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underground manby gabriel tarde translated by cloudesley breretonrecording by ruth golding introductoryit was towards the end of the twentieth century of the prehistoric era, formerly called thechristian, that took place, as is well known, the unexpected catastrophe with which thepresent epoch began, that fortunate disaster which compelled the overflowing flood of civilisationto disappear for the benefit of mankind. i have briefly to relate this universal cataclysmand the unhoped-for redemption so rapidly effected within a few centuries of heroicand triumphant efforts. of course, i shall pass over in silence the particular detailswhich are known to everybody, and shall merely

confine myself to the general outlines ofthe story. but first of all it may be as well to recall in a few words the degree of relativeprogress already attained by mankind, while still living above ground and on the surfaceof the earth, on the eve of this momentous event. iprosperity the zenith of human prosperity seemed to havebeen reached in the superficial and frivolous sense of the word. for the last fifty years,the final establishment of the great asiatic-american-european confederacy, and its indisputable supremacyover what was still left, here and there, in oceania and central africa of barbaroustribes incapable of assimilation, had habituated

all the nations, now converted into provinces,to the delights of universal and henceforth inviolable peace. it had required not lessthan 150 years of warfare to arrive at this wonderful result. but all these horrors wereforgotten. true, there had been many terrific battles between armies of three and four millionmen, between trains with armour-clad carriages, flung, at full speed, against one another,and opening fire on every side; engagements between squadrons of sub-marines which blewone another up with electric discharges; between fleets of iron-clad balloons, harpooned andripped up by aerial torpedoes, hurled headlong from the clouds, with thousands of parachuteswhich violently opened and enveloped each other in a storm of grape-shot as they felltogether to earth. yet of all this warlike

mania there only remained a vague poetic remembrance.forgetfulness is the beginning of happiness, as fear is the beginning of wisdom.as a solitary exception to the general rule, the nations, after this gigantic blood-letting,did not experience the lethargy that follows from exhaustion, but the calm that the accessionof strength produces. the explanation is easy. for about a hundred years the military selectioncommittees had broken with the blind routine of the past and made it a practice to pickout carefully the strongest and best made among the young men, in order to exempt themfrom the burden of military service which had become purely mechanical, and to sendto the depot all the weaklings who were good enough to fulfil the sorely diminished functionsof the soldier and even of the non-commissioned

officer. that was really a piece of intelligentselection; and the historian cannot conscientiously refuse gratefully to praise this innovation,thanks to which the incomparable beauty of the human race to-day has been gradually developed.in fact, when we now look through the glass cases of our museums of antiquities at thosesingular collections of caricatures which our ancestors used to call their photographicalbums, we can confirm the vastness of the progress thus accomplished, if it is reallytrue that we are actually descended from these dwarfs and scare-crows, as an otherwise trustworthytradition attests. from this epoch dates the discovery of thelast microbes, which had not yet been analysed by the neo-pasteurian school. once the causeof every disease was known, the remedy was

not long in becoming known as well, and fromthat moment, a consumptive or rheumatic patient, or an invalid of any kind became as rare aphenomenon as a double-headed monster formerly was, or an honest publican. ever since thatepoch we have dropped the ridiculous employment of those inquiries about health with whichthe conversations of our ancestors were needlessly interlarded, such as "how are you?" or "howdo you do?" short-sightedness alone continued its lamentable progress, being stimulatedby the extraordinary spread of journalism. there was not a woman or a child, who didnot wear a _pince-nez_. this drawback, which besides was only momentary, was largely compensatedfor by the progress it caused in the optician's art.alongside of the political unity which did

away with the enmities of nations, there appeareda linguistic unity which rapidly blotted out the last differences between them. alreadysince the twentieth century the need of a single common language, similar to latin inthe middle ages, had become sufficiently intense among the learned throughout the whole worldto induce them to make use of an international idiom in all their writings. at the end ofa long struggle for supremacy with english and spanish, greek finally established itsclaims, after the break-up of the british empire and the recapture of constantinopleby the grã¦co-russian empire. gradually, or rather with the rapidity characteristic ofall modern progress, its usage descended from strata to strata till it reached the lowestlayers of society, and from the middle of

the twenty-second century there was not alittle child between the loire and the river amour who could not express itself with easein the language of demosthenes. here and there a few isolated villages in the hollows ofthe mountains still persisted, in spite of the protests of their schoolmasters, to manglethe old dialect formerly called french, german, or italian, but the sound of this gibberishin the towns would have raised a hearty laugh. all contemporary documents agree in bearingwitness to the rapidity, the depth, and the universality of the change which took placein the customs, ideas, and needs, and in all the forms of social life, thus reduced toa common level from one pole to the other, as a result of this unification of language.it seemed as if the course of civilisation

had been hitherto confined within high banksand that now, when for the first time all the banks had burst, it readily spread overthe whole globe. it was no longer millions but thousands of millions that the least newlydiscovered improvement in industry brought in to its inventor; for henceforth there wasno barrier to stop in its star-like radiation the expansion of any idea, no matter whereit originated. for the same reason it was no longer by hundreds but by thousands, thatwere reckoned the editions of any book, which appealed but moderately to the public taste,or the performance of a play which was ever so little applauded. the rivalry between authorshad therefore risen to its fullest diapason. their fancy, moreover, could find full scope,for the first effect of this deluge of universalised

neo-hellenism had been to overwhelm for everall the pretended literatures of our rude ancestors. they became unintelligible, evento the very titles of what they were pleased to call their classical masterpieces, evento the barbarous names of shakespeare, goethe, and hugo, who are now forgotten, and whoserugged verses are deciphered with such difficulty by our scholars. to plagiarise these folkswhom hardly anyone could henceforth read, was to render them service, nay, to pay themtoo much honour. one did not fail to do so; and prodigious was the success of these audaciousimitations which were offered as original works. the material thus to turn to accountwas abundant, and indeed inexhaustible. unfortunately for the young writers the ancientpoets who had been dead for centuries, homer,

sophocles, euripides, had returned to life,a hundred times more hale and hearty than at the time of pericles himself; and thisunexpected competition proved a singular thorn in the side of the new-comers. it was in factin vain that original geniuses produced on the stage such sensational novelties as _athalias,hernanias, macbethã¨s_; the public often turned its back on them to rush off to performancesof _oedipus rex_ or the _birds_ (of aristophanes). and _nanais_, though a vigorous sketch ofa novelist of the new school, was a complete failure owing to the frenzied success of apopular edition of the odyssey. the ears of the people were saturated with alexandrinesclassical, romantic, and the rest. they were bored by the childish tricks of cã¦sura andrhyme which sometimes attempted a see-saw

effect by producing now a poor and now a fullrhyme, or again made a pretence of hiding away and keeping out of sight in order toinduce the hearer to hunt it out. the splendid, untrammelled, and exuberant hexameters ofhomer, the stanzas of sappho, the iambics of sophocles, furnished them with unspeakablepleasure, which did the greatest harm to the music of a certain wagner. music in generalfell to the secondary position to which it really belongs in the hierarchy of the finearts. to make up for it, in the midst of this scholarly renaissance of the human spirit,there arose an occasion for an unexpected literary outburst which allowed poetry toregain its legitimate rank, that is to say, the foremost. in fact it never fails to floweragain when language takes a new lease of life,

and all the more so when the latter undergoesa complete metamorphosis, and the pleasure arises of expressing anew the eternal truisms.it was not merely a simple means of diversion for the cultured. the masses took their sharein it with enthusiasm. certainly they now had leisure to read and appreciate the masterpiecesof art. the transmission of force at a distance by electricity, and its enlistment under athousand forms, for instance, in that of cylinders of compressed air, which could be easily carriedfrom place to place, had reduced manual labour to a mere nothing. the waterfalls, the windsand the tides had become the slaves of man, as steam had once been in the remote agesand in an infinitely less degree. intelligently distributed and turned to account by meansof improved machines, as simple as they were

ingenious, this enormous energy freely furnishedby nature had long rendered superfluous every kind of domestic servant and the greater numberof artisans. the voluntary workmen, who still existed, spent barely three hours a day inthe international factories, magnificent co-operative workshops, in which the productivity of humanenergy, multiplied tenfold, and even a hundredfold, surpassed the expectations of their founders.this does not mean that the social problem had been thereby solved. in default of want,it is true, there were no longer any quarrels; wealth or a competence had become the lotof every man, with the result that hardly anyone henceforth set any store by them. indefault of ugliness, also, love was scarcely an object of either appreciation or jealousy,owing to the abundance of pretty women and

handsome men who were as common as blackberriesand not difficult to please, in appearance at least. thus expelled from its two formerprincipal paths, human desire rushed with all its might towards the only field whichremained open to it, the conquest of political power, which grew vaster every day owing tothe progress of socialistic centralisation. overflowing ambition, swollen all at oncewith all the evil passions pouring into it alone, with the covetousness, lust, envioushunger, and hungry envy of preceding ages, reached at that time an appalling height.it was a struggle as to who should make himself master of that _summum bonum_, the state;as to who should make the omnipotence and omniscience of the universal state ministerto the realisation of his personal programme

or his humanitarian dreams. the result wasnot, as had been prophesied, a vast democratic republic. such an immense outburst of pridecould not fail to set up a new throne, the highest, the mightiest, the most gloriousthat has ever been. besides, inasmuch as the population of the single state was reckonedby thousands of millions, universal suffrage had become impracticable and illusory. toobviate the greater inconvenience of deliberative assemblies, ten or a hundred times too numerous,it had been found necessary so to increase the electoral districts that each deputy representedat least ten million electors. that is not surprising if one reflects that it was thefirst time that the very simple idea had won acceptance of extending to women and childrenthe right of voting exercised in their name,

naturally enough, by their father or by theirlawful or natural husband. incidentally one may note that this salutary and necessaryreform, as much in accordance with common sense as with logic, required alike by theprinciple of national sovereignty and by the needs of social stability, nearly failed topass, incredible as it may seem, in the face of a coalition of celibate electors.tradition informs us that the bill relating to this indispensable extension of the franchisewould have been infallibly rejected, if, luckily, the recent election of a multi-millionairesuspected of imperialistic tendencies had not scared the assembly. it fancied it wouldinjure the popularity of this ambitious pretender by hastening to welcome this proposal in whichit only saw one thing, that is, that the fathers

and husbands, outraged or alarmed by the gallantriesof the new cã¦sar, would be all the stronger for impeding his triumphant march. but thisexpectation was, it appears, unrealised. whatever may be the truth of this legend,it is certain that, owing to the enlargement of the electoral districts, combined withthe suppression of the electoral privileges, the election of a deputy was a veritable coronation,and ordinarily produced in the elect a species of megalomania. this reconstituted feudalismwas bound to end in a reconstitution of monarchy. for a moment the learned wore this cosmiccrown, following the prophecy of an ancient philosopher, but they did not keep it. thepopularisation of knowledge through innumerable schools had made science as common an objectas a charming woman or an elegant suite of

furniture. it had been extraordinarily simplifiedby the thorough way in which it had been worked out, complete as regards its general outlines,in which no change could be expected, and its henceforth rigid classification abundantlygarnished with data. only advancing at an imperceptible pace, it held, in short, butan insignificant place in the background of the brain, in which it simply replaced thecatechism of former days. the bulk of intellectual energy was therefore to be found in anotherdirection, as were also its glory and prestige. already the scientific bodies, venerable intheir antiquity, began, alas! to acquire a slight tinge and veneer of ridicule, whichraised a smile and recalled the synods of bonzes or ecclesiastical conferences, suchas are represented in very ancient pictures.

