There are two ways of thinking. One can either accept current ideas and
associations of ideas, just as they are, or else undertake, on his own
account, new associations or, what is rarer, original disassociations.
The intelligence capable of such efforts is, more or less, according
to the degree, or according to the abundance and variety of its other
gifts, a creative intelligence. It is a question either of inventing
new relations between old ideas, old images, or of separating old
ideas, old images united by tradition, of considering them one by one,
free to work them over and arrange an infinite number of new couples
which a fresh operation will disunite once more, and so on till new
ties, always fragile and doubtful, are formed.
In the realm of facts and of experience such operations would
necessarily be limited by the resistance of matter and the
uncompromising character of physical laws. In the purely intellectual
domain they are subject to logic; but logic itself being an
intellectual fabric, its indulgence is almost unlimited. In truth,
the association and the disassociation of ideas (or of images, for
the idea is merely a worn-out image) pursue a winding course which
it is impossible to determine, and whose general direction, even, it
is difficult to follow. There are no ideas so remote, no images so
ill-assorted, that an easy habit of association cannot bring them
together, at least, momentarily. Victor Hugo, seeing a cable wrapped
with rags at the point where it crossed a sharp ridge, saw, at the
same time, the knees of tragic actresses padded to break the dramatic
falls in the fifth act;[1] and these two things so remote--a rope
anchored on a rock, and the knees of an actress--are evoked, as we
read, in a parallel which takes our fancy because the knees and the
rope are equally "furred,"[2] the first above and the latter below, at
the bend; because the elbow made by a cable thus cast bears a certain
resemblance to a leg that is bent; because Giliatt's situation is quite
tragic; and, finally, because, even while perceiving the logic of these
comparisons, we perceive, no less clearly, their delicious absurdity.
Such an association is perforce extremely fugitive, unless the language
adopts it and makes of it one of those figures of speech with which
it delights to enrich itself. It should occasion no surprise were
this bend of a cable to be called its "knee." In any event, the two
images remain ever ready to be divorced, divorce being the permanent
rule in the world of ideas, which is the world of free love. This fact
sometimes scandalizes simple folk. Whoever first dared to say the
"mouth" or the "jaw" of a cannon, according to which of those terms is
the older, was, without doubt, accused either of preciousness or of
coarseness. If it be improper to speak of the "knee" of a rope, it is
quite proper to speak of the "elbow" of a pipe or the "paunch" of a
bottle. But these examples are presented merely as elementary types of
a mechanism which is more familiar to us in practice than in theory.
Leaving aside all images still living, we shall concern ourselves
exclusively with ideas--that is to say, those tenacious and fugitive
shades which flutter about eternally bewildered in men's brains.
There are associations of ideas so durable that they seem everlasting,
so closely knit that they resemble those double stars which the naked
eye seeks in vain to separate. They are usually called "commonplaces."
This expression, relic of an old rhetorical term, _loci communes
sermonis_, has, especially since the development of individualism,
assumed a slighting sense which it was far from possessing at the
start, and even as late as the seventeenth century. The meaning of
"commonplace" has also been narrowed, as well as debased, till it has
come to be a variant of cliché, or hackneyed expression--that which has
already been seen or heard; and, for the mass of men, who employ words
without precision, commonplace is now one of the synonyms of _cliché_.
But _cliché_ refers to the words, commonplace to the ideas. _Cliché_
defines the form or the letter, commonplace the substance or the sense.
To confound them is to confound the thought with the expression of the
thought. The _cliché_ is immediately perceptible. The commonplace very
often escapes notice if clothed in an original dress. There are not
many examples, in any literature, of new ideas expressed in a new form.
The most captious mind must commonly content itself with one or other
of these pleasures, only too happy when not deprived of both at once,
which is not very rarely the case.
The commonplace is both more and less than a hackneyed expression. It
is hackneyed, but sometimes unavoidably so. It is hackneyed, but so
universally accepted that it comes consequently to be called a truth.
Most truths which travel the world (truths are great travellers) may
be regarded as commonplaces, that is to say, associations of ideas
common to a large number of men, none of whom would dare deliberately
to disassociate them. Man, in spite of his lying tendency, has great
respect for what he calls the truth. This is because truth is the staff
with which he travels through life, because commonplaces are the bread
in his wallet, the wine in his gourd. Deprived of the truth contained
in commonplaces, men would be without defence, without support, and
without nourishment. They have so great a need of truths that they
adopt new ones without rejecting the old. Civilized man's brain is a
museum of contradictory truths. This does not disturb him, because he
is a "successive." He ruminates his truths one after the other. He
thinks as he eats. We should vomit with horror if we had presented to
us, in a large dish, the various aliments, from meat to fruit, mixed
with soup, wine and coffee, destined to form our "successive" repast.
