accomplished from the days when the æsthetic activity, by dint of ever
growing, ended by vanquishing utilitarian activity. Henceforth in place
of the relation of producer to consumer has been substituted, as
preponderating element in human dealings, the relation of the artist to
the art-lover. The ancient social ideal was to seek amusement or
self-satisfaction apart and to render mutual service. For this we
substitute the following: to be one's own servant and mutually to
delight one another. Henceforward, to insist once more, society reposes,
not on the exchange of services, but on the exchange of admiration or
criticism, of favourable or unfavourable judgments. The anarchical
regime of greed in all its forms has been succeeded by the autocratic
government of enlightened opinion which has become supreme. For our
worthy ancestors deceived themselves finely when they persuaded
themselves that social progress led to what they termed freedom of
thought. We have something better; we possess the joy and the strength
of the mind which attains a certainty of its own, founded, as it is, on
its only sure basis, the unanimity of other minds on certain essential
matters. On this rock we can rear the highest constructions of thought,
nay, the most gigantic systems of philosophy.
The error, at present recognised, of those ancient visionaries called
socialists was their failure to see that this life in common, this
intense social life, they dreamt of so ardently, had for its
indispensable condition the æsthetic life and the universal propagation
of the religion of truth and beauty. The latter assumes the drastic
lopping off of numerous personal wants. Consequently in rushing, as they
did, into an exaggerated development of commercial life, they were
marching in the opposite direction to their own goal.
They must have begun, I am well aware, by uprooting the fatal habit of
eating bread, which made man a slave to the tyrannical whims of a plant,
of beasts which were necessary for the manuring of this plant, and of
other plants which served as fodder for their beasts.... But as long as
this unhappy craving was rampant and they refrained from combating it,
it was obligatory to abstain from arousing others which were not less
anti-social, that is to say, not less natural. It was far better to
leave men at the ploughtail than to attract them to the factory, for the
dispersion and isolation of individualist types are more preferable to
bringing them together, which can only result in setting them by the
ears. But let us hurry on. All the advantages for which we are indebted
to our anti-natural position are now clear. We alone have realised all
the quintessence of refinement and reality, of strength and of
sweetness, that the social life contains. Formerly, here and there, in a
few rare cases in the midst of deserts an individual had certainly had a
distant foretaste of this ineffable thing, not to mention three or four
salons in the eighteenth century under the ancient regime, two or three
painters' studios, one or two green-rooms. They represented, in a way,
imperceptible cores of social protoplasm lost amid a mass of foreign
matter. But this marrow has become the entire bone at present. Our
cities, all in all, are one vast workshop, household and reception hall.
And this has happened in the simplest and most inevitable manner in the
world. Following the law of separation of the old Herbert Spencer, the
selection of heterogeneous talents and vocations was bound to take place
of its own accord. In fact, at the end of a century there was already
underground in course of development and continuous excavation a city of
painters, a city of sculptors, a city of musicians, of poets, of
geometricians, of physicists, of chemists, even of naturalists, of
psychologists, of scientific or æsthetic specialists of every kind,
except, strictly speaking, in philosophy. For we were obliged after
several attempts to give up the idea of founding or maintaining a city
of philosophers, notably owing to the incessant trouble caused by the
tribe of sociologists who are the most unsociable of mankind.
Let us not forget, by the way, to mention the city of "sappers" (we no
longer speak of architects), whose speciality is to work out the plans
for excavating and repairing all our crypts and to direct the carrying
out of the work by our machines. Quitting the hackneyed paths of former
architecture, they have created in every detail our modern architecture
so profoundly original of which nothing could give an idea to our
forefathers. The public building of the ancient architect was a kind of
massive and voluminous work of art. It was entirely a thing by itself.
Its exterior, and especially its front, occupied his attention far more
than the inside. For the modern architect the interior alone exists, and
each work is linked on to those which have gone before. None stands by
itself. They are only an extension and ramification, one of another, an
endless continuation like the epics of the East. The work of the ancient
architect with its misplaced individuality, with its symmetry, which
gave it a mock air of being a living thing, yet only rendered it more
out of keeping with the surrounding landscape, the more symmetrical and
more skilfully designed it was, produced the effect of a verse in prose,
or of a hackneyed theme in a fantasia. Its special function was to
represent correctness, coldness, and stiffness amid the luxuriant
disorder of nature and the freedom of the other arts. But to-day,
instead of being the most tight-laced of the arts, architecture is the
freest and most wanton of them all. It is the chief element of
picturesqueness in our life, its artificial and veritably artistic
scenery lends to all the masterpieces of our painters and sculptors the
horizon of its perspective, the sky of its vaults, the tangled
vegetation of its innumerable colonnades, whose shafts are a copy of the
idealised trunk of all the antique essence of tree-life, whose capitals
imitate the idealised form of all the antique flowers. Here is nature
winnowed and perfected, which has become human in order to delight
humanity, and which humanity has deified in order to shelter love
beneath its shade. This perfection has only been, however, attained
after much groping in the dark. Many falls of rock, occasioned by
foolhardy excavations, which unduly reduced the number of supports,
swallowed up whole towns during the first two centuries. They will serve
for our descendants as Pompeii to rediscover. At the least shock
produced by earthquakes (the only natural plague which engages our
attention), a few cases of crushing to death still occur here and there,
but such accidents are very rare.
