The phrasing of modern metaphysics calls this faculty assimilation; in other days it has been called imagination: be its name what it will, it is the one essential and especial possession of the poetic mind, which makes it travel over space, and annihilate time, and behold the endless life of innumerable forests as suggested to it by a single green leaf. When the writer, therefore, asks clamorously for folios on folios of documents humains, he proves that he has not this faculty, and that he is making an inventory of human qualities and vices rather than a portrait of them.
THE LEGISLATION OF FEAR
To any one convinced of what seems to be a supreme truth, that the happiness of humanity can only be secured by the liberty of the individual, the tendency of opinion in Europe in this present year must be a matter of grave anxiety. The liberty of the public is everywhere suffering from the return to reaction of their governments. The excesses of a few are made the excuse for the annoyance and restriction of the many. Legislation by fear is everywhere replacing legislation by justice, and is likely to continue to do so. The only statesman who has spoken of anarchy in any kind of philosophic spirit is Lord Rosebery, who called it ‘that strange sect of which we know so little.’ All other political speakers have treated of it only with blind abuse. In truth we do know almost nothing of it; we do not know even who are its high priests and guiding spirits. We know that it is a secret society, and we know that secret societies have always had, in all climes and for all races, the most singular and irresistible fascination. To meet it, ordinary society has only its stupid and brutal police system; its armies of spies, who, as the journey of Caserio from Cette to Lyons proves, are hopelessly useless, even when they are truthful.
It is true that, in the long run, secret societies have always been conquered and dispersed by ordinary society, but they are constantly reappearing in new forms, and it is certain that they have an extreme attraction for certain minds and classes of men, that they exact and receive an universal obedience which is never given to ordinary laws. They constitute a phase, a phenomenon, of human nature which is in itself so strange that it ought to be examined with the most calm and open-minded philosophy, instead of being judged by the screams of frightened crowds and the coarse invective of such politicians[politicians] as Crispi. The curious power which can induce young men to risk their lives, and give them willingly to the scaffold, cannot be worthily examined and met by a rough classification of these men amongst monsters and wretches. That they have been brought, in their youth, to entire insensibility to personal danger and absolute indifference to death, whether to suffer it or cause it, is an indisputable fact; but no one seems to care to investigate the means by which they are brought to this state of feeling, nor the social causes by which this doctrine of destruction has been begotten. They are classed amongst criminals and sent to the scaffold. But it is certain that they are different to ordinary criminals; they may be much worse than they, but they are certainly different, and are in a sense entirely free from egotism, which is the usual motive of common crimes, except so far as they are seduced by the egotism of vanity.
It is impossible not to recognise great qualities allied to great cruelties in anarchists and nihilists, and, in the former, to great follies. When we remember the ghastly punishment of even the slightest political offences in Russia, yet see continually that some one is found who dares place on the Tsar’s dressing-table or writing-table a skull, a threatening letter, a dagger, or some other emblem and menace of death; that to do this, access is obtained into the most private and carefully-guarded apartments of imperial palaces; that who it is that does this can never be ascertained (i.e., there is no traitor who betrays the secret), and that the most elaborate and constant vigilance which terror can devise and absolutism command is impotent to trace the manner in which entrance is effected, we must admit that no common organisation can be at work, and that no common qualities must exist in those affiliated to it. There is no doubt that anarchism is a much more vulgar and much more guilty creed than nihilism. The latter has the reason of its being in the most brutal government that the world holds; it lives in a hell and only strives to escape from that hell, and liberate from it its fellows. Anarchy, with no such excuse, strikes alike at the good and the bad; strikes indeed at the good by preference. Yet there are qualities in it which we have been accustomed to consider virtues; there are resolution, patience, sang froid and absolute indifference to peril; it is these which make it formidable. It also cannot be doubted that behind its Caserios and its Vaillants there must be some higher intelligence, some calm, trained, dominant minds. It has grown up in the dark, and by stealth; unsuspected, unseen, until it is strong enough to shake like an earthquake the existing institutions of the world. We see the bomb, the pistol, the knife; but we do not see the power which directs these, any more than we see that volcanic stratum which makes the solid earth divide and crumble.
The existing clumsy machinery of tribunals and police offices will not have more faculty to detect it than has the public in general. There are no seismographic instruments in the political world. There are only a scaffold and a house of detention. This age, which is squeamish about execution, has invented the infernal torture of solitary confinement. It need not surprise us if there be a return to rack and thumbscrew, these primitive agencies being refined and intensified by the superior resources of science. It is, I believe, proved that Stambuloff tortured his political prisoners with the old-fashioned forms of torture. These can scarcely be worse than the solitary confinement in humid underground cells in which Francesco Crispi causes those who displease him to be confined. Men in the freshness of youth, in the full promise of talent, are shut up in these infernal holes in solitude for a score of years, their health ruined and their minds distraught. Many of these men have no fault whatever except that the authorities are afraid of their political doctrines and of the sympathy the populace feel for them. Where is the regard for ‘life’ in these fell sentences? Death would be a thousand times more merciful.
A youth of twenty-one was in the second week of July condemned at Florence to fifteen months’ imprisonment for having called the pretore of a petty court and his subordinate vigliacchi (scoundrels); an expression so appropriate to the officials of these vicious and corrupt little tribunals that it was unpardonable. If at the end of the fifteen months this lad comes out of prison at war with society, a second Caserio, a second Vaillant, whose will be the fault?
A young lady of good family saved a little dog from the guards in Paris, and when she had seen it safely up its staircase turned in righteous indignation on the men. ‘Are you not ashamed to persecute innocent little animals?’ she said to them. ‘You would be better employed in catching thieves.’ This just remark so infuriated them, as a similar observation did the Florentine pretore, that they seized her, cuffed her, dragged her along under repeated blows, tearing some of her clothes off her back, and, reaching the police-station, locked her up with the low riff-raff of the streets. This took place in a fashionable quarter of Paris. If the male relatives of the young gentlewoman had lynched the guards who thus outraged her they would only have done their duty; but we know that the Parisian tribunals would have condemned them had they done so, and absolved the rascally myrmidons of the law. There is no justice anywhere if police are compromised by it.
At Mantua, in the month of August of this year, a poor woman, who has five children to maintain by her daily labour, was arrested by a guard for bathing in a piece of water outside the town (she ought to have been rewarded for her unusual cleanliness); and being taken before the tribunal she was sentenced to a fine. She exclaimed as she heard the sentence, ‘And the brigadier who brought this misery on me has his decoration!’ She was condemned to further punishment for the rebellious utterance; her defender, a young lawyer, in vain protested, and, for thus protesting, was himself arrested and charged with the misdemeanour of endeavouring ‘to withdraw a prisoner from just authority’! Can anything be more infamous?
In July at Ravenna eight young lads were flung into prison for singing the Hymn of Labour.