The Project Gutenberg eBook ofUnderground ManThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Underground ManAuthor: Gabriel de TardeAuthor of introduction, etc.: H. G. WellsTranslator: Cloudesley BreretonRelease date: August 27, 2010 [eBook #33549]Most recently updated: March 18, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Christine Bell and Marc D'Hooghe*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDERGROUND MAN ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Underground ManAuthor: Gabriel de TardeAuthor of introduction, etc.: H. G. WellsTranslator: Cloudesley BreretonRelease date: August 27, 2010 [eBook #33549]Most recently updated: March 18, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Christine Bell and Marc D'Hooghe
Title: Underground Man
Author: Gabriel de TardeAuthor of introduction, etc.: H. G. WellsTranslator: Cloudesley Brereton
Author: Gabriel de Tarde
Author of introduction, etc.: H. G. Wells
Translator: Cloudesley Brereton
Release date: August 27, 2010 [eBook #33549]Most recently updated: March 18, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Christine Bell and Marc D'Hooghe
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDERGROUND MAN ***
The whole of Tarde is in this little book.
He has put into it along with a charming fancy his genialness and depth of spirit, his ideas on the influence of art and the importance of love, in an exceptional social milieu.
This agreeable day-dream is vigorously thought out. On reading it we fancy we are again seeing and hearing Tarde. In order to indulge in a repetition of the illusion, a pious friendship has desired to clothe this fascinating work in an appropriate dress.
A.L.
CONTENTS
DEDICATIONPREFACE By H.G. WELLSINTRODUCTORYI.PROSPERITYII.THE CATASTROPHEIII.THE STRUGGLEIV.SAVEDV.REGENERATIONVI.LOVEVII.THE ÆSTHETIC LIFENOTEON TARDE By JOSEPH MANCHON
It reflects not at all on Mr Cloudesley Brereton's admirable work of translation to remark how subtly the spirit of such work as this of M. Tarde's changes in such a process. There are certain things peculiar, I suppose, to every language in the world, certain distinctive possibilities in each. To French far more than to English, belong the intellectual liveliness, the cheerful, ironical note, the professorial playfulness of this present work. English is a less nimble, more various and moodier tongue, not only in the sound and form of its sentences but in its forms of thought. It clots and coagulates, it proliferates and darkens, one jests in it with difficulty and great danger to a sober reputation, and one attempts in vain to figure Professor Giddings and Mr Benjamin Kidd, Doctor Beattie Crozier and Mr Wordsworth Donisthorpe glittering out into any so cheerful an exploit as this before us. Like Mr Gilbert's elderly naval man, they "never larks nor plays", and if indeed they did so far triumph over the turgid intricacies of our speech and the conscientious gravity of our style of thought, there would still be the English public to consider, a public easily offended by any lack of straightforwardness in its humorists, preferring to be amused by known and recognised specialists in that line, in relation to themes of recognised humorous tendency, and requiring in its professors as the concomitant of a certain dignified inaccessibility of thought and language, an honourable abstinence from the treacheries, as it would consider them, of irony and satire. Imagine a Story of the Future from Mr Herbert Spencer! America and the north of England would have swept him out of all respect.... But M. Tarde being not only a Member of the Institute and Professor at the College of France, but a Frenchman, was free to give these fancies that entertained him, public, literary, and witty expression, without self-destruction, and produce what has, in its English dress, a curiously unfamiliar effect. Yet the English reader who can overcome his natural disinclination to this union of intelligence and jesting will find a vast amount of suggestion in M. Tarde's fantastic abundance, and bringing his habitual gravity to bear may even succeed in digesting off the humour altogether, and emerging with edification of—it must be admitted—a rather miscellaneous sort.
It is perhaps remarkable that for so many people, so tremendous a theme as the material future of mankind should only be approachable either through a method of conscientiously technical, pseudo-scientific discussion that is in effect scarcely an approach at all or else in this mood of levity. I know of no book in this direction that can claim to be a permanent success which combines a tolerable intelligibility with a simple good faith in the reader. One may speculate how this comes about? The subject it would seem is so grave and great as to be incompatibly out of proportion to the affairs and conditions of the individual life about which our workaday thinking goes on. We are interested indeed, but at the same time we feel it is outside us and beyond us. To turn one's attention to it is at once to get an effect of presumption, strain, and extravagant absurdity. It is like picking up a spade to attack a mountain, and one's instinct is to put oneself right in the eyes of one's fellow-men at once, by a few unmistakably facetious flourishes. It is the same instinct really as that protective "foolery" in which schoolboys indulge when they embark upon some hopeless undertaking, or find themselves entirely outclassed at a game.
The same instinct one finds in the facetious "parley vous Francey" of a low class Englishman who would in secret like very much to speak French, but in practice only admits such an idea as a laughable absurdity. To give a concrete form to your sociological speculations is to strip them of all their poor pretensions, and leave them shivering in palpable inadequacy. It is not because the question is unimportant, but because it is so overwhelmingly important that this jesting about the Future, this fantastic and "ironical" fiction goes on. It is the only medium to express the vague, ill-formed, new ideas with which we are all labouring. It does not give any measure of our real sense of the proportion of things that the Future should appear in our literature as a sort of comic rally and harlequinade after the serious drama of the Present—in which the heroes and heroines of the latter turn up again in novel and undignified positions; but it seems to be the only method at present available by which we may talk about our race's material Destiny at all.
M. Tarde, in this special case before us, pursues a course of elusive ironies; sometimes he jests at contemporary ideas by imagining them in burlesque realisation, sometimes he jests at contemporary facts by transposing them into strange surroundings, sometimes he broaches fancies of his own chiefly for their own sake, yet with the well-managed literary equivalent of the palliating laugh of conversational diffidence. It is interesting to remark upon the clearness, the French reasonableness and order of his conceptions throughout. He thinks, as the French seem always to think, in terms of a humanity at once more lucid and more limited than the mankind with which we English have to deal. There are no lapses, no fogs and mysteries, no total inadequacies, no brutalities and left-handedness—and no dark gleams of the divinity, about these amused bright people of five hundred years ahead, who are overtaken by the great solar catastrophe. They have established a world state and eliminated the ugly and feeble. You imagine the gentlemen in that Utopia moving gracefully—with beautifully trimmed nails and beards—about the most elegant and ravishing of ladies, their charm greatly enhanced by thepince-nez, that is in universal wear. They all speak not Esperanto—but Greek, which strikes one as a little out of the picture—and all being more or less wealthy and pretty women and handsome men, "as common as blackberries" and as available, "human desire rushed with all its might towards the only field that remained open to it",—politics. From that it was presently turned back again by a certain philosophical financier, who, most delightfully, secured his work for ever, as the reader may learn in detail, by erecting a statue of Louis Philippe in wrought aluminium against any return of the flood—and then what remained? The most brilliant efflorescence of poetry and art!
One does not quite know how far M. Tarde is in this first part of his story jesting at his common countrymen's precisions and finalities and unenterprising, exact arrangements, and how far he is sharing them. Throughout he seems to assume that men can really make finished plans, and carry them out, and settle things for ever, and so assure us this state of elegant promenading among the arts, whereas the whole charm and interest of making plans and carrying out, lies to the more typical kind of Englishman, in his ineradicable, his innate, instinctive conviction, that he will, try as he may, never carry them out at all, but something else adventurously and happily unexpected and different. M. Tarde gives his world the unexpected, but it comes, not insidiously as a unique difference in every individual and item concerned, but from without. Just as Humanity, handsome and charming, has grouped itself pleasantly, rationally, and in the best of taste for ever in its studios, in itssalons, at its little green tables, at itstables d'hôte, in itscabinets particuliers—the sun goes out!
