The day at length arrived on which, all the intellectual inheritance of the past, all the real capital of humanity having been rescued from the general shipwreck, the castaways were able to go down in their turn, having henceforth only to think of their own preservation. That day which forms, as everyone knows, the starting point of our new era, called the era of salvation, was a solemn holiday. The sun, however, as if to arouse regret, indulged in a few last bursts of sunshine. On casting a final glance on this brightness, which they were never to behold again, the survivors of mankind could not, we are told, restrain their tears. A young poet on the brink of the pit that yawned to swallow them up, repeated in the musical language of Euripides, the farewell to the light of the dying Iphigenia. But that was a short-lived moment of very natural emotion which speedily changed into an outburst of unspeakable delight.
How great in fact was their amazement and their ecstasy! They expected a tomb; they opened their eyes in the most brilliant and interminable galleries of art they could possibly see, insalonsmore beautiful than those of Versailles, in enchanted palaces, in which all extremes of climate, rain, and wind, cold and torrid heat were unknown; where innumerable lamps, veritable suns in brilliancy and moons in softness, shed unceasingly through the blue depths their daylight that knew no night. Assuredly the sight was far from what it has since become; we need an effort of imagination in order to represent the psychological condition of our poor ancestors, hitherto accustomed to the perpetual and insufferable discomforts and inconveniences of life on the surface of the globe, in order to realise their enthusiasm, at a moment, when only counting on escaping from the most appalling of deaths by means of the gloomiest of dungeons, they felt themselves delivered of all their troubles, and of all their apprehensions at the same time! Have you noticed in the retrospective museum that quaint bit of apparatus of our fathers, which is called an umbrella? Look at it and reflect on the heart-breaking element, in a situation, which condemned man to make use of this ridiculous piece of furniture. Imagine yourself obliged to protect yourselves against those gigantic downpours which would unexpectedly arrive on the scene and drench you for three or four days running. Think likewise of sailors caught in a whirling cyclone, of the victims of sunstroke, of the 20,000 Indians annually devoured by tigers or killed by the bite of venomous serpents; think of those struck by lightning. I do not speak of the legions of parasites and insects, of the acarus, the phylloxera, and the microscopic beings which drained the blood, the sweat, and the life of man, inoculating him with typhus, plague, and cholera. In truth, if our change of condition has demanded some sacrifices, it is not an illusion to declare that the balance of advantage is immensely greater. What in comparison with this unparalleled revolution is the most renowned of the petty revolutions of the past which to-day are treated so lightly, and rightly so, by our historians. One wonders how the first inhabitants of these underground dwellings could, even for a moment, regret the sun, a mode of lighting that bristled with so many inconveniences. The sun was a capricious luminary which went out and was relit at variable hours, shone when it felt disposed, sometimes was eclipsed, or hid itself behind the clouds when one had most need of it, or pitilessly blinded one at the very moment one yearned for shade! Every night,—do we really realise the full force of the inconvenience?—every night the sun commanded social life to desist and social life desisted. Humanity was actually to that extent the slave of nature! To think it never succeeded in, never even dreamed of, freeing itself from this slavery which weighed so heavily and unconsciously on its destinies, on the course of its progress thus straitened and confined! Ah! Let us once more bless our fortunate disaster!
What excuses or explains the weakness of the first immigrants of the inner world is the fact that their life was necessarily rough and full of hardships, in spite of a notable improvement after their descent into the caverns. They had perpetually to enlarge them, to adjust them to the requirements of the two civilisations, ancient and modern. That was not the work of a single day. I am well aware how happily fortune favoured them; how they again and again had the good luck when driving their tunnels to discover natural grottoes of the utmost beauty, in which it was enough to illuminate with the usual methods of lighting (which was absolutely cost-free, as Miltiades had foreseen) in order to render them almost habitable: delightful squares, as it were, enshrined and sparsely disseminated throughout the labyrinth of our brilliantly lighted streets; mines of sparkling diamonds, lakes of quicksilver, mounds of golden ingots. I am well aware that they had at their disposition a sum of natural forces very superior to all that the preceding ages had been acquainted with. That is very easy to understand. In fact, if they lacked waterfalls, they replaced them very advantageously by the finest falls in temperature that physicists have ever dreamed of. The central heat of the globe could not, it is true, by itself alone be a mechanical force, any more than formerly a large mass of water falling by hypothesis to the greatest possible depth. It is in its passage from a higher to a lower level that the mass of water becomes (or rather became) available energy: it is in its descent from a higher to a lower degree of the thermometer that heat likewise becomes so. The greater distance between any two degrees the greater amount of surplus energy. Now, the mining physicists had hardly descended into the bowels of the earth ere they at once perceived that thus placed between the furnaces of the central fire, as it were, a forge of the Cyclops, hot enough to liquefy granite, and the outer cold, which was sufficient to solidify oxygen and nitrogen, they had at their disposal the most enormous extremes in temperature, and consequently thermic cataracts by the side of which all the cataracts of Abyssinia and Niagara were only toys. What caldrons did they own in the ancient volcanoes! What condensers in the glaciers! At first sight they must have seen that if a few distributing agencies of this prodigious energy were provided, they had power enough there to perform the whole work of mankind—excavation, air supply, water supply, sanitation, locomotion, descent and transport of provisions, etc.
I am well aware of that. I am further aware that ever favoured by fortune, the inseparable friend of daring, the new Troglodytes have never suffered from famine, nor from shortness of supplies. When one of their snow-covered deposits of carcasses threatened to give out, they used to make several trial borings, drive several shafts in an upward direction. They never failed presently to meet with rich finds of food reserves, extensive enough to close the mouths of the alarmists, whereby there resulted on each occasion, according to the law of Malthus, a sudden increase in the population, coupled with the excavation of new underground cities, more flourishing than their older sisters. But, in spite of all this, we remain overwhelmed with wonder when we consider the incalculable degree of courage and intelligence lavished on such a work, and solely called into being by an idea which, starting one day from one individual brain, has leavened the whole globe. What giant falls of earth, what murderous explosions, what a death-roll there must have been at the outset of the enterprise! We shall never know what bloodthirsty duels, what rapes, what doleful tragedies, took place in this lawless society, which had not yet been reorganised. The history of the early conquerors and colonists of America, if it could be told in detail, would pale entirely beside it. Let us draw a veil over the proceedings. But this pitch of horrors was perhaps necessary to teach us that in the forced intimacy of a cave there is no mean between warfare and love, between mutual slaughter or mutual embraces. We began by fighting; to-day we fall on each other's necks. And in fact, what human ear, nose, or stomach could have longer withstood the deafening roar and smoke of melanite explosions beneath our crypts; the sight and stench of mangled bodies piled up within our narrow confines? Hideous and odious, revolting beyond all expression, the underground war finished by becoming impossible.
It is, however, painful to think that it lasted right up to the death of our glorious preserver. Everyone is acquainted with the heroic adventure in which Miltiades and his companion lost their lives. It has been so often painted, sculptured, sung, and immortalised by the great masters, that it is not allowable to pass it over in silence. The famous struggle between the centralist and federalist cities, that is to say, at bottom, between the industrial and artist cities, having ended in the triumph of the latter, a still more bloodthirsty conflict sprang up between the free thinking and the cellular cities. The former fought to assert the freedom of love with its uncertain fecundity; the second, for its prudent regulation. Miltiades, misled by his passion, committed the fault of siding with the former, a pardonable error which posterity has forgiven him. Besieged in his last grotto—a perfect marvel in strongholds—and at the end of his provisions, the besiegers having intercepted the arrival of all his convoys, he essayed a final effort: he prepared a formidable explosion intended to blow up the vault of his cavern, and forcibly to open a way upwards by which he might have the chance of reaching a deposit of provisions. His hope was deceived. The vault blew up, it is true, and disclosed a cavern above it, the most colossal one had hitherto seen, that dimly resembled a Hindoo temple. But the hero himself perished miserably, buried with Lydia beneath enormous rocks on the very spot on which now stands their double statue in marble, the masterpiece of our new Phidias, which is now the crowded meeting-place of our national pilgrimages.
