for me to express again, in the interests of beauty, all my thought, I should, before the general baseness, seize with eagerness this fresh occasion.”
CLOVIS HUGUES
The raffiné De Goncourt was wont to dream of an infernal machine “tuant la bêtise chic qui de quatre à six heures fait le tour du Bois de Boulogne.” Similarly it is the Philistinism and vulgar fetichism of the hour, its imbecility and ugliness, that particularly exasperate M. Tailhade, this other raffiné, and set scintillating his scholarly and artistic ire. It was out of the depths of a profound disgust that he drew his scorching volume, Le Pays des Mufles; and it is the æsthetic offences quite as much as the economic misdoings of the bourgeois that he habitually lashes.
Socialism likewise has its poets, of whom Clovis Hugues and Maurice Bouchor (poets considerably inferior to Richepin and Tailhade) may be mentioned among the maturer men.
Clovis Hugues has as avocation, when the fortune of elections favours him, the defence of socialistic principles in the Chamber of Deputies; and M. Bouchor gives a considerable portion of his time to acquainting working people with the masterpieces of literature. “The æsthetic sense, which is the most elevated means of enjoyment, being dependent on the regular action of the other senses,” says Bouchor, “we need, if we would assure to all men a complete development, to demand plenty of material comfort for every individual. We ought to realise for all humanity the idea of the old Latin adage,—Mens sana in corpore sano. Thus socialism, which current prejudice interprets as a negation of art for art’s sake, is, on the contrary, the most direct route to it, and the affirmation of it.... We wish to raise the masses to the noblest artistic conceptions.... The people have a right to beauty, to science, to an unutilitarian culture of the mind, to whatever, in a word, can enlighten and ennoble it.”