247

From The Spectator.

period, though without, as breaking with or alienating a single one many theorems, and to which all the Calwe believe, that the mind which held the key to so of his old friends. His dread lest religious culuses of Generating Functions, of belief should be allowed either to benefit Finite Differences, of Variations,-- were his own worldly prospects or to injure almost as familiar as the multiplicationany other man's, was intense with the table, will find that it holds also the key intensity of a different generation from to many of the generating functions, differours; and a quaint and touching passage ences, and variations of creation,- to the in his will shows that he resolutely con- architecture of the universe and the econcealed his own faith from what seems to omy of thought,-in a very much larger us the almost morbid fear of its conducing sense than any of which we have yet any to his advancement. "I commit," he says, clear apprehensions. "my future destiny with hope derived from experience to Almighty God, who has been and will be my guide and support; to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom I believe in my heart that God has raised him from the dead, and whom I have not confessed with PAUL JOSEPH PROUDHON. my mouth in the sense usually attached law, not only of society, but of the uni"CONTRADICTION is the fundamental to these words, because such confession has been in my time the only way up in the best illustration of his maxim. His verse; and Proudhon, who says so, is the world." What a singular and yet chief work is his Système des Contradictions genuine burst of piety is here. And real économiques. His whole teaching consists though very reticent piety was deep in his of reconciliations of "Yes" and "No," character. One who has a right to speak, black and white. His life and lot are a says of him," His trust in God in the curious collection of contradictions. To smallest details, as well as in the most begin with one of the most fundamental important matters of his life, was living of them, it is doubtful whether Proudhon and unvarying. Three days before he at any time believed in a God - he speaks was taken, I said to him, 'I hope you will of God as the Eternal X, and his Deity not go yet.' He answered very quietly was not one to be worshipped; but then and cheerfully, 'Leave it all in God's he believed in several devils. Besides "le hands.' It was not true that he had Mal," there were minor evil potentates, ever had a paralytic stroke. His mind not, indeed, Belial, Moloch, and Beelzebub; retained its full power to the last moment. Proudhon's devils were Propriété, Capital, And so passed away, in the simplicity Competition, and other entities, which he of perfect faith, one of the greatest math-clothed with powers baneful as those posematicians of the day,-probably, in rela-sessed by the fallen angels. tion to the investigation of the reasoning its good sense, he never had; the only Fame, in processes of mathematics and the thorough saying of his which has clung to the popanalysis of their intellectual weight, the ular mind, "Property is theft," has sufvery greatest of them all,- into a world fered the most cruel form of misquotation where it is not very easy for us to conceive how this great apparatus for attaining accurate knowledge, this wonderful array of the balustrades by which we hold in climbing up towards truth, is to be turned to full account. This master of the great intellectual processes, reasoner who knew how to cheat the this weaknesses of human reason wherever they can be cheated, and reap all the benefit of an intellectual machinery stronger in many senses than the intellects that use it, is gone where we often rashly suppose that Method is swallowed up in Knowledge. But if it be true, as Plato held, that God is the great geometer,- and every century seems to make it less possible to deny it, -it may be that the knowledge of method will prove to be of itself knowledge, and

stood. But the very stones flung at him it has been almost uniformly misunderform no inconsiderable heap, and in their eagerness to slay him his enemies have made for him a monument. Proudhon literature, published between The antiThere was, in fact, a time when it was the 1848 and 1860, is at once bulky and dreary. fashion for a clever young Frenchman to prove his conservatism by refuting Proudhon, and his pamphlet or article was regarded as the novice's first communion, the taking of the sacrament of respectability. When thieves are about there is a general looking to locks and bars, and in that period, when Proudhon was at largeProudhon, who was supposed to have systematized burglary in half-a-dozen octavo volumes, each a jemmy to be had at

Paul Joseph Proudhon, and his biographer, if indeed it be not part of the curse that he shall never get a biographer worthy of him, must reconcile these contradictions, and, in the favourite phrase of Proudhon, lift us to that higher synthesis in which they are harmonized.