it is, therefore, not surprising that thisfirst dynasty of imperial physicists and geometricians, genial copies of the antonines, were promptlysucceeded by a dynasty of artists who had deserted art to wield the sceptre, as theylately had wielded the bow, the roughing chisel, and the brush. the most famous of all, a manpossessed of an overflowing imagination which was yet well under control, and ministeredto by an unparalleled energy, was an architect who among other gigantic projects formed theidea of rasing to the ground his capital, constantinople, in order to rebuild it elsewhere,on the site of ancient babylon, which for three thousand years had been a desert—atruly luminous idea. in this incomparable plain of chaldea watered by a second nilethere was another still more beautiful and

fertile egypt awaiting resurrection and metamorphosis,an infinite expanse extending as far as the eye could see, to be covered with strikingpublic buildings constructed with magical speed, with a teeming and throbbing population,with golden harvests beneath a sky of changeless blue, with an iron net-work of railways radiatingfrom the town of nebuchadnesor to the furthest ends of europe, africa and asia, and crossingthe himalayas, the caucasus, and the sahara. the stored energy, electrically conveyed,of a hundred abyssinian waterfalls, and of, i do not know, how many cyclones, hardly sufficedto transport from the mountains of armenia the necessary stone, wood and iron for thesenumerous constructions. one day an excursion train, composed of a thousand and one carriages,having passed too close to the electric cable

at the moment when the current was at itsmaximum, was destroyed and reduced to ashes in the twinkling of an eye. none the lessbabylon, the proud city of muddy clay, with its paltry splendours of unbaked and paintedbrick, found itself rebuilt in marble and granite, to the utmost confusion of the nabopolassars,the belshazzars, the cyruses, and the alexanders. it is needless to add that the archã¦ologistsmade on this occasion the most priceless discoveries, in the several successive strata, of babylonianand assyrian antiquities. the mania for assyriology went so far that every sculptor's studio,the palaces, and even the king's armorial bearings were invaded by winged bulls withhuman heads, just as formerly the museums were full of cupids or cherubims, "with theircravat-like wings". certain school books for

primary schools were actually printed in cuneiformcharacters in order to enhance their authority over the youthful imagination.this imperial orgy in bricks and mortar having unhappily occasioned the seventh, eighth,and ninth bankruptcy of the state and several consecutive inundations of paper-money, thepeople in general rejoiced to see after this brilliant reign the crown borne by a philosophicalfinancier. order had hardly been re-established in the finances, when he made his preparationfor applying on a grand scale his ideal of government, which was of a highly remarkablenature. one was not long in noticing, in fact, after his accession, that all the newly chosenladies of honour, who were otherwise very intelligent but entirely lacking in wit, werechiefly conspicuous for their striking ugliness;

that the liveries of the court were of a greyand lifeless colour; that the court balls reproduced by instantaneous cinematographyto the tune of millions of copies furnished a collection of the most honest and insignificantfaces and unappetising forms that one could possibly see; that the candidates recentlyappointed, after a preliminary despatch of their portraits, to the highest dignitiesof the empire, were pre-eminently distinguished by the commonness of their bearing; in short,that the races and the public holidays (the date of which were notified in advance bysecret telegrams announcing the arrival of a cyclone from america), happened nine timesout of ten to take place on a day of thick fog, or of pelting rain, which transformedthem into an immense array of waterproofs

and umbrellas. alike in his legislative proposals,as in his appointments, the choice of the prince was always the following: the mostuseful and the best among the most unattractive. an insufferable sameness of colour, a depressingmonotony, a sickening insipidity were the distinctive note of all the acts of the government.people laughed, grew excited, waxed indignant, and got used to it. the result was that atthe end of a certain time it was impossible to meet an office-seeker or a politician,that is to say, an artist or literary man, out of his element and in search of the beautifulin an alien sphere, who did not turn his back on the pursuit of a government appointmentin order to return to rhyming, sculpture and painting. and from that moment the followingaphorism has won general acceptance, that

the superiority of the politician is onlymediocrity raised to its highest power. this is the great benefit that we owe to thiseminent monarch. the lofty purpose of his reign has been revealed by the posthumouspublication of his memoirs. of these writings with which we can so ill dispense, we haveonly left this fragment which is well calculated to make us regret the loss of the remainder:"who is the true founder of sociology? auguste comte? no, menenius agrippa. this great manunderstood that government is the stomach, not the head of the social organism. now,the merit of a stomach is to be good and ugly, useful and repulsive to the eye, for if thisindispensable organ were agreeable to look upon, it would be much to be feared that peoplewould meddle with it and nature would not

have taken such care to conceal and defendit. what sensible person prides himself on having a beautiful digestive apparatus, alovely liver or elegant lungs? such a pretension would, however, not be more ridiculous thanthe foible of cutting a great dash in politics. what wants cultivating is the substantialand the commonplace. my poor predecessors." ... here follows a blank; a little furtheron, we read: "the best government is that which holds to being so perfectly humdrum,regular, neuter, and even emasculated, that no one can henceforth get up any enthusiasmeither for or against it." such was the last successor of semiramis.on the re-discovered site of the hanging-gardens he caused to be erected, at the expense ofthe state, a statue of louis philippe in wrought

aluminium, in the middle of a public gardenplanted with common laurels and cauliflowers. the universe breathed again. it yawned a littleno doubt, but it revelled for the first time in the fulness of peace, in the almost gratuitousabundance of every kind of wealth. it burst into the most brilliant efflorescence, orrather display of poetry and art, but especially of luxury, that the world had as yet seen.it was just at that moment an extraordinary alarm of a novel kind, justly provoked bythe astronomical observations made on the tower of babel, which had been rebuilt asan eiffel tower on an enlarged scale, began to spread among the terrified populations.end of chapter i chapter iithe catastrophe

on several occasions already the sun had givenevident signs of weakness. from year to year his spots increased in size and number, andhis heat sensibly diminished. people were lost in conjecture. was his fuel giving out?had he just traversed in his journey through space an exceptionally cold region? no oneknew. whatever the reason was, the public concerned itself little about the matter,as in all that is gradual and not sudden. the "solar anã¦mia," which moreover restoredsome degree of animation to neglected astronomy, had merely become the subject of several rathersmart articles in the reviews. in general, the _savants_, in their well-warmed studies,affected to disbelieve in the fall of temperature, and, in spite of the formal indications ofthe thermometer, they did not cease to repeat

that the dogma of slow evolution, and of theconservation of energy combined with the classical nebular hypothesis, forbade the admissionof a sufficiently rapid cooling of the solar mass to make itself felt during the shortduration of a century, much more so during that of five years or a year. a few unorthodoxpersons of heretical and pessimistic temperament remarked, it is true, that at different epochs,if one believed the astronomers of the remote past, certain stars had gradually burnt outin the heavens, or had passed from the most dazzling brilliance to an almost completeobscurity, during the course of barely a single year. they therefore concluded that the caseof our sun had nothing exceptional about it; that the theory of slow-footed evolution wasnot perhaps universally applicable; and that,

sometimes, as an old visionary mystic calledcuvier had ventured to put forward in legendary times, veritable revolutions took place inthe heavens as well as on earth. but orthodox science combated with indignation these audacioustheories. however, the winter of 2489 was so disastrous,it was actually necessary to take the threatening predictions of the alarmists seriously. onereached the point of fearing at any moment a "solar apoplexy." that was the title ofa sensational pamphlet which went through twenty thousand editions. the return of thespring was anxiously awaited. the spring returned at last, and the starrymonarch reappeared, but his golden crown was gone, and he himself well-nigh unrecognisable.he was entirely red. the meadows were no longer

green, the sky was no longer blue, the chinesewere no longer yellow, all had suddenly changed colour as in a transformation scene. then,by degrees, from the red that he was he became orange. he might then have been compared toa golden apple in the sky, and so during several years he was seen to pass, and all naturewith him, through a thousand magnificent or terrible tints—from orange to yellow, fromyellow to green, and from green at length to indigo and pale blue. the meteorologiststhen recalled the fact, in the year 1883, on the second of september, the sun had appearedin venezuela the whole day long as blue as the moon. so many colours, so many new decorationsof the chameleon-like universe which dazzled the terrified eye, which revived and restoredto its primitive sharpness the rejuvenated

sensation of the beauties of nature, and stronglystirred the depths of men's souls by renewing the former aspect of things.at the same time disaster succeeded disaster. the entire population of norway, northernrussia, and siberia perished, frozen to death in a single night; the temperate zone wasdecimated, and what was left of its inhabitants fled before the enormous drifts of snow andice, and emigrated by hundreds of millions towards the tropics, crowding into the pantingtrains, several of which, overtaken by tornadoes of snow, disappeared for ever.the telegraph successively informed the capital, now that there was no longer any news of immensetrains caught in the tunnels under the pyrenees, the alps, the caucasus, or himalayas, in whichthey were imprisoned by enormous avalanches,

which blocked simultaneously the two issues;now that some of the largest rivers of the world—the rhine, for instance, and the danube—hadceased to flow, completely frozen to the bottom, from which resulted a drought, followed byan indescribable famine, which obliged thousands of mothers to devour their own children. fromtime to time a country or continent broke off suddenly its communication with the centralagency, the reason being that an entire telegraphic section was buried under the snow, from whichat intervals emerged the uneven tops of their posts, with their little cups of porcelain.of this immense network of electricity which enveloped in its close meshes the entire globe,as of that prodigious coat of mail with which the complicated system of railways clothedthe earth, there was only left some scattered

fragments, like the remnant of the grand armyof napoleon during the retreat from russia. meanwhile, the glaciers of the alps, the andes,and of all the mountains of the world hitherto vanquished by the sun, which for several thousandcenturies had been thrust back into their last entrenchments, resumed their triumphantmarch. all the glaciers that had been dead since the geological ages came to life again,more colossal than ever. from all the valleys in the alps or pyrenees, that were latelygreen and peopled with delightful health resorts, there issued these snowy hordes, these streamsof icy lava, with their frontal moraine advancing as it spread over the plain, a moving cliffcomposed of rocks and overturned engines, of the wreckage of bridges, stations, hotelsand public edifices, whirled along in the

wildest confusion, a heart-breaking welterof gigantic bric-ã -brac, with which the triumphant invasion decked itself out as with the lootof victory. slowly, step by step, in spite of sundry transient intervals of light andwarmth, in spite of occasionally scorching days which bore witness to the supreme convulsionsof the sun in its battle against death, which revived in men's souls misleading hopes, athwartand even by means of these unexpected changes the pale invaders advanced. they retook andrecovered one by one all their ancient realms in the glacial period, and if they found onthe road some gigantic vagrant block lying in sullen solitude, near some famous city,a hundred leagues from its native hills, mysterious witness of the immense catastrophe of formertimes, they raised it and bore it onward,

cradling it on their unyielding waves, asan advancing army recaptures and enfurls its ancient flags, all covered with dust, whichit has found again in its enemies' sanctuaries. but what was the glacial period compared withthis new crisis of the globe and the sky? doubtless it had been due to a similar attackof weakness, to a similar failure of the sun, and many species of animals had necessarilyperished at the time, from being insufficiently clad. that had been, however, but a warningbell, so to say, a simple notification of the final and fatal attack. the glacial periods—forwe know there have been several—now explained themselves by their reappearance on a largescale. but this clearing up of an obscure point in geology was, one must admit, an insufficientcompensation for the public disasters which

were its price.what calamities! what horrors! my pen confesses its impotence to retrace them. besides howcan we tell the story of disasters which were so complete they often simultaneously overwhelmedunder snow-drifts a hundred yards deep all that witnessed them, to the very last man.all that we know for certain is what took place at the time towards the end of the twenty-fifthcentury in a little district of arabia petrã¦a. thither had flocked for refuge, in one hordeafter another, wave after wave, with host upon host frozen one on the top of another,as they advanced, the few millions of human creatures who survived of the hundreds ofmillions that had disappeared. arabia petrã¦a had, therefore, along with the sahara, becomethe most populous country of the globe. they

transported hither by reason of the relativewarmth of its climate, i will not say the seat of government—for, alas! terror alonereigned—but an immense stove which took its place, and whatever remained of babylonnow covered over by a glacier. a new town was constructed in a few months on the plansof an entirely new system of architecture, marvellously adapted for the struggle againstthe cold. by the most happy of chances some rich and unworked coal mines were discoveredon the spot. there was enough fuel there, it seems, to provide warmth for many yearsto come. and as for food, it was not as yet too pressing a question. the granaries containedseveral sacks of corn, while waiting for the sun to revive and the corn to sprout again.the sun had certainly revived after the glacial

periods; why should it not do so again? askedthe optimists. it was but the hope of a day. the sun assumeda violet hue. the frozen corn ceased to be eatable. the cold became so intense that thewalls of the houses as they contracted cracked and admitted blasts of air which killed theinhabitants on the spot. a physicist affirmed that he saw crystals of solid nitrogen andoxygen fall from the sky which gave rise to the fear that the atmosphere would shortlybecome decomposed. the seas were already frozen solid. a hundred thousand human creatureshuddling around the huge government stove, which was no longer equal to restoring theircirculation, were turned into icicles in a single night; and the night following, a secondhundred thousand perished likewise. of the

beautiful human race, so strong and noble,formed by so many centuries of effort and genius by such an intelligent and extendedselection, there would soon have been only left a few thousands, a few hundreds of haggardand trembling specimens, unique trustees of the last ruins of what had once been civilisation.end of chapter ii chapter iiithe struggle in this extremity a man arose who did notdespair of humanity. his name has been preserved for us. by a singular coincidence he was calledmiltiades, like another saviour of hellenism. he was not, however, of hellenic race. a crossbetween a slave and a breton he had only half sympathised with the prosperity of the neo-grã¦cianworld with its levelling and enervating tendencies,