From these fruitful though troublous times, and from this beneficial disorder, an advantage has accrued to us which we shall never sufficiently appreciate. Our race, already so beautiful, has been further strengthened and purified by these numerous trials. Short-sightedness itself has disappeared under the prolonged influence of a light that is pleasing to the eye, and of the habit of reading books which are written in very large characters. For, from lack of paper, we are obliged to write on slates, on pillars, obelisks, on the broad panels of marble, and this necessity, in addition to compelling us to adopt a sober style and contributing to the formation of taste, prevents the daily newspapers from reappearing, to the great benefit of the optic nerves and the lobes of the brain. It was, by the way, an immense misfortune for "pre-salvationist" man to possess textile plants which allowed him to stereotype without the slightest trouble on rags of paper without the slightest value, all his ideas, idle or serious, piled indiscriminately one on the other. Now, before graving our thoughts on a panel of rock, we take time to reflect on our subject. Yet another bane among our primitive forefathers was tobacco. At present we no longer smoke, we can no longer smoke. The public health is accordingly magnificent.
It does not fall within the scope of my rapid sketch to relate date by date the laborious vicissitudes of humanity since its settlement within the planet from the year 1 of the era of Salvation to the year 596, in which I write these lines in chalk on slabs of schist. I should only like to bring out for my contemporaries, who might very well fail to notice them (for we barely observe what we have always before our eyes), the distinctive and original features of this modern civilisation of which we are so justly proud. Now that after many abortive trials and agonizing convulsions it has succeeded in taking its final shape, we can clearly establish its essential characteristics. It consists in the complete elimination of living nature, whether animal or vegetable, man only excepted. That has produced, so to say, a purification of society. Secluded thus from every influence of the natural milieu into which it was hitherto plunged and confined, the social milieu was for the first time able to reveal and display its true virtues, and the real social bond appeared in all its vigour and purity. It might be said that destiny had desired to make in our case an extended sociological experiment for its own edification by placing us in such extraordinarily unique conditions.[1]The problem, in a way, was to learn, what would social man become if committed to his own keeping, yet left to himself—furnished with all the intellectual acquisitions accumulated through a remote past by human geniuses, but deprived of the assistance of all other living beings, nay, even of those beings half endowed with life, that we call rivers and seas and stars, and thrown back on the conquered, yet passive forces of chemical, inorganic and lifeless Nature, which is separated from man by too deep a chasm to exercise on him any action from the social point of view. The problem was to learn what this humanity would do when restricted to man, and obliged to extract from its own resources, if not its food supplies, yet at least all its pleasures, all its occupations, all its creative inspirations. The answer has been given, and we have realised at the same time what an unsuspected drag the terrestrial fauna and flora had hitherto been on the progress of humanity.
[1]In appearance only: we must not forget that in accordance with all probability many extinct stars must have served as the scene of this normal and necessary phase of social life.
[1]In appearance only: we must not forget that in accordance with all probability many extinct stars must have served as the scene of this normal and necessary phase of social life.
At first human pride and the faith of man in himself hitherto held in check by the constant presence, by the profound sense of the superiority of the forces round it, rebounded with a force of elasticity really appalling. We are a race of Titans. But, at the same time, whatever enervating element there might have been in the air of our grottoes has been thereby victoriously combated. Otherwise our air is the purest that man has ever breathed; all the bad germs with which the atmosphere was loaded were killed by the cold. Far from being attacked by anæmia as some predicted, we live in a state of habitual excitement maintained by the multiplicity of our relations and of our "social tonics" (friendly shakes of the hand, talks, meetings with charming women, etc.). With a certain number among us it passes into a state of unintermittent delirium under the name of Troglodytic fever. This new malady, whose microbe has not yet been discovered, was unknown to our forefathers, thanks perhaps to the stupefying (or soothing, if you prefer it) influence of natural and rural distractions. Rural! what a strange anachronism! Fishermen, hunters, ploughmen, and shepherds—do we really understand to-day the meaning of these words? Have we for a moment reflected on the life of that fossil creature who is so frequently mentioned in books of ancient history and who was called the peasant? The habitual society of this curious creature which comprised half or three-quarters of the population was not man, but four-footed beasts, pot herbs and green crops, which, owing to the conditions necessary for their production in the country (yet another word which has become meaningless) condemned him to live a wild, solitary life, far from his fellows. As for his herds, they were acquainted with the charms of social life, but he had not the slightest inkling of what it meant.
The towns, to which people were so astonished that there should be a desire to emigrate, were the only centres, rare and widely scattered as they were, in which life in society was then known. But to what extent does it not appear to have been adulterated, and attenuated by animal and vegetable life? Another fossil peculiar to these regions is the artisan. Was the relation of the worker to his employer, of the artisan class to the other classes of the population, of these classes between themselves a really social relation? Not the least in the world! Certain sophists, who were called economists, and who were to our sociologists of to-day what the alchemists formerly were to the chemists or the astrologers to the astronomers, had given credit, it is true, to this error—that society essentially consists in an exchange of services. From this point of view, which, moreover, is quite out of date, the social bond could never be closer than that between the ass and the ass driver, the ox and drover, the sheep and the shepherd. Society, we now know, consists in the exchange of reflections. Mutually to ape one another, and by dint of accumulated apings diversely combined to create an originality is the important thing. Reciprocal service is only an accessory. That is why the urban life of former days being principally founded on the organic and natural, rather than on the social relation of producer to consumer, or of workman to employer, was itself only a very imperfect kind of social life, and accordingly the source of endless disagreements.
If it has been possible for us to realise the most perfect and the most intense social life that has ever been seen, it is thanks to the extreme simplicity of our strictly so-called wants. At a time when man was "panivorous" and omnivorous, the craving for food was broken up into an infinity of petty ramifications. To-day it is confined to eating meat which has been preserved in the best of refrigerators. Within the space of an hour each morning, a single member of society by the employment of our ingenious transport machinery feeds a thousand of his kind. The need of clothing has been pretty nearly abolished by the softness of an ever constant climate, and, we must also admit it, by the absence of silkworms and of textile plants. That would perhaps be a disadvantage were it not for the incomparable beauty of our bodies, which lends a real charm to this grand simplicity of costume. Let us observe, however, that it is fairly customary to wear coats of asbestos spangled with mica, of silver interwoven and enriched with gold, in which the refined and delicate charms of our women appear as though moulded in metal, rather than completely screened from view. This metallic iridescence with its infinite tints has a most delightful effect. These are, however, costumes that never wear out. How many clothiers, milliners, tailors, and drapery establishments are thereby abolished at a single stroke! The need of shelter remains, it is true, but it has been greatly reduced. One is no longer obliged to sleep at "starlight-hotel". When a young man grows weary of the life in common which has hitherto sufficed him in the spacious working-drawing-room of his fellows, and desires for matrimonial reasons to have a dwelling to himself, he has only to apply the boring-machine somewhere against the rocky wall and his cell is excavated in a few days. There is no rent and few articles of furniture. The joint-stock furniture, which is magnificent, is almost the only one of which the pair of lovers make use.