Our horror would be as great were we shown the repellent amalgam
of contradictory truths which find lodgment in our mind. Some few
analytical intelligences have sought vainly to draw up in cold blood
the inventory of their contradictions. To each objection offered by
reason, sentiment opposes an immediately valid excuse; for, as M.
Ribot has pointed out, the sentiments are what is strongest in us,
representing the elements of permanence and continuity. It is not
less difficult to inventory the contradictions of others, where a
single individual is concerned; for here we come up against hypocrisy
which has, precisely, as its social rôle, to dissimulate the too
strident clash of our variegated convictions. We should then question
all men--that is to say, the human entity--or at least groups of men
sufficiently numerous for the cynicism of some to compensate the
hypocrisy of others.
In the lower animal regions and in the vegetable world, budding is
one of the ways in which life is created. Scission is seen to take
place equally in the world of ideas; but the result, instead of being
a new life, is a new abstraction. All general grammars, or elementary
treatises on logic, teach how abstractions are formed. They have
neglected to teach how they are not formed--that is, why a given
commonplace persists in living on without posterity. It is a somewhat
delicate question, but it would suggest interesting remarks for a
chapter to be called "Refractory commonplaces, or the impossibility of
disassociating certain ideas." It would, perhaps, be useful to examine
first how ideas become associated, and to what end. The method of this
operation is of the simplest sort. Its principle is analogy. There are
very remote analogies; there are others so close that they lie within
reach of all.
A great many commonplaces have an historic origin. One day two ideas
became united under the influence of events, and this union proved more
or less lasting. Having seen with its own eyes the death-struggle of
Byzantium, Europe coupled these two ideas, Byzantium-Decadence, which
became a commonplace, an incontestable truth for all men who read and
write, and thus necessarily for all the rest--for those who cannot
verify the truths offered them. From Byzantium, this association of
ideas was extended to the whole Roman Empire, which is now, for sage
and respectful historians, nothing but a succession of decadences.
We read recently in a weighty newspaper: "If the despotic form of
government possessed a special virtue, conducive to the creation of
good armies, would not the establishment of the empire have inaugurated
an era of development in the military power of the Romans? It was, on
the contrary, a signal for downfall and destruction." This commonplace,
of Christian origin, has been popularized, in modern times, as
everyone knows, by Montesquieu and Gibbon. It has been magisterially
disassociated by M. Gaston Paris, and is now nothing but nonsense.
But, as its genealogy is known--as its birth and its death have been
witnessed--it may serve fairly well as an example to explain the
nature of a great historic truth.
The secret purpose of the commonplace is, in fact, to express a truth.
Isolated ideas represent merely facts or abstractions. To form a truth,
two factors are needed--a fact and an abstraction. Such, at least, is
the commonest mode of generation. Almost every truth, almost every
commonplace, may be resolved into these two elements.
The word "truth" may almost always be employed concurrently with
the word "commonplace," and is thus defined, once and for all, as a
commonplace which has not yet been disassociated, disassociation being
analogous to what, in chemistry, is called analysis. Chemical analysis
challenges neither the existence nor the qualities of the substance
which it disassociates into diverse elements often disassociable in
their turn. It limits itself to liberating these elements and offering
them to synthesis which, varying the proportions and adding new
elements, will, if it likes, obtain entirely different substances. With
the fragments of a truth can be constructed another truth "identically
contrary." Such a task would be a mere game, but useful, nevertheless,
like all those exercises which limber the intelligence and lead it
towards that state of disdainful nobility to which it should aspire.
There are, however, truths that one dreams neither of analyzing nor of
denying. Whether furnished us by the secular experience of humanity,
or forming part of the axioms of science, they are incontestable. The
preacher who proclaimed from the pulpit, before Louis XIV, "Gentlemen,
we shall all die!" proffered a truth which the king, though he scowled,
did not pretend seriously to dispute. It is, however, one of those
truths that have doubtless experienced the greatest difficulty in
becoming established, and are not, even now, universally admitted.
It was not all at once that the Aryan races connected these two
ideas--that of death and that of necessity. Many black tribes still
have not reached this point. There is no natural death, no necessary
death, for the Negro. The sorcerer is consulted, at each decease,
in order to ascertain the author of this secret and magic crime. We
ourselves are still somewhat in the same mental state, and every
premature death of a prominent man gives immediate rise to rumours of
poisoning, of mysterious murder. Everyone remembers the legends started
by the death of Gambetta and of Félix Faure. They connect naturally
with those that stirred the end of the seventeenth century--with those
which, far more than the facts, doubtless rare, darkened the sixteenth
century in Italy. Stendhal, in his Roman anecdotes, overworks this
poison superstition which must still, in our day, claim more than one
judicial victim.