In the idea of that solar extinction there are extraordinary imaginative possibilities, and M. Tarde must have exercised considerable restraint to prevent their running away with him and so jarring with the ironical lightness of his earlier passages. The conception of the sun seized in a mysterious, chill grip and flickering from hue to hue in the skies of a darkened, amazed and terrified world, could be presented in images of stupendous majesty and splendour. There arise visions of darkened cities and indistinct, multitudinous, fleeing crowds, of wide country-sides of chill dismay, of beasts silent with the fear of this last eclipse, and bats and night-birds abroad amidst the lost daylight creatures and fluttering perplexed on noiseless wings. Then the abrupt sight of the countless stars made visible by this great abdication, the thickening of the sky to stormy masses of cloud so that these are hidden again, the soughing of a world-wide wind, and then first little flakes and then the drift and driving of the multiplying snow into the dim illumination of lamps, of windows, of street lights lit untimely. Then again, the shiver of the cold, the clutching of hands at coats and wraps, the blind hurrying to shelter and the comfort of a fire—the blaze of fires. One sees the red-lit faces about the fires, sees the furtive glances at the wind-tormented windows, hears the furious knocking of those other strangers barred out, for, "we cannot have everyone in here". The darkness deepens, the cries without die away, and nothing is left but the shift and falling of the incessant snow from roof to ground. Every now and then the disjointed talk would cease altogether, and in the stillness one would hear the faint yet insistent creeping sound of the snowfall. "There is a little food downstairs," one would say. "The servants must not eat it.... We had better lock it upstairs. We may be here—for days." Grim stuff, indeed, one might make of it all, if one dealt with it in realistic fashion, and great and increasing toil one would find to carry on the tale. M. Tarde was well advised to let his hand pass lightly over this episode, to give us a simply pyrotechnic effect of red, yellow, green and pale blue, to let his people flee and die like marionettes beneath the paper snows of a shop window dressed for Christmas, and to emerge after the change with his urbanity unimpaired. His apt jest at the endurance of artists' models, his easy allusion to the hardening effects of fashionable decolletage, is the measure of his dexterous success; his mention of hotel furniture on the terminal moraines of the returning Alpine glaciers, just a happy touch of that flavouring of reality which in abundance would have altogether overwhelmed his purpose.
Directly one thinks at all seriously of such a thing as this solar extinction, one perceives how preposterously hopeless it is to imagine that mankind would make any head against so swift and absolute a fate. Our race would behave just as any single man behaves when death takes him suddenly through some cardiac failure. It would feel very queer, it would want to sit down and alleviate its strange discomfort, it would say something stupid or inarticulate, make an odd gesture or so, and flicker out. But it is compatible with the fantastic and ironical style for M. Tarde to mock our conceit in our race's capacity and pretend men did all sorts of organized and wholesale things quite beyond their capabilities. People flee in "hordes" to Arabia Petræa and the Sahara, and there perform prodigies of resistance. There arises the heroic leader and preserver, Miltiades, who preaches Neo-troglodytism and loves the peerless Lydia, and leads the remnant of humanity underground. So M. Tarde arrives at the idea he is most concerned in developing, the idea of an introverted world, and people following the dwindling heat of the interior, generation after generation, through gallery and tunnel to the core. About that conception he weaves the finest and richest and most suggestive of his fantastic filaments.
Perhaps the best sustained thread in this admirably entertaining tissue is the entire satisfaction of the imaginary historian at the new conditions of life. The earth is made into an interminable honeycomb, all other forms of life than man are eliminated, and our race has developed into a community sustained at a high level of happiness and satisfaction by a constant resort to "social tonics". Half mockingly, half approvingly, M. Tarde here indicates a new conception of human intercourse and criticises with a richly suggestive detachment, the social relationships of to-day. He moves indicatively and lightly over deeps of human possibility; it is in these later passages that our author is essentially found. One may regret he did not further expand his happy opportunity of treating all the social types to-day as ice embedded fossils, his comments on the peasant and artisan are so fine as to provoke the appetite. He rejects the proposition that "society consists in an exchange of services" with the confidence of a man who has thought it finely out. He gives out clearly what so many of us are beginning dimly perhaps to apprehend, that "society consists in the exchange of reflections". The passages subsequent to this pronouncement will be the seed of many interesting developments in any mind sufficiently attuned to his. They constitute the body, the serious reality to which all the rest of this little book is so much dress, adornment and concealment. Very many of us, I believe, are dreaming of the possibility of human groupings based on interest and a common creative impulse rather than on justice and a trade in help and services; and I do not scruple therefore to put my heavy underline and marginal note to M. Tarde's most intimate moment. A page or so further on he is back below his ironical mask again, jesting at the "tribe of sociologists"—the most unsociable of mankind. Thereafter jest, picturesque suggestion, fantasy, philosophical whim, alternate in a continuously delightful fashion to the end—but always with the gleam of a definite intention coming and going within sight of the surface—and one ends at last a half convinced Neo-troglodyte, invaded by a passion of intellectual regret for the varied interests of that inaccessible world and its irradiating love. The description of the development of science, and particularly of troglodytic astronomy, robbed of its material, is a delightful freak of intellectual fantasy, and the philosophical dream of the slow concentration of human life into the final form of a single culminating omniscient, and therefore a completely retrospective and anticipatory being, a being that is, that has cast aside the time garment, is one of these suggestions that have at once something penetratingly plausible, and a sort of colossal and absurd monstrosity. If I may be forgiven a personal intrusion at this point, there is a singular parallelism between this foreshadowed Last Man of M. Tarde's stalactitic philosopher, and a certainGrand LunarI once wrote about in a book called "The First Men in the Moon". And I remember coming upon the same idea in a book by Merejkowski, the title of which I am now totally unable to recall.... But I will not write further on this curiously attractive and deep seated suggestion. My proper business here is, I think, chiefly to direct the reader past the lightness and cheerful superficiality of the opening portions of this book, and its—at the first blush, rather disappointing but critically justifiable, treatment of the actual catastrophe, to these obscure but curiously stimulating and interesting caves, and tunnels, and galleries in which the elusive real thought of M. Tarde lurks—for those who care to follow it up and seize it and understand.
H. G. WELLS.
It was towards the end of the twentieth century of the prehistoric era, formerly called the Christian, that took place, as is well known, the unexpected catastrophe with which the present epoch began, that fortunate disaster which compelled the overflowing flood of civilisation to disappear for the benefit of mankind. I have briefly to relate this universal cataclysm and the unhoped-for redemption so rapidly effected within a few centuries of heroic and triumphant efforts. Of course, I shall pass over in silence the particular details which are known to everybody, and shall merely confine myself to the general outlines of the story. But first of all it may be as well to recall in a few words the degree of relative progress already attained by mankind, while still living above ground and on the surface of the earth, on the eve of this momentous event.
