various persecutions of men of genius, inventors or reformers, will
suffice to prove the terrible influence of misoneism, which is the more
intolerant and the more fanatical the more ignorant it is; and we need
only cite the names of Columbus, of Galileo, and of Salomon de Caus,
the first inventor of steam apparatus, who was sent to the Bicêtre by
Richelieu.
_Misoneism in literature._—Likewise to misoneism we owe, in great
part, our admiration for old works and ancient ruins, however hideous
they may be. Because admired by our fathers and by our forefathers they
obtain, so to say, a way of entrance into us, to impose themselves on
our veneration. Thus the Sanscrit language for the Hindoo, the Hebrew
language for the Jews, and to some extent Latin for many Christian
Europeans have become a kind of sacred tongue and linguistic fetich
even outside the precincts of religious usage.
The enormous influence of grammarians in imperial Rome, and afterwards
during the epoch of decadence, as well as in the middle ages, explains
also the persistence of the modern fetichism for grammar, which seems
absurd in an age of naturalists and mathematicians.
And from thence comes the not less absurd and yet unshakable faith in
classicism, rooted deeply even in men worthy of respect, who cause
us to lose the best years of life in stammering in an almost useless
tongue.
_Misoneism in politics._—The same may be said with much more fitness
of many social and political institutions which are thought to be
modern and which are only relics of other times; it is for this reason
only that they attract the admiration and the respect of the majority
of people, constituting true conventional lies, as Nordau calls them,
but which have their _bourgeois_ believers and apostles.
In fact, the past is so incorporated in our inward being that even
the most refractory of us feel a powerful attraction towards it. Thus
we may be as unbelieving as can be wished, and yet at every hour of
the day we feel ourselves struck and attracted by the cajoleries of
priests. We may be lovers of equality, but, as we have already said,
we feel a secret veneration for the heirs of our barons. It is in
vain that the uselessness of certain laws is accepted; he who upholds
and defends them will meet with the approbation of multitudes, called
forth by the sole circumstance that the laws have existed. And if
civilisation progresses often, it is because it finds in the changes
of climate, of race, or in the appearance of men of genius or madmen,
circumstances which end in combining a great many small movements in
such a manner as to make of them in time a great one. Max Nordau thinks
(with some exaggeration) that progress is due more to a few enlightened
despots than to all revolutionists. But this progress was very slow;
he who wished to precipitate it, contravened the physiological nature
of man; consequently a revolution which is not an evolution, is
pathological and criminal.
_Misoneism in the punishment of crimes against custom._—This is why
in primitive legislation we see offences against custom constitute the
_maximum_ of delict, of immorality.
II. PHILONEISM.
This theory of misoneism, previously expounded in my "Delitto
Politico," has aroused opposition from all sides; especially in France,
on the part of Brunetière, Proal, Tarde, Joly, and Merlino. "Children,"
say they, "women, savages are curious, lovers of novelties, and
misoneists are so far from being ignorant that you yourself refer to
them as being among the academicians, (these last are still it appears
in the Latin world admirers of good faith); artists have success
only in attempting new paths; all peoples have the love of change;
they prove it by their emigrations and by their invasions; the great
invasions of the barbarians were an example of it."
"Besides, if there are _misoneists_, there are also _neophiles_, and
the one makes up for the other."
"In each of us," writes Tarde, "by the side of habit, a sort of
physiological misoneism, exists caprice; by the side of the inclination
to repeat, the inclination to innovate. The first of these two
necessities is fundamental, but the second is the essential, the
_raison d'être_ of the others."[73]
[73] _Revue Philosophique_, October, 1890.
In order to reply to all these objections it is necessary above
all to be well understood. As to minor innovations, and caprices
that satisfy the need of movement of our organs, from the very fact
that they are animate, it is certain that we are all very eager for
these; in proportion of course to our sex, our age, and our degree of
intellectual culture. The little child will be happy with a toy, he
will experience fear or dread at the sight of a mask, of a large animal
or even of a small one; I have seen children frightened by a sparrow,
by a fly. Woman takes pleasure in disguising herself in a striking
manner, in wearing new garments in which to attend great plays in the
theatres, but she has a horror of new religious rites, and of new
discoveries, to such a degree that a great number still refuse to use
linen and knitted work made by machinery; sewing machines themselves
find their way among them only very slowly. (Merlino.)