and amid this wholesale obliteration of previouscivilisation, and universal triumph of a kind of byzantine renaissance brought up to date,he belonged to those who reverently guarded in the depths of their heart the germs ofrecusancy. but, like the barbarian stilicho, the last defender of the foundering romanworld against the barbaric hordes, it was precisely this disbeliever in civilisationwho alone undertook to arrest it on the brink of its vast downfall. eloquent and handsome,but nearly always taciturn, he was not without certain resemblances in pose and features,so it was said, to chateaubriand and napoleon (two celebrities, as one knows, who in theirtime were famous throughout an entire continent). worshipped by the women of whom he was thehope, and by the men who stood greatly in

awe of him, he had early kept the crowd atarm's length, and a singular accident had doubled his natural shyness. finding the sealess monotonously dull at any rate than terra firma, and in any case more unconfined, hehad passed his youth on board the last iron-clad of state of which he was captain, in patrollingthe coasts of continents, in dreaming of impossible adventures, and of conquests when all wasconquered, of discoveries of america when all was discovered, and in cursing all formertravellers, discoverers and conquerors, fortunate reapers in all the fields of glory in whichthere was nothing more left to glean. one day, however, he believed he had discovereda new island—it was a mistake—and he had the joy of engaging in a fight, the last ofwhich ancient history makes mention, with

an apparently highly primitive tribe of savages,who spoke english and read the bible. in this fight he displayed such valour that he wasunanimously pronounced to be mad by his crew, and was in great danger of losing his rankafter a specialist in insanity, who had been called in, was on the point of publicly confirmingpopular opinion by declaring he was suffering from suicidal mono-mania of a novel kind.luckily an archã¦ologist protested and showed by actual documents that this phenomenon,which had become so unusual but was frequent in past ages under the name of bravery, wasa simple case of ancestral reversion sufficiently serious to merit examination. as luck wouldhave it, the unfortunate miltiades had been wounded in the face in the same encounter;and the scar which all the art of the best

surgeons never succeeded in removing, drewdown upon him the annoying and almost insulting nick-name of "scarred face". it may be readilyunderstood how from this time forward, soured by the consciousness of his partial disfigurement,as the ancient bard byron had formerly been for a nearly similar reason, he avoided appearingin public, and thereby giving the crowd an opportunity of pointing the finger of scornat the visible traces of his former attack of madness. he was never seen again till theday when, his vessel being hemmed in by the icebergs of the gulf stream, he was obligedwith his companions to finish the crossing on foot over the solidly frozen atlantic.in the middle of the central state shelter, a huge vaulted hall with walls ten yards thick,without windows, surrounded with a hundred

gigantic furnaces, and perpetually lit upby their hundred flaming maws, miltiades one day appeared. the remnant of the flower ofhumanity, of both sexes, splendid even in its misery, was huddled together there. theydid not consist of the great men of science with their bald pates, nor even the greatactresses, nor the great writers, whose inspiration had deserted them, nor the consequential onesnow past their prime, nor of prim old ladies—broncho-pneumonia, alas! had made a clean sweep of them all atthe very first frost—but the enthusiastic heirs of their traditions, their secrets,and also of their vacant chairs, that is to say, their pupils, full of talent and promise.not a single university professor was there, but a crowd of deputies and assistants; nota single minister, but a crowd of young secretaries

of state. not a single mother of a family,but a bevy of artists' models, admirably formed, and inured against the cold by the practiceof posing for the nude; above all, a number of fashionable beauties, who had been likewisesaved by the excellent hygienic effect of daily wearing low dresses, without takinginto account the warmth of their temperament. among them it was impossible not to noticethe princess lydia, owing to her tall and exquisite figure, the brilliancy of her dressand her wit, of her dark eyes and fair complexion, owing in fact to the radiance of her wholeperson. she had carried off the prize at the last grand international beauty competition,and was accounted the reigning beauty of the drawing-rooms of babylon. what a differentset of individuals from that which the spectator

formerly surveyed through his opera-glassfrom the top of the galleries of the so-called chamber of deputies! youth, beauty, genius,love, infinite treasures of science and art, writers whose pens were of pure gold, artistswith marvellous technique, singers one raved about, all that was left of refinement andculture on the earth, was concentrated in this last knot of human beings, which blossomedunder the snow like a tuft of rhododendrons, or of alpine roses at the foot of some mountainsummit. but what dejection had fallen on these fair flowers! how sadly drooped these manifoldgraces! at the sudden apparition of miltiades everybrow was lifted, every eye was fastened upon him. he was tall, lean, and wizened, in spiteof the false plumpness of his thick white

furs. when he threw back his big white hood,which recalled the dominican cowl of antiquity, they caught sight of his huge scar athwartthe icicles on his beard and eyebrows. at the sight of it first a smile and then a shudder,which was not due to cold alone, ran through the ranks of the women. for must we confessit, in spite of the efforts of a rational education, the inclination to applaud braveryand its indications could not be entirely uprooted from their hearts. lydia, notably,remained imbued with this sentiment of another age, by a kind of moral ancestral reversionwhich served as a pendant to her physical atavism. she concealed so little her feelingsof admiration, that miltiades himself was struck by it. her admiration was combinedwith astonishment, for he was believed to

have been dead for years. they asked one anotherby what accumulation of miracles he had been able to escape the fate of his companions.he requested leave to speak. it was granted him. he mounted a platform, and such a profoundsilence ensued, one might have heard the snow falling outside, in spite of the thicknessof the walls. but let us at this point allow an eye-witness to speak; let us copy an extractof the account that he phonographed of this memorable scene. i pass over the part of miltiades'discourse in which he related the thrilling story of the dangers he had encountered fromthe time he left his vessel. (_continuous applause_.) after stating that in passingby paris on a sledge drawn by reindeer—thanks to it being the season of the dog-days—hehad recognised the site of this buried city

by the double-pointed mound of snow whichhad formed over the spires of notre-dame—(_excitement in the audience_)—the speaker continued:—"the situation is serious," said he, "nothing like it has been seen since the geologicalepochs. is it irretrievable? no! (_hear! hear!_) desperate diseases require desperate remedies.an idea, a glimmer of hope has flashed upon me, but it is so strange, i shall never dareto reveal it to you. (_speak! speak!_) no, i dare not, i shall never dare to formulatethis project. you would believe me to be still insane. you desire it, you promise me to listento the end to my absurd and extravagant project? (_yes! yes!_) even to give it a fair trial?(_yes! yes!_) well! i will speak. (_silence!_) "the hour has come to ascertain to what extentit is true to say and to keep on repeating,

as has been the practice for the last threecenturies since the time of a certain stephenson, that all our energy, all our strength, whetherphysical or moral, comes to us from the sun.... (_numerous voices: 'that is so'_). the calculationhas been made: in two years, three months, and six days, if there still remains a morselof coal there will not remain a morsel of bread! (_prolonged sensation_.) therefore,if the source of all force, of all motion, and all life is in the sun, and in the sunalone, there is no ground for self-delusion: in two years, three months, and six days,the genius of man will be quenched, and through the gloomy heavens the corpse of mankind,like a siberian mammoth, will roll for everlasting, incapable for ever of resurrection. (_excitement_.)"but is that the case? no, it is not, it cannot

be the case. with all the energy of my heart,which does not come from the sun—that energy which comes from the earth, from our motherearth buried there below, far, far away, for ever hidden from our eyes—i protest againstthis vain theory, and against so many articles of faith and religion which i have been obligedhitherto to endure in silence. (_slight murmurs from the centre_.) the earth is the contemporaryof the sun, and not its daughter; the earth was formerly a luminous star like the sun,only sooner extinct. it is only on the surface that the earth is devoid of movement, frozenand paralysed. its bosom is ever warm and burning. it has only concentrated its firewithin itself in order to preserve it better. (_signs of interest in the audience_.) therelies a virgin force that is unexploited, a

force superior to all that the sun has beenable to generate for our industry by waterfalls which to-day are frozen, by cyclones whichnow have ceased, by tides which to-day are suspended; a force in which our engineers,with a little initiative, will find a hundredfold the equivalent of the motive power they havelost. it is no more by this gesture (_the speaker raises his finger to heaven_), thatthe hope of salvation should henceforth be expressed, it is by this one. (_he lowershis right hand towards the earth.... signs of astonishment: a few murmurs of dissentwhich are immediately repressed by the women_.) we must say no more: 'up there!' but, 'below!'there, below, far below, lies the promised eden, the abode of deliverance and of bliss:there, and there alone, there are still innumerable

conquests and discoveries to be made! (_bravoson the left_.) ought i to draw my conclusion? (_yes! yes!_) let us descend into these depths;let us make these abysses our sure retreat. the mystics had a sublime presentiment whenthey said in their latin: 'from the outward to the inward.' the earth calls us to itsinner self. for many centuries it has lived separated, so to say, from its children, theliving creatures it produced outside during its period of fecundity before the coolingof its crust! after its crust cooled, the rays of a distant star alone, it is true,have maintained on this dead epidermis their artificial and superficial life which hasbeen a stranger to her own. "but this schism has lasted too long. it isimperative that it should cease. it is time

to follow empedocles, ulysses, ã†neas, dante,to the gloomy abodes of the underworld, to plunge mankind again in the fountain fromwhich it sprang, to effect the complete restoration of the exiled soul to the land of its birth!(_applause here and there_.) besides, there is but this alternative: life undergroundor death. the sun is failing us: let us dispense with the sun. the plan, which it remains forme to propose, has been worked out for several months past by the most eminent men. to-dayit is finished; it is final. it is complete in all its details. does it interest you?(_on all sides: 'read it, read it.'_) you will see that with discipline, patience, andcourage—yes, courage, i risk this evil-sounding word (_'risk it, risk it.'_)—and above all,with the aid of that splendid heritage of

science and art which comes to us from thepast, for which we are accountable to the most distant of our descendants, to the boundlessuniverse, and i was going to say, to god (_signs of surprise_), we can be saved if we will."(_thunder of applause_.) the speaker next entered into lengthy details,which it is useless to reproduce here, on the neo-troglodytism which he pretended toinaugurate as the acme of civilisation, "which had," said he, "began with caves, and wasdestined to return to these subterranean retreats, but at a far deeper level." he displayed designs,quantities and drawings. he had no trouble in proving that, on condition of burrowingsufficiently deep into the ground below, they would find a deliciously gentle warmth, anelysian temperature. it would be enough to

excavate, enlarge, heighten, and extend thegalleries of already existing mines in order to render them habitable and comfortable intothe bargain. the electric light, supplied entirely without expense by the scatteredcentres of the fire within, would provide for the magnificent illumination both by dayand night of these colossal crypts, these marvellous cloisters, indefinitely extendedand embellished by successive generations. with a good system of ventilation, all dangerof suffocation or of foulness of air would be avoided. in short, after a more or lesslong period of settling in, civilised life could unfold anew in all its intellectual,artistic, and fashionable splendour, as freely as it did in the capricious and intermittentlight or natural day, and even perhaps more

surely. at these last words, the princesslydia broke her fan, by dint of applauding. an objection then came from the right, "withwhat shall we be fed?" miltiades smiled disdainfully and replied: "nothing is simpler. for ordinarydrinking purposes we first of all shall have melted ice. every day we shall transport enormousblocks of it in order to keep the orifices of the crypts free from obstruction, and tosupply the public fountains. i may add that chemists undertake to manufacture alcoholfrom anything, even from mineralised rocks, and that it is the a.b.c. of the grocer'strade to manufacture wine from alcohol and water. (_'hear! hear!' from all the benches_).as for food, is not chemistry also capable of manufacturing butter, albumen, and milkfrom no matter what? besides, has the last

word been said on the subject? is it not highlyprobable that before long, if it takes up the matter, it will succeed in satisfying,both on the score of quantity and expense, the desires of the most refined gastronomy?and, meanwhile.... (_a voice timidly: 'meanwhile?'_) meanwhile does not our disaster itself, bya kind of providential occurrence, place within our reach the best stocked, the most abundant,the most inexhaustible larder that the human race has ever had? immense stores, the mostadmirable which have hitherto been laid down, are lying for us under the ice or the snow.myriads of domestic or wild animals—i dare not add, of men and women (_a general shudderof horror_)—but at least of bullocks, sheep and poultry, frozen instantaneously in a singlemass, are lying here and there in the public

markets a few steps away. let us collect,as long as such work is still possible out of doors, this boundless quarry which wasdestined to feed for years several hundreds of millions, and which will well suffice,in consequence, to feed a few thousands only for ages, even should they multiply unduly,in despite of malthus. if stacked in the neighbourhood of the orifice of the chief cavern, they willbe easy to get at and will provide a delightful fare for our fraternal love-feasts."still further objections were formulated from different quarters. they were forcibly disposedof with the same irresistible easy assurance. the conclusion is worthy of a verbatim quotation:"however extraordinary the catastrophe which has befallen us and the means of escape whichis left us may seem in appearance, a little

reflection will suffice to prove to us thatthe predicament in which we are, must have been repeated a thousand times already inthe immensity of the universe, and must have been cleared up in the same fashion, beinginevitably and normally the final phase in the life-drama of every star. the astronomersknow that every sun is bound to become extinct; they know, therefore, that in addition tothe luminous and visible stars, there are in the heavens an infinitely greater numberof extinct and rayless stars which continue endlessly to revolve with their train of planets,doomed to an eternity of night and cold. well, if this is the case, i ask you: can we supposethat life, thought, and love, are the exclusive privilege of an infinite minority of solarsystems still possessed of light and heat,

and deny to the immense majority of gloomystars every manifestation of life and animation, the very highest reason for their existence?thus lifelessness, death, the void in movement would be the rule; and life the exception!thus the nine-tenths, the ninety-nine hundredths, perhaps, of the solar systems, would idlyrevolve like senseless and gigantic mill-wheels, a useless encumbrance of space. that is impossibleand idiotic, that is blasphemous. let us have more faith in the unknown! truth, here aseverywhere else, is without doubt the antipodes of appearance. all that glitters is not gold.these splendid constellations which attempt to dazzle us are themselves relatively barren.their light, what is it? a transient glory, a ruinous luxury, an ostentatious squanderingof energy, born of illimitable senselessness.

but when the stars have sown their wild oats,then the serious task of their life begins, they develop their inner resources. for frozenand sunless without, they literally preserve in their inviolate centres their unquenchablefire, defended by the very layers of ice. there, finally, is to be relit the lamp oflife, banished from the surface above. for a last time, therefore, let us look upwardsin order there to find hope. up there innumerable races of mankind under ground, buried, totheir supreme joy, in the catacombs of invisible stars, encourage us by their example. letus act like them, let us like them withdraw to the interior of our planet. like them,let us bury ourselves in order to rise again, and like them let us carry with us into ourtomb, all that is worthy to survive of our

previous existence. it is not merely breadalone that man has need of. he must live to think, and not merely think to live."recall the legend of noah: to escape from a disaster almost equal to our own, and todispute with it all that the earth had most precious in his eyes; what did he do, thoughhe was but a simple-minded fellow and addicted to drink? he turned his ark into a museum,containing a complete collection of plants and animals, even of poisonous plants, ofwild beasts, boa-constrictors, and scorpions, and by reason of this picturesque but incongruouscargo of creatures mutually harmful and seeking one and all to devour each other, of thismiscellany of living contradictions which for so long was so foolishly worshipped underthe name of nature, he believed in good faith

to have deserved well of the future."but we, in our new ark, mysterious, impenetrable, indestructible, shall carry with us neitherplants nor animals. these types of existence are annihilated; these rough drafts in creation,these fumbling experiments of earth in quest of the human form are for ever blotted out.let us not regret it. in place of so many pairs of animals which take up so much room,of so many useless seeds, we will carry with us into our retreat the harmonious garlandof all the truths in perfect accord with one another; of all artistic and poetic beauties,which are all members one of another, united like sisters, which human genius has broughtto light in the course of ages and multiplied thereafter in millions of copies: all of whichwill be destroyed save a single one, which

it will be our task to guarantee against alldanger of destruction. we shall establish a vast library containing all the principalworks, enriched with cinematographic albums. we shall set up a vast museum composed ofsingle specimens of all the schools, of all the styles of the masters in architecture,sculpture, painting, and even music. these are our real treasures, our real seed forfuture harvests, our gods for whom we will do battle till our latest breath."the speaker stepped down from the platform in the midst of indescribable enthusiasm:the ladies crowded round him. they deputed lydia to bestow on him a kiss in the nameof them all. blushing with modesty the latter obeyed—a further sign of moral atavism onher part—and the applause redoubled. the

thermometers of the shelter rose several degreesin a few minutes. it is well to recall to the younger generationthese resolute words, between the lines of which they will read the gratitude they oweto the heroic "scarred face," who so nearly died with the reputation of a mono-maniac.they, too, are beginning to grow enervated and accustomed to the delights of their undergroundelysium, to the luxurious spaciousness of these endless catacombs, the legacy of gigantictoil on the part of their fathers, they too, are, inclined to think that all this happenedof its own accord, or at least was inevitable, that after all there was no other way of escapingfrom the cold above ground, and that this simple expedient did not require a great outlayof imagination. profound error! at its first

appearance, the idea of miltiades had beenhailed, and rightly enough, as a flash of genius. but for him, but for his energy, andhis eloquence, which was placed at the service of his imagination, but for his forcefulness,his charm, and his perseverance, which seconded his energy, let us add, but for the profoundpassion that lydia, the noblest and most valiant of women, had been able to inspire in him,and which increased his heroism tenfold, humanity would have suffered the fate of all the otheranimal or vegetable species. what strikes us to-day in his discourse is the extraordinaryand truly prophetic lucidity with which he sketched in general terms the conditions ofexistence in the new world. without doubt, these expectations have been immensely surpassed.he did not foresee, he could not foresee,

the prodigious accessions which his originalidea has received owing to its development by thousands of auxiliary geniuses. he wasfar more right than he fancied, like the majority of reformers—who are generally wrongly accused,of being too much wrapt up in their own ideas. but on the whole, never was so magnificenta plan so promptly carried out. from that very day all these exquisite anddelicate hands set to work, aided, it is true, by incomparable machines. everywhere, at thehead of all the workings, were to be found lydia and miltiades. henceforth inseparable,they vied with one another in ardour; and before a year was out the galleries of themines had become sufficiently large and comfortable, sufficiently decorated even and brilliantlylighted, to receive the vast and priceless

collections of all kinds, which it was theirobject to place in safety there, in view of the future.with infinite precautions they were lowered one after another, bale by bale, into thebowels of the earth. this salvage of the goods and chattels of humanity was methodicallycarried out. it included all the quintessence of the ancient grand libraries of paris, berlin,and london, which had been brought together at babylon, and then carried for safety intothe desert with the rest. the cream of all former museums, of all previous exhibitionsof industry and art, was concentrated there with considerable additions. there were manuscripts,books, bronzes, and pictures. what an expenditure of energy and incessant toil, in spite ofthe assistance of inter-terrestrial forces,

had been necessary for packing, transporting,and housing it all! and yet, for the greater part, it was useless to those who voluntarilythis task imposed upon themselves. they all knew it. they were well aware that they wereprobably condemned for the rest of their days to a hard and matter-of-fact existence, forwhich their lives as artists, philosophers, and men of letters, had scarcely preparedthem. but—for the first time—the idea of duty to be done found its way into thesehearts, the beauty of self-sacrifice subdued these dilettanti. they sacrificed themselvesto the unknown, to that which is not yet, to the posterity towards which were turnedall the desires of their electrified spirits, as all the atoms of the magnetised iron turntowards the pole. it was thus that, at the

time when there were still countries, in themidst of some great national peril, a wave of heroism swept over the most frivolous cities.however admirable may have been, at the epoch of which i speak, this collective need ofindividual self-sacrifice, ought we to be astonished at it, when we know from the treatiseson natural history that have been preserved, that mere insects giving the same exampleof foresight and self-renunciation, used before their death to employ their latest energiesto collect provisions useless to themselves, and only useful in the future to their larvã¦at their birth. end of chapter iii chapter ivsaved!

the day at length arrived on which, all theintellectual inheritance of the past, all the real capital of humanity having been rescuedfrom the general shipwreck, the castaways were able to go down in their turn, havinghenceforth only to think of their own preservation. that day which forms, as everyone knows, thestarting point of our new era, called the era of salvation, was a solemn holiday. thesun, however, as if to arouse regret, indulged in a few last bursts of sunshine. on castinga final glance on this brightness, which they were never to behold again, the survivorsof mankind could not, we are told, restrain their tears. a young poet on the brink ofthe pit that yawned to swallow them up, repeated in the musical language of euripides, thefarewell to the light of the dying iphigenia.

but that was a short-lived moment of verynatural emotion which speedily changed into an outburst of unspeakable delight.how great in fact was their amazement and their ecstasy! they expected a tomb; theyopened their eyes in the most brilliant and interminable galleries of art they could possiblysee, in _salons_ more beautiful than those of versailles, in enchanted palaces, in whichall extremes of climate, rain, and wind, cold and torrid heat were unknown; where innumerablelamps, veritable suns in brilliancy and moons in softness, shed unceasingly through theblue depths their daylight that knew no night. assuredly the sight was far from what it hassince become; we need an effort of imagination in order to represent the psychological conditionof our poor ancestors, hitherto accustomed

to the perpetual and insufferable discomfortsand inconveniences of life on the surface of the globe, in order to realise their enthusiasm,at a moment, when only counting on escaping from the most appalling of deaths by meansof the gloomiest of dungeons, they felt themselves delivered of all their troubles, and of alltheir apprehensions at the same time! have you noticed in the retrospective museum thatquaint bit of apparatus of our fathers, which is called an umbrella? look at it and reflecton the heart-breaking element, in a situation, which condemned man to make use of this ridiculouspiece of furniture. imagine yourself obliged to protect yourselves against those giganticdownpours which would unexpectedly arrive on the scene and drench you for three or fourdays running. think likewise of sailors caught

in a whirling cyclone, of the victims of sunstroke,of the 20,000 indians annually devoured by tigers or killed by the bite of venomous serpents;think of those struck by lightning. i do not speak of the legions of parasites and insects,of the acarus, the phylloxera, and the microscopic beings which drained the blood, the sweat,and the life of man, inoculating him with typhus, plague, and cholera. in truth, ifour change of condition has demanded some sacrifices, it is not an illusion to declarethat the balance of advantage is immensely greater. what in comparison with this unparalleledrevolution is the most renowned of the petty revolutions of the past which to-day are treatedso lightly, and rightly so, by our historians. one wonders how the first inhabitants of theseunderground dwellings could, even for a moment,

regret the sun, a mode of lighting that bristledwith so many inconveniences. the sun was a capricious luminary which went out and wasrelit at variable hours, shone when it felt disposed, sometimes was eclipsed, or hid itselfbehind the clouds when one had most need of it, or pitilessly blinded one at the verymoment one yearned for shade! every night,—do we really realise the full force of the inconvenience?—everynight the sun commanded social life to desist and social life desisted. humanity was actuallyto that extent the slave of nature! to think it never succeeded in, never even dreamedof, freeing itself from this slavery which weighed so heavily and unconsciously on itsdestinies, on the course of its progress thus straitened and confined! ah! let us once morebless our fortunate disaster!

what excuses or explains the weakness of thefirst immigrants of the inner world is the fact that their life was necessarily roughand full of hardships, in spite of a notable improvement after their descent into the caverns.they had perpetually to enlarge them, to adjust them to the requirements of the two civilisations,ancient and modern. that was not the work of a single day. i am well aware how happilyfortune favoured them; how they again and again had the good luck when driving theirtunnels to discover natural grottoes of the utmost beauty, in which it was enough to illuminatewith the usual methods of lighting (which was absolutely cost-free, as miltiades hadforeseen) in order to render them almost habitable: delightful squares, as it were, enshrinedand sparsely disseminated throughout the labyrinth

of our brilliantly lighted streets; minesof sparkling diamonds, lakes of quicksilver, mounds of golden ingots. i am well aware thatthey had at their disposition a sum of natural forces very superior to all that the precedingages had been acquainted with. that is very easy to understand. in fact, if they lackedwaterfalls, they replaced them very advantageously by the finest falls in temperature that physicistshave ever dreamed of. the central heat of the globe could not, it is true, by itselfalone be a mechanical force, any more than formerly a large mass of water falling byhypothesis to the greatest possible depth. it is in its passage from a higher to a lowerlevel that the mass of water becomes (or rather became) available energy: it is in its descentfrom a higher to a lower degree of the thermometer

that heat likewise becomes so. the greaterdistance between any two degrees the greater amount of surplus energy. now, the miningphysicists had hardly descended into the bowels of the earth ere they at once perceived thatthus placed between the furnaces of the central fire, as it were, a forge of the cyclops,hot enough to liquefy granite, and the outer cold, which was sufficient to solidify oxygenand nitrogen, they had at their disposal the most enormous extremes in temperature, andconsequently thermic cataracts by the side of which all the cataracts of abyssinia andniagara were only toys. what caldrons did they own in the ancient volcanoes! what condensersin the glaciers! at first sight they must have seen that if a few distributing agenciesof this prodigious energy were provided, they

had power enough there to perform the wholework of mankind—excavation, air supply, water supply, sanitation, locomotion, descentand transport of provisions, etc. i am well aware of that. i am further awarethat ever favoured by fortune, the inseparable friend of daring, the new troglodytes havenever suffered from famine, nor from shortness of supplies. when one of their snow-covereddeposits of carcasses threatened to give out, they used to make several trial borings, driveseveral shafts in an upward direction. they never failed presently to meet with rich findsof food reserves, extensive enough to close the mouths of the alarmists, whereby thereresulted on each occasion, according to the law of malthus, a sudden increase in the population,coupled with the excavation of new underground

cities, more flourishing than their oldersisters. but, in spite of all this, we remain overwhelmed with wonder when we consider theincalculable degree of courage and intelligence lavished on such a work, and solely calledinto being by an idea which, starting one day from one individual brain, has leavenedthe whole globe. what giant falls of earth, what murderous explosions, what a death-rollthere must have been at the outset of the enterprise! we shall never know what bloodthirstyduels, what rapes, what doleful tragedies, took place in this lawless society, whichhad not yet been reorganised. the history of the early conquerors and colonists of america,if it could be told in detail, would pale entirely beside it. let us draw a veil overthe proceedings. but this pitch of horrors

was perhaps necessary to teach us that inthe forced intimacy of a cave there is no mean between warfare and love, between mutualslaughter or mutual embraces. we began by fighting; to-day we fall on each other's necks.and in fact, what human ear, nose, or stomach could have longer withstood the deafeningroar and smoke of melanite explosions beneath our crypts; the sight and stench of mangledbodies piled up within our narrow confines? hideous and odious, revolting beyond all expression,the underground war finished by becoming impossible. it is, however, painful to think that it lastedright up to the death of our glorious preserver. everyone is acquainted with the heroic adventurein which miltiades and his companion lost their lives. it has been so often painted,sculptured, sung, and immortalised by the

great masters, that it is not allowable topass it over in silence. the famous struggle between the centralist and federalist cities,that is to say, at bottom, between the industrial and artist cities, having ended in the triumphof the latter, a still more bloodthirsty conflict sprang up between the free thinking and thecellular cities. the former fought to assert the freedom of love with its uncertain fecundity;the second, for its prudent regulation. miltiades, misled by his passion, committed the faultof siding with the former, a pardonable error which posterity has forgiven him. besiegedin his last grotto—a perfect marvel in strongholds—and at the end of his provisions, the besiegershaving intercepted the arrival of all his convoys, he essayed a final effort: he prepareda formidable explosion intended to blow up

the vault of his cavern, and forcibly to opena way upwards by which he might have the chance of reaching a deposit of provisions. his hopewas deceived. the vault blew up, it is true, and disclosed a cavern above it, the mostcolossal one had hitherto seen, that dimly resembled a hindoo temple. but the hero himselfperished miserably, buried with lydia beneath enormous rocks on the very spot on which nowstands their double statue in marble, the masterpiece of our new phidias, which is nowthe crowded meeting-place of our national pilgrimages.from these fruitful though troublous times, and from this beneficial disorder, an advantagehas accrued to us which we shall never sufficiently appreciate. our race, already so beautiful,has been further strengthened and purified

by these numerous trials. short-sightednessitself has disappeared under the prolonged influence of a light that is pleasing to theeye, and of the habit of reading books which are written in very large characters. for,from lack of paper, we are obliged to write on slates, on pillars, obelisks, on the broadpanels of marble, and this necessity, in addition to compelling us to adopt a sober style andcontributing to the formation of taste, prevents the daily newspapers from reappearing, tothe great benefit of the optic nerves and the lobes of the brain. it was, by the way,an immense misfortune for "pre-salvationist" man to possess textile plants which allowedhim to stereotype without the slightest trouble on rags of paper without the slightest value,all his ideas, idle or serious, piled indiscriminately

one on the other. now, before graving ourthoughts on a panel of rock, we take time to reflect on our subject. yet another baneamong our primitive forefathers was tobacco. at present we no longer smoke, we can no longersmoke. the public health is accordingly magnificent. end of chapter iv chapter vregeneration it does not fall within the scope of my rapidsketch to relate date by date the laborious vicissitudes of humanity since its settlementwithin the planet from the year 1 of the era of salvation to the year 596, in which i writethese lines in chalk on slabs of schist. i should only like to bring out for my contemporaries,who might very well fail to notice them (for

we barely observe what we have always beforeour eyes), the distinctive and original features of this modern civilisation of which we areso justly proud. now that after many abortive trials and agonizing convulsions it has succeededin taking its final shape, we can clearly establish its essential characteristics. itconsists in the complete elimination of living nature, whether animal or vegetable, man onlyexcepted. that has produced, so to say, a purification of society. secluded thus fromevery influence of the natural milieu into which it was hitherto plunged and confined,the social milieu was for the first time able to reveal and display its true virtues, andthe real social bond appeared in all its vigour and purity. it might be said that destinyhad desired to make in our case an extended

sociological experiment for its own edificationby placing us in such extraordinarily unique conditions.[1] the problem, in a way, wasto learn, what would social man become if committed to his own keeping, yet left tohimself—furnished with all the intellectual acquisitions accumulated through a remotepast by human geniuses, but deprived of the assistance of all other living beings, nay,even of those beings half endowed with life, that we call rivers and seas and stars, andthrown back on the conquered, yet passive forces of chemical, inorganic and lifelessnature, which is separated from man by too deep a chasm to exercise on him any actionfrom the social point of view. the problem was to learn what this humanity would do whenrestricted to man, and obliged to extract

from its own resources, if not its food supplies,yet at least all its pleasures, all its occupations, all its creative inspirations. the answerhas been given, and we have realised at the same time what an unsuspected drag the terrestrialfauna and flora had hitherto been on the progress of humanity.[1] in appearance only: we must not forget that in accordance with all probability manyextinct stars must have served as the scene of this normal and necessary phase of sociallife. at first human pride and the faith of manin himself hitherto held in check by the constant presence, by the profound sense of the superiorityof the forces round it, rebounded with a force of elasticity really appalling. we are a raceof titans. but, at the same time, whatever

enervating element there might have been inthe air of our grottoes has been thereby victoriously combated. otherwise our air is the purestthat man has ever breathed; all the bad germs with which the atmosphere was loaded werekilled by the cold. far from being attacked by anã¦mia as some predicted, we live in astate of habitual excitement maintained by the multiplicity of our relations and of our"social tonics" (friendly shakes of the hand, talks, meetings with charming women, etc.).with a certain number among us it passes into a state of unintermittent delirium under thename of troglodytic fever. this new malady, whose microbe has not yet been discovered,was unknown to our forefathers, thanks perhaps to the stupefying (or soothing, if you preferit) influence of natural and rural distractions.

rural! what a strange anachronism! fishermen,hunters, ploughmen, and shepherds—do we really understand to-day the meaning of thesewords? have we for a moment reflected on the life of that fossil creature who is so frequentlymentioned in books of ancient history and who was called the peasant? the habitual societyof this curious creature which comprised half or three-quarters of the population was notman, but four-footed beasts, pot herbs and green crops, which, owing to the conditionsnecessary for their production in the country (yet another word which has become meaningless)condemned him to live a wild, solitary life, far from his fellows. as for his herds, theywere acquainted with the charms of social life, but he had not the slightest inklingof what it meant.

the towns, to which people were so astonishedthat there should be a desire to emigrate, were the only centres, rare and widely scatteredas they were, in which life in society was then known. but to what extent does it notappear to have been adulterated, and attenuated by animal and vegetable life? another fossilpeculiar to these regions is the artisan. was the relation of the worker to his employer,of the artisan class to the other classes of the population, of these classes betweenthemselves a really social relation? not the least in the world! certain sophists, whowere called economists, and who were to our sociologists of to-day what the alchemistsformerly were to the chemists or the astrologers to the astronomers, had given credit, it istrue, to this error—that society essentially

consists in an exchange of services. fromthis point of view, which, moreover, is quite out of date, the social bond could never becloser than that between the ass and the ass driver, the ox and drover, the sheep and theshepherd. society, we now know, consists in the exchange of reflections. mutually to apeone another, and by dint of accumulated apings diversely combined to create an originalityis the important thing. reciprocal service is only an accessory. that is why the urbanlife of former days being principally founded on the organic and natural, rather than onthe social relation of producer to consumer, or of workman to employer, was itself onlya very imperfect kind of social life, and accordingly the source of endless disagreements.if it has been possible for us to realise

the most perfect and the most intense sociallife that has ever been seen, it is thanks to the extreme simplicity of our strictlyso-called wants. at a time when man was "panivorous" and omnivorous, the craving for food was brokenup into an infinity of petty ramifications. to-day it is confined to eating meat whichhas been preserved in the best of refrigerators. within the space of an hour each morning,a single member of society by the employment of our ingenious transport machinery feedsa thousand of his kind. the need of clothing has been pretty nearly abolished by the softnessof an ever constant climate, and, we must also admit it, by the absence of silkwormsand of textile plants. that would perhaps be a disadvantage were it not for the incomparablebeauty of our bodies, which lends a real charm

to this grand simplicity of costume. let usobserve, however, that it is fairly customary to wear coats of asbestos spangled with mica,of silver interwoven and enriched with gold, in which the refined and delicate charms ofour women appear as though moulded in metal, rather than completely screened from view.this metallic iridescence with its infinite tints has a most delightful effect. theseare, however, costumes that never wear out. how many clothiers, milliners, tailors, anddrapery establishments are thereby abolished at a single stroke! the need of shelter remains,it is true, but it has been greatly reduced. one is no longer obliged to sleep at "starlight-hotel".when a young man grows weary of the life in common which has hitherto sufficed him inthe spacious working-drawing-room of his fellows,

and desires for matrimonial reasons to havea dwelling to himself, he has only to apply the boring-machine somewhere against the rockywall and his cell is excavated in a few days. there is no rent and few articles of furniture.the joint-stock furniture, which is magnificent, is almost the only one of which the pair oflovers make use. the quota of absolute necessities being thusreduced to almost nothing, the quota of superfluities has been able to be extended to almost everything.since we live on so little, there remains abundant time for thought. a minimum of utilitarianwork and a maximum of ã¦sthetic, is surely civilisation itself in its most essentialelement. the room left vacant in the heart by the reduction of our wants is taken upby the talents—those artistic, poetic, and

scientific talents which, as they day by daymultiply and take deeper root, become really and truly acquired wants. they really spring,however, from a necessity to produce, and not from a necessity to consume. i underlinethis difference. the manufacturer is ever toiling, not for his own pleasure nor forthat of the world about him, of his fellow-men or his natural rivals, but for a society differentfrom his own—on mutual terms, but that is immaterial. his work, therefore, constitutesa non-social, an almost anti-social relationship with those who are not of his kind, to thegreat hurt and hindrance of his relations with those who are. the increasing intensityof his work tends to accentuate and not to attenuate the dissimilarities between thedifferent grades of society, which act as

an obstacle to the general reunion. we haveclearly seen the truth of this in the course of the twentieth century of the ancient era,when the whole population was divided into trades-unions of the different professions,which waged desperate warfare on one another, and whose members in the bosom of each unionhated one another as only brothers can. but for the scientist, the artist, the loverof beauty in all its forms, to produce is a passion, to consume is only a taste. forevery artist has a dilettante double. but his dilettantism in respect to arts otherthan his own only plays by comparison a secondary part in his life. the artist creates throughsheer delight, and he alone creates for such motives.we can now comprehend the depth of the truly

social revolution which was accomplished fromthe days when the ã¦sthetic activity, by dint of ever growing, ended by vanquishing utilitarianactivity. henceforth in place of the relation of producer to consumer has been substituted,as preponderating element in human dealings, the relation of the artist to the art-lover.the ancient social ideal was to seek amusement or self-satisfaction apart and to render mutualservice. for this we substitute the following: to be one's own servant and mutually to delightone another. henceforward, to insist once more, society reposes, not on the exchangeof services, but on the exchange of admiration or criticism, of favourable or unfavourablejudgments. the anarchical regime of greed in all its forms has been succeeded by theautocratic government of enlightened opinion

which has become supreme. for our worthy ancestorsdeceived themselves finely when they persuaded themselves that social progress led to whatthey termed freedom of thought. we have something better; we possess the joy and the strengthof the mind which attains a certainty of its own, founded, as it is, on its only sure basis,the unanimity of other minds on certain essential matters. on this rock we can rear the highestconstructions of thought, nay, the most gigantic systems of philosophy.the error, at present recognised, of those ancient visionaries called socialists wastheir failure to see that this life in common, this intense social life, they dreamt of soardently, had for its indispensable condition the ã¦sthetic life and the universal propagationof the religion of truth and beauty. the latter

assumes the drastic lopping off of numerouspersonal wants. consequently in rushing, as they did, into an exaggerated developmentof commercial life, they were marching in the opposite direction to their own goal.they must have begun, i am well aware, by uprooting the fatal habit of eating bread,which made man a slave to the tyrannical whims of a plant, of beasts which were necessaryfor the manuring of this plant, and of other plants which served as fodder for their beasts....but as long as this unhappy craving was rampant and they refrained from combating it, it wasobligatory to abstain from arousing others which were not less anti-social, that is tosay, not less natural. it was far better to leave men at the ploughtail than to attractthem to the factory, for the dispersion and

isolation of individualist types are morepreferable to bringing them together, which can only result in setting them by the ears.but let us hurry on. all the advantages for which we are indebted to our anti-naturalposition are now clear. we alone have realised all the quintessence of refinement and reality,of strength and of sweetness, that the social life contains. formerly, here and there, ina few rare cases in the midst of deserts an individual had certainly had a distant foretasteof this ineffable thing, not to mention three or four salons in the eighteenth century underthe ancient regime, two or three painters' studios, one or two green-rooms. they represented,in a way, imperceptible cores of social protoplasm lost amid a mass of foreign matter. but thismarrow has become the entire bone at present.

our cities, all in all, are one vast workshop,household and reception hall. and this has happened in the simplest and most inevitablemanner in the world. following the law of separation of the old herbert spencer, theselection of heterogeneous talents and vocations was bound to take place of its own accord.in fact, at the end of a century there was already underground in course of developmentand continuous excavation a city of painters, a city of sculptors, a city of musicians,of poets, of geometricians, of physicists, of chemists, even of naturalists, of psychologists,of scientific or ã¦sthetic specialists of every kind, except, strictly speaking, inphilosophy. for we were obliged after several attempts to give up the idea of founding ormaintaining a city of philosophers, notably

owing to the incessant trouble caused by thetribe of sociologists who are the most unsociable of mankind.let us not forget, by the way, to mention the city of "sappers" (we no longer speakof architects), whose speciality is to work out the plans for excavating and repairingall our crypts and to direct the carrying out of the work by our machines. quittingthe hackneyed paths of former architecture, they have created in every detail our modernarchitecture so profoundly original of which nothing could give an idea to our forefathers.the public building of the ancient architect was a kind of massive and voluminous workof art. it was entirely a thing by itself. its exterior, and especially its front, occupiedhis attention far more than the inside. for

the modern architect the interior alone exists,and each work is linked on to those which have gone before. none stands by itself. theyare only an extension and ramification, one of another, an endless continuation like theepics of the east. the work of the ancient architect with its misplaced individuality,with its symmetry, which gave it a mock air of being a living thing, yet only renderedit more out of keeping with the surrounding landscape, the more symmetrical and more skilfullydesigned it was, produced the effect of a verse in prose, or of a hackneyed theme ina fantasia. its special function was to represent correctness, coldness, and stiffness amidthe luxuriant disorder of nature and the freedom of the other arts. but to-day, instead ofbeing the most tight-laced of the arts, architecture

is the freest and most wanton of them all.it is the chief element of picturesqueness in our life, its artificial and veritablyartistic scenery lends to all the masterpieces of our painters and sculptors the horizonof its perspective, the sky of its vaults, the tangled vegetation of its innumerablecolonnades, whose shafts are a copy of the idealised trunk of all the antique essenceof tree-life, whose capitals imitate the idealised form of all the antique flowers. here is naturewinnowed and perfected, which has become human in order to delight humanity, and which humanityhas deified in order to shelter love beneath its shade. this perfection has only been,however, attained after much groping in the dark. many falls of rock, occasioned by foolhardyexcavations, which unduly reduced the number

of supports, swallowed up whole towns duringthe first two centuries. they will serve for our descendants as pompeii to rediscover.at the least shock produced by earthquakes (the only natural plague which engages ourattention), a few cases of crushing to death still occur here and there, but such accidentsare very rare. to return to our subject. each of our citiesin founding colonies in the region round it, has become the mother of cities similar toitself, in which its own peculiar colour has been multiplied in different tints which reflectand render it more beautiful. it is thus with us that nations are formed whose differencesno longer correspond to geographical accidents but to the diversity of the social aptitudesof human nature and of nothing else. nay,

more, in each of them the division of citiesis founded on that of schools, the most flourishing of which, at any given moment, raises itsparticular town to the rank of capital, thanks to the all-powerful favour of the public.the beginnings and devolution of power, questions which have so deeply agitated humanity ofyore, arise with us in the most natural way in the world. there is always amid the crowdof our genius, a superior genius who is hailed as such by the almost unanimous acclamationof his pupils at first, and next of his comrades. a man is judged in fact by his peers and accordingto his productions, not by the incompetent or according to his electoral exploits. inthe light of the intimate sense of corporate life which binds and cements us one to another,the elevation of such a dictator to the supreme

magistracy has nothing humiliating about itfor the pride of the senators who have elected him, and who are the chiefs of all the leadingschools they themselves have created. the elector who is a pupil, the elector who isan intelligent and sympathetic admirer identifies himself with the object of his choice. nowit is the particular characteristic of a "geniocratic" republic to be based on admiration, not onenvy, on sympathy, and not on dislike—on enlightenment, not on illusion.nothing is more delightful than a tour through our domains. our towns, which are quite closeto one another are severally connected by broad roads which are always illuminated anddotted with light and graceful monocycles, with trains without smoke or whistle, withpretty electric carriages which glide silently

along, like gondolas between walls coveredwith admirable bas-reliefs, with charming inscriptions, with immortal fancies, the outpouringsand accumulations of ten generations of wandering artists. similarly one might have seen inthe olden times the scanty remains of some convent where, in the course of ages the monkshad translated their weariness of spirit into grinning figures, with hooded heads, intobeasts from the apocalypse, clumsily sculptured on the capitals of the little pilasters oraround the stone chair of the abbot. but what a distance lies between this monkish nightmareand this artistic revelation! at the very most the pretty little gallery which joinedacross the arno, the museum of the pitti palace, with that of the uffizi at florence, couldgive our ancestors a faint idea of what we

see.if the corridors of our abode possess this wealth and splendour, what shall we say ofthe dwelling-places, or of the cities? they are filled with heaps of artistic marvels,of frescoes, enamels, gold and silver plate, bronzes and pictures, the acme and quintessenceof musical emotions, of philosophic conceptions, of poetic dreams, enough to baffle all description,and weary all admiration. we have difficulty in believing that the labyrinth of galleries,subterranean palaces and marble catacombs, all named and numbered, whose manifold nomenclaturerecalls all the geography and history of the past, have been excavated in so few centuries.that is what perseverance can do! however accustomed we may be to this extraordinarysight, it still at times happens when wandering

alone, during the hours of the siesta, inthis sort of infinite cathedral, with its irregular and endless architecture, throughthis forest of lofty columns, massive or in close formation, displaying in turn the mostdiversified and grandiose styles, egyptian, greek, byzantine, arab, gothic, and reminiscentof all the vanished and venerated floras and faunas, when it is not above all profoundlyoriginal ... it happens, i repeat, that panting, and beside ourselves with ecstasy, we cometo a standstill, like the traveller of yore when he entered the twilight of a virgin forest,or of the pillared hall of karnak. to those who on reading the ancient accountsof travels might perchance have regretted the wanderings of caravans across the desertsor the discoveries of new worlds, our universe

can offer boundless excursions under the atlanticand pacific oceans frozen to their very lowest depths. venturesome explorers, i was goingto say discoverers, have in every direction and in the easiest imaginable fashion honeycombedthese immense ice-caps with endless passages much in the same way as the termites, accordingto our palã¦ontologists, bored through the floors of our fathers. we extend at will thesefantastic galleries of crystal, which, wherever they cross one another, form so many crystalpalaces, by casting on the walls a ray of intense heat which makes them melt. we takegood care to drain the water due to the liquefaction into one of those bottomless pits which hereand there yawn hideously beneath our feet. thanks to this method and the improvementsit has undergone we have succeeded in cutting,

hewing and carving the solidified sea-water.we are able to glide through it, to manoeuvre in it, to course through it on skates or velocipedeswith an ease and agility that are always admired in spite of our being accustomed to it. thesevere cold of these regions is scarcely tempered by millions of electric lamps which are mirroredin these emerald-green icicles with their velvet-like tints and renders a permanentstay impossible. it would even prevent us crossing them if, by good luck, the earliestpioneers had not discovered in them crowds of seals which had been caught while stillalive by the freezing of the waters in which they remain imprisoned. their carefully preparedskins have furnished us with warm clothing. nothing is more curious than thus suddenlyto catch sight of, as it were through a mysterious

glass case, one of these huge marine animals,sometimes a whale, a shark or a devil fish, and that star-like flora which carpets theseas. though appearing crystallized in its transparent prison, in its elysium of purebrine, it has lost none of its secret charm, that was quite unknown to our ancestors. idealisedby its very lack of motion, immortalised by its death, it dimly shines here and therewith gleams of pearl and mother of pearl in the twilight of the depths below, to the right,the left, beneath the feet or above the head of the solitary skater who roams with hislamp on his forehead in pursuit of the unknown. there is always something new to look forwardto from these miraculous soundings, so different from the soundings of former time. never atourist has come home without having discovered

some interesting object—a piece of wreckage,the steeple of some sunken town, a human skeleton to enrich our prehistoric museums, sometimesa shoal of sardines or cod. these splendid and timely reserves come in very handy forreplenishing our bill of fare. but the chief fascination of such adventurous explorationis the sense of the boundless and the everlasting, of the unfathomable and the changeless bywhich one is arrested and overwhelmed in these bottomless depths. the savour of this silenceand solitude, of this profound peace, the sequel to so many tempests, of this almoststarless gloaming and twilight with its fleeting gleams, reposes the eye after our undergroundilluminations. i will not speak of the surprises which the hand of man has lavished there.at the moment when one least expects it one

sees the submarine tunnel along which oneis gliding, enlarged beyond all measure and transformed into a vast hall in which thefancy of our sculptors has found full play, a temple of vast dimensions with transparentpillars, with walls of enthralling beauty that the eye in ecstasy attempts to fathom.that is often the trysting place of friends and lovers, and the excursion begun in dreamyloneliness is continued in loving companionship. but we have wandered long enough in thesehalls of mysteries. let us return to our cities. one would look, by the bye, in vain for acity of lawyers there, or even, for a court of justice. there is no more arable land andtherefore no more lawsuits about property or ancient rights. there are no more walls,and therefore no more lawsuits about party

walls. as for felonies and misdemeanours,we do not know exactly why, but it is an obvious fact that with the spread of the cult of artthey have disappeared as by enchantment, while formerly the progress of industrial life hadtripled their numbers in half a century. man in becoming a town dweller has becomereally human. from the time that all sorts of trees and beasts, of flowers and insectsno longer interpose between men, and all sorts of vulgar wants no longer hinder the progressof the truly human faculties, every one seems to be born well-bred, just as every one isborn a sculptor or musician, philosopher or poet, and speaks the most correct languagewith the purest accent. an indescribable courtesy, skilled to charm without falsehood, to pleasewithout obsequiousness, the most free from

fawning one has ever seen, is united to apoliteness which has at heart the feeling, not of a social hierarchy to be respected,but of a social harmony to be maintained. it is composed not of more or less degenerateairs of the court, but of more or less faithful reflections of the heart. its refinement issuch as the race who lived on the surface of earth never even dreamed of. it permeateslike a fragrant oil all the complicated and delicate machinery of our existence. no unsociableness,no misanthropy can resist it. the charm is too profound. the single threat of ostracism,i do not say of expulsion to the realms above, which would be a death sentence, but of banishmentbeyond the limits of the usual corporate life, is sufficient to arrest the most criminalnatures on the slope of crime. there is in

the slightest inflexion of voice, in the leastinclination of the head of our women a special charm, which is not only the charm of formertimes, whether roguish kindness or kindly roguishness, but a refinement at once moreexquisite and more healthful in which the constant practice of seeing and doing beautifulthings or loving and being loved is expressed in an ineffable fashion.end of chapter v chapter vilove love, in fact, is the unseen and perennialsource of this novel courtesy. the capital importance it has assumed, the strange formsit has worn, the unexpected heights to which it has risen, are perhaps the most significantcharacteristics of our civilisation. in the

glittering and superficial epochs, age ofpaper and electro-plating, which immediately preceded our present era, love was held incheck by a thousand childish needs, by the contagious mono-mania of unsightly and cumbersomeluxury or of ceaseless globe-trotting, and by that other form of madness which has nowdisappeared, the so-called political ambition. it suffered accordingly an immense decline,relatively speaking. to-day it benefits from the destruction or gradual diminution of allthe other principal impulses of the heart which have taken refuge and concentrated themselvesin it as banished mankind has done in the warm bosom of the earth. patriotism is dead,since there is no longer any native land, but only a native grot. moreover the guildswhich we enter as we please according to our

vocations have taken the place of fatherlands.corporate spirit has exterminated patriotism. in the same fashion the school is on the roadnot to exterminate but to transform the family, which is only right and proper. the best thatcan be said for the parents of old was that they were compulsory and not always cost-freefriends. one was not wrong in preferring in general to them friends who are a speciesof optional and unselfish relations. maternal love itself has undergone a good many transformationsamong our women artists, and one must admit, sundry partial set backs.but love is left to us. or rather, be it said without vanity, it is we who discovered andintroduced it. its name has preceded it by a good many centuries. our ancestors gaveit its name, but they spoke of it as the hebrews

spoke of the messiah. it has revealed itselfin our day. in our day it has become incarnate, it has founded the true religion, universaland enduring, that pure and austere moral which is indistinguishable from art. it hasbeen favoured at the outset, beyond all doubt and beyond all expectation by the charm andbeauty of our women, who are all differently yet almost equally accomplished. there isnothing _natural_ left in our world below if it be not they. but it appears they havealways been the most beautiful thing in nature even in the most unfavourable and ill-favouredages. for we are assured that never was the graceful curve of hill or stream, of waveor rippling cornfield, that never was the hue of the dawn or of the mediterranean equalin sweetness, in strength, in richness of

visible music and harmony to the female form.there must therefore have been a special instinct which is quite incomprehensible which formerlyretained the poor beside their natal river or rock and prevented their emigrating tothe big towns, where they might well have hoped to admire at their ease tints and outlinesof beauty assuredly far superior to the charm of the locality to whose attractions theyfell a victim. at present there is no other country than the woman of one's affections;there is no other home-sickness than that caused by her absence.but the foregoing is insufficient to explain the unparalleled power and persistence ofour love which time intensifies more than it wears out, and consummates as it consumesit. love, we now at last know, is like air,

essential to life; we must look to it forhealth and not for mere nourishment. it is as the sun once was, we must use it to giveus light, not allow it to dazzle us. it resembles that imposing temple that the fervour of ourfathers raised in its honour when they worshipped it, unwittingly, at the paris opera-house.the most beautiful part of it is the staircase—when one mounts it. we have therefore attemptedto make the staircase monopolise the whole edifice without leaving the tiniest room forthe hall. the wise man, an ancient writer has said, is to the woman what the asymptoteis to the curve, it draws ever nearer but never touches. it was a half crazy fellownamed rousseau who uttered this splendid aphorism and our society flatters itself that it haspractised it far better than he. all the same

the ideal thus outlined, we are compelledto confess, is rarely attained in all its entity. this degree of perfection is reservedfor the most saintly souls, the ascetics, men and women, who wander together, two andtwo, in the most marvellous cloisters, in the most raphaelesque cells in the city ofpainters, in a sort of artificial dusk produced by a coloured twilight in the midst of a throngof similar couples, and on the banks of a stream so to say of audacious and splendidrevelations of the nude. they pass their life in feasting their eyes on these waves of beauty,the living bank of which is their own passion. together they climb the fiery steps of theheavenly staircase to the very summit on which they halt. then supremely inspired they setto work and produce masterpieces. heroic lovers

are they whose whole pleasure in love consistsin the sublime joy of feeling their love growing within them, blissful because it is shared,inspiring because it is chaste. but for the greater number of us it has beennecessary to come down to the level of the insurmountable weakness of the old adam. nonethe less the inelastic limits of our food supplies have made it a duty for us rigorouslyto guard against a possible excess in our population which has reached to-day fiftymillions, a figure it can never exceed without danger. we have been obliged to forbid ingeneral under the most severe penalties a practice which apparently was very commonand indulged in _ad libitum_ by our forefathers. is it possible that after manufacturing therubbish heaps of law with which our libraries

are lumbered up, they precisely omitted toregulate the only matter considered worthy to-day of regulation? can we conceive thatit could ever have been permissible to the first comer without due authorisation to exposesociety to the arrival of a new hungry and wailing member—above all at a time whenit was not possible to kill a partridge without a game licence, or to import a sack of cornwithout paying duty? wiser and more far-sighted, we degrade, and in case of a second offencewe condemn to be thrown into a lake of petroleum, whoever allows himself to infringe our constitutionallaw on this point, or rather we should say, should allow himself, for the force of publicopinion has got the better of the crime and has rendered our penalties unnecessary. wesometimes, nay very often, see lovers who

go mad from love and die in consequence. otherscourageously get themselves hoisted by a lift to the gaping mouth of an extinct volcanoand reach the outer air which in a moment freezes them to death. they have scarcelytime to regard the azure sky—a magnificent spectacle, so they say—and the twilighthues of the still dying sun or the vast and unstudied disorder of the stars; then lockedin each other's arms they fall dead upon the ice! the summit of their favourite volcanois completely crowned with their corpses which are admirably preserved always in twos, starkand livid, a living image still of love and agony, of despair and frenzy, but more oftenof ecstatic repose. they recently made an indelible impression on a celebrated travellerwho was bold enough to make the ascent in

order to get a glimpse of them. we all knowhow he has since died from the effects. but what is unheard of and unexampled in ourday is for a woman in love to abandon herself to her lover before the latter has under herinspiration produced a masterpiece which is adjudged and proclaimed as such by his rivals.for here we have the indispensable condition to which legitimate marriage is subordinated.the right to have children is the monopoly and supreme recompense of genius. it is besidesa powerful lever for the uplifting and exaltation of the race. futhermore a man can only exerciseit exactly the same number of times as he produces works worthy of a master. but inthis respect some indulgence is shown. it even happens pretty frequently that touchedby pity for some grand passion that disposes

only of a mediocre talent, the affected admirationof the public partly from sympathy and partly from condescension accords a favourable verdictto works of no intrinsic value. perhaps there are also (in fact there is no doubt aboutit) for common use other methods of getting round the law.ancient society reposed on the fear of punishment, on a penal system which has had its day. ours,it is clear, is based on the expectation of happiness. the enthusiasm and creative firearoused by such a perspective are attested by our exhibitions, and borne witness to bythe rich luxuriance of our annual art harvests. when we think of the precisely opposite effectsof ancient marriage, that institution of our ancestors, more ridiculous still than theirumbrellas, one can measure the distance between

this excessive and pretended exclusive _debitumconjugale_ and our mode of union, at once free and regulated, energetic and intermittent,passionate and restrained, the true corner-stone of our regenerated humanity. the sufferingsit imposes on those who are sacrificed, the unsuccessful artists, is not for the lattera cause of complaint. their despair itself is dear to the desperate; for if they do notdie of it, they draw life and immortality from it and from the bottomless pit of theirinner depth of woe, they gather deathless flowers, flowers of art or poesy for some,mystic roses for others. to the latter perhaps is given at that moment, as they grope intheir inward darkness to touch most nearly the essence of things, and these delightsare so vivid that our artists and our metaphysical

mystics wonder whether art and philosophywere made to console love or if the sole reason for love's existence is not to inspire artand the pursuit of ultimate truth. this last opinion has generally prevailed.the extent to which love has refined our habits, and to which our civilisation based on loveis superior in morality to the former civilisation based on ambition and covetousness, was provedat the time of the great discovery which took place in the year of salvation 194. guidedby some mysterious inkling, some electric sense of direction, a bold sapper by dintof forcing his way through the flanks of the earth beyond the ordinary galleries suddenlypenetrated into a strange open space buzzing with human voices and swarming with humanfaces. but what squeaky voices! what sallow

complexions! what an impossible language withno connection with our greek! it was, without doubt, a veritable underground america, quiteas vast and still more curious. it was the work of a little tribe of burrowing chinesewho had had, one imagines, the same idea as our miltiades. much more practical than he,they had hastily crawled underground without encumbering themselves with museums and libraries,and there they had multiplied enormously. instead of confining themselves as we to turningto account the deposits of animal carcasses, they had shamelessly given themselves up toancestral cannibalism. they were thus enabled, seeing the thousand of millions of chinesedestroyed and buried beneath the snow, to give full vent to their prolific instincts.alas! who knows if our own descendants will

not one day be reduced to this extremity?in what promiscuity, in what a slough of greed, falsehood and robbery were these unfortunatesliving! the words of our language refuse to depict their filth and coarseness. with infinitepains they raised underground diminutive vegetables in diminutive beds of soil they had broughtthither together with diminutive pigs and dogs.... these ancient servants of mankindappeared very disgusting to our new christopher columbus. these degraded beings (i speak ofthe masters and not of the animals, for the latter belong to a breed that has been muchimproved by those who raised them) had lost all recollection of the middle empire andeven of the surface of the earth. they heartily laughed when some of our _savants_ sent ona mission to them spoke to them of the firmament,

the sun, the moon and the stars.... they listened,however, to the end of these accounts, then in an ironical tone they asked our envoys:"have you seen all that?" and the latter unfortunately could not reply to the question, since noone among us has seen the sky except the lovers who go to die together.now, what did our settlers do at the sight of such cerebral atrophy? several proposed,it is true, to exterminate these savages who might well become dangerous owing to theircunning and to their numbers, and to appropriate their dwelling-place after a certain amountof cleaning and painting and the removal of numerous little bells. others proposed toreduce them to the status of slaves or servants in order to shift on to them all our menialwork. but these two proposals were rejected.

an attempt was made to civilize and to renderless savage these poor cousins, and once the impossibility of any success in that directionhad been ascertained the partition was carefully blocked up.end of chapter vi chapter viithe ã†sthetic life such is the moral miracle wrought by our excellencewhich itself is begotten of love and beauty. but the intellectual marvels which have issuedfrom the same source, merit a still more extended notice. it will be enough for me to indicatethem as i go along. let us first speak of the sciences. one mighthave 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 observationand experience ceased to flow, astronomy and meteorology would henceforth be brought toa standstill while zoology and botany would have become palã¦ontology pure and simple,without speaking of their application to the navy, army and agriculture, which are allto-day entirely obsolete; in fact, that they would have ceased to make a step forward andwould 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, formerlyeminently useful and inductive, have for the first time had the advantage of passionatelyinteresting and exciting the general public since they have acquired this double characteristicof being an object of luxury and a deductive

subject. the past has accumulated such undigestedmasses of astronomical tables, papers and proceedings dealing with measurements, vivisections,and innumerable experiments, that the human mind can live on this capital till the endof 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 viewof their success that they are entirely based on written testimony, and in no way on senseperception, and that they on all occasions invoke the authority of books (for we talkto-day of whole bibliographies when formerly people spoke of a single bible—evidentlyan immense difference). this great and inestimable advantage consists in the extraordinary richesof our libraries in documents of the most

diverse kinds which never leaves an ingenioustheorist in the lurch, and is equal to supporting in a plenary and authoritative fashion themost contradictory opinions at one and the same symposium. its abundance recalls theadmirable wealth of antique legislation and jurisprudence in texts and decisions of everyhue which rendered the lawsuits so interesting, almost as much as the battles of the populaceof alexandria on the subject of a theological iota. the debates of our _savants_, theirpolemics relative to the vitellin yolk of the egg of the arachneida, or the digestiveapparatus of the infusoria, constitute the burning questions which distress us, and whichif we had the misfortune to possess a regular press, would not fail to drench our streetsin gore. for the questions which are useless

and even harmful have always the knack ofrousing the passions, provided they are insoluble. these are our religious quarrels. in factthe sum total of the sciences bequeathed to us by the past has become definitely and inevitablya religion. our _savants_ to-day who work deductively on these data from henceforthchangeless and inviolate, exactly recall on a much larger scale the theologians of theancient world. this new encyclopã¦dic theology, not less fertile than others in schisms andheresies, is the unique but inexhaustible source of divisions in the bosom of our churchwhich is otherwise so compact. it is perhaps the most profound and fascinating charm ofour intellectual leaders. "all the same, they are dead sciences!" saycertain malcontents. let us accept the epithet.