The zenith of human prosperity seemed to have been reached in the superficial and frivolous sense of the word. For the last fifty years, the final establishment of the great Asiatic-American-European confederacy, and its indisputable supremacy over what was still left, here and there, in Oceania and central Africa of barbarous tribes incapable of assimilation, had habituated all the nations, now converted into provinces, to the delights of universal and henceforth inviolable peace. It had required not less than 150 years of warfare to arrive at this wonderful result. But all these horrors were forgotten. True, there had been many terrific battles between armies of three and four million men, between trains with armour-clad carriages, flung, at full speed, against one another, and opening fire on every side; engagements between squadrons of sub-marines which blew one another up with electric discharges; between fleets of iron-clad balloons, harpooned and ripped up by aerial torpedoes, hurled headlong from the clouds, with thousands of parachutes which violently opened and enveloped each other in a storm of grape-shot as they fell together to earth. Yet of all this warlike mania there only remained a vague poetic remembrance. Forgetfulness is the beginning of happiness, as fear is the beginning of wisdom.
As a solitary exception to the general rule, the nations, after this gigantic blood-letting, did not experience the lethargy that follows from exhaustion, but the calm that the accession of strength produces. The explanation is easy. For about a hundred years the military selection committees had broken with the blind routine of the past and made it a practice to pick out carefully the strongest and best made among the young men, in order to exempt them from the burden of military service which had become purely mechanical, and to send to the depot all the weaklings who were good enough to fulfil the sorely diminished functions of the soldier and even of the non-commissioned officer. That was really a piece of intelligent selection; and the historian cannot conscientiously refuse gratefully to praise this innovation, thanks to which the incomparable beauty of the human race to-day has been gradually developed. In fact, when we now look through the glass cases of our museums of antiquities at those singular collections of caricatures which our ancestors used to call their photographic albums, we can confirm the vastness of the progress thus accomplished, if it is really true that we are actually descended from these dwarfs and scare-crows, as an otherwise trustworthy tradition attests.
From this epoch dates the discovery of the last microbes, which had not yet been analysed by the neo-Pasteurian school. Once the cause of every disease was known, the remedy was not long in becoming known as well, and from that moment, a consumptive or rheumatic patient, or an invalid of any kind became as rare a phenomenon as a double-headed monster formerly was, or an honest publican. Ever since that epoch we have dropped the ridiculous employment of those inquiries about health with which the conversations of our ancestors were needlessly interlarded, such as "How are you?" or "How do you do?" Short-sightedness alone continued its lamentable progress, being stimulated by the extraordinary spread of journalism. There was not a woman or a child, who did not wear apince-nez. This drawback, which besides was only momentary, was largely compensated for by the progress it caused in the optician's art.
Alongside of the political unity which did away with the enmities of nations, there appeared a linguistic unity which rapidly blotted out the last differences between them. Already since the twentieth century the need of a single common language, similar to Latin in the Middle Ages, had become sufficiently intense among the learned throughout the whole world to induce them to make use of an international idiom in all their writings. At the end of a long struggle for supremacy with English and Spanish, Greek finally established its claims, after the break-up of the British Empire and the recapture of Constantinople by the Græco-Russian Empire. Gradually, or rather with the rapidity characteristic of all modern progress, its usage descended from strata to strata till it reached the lowest layers of society, and from the middle of the twenty-second century there was not a little child between the Loire and the River Amour who could not express itself with ease in the language of Demosthenes. Here and there a few isolated villages in the hollows of the mountains still persisted, in spite of the protests of their schoolmasters, to mangle the old dialect formerly called French, German, or Italian, but the sound of this gibberish in the towns would have raised a hearty laugh.
All contemporary documents agree in bearing witness to the rapidity, the depth, and the universality of the change which took place in the customs, ideas, and needs, and in all the forms of social life, thus reduced to a common level from one pole to the other, as a result of this unification of language. It seemed as if the course of civilisation had been hitherto confined within high banks and that now, when for the first time all the banks had burst, it readily spread over the whole globe. It was no longer millions but thousands of millions that the least newly discovered improvement in industry brought in to its inventor; for henceforth there was no barrier to stop in its star-like radiation the expansion of any idea, no matter where it originated. For the same reason it was no longer by hundreds but by thousands, that were reckoned the editions of any book, which appealed but moderately to the public taste, or the performance of a play which was ever so little applauded. The rivalry between authors had therefore risen to its fullest diapason. Their fancy, moreover, could find full scope, for the first effect of this deluge of universalised neo-Hellenism had been to overwhelm for ever all the pretended literatures of our rude ancestors. They became unintelligible, even to the very titles of what they were pleased to call their classical masterpieces, even to the barbarous names of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Hugo, who are now forgotten, and whose rugged verses are deciphered with such difficulty by our scholars. To plagiarise these folks whom hardly anyone could henceforth read, was to render them service, nay, to pay them too much honour. One did not fail to do so; and prodigious was the success of these audacious imitations which were offered as original works. The material thus to turn to account was abundant, and indeed inexhaustible.
Unfortunately for the young writers the ancient poets who had been dead for centuries, Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, had returned to life, a hundred times more hale and hearty than at the time of Pericles himself; and this unexpected competition proved a singular thorn in the side of the new-comers. It was in fact in vain that original geniuses produced on the stage such sensational novelties asAthalias, Hernanias, Macbethès; the public often turned its back on them to rush off to performances ofOedipus Rexor theBirds(of Aristophanes). AndNanais, though a vigorous sketch of a novelist of the new school, was a complete failure owing to the frenzied success of a popular edition of the Odyssey. The ears of the people were saturated with Alexandrines classical, romantic, and the rest. They were bored by the childish tricks of cæsura and rhyme which sometimes attempted a see-saw effect by producing now a poor and now a full rhyme, or again made a pretence of hiding away and keeping out of sight in order to induce the hearer to hunt it out. The splendid, untrammelled, and exuberant hexameters of Homer, the stanzas of Sappho, the iambics of Sophocles, furnished them with unspeakable pleasure, which did the greatest harm to the music of a certain Wagner. Music in general fell to the secondary position to which it really belongs in the hierarchy of the fine arts. To make up for it, in the midst of this scholarly renaissance of the human spirit, there arose an occasion for an unexpected literary outburst which allowed poetry to regain its legitimate rank, that is to say, the foremost. In fact it never fails to flower again when language takes a new lease of life, and all the more so when the latter undergoes a complete metamorphosis, and the pleasure arises of expressing anew the eternal truisms.
It was not merely a simple means of diversion for the cultured. The masses took their share in it with enthusiasm. Certainly they now had leisure to read and appreciate the masterpieces of art. The transmission of force at a distance by electricity, and its enlistment under a thousand forms, for instance, in that of cylinders of compressed air, which could be easily carried from place to place, had reduced manual labour to a mere nothing. The waterfalls, the winds and the tides had become the slaves of man, as steam had once been in the remote ages and in an infinitely less degree. Intelligently distributed and turned to account by means of improved machines, as simple as they were ingenious, this enormous energy freely furnished by nature had long rendered superfluous every kind of domestic servant and the greater number of artisans. The voluntary workmen, who still existed, spent barely three hours a day in the international factories, magnificent co-operative workshops, in which the productivity of human energy, multiplied tenfold, and even a hundredfold, surpassed the expectations of their founders.
