“We publish more than our own share of worthless trash,” once said a French writer to me, “but it is always better written than your trash, for our bad writers must have some knowledge of grammar, which it appears yours lack, and they must write with what looks like a certain measure of style, whereas your bad writers shine by absence of the smallest pretension to style of any kind”; which means, of course, that illiterate French men and women know their language better than illiterate English men and women know theirs. They have been better trained and disciplined in the maintenance of grammatical laws. And while English journalism would, I am confident, never descend into the gross personalities and insults of the low French Press,—that kind of journalism presided over by MM. Drumont of La Libre Parole, Millevoye of La Patrie, Judet of Le Petit Journal, and Rochefort of L’Intransigeant, the unspeakable Intransigeant,—more intellect, education, and style are expended in the columns of an ordinary French paper than would be needed to carry on a dozen successful London papers. No London journalist would think it worth his while to spend an entire morning over the “confection” of a bright leaderette, read to-day and forgotten to-morrow, or be content to cast real brilliance on the ambient air in the reckless fashion of the polished French journalist. The thousand exquisite things Daudet in this fashion flung into the bottomless abyss of journalism without a thought—Provençal spendthrift that he was!—that he was wasting his intellectual capital!
The Temps, a Protestant organ, is the most serious, the best informed, and the most respectable of Parisian newspapers. It has not the dash, the astonishing verve, the invincible courage of the Figaro, but it is always well written, moderate, and interesting. The dramatic and literary columns are special features. The day of the Débats is over. It once held the first place as an intellectual and political paper, but it has lost all vitality, and it has become that unacceptable thing in such an atmosphere as Paris, démodé. Few of its subscribers have remained faithful to it, and only one or two of its distinguished contributors.
The Débats, like the Temps, is eminently respectable, and never uses that recognised weapon of French journalism, calumny, which makes the loss of its prestige on political grounds to be deplored. For, in its method of fighting its political campaigns, the French Press to-day has descended to strange depths of dishevelled freedom. Under the Second Empire the Press had hardly more liberty than that which it enjoyed under the iron heel of Napoleon, and the supervision exercised by the censor in songs, plays, pamphlets, and literature was assuredly of greater benefit to the nation, even when making allowances for errors of judgment, than the coarse and outrageous licence permitted under the Third Republic. It was nothing but an act of stupid prudery to have taken proceedings against a grave masterpiece like Madame Bovary, but the Public Prosecutor, M. Bulot, should certainly have taken measures to summon before a court of justice M. Octave Mirbeau for writing such an irredeemable study as Le Journal d’une Femme de Chambre. The working-man, the artisan, those whom the conditions of existence have excluded from the privileges of education, who can pay only a sou for their daily supply of political information, cannot be too deeply pitied for having to rely upon such sources of news as La Patrie and L’Intransigeant. They go into the wine-shop then, primed with the awful lesson in civilisation they daily receive, their minds poisoned against all those in public office by the ferocious hate, the slander, the ignoble lies they have read and discussed in their newspaper. How are these to distinguish between truth and falsehood? No critical faculties in them have been cultivated by training or education. They accept as educated the men who write these pernicious articles, and if the writers solemnly assure their readers that every public man in France is a thief and traitor, the latter suppose these men must know, and, being by nature suspicious of those who rule and tax them, they are only too ready to believe all they read. And so they credit M. Loubet with a capacity for every dark crime.
The unpretentious dignity and courage, above all, the bourgeois simplicity of M. Loubet’s presidentship of the Republic should bid us hope for France in our worst hour of despondency. There is a fine sense of duty in the race, for which this simple civilian stands without brag, assumption, or a trace of French panache. Honour came to seek him uncourted, and he has not wavered or been bullied into resignation by the most appalling insults, outrages, calumnies, and actual assaults that have ever been showered on one mortal man. As a figure of civic integrity and of unassuming merit, I know none worthier of admiration in France to-day. For the terrible price paid in Paris for public office is not only abuse of person and principles, but the digging into every private corner of family history with a deliberate intent to injure and wound by attacks upon the dead. It is this extraordinary Nationalist Press that has so brutalised the imagination of the great reading public, that its readers do not even exact logic or a shadow of consistency from those who cater their politics for them. A little while ago two French officers killed their superior officer sent to arrest them on their way into the heart of Africa. Those two officers were then despatched by their own men, and the Patrie Française made a great splash in the way of a patriotic funeral for the assassinated colonel. Had the colonel been murdered by two civilians all would have been well. But the assassins were officers, and officers, when they are not Jews, must always be respected, admired, and adored. So when the patriots had done weeping over Colonel Klobb, since he had been interred with national and military honours, MM. Coppée and Lemaître, in the name of the nation, acting as chief mourners, they decided to forget him and wax exceedingly and patriotically wroth over the fate of his glorious assassins. Why were Voulet and Chanoine killed? Who had dared to kill so sacred a thing as a French officer? It must be the Government, the wicked, infamous, Jew-paid Government. M. Loubet, of course, gave the order, and M. Waldeck-Rousseau transmitted it, and then, lest anyone should live to tell the tale, Waldeck-Rousseau wired instructions to kill off anyone else belonging to the mission. My Catholic friends are ever lamenting the lack of freedom under the Third Republic. I wonder if any Catholic Government has ever tolerated its enemies in the very heart of its rule writing daily in a hostile Press that it traffics in assassination. And nobody seems to find the charge in this case laughable. Nationalism is certainly in direct hostility to all sense of humour.
But France is too sound and honest and sober a race to live contented with no other public influence than that of her untrustworthy Press. The Catholics have always understood that religious ideas are most happily and lastingly spread by direct personal influences, hence the prestige of their clergy. Catholic clubs and societies abound, but the want of liberal education in the working-man was deeply felt in the revelations of the Affaire. To write of France to-day is to hark back perpetually to the Dreyfus Affair. Everything seems to date from it, everything to touch it, everything to be explained by it. The misfortunes of no single man in all history have ever left such abiding and momentous consequences as those of the Alsatian Jewish officer, whose return to his native land all Europe stood still to watch with thrilled pulses. And so it was felt, as infamy after infamy practised against him was discovered, that the people should be educated to think for themselves, to know and understand what is being done in their name. It was felt, too, that they should have their share of the intellectual ideas, the moral and mental beauty that brightens life and gives it zest, hitherto appropriated by the rich and leisured classes. What M. Deherme calls the co-operation in idea, the basis of the people’s colleges of Paris, is really the popularisation of culture. Anything is good that will help to keep the workmen out of the wineshops, where they are poisoned with inferior and inflammable alcohol, and guard them from the political garbage of their inferior and inflammable newspapers. If you cannot give the workman space, privacy, wealth, and luxurious home-life, at least make him free in his heritage of the thoughts that move the ages, put him in contact with the current of ideas in the ambient air. And so M. Deherme’s notion “caught on,” and from it sprang the “Universités Populaires” opened in several of the populous working-quarters of the capital, where every evening, during certain periods, every different kind of distinguished citizen gives some of his leisure and some of his brains to the poor.
A subscription of fivepence a week, afterwards reduced to sevenpence halfpenny a month, from the numerous members was thought sufficient to pay for rent and light, while the rich should lend their pictures, give their books, and under the form of lectures impart their knowledge—this was the practical form of co-operation of ideas. Then it was decided that a doctor should have his free consultation-room, and working-men’s families be able to come on Sundays and enjoy reading and plays or amusements of divers kinds. In winter, as well as books and papers, light was at their service, which was a small economy that balanced the small charge for these privileges. At its worst, it was always better and cheaper than the wineshop. M. Deherme hired a small lecture-room in the Rue Paul Bert, and for two years, even in the summer months of holiday, arranged for commercial lectures, debates, entertainments provided by the disinterested professional class—always the readiest to assist the poor. The wealthy sometimes give of their superfluous income—and how little! Contrast with it the much that doctors, lawyers, professors, men of science, give of their less as regards actual income! When men like Zola and Léon Daudet sneer at surgeons and fashionable doctors, I ask myself if, for a moment, they realise all that these surgeons and doctors do for the needy for nothing. You give a subscription for some charitable object duly recorded in the newspapers. You have the benefit of your charitable reputation, and your self-advertisement; you have earned both without any actual sacrifice.
