foil of our other fine arts, they in their turn, however admirable, have
the air of being barely worthy to illustrate our poetry and literature
graven on stone. But in our poetry and even in our literature there are
glories which in comparison with less obvious beauty are as the corona
is to the ovary, or the frame to the picture. Read our romantic dramas
and epics in which all ancient history is magically unrolled down to the
heroic struggle and love story of Miltiades. You will decide that
nothing more sublime could ever be written. Read also our idylls, our
elegies, our epigrams inspired by antiquity, and our poetry of every
kind written in a dozen dead languages which when desired revive in
order to vivify with their clear notes and their manifold harmonies, the
pleasure of our ear, to accompany, so to say, with their rich
orchestration in English, German, Swedish, Arabic, Italian and French,
the music of our pure Attic. You will imagine nothing more fascinating
than this renaissance and transfiguration of forgotten idioms, once the
glory of antiquity. As for our dramas and our poems which are often at
once the collective and individual work of a school, incarnate in its
chief and animated with a single idea like the sculptures of the
Parthenon, there is nothing comparable in the masterpieces of Sophocles
or Homer. What the extinct species of nature formerly alive are to our
painters and sculptors, the no less extinct sentiments of former human
nature are to our dramatists. Jealousy, ambition, patriotism,
fanaticism, the mad lust of battle, the exalted love of family, the
pride of an illustrious name, all the vanished passions of the heart
when called up upon the stage, no longer cause tears or terror in a
single soul, any more than the heraldic tigers and lions painted up on
our public squares frighten our children. But in a new accent with quite
a different ring, they speak to us their ancient language; and to tell
the truth, they are only a grand piano on which our new passions play.
Now there is but a single passion for all its thousand names, as there
is above but a single sun. It is love, the soul of our soul and source
of our art. That is the true sun which will never fail us, which is
never weary of touching and reanimating with the light of its
countenance its lower creations of yore, the first-born incarnations of
the heart, in order to make them young once more, in order to re-gild
them with its dawns, and reincarnadine them with its setting splendours;
almost in the same fashion as it sufficed the other sun to compass with
a single ray that august summons to deck the earth, addressed to every
ancient plant of the field, awakening it to bloom anew, that grand
yearly transformation scene, so deceptive and entrancing, which they
named the Spring, when there was still a Spring to name!
And so for our highly refined writers, all that I have just praised a
moment ago has no value if their heart is left untouched. They would
give for one true and personal note all these feats of skill and sleight
of hand. What they look for under the most grandiose conceptions and
stage effects, and under the most audacious novelties in rhyme; what
they adore on bended knee when they have found it, is a short passage, a
line, half a line, on which an imperceptible hint of profound passion,
or the most fleeting phase, though unexpressed, of love in joy, in
suffering or in death has left its impress. Thus at the beginning of
humanity each tint of the dawn or the dusk, each hour of the day was,
for the first man who gave it a name, a new solar god who soon possessed
worshippers, priests and temples of his own. But to analyse sensations
after the manner of the old-fashioned erotic writers gives us no
trouble. The real difficulty and merit lie in gathering along with our
mystics, from the lowest depths of sorrow, its flowers of ecstasy, the
pearls and coral that lie at the bottom of its sea, and to enrich the
soul in its own eyes. Our purest poetry thus joins hands with our most
profound psychology. One is the oracle, the other the dogma of one and
the same religion.
And yet is it credible? In spite of its beauty, harmony and incomparable
charm, our society has also its malcontents. There are here and there
certain recusants who declare they are soaked and saturated with the
essence, so remarkably pure and so much above proof, of our excessive
and compulsory society. They find our realm of beauty too static, our
atmosphere of happiness too tranquil. In vain to please them we vary
from time to time the intensity and colouring of our illuminations and
ventilate our colonnades with a kind of refreshing breeze. They persist
in condemning as monotonous our day devoid of clouds or night; our year,
devoid of seasons; our towns devoid of country-life. Very curiously when
the month of May comes round, this feeling of restlessness which they
alone experience at ordinary times, becomes contagious and well-nigh
general. And so it is the most melancholy and least busy month of the
year. One would say that the Spring driven from every place, from the
gloomy immensity of the heavens and from the frozen surface of the earth
has, as we, sought refuge under ground; or rather that her wandering
ghost returns at stated seasons to visit us and tantalise us by her
haunting presence. It is then that the city of the musicians grows full
and their music becomes so sweet, pathetic, mournful, and desperately
harrowing that we see lovers by hundreds at a time take each other by
the hand and go up to gaze upon the death-dealing sky.... In reference
to this I ought to say that there was recently a false alarm caused by a
madman who pretended he had seen the sun coming back to life and melting
the ice. At this news which had not been otherwise confirmed, quite a
considerable portion of the population became unsettled and gave itself
up to the pleasing task of forming plans for an early exodus. Such
unhealthy and revolutionary dreams evidently only serve to foment
artificial discontent.