Garnier Frères there was a general fur-few friends to lean upon; and everything bishing up of the social contract, and a turning to evil in thy hands, thy good seed production of anti-Proudhon property-shall be as the chaff of other men." Such preservers; all which from M. Thiers' was the lot, looked at from end to end, declever volume down to countless thin, tails and minor vicissitudes unnoted, of scrappy pamphlets, give Proudhon a prominent place in every large catalogue. From among his contemporaries one would have been apt to single out Proudhon as the likeliest of them all to be the founder of a new sect, for who had in ampler measure than this son of a Besançon artizan that unquenchable faith in himself, that thirst of strife and persuasive self-sufficiency which are the keystones of a new religious organization? If Jean Jacques had won disciples, what was in store for Paul Joseph, almost as eloquent and with a robust confidence in himself such as the former never had? And yet his doctrine, preached in and out of season, well-nigh perished with himself. No one has been found to expound it in its entirety. There was, indeed, a faithful friend at hand to indite the political testament of the dying Socialist, and to append it to his last work, the Political Capacity of the Working Classes. But he left no band of disciples; there is such a thing as Proudhonism, and there are no Proudhonists. He warred against authority all his life, and such as he are wont in their old age to be solaced by having round their chairs a little knot of admirers repeating the master's sayings with saccharine comment, and to be regaled by the incense of flattery and whiffs of praise. This is the partizan leader's comfort, and yet it was denied to Proudhon, who had fought as few partizans ever did. Nobody long sided with him heartily. He never sat purring in salons while literary or revolutionary ladies stroked his patriarchal fur. Against the rich capitalist, and the noble, and priest, and rulers of all sorts, he made open war, and yet the poor mistrusted or jeered at their strange and unsavoury ally. An economist himself, he had a feud against the whole tribe of economists. A journalist and littérateur, he tossed and gored his confrères. More or less a martyr himself, he declares that, "next to persecutors, there is nothing I hate so much as martyrs;" and so not unnaturally, some will say, no crowd gathered round the old apostle. Of well-nigh all he was deserted. His power and energy considered, there are few lives that seem so tragically empty. A curse and a blight seemed to fall on all he did, and the curse, one would think, was this: "Eloquent, yet not persuasive, thou shalt have foes many and bitter, and

We do not pretend to be able to explain the whole matter; but obviously the root of much of this singularity lay in misapprehension, and consequently mistrust. He seemed to outsiders to tread on all men's toes, and this not by accident, but on some high and inscrutable principle. Those with whom he commonly foughtall those Socialists who had regarded the work of 1789 as quite incomplete, and the Revolution of 1848 as the opportunity for crowning the edifice - dreaded this strange auxiliary. They did not know what to make of this brawny athlete, who was given to falling on his friends as soon as he had routed the enemy, for, as a French critic observes, what Proudhon chiefly detested was his neighbour. They could understand Fourierism, and how the phalanstère was to be laid out; they saw daylight in Saint Simon, and, what is more, in the Circulus, Triad, and other poor stuff with which his disciples overlaid his doctrine; L'Organisation du Travail was simple as a song-book. It was only Proudhon, with his uncouth dialectical forms and appalling paradoxes, in doctrine and conduct, that there was no understanding; and so, while acknowledging that among the crowd of Socialists of the time, Fourier, Pierre Leroux, Babeuf, Louis Blanc, this man towered above all, they were forced, some of the best of them, to own that he was impracticable, and the frivolous among them to conclude that Proudhonism was another name for running a muck. And they had an excuse. There was the strange doctrine itself, Hegelianism mistranslated into French: "the hour of the universal equation,” Proudhon said, was about to sound, and the multitude marvelled or smiled thereat. It also requires much philosophy to detect caresses beneath assiduous chastisement, and Proudhon was always-of course, in the cause of philanthropy birching some of his friends. He might be logical in this, still his friends did not like it. Of the people, he was not with them, for did he not sometimes sneer at

