Part III. is the after-thought, what the poet would most wish to have

said to Jesus Christ if he really had returned and he had been the first to greet him. Necessarily a repetition at many points of Parts I. and II., its excuse is the following declaration of faith:—

“_Chacun a la Beauté en lui, Chacun a la Justice en lui, Chacun a la Force en lui-même. L’Homme est tout seul dans l’Univers. Oh! oui, ben seul, et c’est sa gloire, Car y n’a qu’ deux yeux pour tout voir._

“_Le Ciel, la Terre, et les Etoiles Sont prisonniers d’ ses cils en pleurs. Y’ n’ peut donc compter qu’ sur lui-même, J’ m’en vas m’ remuer qu’ chacun m’imite, C’est là qu’est la clef du Problème. L’Homme doit êt’ son Maître et son Dieu._”

and the following threat:—

“_Donnez-nous tous les jours l’ brich’ ton (pain) régulier, Autrement nous tâch’rons d’ le prendre._”

It was probably this downright and direct threat that led Jules Claretie, writing for _Le Temps_, to say: “The poetry of the lean Jehan Rictus is the Fronde of to-day. Far better that it mutter in the cabaret than in the street.” The majority of the press critics, ignoring this single unequivocal threat and numerous indirect but slightly veiled anathemas, have pronounced his work “gentle and refined.” Both interpretations are, in a measure, right.

Desiring revolt with his whole soul, and sure of the righteousness of it, he is likewise so sure of its entire uselessness that he deprecates it far oftener than he proclaims it. A better state of things, in even the most distant future, is to him but a dubious “perhaps.” From kings, presidents, councils, parliaments, nobles, bourgeois, popes, priests, economists, reformers, and philanthropists he expects nothing. From his own down-trodden class he expects no more. They are stupid cattle, waiting patiently to be bled. Enfeebled by hardship, cowed into spiritlessness by police and magistrates, ready to share with the dogs the crumbs that drop from rich men’s tables, to cringe and fawn before the faintest prospect of a bone; ready to sell themselves outright for two bars of music, three sous of absinthe, or a couple of rounds of tobacco; blinded by the dazzling fiction of universal suffrage: they are only fit, at the moment a Bastille ought to be taken, to take the tram-car of that name, and generally show more signs of reverting to the type of the ourang-outang than of ushering in that era of universal affection, when all men will be as brothers, and all nations of one speech and one mind.

His prayers are despairing cries to a half-credited God,—a God at best so old, deaf, blind, unconcerned, and far away that his interference is not much to be counted on.

He conjures Jesus Christ into the world only to chaff him for his faith in man, to characterise his teachings as the beautiful soliloquies of an unfortunate, and, finally, to warn him to make good his escape, if he would keep out of the clutches of nineteenth-century Judas Iscariots and Pontius Pilates.

The prophets and teachers who have tried radically to better the world have always been treated as criminals, and always will be. It is vain to struggle to make things over. Man is a muff by nature, and nature will never change. The kilogramme of iron falsely called a heart will never be anything more than a kilogramme of iron. The bank of love “assigned” centuries ago. Modern civilisation is organised distress. These are his sober and reasoned conclusions.

But ever and anon, when pain grows too great to be borne, the blind instinct of self-preservation overtops reason. Then he swears to be his “own good God all alone,” taking “his own skin for a banner, since that is the only thing he has in the world.” Even so his words are less the rallying cry of a reformer who believes in success than the desperate defiance of a Prometheus chained to a rock; and recoil is speedy to his habitual sentiment reiterated so often as to be a veritable refrain, “It’s only life, after all: there’s nothing to do but to weep.”

“Jehan Rictus,” said a writer in the _Gil Blas_, “has definitely fixed a new poetic sob in the cacophony of eternal human suffering.” Needless to add, a sob was not his choice. Fate chose for him. His is no case of “wilful sadness in literature.” Sweet, tender, affectionate by nature, enamoured of sunlight, he might, under happier conditions, have given a smile, a cheer, a pæan even, to the world. In giving a sob, he gave what life gave him,—his all.

He is the perfect nihilist, who fails to be the perfect anarchist only because he has no faith. His Paris underworld is an Inferno. “All hope abandon ye who enter here,” is the burden of his message from the submerged; and it is this, probably, that led Laurent Tailhade to call him “the Dante of _la misère_.”