This does not mean that the social problem had been thereby solved. In default of want, it is true, there were no longer any quarrels; wealth or a competence had become the lot of every man, with the result that hardly anyone henceforth set any store by them. In default of ugliness, also, love was scarcely an object of either appreciation or jealousy, owing to the abundance of pretty women and handsome men who were as common as blackberries and not difficult to please, in appearance at least. Thus expelled from its two former principal paths, human desire rushed with all its might towards the only field which remained open to it, the conquest of political power, which grew vaster every day owing to the progress of socialistic centralisation. Overflowing ambition, swollen all at once with all the evil passions pouring into it alone, with the covetousness, lust, envious hunger, and hungry envy of preceding ages, reached at that time an appalling height. It was a struggle as to who should make himself master of thatsummum bonum, the State; as to who should make the omnipotence and omniscience of the Universal State minister to the realisation of his personal programme or his humanitarian dreams. The result was not, as had been prophesied, a vast democratic republic. Such an immense outburst of pride could not fail to set up a new throne, the highest, the mightiest, the most glorious that has ever been. Besides, inasmuch as the population of the Single State was reckoned by thousands of millions, universal suffrage had become impracticable and illusory. To obviate the greater inconvenience of deliberative assemblies, ten or a hundred times too numerous, it had been found necessary so to increase the electoral districts that each deputy represented at least ten million electors. That is not surprising if one reflects that it was the first time that the very simple idea had won acceptance of extending to women and children the right of voting exercised in their name, naturally enough, by their father or by their lawful or natural husband. Incidentally one may note that this salutary and necessary reform, as much in accordance with common sense as with logic, required alike by the principle of national sovereignty and by the needs of social stability, nearly failed to pass, incredible as it may seem, in the face of a coalition of celibate electors.
Tradition informs us that the bill relating to this indispensable extension of the franchise would have been infallibly rejected, if, luckily, the recent election of a multi-millionaire suspected of imperialistic tendencies had not scared the assembly. It fancied it would injure the popularity of this ambitious pretender by hastening to welcome this proposal in which it only saw one thing, that is, that the fathers and husbands, outraged or alarmed by the gallantries of the new Cæsar, would be all the stronger for impeding his triumphant march. But this expectation was, it appears, unrealised.
Whatever may be the truth of this legend, it is certain that, owing to the enlargement of the electoral districts, combined with the suppression of the electoral privileges, the election of a deputy was a veritable coronation, and ordinarily produced in the elect a species of megalomania. This reconstituted feudalism was bound to end in a reconstitution of monarchy. For a moment the learned wore this cosmic crown, following the prophecy of an ancient philosopher, but they did not keep it. The popularisation of knowledge through innumerable schools had made science as common an object as a charming woman or an elegant suite of furniture. It had been extraordinarily simplified by the thorough way in which it had been worked out, complete as regards its general outlines, in which no change could be expected, and its henceforth rigid classification abundantly garnished with data. Only advancing at an imperceptible pace, it held, in short, but an insignificant place in the background of the brain, in which it simply replaced the catechism of former days. The bulk of intellectual energy was therefore to be found in another direction, as were also its glory and prestige. Already the scientific bodies, venerable in their antiquity, began, alas! to acquire a slight tinge and veneer of ridicule, which raised a smile and recalled the synods of bonzes or ecclesiastical conferences, such as are represented in very ancient pictures. It is, therefore, not surprising that this first dynasty of imperial physicists and geometricians, genial copies of the Antonines, were promptly succeeded by a dynasty of artists who had deserted art to wield the sceptre, as they lately had wielded the bow, the roughing chisel, and the brush. The most famous of all, a man possessed of an overflowing imagination which was yet well under control, and ministered to by an unparalleled energy, was an architect who among other gigantic projects formed the idea of rasing to the ground his capital, Constantinople, in order to rebuild it elsewhere, on the site of ancient Babylon, which for three thousand years had been a desert—a truly luminous idea. In this incomparable plain of Chaldea watered by a second Nile there was another still more beautiful and fertile Egypt awaiting resurrection and metamorphosis, an infinite expanse extending as far as the eye could see, to be covered with striking public buildings constructed with magical speed, with a teeming and throbbing population, with golden harvests beneath a sky of changeless blue, with an iron net-work of railways radiating from the town of Nebuchadnesor to the furthest ends of Europe, Africa and Asia, and crossing the Himalayas, the Caucasus, and the Sahara. The stored energy, electrically conveyed, of a hundred Abyssinian waterfalls, and of, I do not know, how many cyclones, hardly sufficed to transport from the mountains of Armenia the necessary stone, wood and iron for these numerous constructions. One day an excursion train, composed of a thousand and one carriages, having passed too close to the electric cable at the moment when the current was at its maximum, was destroyed and reduced to ashes in the twinkling of an eye. None the less Babylon, the proud city of muddy clay, with its paltry splendours of unbaked and painted brick, found itself rebuilt in marble and granite, to the utmost confusion of the Nabopolassars, the Belshazzars, the Cyruses, and the Alexanders. It is needless to add that the archæologists made on this occasion the most priceless discoveries, in the several successive strata, of Babylonian and Assyrian antiquities. The mania for Assyriology went so far that every sculptor's studio, the palaces, and even the King's armorial bearings were invaded by winged bulls with human heads, just as formerly the museums were full of cupids or cherubims, "with their cravat-like wings". Certain school books for primary schools were actually printed in cuneiform characters in order to enhance their authority over the youthful imagination.
This imperial orgy in bricks and mortar having unhappily occasioned the seventh, eighth, and ninth bankruptcy of the State and several consecutive inundations of paper-money, the people in general rejoiced to see after this brilliant reign the crown borne by a philosophical financier. Order had hardly been re-established in the finances, when he made his preparation for applying on a grand scale his ideal of government, which was of a highly remarkable nature. One was not long in noticing, in fact, after his accession, that all the newly chosen ladies of honour, who were otherwise very intelligent but entirely lacking in wit, were chiefly conspicuous for their striking ugliness; that the liveries of the court were of a grey and lifeless colour; that the court balls reproduced by instantaneous cinematography to the tune of millions of copies furnished a collection of the most honest and insignificant faces and unappetising forms that one could possibly see; that the candidates recently appointed, after a preliminary despatch of their portraits, to the highest dignities of the Empire, were pre-eminently distinguished by the commonness of their bearing; in short, that the races and the public holidays (the date of which were notified in advance by secret telegrams announcing the arrival of a cyclone from America), happened nine times out of ten to take place on a day of thick fog, or of pelting rain, which transformed them into an immense array of waterproofs and umbrellas. Alike in his legislative proposals, as in his appointments, the choice of the prince was always the following: the most useful and the best among the most unattractive. An insufferable sameness of colour, a depressing monotony, a sickening insipidity were the distinctive note of all the acts of the government. People laughed, grew excited, waxed indignant, and got used to it. The result was that at the end of a certain time it was impossible to meet an office-seeker or a politician, that is to say, an artist or literary man, out of his element and in search of the beautiful in an alien sphere, who did not turn his back on the pursuit of a government appointment in order to return to rhyming, sculpture and painting. And from that moment the following aphorism has won general acceptance, that the superiority of the politician is only mediocrity raised to its highest power.