The quota of absolute necessities being thus reduced to almost nothing, the quota of superfluities has been able to be extended to almost everything. Since we live on so little, there remains abundant time for thought. A minimum of utilitarian work and a maximum of æsthetic, is surely civilisation itself in its most essential element. The room left vacant in the heart by the reduction of our wants is taken up by the talents—those artistic, poetic, and scientific talents which, as they day by day multiply and take deeper root, become really and truly acquired wants. They really spring, however, from a necessity to produce, and not from a necessity to consume. I underline this difference. The manufacturer is ever toiling, not for his own pleasure nor for that of the world about him, of his fellow-men or his natural rivals, but for a society different from his own—on mutual terms, but that is immaterial. His work, therefore, constitutes a non-social, an almost anti-social relationship with those who are not of his kind, to the great hurt and hindrance of his relations with those who are. The increasing intensity of his work tends to accentuate and not to attenuate the dissimilarities between the different grades of society, which act as an obstacle to the general reunion. We have clearly seen the truth of this in the course of the twentieth century of the ancient era, when the whole population was divided into trades-unions of the different professions, which waged desperate warfare on one another, and whose members in the bosom of each union hated one another as only brothers can.
But for the scientist, the artist, the lover of beauty in all its forms, to produce is a passion, to consume is only a taste. For every artist has a dilettante double. But his dilettantism in respect to arts other than his own only plays by comparison a secondary part in his life. The artist creates through sheer delight, and he alone creates for such motives.
We can now comprehend the depth of the truly social revolution which was accomplished from the days when the æsthetic activity, by dint of ever growing, ended by vanquishing utilitarian activity. Henceforth in place of the relation of producer to consumer has been substituted, as preponderating element in human dealings, the relation of the artist to the art-lover. The ancient social ideal was to seek amusement or self-satisfaction apart and to render mutual service. For this we substitute the following: to be one's own servant and mutually to delight one another. Henceforward, to insist once more, society reposes, not on the exchange of services, but on the exchange of admiration or criticism, of favourable or unfavourable judgments. The anarchical regime of greed in all its forms has been succeeded by the autocratic government of enlightened opinion which has become supreme. For our worthy ancestors deceived themselves finely when they persuaded themselves that social progress led to what they termed freedom of thought. We have something better; we possess the joy and the strength of the mind which attains a certainty of its own, founded, as it is, on its only sure basis, the unanimity of other minds on certain essential matters. On this rock we can rear the highest constructions of thought, nay, the most gigantic systems of philosophy.
The error, at present recognised, of those ancient visionaries called socialists was their failure to see that this life in common, this intense social life, they dreamt of so ardently, had for its indispensable condition the æsthetic life and the universal propagation of the religion of truth and beauty. The latter assumes the drastic lopping off of numerous personal wants. Consequently in rushing, as they did, into an exaggerated development of commercial life, they were marching in the opposite direction to their own goal.
They must have begun, I am well aware, by uprooting the fatal habit of eating bread, which made man a slave to the tyrannical whims of a plant, of beasts which were necessary for the manuring of this plant, and of other plants which served as fodder for their beasts.... But as long as this unhappy craving was rampant and they refrained from combating it, it was obligatory to abstain from arousing others which were not less anti-social, that is to say, not less natural. It was far better to leave men at the ploughtail than to attract them to the factory, for the dispersion and isolation of individualist types are more preferable to bringing them together, which can only result in setting them by the ears. But let us hurry on. All the advantages for which we are indebted to our anti-natural position are now clear. We alone have realised all the quintessence of refinement and reality, of strength and of sweetness, that the social life contains. Formerly, here and there, in a few rare cases in the midst of deserts an individual had certainly had a distant foretaste of this ineffable thing, not to mention three or four salons in the eighteenth century under the ancient regime, two or three painters' studios, one or two green-rooms. They represented, in a way, imperceptible cores of social protoplasm lost amid a mass of foreign matter. But this marrow has become the entire bone at present. Our cities, all in all, are one vast workshop, household and reception hall. And this has happened in the simplest and most inevitable manner in the world. Following the law of separation of the old Herbert Spencer, the selection of heterogeneous talents and vocations was bound to take place of its own accord. In fact, at the end of a century there was already underground in course of development and continuous excavation a city of painters, a city of sculptors, a city of musicians, of poets, of geometricians, of physicists, of chemists, even of naturalists, of psychologists, of scientific or æsthetic specialists of every kind, except, strictly speaking, in philosophy. For we were obliged after several attempts to give up the idea of founding or maintaining a city of philosophers, notably owing to the incessant trouble caused by the tribe of sociologists who are the most unsociable of mankind.
Let us not forget, by the way, to mention the city of "sappers" (we no longer speak of architects), whose speciality is to work out the plans for excavating and repairing all our crypts and to direct the carrying out of the work by our machines. Quitting the hackneyed paths of former architecture, they have created in every detail our modern architecture so profoundly original of which nothing could give an idea to our forefathers. The public building of the ancient architect was a kind of massive and voluminous work of art. It was entirely a thing by itself. Its exterior, and especially its front, occupied his attention far more than the inside. For the modern architect the interior alone exists, and each work is linked on to those which have gone before. None stands by itself. They are only an extension and ramification, one of another, an endless continuation like the epics of the East. The work of the ancient architect with its misplaced individuality, with its symmetry, which gave it a mock air of being a living thing, yet only rendered it more out of keeping with the surrounding landscape, the more symmetrical and more skilfully designed it was, produced the effect of a verse in prose, or of a hackneyed theme in a fantasia. Its special function was to represent correctness, coldness, and stiffness amid the luxuriant disorder of nature and the freedom of the other arts. But to-day, instead of being the most tight-laced of the arts, architecture is the freest and most wanton of them all. It is the chief element of picturesqueness in our life, its artificial and veritably artistic scenery lends to all the masterpieces of our painters and sculptors the horizon of its perspective, the sky of its vaults, the tangled vegetation of its innumerable colonnades, whose shafts are a copy of the idealised trunk of all the antique essence of tree-life, whose capitals imitate the idealised form of all the antique flowers. Here is nature winnowed and perfected, which has become human in order to delight humanity, and which humanity has deified in order to shelter love beneath its shade. This perfection has only been, however, attained after much groping in the dark. Many falls of rock, occasioned by foolhardy excavations, which unduly reduced the number of supports, swallowed up whole towns during the first two centuries. They will serve for our descendants as Pompeii to rediscover. At the least shock produced by earthquakes (the only natural plague which engages our attention), a few cases of crushing to death still occur here and there, but such accidents are very rare.
To return to our subject. Each of our cities in founding colonies in the region round it, has become the mother of cities similar to itself, in which its own peculiar colour has been multiplied in different tints which reflect and render it more beautiful. It is thus with us that nations are formed whose differences no longer correspond to geographical accidents but to the diversity of the social aptitudes of human nature and of nothing else. Nay, more, in each of them the division of cities is founded on that of schools, the most flourishing of which, at any given moment, raises its particular town to the rank of capital, thanks to the all-powerful favour of the public.
The beginnings and devolution of power, questions which have so deeply agitated humanity of yore, arise with us in the most natural way in the world. There is always amid the crowd of our genius, a superior genius who is hailed as such by the almost unanimous acclamation of his pupils at first, and next of his comrades. A man is judged in fact by his peers and according to his productions, not by the incompetent or according to his electoral exploits. In the light of the intimate sense of corporate life which binds and cements us one to another, the elevation of such a dictator to the supreme magistracy has nothing humiliating about it for the pride of the senators who have elected him, and who are the chiefs of all the leading schools they themselves have created. The elector who is a pupil, the elector who is an intelligent and sympathetic admirer identifies himself with the object of his choice. Now it is the particular characteristic of a "Geniocratic" Republic to be based on admiration, not on envy, on sympathy, and not on dislike—on enlightenment, not on illusion.
