Page:An Appeal to the Young by Kropotkin.djvu/9

 side after having suffered disappointment after disappointment, you will lay your favourite authors on the shelf, and you will end by saying that Tell was no doubt a very honest fellow, but after all a trifle cracked; that poetry is a first-rate thing for the fireside, especially when a man has been teaching the rule-of-three all day long, but still poets are always in the clouds and their views have nothing to do with the life of to-day, nor with the next visit of the Inspector of Schools..,

Or, on the other hand, the dreams of your youth will become the firm convictions of your mature age. You will wish to have wide, human education for all, in school and out of school; and, seeing that this is impossible in existing conditions, you will attack the very foundations of bourgeois society. Then discharged as you will be by the Education Department, you will leave your school and come among us and be of us; you will tell men of riper years but of smaller attainments than yourself how enticing knowledge is, what mankind ought to be, nay, what we could be. You will come and work with Socialists for the complete transformation of the existing system, will strive tide by side with us to attain true equality, true fraternity, never-ending liberty for the world.

Lastly, you, young artist, sculptor, painter, poet, musician, do you not observe that the sacred fire which inspired your predecessor! is wanting in the men of to-day? that art is commonplace and mediocrity reigns supreme?

Could it be otherwise? The delight at having re-discovered the ancient world, of having bathed afresh in the springs of nature which created the masterpieces of the Renaissance no longer exists for the art of our time, the revolutionary ideal has left it cold until now, and, failing an ideal, our art fancies that it has found one in realism when it painfully photographs in colours the dewdrop on the leaf of a plant, imitates the muscles in the leg of a cow, or describes minutely in prose and in verse the suffocating filth of a sewer, the boudoir of a whore of high degree.

"But if this is so, what is to be done?" you say. If, I reply, the sacred fire that you say you possess is nothing better than a smouldering wick, then you will go on doing as you have done, and your art will speedily degenerate into the trade of decorator of tradesman's shops, of a purveyor of libretti to third-rate operettas and tales for Christmas Annuals—most of you are already running down that grade with a fine head of steam on. …

But, if your heart really beats in unison with that of humanity, if like a true poet you have an ear for Lite, then, gazing out upon this sea of sorrow whose tide sweeps up around you, face to face with these people dying of hunger, in the presence of these corpses piled up in these mines, and these mutilated bodies lying in heaps on the barricades, looking at these long lines of exiles who are going to bury themselves in the snows of Siberia and in the marshes of tropical islands, in full view of this desperate battle which is being fought, amid the cries of pain from the conquered and the orgies of the victors, of heroism in conflict with cowardice, of noble determination face to face with contemptible cunning—you cannot remain neutral; you will come and take the side of the oppressed because you know that the beautiful, the sublime, the