This is the great benefit that we owe to this eminent monarch. The lofty purpose of his reign has been revealed by the posthumous publication of his memoirs. Of these writings with which we can so ill dispense, we have only left this fragment which is well calculated to make us regret the loss of the remainder: "Who is the true founder of Sociology? Auguste Comte? No, Menenius Agrippa. This great man understood that government is the stomach, not the head of the social organism. Now, the merit of a stomach is to be good and ugly, useful and repulsive to the eye, for if this indispensable organ were agreeable to look upon, it would be much to be feared that people would meddle with it and nature would not have taken such care to conceal and defend it. What sensible person prides himself on having a beautiful digestive apparatus, a lovely liver or elegant lungs? Such a pretension would, however, not be more ridiculous than the foible of cutting a great dash in politics. What wants cultivating is the substantial and the commonplace. My poor predecessors." ... Here follows a blank; a little further on, we read: "The best government is that which holds to being so perfectly humdrum, regular, neuter, and even emasculated, that no one can henceforth get up any enthusiasm either for or against it."
Such was the last successor of Semiramis. On the re-discovered site of the Hanging-gardens he caused to be erected, at the expense of the State, a statue of Louis Philippe in wrought aluminium, in the middle of a public garden planted with common laurels and cauliflowers.
The Universe breathed again. It yawned a little no doubt, but it revelled for the first time in the fulness of peace, in the almost gratuitous abundance of every kind of wealth. It burst into the most brilliant efflorescence, or rather display of poetry and art, but especially of luxury, that the world had as yet seen. It was just at that moment an extraordinary alarm of a novel kind, justly provoked by the astronomical observations made on the tower of Babel, which had been rebuilt as an Eiffel Tower on an enlarged scale, began to spread among the terrified populations.
On several occasions already the sun had given evident signs of weakness. From year to year his spots increased in size and number, and his heat sensibly diminished. People were lost in conjecture. Was his fuel giving out? Had he just traversed in his journey through space an exceptionally cold region? No one knew. Whatever the reason was, the public concerned itself little about the matter, as in all that is gradual and not sudden. The "solar anæmia," which moreover restored some degree of animation to neglected astronomy, had merely become the subject of several rather smart articles in the reviews. In general, thesavants, in their well-warmed studies, affected to disbelieve in the fall of temperature, and, in spite of the formal indications of the thermometer, they did not cease to repeat that the dogma of slow evolution, and of the conservation of energy combined with the classical nebular hypothesis, forbade the admission of a sufficiently rapid cooling of the solar mass to make itself felt during the short duration of a century, much more so during that of five years or a year. A few unorthodox persons of heretical and pessimistic temperament remarked, it is true, that at different epochs, if one believed the astronomers of the remote past, certain stars had gradually burnt out in the heavens, or had passed from the most dazzling brilliance to an almost complete obscurity, during the course of barely a single year. They therefore concluded that the case of our sun had nothing exceptional about it; that the theory of slow-footed evolution was not perhaps universally applicable; and that, sometimes, as an old visionary mystic called Cuvier had ventured to put forward in legendary times, veritable revolutions took place in the heavens as well as on earth. But orthodox science combated with indignation these audacious theories.
However, the winter of 2489 was so disastrous, it was actually necessary to take the threatening predictions of the alarmists seriously. One reached the point of fearing at any moment a "solar apoplexy." That was the title of a sensational pamphlet which went through twenty thousand editions. The return of the spring was anxiously awaited.
The spring returned at last, and the starry monarch reappeared, but his golden crown was gone, and he himself well-nigh unrecognisable. He was entirely red. The meadows were no longer green, the sky was no longer blue, the Chinese were no longer yellow, all had suddenly changed colour as in a transformation scene. Then, by degrees, from the red that he was he became orange. He might then have been compared to a golden apple in the sky, and so during several years he was seen to pass, and all nature with him, through a thousand magnificent or terrible tints—from orange to yellow, from yellow to green, and from green at length to indigo and pale blue. The meteorologists then recalled the fact, in the year 1883, on the second of September, the sun had appeared in Venezuela the whole day long as blue as the moon. So many colours, so many new decorations of the chameleon-like universe which dazzled the terrified eye, which revived and restored to its primitive sharpness the rejuvenated sensation of the beauties of nature, and strongly stirred the depths of men's souls by renewing the former aspect of things.
At the same time disaster succeeded disaster. The entire population of Norway, Northern Russia, and Siberia perished, frozen to death in a single night; the temperate zone was decimated, and what was left of its inhabitants fled before the enormous drifts of snow and ice, and emigrated by hundreds of millions towards the tropics, crowding into the panting trains, several of which, overtaken by tornadoes of snow, disappeared for ever.
The telegraph successively informed the capital, now that there was no longer any news of immense trains caught in the tunnels under the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Caucasus, or Himalayas, in which they were imprisoned by enormous avalanches, which blocked simultaneously the two issues; now that some of the largest rivers of the world—the Rhine, for instance, and the Danube—had ceased to flow, completely frozen to the bottom, from which resulted a drought, followed by an indescribable famine, which obliged thousands of mothers to devour their own children. From time to time a country or continent broke off suddenly its communication with the central agency, the reason being that an entire telegraphic section was buried under the snow, from which at intervals emerged the uneven tops of their posts, with their little cups of porcelain. Of this immense network of electricity which enveloped in its close meshes the entire globe, as of that prodigious coat of mail with which the complicated system of railways clothed the earth, there was only left some scattered fragments, like the remnant of the Grand Army of Napoleon during the retreat from Russia.
Meanwhile, the glaciers of the Alps, the Andes, and of all the mountains of the world hitherto vanquished by the sun, which for several thousand centuries had been thrust back into their last entrenchments, resumed their triumphant march. All the glaciers that had been dead since the geological ages came to life again, more colossal than ever. From all the valleys in the Alps or Pyrenees, that were lately green and peopled with delightful health resorts, there issued these snowy hordes, these streams of icy lava, with their frontal moraine advancing as it spread over the plain, a moving cliff composed of rocks and overturned engines, of the wreckage of bridges, stations, hotels and public edifices, whirled along in the wildest confusion, a heart-breaking welter of gigantic bric-à-brac, with which the triumphant invasion decked itself out as with the loot of victory. Slowly, step by step, in spite of sundry transient intervals of light and warmth, in spite of occasionally scorching days which bore witness to the supreme convulsions of the sun in its battle against death, which revived in men's souls misleading hopes, athwart and even by means of these unexpected changes the pale invaders advanced. They retook and recovered one by one all their ancient realms in the glacial period, and if they found on the road some gigantic vagrant block lying in sullen solitude, near some famous city, a hundred leagues from its native hills, mysterious witness of the immense catastrophe of former times, they raised it and bore it onward, cradling it on their unyielding waves, as an advancing army recaptures and enfurls its ancient flags, all covered with dust, which it has found again in its enemies' sanctuaries.
But what was the glacial period compared with this new crisis of the globe and the sky? Doubtless it had been due to a similar attack of weakness, to a similar failure of the sun, and many species of animals had necessarily perished at the time, from being insufficiently clad. That had been, however, but a warning bell, so to say, a simple notification of the final and fatal attack. The glacial periods—for we know there have been several—now explained themselves by their reappearance on a large scale. But this clearing up of an obscure point in geology was, one must admit, an insufficient compensation for the public disasters which were its price.
What calamities! What horrors! My pen confesses its impotence to retrace them. Besides how can we tell the story of disasters which were so complete they often simultaneously overwhelmed under snow-drifts a hundred yards deep all that witnessed them, to the very last man. All that we know for certain is what took place at the time towards the end of the twenty-fifth century in a little district of Arabia Petræa.