Nothing is more delightful than a tour through our domains. Our towns, which are quite close to one another are severally connected by broad roads which are always illuminated and dotted with light and graceful monocycles, with trains without smoke or whistle, with pretty electric carriages which glide silently along, like gondolas between walls covered with admirable bas-reliefs, with charming inscriptions, with immortal fancies, the outpourings and accumulations of ten generations of wandering artists. Similarly one might have seen in the olden times the scanty remains of some convent where, in the course of ages the monks had translated their weariness of spirit into grinning figures, with hooded heads, into beasts from the Apocalypse, clumsily sculptured on the capitals of the little pilasters or around the stone chair of the Abbot. But what a distance lies between this monkish nightmare and this artistic revelation! At the very most the pretty little gallery which joined across the Arno, the museum of the Pitti Palace, with that of the Uffizi at Florence, could give our ancestors a faint idea of what we see.
If the corridors of our abode possess this wealth and splendour, what shall we say of the dwelling-places, or of the cities? They are filled with heaps of artistic marvels, of frescoes, enamels, gold and silver plate, bronzes and pictures, the acme and quintessence of musical emotions, of philosophic conceptions, of poetic dreams, enough to baffle all description, and weary all admiration. We have difficulty in believing that the labyrinth of galleries, subterranean palaces and marble catacombs, all named and numbered, whose manifold nomenclature recalls all the geography and history of the past, have been excavated in so few centuries. That is what perseverance can do! However accustomed we may be to this extraordinary sight, it still at times happens when wandering alone, during the hours of the siesta, in this sort of infinite cathedral, with its irregular and endless architecture, through this forest of lofty columns, massive or in close formation, displaying in turn the most diversified and grandiose styles, Egyptian, Greek, Byzantine, Arab, Gothic, and reminiscent of all the vanished and venerated floras and faunas, when it is not above all profoundly original ... it happens, I repeat, that panting, and beside ourselves with ecstasy, we come to a standstill, like the traveller of yore when he entered the twilight of a virgin forest, or of the pillared hall of Karnak.
To those who on reading the ancient accounts of travels might perchance have regretted the wanderings of caravans across the deserts or the discoveries of new worlds, our universe can offer boundless excursions under the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans frozen to their very lowest depths. Venturesome explorers, I was going to say discoverers, have in every direction and in the easiest imaginable fashion honeycombed these immense ice-caps with endless passages much in the same way as the termites, according to our palæontologists, bored through the floors of our fathers. We extend at will these fantastic galleries of crystal, which, wherever they cross one another, form so many crystal palaces, by casting on the walls a ray of intense heat which makes them melt. We take good care to drain the water due to the liquefaction into one of those bottomless pits which here and there yawn hideously beneath our feet. Thanks to this method and the improvements it has undergone we have succeeded in cutting, hewing and carving the solidified sea-water. We are able to glide through it, to manoeuvre in it, to course through it on skates or velocipedes with an ease and agility that are always admired in spite of our being accustomed to it. The severe cold of these regions is scarcely tempered by millions of electric lamps which are mirrored in these emerald-green icicles with their velvet-like tints and renders a permanent stay impossible. It would even prevent us crossing them if, by good luck, the earliest pioneers had not discovered in them crowds of seals which had been caught while still alive by the freezing of the waters in which they remain imprisoned. Their carefully prepared skins have furnished us with warm clothing. Nothing is more curious than thus suddenly to catch sight of, as it were through a mysterious glass case, one of these huge marine animals, sometimes a whale, a shark or a devil fish, and that star-like flora which carpets the seas. Though appearing crystallized in its transparent prison, in its Elysium of pure brine, it has lost none of its secret charm, that was quite unknown to our ancestors. Idealised by its very lack of motion, immortalised by its death, it dimly shines here and there with gleams of pearl and mother of pearl in the twilight of the depths below, to the right, the left, beneath the feet or above the head of the solitary skater who roams with his lamp on his forehead in pursuit of the unknown. There is always something new to look forward to from these miraculous soundings, so different from the soundings of former time. Never a tourist has come home without having discovered some interesting object—a piece of wreckage, the steeple of some sunken town, a human skeleton to enrich our prehistoric museums, sometimes a shoal of sardines or cod. These splendid and timely reserves come in very handy for replenishing our bill of fare. But the chief fascination of such adventurous exploration is the sense of the boundless and the everlasting, of the unfathomable and the changeless by which one is arrested and overwhelmed in these bottomless depths. The savour of this silence and solitude, of this profound peace, the sequel to so many tempests, of this almost starless gloaming and twilight with its fleeting gleams, reposes the eye after our underground illuminations. I will not speak of the surprises which the hand of man has lavished there. At the moment when one least expects it one sees the submarine tunnel along which one is gliding, enlarged beyond all measure and transformed into a vast hall in which the fancy of our sculptors has found full play, a temple of vast dimensions with transparent pillars, with walls of enthralling beauty that the eye in ecstasy attempts to fathom. That is often the trysting place of friends and lovers, and the excursion begun in dreamy loneliness is continued in loving companionship.
But we have wandered long enough in these halls of mysteries. Let us return to our cities. One would look, by the bye, in vain for a city of lawyers there, or even, for a court of justice. There is no more arable land and therefore no more lawsuits about property or ancient rights. There are no more walls, and therefore no more lawsuits about party walls. As for felonies and misdemeanours, we do not know exactly why, but it is an obvious fact that with the spread of the cult of art they have disappeared as by enchantment, while formerly the progress of industrial life had tripled their numbers in half a century.
Man in becoming a town dweller has become really human. From the time that all sorts of trees and beasts, of flowers and insects no longer interpose between men, and all sorts of vulgar wants no longer hinder the progress of the truly human faculties, every one seems to be born well-bred, just as every one is born a sculptor or musician, philosopher or poet, and speaks the most correct language with the purest accent. An indescribable courtesy, skilled to charm without falsehood, to please without obsequiousness, the most free from fawning one has ever seen, is united to a politeness which has at heart the feeling, not of a social hierarchy to be respected, but of a social harmony to be maintained. It is composed not of more or less degenerate airs of the court, but of more or less faithful reflections of the heart. Its refinement is such as the race who lived on the surface of earth never even dreamed of. It permeates like a fragrant oil all the complicated and delicate machinery of our existence. No unsociableness, no misanthropy can resist it. The charm is too profound. The single threat of ostracism, I do not say of expulsion to the realms above, which would be a death sentence, but of banishment beyond the limits of the usual corporate life, is sufficient to arrest the most criminal natures on the slope of crime. There is in the slightest inflexion of voice, in the least inclination of the head of our women a special charm, which is not only the charm of former times, whether roguish kindness or kindly roguishness, but a refinement at once more exquisite and more healthful in which the constant practice of seeing and doing beautiful things or loving and being loved is expressed in an ineffable fashion.