How many doctors and surgeons have their hours set aside regularly for free consultations, and add to these gifts of money for medicine and wine! If I were to try to enumerate all the kindnesses and liberal charities done by big doctors and surgeons, and by small doctors, and never a word of it recorded, I should have to embark in several volumes. I know no class of men so disinterested and generous, except perhaps, barristers and professors. In France we need seek no more splendid examples in this class of men than the present French Prime Minister, M. Waldeck-Rousseau, who gave up a lucrative profession, being the most brilliant and best paid advocate of France, to become an ill-paid Minister, sacrificing in the hour of a great national crisis something like fifteen thousand a year; and Maître Labori, who, in order to defend an unpopular cause, not only risked his life but fell from the height of professional wealth to something nearly approaching professional poverty. The Université Populaire, a liberal institution, with, in consequence, Church, Army, aristocracy and snobbish upper-middle class against it, was supported by such professors and writers, the glory of hard-working, thoughtful and intelligent France: M. Gabriel Séailles, philosopher; M. Ferdinand Buisson, educationalist; M. Emile Duclaux, director of the Pasteur Institute; the Pasteur Wagner, M. Paul Desjardins; M. Daniel Halévy, the brilliant young son of the illustrious writer, Ludovic Halévy, one of the simplest and most charming of Frenchmen it is my privilege to know; M. Anatole France, whom I do not hesitate to call the greatest of living French writers; M. Paul Hervieu, a kind of French George Meredith, with all the qualities and defects, the generosity and passion for justice of his great English brother, and others less known across the Channel.
Now the mother-house of the Université Populaire is in the Faubourg St. Antoine, the big nerve of labouring Paris. Here, in the heart of the Socialist movement, serious and honourable men strive nobly to combat the current of anarchy by fraternity in ideas and intellect with those who work by their hands and the sweat of their brow to keep France where she is, and where she will ever remain as long as her children so strive, the centre of civilisation. The new building has a spacious lecture-hall, a museum, billiard-room, theatre, and library. The fame of its brilliant lectures has drawn such a large gathering from the centres of fashion and idleness that many a time the workman, the real “lord of the soil,” has been turned away from his own door, having arrived late, when all the places were taken by the well-dressed usurpers from the boulevards and wealthy avenues.
Branch colleges have happily been established on the same lines at Montmartre, Grenelle, Belleville, the Boulevard Barbés, the Barrière d’Italie, the Rue Mouffetard, and, without the city wall, where the idea first started under the personal superintendence of its noble founder, M. Deherme, at Montreuil sous Bois. Alas, it cannot be said that the impetus that formed these admirable institutions has continued with the same force. Some of the people’s colleges are temporarily closed, because the workmen have not shown ardour of late in attending them. It may only mean the defection that accompanies all strong reactions. Nobody but Don Quixote could for ever live and die at the fever-point of chivalry. Humanity traverses passionate crises, which reveal in a transient flash all that is best and worst in it, and then calms down to the ordinary level of contentment, which has neither best nor worst, but which denotes merely the humdrum desire to live as easily as possible. The historical social crisis France has gone through has done this good, that a freer current was established between the intellectual and the manual workers of France, the guiding soul and hand of the race; and though for the moment the great emotions which served as intermediary between them are forgotten, something of their union will remain. Neither the Church nor militarism, neither the worst influences of caste nor of the clerical party, can undo the good done by this late union. Let us hope the Université Populaire will pull up in the coming crisis of the Liberal Government, against which every base engine and infamy will be used, and that such an excellent institution as one which provides the teaching of the best intellects of France for the working-classes, libraries (from which are excluded any novels that respectable women and girls could not read), concerts, public reading-rooms well lighted and heated in winter, free consultations of brilliant lawyers and doctors on stated days, for the modest subscription of sevenpence halfpenny a month for an entire family, will not perish for want of general encouragement.
The French Liberals are making giant efforts to spread enlightenment, comfort, and fraternity among their poorer brethren, and under the name of solidarity, are founding cheap restaurants, bath-houses, workmen’s dwellings, and a nursing institute. Their efforts have inspired a Conservative rivalry, most excellent for the good of the country, as all rivalries are which strive for the improvement of the condition of the artisan class and the poor. The difference between them lies in the fact that the Catholic party is opposed to education. They wish to give as charity the Republic’s offer as a right earned by labour.