Thither had flocked for refuge, in one horde after another, wave after wave, with host upon host frozen one on the top of another, as they advanced, the few millions of human creatures who survived of the hundreds of millions that had disappeared. Arabia Petræa had, therefore, along with the Sahara, become the most populous country of the globe. They transported hither by reason of the relative warmth of its climate, I will not say the seat of Government—for, alas! Terror alone reigned—but an immense stove which took its place, and whatever remained of Babylon now covered over by a glacier. A new town was constructed in a few months on the plans of an entirely new system of architecture, marvellously adapted for the struggle against the cold. By the most happy of chances some rich and unworked coal mines were discovered on the spot. There was enough fuel there, it seems, to provide warmth for many years to come. And as for food, it was not as yet too pressing a question. The granaries contained several sacks of corn, while waiting for the sun to revive and the corn to sprout again. The sun had certainly revived after the glacial periods; why should it not do so again? asked the optimists.
It was but the hope of a day. The sun assumed a violet hue. The frozen corn ceased to be eatable. The cold became so intense that the walls of the houses as they contracted cracked and admitted blasts of air which killed the inhabitants on the spot. A physicist affirmed that he saw crystals of solid nitrogen and oxygen fall from the sky which gave rise to the fear that the atmosphere would shortly become decomposed. The seas were already frozen solid. A hundred thousand human creatures huddling around the huge government stove, which was no longer equal to restoring their circulation, were turned into icicles in a single night; and the night following, a second hundred thousand perished likewise. Of the beautiful human race, so strong and noble, formed by so many centuries of effort and genius by such an intelligent and extended selection, there would soon have been only left a few thousands, a few hundreds of haggard and trembling specimens, unique trustees of the last ruins of what had once been civilisation.
In this extremity a man arose who did not despair of humanity. His name has been preserved for us. By a singular coincidence he was called Miltiades, like another saviour of Hellenism. He was not, however, of Hellenic race. A cross between a Slave and a Breton he had only half sympathised with the prosperity of the Neo-Græcian world with its levelling and enervating tendencies, and amid this wholesale obliteration of previous civilisation, and universal triumph of a kind of Byzantine renaissance brought up to date, he belonged to those who reverently guarded in the depths of their heart the germs of recusancy. But, like the barbarian stilicho, the last defender of the foundering Roman world against the barbaric hordes, it was precisely this disbeliever in civilisation who alone undertook to arrest it on the brink of its vast downfall. Eloquent and handsome, but nearly always taciturn, he was not without certain resemblances in pose and features, so it was said, to Chateaubriand and Napoleon (two celebrities, as one knows, who in their time were famous throughout an entire continent). Worshipped by the women of whom he was the hope, and by the men who stood greatly in awe of him, he had early kept the crowd at arm's length, and a singular accident had doubled his natural shyness. Finding the sea less monotonously dull at any rate than terra firma, and in any case more unconfined, he had passed his youth on board the last iron-clad of State of which he was captain, in patrolling the coasts of continents, in dreaming of impossible adventures, and of conquests when all was conquered, of discoveries of America when all was discovered, and in cursing all former travellers, discoverers and conquerors, fortunate reapers in all the fields of glory in which there was nothing more left to glean. One day, however, he believed he had discovered a new island—it was a mistake—and he had the joy of engaging in a fight, the last of which ancient history makes mention, with an apparently highly primitive tribe of savages, who spoke English and read the Bible. In this fight he displayed such valour that he was unanimously pronounced to be mad by his crew, and was in great danger of losing his rank after a specialist in insanity, who had been called in, was on the point of publicly confirming popular opinion by declaring he was suffering from suicidal mono-mania of a novel kind. Luckily an archæologist protested and showed by actual documents that this phenomenon, which had become so unusual but was frequent in past ages under the name of bravery, was a simple case of ancestral reversion sufficiently serious to merit examination. As luck would have it, the unfortunate Miltiades had been wounded in the face in the same encounter; and the scar which all the art of the best surgeons never succeeded in removing, drew down upon him the annoying and almost insulting nick-name of "scarred face". It may be readily understood how from this time forward, soured by the consciousness of his partial disfigurement, as the ancient bard Byron had formerly been for a nearly similar reason, he avoided appearing in public, and thereby giving the crowd an opportunity of pointing the finger of scorn at the visible traces of his former attack of madness. He was never seen again till the day when, his vessel being hemmed in by the icebergs of the Gulf Stream, he was obliged with his companions to finish the crossing on foot over the solidly frozen Atlantic.
In the middle of the central state shelter, a huge vaulted hall with walls ten yards thick, without windows, surrounded with a hundred gigantic furnaces, and perpetually lit up by their hundred flaming maws, Miltiades one day appeared. The remnant of the flower of humanity, of both sexes, splendid even in its misery, was huddled together there. They did not consist of the great men of science with their bald pates, nor even the great actresses, nor the great writers, whose inspiration had deserted them, nor the consequential ones now past their prime, nor of prim old ladies—broncho-pneumonia, alas! had made a clean sweep of them all at the very first frost—but the enthusiastic heirs of their traditions, their secrets, and also of their vacant chairs, that is to say, their pupils, full of talent and promise. Not a single university professor was there, but a crowd of deputies and assistants; not a single minister, but a crowd of young secretaries of state. Not a single mother of a family, but a bevy of artists' models, admirably formed, and inured against the cold by the practice of posing for the nude; above all, a number of fashionable beauties, who had been likewise saved by the excellent hygienic effect of daily wearing low dresses, without taking into account the warmth of their temperament. Among them it was impossible not to notice the Princess Lydia, owing to her tall and exquisite figure, the brilliancy of her dress and her wit, of her dark eyes and fair complexion, owing in fact to the radiance of her whole person. She had carried off the prize at the last grand international beauty competition, and was accounted the reigning beauty of the drawing-rooms of Babylon. What a different set of individuals from that which the spectator formerly surveyed through his opera-glass from the top of the galleries of the so-called Chamber of Deputies! Youth, beauty, genius, love, infinite treasures of science and art, writers whose pens were of pure gold, artists with marvellous technique, singers one raved about, all that was left of refinement and culture on the earth, was concentrated in this last knot of human beings, which blossomed under the snow like a tuft of rhododendrons, or of Alpine roses at the foot of some mountain summit. But what dejection had fallen on these fair flowers! How sadly drooped these manifold graces!