When it is claimed (Merlino) that savages love novelties, from the
fact, related by Ellis, that some of them endeavored to procure Bibles,
(taking them, perhaps, for playthings,) or arms of which they had seen
the useful effects, their nature is misjudged; since even after many
years passed in contact with European civilisation, after having worn
its clothing and ornaments, they return naked to their forests, where
a warm garment would certainly not be an object of embarrassment. To
believe with Cardinal Massaia that they offer themselves voluntarily
for vaccination, that they even ask it, is to ignore that even among
ourselves, vaccination encounters a great number of adversaries. Does
not Stanley relate that in his last journey, an epidemic of smallpox
having broken out in the camp, many of the porters, although they
saw that the vaccinated Zanzibaris did not die, refused to submit to
vaccination?
According to Tarde, the superstitious admiration, the enthusiastic
veneration by barbarous peoples of various forms of insanity, often
baptised as prophetism and saintliness, scarcely accords with the
aversion for novelties, that is to say for singularities, which I
attribute to them too liberally. But the cause of that admiration is
nothing else than the fear, the ignorance which leads them to take
a disease for the inspiration of a God. Nevertheless, I am far from
denying the influence of madmen in philoneism and in revolutions (as we
shall see in the sequel of this article); yet if we observe the Santons
of Africa and their obscenities, we see that it is not for their useful
and innovating ideas that barbarians venerate madmen.
The Academician will admire a new species of snail, he will thrill with
joy at the discovery of a Phœnician inscription that will enable him
to learn the name of a tribal chief, he will go into ecstasies before
a greater curvity given to a screw, but he will excommunicate the
telephone, the telegraph, the railway, the new laws of Darwin.
The artist, also, will love to trace a new arabesque, to change to
blue the prevailing color of the rose, but he will never attempt,
directly, with success, new methods. The hatred by all the elevated
and academical classes which still besets Zola, Balzac, and Flaubert,
the action brought against the last named, and the universal scandals
raised by De Goncourt, Boito, Rossini, and Verdi, are there to prove
it. The first, at least, who attempts a new method in painting, in
literature, etc., will encounter only hatred and contempt. And when we
smile at models unchangeably fixed by Egyptian art, we do not think
that the Madonna and the Jesus of our painters have not changed for
eighteen centuries.
Horace wrote:
"Adeo sanctum est vetus omne poema.
* * * * *
Indignor quicquam reprehendi, non quia crasse
Compositum, illepideve putetur, sed quia nuper."
It is then not true, as is objected against me in France (_Journal des
Economistes_, 1890), that in extending misoneism to the academies, its
greatest intensity is excluded from among the ignorant. Each class,
each caste has a proportionate ignorance, and a repugnance equally
proportional for that of which it is ignorant. We have demonstrated it
for genius itself, which is sublime on certain sides only to be the
lowest on some others, and we could have a proof of it even in the
opposition that the most ardent neophiles, the anarchists, make to this
theory of misoneism, of which they are thus themselves a confirmation.
Bismarck despises parliamentarianism, peace, arbitration, and even the
Latin, or rather European, alphabet. Flaubert and Rossini had a dread
of railways. The statesmen who govern Europe are not all geniuses,
but they are men not destitute of intellectual culture; and yet how
can it be explained that they so strive with ever increasing tenacity
and zeal to increase armaments and armies, to the extent of causing
ruin to their peoples,—a greater and more complete ruin perhaps, than
that which even a disastrous war might occasion? And this for the
purpose, they declare, (and it seems to be sincere,) of more surely
escaping war, when as a fact one fourth of the money spent for that end
would be sufficient to assure the happiness of the peoples governed
by affording the social questions which they all pretend to have at
heart, a solution which, as things now are, it is ever becoming more
difficult to reach. The true cause is in the repugnance they experience
to the idea of starting on a fresh path, in the tendency to adhere to
old habits which go back even to the epochs of the warrior castes.