Love, in fact, is the unseen and perennial source of this novel courtesy. The capital importance it has assumed, the strange forms it has worn, the unexpected heights to which it has risen, are perhaps the most significant characteristics of our civilisation. In the glittering and superficial epochs, age of paper and electro-plating, which immediately preceded our present era, love was held in check by a thousand childish needs, by the contagious mono-mania of unsightly and cumbersome luxury or of ceaseless globe-trotting, and by that other form of madness which has now disappeared, the so-called political ambition. It suffered accordingly an immense decline, relatively speaking. To-day it benefits from the destruction or gradual diminution of all the other principal impulses of the heart which have taken refuge and concentrated themselves in it as banished mankind has done in the warm bosom of the earth. Patriotism is dead, since there is no longer any native land, but only a native grot. Moreover the guilds which we enter as we please according to our vocations have taken the place of Fatherlands. Corporate spirit has exterminated patriotism. In the same fashion the school is on the road not to exterminate but to transform the family, which is only right and proper. The best that can be said for the parents of old was that they were compulsory and not always cost-free friends. One was not wrong in preferring in general to them friends who are a species of optional and unselfish relations. Maternal love itself has undergone a good many transformations among our women artists, and one must admit, sundry partial set backs.
But love is left to us. Or rather, be it said without vanity, it is we who discovered and introduced it. Its name has preceded it by a good many centuries. Our ancestors gave it its name, but they spoke of it as the Hebrews spoke of the Messiah. It has revealed itself in our day. In our day it has become incarnate, it has founded the true religion, universal and enduring, that pure and austere moral which is indistinguishable from art. It has been favoured at the outset, beyond all doubt and beyond all expectation by the charm and beauty of our women, who are all differently yet almost equally accomplished. There is nothingnaturalleft in our world below if it be not they. But it appears they have always been the most beautiful thing in nature even in the most unfavourable and ill-favoured ages. For we are assured that never was the graceful curve of hill or stream, of wave or rippling cornfield, that never was the hue of the dawn or of the Mediterranean equal in sweetness, in strength, in richness of visible music and harmony to the female form. There must therefore have been a special instinct which is quite incomprehensible which formerly retained the poor beside their natal river or rock and prevented their emigrating to the big towns, where they might well have hoped to admire at their ease tints and outlines of beauty assuredly far superior to the charm of the locality to whose attractions they fell a victim. At present there is no other country than the woman of one's affections; there is no other home-sickness than that caused by her absence.
But the foregoing is insufficient to explain the unparalleled power and persistence of our love which time intensifies more than it wears out, and consummates as it consumes it. Love, we now at last know, is like air, essential to life; we must look to it for health and not for mere nourishment. It is as the sun once was, we must use it to give us light, not allow it to dazzle us. It resembles that imposing temple that the fervour of our fathers raised in its honour when they worshipped it, unwittingly, at the Paris Opera-house. The most beautiful part of it is the staircase—when one mounts it. We have therefore attempted to make the staircase monopolise the whole edifice without leaving the tiniest room for the hall. The wise man, an ancient writer has said, is to the woman what the asymptote is to the curve, it draws ever nearer but never touches. It was a half crazy fellow named Rousseau who uttered this splendid aphorism and our society flatters itself that it has practised it far better than he. All the same the ideal thus outlined, we are compelled to confess, is rarely attained in all its entity. This degree of perfection is reserved for the most saintly souls, the ascetics, men and women, who wander together, two and two, in the most marvellous cloisters, in the most Raphaelesque cells in the city of painters, in a sort of artificial dusk produced by a coloured twilight in the midst of a throng of similar couples, and on the banks of a stream so to say of audacious and splendid revelations of the nude. They pass their life in feasting their eyes on these waves of beauty, the living bank of which is their own passion. Together they climb the fiery steps of the heavenly staircase to the very summit on which they halt. Then supremely inspired they set to work and produce masterpieces. Heroic lovers are they whose whole pleasure in love consists in the sublime joy of feeling their love growing within them, blissful because it is shared, inspiring because it is chaste.
But for the greater number of us it has been necessary to come down to the level of the insurmountable weakness of the old Adam. None the less the inelastic limits of our food supplies have made it a duty for us rigorously to guard against a possible excess in our population which has reached to-day fifty millions, a figure it can never exceed without danger. We have been obliged to forbid in general under the most severe penalties a practice which apparently was very common and indulged inad libitumby our forefathers. Is it possible that after manufacturing the rubbish heaps of law with which our libraries are lumbered up, they precisely omitted to regulate the only matter considered worthy to-day of regulation? Can we conceive that it could ever have been permissible to the first comer without due authorisation to expose society to the arrival of a new hungry and wailing member—above all at a time when it was not possible to kill a partridge without a game licence, or to import a sack of corn without paying duty? Wiser and more far-sighted, we degrade, and in case of a second offence we condemn to be thrown into a lake of petroleum, whoever allows himself to infringe our constitutional law on this point, or rather we should say, should allow himself, for the force of public opinion has got the better of the crime and has rendered our penalties unnecessary. We sometimes, nay very often, see lovers who go mad from love and die in consequence. Others courageously get themselves hoisted by a lift to the gaping mouth of an extinct volcano and reach the outer air which in a moment freezes them to death. They have scarcely time to regard the azure sky—a magnificent spectacle, so they say—and the twilight hues of the still dying sun or the vast and unstudied disorder of the stars; then locked in each other's arms they fall dead upon the ice! The summit of their favourite volcano is completely crowned with their corpses which are admirably preserved always in twos, stark and livid, a living image still of love and agony, of despair and frenzy, but more often of ecstatic repose. They recently made an indelible impression on a celebrated traveller who was bold enough to make the ascent in order to get a glimpse of them. We all know how he has since died from the effects.
But what is unheard of and unexampled in our day is for a woman in love to abandon herself to her lover before the latter has under her inspiration produced a masterpiece which is adjudged and proclaimed as such by his rivals. For here we have the indispensable condition to which legitimate marriage is subordinated. The right to have children is the monopoly and supreme recompense of genius. It is besides a powerful lever for the uplifting and exaltation of the race. Futhermore a man can only exercise it exactly the same number of times as he produces works worthy of a master. But in this respect some indulgence is shown. It even happens pretty frequently that touched by pity for some grand passion that disposes only of a mediocre talent, the affected admiration of the public partly from sympathy and partly from condescension accords a favourable verdict to works of no intrinsic value. Perhaps there are also (in fact there is no doubt about it) for common use other methods of getting round the law.
Ancient society reposed on the fear of punishment, on a penal system which has had its day. Ours, it is clear, is based on the expectation of happiness. The enthusiasm and creative fire aroused by such a perspective are attested by our exhibitions, and borne witness to by the rich luxuriance of our annual art harvests. When we think of the precisely opposite effects of ancient marriage, that institution of our ancestors, more ridiculous still than their umbrellas, one can measure the distance between this excessive and pretended exclusivedebitum conjugaleand our mode of union, at once free and regulated, energetic and intermittent, passionate and restrained, the true corner-stone of our regenerated humanity. The sufferings it imposes on those who are sacrificed, the unsuccessful artists, is not for the latter a cause of complaint. Their despair itself is dear to the desperate; for if they do not die of it, they draw life and immortality from it and from the bottomless pit of their inner depth of woe, they gather deathless flowers, flowers of art or poesy for some, mystic roses for others. To the latter perhaps is given at that moment, as they grope in their inward darkness to touch most nearly the essence of things, and these delights are so vivid that our artists and our metaphysical mystics wonder whether art and philosophy were made to console love or if the sole reason for love's existence is not to inspire art and the pursuit of ultimate truth. This last opinion has generally prevailed.