Man associates ideas, not at all in accordance with verifiable
exactitude, but with his pleasure and his interest. That is why most
truths are merely prejudices. Those that are least open to question are
also those that he has always sought to combat cunningly with the ruse
of silence. The same inertia is opposed to the work of disassociation
seen operating slowly on certain truths.
The state of disassociation reached by moral commonplaces seems to bear
a rather close relation to the degree of intellectual civilization.
Here, too, it is a question of a sort of struggle, carried on, not
by individuals, but by peoples formed into nations, against palpable
facts which, while augmenting the intensity of the individual life,
diminish, for that very reason, as experience proves, the intensity of
collective life and energy. There is no doubt that a man can derive
from immorality itself--from his refusal to subscribe to the prejudices
inscribed in a decalogue--a great personal benefit; but a collectivity
of individuals too strong, too mutually independent, makes but a
mediocre people. We have, in such cases, the spectacle of the social
instinct entering the lists against the individual instinct, and of
societies professing, as such, a morality that each of its intelligent
members, followed by a very large part of the herd, deems vain, outworn
or tyrannical.
A rather curious illustration of these principles will be found by
examining the present state of sexual morality. This morality, peculiar
to Christian peoples, is based upon the exceedingly close association
of two ideas--that of carnal pleasure and that of generation. Any
man or people that has not disassociated these two ideas, has not
mentally liberated the elements of this truth, namely, that outside
of the properly generative act, accomplished under the protection of
the laws, whether religious or civil--the second being mere parodies
of the first, in our essentially Christian civilizations--sexual acts
are sins, errors, faults, weaknesses. Whoever consciously adopts
this rule, sanctioned by the codes, belongs evidently to a still
rudimentary civilization. The highest civilization being that in which
the individual is freest, the most exempt from obligations, this
proposition would be open to question only if taken as a provocation
to libertinism, or as a depreciation of asceticism. It does not matter
here whether it be moral or immoral. It ought, if exact, to be seen,
at the first glance, in the facts. Nothing is easier. A statistical
table of European natality will convince the stubbornest that there
is a very close bond--a bond of cause and effect--between a people's
intellectuality and its fecundity. The same is true for individuals
as for social groups. It is as a result of intellectual weakness that
working-men allow their homes to be flooded with offspring. The slums
are full of unfortunate individuals who, having begotten a dozen
children, are surprised to find life harsh. These poor creatures, who
lack even the excuse of religious beliefs, have not yet learned to
disassociate the idea of carnal pleasure and that of generation. In
their case, the first determines the second, and their acts respond to
a childish, almost animal cerebral process. The man who has reached a
really human stage in the scale of intelligence, limits his offspring
at will. It is one of his privileges, but it is among those that he
attains only to die of them.
Fortunate for the individual whom it sets free, this particular
disassociation is, in fact, far less fortunate for a people. However,
it will favour the further development of civilization, by maintaining
upon the earth, the spaces required for human evolution.
It was not till fairly late that the Greeks succeeded in separating
the idea of woman and that of generation; but they had already
disassociated, at a very early date, the idea of generation and that
of carnal pleasure. When they ceased to consider woman solely as an
instrument of generation, the reign of the courtesans began. The Greeks
seem, moreover, always to have had an extremely vague sexual morality,
though this did not prevent them from cutting a certain figure in
history.
Christianity could not, without forswearing its own principles,
encourage the disassociation of the idea of carnal pleasure and that
of generation; but it successfully promoted, on the other hand, the
disassociation of the idea of love and that of carnal pleasure, and
this was one of the great conquests of humanity. The Egyptians were so
far incapable of understanding such a disassociation, that the love of
a brother and sister would have seemed nothing to them if it had not
led to sexual intercourse. The lower classes of great cities are often
enough quite Egyptian in this regard. The different sorts of incest
which occasionally come to our notice, testify to the fact than an
analogous state of mind is not absolutely incompatible with a certain
intellectual culture. The peculiarly Christian form of chaste love,
freed from all idea of physical pleasure, is divine love, such as it
is seen flowering in the mystical exaltation of the contemplatives.
This is the really pure love, since it corresponds to nothing that
can be defined. It is the intelligence adoring itself in its own
infinite self-made image. Whatever sensual element may be involved
has its source in the very constitution of the human body, and in the
law governing the interdependence of the organs. No account should,
therefore, be taken of it in a non-physiological study. What has been
clumsily called Platonic love is thus a Christian creation. It is in
the last analysis a passionate friendship, as vital and jealous as
physical love, but freed from the idea of carnal pleasure, just as
the latter had already been freed from the idea of generation. This
ideal state of the human affections is the first stage on the road to
asceticism, and asceticism might be defined as the state of mind in
which all ideas are disassociated.
