Alvan F. Sanborn

“ Go kill this thing called politics,—this slimy, slippery thing which you think you hold and which always escapes you, which you believe dead and which always comes to life again,—this abominable thing by which everything has been debased, everything corrupted, everything bought, everything sold,—justice, love, beauty!—which has made venality of conscience a national institution of France; which has done worse still, since with its filthy slaver it has befouled the august face of the poor! worse still, since it has destroyed in you your last ideal,—faith in Revolution! ”

“ In portraying the physical discomforts of poverty, the racking coughs, raging thirsts, aching bones, the nights without shelter or sleep, the days without food, the tears that scald and the tearlessness that deadens, Jehan Rictus has only done what has been done a score of times in prose and verse. Surely, an empty heart keeps close company, more often than not, with an empty stomach, and it is in portraying vividly the mental and spiritual aspects of poverty that his work is fresh and unique. ”

“ Luce remains faithful to the tendency to sink in nature the immense strivings of human beings. The surroundings of men determine their existence and their history. In seeing these monumental and sinister chimneys and scaffoldings under the moon, these smoke-clouds which move towards the horizon like hordes, these fires which tear the night and seem to bleed like flesh, we think of the tortured humanity of which they express the suffering. ”

“ A playful pessimist, a piquant anarchist, a mischievous nihilist, if you will, but a pessimist, an anarchist, a nihilist, for all that. “Prejudices,” he says, “are unmade and remade without ceasing: they have the eternal mobility of the clouds. It is in their nature to be august before appearing to be odious; and the men are rare who have not the superstition of their time, and who look straight in the eye what the crowd does not dare to look at.” ”

“ The Butte, then, the real Montmartre, is in Paris, but not of it, and yet, of necessity, perpetually conscious of it,—a community which is and which is not a provincial town, which has an esprit de corps not inconsistent with independence, a unity not destructive of variety, and a sociability admirably accordant with a seemly privacy; while the Montmartrois sees Paris without being blinded by it, touches Paris without being crushed by it, and is stimulated by Paris without losing his identity therein. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here is an election placard which may serve as a sample:—
“A BAS LA CHAMBRE!
“People, retake your liberty, your initiative, and keep them. The Government is the valet of Capital. Down with the Government! Down with the king, Loubet! To the sewer with the Senate! To the river with the Chamber! To the dunghill with all this ancient social rottenness! Away with the Chamber! Away with the Senate! Away with the Presidency! Away with Capital!
“Vive la Révolution Sociale! Vive l’Anarchie!
“ (Signed) An Anarchist Group.” ”

“ The most kindly disposed regard anarchy as a vague aspiration which they do not hesitate to recognise as desirable for humanity to attain, but as so completely inaccessible that there is no reason for making any decided effort to realise it, and consider the anarchist as a species of lunatic whom it is prudent to avoid, a pitiful illuminé who strays from the practicable paths to lose himself in the vagueness of Utopia. ”

“ Gare à vous, naïve, short-sighted bourgeois, who with your reading and writing started them on their quest for the new, if you attempt to place obstructions in their path!
The people have a startling way of getting, in the long run, the specific things they set their hearts on. And one may admit—without the slightest prejudice to his intellectual independence or the slightest abdication of his preferences—that the specific things the revolutionists of Paris and the world at large are striving for may sooner or later be theirs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Few anarchists see in the grève générale, as he does, a purely passive revolution, which will prevail without the shedding of a drop of blood or any other violence whatsoever. Most of its anarchist advocates regard it, “not as a strike of folded arms, but as a general revolt of the proletariat, outside of all political lines, for the conquest of the means of production and for complete emancipation.” ”

“ The spirit of nature that with soft music is bursting the bonds of winter, and the spirit of the artist, spontaneous, impulsive, capricious, and free, are in absolute accord. One breathes contempt for prudery and custom with the very air. Nature’s upward-rushing sap and the artist’s careering fancy alike defy repression.
“Tout être a le droit d’être libre,” the splendid throbbing lyric climax of Charpentier’s Montmartre opera, Louise, had here its origin. ”

“ To live their dream, realise their aspirations, they, too, must work—for the moral and intellectual elevation of the masses. They, too, must understand that their own development is made up of the intellectuality of all; that, whatever the heights they believe they have attained, they belong to the multitude. If they strain to rise above the multitude, a thousand bonds hold them to it, fetter their action and their thought, preventing them forever from reaching the summits they have glimpsed. ”

“ One cannot have lived in the Quartier long and not have had student friends who had more than a passing acquaintance with hunger and for whom a fire in winter was a festival event. In his mansard, where the student is doomed to freeze in winter and broil in summer, or in his stuffy, windowless cabinet, where he is doomed to suffocate the year round, are enough outward signs of destitution to rive the heart of the most hardened professional charity visitor; and yet, ten to one, this poor devil of a “Jack” has his “Jill,” for the grisette exists. ”