Luckily a scholar in rummaging in a forgotten corner of the archives put
his hand on a big collection of phonographic and cinematographic records
which had been amassed by an ancient collector. Interpreted by the
phonograph and cinematograph together, these cylinders and films have
enabled us suddenly to hear all the former sounds in nature accompanied
by their corresponding sights, the thunder, the winds, the mountain
torrents, the murmurs that accompany the dawn, the monotonous cry of the
osprey and the long drawn out lament of the nightingale amid the
manifold whisperings of night. At this resurrection of another age to
the ear and eye, of extinct species and vanished phenomena, an immense
astonishment quickly followed by an immense disillusion arose among the
most ardent partisans of a return to the ancient regime. For that was
not what one had hitherto believed on the strength of what even the most
realist poets and novelists had told us. It was something infinitely
less ravishing and less worthy of our regret. The song of the
nightingale above all provoked a most unpleasant surprise. We were all
angry with it for showing itself so inferior to its reputation.
Assuredly the worst of our concerts is more musical than this so-called
symphony of nature with full orchestral accompaniment.
Thus has been quelled by an ingenious expedient entirely unknown to
former governments, this first and only attempt at rebellion. May it be
the last. A certain leaven of discord is beginning, alas, to contaminate
our ranks, and our moralists observe not without apprehension sundry
symptoms which indicate the relaxation of our morals. The growth in our
population is very disquieting, notably since certain chemical
discoveries, following upon which we have been too much in a hurry to
declare that bread might be made of stones, and that it was no longer
worth while to husband our food supplies or to trouble ourselves to
maintain at a certain limit the number of mouths to feed.
Simultaneously with the increase in the number of children, there is a
diminution in the number of masterpieces. Let us hope that this
lamentable movement will soon abate. If the sun once more, as after the
different glacial epochs, succeeds in awakening from his lethargy and
regains fresh strength, let us pray that only a small part of our
population, that which is the most light-headed, the most unruly, and
the most deeply attacked by incurable "matrimonialitis", will avail
itself of the seeming yet deceptive advantages offered by this open air
cure and will make a dash upwards for the freedom of those inclement
climes! But this is highly improbable if one reflects on the advanced
age of the sun and the danger of those relapses common to old age. It is
still less desirable. Let us repeat in the words of Miltiades our august
ancestor, blessed are those stars which are extinct, that is to say, the
almost entire number of those which people space. Radiance, as he truly
said, is to the stars what the flowering season is to the plants. After
having flowered, they begin to bear fruit. Thus, doubtless, weary of
expansion and the useless squandering of their strength through the
infinite void, the stars collect the germs of higher life in order to
fertilize them in the depth of their bosom. The deceptive brilliancy of
these widely scattered stars, so relatively few in number, which are
still alight, which have not finished sowing what Miltiades called their
wild oats of light and heat, prevented the first race of men from
thinking of this, to wit of the numberless and tranquil multitude of
dark stars to whom this radiance served as a cloak. But as for us,
delivered from their spell and freed from this immemorial optical
delusion, we continue firmly to believe that, among the stars as among
mankind, the most brilliant are not the best, and that the same causes
have brought about elsewhere the same results, compelling other races of
men to hide themselves in the bosom of their earth, and there in peace
to pursue the happy course of their destiny under unique conditions of
absolute independence and purity, that in short in the heavens as on the
earth true happiness lives concealed.
NOTE ON TARDE
Gabriel Tarde was originally a member of the legal profession. For a
long time he was examining magistrate at Sarlat. His works on sociology
and criminology revealed him to the public. He was appointed head of the
Statistical bureau at the Ministry of Justice, a post in which he was
able to obtain first hand the most precious documents for his social
studies. Later he was elected to the chair of modern philosophy at the
College of France, then he was elected member of the Academy of moral
and political sciences in the philosophical section. He died in 1904.
Tarde wrote a great deal. His flexibility of spirit and style add charm
to his work on technical subjects. In criminology his principal works
are: "The Philosophy of Punishment", "The Professional Criminal",
"Comparative Criminality" (1898);--then come the political works, such
as "The Transformation of Power" (1899). His "Transformation of Law"
dates from 1894. His study in social psychology entitled "Opinion and
the Masses" appeared in 1901. His most celebrated work is perhaps "The
Laws of Imitation" (1900) which was preceded by his "Social Logic"
(1898) and his "Universal Opposition" (1897).
According to Tarde the social phenomena proceed from individual
inventions which in their turn are the offspring of imitation: the
latter is for Tarde a capital factor in social life. Original ideas or
inventions germinate ceaselessly in the social _milieu_, but only some,
either by their superior adaptability or through the peculiar authority
of their inventor, are accepted by the public as a whole. Sociology is
thus reduced to a Psychology of the _processus_ of invention and
imitations. This explains why the great effort of Tarde has been to
discover the "Laws of Invention". Thereby he has given in sociology a
preponderating place to the individual, and the accidental, and has thus
separated himself from the most general tendencies of thought in our
times which are those of Comte.
The style of Tarde is abstract but supple. This fragment of future
History forms a kind of exception to his general work which is very
abstract. Tarde reveals himself in it one of the masters of literary
French. The style is picturesque, intense, broad, even periodic, novel
in respect to the thought, and entirely classical in its purity.
Joseph Manchon.