With the waning of the Christian influence, the first stage of
asceticism has become a less and less frequent halting-place, and
asceticism itself, grown equally rare, is often reached by another
route. In our day the idea of love has once more been closely connected
with the idea of physical pleasure, and moralists are busy refashioning
its primitive association with the idea of generation. It is a rather
curious retrogression.
An historical psychology of humanity could be attempted by determining
the precise degree of disassociation attained, in the course of the
centuries, by a certain number of those truths which the orthodox agree
to call primordial. This method ought even to form the base, and this
determination the very aim, of history. Since everything in man comes
back to the intelligence, everything in history ought to come back to
psychology. It would be some excuse for the facts, were they found to
admit of an explanation neither diplomatic nor strategic. What was
the association of ideas, or the truth not yet disassociated, which
favoured the accomplishment of the mission which Jeanne d'Arc believed
to have been received from heaven? To answer this question, it would
be necessary to discover certain ideas capable of uniting equally in
French brains and in English, or a truth at that time indisputably
admitted by all Christendom. Jeanne d'Arc was regarded, at once by her
friends and by her enemies, as possessing a supernatural power. For
the English, she was a very potent sorceress. Opinion is unanimous on
this point, and there is abundant evidence. But for her partisans? For
them she was doubtless a sorceress also, or rather, a magician. Magic
is not necessarily diabolical. Supernatural beings, that were neither
angels nor demons, but Powers which man's intelligence could bring
under its dominion, were afloat in the imagination. The magician was
the good sorcerer. Were this not so, would a man as wise and as saintly
as Albertus Magnus have been taxed with magic? The soldier who followed
Jeanne d'Arc, and the soldier who fought her, sorceress or magician,
formed of her, quite probably, an idea identical in its dreadful
absurdity. But if the English shouted the name of sorceress, the French
withheld the name of "magician," doubtless for the same reason which so
long protected the usurper Ta-Kiang through the marvellous adventures
narrated by Judith Gautier in her admirable _Dragon Impérial_.
What idea, at any given moment, did each class of society form of the
soldier? Would not the answer to this question contain a whole course
in history? Coming down to our own time, it might be asked at what
moment the idea of honour and the military idea became united in the
common mind. Is the union a survival of the aristocratic conception
of the army? Was the association formed as a result of the events of
thirty years ago, when the people decided to exalt the soldier for its
own encouragement? This idea of honour should be clearly understood. It
contains several other ideas--ideas of bravery, of disinterestedness,
of discipline, of sacrifice, of heroism, of probity, of loyalty, of
frankness, of good humour, of openness, of simplicity, etc. The word
itself would, in fine, be found to sum up the qualities of which the
French race believes itself to be the expression. To determine its
origin would be, then, to determine automatically the period when
the Frenchman began to believe himself a compendium of all the manly
virtues. The military man has remained in France, in spite of recent
objections, the very type of the man of honour. The two ideas are
united very energetically. They form a truth which is scarcely disputed
to-day, except by individuals of slight authority or of doubtful
sincerity. Its disassociation is, therefore, very little advanced as
regards the nation as a whole. It was, however, for a moment at least,
completely effected in certain minds. This involved, from the strictly
intellectual point of view, a considerable effort of abstraction which
we cannot but admire when we regard dispassionately the cerebral
machine in its functioning. Doubtless the result achieved was not
the product of normal reasoning. The disassociation was accomplished
in a fit of fever. It was unconscious, and it was momentary; but it
_was_, and that is the important point for the observer. The idea of
honour, with all it implies, became separated from the military idea,
which, in this instance, is the factual idea, the female idea, ready
to receive all the modifiers, and it was perceived that, if there
was a certain logical relation between them, this relation was not
necessary. There is the decisive point. A truth is dead when it has
been shown that the relations between the elements are habitual, and
not necessary; and, as the death of a truth is a great benefit for
mankind, this disassociation would have been very important if it had
been definitive, if it had remained stable. Unfortunately, after the
effort to attain the pure idea, the old mental habits resumed their
sway. The former modifying element was instantly replaced by an element
by no means new, less logical than the other, and even less necessary.
The operation seemed to have miscarried. Association of ideas occurred
again in the very same form as before, though one of the elements had
now been turned inside out, like an old glove. For honour had been
substituted dishonour, with all the adventitious ideas belonging to
the old element transformed into cowardice, deceitfulness, lack of
discipline, falseness, duplicity, wickedness, etc. This new association
of ideas may have a destructive value, but it offers no intellectual
interest.
The moral of this anecdote is that the ideas which seem to us the
clearest, the most evident,--the most palpable, as it were--are, even
so, not strong enough to impose themselves in all their nakedness
upon the average mind. In order to assimilate the idea of the army,
a contemporary brain must swathe it with elements which have only a
chance or current relation with the main idea. A humble politician
cannot, doubtless, be expected to adopt Napoleon's simple idea of
an army as a sword. Very simple ideas lie within the reach of very
complicated minds only. It seems, however, that it should not be absurd
to regard the army merely as the exteriorized force of a nation, and
then to demand of this particular force only those very qualities which
are demanded of force in general. But perhaps even this is too simple?
What excellent opportunities the present offers for one who would
study the mechanism of the association and disassociation of ideas!
We often talk of ideas. We write on the evolution of ideas. Yet no
word is vaguer or more ill-defined. There are naïve writers who hold
forth on the Idea, with a capital I. There are co-operative societies
that start out suddenly in quest of the Idea. There are people who
devote themselves to the Idea, who live with their gaze fixed upon the
Idea. Just what is meant by such rambling? That is what I have never
been able to understand. Employed thus, alone, the word is perhaps a
corruption of the word Ideal. Is the modifying term perhaps understood
also? Is it a stray fragment of the Hegelian philosophy which the
slow advance of the great social glacier has, in passing, deposited
in certain heads, where it rolls and clatters about like a rock? No
one knows. Employed as a relative, the word is not much clearer in
ordinary phraseologies. Its primitive meaning is too far forgotten, as
well as the fact that an idea is nothing but an image that has reached
the state of abstraction, of notion; but it is forgotten also that,
in order to be entitled to the name of idea, a notion must be free
from all compromise with the contingent. A notion, reaching the estate
of idea, has become indisputable. It is a cipher, a sign--one of the
letters in the alphabet of thought.
Ideas cannot be classed as true and false. The idea is necessarily
true. An idea that can be disputed is an idea mingled with concrete
notions, that is to say, a truth. The work of disassociation tends,
precisely, to free the truth from all its fragile part, in order
to obtain the pure, one, and consequently unassailable idea. But
if words were never used save in their unique and absolute sense,
connected discourse would be difficult. There must be left a little
of that vagueness and flexibility which usage has given them; and, in
particular, too much stress must not be laid upon the gap separating
the abstract from the concrete. There is an intermediate state between
ice and water--that in which the latter begins to congeal, when it
still cracks and yields under the pressure of the hand plunged into
it. Perhaps we should not even demand that the words contained in
philosophic handbooks should abdicate all pretension to ambiguity.
The idea of army, which aroused serious polemics, and which was
liberated an instant, only to be obscured anew, is one of those
that border on the concrete and cannot be spoken of without minute
references to reality. The idea of justice, on the contrary, can be
considered in itself, _in abstracto_. In the inquiry made by M. Ribot
on the subject of general ideas, almost all those who heard the word
Justice pronounced, saw, in their mind's eye, the legendary lady with
the scales. There is, in this traditional representation of an abstract
idea, a notion of the very origin of that idea.
The idea of justice is, in fact, nothing but the idea of equilibrium.
Justice is the dead-point in a series of acts--the ideal point at
which contrary forces neutralize each other to produce inertia. Life
which had passed this dead-point of absolute justice could not longer
live, since the idea of life, identical with that of a conflict of
forces, is necessarily the idea of justice. The reign of justice could
only be the reign of silence and of petrification. Mouths cease to
speak--vain organs of stupefied brains--and arms uplifted in suspended
gesture describe nothing further in the frozen air. Theologians
situated justice beyond the world, in eternity. There only can it be
conceived, and there only can it, without danger to life, exercise
once and for all its tyranny which knows but one sort of decree, the
decree of death. The idea of justice, then, clearly belongs to the
series of ideas that are indisputable and undemonstrable. Nothing can
be done with it in its pure state. It must be associated with some
element of fact, or we must cease using a word which corresponds only
to an inconceivable entity. To tell the truth, the idea of justice
is perhaps here disassociated for the first time. Under this name
men allege sometimes the idea of punishment, which is very familiar
to them, sometimes the idea of non-punishment--a neutral idea, mere
shadow of the former. It is question of punishing the guilty and of
not disturbing the innocent--a distinction which, in order to be
comprehensible, would immediately imply a definition of guilt and
a definition of innocence. That is difficult, these words from the
moral dictionary having to-day nothing but a dwindling and entirely
relative significance. And why, it might be asked, should a guilty man
be punished? It would seem, on the contrary, as if the innocent man,
who is supposed to be healthy and normal, were much more capable of
supporting punishment than the guilty man, who is sick and weakly. Why
should not the imbecile, who has let himself be robbed, be punished
instead of the robber, who has certain excuses to offer? That is
what justice would decree if, instead of a theological conception,
it were still, as at Sparta, an imitation of nature. Nothing exists
save by virtue of disequilibrium, of injustice. Every existence is
a theft practised upon other existences. No life flourishes except
in a cemetery. If, instead of being the denier of natural laws,
humanity wished to become their auxiliary, it would seek to protect
the strong against the coalition of the weak, and give the people to
the aristocrats as a footstool. It would seem, on the contrary, as if
that which is to-day understood by justice were, simultaneously with
the punishment of the guilty, the extermination of the strong, and,
simultaneously with the non-punishment of the innocent, the exaltation
of the humble. The origin of this complex, bastard, hypocritical idea
should then be sought in the Gospel, in the "woe to the rich" of
the Jewish demagogues. Thus understood, the idea of justice appears
contaminated at once by hatred and by envy. It no longer retains
anything of its original meaning, and one cannot attempt its analysis
without danger of being duped by the vulgar meaning of the words.
