The means which his enemies employed to displace him were contemptible in the extreme, but their malice was easily accounted for. He had excited the deep resentment of all the supporters of General Boulanger, who accused him of being the cause of their favourite's fall, and with having betrayed him in 1888. The fanatics of the Panama scandal endeavoured to prove that his newspaper, La Justice, had supported the schemes and accepted the cheques of the egregious Cornelius Herz. The Anglophobes, who unhappily numbered too many of the less thinking population of France at that time, accused him of intriguing with the English Government to the detriment of the Republic, and they went so far as to produce documents, forged by the notorious mulatto, Norton, which they pretended had been stolen from our embassy in Paris. "Qu'il parle anglais," was one accusation shouted at Clemenceau in the Chamber on the 4th of June, 1888. Calamities of every sort, public and private, gathered round his undaunted head. At last he could ignore these attacks no longer, and on a fateful day he rose to put himself right before Parliament. It was too late; his appearance was greeted by an icy silence, and, as he said himself, he glanced round to see none but the hungry faces of men longing for the moment when they could trample on his corpse. Magnificent as was his defence, it availed him nothing against such a combination of malignities; even his few friends, losing courage, failed to support him. The legislative elections were at hand, and the enemies of M. Clemenceau very cleverly organized a press propaganda, which presented him to the French public in an absolutely odious light. He went down to address his Provençal constituents, and in the little mountain town of Salernes he delivered the remarkable speech to which reference has been made. All in vain: on the 20th of August, 1893, he was ignominiously rejected by the electors of the Var in favour of a local nonentity, and his career as a member of parliament ended.[7]
These circumstances, which paralysed for many years the parliamentary activity of Clemenceau, have to be borne in mind when we examine his literary record. Without delay, in that spirit of prompt acceptance of the inevitable which has never ceased to mark his buoyant, elastic character, he threw himself into a new employment. He became, in his fifty-third year, one of the most active and persistent journalists in France. His fiery independence and his audacious vivacity pointed him out at once to editors who had the wit to cater for the better, that is to say for the livelier, class of readers. M. Clemenceau, a free lance if ever there was one, became the terror and the delight of Le Figaro, La Justice, and Le Journal, while to La Dépêche de Toulouse he contributed articles which presupposed a wider horizon and depended less on the passion of the moment. Future bibliographers, it may be, will search the files of these and other newspapers of that day for more and more numerous examples of his fecundity, since he embraced all subjects in what he called the huge forest of social existence. An exhibition of pictures, a new novel, an accident in the suburbs, a definition of God by M. Jules Simon, a joke by M. Francis Maynard, the effect of champagne upon labour unrest, the architecture of Chicago—nothing came amiss to the pen of a man whose curiosity about life was boundless, and whose facility in expression was volcanic.
But there was a certain group of subjects which, at this critical hour in his career, particularly attracted the attention of M. Clemenceau, and these give a special colour to the earliest, and perhaps the most remarkable, collection of his essays. A student of the temperament of the great statesman, as he has since then so pre-eminently shown himself to be, is bound to give his mind to the volume called La Mêlée Sociale which M. Clemenceau published in 1895. This was practically his earliest bid for purely literary distinction, since the juvenile theses on anatomical subjects, and the translations from John Stuart Mill, hardly come within the category of literature. Between 1876 and 1885 M. Clemenceau had printed, or had permitted to be circulated, a certain number of his speeches in the Chamber; I have traced eight of these in the catalogue of M. Le Blond. These formed a very small fraction of his abundant eloquence in Parliament, and they were not particularly finished as specimens of lettered oratory. But between 1885 and 1895 we do not find even such slender evidences as these of the politician's desire to pose as an author. The publication of La Mêlée Sociale, therefore, was, to speak practically, an experiment; it was the challenge of a new writer, or at least of a publicist who had never before competed with the recognized creators of books.
It is obvious that in making this experiment M. Clemenceau exercised a great deal of care and forethought. The articles reprinted are not presented haphazard, nor without an evident intention of producing the best effect possible. They are selected on a peculiar system from the mass of the journalist's miscellaneous output. The collection has a central idea, and this is developed in a very remarkable preface, which remains one of the author's most philosophical and most elaborate compositions. This central idea is the tragical one of the great vital conflict which pervades the world, has always pervaded it, and must ever remain unaffected by the superficial improvements of civilization. All through the universe the various living organisms are in a condition of ceaseless contest. Everywhere something conquers something else which is conquered, and life sustains itself and ensures its own permanence by spreading death around it. Life, in fact, depends on death for its sustaining energy, and the fiercer the passion of vitality the more vehemently flourishes the instinct of destruction.
The imagination of the author of La Mêlée Sociale broods upon the monstrous facts of natural history. If he traverses a woodland, he is conscious of a silent army of beasts and birds and insects, and even of trees and plants, which are waging ceaseless battle against others of their kind. If he begins to stir the soil of a meadow with his foot, he refrains with a shudder, since millions of corpses lie but just below the surface of the fruitful earth. He peers down into the depths of the sea, only to recognize that a prodigious and unflagging massacre of living forms is necessary to keep the ocean habitable for those who survive. Everywhere, throughout the universe, he finds carnage triumphant; and eternal warfare is the symbol of the instinct of self-preservation.