all their favourite notions? Did he not for rapids, along which the navigator or criticize universal suffrage, co-operation, reader is painfully jolted. Proudhon is and all that they liked? And why his the most ardent and enthusiastic of socialabuse and scorn of the other Socialist ists. Touching this trait of his character, leaders? Did he not rail at Fourier as there is a problem in spiritual mechanics any grocer might? and then, when the which only a poet could solve; perhaps enraptured grocer offered him the hand of Browning alone is equal to the task. We fellowship, did he not scorn it, and insult, greatly want a compressed biography of and spit upon every article in the grocer's some of the irreligious or unreligious recreed? There was no trusting such a generators of our time, so as to make it man. Out of the camp of Democracy with clear how and why they have been so frehim, in spite of all his talk about the prin- quently apostolically zealous. We know ciples of 1789! how the religious enthusiast feeds and But we get but a glimpse of the man fans his ardour. It may be he has by until we know his temperament. For our night visions to comfort him. Perhaps by part, we figure Proudhon as a sort of day angels minister to his wants with Hecla. From amid wastes of statistics meat and drink which other men know not and metaphysics, bleak and cold as the of. At any rate, before him are the open snows that lie on Hecla, he keeps belch-doors of heaven and the glories thereof, ing forth sulphureous flames and murky behind him the flaming doors of hell and smoke. There is scarcely a pause in the the lamentations that come therefrom. torrent of fiery indignation. He is always Why should he, thus caressed and spurred, in a towering passion; he has been so be a laggard? Strange, or almost so, if he since a youth. Formerly they would have were. But those unsaintly martyrs and said, "This man has some sort of demon, devout heretics, those believers whom all in fact, demons enough for many herds Churches have anathematized, who have of swine." He snorts forth his anarchical no heaven to fly to and no hell to fly from, syllogisms, and rejoicing in his controver- to whom the present is all, and that pressial strength, he tramples under foot and makes riotous havoc of his foes. Destruam et ædificabo is the proud motto he prefixes to his Système, and with what glee he sacks, or tries to sack, the domains of popular religion, politics, economics, and æsthetics! In that work there are passages touching the most sacred articles of the creed of the world which sound to us as a war-whoop or feast-song sung by cannibals dancing round their victim. Not even in Carlyle do we find such abundance of consuming, pitiless wrath. Why, one man against millions though he be, it is Proudhon that is the persecutor and tyrant, with his cruel words and hatred. And all this, which is a charm of Proudhon when one first gets his acquaintance, by and by makes him pall. Force, no doubt, there generally is in the genuine expression of a strong will and clear mind; but though Jeremiahs such as he was are not to be gathered under every hedge, Proudhon in hand we are sometimes reminded of Joubert's saying that "force is not energy," and occasionally we are disposed to think that Proudhon was varicose rather than muscular. No; the writer, as an artist, at all events, must not always be at the top of his speed, and this golden rule Proudhon somehow never mastered. Whilst the flow of your true artist is like the stately, measured march of an ample river, his is formed of a succession of cataracts

ent, with the sun quite taken out of the firmament, dull and miry; who see no inspiriting visions, look for the advent of no Messiah or millennium, and whose motives, one would say, must be thin and feeble, even as their horizon is contracted and their ambition earthy-how and by what curious grafting find we such imperial flowers blooming on so mean a stem? We see on the one hand miserable motives, and on the other splendid fruition of enterprise, and Joshuas, whom Israel never knew go forth with as much courage and confidence as did those who of old went up from Gilgal by night against the Amorites, and to whose leader the Lord said,

-

"Fear them not; I have delivered them into thy hand." Once or twice in an age no doubt chance will have it that bees hive in a carcase, and honey come therefrom; but how happens it that, to take the whole band of French Socialists of this century, they have been marked by indomitable and unselfish energy? We want a poet, and a poet who is also a thinker, to bridge the gulf that seems to sever this supernatural zeal from this hatred of supernaturalism, this immersion in the present from this wise and divine carelessness of the gains of to-day which we were taught was born only of "the sublime attractions of the grave; " so that we, wafted by the poet to their places, shall forswear with St. Simon riches and