Yet, with a little care, it would be seen that the depreciation of
this useful term arose originally from a confusion between the idea
of right and the idea of punishment. The day when justice came to
mean sometimes criminal justice, sometimes civil justice, the world
confused these two practical notions, and the teachers of the people,
incapable of a serious effort of disassociation, have come to magnify
a misunderstanding which, moreover, serves their own interests. The
real idea of justice appears then, finally, as quite non-existent in
the very word which figures in the human vocabulary. This word resolves
itself, on analysis, into elements which are still very complex, and
among which may be distinguished the idea of right and the idea of
punishment. But there is so much that is illogical in this curious
coupling, that we should be inclined to doubt the accuracy of our
operation, did not the social facts furnish its proof.
We might here examine this question: do abstract words really exist for
the people, for the average man? Probably not. It would even seem as if
the same word attained only graduated stages of abstraction, according
to the degree of intellectual culture. The pure idea is more or less
contaminated by concern for personal, caste or group interests, and
the word justice, for example, thus clothes all sorts of particular
and limited meanings under the weight of which its supreme sense
disappears, overwhelmed.
The moment an idea is disassociated and it enters thus, quite
naked, into circulation, it begins to pick up, in the course of its
wanderings, all sorts of parasitic vegetations. Sometimes the original
organism disappears entirely, devoured by the egoistic colonies which
develop in it. A very amusing example of the way in which ideas are
thus deflected was recently given by the corporation of house-painters,
at the ceremony called the "Triumph of the Republic." These workmen
carried a banner on which their demands for social justice were summed
up in the cry: "Down with Ripolin!" The reader should know that Ripolin
is a prepared paint which anyone can apply, in order to understand the
full sincerity of this slogan as well as its artlessness. Ripolin here
represents injustice and oppression. It is the enemy, the devil. We
all have our ripolin with which we colour, according to our needs, the
abstract ideas which otherwise would be of no personal use to us.
It is under one of these motleys that the idea of liberty is presented
to us by the politicians. Hearing this word, we now perceive little
other than the idea of political liberty, and it would seem as if all
the liberties which man is capable of enjoying were summed up in this
ambiguous expression. Moreover, it is the same with the pure idea of
liberty, as with the pure idea of justice; it is of no use to us in
the ordinary business of life. Neither man nor nature is free, any
more than either is just. Reasoning has no hold upon such ideas. To
express them is to assert them, but they would necessarily falsify
every argument into which one might wish to introduce them. Reduced
to its social significance, the idea of liberty is still incompletely
disassociated. There is no general idea of liberty, and it is difficult
to form one, since the liberty of an individual is exercised only at
the expense of the liberty of others. Formerly liberty was called
privilege. Taking everything into account, that is perhaps its true
name. Even to-day one of our relative liberties--the liberty of the
press--is an ensemble of privileges. Privileges also are the liberty
of speech granted to lawyers, the liberty of trade unions, and,
to-morrow, the liberty of association as it is now proposed to us. The
idea of liberty is perhaps only an emphatic corruption of the idea of
privilege. The Latins, who made great use of the word liberty, meant by
it the privilege of the Roman citizen.
It is seen that there is often an enormous gap between the common
meaning of a word and its real significance in the depths of obscure
verbal consciousnesses, whether because several associated ideas
are expressed by a single word, or because the primitive idea has
been submerged by the invasion of a secondary idea. It is thus
possible--especially in dealing with generalizations--to write
sentences having at once an apparent and a secret meaning. Words,
which are signs, are almost always ciphers as well. The unconscious
conventional language is very much in use, and there are even matters
where it is the only one employed. But cipher implies deciphering. It
is not easy to understand even the sincerest writing, and the author
himself often goes astray because the meaning of words varies not only
from one man to another, but from moment to moment, in the case of the
same man. Language is thus a great cause of deception. It evolves in
abstraction, while life evolves in complete concrete reality. Between
speech and the things designated by speech, there is the same distance
as between a landscape and the description of a landscape. And it must
still further be borne in mind that the landscapes which we depict
are known to us, most often, only through words which are, in turn,
reflections of anterior words. Yet we understand each other. It is a
miracle which I have no intention of analyzing at present. It will
be more to our purpose, in concluding this sketch, which is merely a
method, to undertake the examination of the quite modern ideas of art
and of beauty.
