I love you, and carry your image deep here in this heart which so many think is of stone.'
Since thcn I have not seen him: in 1 85 1 \vhen, by the kindness of Leon Fauclwr, I visited Paris for a few days, he had been sent away to some central prison. A year later, when I. was passing through Paris in secr<'t, Proudhon was ill at Besan<;on.
Prou<lhon had his sPnsitiY<• spot that had be<•n bruis<•d bdon•, and there he was incorrigible; there the limit of his character was reached and, as is always the case, beyond it he was a conservative and a follower of tradition. I am speaking of his views of family life and of the significance of woman in general.
'How lucky is our frieml N.!' Proudhon would say jestingly;
'his \vifl' is not so stupid that slw can't make a good flOt-au-fcu and not clen•r enough to discuss his articles. That's all that is neccssary for domPstic happiness.'
In this jest Proudhon laughingly (•xpresscd the essential basis of his view of womnn. I lis conceptions of fnmily rclntionships wen' coarse and reactionary, but they expressed not the bourr:;cois Plemcnt of the townsman, but rather the stubborn feeling l l In the first three weeks of Jun<' 1 850. ( ;l.S.)
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of the rustic paterfamilias, haughtily regarding woman as a subordinate worker and himself as the autocratic head of the family.
A year and a half after this was written, Proudhon published his great work on Justice in the Church and in Revolution.
This book, for which France, now become farouche, condemned him once more to three years' imprisorunent,12 I read through attentively, and I closed the third volume oppressed by gloomy thoughts.
A grievous . . . grievous time! . . . The a tmosphere of decomposition stupefies the strongest. . . .
This 'brilliant fighter,' too, could not endure it, and was broken: in his last work I see the same might of controversy, the same flourish, but it brings him now to preconceived results; it is no longer free in the very fullest sense. Towards the end of the book I watched over Proudhon as Kent watched over King Lear, expecting him to recover his reason, but he raved more and more-there \Vere the same fits of intolerance, of unbridled speech, as in Lear; and in the same way 'every inch' reveals talent, but . . . a talent that is 'touched' . . . and he runs with a corpse, only not a daughter's but a mother's, whom he takes to be living.13
Latin thought, religious in its very negation, superstitious in doubt, rejecting one set of authorities in the name of another, has rarely gone further, rarely plunged more deeply in medias res of reality, rarely freed itself from all fetters, with such dialectic boldness and certainty as in this book. In it not only the crude dualism of religion but the subtle dualism of philosophy is cast off; the mind is set free not only from heavenly phantoms but from those of the earth, it strides beyond the sentimental apotheosis of humanity and the fatalism of progress, and has none of the invariable litanies of brotherhood, democracy, and progress which are so pitifully wearisome in the midst of wrangling and violence. Proudhon sacrificed the idols and the language of revolution to the understanding of it, and transferred morality to its only real basis, the heart of man, recognising reason alone, and no other gods but it.
And after all that, the great iconoclast was frightened of human nature's being set free ; for, having freed it abstractly, he fell back once more into metaphysics, endowed it with a fictitious will, could not manage it, and led it to be immolated to an 1 2 In 1 858. Proudhon did not sen·e this sen•ence, but emigrated to Belgium, where he lived till 1 862. (A.S.) l3 I have partly modified my opinion of this work of Proudhon ( 1 866) .
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i nhuman god, the cold god of ;usticc, the god of equilibrium, of quiet and repose, the god of the Brahmins, who seek to los, all that is personal and to be dissolved, to come to rest in an infinite world of nothingness.
On the empty altar were set up scales. This would be a new Caudine Forks for humanity.
The 'justice' vvhich is his goal is not even the artistic harmony of Plato's Republic, the elegant equilibrium of passion and sacrifice; the Gallic tribune takes nothing from 'anarchic and frivolous Greece' ; he stoically tramples personal feelings under foot, and does not seek to conciliate them with the sacrifice of the family and the commune. His 'free personality' is a sentry and a workman with no fixed terms of service; he will serve and must stand on guard until he is relieved by death ; he must kill in himself all ptrsonal passion, everything outside duty, because he is not himself: his meaning, his essence, lie outside himself; he is the instrument of justice ; he is pre-destined, like the Virgin Mary, to bear the idea in suffering and to bring it into the world for the salvation of the state.
The family, the first cell of society, the first cradle of justice, is doomed to everlasting, inescapable toil; it must serve as the altar of purification from the personal ; in it the passions must be stamped out. The austere Roman family in the workshop of today is Proudhon's ideal. Christianity has softened family life too much: it has preferred Mary to Martha, the dreamer to the housewife: it has forgiven the sinner and held out a hand to the penitent, because she loved much; but in Proudhon's family, just
"·hat is needed is to love little. And that is not alclass="underline" Christianity puts the individual far higher than his family relationships. It has said to the son: 'Forsake father and mother and follow me'to the son who in the name of Proudhon's incarnation of iusticc must be shackled once more in the stocks of absolute paternal authority, who in his father's lifetime can have no freedom, least of all in the choice of a \vife. He is to be tempered in slavery, to become in his turn a tyrant over the children who are born without love, from duty, for the continuation of the family. In this family m<�rriage will be indissoluble, but in return it will be as cold as icP. Marriage is properly a victory over love ; the less love there is between the cook-wife and the workmanhusband the bPtter. And to think that I should meet these old, shabby bogeys from right wing Hegelianism in the writings of Proudhon !
FPPling is banished, everything is frozen, the colours have vanishPd, nothing is left but the dull, exhausting, inescapable toil of the proletariat of to-day, the toil from which at least the
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aristocratic family of ancient Rome, based on slavery, was free: the poetic beauty of the Church is no more, nor the delirium of faith, nor hopes of paradise; even verse by that time 'will no longer be written,' so Proudhon asserts, but in return work will
'be increased.' For individual freedom, for the right of initiative, for independence, one may well sacrifice the lullaby of religion; but to sacrifice everything for the incarnation of the idea of justice-what nonsense!
Man is doomed to toiclass="underline" he must labour till his hand drops and the son takes from the cold fingers of his father the plane or the hammer and carries on the everlasting work. But vvhat if among the sons there happens to be one with a little more sense, who lays down the chisel and asks: