REMY DE GOURMONT (continued 2)

It is not a question of disputing the awards of glory or of proposing a revised list. Such as it is, it serves its purpose. It may have the same usefulness as the arbitrary classifications of botany. It is not a matter of amending it, it is a matter of tearing it up.

That Racine is a better poet than Tristan l'Hermite, and that Iphigénie is superior to Marianne, are two propositions unequally true; for we might quite as well be asked to compare this, which is by Racine:

Que c'est une chose charmante De voir cet étang gracieux Où, comme en un lit précieux, L'onde est toujours calme et dormante! Quelles richesses admirables N'ont point ces nageurs marquetés, Ces poissons aux dos argentés, Sur leurs écailles agréables![10]

with this, which is by Tristan:

Auprès de cette grotte sombre Où l'on respire un air si doux, L'onde lutte avec les cailloux, Et la lumière avec que l'ombre. Ces flots, las de l'exercice Qu'ils ont fait dessus ce gravier, Se reposent dans ce vivier, Où mourut autrefois Narcisse. L'ombre de cette fleur vermeille Et celle de ces jons pendans Paraissent estre la-dedans Les songes de l'eau qui someille.[11]

I am well aware that I am here comparing the best of Tristan with the worst of Racine; but all the same, if Racine had his park, Tristan had his garden, and it is often agreeable there. Let us then tear up the list of awards in order to remain ignorant of the fact that Tristan l'Hermite is a poet "whose versification is ridiculous,"[12] so that our pleasure in meeting him may not thus be spoiled in advance, and so that, with him, we may dare address his muse:

Fay moy boire au creux de tes mains, Si l'eau n'en dissout point la neige.

This is the drawback to comparative methods. Having set up the great poet of the century as a standard, the critics thereafter value the others merely as precursors or as disciples.[13] Authors are often judged according to what they are not, through failure to understand their particular genius, and often also through failure to question them themselves. Pratinas, truly, is better treated. He enjoys silence.

But he is dead, and we are discussing the living. Living what life, and in the memory of what men? Life is a physical fact. A book which exists as a volume in a library is not dead, and is it not perhaps a glory more enviable to remain unknown, like Théophile, than to be famous, like Jean-Baptiste Rousseau? When glory is merely classic, it is perhaps one of the harshest forms of humiliation. To have dreamed of thrilling men and women with passion, and to become but the dull task which keeps the careless schoolboy a captive! Are there, however, any universal reputations that are not classic? Very few, and in that case, they have another blemish. It is for their smut that Restif's[14] ridiculous novels are still read—also Voltaire's syphilitic tales, and that tedious Manon Lescaut, so clumsily adapted from the English. The books of yesterday no longer have a public, if by public be understood disinterested men who read simply for their pleasure, enjoying the art and the thought contained in a book; but they still have readers, and all have some.

The only dead book is the book which is lost. All the rest live, almost with the same life, and the older they grow, the more intense this life becomes, becoming more precious. Literary glory is nominal. Literary life is personal. There is not a poet of the prodigious seventeenth century who does not come to life again each day in the pious hands of a lover. Bossuet has not been more thumbed than this Recueil by Pierre du Marteu;[15] and, all things considered, the Plainte du cheval Pégase aux chevaux de la petite Écurie, by Monsieur de Benserade, is more agreeable and less dangerous reading than the Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle. Is pompous moralizing after all so superior to sprightly burlesque? Every mountain plant offers an equal interest to the artless botanist. For him the euphorbia is not celebrated or the borage ridiculous (besides which it has the most beautiful eyes in the world), and he fills his bag till it can hold not another blade of grass. Literary glory was invented for the use of children preparing their examinations. It matters little to the explorer of the mind of the past that this agreeable verse is by an unknown poet, or that profound thought by a despised thinker. A man and his work are so different in interest! The man is a physiological entity of value only in the environment that developed it. The work, whatever it may be, can keep an abstract power for centuries. This power should not be exaggerated or erected into a tyranny. A thought is very little more than a dry flower; but the man has perished and the flower still lies in the herbal. It is the witness to a life that has disappeared, the sign of an annihilated sensibility.

When, in the Gallery of Apollo, we gaze at those onyxes and those corundums in the form of conches and cups, those gold plaques engraved with flowers, and those flaming enamels, do we, before daring to rejoice, demand the name of the artist who created such objects? If we did, the question would be vain. The work lives and the name is dead. What matters the name?

"I, who have no wish for glory," wrote Flaubert. He spoke of posterity—of that future and, consequently, non-existent time, to which so many second-rate energies sacrifice the one reality, the present hour. Since none of Flaubert's books can serve as a pretext for moral teaching, he was well-advised. He did not wish for glory, and he will not have it, unless Madame Bovary retains during the next century its equivocal reputation and finds a place, in schoolboy-tradition, among the celebrated bad books. This is little likely, seeing that Mademoiselle de Maupin is already hard to read. But that which cannot be said for the future, either of him or of any writer of the last half of the century, may be said for the past. Gautier and Flaubert have known glory—the glory that they accorded themselves in the invincible consciousness of their genius. Glory is a sensation of life and of strength; a food-sprite would taste it in a tree trunk.

How amusing it is to listen to the eloquent professor who declares: "This book will not last." But no book lasts, and yet all books last. Do you know Palemon, fable bocagère et pastorale, by the Sieur Frénicle?[16] Well, this book has lasted, since I have just read it, and since I resurrect one of its verses, which is not ugly:

O, que j'eus de plaisir à la voir toute nue!

It is time man learned at last to resign himself to annihilation, and even to enjoy that idea whose sweetness is incomparable. Writers might give the people the example, by resolutely abandoning their vainglorious hopes. They will leave a name which will grace the catalogues for several centuries, and works which will last as long as the matter upon which they are printed. This is a rare privilege, for which they ought to be willing to silence their complaints. And even were this illusory eternity to be denied them, as well as all present glory, why should that diminish their activity? It is to the passer-by, not to future humanity, that the wild cherry-tree offers its fruits; and even if no one passes, just as in the spring it has covered itself with snow, so it puts on its purple with the coming of summer. Life is a personal, immediate fact, which glides past the very moment it is perceived. It is bad reasoning to attach to this moment the age to come; for the present alone exists, and we must keep within the limits of logic in order to remain men. Let us be a little less primitive, not fancying that the next century will be the "double" of the present, and that our works will keep the position they hold to-day, or will have a worse. Our way of understanding Bérénice would afflict Racine, and Molière would gladly blow out the candles on nights when the Misanthrope is such a bore. Books have but one season. Trees, shrubs, or simple blades of grass, they die having sometimes sown their kind, and true glory for a writer would be to call forth a work whose shade would smother him. That would be true glory, because it would be a return to the noblest conditions of life. The witnesses of the past are never anything but paradoxes. They began to languish a few years, or even less, after their birth, and their old age drags on, sad and wrinkled, amid men who no longer either understand or love them. To desire immortality is to wish to live forever in the condition of Swift's "Struldbruggs."

"Such are the details imparted to me respecting the Immortals of this country...."—and man's sentiment continues to revolt against the idea of destruction, and the writer trembles at the idea of perennial obscurity. Our sensibility needs a tiny light in the far-off distance among the trees which line our horizon. That reassures the muscles, calms the pulses.

1900.

SUCCESS AND THE IDEA OF BEAUTY

I

In one of his Paradoxes, where he at times has a touch of Heine's irony or of Schopenhauer's wit, Max Nordau has sketched the Machiavellian plan of a school of success. The reverse of the usual morality would be taught there, and not virtue, but the art of arriving. This school already exists. It is life. Precocious eyes and ears take in its teachings from adolescence. There are young men who consecrate themselves to success, like others to the priesthood or to glory. Are they unreasonable? No. And contemptible? Why? Writing, singing, sculpturing are acts. Thinking, even in the silence of the night and in the depth of a dungeon, is an act. But what act is there that has not for its end its own accomplishment? The reasoner who has convinced himself will necessarily wish to persuade others; and the poet who admires himself, to force others to share his enthusiasm. Those who are contented with an intimate or restricted approbation are perhaps wise, but they will not be numbered among the strong. Though timid, though disdainful, the dreamer wishes the glory of dreaming, and he would dream with delight before throngs rapturously contemplating his eyes lost in an ocean of dreams and of nonsense. That would be success. Success has something precise which soothes and nourishes. It is a repast. It is a fact. It is the final goal.

