Gabriel de Tarde
Underground Man
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.
If our architecture in spite of all its splendours seems but a simple 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.