the level of the insurmountable weakness of the old Adam. None the less
the inelastic limits of our food supplies have made it a duty for us
rigorously to guard against a possible excess in our population which
has reached to-day fifty millions, a figure it can never exceed without
danger. We have been obliged to forbid in general under the most severe
penalties a practice which apparently was very common and indulged in
_ad libitum_ by our forefathers. Is it possible that after manufacturing
the rubbish heaps of law with which our libraries are lumbered up, they
precisely omitted to regulate the only matter considered worthy to-day
of regulation? Can we conceive that it could ever have been permissible
to the first comer without due authorisation to expose society to the
arrival of a new hungry and wailing member--above all at a time when it
was not possible to kill a partridge without a game licence, or to
import a sack of corn without paying duty? Wiser and more far-sighted,
we degrade, and in case of a second offence we condemn to be thrown into
a lake of petroleum, whoever allows himself to infringe our
constitutional law on this point, or rather we should say, should allow
himself, for the force of public opinion has got the better of the crime
and has rendered our penalties unnecessary. We sometimes, nay very
often, see lovers who go mad from love and die in consequence. Others
courageously get themselves hoisted by a lift to the gaping mouth of an
extinct volcano and reach the outer air which in a moment freezes them
to death. They have scarcely time to regard the azure sky--a magnificent
spectacle, so they say--and the twilight hues of the still dying sun or
the vast and unstudied disorder of the stars; then locked in each
other's arms they fall dead upon the ice! The summit of their favourite
volcano is completely crowned with their corpses which are admirably
preserved always in twos, stark and livid, a living image still of love
and agony, of despair and frenzy, but more often of ecstatic repose.
They recently made an indelible impression on a celebrated traveller who
was bold enough to make the ascent in order to get a glimpse of them. We
all know how he has since died from the effects.
But what is unheard of and unexampled in our day is for a woman in love
to abandon herself to her lover before the latter has under her
inspiration produced a masterpiece which is adjudged and proclaimed as
such by his rivals. For here we have the indispensable condition to
which legitimate marriage is subordinated. The right to have children is
the monopoly and supreme recompense of genius. It is besides a powerful
lever for the uplifting and exaltation of the race. Futhermore a man can
only exercise it exactly the same number of times as he produces works
worthy of a master. But in this respect some indulgence is shown. It
even happens pretty frequently that touched by pity for some grand
passion that disposes only of a mediocre talent, the affected admiration
of the public partly from sympathy and partly from condescension accords
a favourable verdict to works of no intrinsic value. Perhaps there are
also (in fact there is no doubt about it) for common use other methods
of getting round the law.
Ancient society reposed on the fear of punishment, on a penal system
which has had its day. Ours, it is clear, is based on the expectation of
happiness. The enthusiasm and creative fire aroused by such a
perspective are attested by our exhibitions, and borne witness to by the
rich luxuriance of our annual art harvests. When we think of the
precisely opposite effects of ancient marriage, that institution of our
ancestors, more ridiculous still than their umbrellas, one can measure
the distance between this excessive and pretended exclusive _debitum
conjugale_ and our mode of union, at once free and regulated, energetic
and intermittent, passionate and restrained, the true corner-stone of
our regenerated humanity. The sufferings it imposes on those who are
sacrificed, the unsuccessful artists, is not for the latter a cause of
complaint. Their despair itself is dear to the desperate; for if they do
not die of it, they draw life and immortality from it and from the
bottomless pit of their inner depth of woe, they gather deathless
flowers, flowers of art or poesy for some, mystic roses for others. To
the latter perhaps is given at that moment, as they grope in their
inward darkness to touch most nearly the essence of things, and these
delights are so vivid that our artists and our metaphysical mystics
wonder whether art and philosophy were made to console love or if the
sole reason for love's existence is not to inspire art and the pursuit
of ultimate truth. This last opinion has generally prevailed.
The extent to which love has refined our habits, and to which our
civilisation based on love is superior in morality to the former
civilisation based on ambition and covetousness, was proved at the time
of the great discovery which took place in the Year of Salvation 194.