The extent to which love has refined our habits, and to which our civilisation based on love is superior in morality to the former civilisation based on ambition and covetousness, was proved at the time of the great discovery which took place in the Year of Salvation 194. Guided by some mysterious inkling, some electric sense of direction, a bold sapper by dint of forcing his way through the flanks of the earth beyond the ordinary galleries suddenly penetrated into a strange open space buzzing with human voices and swarming with human faces. But what squeaky voices! What sallow complexions! What an impossible language with no connection with our Greek! It was, without doubt, a veritable underground America, quite as vast and still more curious. It was the work of a little tribe of burrowing Chinese who had had, one imagines, the same idea as our Miltiades. Much more practical than he, they had hastily crawled underground without encumbering themselves with museums and libraries, and there they had multiplied enormously. Instead of confining themselves as we to turning to account the deposits of animal carcasses, they had shamelessly given themselves up to ancestral cannibalism. They were thus enabled, seeing the thousand of millions of Chinese destroyed and buried beneath the snow, to give full vent to their prolific instincts. Alas! who knows if our own descendants will not one day be reduced to this extremity? In what promiscuity, in what a slough of greed, falsehood and robbery were these unfortunates living! The words of our language refuse to depict their filth and coarseness. With infinite pains they raised underground diminutive vegetables in diminutive beds of soil they had brought thither together with diminutive pigs and dogs.... These ancient servants of mankind appeared very disgusting to our new Christopher Columbus. These degraded beings (I speak of the masters and not of the animals, for the latter belong to a breed that has been much improved by those who raised them) had lost all recollection of the Middle Empire and even of the surface of the earth. They heartily laughed when some of oursavantssent on a mission to them spoke to them of the firmament, the sun, the moon and the stars.... They listened, however, to the end of these accounts, then in an ironical tone they asked our envoys: "Have you seen all that?" And the latter unfortunately could not reply to the question, since no one among us has seen the sky except the lovers who go to die together.
Now, what did our settlers do at the sight of such cerebral atrophy? Several proposed, it is true, to exterminate these savages who might well become dangerous owing to their cunning and to their numbers, and to appropriate their dwelling-place after a certain amount of cleaning and painting and the removal of numerous little bells. Others proposed to reduce them to the status of slaves or servants in order to shift on to them all our menial work. But these two proposals were rejected. An attempt was made to civilize and to render less savage these poor cousins, and once the impossibility of any success in that direction had been ascertained the partition was carefully blocked up.
Such is the moral miracle wrought by our excellence which itself is begotten of love and beauty. But the intellectual marvels which have issued from the same source, merit a still more extended notice. It will be enough for me to indicate them as I go along.
Let us first speak of the sciences. One might have thought that from the day that the stars and celestial bodies, the faunas and floras, ceased to play a certain part in our lives or that the manifold sources of observation and experience ceased to flow, astronomy and meteorology would henceforth be brought to a standstill while zoology and botany would have become palæontology pure and simple, without speaking of their application to the navy, army and agriculture, which are all to-day entirely obsolete; in fact, that they would have ceased to make a step forward and would have fallen into complete oblivion. Luckily these apprehensions proved groundless. Let us admire the extent to which the sciences which the past has bequeathed to us, formerly eminently useful and inductive, have for the first time had the advantage of passionately interesting and exciting the general public since they have acquired this double characteristic of being an object of luxury and a deductive subject. The past has accumulated such undigested masses of astronomical tables, papers and proceedings dealing with measurements, vivisections, and innumerable experiments, that the human mind can live on this capital till the end of time. It was high time that it began at last to arrange and utilize these materials. Now, for the sciences of which I am speaking, the advantage is great from the point of view of their success that they are entirely based on written testimony, and in no way on sense perception, and that they on all occasions invoke the authority of books (for we talk to-day of whole bibliographies when formerly people spoke of a single Bible—evidently an immense difference). This great and inestimable advantage consists in the extraordinary riches of our libraries in documents of the most diverse kinds which never leaves an ingenious theorist in the lurch, and is equal to supporting in a plenary and authoritative fashion the most contradictory opinions at one and the same symposium. Its abundance recalls the admirable wealth of antique legislation and jurisprudence in texts and decisions of every hue which rendered the lawsuits so interesting, almost as much as the battles of the populace of Alexandria on the subject of a theological iota. The debates of oursavants, their polemics relative to the Vitellin yolk of the egg of the Arachneida, or the digestive apparatus of the Infusoria, constitute the burning questions which distress us, and which if we had the misfortune to possess a regular press, would not fail to drench our streets in gore. For the questions which are useless and even harmful have always the knack of rousing the passions, provided they are insoluble.
These are our religious quarrels. In fact the sum total of the sciences bequeathed to us by the past has become definitely and inevitably a religion. Oursavantsto-day who work deductively on these data from henceforth changeless and inviolate, exactly recall on a much larger scale the theologians of the ancient world. This new encyclopædic theology, not less fertile than others in schisms and heresies, is the unique but inexhaustible source of divisions in the bosom of our Church which is otherwise so compact. It is perhaps the most profound and fascinating charm of our intellectual leaders.
"All the same, they are dead sciences!" say certain malcontents. Let us accept the epithet. They are dead, if one likes, but after the fashion of those languages in which a whole people chanted its hymns although no one speaks them any longer. This is also the case with certain faces whose beauty only appears in its fulness when their last sleep has come. Let none therefore be surprised if our love fastens on these majestic dogmas, by which we are more and more overshadowed, on these higher inutilities which are our vocation. Above all, mathematics, as being the most perfect type of the new sciences, has progressed with giant steps. Descending to fabulous depths, analysis has allowed the astronomers at length to attack and to solve problems whose mere statement would have provoked an incredulous smile in their predecessors. And so they discover every day, chalk in hand, not with the telescope to the eye, I know not how many intra-mercurial or extra-neptunian planets, and begin to distinguish the planets of the nearer stars. There are in this department, in the comparative anatomy and physiology of numerous solar systems, the most novel and profound views. Our Leverriers are reckoned by hundreds. Being all the better acquainted with the sky because they no longer see it, they resemble Beethoven, who only wrote his finest symphonies when he had lost his hearing. Our Claude Bernards and Pasteurs are almost as numerous. Although we are careful as a matter of fact not to accord to the natural sciences the exaggerated and fundamentally anti-social importance they formerly usurped during two or three centuries, we do not completely neglect them. Even the applied sciences have their votaries. Recently one of the latter has at last discovered—such is the irony of destiny—the practical means of steering balloons. These discoveries are useless, I admit, yet are ever beautiful and fertile, fertile in new, if superfluous, beauties. They are welcomed with transports of feverish enthusiasm and win for their originators something better than glory,—the happiness that we know so well.
But among the sciences there are two which are still experimental and inductive and in addition pre-eminently useful. It is to this exceptional standing that they perhaps owe, we must admit, the unparalled rapidity with which they have grown. These two sciences which were formerly the antipodes of one another, are to-day on the high road to becoming identical by dint of pushing their joint researches ever deeper and crushing to atoms the last problems left. Their names are chemistry and psychology.