Success is a fact in itself, and quite aside from the word or the act which it accompanies. The assassin who has accomplished his crime, step by step, experiences other joys than that of slaked avidity. He finds, in short, that success has declared for him; and, all pursuit thrown off his track, we understand very well the state of mind that Barbey d'Aurevilly has dared to describe. Yet crime, unless of a political order, is seldom publicly applauded in our civilizations, as among the Dyaks of Borneo, or the subjects of the Old Man of the Mountain. That is why, in spite of the celebrated irony, we shall not consider assassination "as one of the fine arts." It should at least be classed among the arts whose success is their one and only end, and which attach much less importance to their initial designation than to what they are called at the end. But that is not the subject of this essay, which is very serious, and whose words will all be carefully weighed. It will deal exclusively with works of art and, in particular, with literary works.

Success, then, is a fact; but, in the case of those acts which concern us here, it is a contingent fact and one that does not change the essence of the act itself. In this respect, I should be inclined to compare success to consciousness—a torch which, lighted within us, illumines our actions and our thoughts, but has no more influence on their nature than, when the moon is shining, the shadow of a passing train has on its speed. Consciousness determines no act. Success does not create a work, but sheds such light upon it that some trace of it almost always remains in the memory of men. A writer does not become Racine because he has been applauded before the footlights, and he remains Racine, even if Phèdre be played six nights in succession to empty boxes;[1] but he becomes Pradon, and that is a good deal. To be Pradon through the centuries is to live with a glory dark and disagreeable, sad and vain. Quite so, but it is scarcely less precarious than the life which we call real. Pradon is at once ridiculous and illustrious. It is impossible to tell the story of Racine's career without bringing his name into it. We search his works in order to understand that renown of a day which has been prolonged over so many morrows. It cannot be doubted; Pradon had almost no talent, though he was fairly adroit in his trade as a dramatic constructor. He was, as the journalists say, a man of the theatre. Critics have even gone so far as to claim[2] that, in order to have a perfect Phèdre, the play should have been written by Racine on Pradon's plan. That is absurd; but every success has its cause. The cabal explains nothing. The Duchesse de Bouillon would not have risked the battle on a worthless card. Pradon was known. His tragedy of Pyrame et Thisbé had been applauded. Ten years after Phèdre, and without any cabal, his Régulus was praised to the skies. He was therefore destined to enjoy a moderate reputation, such as Solyman, for example, brought its author, the Abbé Abeille, about the same date.

Was it fortunate for this commonplace poet to have encountered the Duchesse de Bouillon? Anticipating our modern methods, this terrible woman had hired the boxes of the two theatres, filling those at one and leaving the others empty. To-day, she would have bought the newspapers in addition, but no one knows how much she paid the cackling of the newsmongers and the pamphleteers. It was a masterpiece in its way, since it succeeded marvellously; but what did Pradon gain by it? After much abuse, an ocean of posthumous blame. Not a day passes that some professor does not treat him as if he were a Damiens or a Ravaillac. Is immortality a sufficient reward for such treatment? Is shameful immortality preferable to oblivion? First of all, we should dismiss the shame, and ignore the abuse. Every success inflames the fire of hatred and deepens the descending smoke. That does not matter. Hate is an opinion. So is abuse; and so are the words that cast infamy. Success is a fact. The Duchesse de Bouillon could not change the essential value of the two Phèdres, any more than she could transmute "vile lead" into pure gold; but she could veil the gold and gild the lead, and she could force posterity to repeat her favourite's name. That was her work. It was well done and it has remained memorable. No one knew at the time which to admire of these two paintings with like frames. Pradon's friends were as powerful as Racine's. The latter had Boileau, the former Sanlecque, his sometimes successful rival. But Boileau's authority faded before that of Madame des Houlières, representing polite society and the ruelles. Thanks to the quarrel of the Sonnets, even wit ranged itself on Pradon's side, for the Duc de Nevers' still conserves to-day the most amusing malice. Molière, who detested Racine, and had already lent his theatre to a parody of Andromaque, would, no doubt, have favoured Pradon. His death spared the friends of sound letters that scandal. It was, therefore, a reasonable illusion around which success crystallized, and the witlings had no cause to blush for the part which they played. It is a pious lie on the part of the historians of French literature to pretend that the true public avenged Racine for the desert organized by Madame de Bouillon. The boxes of the Hôtel de Bourgogne had been hired for six days, while Racine's Phèdre had but seven performances. The public had understood. It obeyed success as dogs obey the sound of the whistle.