To return to our subject. Each of our cities in founding colonies in the
region round it, has become the mother of cities similar to itself, in
which its own peculiar colour has been multiplied in different tints
which reflect and render it more beautiful. It is thus with us that
nations are formed whose differences no longer correspond to
geographical accidents but to the diversity of the social aptitudes of
human nature and of nothing else. Nay, more, in each of them the
division of cities is founded on that of schools, the most flourishing
of which, at any given moment, raises its particular town to the rank of
capital, thanks to the all-powerful favour of the public.
The beginnings and devolution of power, questions which have so deeply
agitated humanity of yore, arise with us in the most natural way in the
world. There is always amid the crowd of our genius, a superior genius
who is hailed as such by the almost unanimous acclamation of his pupils
at first, and next of his comrades. A man is judged in fact by his peers
and according to his productions, not by the incompetent or according to
his electoral exploits. In the light of the intimate sense of corporate
life which binds and cements us one to another, the elevation of such a
dictator to the supreme magistracy has nothing humiliating about it for
the pride of the senators who have elected him, and who are the chiefs
of all the leading schools they themselves have created. The elector who
is a pupil, the elector who is an intelligent and sympathetic admirer
identifies himself with the object of his choice. Now it is the
particular characteristic of a "Geniocratic" Republic to be based on
admiration, not on envy, on sympathy, and not on dislike--on
enlightenment, not on illusion.
Nothing is more delightful than a tour through our domains. Our towns,
which are quite close to one another are severally connected by broad
roads which are always illuminated and dotted with light and graceful
monocycles, with trains without smoke or whistle, with pretty electric
carriages which glide silently along, like gondolas between walls
covered with admirable bas-reliefs, with charming inscriptions, with
immortal fancies, the outpourings and accumulations of ten generations
of wandering artists. Similarly one might have seen in the olden times
the scanty remains of some convent where, in the course of ages the
monks had translated their weariness of spirit into grinning figures,
with hooded heads, into beasts from the Apocalypse, clumsily sculptured
on the capitals of the little pilasters or around the stone chair of the
Abbot. But what a distance lies between this monkish nightmare and this
artistic revelation! At the very most the pretty little gallery which
joined across the Arno, the museum of the Pitti Palace, with that of the
Uffizi at Florence, could give our ancestors a faint idea of what we
see.
If the corridors of our abode possess this wealth and splendour, what
shall we say of the dwelling-places, or of the cities? They are filled
with heaps of artistic marvels, of frescoes, enamels, gold and silver
plate, bronzes and pictures, the acme and quintessence of musical
emotions, of philosophic conceptions, of poetic dreams, enough to baffle
all description, and weary all admiration. We have difficulty in
believing that the labyrinth of galleries, subterranean palaces and
marble catacombs, all named and numbered, whose manifold nomenclature
recalls all the geography and history of the past, have been excavated
in so few centuries. That is what perseverance can do! However
accustomed we may be to this extraordinary sight, it still at times
happens when wandering alone, during the hours of the siesta, in this
sort of infinite cathedral, with its irregular and endless architecture,
through this forest of lofty columns, massive or in close formation,
displaying in turn the most diversified and grandiose styles, Egyptian,
Greek, Byzantine, Arab, Gothic, and reminiscent of all the vanished and
venerated floras and faunas, when it is not above all profoundly
original ... it happens, I repeat, that panting, and beside ourselves
with ecstasy, we come to a standstill, like the traveller of yore when
he entered the twilight of a virgin forest, or of the pillared hall of
Karnak.