social rank and embrace poverty, and with | yesterday, down goes to-day the fact, for Owen shall devote an often tried ability the admiration or meditation of all the to amass a fortune to carrying out, amid ages to come; Cobbett is always drawing contumely and sneers, a project of philan- himself up to his full length, and bluntly thropy. Meantime, until that poet is saying that he, William Cobbett, of Botley forthcoming, we shall be content to put Farm, is as good a man as the best of together some considerations partially ex- them. These and a thousand other men plaining why Proudhon never slackened of letters were egotists. But we search his hand. Think of him as come of a stur- biographies to little purpose for another dy workman stock. The Proudhons were instance of that proud imperturbable feelnever known to budge. They were con- ing which Proudhon displays that it is he stitutionally sceptical, but sceptical with- against the world, and that the world has out levity or immorality. From them he got no case, a sectarian feeling that dislearned to be a hermit in society. They senting humanity itself is a mere clique or taught him to dispense with sympathy faction, to be put down as one might some and to be heedless of the talk of the hooting urchin in the back benches. street-corner, or the café, or the journal. Whole classes, batches of respectables, are War with the authorities at Besançon re- coolly sentenced to transportation or exvealed, if it did not educate, his native ile by this friendless autocrat. We shall fierceness. In time he came to look upon cite an instance or two, though of course opposition as his due. If it was not forth- only the continuous perusal of his books coming, he greedily made it. And read- would convey an adequate idea of this ing some of his vituperative pamphlets, egotism. On the 11th of July, 1818, he and regarding the circumstances of their presented to the Committee of Finance of publication, we are tempted to think that the National Assembly a plan for taxing they sprang from some such undercurrent incomes. The nature of it is immaterial; of feeling as this: "They are becoming enough that the payment of debts was to respectful to me; this must be stopped"; be postponed for three years. The reand so 66 bang, bang!” in among his old porter of the Committee, M. Thiers, anfoes go the contents of his gun. Need we nounced that "The proposition of Citizen say that he accomplished his purpose? Proudhon is immoral, unjust, factious, full And think also of the system and princi- of malice, perfidy, and ignorance, antiples which he professed; they help to ex- financial, anti-social, savage, extravagant, plain his unflagging ardour. It can scarce- emanating from misanthropy, chagrin, and ly be doubted by one who examines his loneliness, an encouragement to informers numerous works, and reflects on his and civil war, an assault upon property, scheme of social and political amendment, and tending to the abolition of the family that with all its numerous gaps and er- and atheism." And when Proudhon prorors, it exhibits far more mastery of prac- ceeded to unfold and defend his plan, the tical difficulties than most of the many Assembly, not easily shocked by vagaries rival schemes. His Guide to the Bourse of theory, was so averse to the proshows his knowledge of details, and his posed jubilee, that it interrupted him success in business is a proof of his capaci- with laughter and jeering, and cries of ty. Take the great socialistic works from To the Moniteur with his speech, to Plato's Republic and compare them with Charenton with the author," "IntolerProudhon's; few, if any, are marked by able!" "It is all very clear, your purse such sagacity, breadth of view, regard to or your life." Modesty in these circumdetails, and so much enlightened apprecia- stances would have sat down discomfited; tion of institutions unfavourable to his no- your mongrel egotist would have broken tions. And if all this is not acknowl-out in helpless scolding. But Proudhon's edged, it is probably because most have egotism was thorough-bred; and, seeing been scared away by his rough language, that the reporter had got hold of all the and have hastily and erroneously set him heaviest missiles within reach, he took down as a mere bawling incendiary. If down other weapons, he became insultwe are to sound this difficulty, we must ingly calm, and with a suavity that was not forget the egotism, the sublime ego- luxurious insolence in the circumstances, tism, of Proudhon. There is not perhaps he promised his six hundred and ninetyin literary history another instance of one raging opponents that he should be such obtrusive, ponderous self-sufficiency. indulgent to them. Then, putting his Rousseau, who thinks his meanest and whip, so to speak, in his pocket, he began, dirtiest emotion worth bringing to market interruptions unnoted, to go through his is an egotist; if Montaigne pared his nails demonstrations, and so show how signally