The reason is that success, though organized by fraudulent means, possesses a powerful attraction for the throng, even the literary throng. Assuredly, the theatrical public was, in 1677, far superior, in point of intelligence, education and taste, to the average public to-day. Yet it is seen applauding decidedly commonplace plays, while disdaining those of the first quality. The reason is that success, and especially theatrical success, can spring spontaneously from an accident,—from the agreeable face of an actress, from a fine gesture, from a well-timed bit of applause, from the caprice or emotion of a small group of spectators. The herd follows—since all men who come together are herds—and history numbers one more name and date.

The Americans—of the North, for in the South they have more finesse—never hesitate before success. What dramatic poem is it whose success has surpassed the enthusiasm aroused even by the Cid and by Hernani? Cyrano de Bergerac. Then this work is worthy of admiration, and they have it, as well as l'Aiglon, learned by heart in the schools where, though themselves illiterate, they cultivate learned wives. To repeat once more my real thought, I do not find that unreasonable. Let us not confound history, which is a complete or at least a consecutive novel, with the present, which appears to us in fragments, like a newspaper torn into a thousand pieces. How are these to be arranged, in what order? We have not the slightest idea. Our wisest and sanest contemporary judgment will be ridiculous in twenty years, because we lacked patience to reconstitute the entire sheet, or because the fire or the wind snatched away a number of the tiny squares. In this hazy state of our ideas, success gleams like an electric moon. Something undeniable is shining—something that the professors of philosophy call a criterium. But let us call it simply a fact, just as a flower is a fact, or a shower, or a conflagration. And what can be opposed to this fact, to contradict it? Almost nothing—the product of a judgment, certain men's notion of literary beauty. Moreover, this opposition is not radical, since beauty does not at all, in principle, exclude the chances of success. No bets should be placed on beauty. It would be imprudent to back her on even terms; but there are historic instances where the most beautiful work has also been the most warmly welcomed. In such cases success is adorable, like the sun which comes at just the right moment to ripen the crops, or the storm to fill the brooks and springs to overflowing. What is a beautiful book of which not a single copy remains known to us? What was an armless Venus before M. de Marcellus had summoned her from the abysses? Success is like daylight and, once again, if it does not create the work, it completes it by rending the shadowy veil by which it is encompassed.

There is another consideration which enhances still further the value of success, namely that, if the purpose of a work of art be to please, the greater will be the number of its conquests and the better this purpose will have been accomplished. Art has certainly a function, since it exists. It satisfies a need of our nature. To say that this need is, precisely, the artistic taste, is to say that a man likes coffee or tobacco because they satisfy his taste for coffee or tobacco. It is to say nothing at all—not even nonsense. It is to utter words without any meaning whatsoever. Things do not correspond with this simplicity in life—with this amiable relation of the kettle to its cover. Let us leave such explanations to the Christian philosophy of final causes. The purpose of art being to please, success is at least a first evidence in favour of the work. The idea of pleasing is very complex. We shall see later what it contains; but the word may serve us provisionally. Then this work pleases. A tower has suddenly arisen accompanied by the passionate plaudits of the crowd. That is the fact. This tower should be demolished. That is not easy, since by a singular magic almost all the battering-rams brought against it turn into buttresses which add their weight to the solidity of the monument. This monument must be convinced that it does not exist, this crowd that its admiration has not moved all those stones, that it lies; that it is hallucinated, or that it is imbecile. This cannot be done. It finds the tower beautiful. What can we answer, except "Yes, it is beautiful"?

