UNDERGROUND MAN
By
GABRIEL TARDE
(1843-1904)
MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE
PROFESSOR AT THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE
TRANSLATED BY CLOUDESLEY BRERETON
M.A., L. ÈS L.
WITH A PREFACE BY H.G. WELLS
LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
1905
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
DEDICATION
PREFACE By H.G. WELLS
INTRODUCTORY
I. PROSPERITY
II. THE CATASTROPHE
III. THE STRUGGLE
IV. SAVED
V. REGENERATION
VI. LOVE
VII. THE ÆSTHETIC LIFE
NOTE ON TARDE By JOSEPH MANCHON
PREFACE
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 the _pince-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 its
_salons_, at its little green tables, at its _tables d'hôte_, in its
_cabinets 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 certain _Grand Lunar_ I
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.
INTRODUCTORY
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.
I
PROSPERITY
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
a _pince-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 as _Athalias, Hernanias,
Macbethès_; the public often turned its back on them to rush off to
performances of _Oedipus Rex_ or the _Birds_ (of Aristophanes). And
_Nanais_, 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 that _summum 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.
II
THE CATASTROPHE
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, the
_savants_, 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.