Jehan Rictus is at present preaching his gospel of blended defiance and despair in prose, in a journal called _L’Ennemi du Peuple_. His journalism, however, rises very little above the commonplace. He is growing fat and fashionable, and it is to be feared that his days of significant poetical productiveness are over.

Montmartre participated actively in the revolution of 1830, and was the seat of the _Club de la Montagne_ in that of 1848. Of the period immediately preceding the Commune one of its old residents writes: “There, insurrection held its drums and its guns always ready. The right to live free was the most precious of all things to the hearts of all.” It seems to have been the order to seize the cannons which the _Gardes Nationaux_ had transported to Montmartre after the capitulation of Paris that precipitated the Commune; and it was at Montmartre that the generals Lecomte and Clément Thomas were executed.

Louise Michel—and who should know better?—in her fascinating _Mémoires_ testifies to the revolutionary prestige of Montmartre. She says, referring to the siege of Paris:—

“The Eighteenth Arrondissement was the terror of the selfish, plundering jobbers, and others of their breed. When it was rumoured, ‘Montmartre is coming down’ (‘_Montmartre va descendre_’), the reactionaries scampered to their holes like hunted animals, deserting in their panic the secret storehouses in which provisions were rotting while Paris was starving to death.”

Again, apropos of her discharge from custody in the early part of the insurrection, she writes:—

“The four _citoyens_, Th. Ferré, Avronsart, Burlot, and Christ, came to demand my release in the name of the Eighteenth Arrondissement. At the first word of this phrase,—terror of the reaction,—‘Montmartre is coming down,’ I was given into their hands.”

Still again, in a letter to Rochefort and Pain, on her return from exile:—

“I am writing to Joffrin at the same time as to you on the subject of the meeting of Montmartre, before which I cannot go to any other. It was at Montmartre I marched formerly: it is with Montmartre I march to-day.”

It was to the Montmartre of the _indigènes_, the Montmartre of the workingmen, the Montmartre then regarded as a twin of Belleville, which was known as le _cratère de la révolution_, that Louise Michel paid these tributes of affection and esteem. The invasion of the hordes of arts and letters, who hold the _Vache Enragée_ above the Golden Calf, far from weakening the revolutionary fervour of the Butte, has strengthened it. Montmartre is none the less a hot-bed of revolution for having become a shrine of the Muses. On the contrary, its present revolutionary spirit is the spirit of the old Montmartre and of the new Bohemia fused into one; and it makes the “selfish, plundering jobbers, and others of their breed,” quake more than ever.

At every cloud on the municipal horizon no bigger than a man’s hand, at every suggestion of disturbance in the political atmosphere, at every slightest rumble presaging the rising of the masses, the classes peer nervously and timorously in the direction of the beetling Montmartre, regretting from the bottom of their hearts that the offer Rothschild is said to have once made, to raze the Butte at his own expense, was not accepted by the government.

The relations between the aboriginal workingmen and the artistic and literary colonists of Montmartre are of the most cordial sort. There is a genuine solidarity between them (wherein is a profound lesson for the social settler), because they have common sufferings, common hatreds, common apprehensions, and common hopes; because they faint from the same hunger, shiver from the same frost, dread the same rent-bills, are liable to the same evictions and the same police _rafles_, and are under the same temptation, when houseless, to commit a petty misdemeanour in order to get stowed away for the night.

Artists may help the poor working people about them—without that effort of will, that compulsion of duty, which inevitably involves patronage, and which is the bane of all the attempts of the well-to-do to “elevate” the poor—because, poor themselves, they often accept help from them in return and _in kind_, and because they are neither mysteries nor objects of envy to any.

Nowhere in Paris, certainly, is the identity of interests and sentiments of the simple proletariat and the _prolétariat littéraire_ so graphically presented and the much-prated alliance between brain and brawn, labour and intellect, so completely realised. 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_; in the more than unconventional daily life, with its contemptuous disregard of ordinances of state and sacraments of church; in the political and social satire of the _chansonniers_, who sing indifferently in the _soirées_ of the socialist and anarchist groups and in the _cabarets artistiques et littéraires_; and in the coarse derision of the bawlers of the _cabarets brutaux_,—is not to be ignored on the ground that it bears a semblance of mirth. The child’s play theory is absolutely untenable in this connection. These jolly Bohemian dogs of Montmartre are capable of corroding rancours and terrible wrath. And, if that descent from Montmartre which the conscience-stricken bourgeois feel in their bones will come, ever does come, it will not be the simple proletariat that will inaugurate and lead it, but the rollicking _prolétariat littéraire_.