The priest takes a wafer on the corporal and elevates it to divine dignity. He places it in the monstrance and shows it to the people, who during this ceremony kneel, bow, pray and believe. The work exalted by success is no less chosen by chance than the wafer by the priest's fingers; but its divinity, also, is no less certain the moment this choice has been made. The decrees of destiny must be respected, and popular piety not thwarted.

II

Yet, it is said, there is an aesthetic. There are several aesthetics, even. But we shall suppose there is but one, and that—always in principle—it has good reasons for opposing success, whatever it may be. Acceptance of an aesthetic obliges us to admit that there is an absolute beauty, and that works are deemed beautiful according to the degree of their resemblance to this vague and complaisant ideal. It is this aesthetic—admitting its existence for the moment—that is now to be laid open and submitted to the scalpel.

The sensibility which yields to success, or which produces it, is very interesting; but perhaps it will be permitted not to despise entirely, and at very first sight, the sensibility which opposes success and denies that the successful work is, as such, the beautiful work. These two sensibilities, though equally spontaneous, are not equally pure. The second is very mixed. The aesthetic which sums it up—an aesthetic as fragile as morality—is a mixture of beliefs, of traditions, of arguments, of habits, of conceptions. Respect enters into it—also fear and an obscure appetite for novelty. "On new thoughts let us make old verses." The new-old—that is what all aesthetics extol, for a caste must be flattered in keeping with its nerves and its erudition. The artist's judgment, in artistic matters, is an amalgam of sensations and superstitions. The simple-minded crowd has merely sensations. Its judgment is not aesthetic. It is not even a judgment. It is the naïve avowal of a pleasure. It follows necessarily from this that the aesthetic caste alone is qualified to judge the beauty of works, and to accord them this quality. The crowd creates success, the caste creates beauty. It is all the same, if you like, since there is a hierarchy neither in acts nor in sensations, and all is but movement. It is the same, but it is different. There, then, is one point established. In art, the opinion of the intelligence is opposed to the opinion of sensibility. Sensibility is concerned only with pleasure. If, to this pleasure, an intellectual element be added, we have aesthetics. The crowd can say: that pleases me, hence it is beautiful. It cannot say: that pleases me, yet it is not beautiful, or: that displeases me, yet it is beautiful. The crowd, as such, never lies; while aesthetic judgment is one of the most complicated forms of falsehood.[3]

It is very evident that absolute beauty exists no more than truth, justice, love. The beauty of the poets, the truth of the philosophers, the justice of the sociologists, the love of the theologians, are all so many abstractions which enter the realm of our senses—and very clumsily—only when blocked out by the sculptor's chisel. Like ideas conceived in the future or in the past, they express a certain harmony between our present sensations and the general state of our intelligence. This is especially felt in the case of truth, which is indeed a sensation uncontradicted by our intelligence; but any other intelligence may contradict it, or it may find itself contradicted by sensations of a different order or intensity.

The idea of beauty has an emotional origin, connected with the idea of generation. The female who is to be the mother must conform to the racial type. That is, she must be beautiful.[4] Woman is less exacting, perhaps because man transmits very little of himself to his offspring. The first standard of beauty was, then, woman and, in general, the human body. Beauty, in the case of an animal, an object, is possession of something human in the form, in the character. A landscape can be described in terms almost all of which would apply to the beauty of a woman, and marble has her whiteness, sapphires are her eyes, coral is her lips. We have here a whole vocabulary of poetic commonplaces. To be sure, some of them should be corrected, and it should be noted that it is ebony which is black as black hair, and the swan which has a woman's neck. Beauty is so sexual that the only generally accepted works of art are those which show, quite simply, the human body in its nakedness. By his persistence in remaining purely sexual, the Greek sculptor has placed himself above all discussion for eternity. It is beautiful, because it is a beautiful human body, such as every man or every woman would like to unite with for the perpetuation of the race.