Indeed in the minds of a very great number, at least among the Germans,
a good corporal of the guard is more worthy of consideration than a
great scholar; debate in parliament on the erection of a fortress is
not permitted, however costly it may be, whilst every one may speak on
the establishment of a school; in France, in Italy, and in Germany,
to touch the war budget, unproductive and ruinous as it may be, is to
raise the hand to the ark of the covenant,—a veritable state crime.
But science is a new thing, while the art of war goes back to remotest
antiquity; it descends from Achilles and from Cain.
I was not guilty of a self-contradiction when I said that the modern
French love novelty as much as their ancestors did. I am too much the
friend and too fond of the French to flatter them, and not to tell
them exactly what I think. France is undeniably at the head of the
Latin races, but to the same extent, and perhaps more than they, it
prefers novelties to the new. It has always had the stormy agitations,
rather than the useful results, of revolutions. The great religious
reform, Protestantism, touched it without affecting it; the great
constitutional reform has taken but slight root, and that two centuries
and a half after it was accomplished in England.
Balzac wrote: "In France the provisional is eternal although the French
are suspected of loving change."
Novelties to be accepted by the French must be such as do not interfere
with their habits. And it is they who have invented the words
_routine_, _blague_, and _chauvinism_. It is because they are still in
the military period of Spencer. So far as that goes, they have cried
out beware! to the English, then, beware to the Russians, now beware
to the Germans and the Italians. They change voluntarily their dress,
their ministers, their external form of government, but always there
remains in them at bottom a slight attachment to the ancient druidical
and Cæsarian tendencies. It is not many years since the priest still
commanded in Vendée. We have seen the French, while extreme republican,
make war for the Pope.
After having a Fourier and Proudhon and, what is more, universal
suffrage, they have not yet a social law which gives satisfaction to
the just demands of the indigent, or of workingmen, beyond that of the
"probi viri."
It is true that they have had their peasant wars—their Jacquerie—and
'89; but these were explosions that aroused them but for a moment
only to allow them afterwards to fall much lower. Indeed, but a few
centuries after the Jacquerie, they saw the same peasants who had
raised the insurrection, kiss the horses of the couriers who brought
good news of the health of the king. And what a king! Louis XV, who
might rather be called the executioner, than the administrator of his
people. And after having driven away so many Cæsars, little was wanting
to make them fall again under such a trumpery Cæsar as Boulanger if the
highest classes of the capital had not been opposed to it.
Moreover certain particular facts, which portray much better their
physiognomy, show how fundamentally conservative they are.
Let us cite for example the veneration exhibited by the high classes
for the Academies and the passion for heraldic titles and decorations.
"France is academic," wrote De Goncourt in _Manette Salomon_.
Sarcey relates that during the siege of Paris, the flesh of the animals
of the Jardin des Plantes, having been put up for sale, the common
people preferred to suffer hunger rather than eat of it, so that the
educated classes alone fed on it.
We know what resistance the French made, under a thousand pretexts, to
the reform of their orthography, which is in part merely the relics of
the old pronunciation.
Recently, an engineer at Bordeaux wrote to me, that, on his inventing
machinery for the easy transference of merchandise from ships to the
quays, sturdy opposition was met with on the part of the stevedores of
the port, who would have been the first to derive great advantage from
it.
The medical faculty at Paris has not only anathematised tartar emetic,
vaccine, ether, and the antiseptic method, but also the physicians who
substituted the use of horses for the ancient employment of mules to
expedite their visits to their patients.[74]
[74] _Revue Scientifique_, 1889.
Is it not in learned Germany that we find Anti-semitism in fashion? And
has not Russia made it a law of the state?
In certain districts of Sicily is not the ancient method still
preserved of embalming and of painting the bodies of the dead which was
practised among the ancient Egyptians?