I am ignorant of their origins, but they are later than the classic
languages, which possess no fixed and precise words to express them,
though the ancients were as well able as we to enjoy the reality
they contain--better, even. They are intertangled. The idea of art
is dependent upon the idea of beauty; but this latter idea is itself
nothing but the idea of harmony, and the idea of harmony reduces
itself to the idea of logic. The beautiful is that which is in its
place. Thence arise the sentiments of pleasure given us by beauty. Or
rather, beauty is a logic which is perceived as a pleasure. If this
be admitted, it will at once be understood why the idea of beauty, in
societies dominated by women, is almost always restricted to the idea
of feminine beauty. Beauty is a woman. There is in this an interesting
subject for analysis, but the question is somewhat complicated. It
would be necessary to show, first, that woman is no more beautiful than
man; that, situated on the same plane in nature, constructed on the
same model, made of the same flesh, she would appear to a sensitive
intelligence, exterior to humanity, exactly the female of man--exactly
what, for man, a jenny is to a jack. And, observing them more closely,
the Martian, who wished to learn something concerning the aesthetics of
terrestrial forms, would even note that, if there be a real difference
in beauty between a man and a woman of the same race, of the same
caste, and of the same age, this difference is almost always in favour
of the man; and that, moreover, if neither the man nor the woman be
entirely beautiful, the defects of the human race are more accentuated
in the woman, where the twofold projection of the belly and the
buttocks--sexual attractions, no doubt--breaks unpleasantly the double
line of the silhouette. The curve of the breasts is almost inflected
under the influence of the back, which has a hollow tendency. Cranach's
nudes confess naïvely these eternal imperfections of woman. Another
defect which artists, when they have taste, remedy instinctively, is
the shortness of the legs, so marked in the photographs of nude women.
This cold anatomy of feminine beauty has often been made. It is, then,
useless to insist upon it--all the more because, unfortunately, its
verification is only too easy. But if woman's beauty be so vulnerable
to criticism, how does it happen that, in spite of all, it remains
indisputable--that it has become for us the very basis and leaven of
the idea of beauty? It is a sexual illusion. The idea of beauty is
not a pure idea. It is intimately connected with the idea of carnal
pleasure. Stendhal had an obscure perception of this line of reasoning
when he defined beauty as "a promise of happiness." Beauty is a woman,
even for women themselves, who have carried docility with regard to
men to the point of adopting this aphorism which they are capable of
understanding only under the form of extreme sensual perversion. We
know, however, that women have a particular type of beauty, which men
have naturally branded "doll-like." If women were sincere, they would
long ago have stigmatized equally the type of feminine beauty by which
man most readily lets himself be seduced.
This identification of woman and beauty goes so far to-day that we
have had innocently proposed us the "apotheosis of woman," meaning the
glorification of beauty, with all the promises contained in Stendhal's
definition taken in its erotic sense. Beauty is a woman and woman is a
beauty. The caricaturists accentuate the common sentiment by invariably
coupling with a woman, whom they strive to render beautiful, a man
whose ugliness they stress to the extreme of vulgarity; and this in
spite of the fact that pretty women are so rare in life, that after
thirty a woman is almost always inferior, age for age, in plastic
beauty, to her husband or lover. It is true that this inferiority is no
easier to demonstrate than it is to feel, and that reasoning remains
ineffective, once the page is finished, for the reader as well as for
the writer; and this is very fortunate.
The idea of beauty has never been disassociated save by aestheticians.
The common run of men accept Stendhal's definition, which amounts to
saying that this idea does not exist--that it has been absolutely
devoured by the idea of happiness--of sexual happiness, happiness given
by a woman. That is why the cult of beauty is suspect for moralists who
have analyzed the value of certain abstract words. They translate this
one by the cult of the flesh, and they would be right, if that last
expression did not imply a somewhat silly attack upon one of man's most
natural tendencies. The necessary result has been that, in opposing
such excessive apotheosis of woman, they have infringed upon the rights
of art. Art being the expression of beauty, and it being possible to
understand beauty only under the material aspects of the true idea
which it contains, art has become almost uniquely feminine. Beauty is
woman; and art, also, is woman. But the latter is less absolute. The
notion of art is even fairly clear for artists and for the _élite_. The
idea of art has been extremely well liberated. There is a pure art
which is concerned exclusively with self-realization. No definition
of it even should be given; for such a definition could not be made
without connecting the idea of art with ideas which are foreign to it,
and which would tend to obscure and sully it.