At the sudden apparition of Miltiades every brow was lifted, every eye was fastened upon him. He was tall, lean, and wizened, in spite of the false plumpness of his thick white furs. When he threw back his big white hood, which recalled the Dominican cowl of antiquity, they caught sight of his huge scar athwart the icicles on his beard and eyebrows. At the sight of it first a smile and then a shudder, which was not due to cold alone, ran through the ranks of the women. For must we confess it, in spite of the efforts of a rational education, the inclination to applaud bravery and its indications could not be entirely uprooted from their hearts. Lydia, notably, remained imbued with this sentiment of another age, by a kind of moral ancestral reversion which served as a pendant to her physical atavism. She concealed so little her feelings of admiration, that Miltiades himself was struck by it. Her admiration was combined with astonishment, for he was believed to have been dead for years. They asked one another by what accumulation of miracles he had been able to escape the fate of his companions. He requested leave to speak. It was granted him. He mounted a platform, and such a profound silence ensued, one might have heard the snow falling outside, in spite of the thickness of the walls. But let us at this point allow an eye-witness to speak; let us copy an extract of the account that he phonographed of this memorable scene. I pass over the part of Miltiades' discourse in which he related the thrilling story of the dangers he had encountered from the time he left his vessel. (Continuous applause.) After stating that in passing by Paris on a sledge drawn by reindeer—thanks to it being the season of the dog-days—he had recognised the site of this buried city by the double-pointed mound of snow which had formed over the spires of Notre-Dame—(excitement in the audience)—the speaker continued:—
"The situation is serious," said he, "nothing like it has been seen since the geological epochs. Is it irretrievable? No! (Hear! hear!) Desperate diseases require desperate remedies. An idea, a glimmer of hope has flashed upon me, but it is so strange, I shall never dare to reveal it to you. (Speak! speak!) No, I dare not, I shall never dare to formulate this project. You would believe me to be still insane. You desire it, you promise me to listen to the end to my absurd and extravagant project? (Yes! yes!) Even to give it a fair trial? (Yes! yes!) Well! I will speak. (Silence!)
"The hour has come to ascertain to what extent it is true to say and to keep on repeating, as has been the practice for the last three centuries since the time of a certain Stephenson, that all our energy, all our strength, whether physical or moral, comes to us from the sun.... (Numerous voices: 'That is so'). The calculation has been made: in two years, three months, and six days, if there still remains a morsel of coal there will not remain a morsel of bread! (Prolonged sensation.) Therefore, if the source of all force, of all motion, and all life is in the sun, and in the sun alone, there is no ground for self-delusion: in two years, three months, and six days, the genius of man will be quenched, and through the gloomy heavens the corpse of mankind, like a Siberian mammoth, will roll for everlasting, incapable for ever of resurrection. (Excitement.)
"But is that the case? No, it is not, it cannot be the case. With all the energy of my heart, which does not come from the sun—that energy which comes from the earth, from our mother earth buried there below, far, far away, for ever hidden from our eyes—I protest against this vain theory, and against so many articles of faith and religion which I have been obliged hitherto to endure in silence. (Slight murmurs from the centre.) The earth is the contemporary of the sun, and not its daughter; the earth was formerly a luminous star like the sun, only sooner extinct. It is only on the surface that the earth is devoid of movement, frozen and paralysed. Its bosom is ever warm and burning. It has only concentrated its fire within itself in order to preserve it better. (Signs of interest in the audience.) There lies a virgin force that is unexploited, a force superior to all that the sun has been able to generate for our industry by waterfalls which to-day are frozen, by cyclones which now have ceased, by tides which to-day are suspended; a force in which our engineers, with a little initiative, will find a hundredfold the equivalent of the motive power they have lost. It is no more by this gesture (the speaker raises his finger to heaven), that the hope of salvation should henceforth be expressed, it is by this one. (He lowers his right hand towards the earth.... Signs of astonishment: a few murmurs of dissent which are immediately repressed by the women.) We must say no more: 'Up there!' but, 'below!' There, below, far below, lies the promised Eden, the abode of deliverance and of bliss: there, and there alone, there are still innumerable conquests and discoveries to be made! (Bravos on the left.) Ought I to draw my conclusion? (Yes! yes!) Let us descend into these depths; let us make these abysses our sure retreat. The mystics had a sublime presentiment when they said in their Latin: 'From the outward to the inward.' The earth calls us to its inner self. For many centuries it has lived separated, so to say, from its children, the living creatures it produced outside during its period of fecundity before the cooling of its crust! After its crust cooled, the rays of a distant star alone, it is true, have maintained on this dead epidermis their artificial and superficial life which has been a stranger to her own.
"But this schism has lasted too long. It is imperative that it should cease. It is time to follow Empedocles, Ulysses, Æneas, Dante, to the gloomy abodes of the underworld, to plunge mankind again in the fountain from which it sprang, to effect the complete restoration of the exiled soul to the land of its birth! (Applause here and there.) Besides, there is but this alternative: life underground or death. The sun is failing us: let us dispense with the sun. The plan, which it remains for me to propose, has been worked out for several months past by the most eminent men. To-day it is finished; it is final. It is complete in all its details. Does it interest you? (On all sides: 'Read it, read it.') You will see that with discipline, patience, and courage—yes, courage, I risk this evil-sounding word ('Risk it, risk it.')—and above all, with the aid of that splendid heritage of science and art which comes to us from the past, for which we are accountable to the most distant of our descendants, to the boundless universe, and I was going to say, to God (signs of surprise), we can be saved if we will." (Thunder of applause.)
The speaker next entered into lengthy details, which it is useless to reproduce here, on the Neo-troglodytism which he pretended to inaugurate as the acme of civilisation, "which had," said he, "began with caves, and was destined to return to these subterranean retreats, but at a far deeper level." He displayed designs, quantities and drawings. He had no trouble in proving that, on condition of burrowing sufficiently deep into the ground below, they would find a deliciously gentle warmth, an Elysian temperature. It would be enough to excavate, enlarge, heighten, and extend the galleries of already existing mines in order to render them habitable and comfortable into the bargain. The electric light, supplied entirely without expense by the scattered centres of the fire within, would provide for the magnificent illumination both by day and night of these colossal crypts, these marvellous cloisters, indefinitely extended and embellished by successive generations. With a good system of ventilation, all danger of suffocation or of foulness of air would be avoided. In short, after a more or less long period of settling in, civilised life could unfold anew in all its intellectual, artistic, and fashionable splendour, as freely as it did in the capricious and intermittent light or natural day, and even perhaps more surely. At these last words, the Princess Lydia broke her fan, by dint of applauding. An objection then came from the right, "With what shall we be fed?" Miltiades smiled disdainfully and replied: "Nothing is simpler. For ordinary drinking purposes we first of all shall have melted ice. Every day we shall transport enormous blocks of it in order to keep the orifices of the crypts free from obstruction, and to supply the public fountains. I may add that chemists undertake to manufacture alcohol from anything, even from mineralised rocks, and that it is the A.B.C. of the grocer's trade to manufacture wine from alcohol and water. ('Hear! hear!' from all the benches). As for food, is not chemistry also capable of manufacturing butter, albumen, and milk from no matter what? Besides, has the last word been said on the subject? Is it not highly probable that before long, if it takes up the matter, it will succeed in satisfying, both on the score of quantity and expense, the desires of the most refined gastronomy? And, meanwhile.... (a voice timidly: 'Meanwhile?') Meanwhile does not our disaster itself, by a kind of providential occurrence, place within our reach the best stocked, the most abundant, the most inexhaustible larder that the human race has ever had? Immense stores, the most admirable which have hitherto been laid down, are lying for us under the ice or the snow. Myriads of domestic or wild animals—I dare not add, of men and women (a general shudder of horror)—but at least of bullocks, sheep and poultry, frozen instantaneously in a single mass, are lying here and there in the public markets a few steps away. Let us collect, as long as such work is still possible out of doors, this boundless quarry which was destined to feed for years several hundreds of millions, and which will well suffice, in consequence, to feed a few thousands only for ages, even should they multiply unduly, in despite of Malthus. If stacked in the neighbourhood of the orifice of the chief cavern, they will be easy to get at and will provide a delightful fare for our fraternal love-feasts."