A recent law-suit tried at Turin has proved that not only the lower
classes, but also numbers of persons belonging to the higher classes
protect themselves by practices that distinctly recall those of the
sorcerers of antiquity. All this would prove that philoneism is rather
the exception than the rule.
It is objected to my position, that nations and peoples are such
lovers of change that they have always emigrated. But before making
this affirmation, we ought to study the causes which impel them to
emigration.
Day by day the peasants see their wages decrease; yet even then they do
not remove from the land that they love more than themselves, and to
which they are more closely bound than they ever were by feudal laws.
When epidemics produced by the bad quality of cereals, as pellagra
and acrodynia, when mortal diseases and the most cruel famine destroy
them by thousands, then only, and even then not always, do they come
to a determination; while for many years they keep before them the
remembrance of their native soil, of that country, which, like a true
stepmother, gave them only diseases and sufferings.
I have listened to poor emigrants say to me: "We have only to die! The
life that we lead is certain death; and it is for this reason alone
that we have determined to emigrate."
As to the invasions of the barbarians, only ill-informed minds can
believe that it was the effect of a sudden movement, of a caprice
hurrying away masses almost without a reason. On the contrary, all now
admit (as was really mentioned in Tacitus, Bk. II., Chap. 2, of the
Annals) that it was a very slow movement, already begun three centuries
before Christ, and of which that of the Cimbri, who came from Jutland,
was an episode. The crossing of the Baltic was an easy enterprise. The
inhabitants of the coast had a sufficient number of vessels, and from
Carlsroon to the nearest ports of Russia and of Pomerania was only a
distance of thirty-four leagues.
If the tribes of Germans, Suevians, and Goths were repulsed from
Italian soil, they had already taken a firm position on the soil of
Gaul. Cæsar (De Bello Gallico) speaks of Ariovistus and the Suevians
whom he met there as his most formidable enemies. They did not appear
to him as forming an isolated body, detached from Germany; on the
contrary, he relates that the Germans time and again forced their way
into Gaul. Movements within continued, for even after Augustus we find
that the Romans did not always encounter the same peoples in the same
countries. This is affirmed by Procopius, Paulus Diaconus, and many
others.
Let us recall here that already after the death of Nero, Civilis, who
was in the service of Rome, led eight cohorts from his country into
Gaul where he was defeated, but he was able to make an arrangement,
thanks to which he could settle as an ally at a small distance from the
borders which he had betrayed (Gibbon).
The Germans (a people composed of voluntary associations of soldiers,
almost savages) being hunters rather than cultivators, were naturally
obliged to change their residence; we know indeed with what rapidity
the game was exhausted, which obliged those who live by it to overrun
an immense extent of territory and continually to transfer their
residence to other places; this is why emigration is in this case the
result of the law of inertia, the people not knowing how to replace
a precarious form of existence by one that is more stable. They had
no towns, but real movable villages that could be compared to those
of the Arabs of Africa. Like all nomad peoples and hunters, when the
hope of a conquest shone before them, they abandoned their forests
and, desiring to reach warmer regions, went from them with their wives
and children to war. During long years their efforts were impotent,
because until the time of Marcus Aurelius they were divided, precisely
like the savages of America, into a great number (40) of small tribes,
dispersed over an immense territory and enemies of one another; it was,
consequently, the more easy to subdue them, the rather that not knowing
the use of the breast-plate and but little that of iron and of cavalry,
they found themselves powerless against the Roman legions, of whose
tactics besides they were ignorant.
But when Rome, at the decadence, commenced to recruit its army with
Germans, and when less vigilant in guarding the frontiers, she allowed
German families, if not even tribes, to pass the same, she found
herself in great part disarmed against an enemy who had already set
foot against her, bearing her own weapons, and what is worse, who knew
her treasures, her tactics, and her weaknesses. Under Tiberius even, it
was known that the auxiliary soldiers constituted the principal force
of the Roman armies (nihil validum in exercitibus nisi quod externum);
at first equal in number to the legionary soldiers, they much exceeded
them afterwards, when the citizens evaded military services, and when
under Gallienus the Senators were forbidden to command the army. To all
these causes can still be added secondary ones.