To those who on reading the ancient accounts of travels might perchance
have regretted the wanderings of caravans across the deserts or the
discoveries of new worlds, our universe can offer boundless excursions
under the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans frozen to their very lowest
depths. Venturesome explorers, I was going to say discoverers, have in
every direction and in the easiest imaginable fashion honeycombed these
immense ice-caps with endless passages much in the same way as the
termites, according to our palæontologists, bored through the floors of
our fathers. We extend at will these fantastic galleries of crystal,
which, wherever they cross one another, form so many crystal palaces, by
casting on the walls a ray of intense heat which makes them melt. We
take good care to drain the water due to the liquefaction into one of
those bottomless pits which here and there yawn hideously beneath our
feet. Thanks to this method and the improvements it has undergone we
have succeeded in cutting, hewing and carving the solidified sea-water.
We are able to glide through it, to manoeuvre in it, to course through
it on skates or velocipedes with an ease and agility that are always
admired in spite of our being accustomed to it. The severe cold of these
regions is scarcely tempered by millions of electric lamps which are
mirrored in these emerald-green icicles with their velvet-like tints and
renders a permanent stay impossible. It would even prevent us crossing
them if, by good luck, the earliest pioneers had not discovered in them
crowds of seals which had been caught while still alive by the freezing
of the waters in which they remain imprisoned. Their carefully prepared
skins have furnished us with warm clothing. Nothing is more curious than
thus suddenly to catch sight of, as it were through a mysterious glass
case, one of these huge marine animals, sometimes a whale, a shark or a
devil fish, and that star-like flora which carpets the seas. Though
appearing crystallized in its transparent prison, in its Elysium of pure
brine, it has lost none of its secret charm, that was quite unknown to
our ancestors. Idealised by its very lack of motion, immortalised by its
death, it dimly shines here and there with gleams of pearl and mother of
pearl in the twilight of the depths below, to the right, the left,
beneath the feet or above the head of the solitary skater who roams with
his lamp on his forehead in pursuit of the unknown. There is always
something new to look forward to from these miraculous soundings, so
different from the soundings of former time. Never a tourist has come
home without having discovered some interesting object--a piece of
wreckage, the steeple of some sunken town, a human skeleton to enrich
our prehistoric museums, sometimes a shoal of sardines or cod. These
splendid and timely reserves come in very handy for replenishing our
bill of fare. But the chief fascination of such adventurous exploration
is the sense of the boundless and the everlasting, of the unfathomable
and the changeless by which one is arrested and overwhelmed in these
bottomless depths. The savour of this silence and solitude, of this
profound peace, the sequel to so many tempests, of this almost starless
gloaming and twilight with its fleeting gleams, reposes the eye after
our underground illuminations. I will not speak of the surprises which
the hand of man has lavished there. At the moment when one least expects
it one sees the submarine tunnel along which one is gliding, enlarged
beyond all measure and transformed into a vast hall in which the fancy
of our sculptors has found full play, a temple of vast dimensions with
transparent pillars, with walls of enthralling beauty that the eye in
ecstasy attempts to fathom. That is often the trysting place of friends
and lovers, and the excursion begun in dreamy loneliness is continued in
loving companionship.
But we have wandered long enough in these halls of mysteries. Let us
return to our cities. One would look, by the bye, in vain for a city of
lawyers there, or even, for a court of justice. There is no more arable
land and therefore no more lawsuits about property or ancient rights.
There are no more walls, and therefore no more lawsuits about party
walls. As for felonies and misdemeanours, we do not know exactly why,
but it is an obvious fact that with the spread of the cult of art they
have disappeared as by enchantment, while formerly the progress of
industrial life had tripled their numbers in half a century.
Man in becoming a town dweller has become really human. From the time
that all sorts of trees and beasts, of flowers and insects no longer
interpose between men, and all sorts of vulgar wants no longer hinder
the progress of the truly human faculties, every one seems to be born
well-bred, just as every one is born a sculptor or musician, philosopher
or poet, and speaks the most correct language with the purest accent. An
indescribable courtesy, skilled to charm without falsehood, to please
without obsequiousness, the most free from fawning one has ever seen, is
united to a politeness which has at heart the feeling, not of a social
hierarchy to be respected, but of a social harmony to be maintained. It
is composed not of more or less degenerate airs of the court, but of
more or less faithful reflections of the heart. Its refinement is such
as the race who lived on the surface of earth never even dreamed of. It
permeates like a fragrant oil all the complicated and delicate machinery
of our existence. No unsociableness, no misanthropy can resist it. The
charm is too profound. The single threat of ostracism, I do not say of
expulsion to the realms above, which would be a death sentence, but of
banishment beyond the limits of the usual corporate life, is sufficient
to arrest the most criminal natures on the slope of crime. There is in
the slightest inflexion of voice, in the least inclination of the head
of our women a special charm, which is not only the charm of former
times, whether roguish kindness or kindly roguishness, but a refinement
at once more exquisite and more healthful in which the constant practice
of seeing and doing beautiful things or loving and being loved is
expressed in an ineffable fashion.
