VOL. VII, NO. 5, JULY 1912

Voltairine de Cleyre

By Alexander Berkman

Voltairine de Cleyre and Alexander Berkman were kindred spirits in many ways—analytical, ascetic, uncompromising in their beliefs, yet personally warm and generous. They corresponded throughout his long imprisonment in the Western Penitentiary, her letters, he said, with their “great charm and rebellious thought” bringing “color to my existence.” His tribute to her was one of several to appear in a memorial issue of Mother Earth in July 1912, following her death the previous month (see Illustration 8, following page 220). Berkman also edited her Selected Works, published two years later by the Mother Earth Publishing Association (see Leonard D. Abbott, “Voltairine de Cleyre’s Posthumous Book,” page 214).

Voltairine DIED so UNEXPECTEDLY, I can hardly realize even now that she is no more. We were such constant and intimate correspondents for the past six years—almost till her last days—that I still cannot free myself from the peculiar feeling that I may get a letter from her at any moment.

She has been in our midst too recently for us to be able to appreciate fully her exceptional character, brilliant mind, and revolutionary activity. We need better perspective of time to estimate correctly the influence and inspiration she exerted on her comrades and the movement.

But this I know: Voltairine was a martyr, as truly as anyone that was ever crucified by a stupid and petty world.

Some die for their ideal; fewer live for it. And I am quite sure that it is much harder and requires more character and strength to live in accordance with one’s purpose and ideas than to die for them. Such are the greatest martyrs, and of them was Voltairine.

Most of us, even revolutionists and Anarchists, often conform, trim a little here, compromise a bit there, and too often we persuade ourselves that the means justify the end. But only those means justify the end which are in their character and tendency in accord with it; and then they are of the end, a part of the end itself. If not, then the means gradually master us, and finally master our end.

This we all know; it is history, and it is personal experience. But how few of us dare admit it even in the solitude of our own heart; how few have the courage and honesty to question their activity and life, and ask themselves, Do my means justify my end? are they in accord? are they one and the same?

Voltairine had the courage and the honesty. Her whole life was motived by unswerving devotion to the cause she had made her own, by never-conforming and never-compromising loyalty to herself. She was human: she had her faults and failings; black days of doubt and agony of despair. But because of them she towered a giant above her time, for—human as she was—she yet proved victor. She was too strong in her humanity to be the plaything of Circumstance, that “inexorable” master of all ye that are weak in spirit. She would not be dominated by the Dominant Idea of the Age, nor yet by the power of her immediate environment. For the really strong, even if they cannot change their environment, do not suffer the environment to change them.

Thus Voltairine de Cleyre went her way, standing almost alone, often embittered by apathy and corruption and the lack of understanding even among friends, yet growing stronger and firmer in her isolation. For she was one of those rare spirits whose staunch devotion to the ideal permeated her every act and every breath of her life and gave strength and encouragement to all her friends and co-workers in the cause of uncompromising Anarchism.

Her life was a protest against all sham, a challenge to all hypocrisy, and an inspiration for social rebellion.

I am proud to have called you friend and comrade, Voltairine! I do not mourn your death—your poor body is freed from pain, and your spirit is victor! You were one of those who, in your own beautiful words, “choose their own allegiance and serve it. Who will say a word to their souls and keep it—keep it not when it is easy, but when it is hard—keep it when the storm roars and there is a white-streaked sky and blue thunder before, and one’s eyes are blinded and one’s ears deafened with the war of opposing things; and keep it under the long leaden sky and the gray dreariness that never lifts.”

Such as you, Voltairine, that “hold unto the last,” Circumstance cannot break. They make and unmake Circumstance, for in them is “the immortal fire of Individual Will, which is the salvation of the Future.”