Guided by some mysterious inkling, some electric sense of direction, a
bold sapper by dint of forcing his way through the flanks of the earth
beyond the ordinary galleries suddenly penetrated into a strange open
space buzzing with human voices and swarming with human faces. But what
squeaky voices! What sallow complexions! What an impossible language
with no connection with our Greek! It was, without doubt, a veritable
underground America, quite as vast and still more curious. It was the
work of a little tribe of burrowing Chinese who had had, one imagines,
the same idea as our Miltiades. Much more practical than he, they had
hastily crawled underground without encumbering themselves with museums
and libraries, and there they had multiplied enormously. Instead of
confining themselves as we to turning to account the deposits of animal
carcasses, they had shamelessly given themselves up to ancestral
cannibalism. They were thus enabled, seeing the thousand of millions of
Chinese destroyed and buried beneath the snow, to give full vent to
their prolific instincts. Alas! who knows if our own descendants will
not one day be reduced to this extremity? In what promiscuity, in what a
slough of greed, falsehood and robbery were these unfortunates living!
The words of our language refuse to depict their filth and coarseness.
With infinite pains they raised underground diminutive vegetables in
diminutive beds of soil they had brought thither together with
diminutive pigs and dogs.... These ancient servants of mankind appeared
very disgusting to our new Christopher Columbus. These degraded beings
(I speak of the masters and not of the animals, for the latter belong to
a breed that has been much improved by those who raised them) had lost
all recollection of the Middle Empire and even of the surface of the
earth. They heartily laughed when some of our _savants_ sent on a
mission to them spoke to them of the firmament, the sun, the moon and
the stars.... They listened, however, to the end of these accounts, then
in an ironical tone they asked our envoys: "Have you seen all that?" And
the latter unfortunately could not reply to the question, since no one
among us has seen the sky except the lovers who go to die together.
Now, what did our settlers do at the sight of such cerebral atrophy?
Several proposed, it is true, to exterminate these savages who might
well become dangerous owing to their cunning and to their numbers, and
to appropriate their dwelling-place after a certain amount of cleaning
and painting and the removal of numerous little bells. Others proposed
to reduce them to the status of slaves or servants in order to shift on
to them all our menial work. But these two proposals were rejected. An
attempt was made to civilize and to render less savage these poor
cousins, and once the impossibility of any success in that direction had
been ascertained the partition was carefully blocked up.
VII
THE ÆSTHETIC LIFE
Such is the moral miracle wrought by our excellence which itself is
begotten of love and beauty. But the intellectual marvels which have
issued from the same source, merit a still more extended notice. It will
be enough for me to indicate them as I go along.
Let us first speak of the sciences. One might have thought that from the
day that the stars and celestial bodies, the faunas and floras, ceased
to play a certain part in our lives or that the manifold sources of
observation and experience ceased to flow, astronomy and meteorology
would henceforth be brought to a standstill while zoology and botany
would have become palæontology pure and simple, without speaking of
their application to the navy, army and agriculture, which are all
to-day entirely obsolete; in fact, that they would have ceased to make a
step forward and would have fallen into complete oblivion. Luckily these
apprehensions proved groundless. Let us admire the extent to which the
sciences which the past has bequeathed to us, formerly eminently useful
and inductive, have for the first time had the advantage of passionately
interesting and exciting the general public since they have acquired
this double characteristic of being an object of luxury and a deductive
subject. The past has accumulated such undigested masses of astronomical
tables, papers and proceedings dealing with measurements, vivisections,
and innumerable experiments, that the human mind can live on this
capital till the end of time. It was high time that it began at last to
arrange and utilize these materials. Now, for the sciences of which I am
speaking, the advantage is great from the point of view of their success
that they are entirely based on written testimony, and in no way on
sense perception, and that they on all occasions invoke the authority of
books (for we talk to-day of whole bibliographies when formerly people
spoke of a single Bible--evidently an immense difference). This great
and inestimable advantage consists in the extraordinary riches of our
libraries in documents of the most diverse kinds which never leaves an
ingenious theorist in the lurch, and is equal to supporting in a plenary
and authoritative fashion the most contradictory opinions at one and the
same symposium. Its abundance recalls the admirable wealth of antique
legislation and jurisprudence in texts and decisions of every hue which
rendered the lawsuits so interesting, almost as much as the battles of
the populace of Alexandria on the subject of a theological iota. The
debates of our _savants_, their polemics relative to the Vitellin yolk
of the egg of the Arachneida, or the digestive apparatus of the
Infusoria, constitute the burning questions which distress us, and which
if we had the misfortune to possess a regular press, would not fail to
drench our streets in gore. For the questions which are useless and even
harmful have always the knack of rousing the passions, provided they are
insoluble.