VI
LOVE
Love, in fact, is the unseen and perennial source of this novel
courtesy. The capital importance it has assumed, the strange forms it
has worn, the unexpected heights to which it has risen, are perhaps the
most significant characteristics of our civilisation. In the glittering
and superficial epochs, age of paper and electro-plating, which
immediately preceded our present era, love was held in check by a
thousand childish needs, by the contagious mono-mania of unsightly and
cumbersome luxury or of ceaseless globe-trotting, and by that other form
of madness which has now disappeared, the so-called political ambition.
It suffered accordingly an immense decline, relatively speaking. To-day
it benefits from the destruction or gradual diminution of all the other
principal impulses of the heart which have taken refuge and concentrated
themselves in it as banished mankind has done in the warm bosom of the
earth. Patriotism is dead, since there is no longer any native land, but
only a native grot. Moreover the guilds which we enter as we please
according to our vocations have taken the place of Fatherlands.
Corporate spirit has exterminated patriotism. In the same fashion the
school is on the road not to exterminate but to transform the family,
which is only right and proper. The best that can be said for the
parents of old was that they were compulsory and not always cost-free
friends. One was not wrong in preferring in general to them friends who
are a species of optional and unselfish relations. Maternal love itself
has undergone a good many transformations among our women artists, and
one must admit, sundry partial set backs.
But love is left to us. Or rather, be it said without vanity, it is we
who discovered and introduced it. Its name has preceded it by a good
many centuries. Our ancestors gave it its name, but they spoke of it as
the Hebrews spoke of the Messiah. It has revealed itself in our day. In
our day it has become incarnate, it has founded the true religion,
universal and enduring, that pure and austere moral which is
indistinguishable from art. It has been favoured at the outset, beyond
all doubt and beyond all expectation by the charm and beauty of our
women, who are all differently yet almost equally accomplished. There is
nothing _natural_ left in our world below if it be not they. But it
appears they have always been the most beautiful thing in nature even in
the most unfavourable and ill-favoured ages. For we are assured that
never was the graceful curve of hill or stream, of wave or rippling
cornfield, that never was the hue of the dawn or of the Mediterranean
equal in sweetness, in strength, in richness of visible music and
harmony to the female form. There must therefore have been a special
instinct which is quite incomprehensible which formerly retained the
poor beside their natal river or rock and prevented their emigrating to
the big towns, where they might well have hoped to admire at their ease
tints and outlines of beauty assuredly far superior to the charm of the
locality to whose attractions they fell a victim. At present there is no
other country than the woman of one's affections; there is no other
home-sickness than that caused by her absence.
But the foregoing is insufficient to explain the unparalleled power and
persistence of our love which time intensifies more than it wears out,
and consummates as it consumes it. Love, we now at last know, is like
air, essential to life; we must look to it for health and not for mere
nourishment. It is as the sun once was, we must use it to give us light,
not allow it to dazzle us. It resembles that imposing temple that the
fervour of our fathers raised in its honour when they worshipped it,
unwittingly, at the Paris Opera-house. The most beautiful part of it is
the staircase--when one mounts it. We have therefore attempted to make
the staircase monopolise the whole edifice without leaving the tiniest
room for the hall. The wise man, an ancient writer has said, is to the
woman what the asymptote is to the curve, it draws ever nearer but never
touches. It was a half crazy fellow named Rousseau who uttered this
splendid aphorism and our society flatters itself that it has practised
it far better than he. All the same the ideal thus outlined, we are
compelled to confess, is rarely attained in all its entity. This degree
of perfection is reserved for the most saintly souls, the ascetics, men
and women, who wander together, two and two, in the most marvellous
cloisters, in the most Raphaelesque cells in the city of painters, in a
sort of artificial dusk produced by a coloured twilight in the midst of
a throng of similar couples, and on the banks of a stream so to say of
audacious and splendid revelations of the nude. They pass their life in
feasting their eyes on these waves of beauty, the living bank of which
is their own passion. Together they climb the fiery steps of the
heavenly staircase to the very summit on which they halt. Then supremely
inspired they set to work and produce masterpieces. Heroic lovers are
they whose whole pleasure in love consists in the sublime joy of feeling
their love growing within them, blissful because it is shared, inspiring
because it is chaste.