DESTRUCTIVE VANITY.
ATAILLANT'S diary, posted to M. Paul ROclus on his way to the Assembly, where he threw his very ineffectual bomb, is a very remarkable illustration of the murderous force with which vanity sometimes charges a hungry mind in which there is nothing satisfying for vanity to feed on. Nothing could illustrate it better than the close of that pas- sage in the diary in which he remarks, " To-morrow is probably my last day of liberty. The wind-up is at hand. I have vainly dissected my sentiments. I feel no hatred for those about to fall to-morrow. What I am going to do I am going to do coolly. It is nearly impossible for me to escape to-morrow. Consequently, the magisterial inquiry, and my condemnation, will not take much time ; and I should be much surprised if I saw the buds open next spring. I face death with calmness. Is it not the refuge of the disillusioned P But at least I shall -die with the satisfaction of having done what I could, to hasten the opening of the new era; and I ask only one thing, that on the dispersion of my body all my atoms may spread among mankind, and transmit the Anarchist virus, so that it may quicken the coming of the new society." That reference to the opening of "the buds in spring," when he shall be no longer in existence, but when the virus with which his shattered body, —"my atoms," as he proudly calls them,—shall have vaccinated men's minds, may perhaps be grafting new buds of purpose on the minds of other Anarchists whom his sublime self- renunciation shall have quickened into further activity, is extremely characteristic of the power of vanity when it has no great gift of its own to feed on, to fill the air it breathes with noise and ruin. For all vanity is by no means so destructive and unamiable. It is only hungry vanity, vanity which has nothing else to dwell upon except its hope of destructive ex- plosiveness, which detonates in this fiery and overwhelming fashion. Vanity is often not only harmless, but even amiable. The vanity of genius, for instance, is not unfrequently as lovable as it is innocent. Most artistic temperaments have vanity in isolation. Almost all poets have a kind of simple delight in their own poetry which is anything but dangerous to the rest of mankind, and may have, as Goldsmith's, for instance, and Cowper's certainly had, a childlike charm. It is only the vanity that has nothing visionary to reflect upon except the destructive violence of its own enormous discon- tent, that is dangerous. If others have felt for a man a good deal of the genuine admiration which he feels for himself, that is apt to pacify him, even to make him serene and benignant, and may sometimes fill him with a sunny glow of benevolent sympathy. It is only that self-esteem which finds no echo in the minds of others that turns a man sour, and will occasionally go as far as inducing him to justify, by rousing the fears of mankind, that swelling sense of self- importance which he cannot gratify by any appeal to men's hopes, or any exaltation of their pleasures. Vaillant's hope that "my atoms," as by anticipation he called his shat- tered body, might sow France with the fabled dragon's teeth that would yield a crop of armed warriors, was a very curious proof that vanity could feed upon a hope of posthumous fame of which it would have but a dubious chance of seeing even the beginning. If he could but transform himself into these dragon's teeth, and sow them far and wide in the moment of death, he would have been content with himself. And no doubt he succeeded in seeing the dawn of what he supposed to be his own fame. Before he died, he had the supreme delight of finding himself notorious, and turned into a kind of saint among the Anarchists, who were eager to hold up his example to the rest of mankind. But we cannot help parenthetically wondering whether Valliant really accepted the curious superstition that the collapse of the society he was so eager to destroy, would necessarily introduce the -" new era " of which Anarchists rave P Surely it is a strangely sanguine trait in men who denounce the old order as altogether corrupt, to assume that from a shattered society must necessarily issue a new era which would not reproduce the old. corruption. But perhaps that may be but the poetry of Anarchists, who are so fond of musing about the buds in spring, that they cannot help thinking that some sort of spring must follow every winter of their discontent. We should have thought that the Anarchist creed would be more logical if it conceived every new era as reproducing the cor- ruptness of its predecessor, and so calling into existence new Anarchists to destroy it in a long succession of evil primogeni- ture. But apparently it is the orthodox creed of Anarchists to hold that if you only pertinaciously destroy what is evil, sometime or other good seed must replace the old seedcorn of corrupt purpose. The Anarchists have not yet told us why. We suppose they must think their own wholesale destructive- ness so heroic that it will necessarily purify the soil and neutralise all its ranker poisons.
The truth is, we surmise, that the vanity which is so desolating in its actual achievements, cannot endure to imagine itself equally desolating in its ultimate results, and so builds itself it " knows not what, of other life, it knows not where." No air-built castles were ever, we sup- pose, more wantonly fabulous than those which rest on the assumption that by shattering a thoroughly evil society to its very foundations, you must necessarily make, room for the growth of a good society in its place. According to the Anarchists, a thoroughly evil society was shattered to its foundations in Prance a hundred years ago, but yet the society which has sprung up in its place has been as evil as that which it succeeded. Why is not the same vicious circle to be repeated again P Yet vanity would not be vanity if it did not engender vain hopes. Some three thousand years ago, when the preacher uttered his prophecy, " Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," he foresaw, no doubt, that though emptiness could produce nothing but emptiness, yet it could produce that emptiest of all emptinesses, which imagines itself rich and increased with goods, and in need of nothing, whereas it is in reality wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked. Surely there was never any illusion more marvellous than that which the Anarchists appear to indulge, that they are helping to regenerate society by doing their best to destroy all that now exists, on the infinitesimal chance that all the germs of social disorder will perish in the explosion, and that all the germs of true order will remain. One might as well propose to blow up a great exhibition of the world's art in the hope that all the bad art and none of the good would perish in the ruins.
It is not easy to account for the new destructiveness, in the present age, of a passion generally so harmless and sometimes so lovable as that of vanity. Usually, men who are profoundly pleased with themselves are blind to the fact that the majority of their fellow creatures are not pleased with them, but the new vanity is not pleased with itself, but only self-important and eager to discover in itself a power over the world of which it can find no trace. The craving appears to be to manufac- ture out of pure emptiness a fateful influence over the world's history at the least possible cost of effort. And obviously pure destructiveness is the only solution of that problem. The really harmless vanity does not seek to carry the fate of the world in its hand, but only to supply a certain mild and agreeable centre of interest to those around it. The new vanity springs out of a hunger to wield power with- out any corresponding mental resources, and that is just what the later resources of science have supplied us with. The vainest idiot deeply discontented with his own insig- nificance, if he has the smallest smattering of chemical science, can become a source of enormous danger and mis- chief to the world in which he lives, and that unfortunately has proved the avenue to a new and very powerful tempta- tion. When such a craving is combined with very little love of life and a superabundance of self-esteem, the way is at once• open for the career of an Anarchist about whom at least one generation of the Western peoples will be compelled to talk. It is a curious feature of Vaillant's diary that he was evidently delighted with himself for not hating the people whom he hoped to destroy. But why should he have hated them P They were absolutely essential to his purpose. Without victims he could never have made himself the hero of a far-reaching sensation, and a man does not generally hate those who are necessary to his schemes. We can only hope that weariness and indif- ference to life will not spread amongst us. It is the love of life which is the best antidote for this kind of morbid vanity, and it is only amongst a people who are losing all joy in life that such crimes as these of the Anarchists and Nihilists are likely to spread. Yet why in a great and growing Empire like Russia should this indifference to life be even more widely diffused than it is amongst the exhausted volcanic passions of Central and Southern Europe P
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