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_.