It will be seen that the new author approached literature definitely from the scientific side, but also that he placed himself almost exclusively under the direction of English minds. M. Clemenceau, in that intense and unceasing contemplation of life which has been his most remarkable characteristic, has always been inspired by English models. In his early youth he was deeply impressed with the teaching of J. S. Mill, and in later years he was manifestly under the successive sway of Sir Charles Lyell and of Herbert Spencer. But by the time he collected his essays in La Mêlée Sociale, he was completely infatuated by the system of Darwin. He had long been familiar with The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man; the death of Darwin in 1882 had deprived him of a master and, as it seemed, a friend, while the publication of the Life and Letters in 1887 had given a coherency and, we may say, an atmosphere, to his conception of the illustrious English savant. When, therefore, M. Clemenceau put together the material of La Mêlée Sociale, he did so in the quality of an advanced Darwinian, and he produced his first book almost as a tribute of affection to the memory of the greatest exponent of the tragedy of natural selection. But the habit of his mind, and no doubt the conditions of his own fortunes, led him into a field more tragical than any haunted by the spirit of the placid philosopher of Down. Charles Darwin refrained from pushing his observations to such sinister conclusions as this:
La mort, partout la mort. Les continents et les mers gémissent de l'effroyable offrande de massacre. C'est le cirque, l'immense Collysée de la Terre, où tout ce qui ne pouvait vivre que de mort, se pare de lumière et de vie pour mourir. De l'herbe à l'éléphant, pas d'autre loi que la loi du plus fort. Au nom de la même loi, le dernier né de l'évolution vivante confond tout ce qui est de vie dans une prodigieuse hécatombe offerte à la suprématie de sa race. Point de pitié. Le pouce retourné commande la mort. L'âme ingrate répudie l'antique solidarité des êtres enlacés en la chaîne des générations transformées. Le cœur dur est fermé. Tout ce qui échappe au carnage prémédité, voulu, s'entretue pour la gloire du grand barbare. La splendeur de la floraison de vie s'éteint dans le sang, pour en renaître, pour y sombrer encore. Et le cirque, toujours vidé, s'emplit toujours.
This passage may be taken as characteristic of the manner of M. Clemenceau in his most reflective mood, in the "style bref, mais clair et vibrant," which Octave Mirbeau commended. This way of writing would err on the side of rhetoric, were it not so concise and rapid, so full of the gusto of life even in its celebration of death. For, in the pages of La Mêlée Sociale, M. Clemenceau shows himself interpenetrated by the sorrows rather than sustained by the possibilities of the tormented inhabitants of earth. Recent events, in his own life and in the history of the French nation, had impressed on his consciousness the inherent cruelty of human beings to one another. Like Wordsworth, and with a far sharper personal pang, he had good reason to lament what man has made of man. Moreover, the months which had extended between M. Clemenceau's political fall and the publication of La Mêlée Sociale had been marked by violent unrest and by a succession of political crimes. Anarchism, hitherto more a theory and a threat than a practical element in the existence of the people, had taken startling prominence. In quick and formidable succession the crimes of Vaillant, of Emile Henry, of Caserio and others, had filled the minds of men with alarm and horror. These events, and the strikes in various trades with their attendant sabotage, and the unrest among the miners, and the earliest germination of that new disease of the State, syndicalism,—all these and many other evidences of renewed bitterness in the struggle for life created in the mind of M. Clemenceau an obsession which is reflected in every chapter of La Mêlée Sociale. As a physician, no less than as a publicist, he diagnosed the "misère physiologique" of the age, and he railed against those in power who touched with the tips of their white kid gloves the maladies which were blackening the surface and substance of human society. In the memory of the attempt made last February to assassinate M. Clemenceau, a special interest attaches to his discussion of this class of murders, of which he gave a remarkably close and prolonged analysis, little conceiving, of course, that he would live to be himself the object of a crime at which the whole world would shudder.
The reader who wishes the literary aspect of M. Clemenceau's mind to be revealed to him in its greatest amenity may next be recommended to turn to the preface of the volume entitled Le Grand Pan, which appeared in 1896. The book itself consists of seventy little essays, reprinted from the Figaro, the Echo de Paris, and other newspapers. These have nothing or very little to do with Pan, but they are eked out and given determination by a long rhapsody in honour of the goat-foot son of Callista, treated as the symbol of natural, as opposed to supernatural science. Everybody knows the famous passage in Plutarch which describes how Thamous the pilot, sailing out of the Gulf of Corinth towards the Ionian Sea on the eve of the crucifixion of Christ, heard a voice announce that "Great Pan is dead!"
And that dismal cry rose slowly
And sank slowly through the air,
Full of spirit's melancholy
And eternity's despair!
And they heard the words it said—
Pan is dead—Great Pan is dead—
Pan, Pan is dead.