Previous to this disassociation, which is recent, and whose origin
is known, the idea of art was connected with diverse ideas which are
normally foreign to it--ideas of morality, of utility, or education.
Art was the edifying illustration introduced into religious or
philosophical catechism. This was the conception of the last two
centuries. We freed ourselves from that yoke. There are now those who
would like to put it back upon our necks. The idea of art has again
been sullied, this time with the idea of utility. Art is called social
by modern preachers. It is also called democratic, both epithets being
well chosen, if it was meant by them to imply complete negation of its
principal function. Admitting art because it can improve individuals
or the masses, is like admitting roses because an eye-wash can be
extracted from them. It is confounding two series of notions which
the well-regulated exercise of the intelligence places upon entirely
different planes. The plastic arts have a language; but this language
cannot be translated into words and phrases. The work of art says
things which are addressed directly to the aesthetic sense, and to
it alone. What it can add, in such a way as to be understood by our
other, faculties, is not worth listening to. And yet it is this
negligible element which interests the boosters of social art. They
are the majority and, as we are governed by the law of numbers, their
triumph seems assured. The idea of art will, perhaps, prove to have
been disassociated for a few years only, and for a small group of
intelligences.
There are, then, a very large number of ideas that are never employed
by men in their pure state, either because they have not yet been
disassociated, or because this disassociation has been incapable of
achieving stability. There are also a great many ideas which exist in
the state of disassociation, or that can provisionally be considered so
to exist, but which have a special affinity for other ideas with which
they are most commonly encountered. There are still others which seem
refractory to certain associations, whereas the facts to which they
correspond are, in reality, extremely frequent. Here are a few examples
of these affinities and of these repulsions, chosen in the profoundly
interesting realm of commonplaces, or truths.
Flags were originally religious tokens, like the oriflamme of
Saint-Denis, and their symbolic utility has remained at least as
great as their real usefulness. But how, outside of war, have they
become symbols of the idea of country? This is easier to explain by
the facts themselves than by abstract logic. To-day, in nearly all
civilized countries, the idea of country and the idea of flag are
invincibly associated. The two words are even interchangeable. But
this is a question of symbolism quite as much as of association of
ideas. Insistence upon it would lead us to the language of colours,
counterpart of the language of flowers, but still more unstable and
arbitrary. If it is amusing to note that the blue of the French flag is
the consecrated colour of the Virgin and of the children of Mary, it
is no less so to find that the pious purple of the robe of Saint-Denis
has become a revolutionary symbol. Like the atoms of Epicurus, ideas
cling together as best they may, through chance encounters, shocks and
accidents.
Certain associations, though very recent, have rapidly acquired a
singular authority, like those of education and intelligence, of
education and morality. But, at most, education may have something
to say for one of the particular forms of memory, or for a literal
knowledge of the commonplaces contained in the Decalogue. The
absurdity of these forced relations appears very clearly in that
which concerns woman. It seems clear that there is a certain sort of
education--that which they receive to-day--which, far from stimulating
their intelligence, tends rather to blunt it. Since they have been
educated seriously, they no longer have the least influence either
in politics or in literature. Compare, in this connection, our last
thirty years with the last thirty years of the _ancien régime_.
These two associations of ideas have, nevertheless, become veritable
commonplaces--truths which it is as useless to expose as to combat.
They take their place with all those which infest books and the
degenerate lobes of man's brain--with old and venerable truths like:
virtue-recompense, vice-punishment, God-goodness, crime-remorse,
duty-happiness, authority-respect, unhappiness-punishment,
future-progress, and thousands of others, some of which, though absurd,
are useful to mankind.
It would be equally possible to make a long catalogue of the
ideas which men refuse to associate, while delighting in the most
disconcerting _débauches_. We have given above the explanation of this
stubborn attitude, namely, that their principal occupation is the
pursuit of happiness, and that they are much more concerned with
reasoning in accordance with their interests than with the rules of
logic.
Thence the universal aversion to connecting the idea of nothingness
with the idea of death. Though the former is evidently contained in the
latter, humanity insists upon considering them separately. It opposes
their union with all its force, never tiring of driving between them a
chimerical wedge upon which resound the hammer-blows of hope. This is
the finest example of the illogical that we can offer ourselves for our
diversion, and the best proof that, in the gravest matters, as in those
of slightest concern, it is sentiment which always triumphs over reason.
Is it a great thing to have learned that? Perhaps.
November, 1899.
[1] _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_, 2nd part, 1st Book, VII.
[2] Technical term.