These are our religious quarrels. In fact the sum total of the sciences
bequeathed to us by the past has become definitely and inevitably a
religion. Our _savants_ to-day who work deductively on these data from
henceforth changeless and inviolate, exactly recall on a much larger
scale the theologians of the ancient world. This new encyclopædic
theology, not less fertile than others in schisms and heresies, is the
unique but inexhaustible source of divisions in the bosom of our Church
which is otherwise so compact. It is perhaps the most profound and
fascinating charm of our intellectual leaders.
"All the same, they are dead sciences!" say certain malcontents. Let us
accept the epithet. They are dead, if one likes, but after the fashion
of those languages in which a whole people chanted its hymns although no
one speaks them any longer. This is also the case with certain faces
whose beauty only appears in its fulness when their last sleep has come.
Let none therefore be surprised if our love fastens on these majestic
dogmas, by which we are more and more overshadowed, on these higher
inutilities which are our vocation. Above all, mathematics, as being the
most perfect type of the new sciences, has progressed with giant steps.
Descending to fabulous depths, analysis has allowed the astronomers at
length to attack and to solve problems whose mere statement would have
provoked an incredulous smile in their predecessors. And so they
discover every day, chalk in hand, not with the telescope to the eye, I
know not how many intra-mercurial or extra-neptunian planets, and begin
to distinguish the planets of the nearer stars. There are in this
department, in the comparative anatomy and physiology of numerous solar
systems, the most novel and profound views. Our Leverriers are reckoned
by hundreds. Being all the better acquainted with the sky because they
no longer see it, they resemble Beethoven, who only wrote his finest
symphonies when he had lost his hearing. Our Claude Bernards and
Pasteurs are almost as numerous. Although we are careful as a matter of
fact not to accord to the natural sciences the exaggerated and
fundamentally anti-social importance they formerly usurped during two or
three centuries, we do not completely neglect them. Even the applied
sciences have their votaries. Recently one of the latter has at last
discovered--such is the irony of destiny--the practical means of
steering balloons. These discoveries are useless, I admit, yet are ever
beautiful and fertile, fertile in new, if superfluous, beauties. They
are welcomed with transports of feverish enthusiasm and win for their
originators something better than glory,--the happiness that we know so
well.
But among the sciences there are two which are still experimental and
inductive and in addition pre-eminently useful. It is to this
exceptional standing that they perhaps owe, we must admit, the
unparalled rapidity with which they have grown. These two sciences which
were formerly the antipodes of one another, are to-day on the high road
to becoming identical by dint of pushing their joint researches ever
deeper and crushing to atoms the last problems left. Their names are
chemistry and psychology.
Our chemists, inspired perhaps by love and better instructed in the
nature of affinities, force their way into the inner life of the
molecules and reveal to us their desires, their ideas, and under a
fallacious air of conformity, their individual physiognomy. While they
thus construct for us the psychology of the atom, our psychologists
explain to us the atomic theory of self, I was going to say the
sociology of self. They enable us to perceive, even in its most minute
detail, the most admirable of all societies, this hierarchy of
consciousness, this feudal system of vassal souls, of which our
personality is the summit. We are indebted to them both for priceless
benefits. Thanks to the former we are no longer alone in a frozen world.
We are conscious that these rocks are alive and animated, we are
conscious that these hard metals which protect and warm us are likewise
a prolific brotherhood. Through their mediation these living stones have
some message for our heart, something at once alien and intimate, which
neither the stars nor the flowers of the field ever told to our
forefathers. And by their mediation also, and the service is not to be
despised--we have learnt certain processes which allow us (in a scanty
measure, it is true, for the moment) to supplement the insufficiency of
our ordinary food supplies, or to vary their monotony by several
substances agreeable to the taste and entirely compounded by artificial
means. But if our chemists have thus reassured us against the danger of
dying of hunger, our psychologists have acquired still further claims on
our gratitude in freeing us from the fear of death. Permeated by their
doctrines we have followed their consequences to their final conclusion
with the deductive vigour that is second nature with us. Death appears
to us as a dethronement that leads to freedom. It restores to itself the
fallen or abdicated self that retires anew into its inner consciousness,
where it finds in depths more than the equivalent of the outward empire
it has lost. In thinking of the terrors of former man, face to face with
the tomb, we compare them with the dread experienced by the comrades of
Miltiades when they were compelled to bid adieu to the fields of ice, to
the snowy horizons, in order to enter for ever the gloomy abysses in
which such a myriad of glittering and marvellous surprises awaited them.
That is a well-established doctrine and one on which no discussion would
be tolerated. It is, with our devotion to beauty and our faith in the
divine omnipotence of love, the foundation of our peace of mind and the
starting point of our enthusiasms. Our philosophers themselves avoid
touching on it, as on all which is fundamental in our institutions. To
this perhaps may be traced an agreeable air of harmlessness which adds
to the charm of their refinement and contributes to their success in
public. With such certainties as ballast we can spring with a light
heart into the æther of systems, and so we do not fail to do so. One may
be surprised, however, that I made a distinction between our
philosophers and those deductive _savants_ of whom I have spoken above.
Their subject-matter and their methods are identical. They chew the
cud--if I may be allowed the expression--in the same fashion at the same
mangers. But the one group, I mean the _savants_, are ordinary
ruminants, that is, slow and clumsy. The others have the peculiar
quality of being at once ruminants and nimble, like the antelope. And
this difference of temperament is indelible.
There is not, I have already said, a city, but there is a grotto of
philosophers, a natural one to which they come, and sit apart from one
another or in groups, according to their schools, on chairs formed of
granite blocks beside a petrifying well. This spacious grotto contains
astounding stalactites, the slow product of continuous droppings which
vaguely imitate, in the eyes of those who are not too critical, all
kinds of beautiful objects, cups and chandeliers, cathedrals and
mirrors--cups which quench no man's thirst, chandeliers which give no
light, cathedrals in which no one prays, but mirrors in which one sees
oneself more or less faithfully and pleasantly portrayed. There also is
to be seen a gloomy and bottomless lake over which hang like so many
question-marks, the pendants in the sombre roof and the beards of the
thinkers. Such is the ample cave which is exactly identical to the
philosophy it shelters, with its crystals sparkling amid its uncertain
shadows--full of precipices, it is true. It recalls better than anything
else to the new race of men, but with a still greater portion of
mirage-like fascination, that diurnal miracle of our forefathers--the
starry night. Now the crowd of systematic ideas which slowly form and
crystallise there in each brain like mental stalactites is indescribably
enormous. While all the former stalactites of thought are for ever
ramifying and changing their shape, turning as it were from a table into
an altar, or from an eagle into a griffin, new ideas appear here and
there still more surprising. There are always, of course,
Neo-Aristotelians, Neo-Kantians, Neo-Cartesians, and Neo-Pythagoricians.
Let us not forget the commentators of Empedocles to whom his passion for
the volcanic underworld has procured an unexpected rejuvenation of his
antique authority on the minds of men, above all since an archæologist
has maintained he has found the skeleton of this grand man in pushing an
exploring gallery to the very foot of Ætna which to-day is completely
extinct. But there is ever arising some great reformer with an
unpublished gospel that each attempts to enrich with a new version
destined to take its place. I will cite for example the greatest
intellect of our time, the chief of the fashionable school in sociology.
According to this profound thinker the social development of humanity,
starting on the outer rind of the earth and continuing to-day beneath
its crust, at no great distance from the surface, is destined in
proportion to the growing solar and planetary cooling, to pursue its
course from strata to strata down to the very centre of the earth, while
the population forcibly contracts and civilisation on the contrary
expands at each new descent. It is worth seeing the vigour and
Dante-like precision with which he characterises the social type
peculiar to each of these humanities, immured within its own circle,
growing ever nobler and richer, happier and better balanced. One should
read the portrait which he has limned with a bold brush of the last man,
sole survivor and heir of a hundred successive civilisations, left to
himself yet self-sufficient in the midst of his immense stores of
science and art. He is happy as a god because he is omniscient and
omnipotent, because he has just discovered the true answer of the Great
Enigma, yet dying because he cannot survive humanity. By means of an
explosive substance of extraordinary potency he blows up the globe with
himself in order to sow the immensity of space with the last remnants of
mankind. This system very naturally has a good many adherents. The
graceful Hypatias, however, who form his female followers, idly lying
round the master's stone, are agreed it would be proper to associate
with the last man, the last woman, not less ideal than he.
But what shall I say of art and poetry? Here to be just, praise must
become panegyric. Let us limit ourselves to indicating the general
tendency of the transformations that have taken place. I have related
what has become of our architecture which has been turned "outside in",
so to say, and brought into keeping with its surroundings, the idealised
image in stone, the essence and consummation of former Nature. I shall
not return to the subject. But I must still say a word about this
immortal and overflowing population of statues, this wealth of frescoes,
enamels, and bronzes which in concert with our poetry celebrate in this
architectural transfiguration of the nether world the apotheosis of
love. There would be an interesting study to make on the gradual
metamorphoses that the genius of our painters and sculptors has imposed
for the last three centuries on these traditional types of lions,
horses, tigers, birds, trees and flowers, with which it is never weary
of disporting itself, without being either helped or hindered by the
sight of any animal or any plant. Never, in fact, have our artists, who
protest strongly against being taken for photographers, depicted so many
plants, animals and landscapes, than since these were no more.
Similarly, they have never painted or sculptured so many draperies,
since everyone goes about almost naked, while formerly at the time when
humanity wore clothes the nude abounded in art. Does it mean that
nature, now dead and formerly alive, from which our great masters drew
their subjects and themes, has become a simple hieroglyphic and coldly
conventional alphabet? No. Daughter to-day of tradition and no longer of
productive nature, humanised and harmonised, she has a still firmer hold
on the heart. If she recalls to each his day-dreams rather than his
recollections, his imaginings rather than his impressions, his
admiration as an artist rather than his terror as a child, she is only
the better calculated to fascinate and subdue. She has for us the
profound and intimate charm of an old legend, but it is a legend in
which one believes.
Nothing is more inspiring. Such must have been the mythology of the
worthy Homer when his hearers in the Cyclades still believed in
Aphrodite and Pallas, in the Dioscuri and the Centaurs, of whom he spoke
to them and wrung from them tears of sheer delight. Thus our poets make
us weep, when they speak to us now of azure skies, of the sea-girt
horizon, of the perfume of roses, of the song of birds, of all those
objects that our eye has never seen, our ear has never heard, of which
all our senses are ignorant, yet our mind conjures them up within us by
a strange instinct at the least suggestion of love.
And when our painters show us these horses whose legs grow ever slimmer,
these swans whose necks become ever rounder and longer, these vines
whose leaves and branches grow ever more intricate with their lace-like
edges and arabesques interwoven round still more exquisite birds, a
matchless emotion rises within us such as a young Greek might have felt
before a bas-relief crowded with fauns and nymphs or with Argonautes
bearing off the Golden Fleece, or with Nereids sporting around the cup
of Amphitrite.