Our chemists, inspired perhaps by love and better instructed in the nature of affinities, force their way into the inner life of the molecules and reveal to us their desires, their ideas, and under a fallacious air of conformity, their individual physiognomy. While they thus construct for us the psychology of the atom, our psychologists explain to us the atomic theory of self, I was going to say the sociology of self. They enable us to perceive, even in its most minute detail, the most admirable of all societies, this hierarchy of consciousness, this feudal system of vassal souls, of which our personality is the summit. We are indebted to them both for priceless benefits. Thanks to the former we are no longer alone in a frozen world. We are conscious that these rocks are alive and animated, we are conscious that these hard metals which protect and warm us are likewise a prolific brotherhood. Through their mediation these living stones have some message for our heart, something at once alien and intimate, which neither the stars nor the flowers of the field ever told to our forefathers. And by their mediation also, and the service is not to be despised—we have learnt certain processes which allow us (in a scanty measure, it is true, for the moment) to supplement the insufficiency of our ordinary food supplies, or to vary their monotony by several substances agreeable to the taste and entirely compounded by artificial means. But if our chemists have thus reassured us against the danger of dying of hunger, our psychologists have acquired still further claims on our gratitude in freeing us from the fear of death. Permeated by their doctrines we have followed their consequences to their final conclusion with the deductive vigour that is second nature with us. Death appears to us as a dethronement that leads to freedom. It restores to itself the fallen or abdicated self that retires anew into its inner consciousness, where it finds in depths more than the equivalent of the outward empire it has lost. In thinking of the terrors of former man, face to face with the tomb, we compare them with the dread experienced by the comrades of Miltiades when they were compelled to bid adieu to the fields of ice, to the snowy horizons, in order to enter for ever the gloomy abysses in which such a myriad of glittering and marvellous surprises awaited them.
That is a well-established doctrine and one on which no discussion would be tolerated. It is, with our devotion to beauty and our faith in the divine omnipotence of love, the foundation of our peace of mind and the starting point of our enthusiasms. Our philosophers themselves avoid touching on it, as on all which is fundamental in our institutions. To this perhaps may be traced an agreeable air of harmlessness which adds to the charm of their refinement and contributes to their success in public. With such certainties as ballast we can spring with a light heart into the æther of systems, and so we do not fail to do so. One may be surprised, however, that I made a distinction between our philosophers and those deductivesavantsof whom I have spoken above. Their subject-matter and their methods are identical. They chew the cud—if I may be allowed the expression—in the same fashion at the same mangers. But the one group, I mean thesavants, are ordinary ruminants, that is, slow and clumsy. The others have the peculiar quality of being at once ruminants and nimble, like the antelope. And this difference of temperament is indelible.
There is not, I have already said, a city, but there is a grotto of philosophers, a natural one to which they come, and sit apart from one another or in groups, according to their schools, on chairs formed of granite blocks beside a petrifying well. This spacious grotto contains astounding stalactites, the slow product of continuous droppings which vaguely imitate, in the eyes of those who are not too critical, all kinds of beautiful objects, cups and chandeliers, cathedrals and mirrors—cups which quench no man's thirst, chandeliers which give no light, cathedrals in which no one prays, but mirrors in which one sees oneself more or less faithfully and pleasantly portrayed. There also is to be seen a gloomy and bottomless lake over which hang like so many question-marks, the pendants in the sombre roof and the beards of the thinkers. Such is the ample cave which is exactly identical to the philosophy it shelters, with its crystals sparkling amid its uncertain shadows—full of precipices, it is true. It recalls better than anything else to the new race of men, but with a still greater portion of mirage-like fascination, that diurnal miracle of our forefathers—the starry night. Now the crowd of systematic ideas which slowly form and crystallise there in each brain like mental stalactites is indescribably enormous. While all the former stalactites of thought are for ever ramifying and changing their shape, turning as it were from a table into an altar, or from an eagle into a griffin, new ideas appear here and there still more surprising. There are always, of course, Neo-Aristotelians, Neo-Kantians, Neo-Cartesians, and Neo-Pythagoricians. Let us not forget the commentators of Empedocles to whom his passion for the volcanic underworld has procured an unexpected rejuvenation of his antique authority on the minds of men, above all since an archæologist has maintained he has found the skeleton of this grand man in pushing an exploring gallery to the very foot of Ætna which to-day is completely extinct. But there is ever arising some great reformer with an unpublished gospel that each attempts to enrich with a new version destined to take its place. I will cite for example the greatest intellect of our time, the chief of the fashionable school in sociology. According to this profound thinker the social development of humanity, starting on the outer rind of the earth and continuing to-day beneath its crust, at no great distance from the surface, is destined in proportion to the growing solar and planetary cooling, to pursue its course from strata to strata down to the very centre of the earth, while the population forcibly contracts and civilisation on the contrary expands at each new descent. It is worth seeing the vigour and Dante-like precision with which he characterises the social type peculiar to each of these humanities, immured within its own circle, growing ever nobler and richer, happier and better balanced. One should read the portrait which he has limned with a bold brush of the last man, sole survivor and heir of a hundred successive civilisations, left to himself yet self-sufficient in the midst of his immense stores of science and art. He is happy as a god because he is omniscient and omnipotent, because he has just discovered the true answer of the Great Enigma, yet dying because he cannot survive humanity. By means of an explosive substance of extraordinary potency he blows up the globe with himself in order to sow the immensity of space with the last remnants of mankind. This system very naturally has a good many adherents. The graceful Hypatias, however, who form his female followers, idly lying round the master's stone, are agreed it would be proper to associate with the last man, the last woman, not less ideal than he.
But what shall I say of art and poetry? Here to be just, praise must become panegyric. Let us limit ourselves to indicating the general tendency of the transformations that have taken place. I have related what has become of our architecture which has been turned "outside in", so to say, and brought into keeping with its surroundings, the idealised image in stone, the essence and consummation of former Nature. I shall not return to the subject. But I must still say a word about this immortal and overflowing population of statues, this wealth of frescoes, enamels, and bronzes which in concert with our poetry celebrate in this architectural transfiguration of the nether world the apotheosis of love. There would be an interesting study to make on the gradual metamorphoses that the genius of our painters and sculptors has imposed for the last three centuries on these traditional types of lions, horses, tigers, birds, trees and flowers, with which it is never weary of disporting itself, without being either helped or hindered by the sight of any animal or any plant. Never, in fact, have our artists, who protest strongly against being taken for photographers, depicted so many plants, animals and landscapes, than since these were no more. Similarly, they have never painted or sculptured so many draperies, since everyone goes about almost naked, while formerly at the time when humanity wore clothes the nude abounded in art. Does it mean that nature, now dead and formerly alive, from which our great masters drew their subjects and themes, has become a simple hieroglyphic and coldly conventional alphabet? No. Daughter to-day of tradition and no longer of productive nature, humanised and harmonised, she has a still firmer hold on the heart. If she recalls to each his day-dreams rather than his recollections, his imaginings rather than his impressions, his admiration as an artist rather than his terror as a child, she is only the better calculated to fascinate and subdue. She has for us the profound and intimate charm of an old legend, but it is a legend in which one believes.
Nothing is more inspiring. Such must have been the mythology of the worthy Homer when his hearers in the Cyclades still believed in Aphrodite and Pallas, in the Dioscuri and the Centaurs, of whom he spoke to them and wrung from them tears of sheer delight. Thus our poets make us weep, when they speak to us now of azure skies, of the sea-girt horizon, of the perfume of roses, of the song of birds, of all those objects that our eye has never seen, our ear has never heard, of which all our senses are ignorant, yet our mind conjures them up within us by a strange instinct at the least suggestion of love.
And when our painters show us these horses whose legs grow ever slimmer, these swans whose necks become ever rounder and longer, these vines whose leaves and branches grow ever more intricate with their lace-like edges and arabesques interwoven round still more exquisite birds, a matchless emotion rises within us such as a young Greek might have felt before a bas-relief crowded with fauns and nymphs or with Argonautes bearing off the Golden Fleece, or with Nereids sporting around the cup of Amphitrite.