Before the historic invasion, emigration had taken place. "When," says
Gibbon, "a cruel famine befell the Germans, they had no other resource
than to send a third or a fourth part of their young men to seek their
fortune elsewhere."
According to the national historians, emigration was due to the
disproportion between the size of the population and the means of
subsistence in the region where they dwelt (Paulus Diaconus): the
Germans were very prolific. As they were not agriculturists, nothing
bound them to the soil; pestilence or famine, a victory or a defeat,
an oracle of the Gods, or the eloquence of a chief sufficed to attract
them to the warmer countries of the south. Germany was then much colder
than it is at present. (Gibbon.)
The necessity of fleeing from the domination of a victorious enemy
forced the Huns towards the west; religious fanaticism drove the nomad
Arabs towards the great Byzantine and Persian empires; religious terror
urged the Cimbri and the Teutons to throw themselves on the Gauls and
on Italy.[75] Often also the taste for wine and liquors led them to
invade rich countries for these gifts of God.
[75] _Revue des deux mondes._ June 11, 1889. Berthollet.
According to a legend, doubted by some historians, but accepted by
others, among them Cipolla, the descent of the Lombards into Italy
appears to have been caused by the fact that some of their companions,
after having served Narses, conveyed into their country some Italian
fruits which excited their curiosity.
All this will suffice to explain the movement we are considering, which
commenced slowly among the Northern peoples and afterwards became
unrestrainable, and to show how the law of inertia was counteracted
among them.
And it is necessary to remark that this need of movement thus begun,
did not end with the conquest; but, obeying perfectly the law of
inertia, according to which a movement being started it continues
indefinitely if friction does not occur to arrest it, it was continued
by the crusades, by the Norman invasion of Sicily, and by the epidemics
of pilgrimage that may be regarded as the continuation of the movement
towards the South, begun three centuries before Christ, and become a
habit when even the necessity was no longer so great as at other times,
and when it was even no longer urgent.
Here is still another cause of philoneism; the successive movements
which grow out of those first started.
As the historians very well observe, Mahomet was a continuation
of the Judaic Christian revolutionary initiative. "Mahomet was a
Nazarene, a Judæo-Christian. Semitic monotheism regained its rights
through him, and avenged itself for the mythological and polytheistic
complications that Greek genius had introduced into the theology
of the first disciples of Jesus." (Renan.) There is more of this
in revolutions and still more in rebellions; progress, philoneism,
following the law of accelerated movement and of the same law of
inertia, once begun, blindly precipitates itself to opposite excesses,
the very thing that causes its ruin. Thus Cromwell in a country almost
feudal and ultra-monarchical reached, or rather was driven by his
party, to regicide, and to the foundation of a democratic republic in
which the peers were consigned to oblivion and his partisans (of the
Barebones parliament) went so far as to wish to do away with lawyers
and universities, to forbid dances, theatrical representations, and
even Christmas festivities, to mutilate statues on behalf of decency,
and to burn sacred pictures. (Macaulay.) This led to a reaction which
under Charles II. reached absolute power by consent of parliament.
In Christianity castration, and even the abolition of property was
reached. We know the excesses of '89.
Passion explains many of these facts, which proceed even to insanity.
St. Paul, from an enemy became an apostle of Christ. Clarendon after
abandoning himself to despair at seeing his son go over from the
service of James to that of William, became a rebel at the end of
fifteen days. The parliament of James, ultra-monarchical as it was,
rebelled. The conventional Baudot said: "There are men who have fever
for twenty-four hours. I have had it for ten years." "In the days of
terrible crises," wrote Valbert, "the law of cause and effect seems
suspended, the work is accomplished in an hour. To ask revolution to
be wise, is to ask the tempest to break nothing."[76]
[76] _Valbert._ _Le centennaire de 1789._ Paris, 1889.