_A la hauteur des bonds la profondeur des chutes_, "but at least we have striven, and we abate not a jot of our generous ambitions. Thus decrees the tradition of Paris . . . that Paris which now as ever holds in her hands the key to supreme victory." CHAPTER XI CLEMENCEAU AS A WRITER M. Clemenceau had a ready pen as well as a very bitter one, and he did not confine himself to articles on politics and sociology. Besides _La Mêlée Sociale_, of which I have given some account in the previous chapter, he published the following books in order within eight years: _Le Grand Pan_, a volume of descriptive essays; _Les Plus Forts_, a novel; _Au Fil des Jours_, and _Les Embuscades de la Vie_, which were, in the main, collections of sketches and tales. At the same time he did a great deal of ordinary journalism, including his articles on the Dreyfus case, which make in themselves four good-sized volumes. _Le Grand Pan_ followed close upon _La Mêlée Sociale_, and came as a delightful surprise to M. Clemenceau's readers, a piece of pure literature. In this book he no longer writes as a citizen of Paris, a man of the boulevards and pavements, but as one country-born and bred, knowing the hills and the sea. Although he describes his own Vendéen scenery with loving familiarity, making the "_Marais_," the "_Bocage_" and the "_Plaine_" live before us, he does not cling to them with the monotonous affection of some French writers, who are, as it were, dyed in their own local colour. Without elaboration, without the detailed building-up of a scene which is the careful habit of some others, he conveys in two or three lines the _feeling_ of a countryside and that elusive but immutable thing, the character of a landscape. This belongs really to the poet's art, and gives, I cannot tell why, a deeper impression, a far more lasting pleasure than all the abundance and detail of prose. Clemenceau's neighbour, and almost fellow-countryman, Renan, had this gift. All the grey waters of the rocky Armorican shore seem to sweep through the first lines of his essay on the Celtic Spirit; and the influence of Renan is marked in _Le Grand Pan_. The first article, which gives the book its title, sets the reader's fancy sailing among the Greek Isles, steered by poetry and tradition, in the light of the golden and the silver age. Clemenceau, like Heine, mourns for the overthrow of the Greek gods in the welter of quarrelling priesthoods and fierce Asian ugliness that flooded the Mediterranean world. "Pan, Pan is dead!" But in the Renaissance--"the tumultuous pageant of Art hurrying to meet the classic gods reborn"--he welcomes the magnificent restoration of the ancient and eternal Powers. And he claims for the nineteenth century the honour of beholding another re-birth of the gods of Nature in the development of science, and the labour that has brought some of the secrets of earth within our ken.