they are dead, if one likes, but after thefashion of those languages in which a whole people chanted its hymns although no one speaksthem any longer. this is also the case with certain faces whose beauty only appears inits fulness when their last sleep has come. let none therefore be surprised if our lovefastens on these majestic dogmas, by which we are more and more overshadowed, on thesehigher inutilities which are our vocation. above all, mathematics, as being the mostperfect 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 merestatement would have provoked an incredulous smile in their predecessors. and so they discoverevery day, chalk in hand, not with the telescope

to the eye, i know not how many intra-mercurialor extra-neptunian planets, and begin to distinguish the planets of the nearer stars. there arein 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 betteracquainted with the sky because they no longer see it, they resemble beethoven, who onlywrote his finest symphonies when he had lost his hearing. our claude bernards and pasteursare almost as numerous. although we are careful as a matter of fact not to accord to the naturalsciences the exaggerated and fundamentally anti-social importance they formerly usurpedduring two or three centuries, we do not completely neglect them. even the applied sciences havetheir votaries. recently one of the latter

has at last discovered—such is the ironyof destiny—the practical means of steering balloons. these discoveries are useless, iadmit, 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 somethingbetter than glory,—the happiness that we know so well.but among the sciences there are two which are still experimental and inductive and inaddition 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 scienceswhich were formerly the antipodes of one another, are to-day on the high road to becoming identicalby dint of pushing their joint researches

ever deeper and crushing to atoms the lastproblems 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 tous the atomic theory of self, i was going to say the sociology of self. they enableus to perceive, even in its most minute detail, the most admirable of all societies, thishierarchy of consciousness, this feudal system of vassal souls, of which our personalityis the summit. we are indebted to them both

for priceless benefits. thanks to the formerwe are no longer alone in a frozen world. we are conscious that these rocks are aliveand animated, we are conscious that these hard metals which protect and warm us arelikewise a prolific brotherhood. through their mediation these living stones have some messagefor our heart, something at once alien and intimate, which neither the stars nor theflowers of the field ever told to our forefathers. and by their mediation also, and the serviceis 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 compoundedby artificial means. but if our chemists have

thus reassured us against the danger of dyingof hunger, our psychologists have acquired still further claims on our gratitude in freeingus from the fear of death. permeated by their doctrines we have followed their consequencesto their final conclusion with the deductive vigour that is second nature with us. deathappears to us as a dethronement that leads to freedom. it restores to itself the fallenor abdicated self that retires anew into its inner consciousness, where it finds in depthsmore than the equivalent of the outward empire it has lost. in thinking of the terrors offormer man, face to face with the tomb, we compare them with the dread experienced bythe comrades of miltiades when they were compelled to bid adieu to the fields of ice, to thesnowy horizons, in order to enter for ever

the gloomy abysses in which such a myriadof 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, thefoundation of our peace of mind and the starting point of our enthusiasms. our philosophersthemselves 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 charmof their refinement and contributes to their success in public. with such certainties asballast we can spring with a light heart into the ã¦ther of systems, and so we do not failto do so. one may be surprised, however, that

i made a distinction between our philosophersand those deductive _savants_ of whom i have spoken above. their subject-matter and theirmethods are identical. they chew the cud—if i may be allowed the expression—in the samefashion 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 ruminantsand 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 naturalone to which they come, and sit apart from one another or in groups, according to theirschools, on chairs formed of granite blocks beside a petrifying well. this spacious grottocontains astounding stalactites, the slow

product of continuous droppings which vaguelyimitate, 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, chandelierswhich give no light, cathedrals in which no one prays, but mirrors in which one sees oneselfmore or less faithfully and pleasantly portrayed. there also is to be seen a gloomy and bottomlesslake over which hang like so many question-marks, the pendants in the sombre roof and the beardsof the thinkers. such is the ample cave which is exactly identical to the philosophy itshelters, 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 stillgreater portion of mirage-like fascination,

that diurnal miracle of our forefathers—thestarry night. now the crowd of systematic ideas which slowly form and crystallise therein each brain like mental stalactites is indescribably enormous. while all the former stalactitesof thought are for ever ramifying and changing their shape, turning as it were from a tableinto an altar, or from an eagle into a griffin, new ideas appear here and there still moresurprising. 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 underworldhas procured an unexpected rejuvenation of his antique authority on the minds of men,above all since an archã¦ologist has maintained he has found the skeleton of this grand manin pushing an exploring gallery to the very

foot of ã†tna which to-day is completely extinct.but there is ever arising some great reformer with an unpublished gospel that each attemptsto enrich with a new version destined to take its place. i will cite for example the greatestintellect of our time, the chief of the fashionable school in sociology. according to this profoundthinker the social development of humanity, starting on the outer rind of the earth andcontinuing to-day beneath its crust, at no great distance from the surface, is destinedin proportion to the growing solar and planetary cooling, to pursue its course from stratato strata down to the very centre of the earth, while the population forcibly contracts andcivilisation on the contrary expands at each new descent. it is worth seeing the vigourand dante-like precision with which he characterises

the social type peculiar to each of thesehumanities, immured within its own circle, growing ever nobler and richer, happier andbetter balanced. one should read the portrait which he has limned with a bold brush of thelast man, sole survivor and heir of a hundred successive civilisations, left to himselfyet self-sufficient in the midst of his immense stores of science and art. he is happy asa god because he is omniscient and omnipotent, because he has just discovered the true answerof the great enigma, yet dying because he cannot survive humanity. by means of an explosivesubstance of extraordinary potency he blows up the globe with himself in order to sowthe immensity of space with the last remnants of mankind. this system very naturally hasa good many adherents. the graceful hypatias,

however, who form his female followers, idlylying round the master's stone, are agreed it would be proper to associate with the lastman, the last woman, not less ideal than he. but what shall i say of art and poetry? hereto be just, praise must become panegyric. let us limit ourselves to indicating the generaltendency of the transformations that have taken place. i have related what has becomeof our architecture which has been turned "outside in", so to say, and brought intokeeping with its surroundings, the idealised image in stone, the essence and consummationof former nature. i shall not return to the subject. but i must still say a word aboutthis immortal and overflowing population of statues, this wealth of frescoes, enamels,and bronzes which in concert with our poetry

celebrate in this architectural transfigurationof the nether world the apotheosis of love. there would be an interesting study to makeon the gradual metamorphoses that the genius of our painters and sculptors has imposedfor the last three centuries on these traditional types of lions, horses, tigers, birds, treesand flowers, with which it is never weary of disporting itself, without being eitherhelped 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, animalsand landscapes, than since these were no more. similarly, they have never painted or sculpturedso many draperies, since everyone goes about almost naked, while formerly at the time whenhumanity wore clothes the nude abounded in

art. does it mean that nature, now dead andformerly alive, from which our great masters drew their subjects and themes, has becomea simple hieroglyphic and coldly conventional alphabet? no. daughter to-day of traditionand no longer of productive nature, humanised and harmonised, she has a still firmer holdon the heart. if she recalls to each his day-dreams rather than his recollections, his imaginingsrather 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 andintimate 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 whenhis hearers in the cyclades still believed

in aphrodite and pallas, in the dioscuri andthe centaurs, of whom he spoke to them and wrung from them tears of sheer delight. thusour 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 neverseen, our ear has never heard, of which all our senses are ignorant, yet our mind conjuresthem 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 swanswhose necks become ever rounder and longer, these vines whose leaves and branches growever more intricate with their lace-like edges and arabesques interwoven round still moreexquisite birds, a matchless emotion rises

within us such as a young greek might havefelt before a bas-relief crowded with fauns and nymphs or with argonautes bearing offthe 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 finearts, they in their turn, however admirable, have the air of being barely worthy to illustrateour poetry and literature graven on stone. but in our poetry and even in our literaturethere are glories which in comparison with less obvious beauty are as the corona is tothe ovary, or the frame to the picture. read our romantic dramas and epics in which allancient 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 adozen dead languages which when desired revive in order to vivify with their clear notesand their manifold harmonies, the pleasure of our ear, to accompany, so to say, withtheir rich orchestration in english, german, swedish, arabic, italian and french, the musicof our pure attic. you will imagine nothing more fascinating than this renaissance andtransfiguration of forgotten idioms, once the glory of antiquity. as for our dramasand 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 speciesof nature formerly alive are to our painters and sculptors, the no less extinct sentimentsof 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 causetears or terror in a single soul, any more than the heraldic tigers and lions paintedup on our public squares frighten our children. but in a new accent with quite a differentring, they speak to us their ancient language; and to tell the truth, they are only a grandpiano on which our new passions play. now there is but a single passion for all itsthousand names, as there is above but a single

sun. it is love, the soul of our soul andsource of our art. that is the true sun which will never fail us, which is never weary oftouching 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, inorder 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 raythat august summons to deck the earth, addressed to every ancient plant of the field, awakeningit to bloom anew, that grand yearly transformation scene, so deceptive and entrancing, whichthey 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 hasno value if their heart is left untouched. they would give for one true and personalnote all these feats of skill and sleight of hand. what they look for under the mostgrandiose 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, halfa 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 atthe 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-fashionederotic writers gives us no trouble. the real difficulty and merit lie in gathering alongwith our mystics, from the lowest depths of sorrow, its flowers of ecstasy, the pearlsand coral that lie at the bottom of its sea, and to enrich the soul in its own eyes. ourpurest poetry thus joins hands with our most profound psychology. one is the oracle, theother 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 andthere certain recusants who declare they are soaked and saturated with the essence, soremarkably pure and so much above proof, of our excessive and compulsory society. theyfind our realm of beauty too static, our atmosphere

of happiness too tranquil. in vain to pleasethem we vary from time to time the intensity and colouring of our illuminations and ventilateour colonnades with a kind of refreshing breeze. they persist in condemning as monotonous ourday 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 whichthey alone experience at ordinary times, becomes contagious and well-nigh general. and so itis the most melancholy and least busy month of the year. one would say that the springdriven from every place, from the gloomy immensity of the heavens and from the frozen surfaceof the earth has, as we, sought refuge under ground; or rather that her wandering ghostreturns at stated seasons to visit us and

tantalise us by her haunting presence. itis 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 eachother by the hand and go up to gaze upon the death-dealing sky.... in reference to thisi ought to say that there was recently a false alarm caused by a madman who pretended hehad seen the sun coming back to life and melting the ice. at this news which had not been otherwiseconfirmed, quite a considerable portion of the population became unsettled and gave itselfup to the pleasing task of forming plans for an early exodus. such unhealthy and revolutionarydreams evidently only serve to foment artificial discontent.luckily a scholar in rummaging in a forgotten

corner of the archives put his hand on a bigcollection of phonographic and cinematographic records which had been amassed by an ancientcollector. interpreted by the phonograph and cinematograph together, these cylinders andfilms have enabled us suddenly to hear all the former sounds in nature accompanied bytheir corresponding sights, the thunder, the winds, the mountain torrents, the murmursthat accompany the dawn, the monotonous cry of the osprey and the long drawn out lamentof the nightingale amid the manifold whisperings of night. at this resurrection of anotherage to the ear and eye, of extinct species and vanished phenomena, an immense astonishmentquickly followed by an immense disillusion arose among the most ardent partisans of areturn to the ancient regime. for that was

not what one had hitherto believed on thestrength of what even the most realist poets and novelists had told us. it was somethinginfinitely less ravishing and less worthy of our regret. the song of the nightingaleabove all provoked a most unpleasant surprise. we were all angry with it for showing itselfso inferior to its reputation. assuredly the worst of our concerts is more musical thanthis so-called symphony of nature with full orchestral accompaniment.thus has been quelled by an ingenious expedient entirely unknown to former governments, thisfirst and only attempt at rebellion. may it be the last. a certain leaven of discord isbeginning, alas, to contaminate our ranks, and our moralists observe not without apprehensionsundry symptoms which indicate the relaxation

of our morals. the growth in our populationis very disquieting, notably since certain chemical discoveries, following upon whichwe have been too much in a hurry to declare that bread might be made of stones, and thatit was no longer worth while to husband our food supplies or to trouble ourselves to maintainat a certain limit the number of mouths to feed.simultaneously with the increase in the number of children, there is a diminution in thenumber of masterpieces. let us hope that this lamentable movement will soon abate. if thesun once more, as after the different glacial epochs, succeeds in awakening from his lethargyand regains fresh strength, let us pray that only a small part of our population, thatwhich 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 bythis 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 dangerof those relapses common to old age. it is still less desirable. let us repeat in thewords of miltiades our august ancestor, blessed are those stars which are extinct, that isto say, the almost entire number of those which people space. radiance, as he trulysaid, is to the stars what the flowering season is to the plants. after having flowered, theybegin to bear fruit. thus, doubtless, weary of expansion and the useless squandering oftheir strength through the infinite void,

the stars collect the germs of higher lifein order to fertilize them in the depth of their bosom. the deceptive brilliancy of thesewidely scattered stars, so relatively few in number, which are still alight, which havenot finished sowing what miltiades called their wild oats of light and heat, preventedthe first race of men from thinking of this, to wit of the numberless and tranquil multitudeof dark stars to whom this radiance served as a cloak. but as for us, delivered fromtheir spell and freed from this immemorial optical delusion, we continue firmly to believethat, among the stars as among mankind, the most brilliant are not the best, and thatthe same causes have brought about elsewhere the same results, compelling other races ofmen to hide themselves in the bosom of their

earth, and there in peace to pursue the happycourse of their destiny under unique conditions of absolute independence and purity, thatin short in the heavens as on the earth true happiness lives concealed. end of underground manby gabriel tarde translated by cloudesley breretonand read by ruth golding