If our architecture in spite of all its splendours seems but a simple foil of our other fine arts, they in their turn, however admirable, have the air of being barely worthy to illustrate our poetry and literature graven on stone. But in our poetry and even in our literature there are glories which in comparison with less obvious beauty are as the corona is to the ovary, or the frame to the picture. Read our romantic dramas and epics in which all ancient history is magically unrolled down to the heroic struggle and love story of Miltiades. You will decide that nothing more sublime could ever be written. Read also our idylls, our elegies, our epigrams inspired by antiquity, and our poetry of every kind written in a dozen dead languages which when desired revive in order to vivify with their clear notes and their manifold harmonies, the pleasure of our ear, to accompany, so to say, with their rich orchestration in English, German, Swedish, Arabic, Italian and French, the music of our pure Attic. You will imagine nothing more fascinating than this renaissance and transfiguration of forgotten idioms, once the glory of antiquity. As for our dramas and our poems which are often at once the collective and individual work of a school, incarnate in its chief and animated with a single idea like the sculptures of the Parthenon, there is nothing comparable in the masterpieces of Sophocles or Homer. What the extinct species of nature formerly alive are to our painters and sculptors, the no less extinct sentiments of former human nature are to our dramatists. Jealousy, ambition, patriotism, fanaticism, the mad lust of battle, the exalted love of family, the pride of an illustrious name, all the vanished passions of the heart when called up upon the stage, no longer cause tears or terror in a single soul, any more than the heraldic tigers and lions painted up on our public squares frighten our children. But in a new accent with quite a different ring, they speak to us their ancient language; and to tell the truth, they are only a grand piano on which our new passions play. Now there is but a single passion for all its thousand names, as there is above but a single sun. It is love, the soul of our soul and source of our art. That is the true sun which will never fail us, which is never weary of touching and reanimating with the light of its countenance its lower creations of yore, the first-born incarnations of the heart, in order to make them young once more, in order to re-gild them with its dawns, and reincarnadine them with its setting splendours; almost in the same fashion as it sufficed the other sun to compass with a single ray that august summons to deck the earth, addressed to every ancient plant of the field, awakening it to bloom anew, that grand yearly transformation scene, so deceptive and entrancing, which they named the Spring, when there was still a Spring to name!
And so for our highly refined writers, all that I have just praised a moment ago has no value if their heart is left untouched. They would give for one true and personal note all these feats of skill and sleight of hand. What they look for under the most grandiose conceptions and stage effects, and under the most audacious novelties in rhyme; what they adore on bended knee when they have found it, is a short passage, a line, half a line, on which an imperceptible hint of profound passion, or the most fleeting phase, though unexpressed, of love in joy, in suffering or in death has left its impress. Thus at the beginning of humanity each tint of the dawn or the dusk, each hour of the day was, for the first man who gave it a name, a new solar god who soon possessed worshippers, priests and temples of his own. But to analyse sensations after the manner of the old-fashioned erotic writers gives us no trouble. The real difficulty and merit lie in gathering along with our mystics, from the lowest depths of sorrow, its flowers of ecstasy, the pearls and coral that lie at the bottom of its sea, and to enrich the soul in its own eyes. Our purest poetry thus joins hands with our most profound psychology. One is the oracle, the other the dogma of one and the same religion.
And yet is it credible? In spite of its beauty, harmony and incomparable charm, our society has also its malcontents. There are here and there certain recusants who declare they are soaked and saturated with the essence, so remarkably pure and so much above proof, of our excessive and compulsory society. They find our realm of beauty too static, our atmosphere of happiness too tranquil. In vain to please them we vary from time to time the intensity and colouring of our illuminations and ventilate our colonnades with a kind of refreshing breeze. They persist in condemning as monotonous our day devoid of clouds or night; our year, devoid of seasons; our towns devoid of country-life. Very curiously when the month of May comes round, this feeling of restlessness which they alone experience at ordinary times, becomes contagious and well-nigh general. And so it is the most melancholy and least busy month of the year. One would say that the Spring driven from every place, from the gloomy immensity of the heavens and from the frozen surface of the earth has, as we, sought refuge under ground; or rather that her wandering ghost returns at stated seasons to visit us and tantalise us by her haunting presence. It is then that the city of the musicians grows full and their music becomes so sweet, pathetic, mournful, and desperately harrowing that we see lovers by hundreds at a time take each other by the hand and go up to gaze upon the death-dealing sky.... In reference to this I ought to say that there was recently a false alarm caused by a madman who pretended he had seen the sun coming back to life and melting the ice. At this news which had not been otherwise confirmed, quite a considerable portion of the population became unsettled and gave itself up to the pleasing task of forming plans for an early exodus. Such unhealthy and revolutionary dreams evidently only serve to foment artificial discontent.
Luckily a scholar in rummaging in a forgotten corner of the archives put his hand on a big collection of phonographic and cinematographic records which had been amassed by an ancient collector. Interpreted by the phonograph and cinematograph together, these cylinders and films have enabled us suddenly to hear all the former sounds in nature accompanied by their corresponding sights, the thunder, the winds, the mountain torrents, the murmurs that accompany the dawn, the monotonous cry of the osprey and the long drawn out lament of the nightingale amid the manifold whisperings of night. At this resurrection of another age to the ear and eye, of extinct species and vanished phenomena, an immense astonishment quickly followed by an immense disillusion arose among the most ardent partisans of a return to the ancient regime. For that was not what one had hitherto believed on the strength of what even the most realist poets and novelists had told us. It was something infinitely less ravishing and less worthy of our regret. The song of the nightingale above all provoked a most unpleasant surprise. We were all angry with it for showing itself so inferior to its reputation. Assuredly the worst of our concerts is more musical than this so-called symphony of nature with full orchestral accompaniment.
Thus has been quelled by an ingenious expedient entirely unknown to former governments, this first and only attempt at rebellion. May it be the last. A certain leaven of discord is beginning, alas, to contaminate our ranks, and our moralists observe not without apprehension sundry symptoms which indicate the relaxation of our morals. The growth in our population is very disquieting, notably since certain chemical discoveries, following upon which we have been too much in a hurry to declare that bread might be made of stones, and that it was no longer worth while to husband our food supplies or to trouble ourselves to maintain at a certain limit the number of mouths to feed.
Simultaneously with the increase in the number of children, there is a diminution in the number of masterpieces. Let us hope that this lamentable movement will soon abate. If the sun once more, as after the different glacial epochs, succeeds in awakening from his lethargy and regains fresh strength, let us pray that only a small part of our population, that which is the most light-headed, the most unruly, and the most deeply attacked by incurable "matrimonialitis", will avail itself of the seeming yet deceptive advantages offered by this open air cure and will make a dash upwards for the freedom of those inclement climes! But this is highly improbable if one reflects on the advanced age of the sun and the danger of those relapses common to old age. It is still less desirable. Let us repeat in the words of Miltiades our august ancestor, blessed are those stars which are extinct, that is to say, the almost entire number of those which people space. Radiance, as he truly said, is to the stars what the flowering season is to the plants. After having flowered, they begin to bear fruit. Thus, doubtless, weary of expansion and the useless squandering of their strength through the infinite void, the stars collect the germs of higher life in order to fertilize them in the depth of their bosom. The deceptive brilliancy of these widely scattered stars, so relatively few in number, which are still alight, which have not finished sowing what Miltiades called their wild oats of light and heat, prevented the first race of men from thinking of this, to wit of the numberless and tranquil multitude of dark stars to whom this radiance served as a cloak. But as for us, delivered from their spell and freed from this immemorial optical delusion, we continue firmly to believe that, among the stars as among mankind, the most brilliant are not the best, and that the same causes have brought about elsewhere the same results, compelling other races of men to hide themselves in the bosom of their earth, and there in peace to pursue the happy course of their destiny under unique conditions of absolute independence and purity, that in short in the heavens as on the earth true happiness lives concealed.