“ For, after all, Tournebroche, my son, in good faith, what are fines and the death penalty, if not robbery and assassination perpetrated with an august exactitude? And do you not see that our justice merely tends, in all its pride, to this shame of avenging an evil by an evil, a suffering by a suffering, and in doubling misdemeanours and crimes in the name of equilibrium and symmetry?
“Customs have more force than laws. Gentleness of demeanour and sweetness of spirit are the only remedies which can reasonably be applied to legal barbarity. ”

“ They don the cast-off garments and retail the worn-out epigrams of 240 their fétiches, who are amused by and therefore endlessly indulgent of them. They strut and smirk and rant like children masquerading in the attic frippery of their elders, make as clever displays of superficial knowledge as the most up-to-date members of the most up-to-date women’s clubs, and revert constantly to a previous connection with the university which is not always imaginary. As individuals, these pseudo-connoisseurs and savants come and go in the Quartier Latin: the class goes on forever. ”

“ And I defy any one who has a drop of red blood in him to be at the centre of several thousand excited people who are shouting the Marseillaise, the Internationale, or the Carmagnole, and not join in, even though his every instinct and belief be anti-revolutionary and he has neither voice nor ear. He who has not shared the surging and chanting of an angry Paris mob has only half experienced the popular thrill, and can have only half an idea what solidarity of emotion means. ”

“ And, realising this, Garrison pointed out against slavery, not the sufferings of the slaves, not the cruelty of the slave-owners, not the equal rights of citizens, but the eternal Christian law of non-resistance. Garrison understood that which the most forward champions against slavery failed to understand,—that the sole irresistible means against slavery was the denial of the right of one man over the liberty of another under any circumstances whatever. ”

“ He has a right, like the rich, to things of beauty.... These flames, this smoke, these tortures, these accursed machines which every day and every hour devour my brain, my heart, my right to happiness, my right to life,—these—these yawning mouths of ovens, these fiery furnaces, these caldrons which are fed with my muscles, with my will, with my liberty, by the shovelful,—to make out of them the wealth and the social puissance of a single man! ”

“ And it is indeed this ability to “be almost happy with nothing,” this fairy-godmother power to transform by a simple flourish a pumpkin into a coach, a dowdy into a fair princess, and a cabbage into a rose, this talent, amounting to genius, for squeezing so very much more out of life than there really is in it, that lifts completely out of the commonplace the life of Montmartre. ”

“ Nowhere this side of heaven, probably, is social democracy so real and so devoid of pose.
It is not to be supposed that these poor devils of painters and poets, ardent-eyed and beauty-loving, are inwardly submissive because they rail outwardly at their misfortunes; that they pardon either the individuals who victimise them or the society which allows individuals to victimise them. Revolt is none the less revolt for perpetrating and relishing a joke.
The note of social revolt in the cavalcade of the Vache Enragée and in the mock ceremony of the marriage of the Rosière ”

“ Nothing could be more open and kind than the welcome you get when, having felt your way up a winding stair 65 as damp and dark as a mediæval donjon-keep, you turn the latch-key, hospitably left in the outside of the door, and with a premonitory knock enter the loft; always providing your entry is courteous and your coming well motived. Indeed, I know in all Paris nothing morally finer than the example Jean Grave’s gentle, unassuming life offers of consecration to the ideal. ”

“ This is not saying that the individual life will be fuller, richer, and sweeter then than it has been and is, nor that the world will be enormously better and happier than it is and has been. Apples of the most golden seeming have been known to turn to ashes in the plucker’s hand; and, when the time comes—if it does come—that the revolutionists’ present cravings have all been satisfied, the millennium will still, in all likelihood, be as far as ever away. ”

“ Of course, the anarchists do not pretend to have invented the critique of the social order. Others had done that before them. As soon as power began to exist, there were malcontents who made no bones of railing at its acts; and, if we possessed the legends which men handed down from generation to generation before writing was known, we should probably find therein satires against the chiefs. It is quite possible to criticise the existing order of things without being an anarchist, and there are those who have done this in a successful fashion which the anarchists will never surpass. ”

“ In a social state like ours, in a social state which fosters preciously, scientifically, in special cultures, poverty and its derivative, crime; in a social state which, in spite of new investigations and in spite of new philosophies, relies solely on the prehistoric forces,—murder and massacre,—what matters to the people—the only class, for that matter, which still produces children—this much-discussed question of depopulation? If the people were clairvoyant, logical with their wretchedness and their servitude, they would desire, not the cessation of depopulation, but its redoubling. ”

“ It may have been a mistake for the classes to impose book-learning on the masses, to compel them to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which makes men as gods; but, having given their wards to eat thereof, having deliberately stimulated them to think, the privileged must let them follow out their thinking to the logical—perhaps, also, to the bitter—end. There is no alternative. There is no such thing as staying them midway in their course, since with growing knowledge has come growing desire. ”

“ Willette takes a mischievous delight in surrounding them with piquant, pagan genii, by way of symbols; and, even when he leaves them quite alone, they belong less to the Paris of the day and the hour, with all their saucy modernity, than to the realm of fantasy. Nevertheless, he can be bitter, vindictive, terrible. No one of his contemporaries, except Forain, can be so awful; and no one, not even Forain, has so often frightened the bourgeois out of their bourgeois wits. ”