Still further objections were formulated from different quarters. They were forcibly disposed of with the same irresistible easy assurance. The conclusion is worthy of a verbatim quotation: "However extraordinary the catastrophe which has befallen us and the means of escape which is left us may seem in appearance, a little reflection will suffice to prove to us that the predicament in which we are, must have been repeated a thousand times already in the immensity of the universe, and must have been cleared up in the same fashion, being inevitably and normally the final phase in the life-drama of every star. The astronomers know that every sun is bound to become extinct; they know, therefore, that in addition to the luminous and visible stars, there are in the heavens an infinitely greater number of extinct and rayless stars which continue endlessly to revolve with their train of planets, doomed to an eternity of night and cold. Well, if this is the case, I ask you: Can we suppose that life, thought, and love, are the exclusive privilege of an infinite minority of solar systems still possessed of light and heat, and deny to the immense majority of gloomy stars every manifestation of life and animation, the very highest reason for their existence? Thus lifelessness, death, the void in movement would be the rule; and life the exception! Thus the nine-tenths, the ninety-nine hundredths, perhaps, of the solar systems, would idly revolve like senseless and gigantic mill-wheels, a useless encumbrance of space. That is impossible and idiotic, that is blasphemous. Let us have more faith in the unknown! Truth, here as everywhere else, is without doubt the antipodes of appearance. All that glitters is not gold. These splendid constellations which attempt to dazzle us are themselves relatively barren. Their light, what is it? A transient glory, a ruinous luxury, an ostentatious squandering of energy, born of illimitable senselessness. But when the stars have sown their wild oats, then the serious task of their life begins, they develop their inner resources. For frozen and sunless without, they literally preserve in their inviolate centres their unquenchable fire, defended by the very layers of ice. There, finally, is to be relit the lamp of life, banished from the surface above. For a last time, therefore, let us look upwards in order there to find hope. Up there innumerable races of mankind under ground, buried, to their supreme joy, in the catacombs of invisible stars, encourage us by their example. Let us act like them, let us like them withdraw to the interior of our planet. Like them, let us bury ourselves in order to rise again, and like them let us carry with us into our tomb, all that is worthy to survive of our previous existence. It is not merely bread alone that man has need of. He must live to think, and not merely think to live.
"Recall the legend of Noah: to escape from a disaster almost equal to our own, and to dispute with it all that the earth had most precious in his eyes; what did he do, though he was but a simple-minded fellow and addicted to drink? He turned his ark into a museum, containing a complete collection of plants and animals, even of poisonous plants, of wild beasts, boa-constrictors, and scorpions, and by reason of this picturesque but incongruous cargo of creatures mutually harmful and seeking one and all to devour each other, of this miscellany of living contradictions which for so long was so foolishly worshipped under the name of Nature, he believed in good faith to have deserved well of the future.
"But we, in our new ark, mysterious, impenetrable, indestructible, shall carry with us neither plants nor animals. These types of existence are annihilated; these rough drafts in creation, these fumbling experiments of Earth in quest of the human form are for ever blotted out. Let us not regret it. In place of so many pairs of animals which take up so much room, of so many useless seeds, we will carry with us into our retreat the harmonious garland of all the truths in perfect accord with one another; of all artistic and poetic beauties, which are all members one of another, united like sisters, which human genius has brought to light in the course of ages and multiplied thereafter in millions of copies: all of which will be destroyed save a single one, which it will be our task to guarantee against all danger of destruction. We shall establish a vast library containing all the principal works, enriched with cinematographic albums. We shall set up a vast museum composed of single specimens of all the schools, of all the styles of the masters in architecture, sculpture, painting, and even music. These are our real treasures, our real seed for future harvests, our gods for whom we will do battle till our latest breath."
The speaker stepped down from the platform in the midst of indescribable enthusiasm: the ladies crowded round him. They deputed Lydia to bestow on him a kiss in the name of them all. Blushing with modesty the latter obeyed—a further sign of moral atavism on her part—and the applause redoubled. The thermometers of the shelter rose several degrees in a few minutes.
It is well to recall to the younger generation these resolute words, between the lines of which they will read the gratitude they owe to the heroic "Scarred face," who so nearly died with the reputation of a mono-maniac. They, too, are beginning to grow enervated and accustomed to the delights of their underground Elysium, to the luxurious spaciousness of these endless catacombs, the legacy of gigantic toil on the part of their fathers, they too, are, inclined to think that all this happened of its own accord, or at least was inevitable, that after all there was no other way of escaping from the cold above ground, and that this simple expedient did not require a great outlay of imagination. Profound error! At its first appearance, the idea of Miltiades had been hailed, and rightly enough, as a flash of genius. But for him, but for his energy, and his eloquence, which was placed at the service of his imagination, but for his forcefulness, his charm, and his perseverance, which seconded his energy, let us add, but for the profound passion that Lydia, the noblest and most valiant of women, had been able to inspire in him, and which increased his heroism tenfold, humanity would have suffered the fate of all the other animal or vegetable species. What strikes us to-day in his discourse is the extraordinary and truly prophetic lucidity with which he sketched in general terms the conditions of existence in the new world. Without doubt, these expectations have been immensely surpassed. He did not foresee, he could not foresee, the prodigious accessions which his original idea has received owing to its development by thousands of auxiliary geniuses. He was far more right than he fancied, like the majority of reformers—who are generally wrongly accused, of being too much wrapt up in their own ideas. But on the whole, never was so magnificent a plan so promptly carried out.
From that very day all these exquisite and delicate hands set to work, aided, it is true, by incomparable machines. Everywhere, at the head of all the workings, were to be found Lydia and Miltiades. Henceforth inseparable, they vied with one another in ardour; and before a year was out the galleries of the mines had become sufficiently large and comfortable, sufficiently decorated even and brilliantly lighted, to receive the vast and priceless collections of all kinds, which it was their object to place in safety there, in view of the future.
With infinite precautions they were lowered one after another, bale by bale, into the bowels of the earth. This salvage of the goods and chattels of humanity was methodically carried out. It included all the quintessence of the ancient grand libraries of Paris, Berlin, and London, which had been brought together at Babylon, and then carried for safety into the desert with the rest. The cream of all former museums, of all previous exhibitions of industry and art, was concentrated there with considerable additions. There were manuscripts, books, bronzes, and pictures. What an expenditure of energy and incessant toil, in spite of the assistance of inter-terrestrial forces, had been necessary for packing, transporting, and housing it all! And yet, for the greater part, it was useless to those who voluntarily this task imposed upon themselves. They all knew it. They were well aware that they were probably condemned for the rest of their days to a hard and matter-of-fact existence, for which their lives as artists, philosophers, and men of letters, had scarcely prepared them. But—for the first time—the idea of duty to be done found its way into these hearts, the beauty of self-sacrifice subdued these dilettanti. They sacrificed themselves to the Unknown, to that which is not yet, to the posterity towards which were turned all the desires of their electrified spirits, as all the atoms of the magnetised iron turn towards the pole. It was thus that, at the time when there were still countries, in the midst of some great national peril, a wave of heroism swept over the most frivolous cities. However admirable may have been, at the epoch of which I speak, this collective need of individual self-sacrifice, ought we to be astonished at it, when we know from the treatises on natural history that have been preserved, that mere insects giving the same example of foresight and self-renunciation, used before their death to employ their latest energies to collect provisions useless to themselves, and only useful in the future to their larvæ at their birth.