Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, politicians, and priests, artists, authors, dancers of death; inwardly you are all full of decay and dead men’s bones. Truly you are the sons of them that slew Christ, and like them you lay on men’s shoulders burdens grievous to be borne, which you yourselves would not touch with the end of your fingers. Crucifiers are you like them, and those who come among you to help the suffering peoples, bringing blessed peace in their hands, you imprison and insult them, and as the Scripture says, persecute them from city to city until all the righteous blood shed upon the earth shall fall upon your heads.
You work only to provide food for Death; your countries are made to subdue the future to the past, and bind the living to the putrifying corpses of the dead. You condemn the new life to perpetuate the empty rites of the tomb. … Let us rise! The resurrection, the Easter of the living, is at hand!
Sons of men, it is not true that you are, the slaves of the dead and are chained by them like serfs to the earth. Let the dead past bury its dead, and itself with them; you are children of the living, and live in your turn. Souls who are bound to the countries of the past, shake off the neurasthenic torpor, wracked by outbursts of frenzy, which weighs you down. Shake it off, my brothers, you who are young and strong; be masters of the present and the past, fathers and sons of your works. Set yourselves free! Each one of you is Man;—not flesh that rots in the tomb, but the blazing fire of life which purifies corruption and renews long-dead corpses, the flame ever new and young which circles the earth with its burning arms. Be free! Conquerors of the Bastille, you have not yet opened the dungeon within you, the falsely called Fatality. It was built as a prison-house for you centuries ago, by slaves or tyrants. They were all convicts of the same stamp, who were afraid that you would discover that you were free. Religions, races, countries, materialistic science, the heavy shadows of the past, are between you and the sun; but go forward! Liberty is there, behind those ramparts and towers, built of prejudices, dead laws, and consecrated falsehoods. They are guarded by the interests of some, the opinion of the drilled masses, and your own doubting spirit. Dare to will; and behind the crumbling walls of this spurious Destiny, you will once more behold the sun and the illimitable horizon.
Insensible to the revolutionary heat of this appeal, the staff of the newspaper only fastened its attention on the few lines where Clerambault seemed to lump all violences together, those of the “left” along with those of the “right.” What did this poet mean by giving lessons to the socialists in a party paper? In the name of what theory? He was not even a socialist. He was nothing but a Tolstoyan anarchist; let him go back to his exercises in style, and his middle-class where he belonged. Some larger-minded spirits remonstrated in vain, that, with or without any label, liberal ideas ought to be welcomed, and that those of Clerambault, however ignorant he might be of the party doctrines, were more truly socialistic than those of members of the party who joined in the work of national slaughter. These views were overruled; Clerambault’s article was returned to him, after spending some weeks in the bottom of a drawer, on the pretext that there were so many current items that they took up all the space, and that the paper had too much copy already.
Clerambault took his article to a small review, which was more attracted by his name than by his ideas. The upshot was that the review was called down, and suspended by police order the day after the article appeared, though it had been whitewashed through and through.
Clerambault, however, persisted. The most rebellious people in the world are those who are forced to rebellion after a lifetime of submission. I remember once to have seen a big sheep so worried by a dog that he finally threw himself upon him. The dog was overcome by this unexpected reversal of the laws of nature and ran away, howling with surprise and terror. The Dog-State is too sure of its own fangs to feel afraid of a few mutinous sheep; but the lamb Clerambault no longer calculated the danger; he simply put his head down and butted. Generous and weak natures are prone to pass without transition from one extreme to another; so from an intensely gregarious feeling Clerambault had jumped at one bound to the extreme of individual isolation. Because he knew it so well, he could see nothing around him but the plague of obedience, that social suggestion of which the effects are everywhere manifest. The passive heroism of the armies excited to frenzy, like millions of ants absorbed in the general mass, the servility of Assemblies, despising the head of their Government, but sustaining him by their votes, even at the risk of an explosion brought about by one “bolter,” the sulky but well-drilled submission of even the liberal Parties, sacrificing their very reason for existence to the absurd fetish of abstract unity. This abdication, this passion, represented the true enemy in Clerambault’s eyes. And it was his task, he thought, to break down its great suggestive power by awakening doubt, the spirit that eats away all chains.
The chief seat of the disease was the idea of Nation;