66

wrong the whole assembly was; and amid ing at present into Proudhon's system, an uproar he closed with a fine a sublime exception must be made with respect to - touch of egotism. Usury will never his famous phrase. "Property is theft" return; "I (Paul Joseph Proudhon) pro- seems to have as its supplement the dochibit it." Or shall we cite the sentences trine that we are all thieves, or that we with which he drives away those who must hold all things in common. In rewould steal from him his famous defini-ality the saying has of necessity nothing tion of property? This definition of to do with either of these conclusions. property is mine, and all my ambition is That formula, according to himself too to prove that I have comprehended its well known and too little understood, was meaning and scope, Property is theft! a machine de guerre he owned. Property There are not uttered in a thousand years is indeed theft; again and again he emtwo sayings like that; I have no other phatically repeats it; the last of the false possession on earth save this definition of gods, the hoary and wicked Jupiter, it is property; but I hold it more precious pernicious and doomed. But while propthan the millions of the Rothschilds, and I erty is theft, proprietors are not at heart make bold to say that it will be the most thieves. Communism, on the other hand, considerable event of the government of would make the earth barren. Even of Louis Philippe." Or shall we cite an in- socialism he says that it is "void of ideas, stance of the manner in which he is wont powerless, immoral, and only fit to make to deal with an opponent? Take his re- dupes or rogues." The proprietor is in joinder to M. Michelet, a writer with Proudhon's system to have the right of whom he was disposed to sympathize; it using, but not of abusing. He is to be paid is this: "In five lines M. Michelet has only for labour, whereas he now is paid for exhibited a talent for being five times ab- gifts of nature or the labours of others. surd." We might quote other passages Savigny's discrimination of property and showing how he always took the wall; possession was a novelty at the time; and how he bullied his brother socialists when Proudhon, applying the distinction not he talked of reform; and how he claimed quite accurately, says that it is his wish to have displaced the axis of the universe, that there should be possession, but not and to have made the earth turn from east property. With all its limitations, espeto west. But perhaps the above quota- cially those prefixed to it in late years, this tions substantiate our assertions. doctrine, so harshly and forbiddingly announced, would recommend itself to some quiet citizens.

And this egotism was revealed in another way. Your self-sufficient man dispenses with services; and Proudhon ground his own philology, his own metaphysics, his own history, and sometimes, too, in perfect honesty, his own facts. He ran up a theory of the origin of languages, turned out a new exegesis of the Eneid, and mixed his own Hebrew, as easily as another might whittle a stick. What though it might be all at feud with scholarship! Was it not I, Paul Joseph Proudhon, that made it all? Yet partly pardon this egotism and truculence. He was intellectually lonely. Others might have intellectual domestics; he, at variance with his fellows, might not. It was necessary that he should be his own factotum. Others, too, might deal gently with an antagonist; they had auxiliaries and a reserve; he had none. And his loneliness and isolation shut up, or drew the blinds on, one window of knowledge after another. It is the fate, as it is the punishment, of the egotistical man that the avenues of knowledge are one by one closed, and that his "ego" is in time everything. This was Proudhon's lot.

Though we have carefully avoided go

The truth is, he was weakly fond of paradoxes. He generally begins his discourse by clapping a pistol to the brains of his audience; as he proceeds, he fires at intervals a random volley of slugs into their midst. All this excites and keeps up attention. Your street crier gives a roll of the drum before he says his say: Proudhon shrieks menteurs, lâches, voleurs, and when a crowd gathers round him to learn what the uproar is about, he stops shrieking and takes to arguing. This was a weakness on which Bastiat had rallied him, and which he never got over. Though in his later works we think we can detect a more sparing indulgence in the vocabulary of abuse, he never altogether got rid of his little trick of discharging a blunderbuss into the midst of his friends. And yet though the phrase, "Property is theft," is uniformly misunderstood, in singling it out and treasuring it up the popular instinct has judged rightly. theft much learning and thought had made him mad. He found it everywhere. We can compare his kleptophobia only to Carlyle's mania with respect to lies and

On