But another fact, more obscure, though not less certain, permits us to bring the idea of beauty back by another route to the very idea of sexuality. This is, that all human emotions, whatever their order, nature or intensity, awaken a more or less marked response in the genital nervous system. Sexual pathology has thrown light upon this. Perfumes, as well as the smell or sight of blood, noise and heat, intellectual or muscular effort, repose and fatigue, drunkenness and abstinence—the most contradictory sensations all favour the sexual impulse. Others, like fear, cold, vexation, also react upon a neighbouring and intricate centre in the genital system. Read the first chapter of En Ménage, in which M. Huysmans describes the effect produced upon a gentle, nervous being by the discovery of a lover in his wife's arms. Among the emotions which reverberate most surely on every somewhat sensitive organism, aesthetic emotions must be placed in the first rank. And thus they return to their origin. That which inclines to love seems beautiful. That which seems beautiful inclines to love. There is between the two an undeniable relation. A man loves a woman because she is beautiful, and he deems her beautiful because he loves her. It is the same with everything that permits associations of sexual ideas, and with every emotion which reacts upon the genital system.

But it is not at all necessary for a work of art to present a sensual picture in order to awaken ideas of love. It is enough for it to be beautiful, captivating. It stirs passion. Where shall we seek the seat of this passion? The brain is merely a centre of transmission. It is not a terminus. It is a happy and praiseworthy error to have made man's brain his absolute centre, but it is an error. The sole natural end of man is reproduction. If his activity had another goal, he would no longer be an animal, and we fall back into Christianity, to be confronted again by the soul, demerit and all the jargon employed by spiritualistic quacks. Emotion becomes conscious at the very moment of its passing, but it merely passes, leaving its image, and descends to the loins. This manner of speaking is perhaps figurative, and, moreover, I am not speaking of intense and strongly localized excitations. What is meant is merely that aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favourable to the reception of erotic emotion. This state is communicated to some by music, to others by painting, the drama. I have known a man—of a certain age, it is true—who could cheat a sexual desire by glancing at engravings. The reverse example would, doubtless, be less paradoxical. Aesthetic emotion is that from which man lets himself be most easily diverted by love, so easy, almost fatal, is the passage from one to the other. This intimate union between art and love is, moreover, the sole explanation of art. Without it—without this genital repercussion—it would never have been born; and, without it, it would not be perpetuated. Nothing is useless in deep-seated human habits. Everything which has lasted is, for that reason, necessary. Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away, and there is no longer art. Take art away, and love becomes merely a physiological need.

But it is less here art itself that is concerned than its emotional power, and there must therefore be grouped under the name of art everything in the nature of spectacle or sport—every diversion enjoyed in public, or with regard to which one communicates to himself his impressions. Fireworks can thrill quite as much as a tragedy. The sole hierarchy is that of intensity; but there is no doubt that the success of a work of art greatly increases its emotional power upon men in general. Hence, for the crowd, the quite natural belief that every successful work is beautiful, and that failure and scorn are always merited. In short, what the caste calls beauty, the people call success; but they have learned from the aristocrats this word truly devoid of meaning for them, and employ it to enhance the quality of their pleasures. That is not entirely illegitimate, success and beauty having a common origin in the emotions, their sole difference being the difference of the nervous systems in which they have evolved.

But very few men are capable of an original aesthetic emotion. Most of those who believe they experience it are like the people themselves, merely obeying the suggestion of a master, the bidding of their memories, the influence of their environment, the fashion. There is a passing beauty as precarious as popular success. A work of art extolled by the caste to-day will be despised by the caste to-morrow, and less trace of it will perhaps remain than of the work rejected by the caste and acclaimed by the people. For success is a fact whose importance increases with the dust it raises, with the number of the faithful come to accompany the cortège. The emotions of the caste and the emotions of the people are destined to the same end. Nature, which makes no leaps, makes no choice either. It is a question of making children. The sense of smell (or an analogous sense) is so highly developed in the emperor-moth, that a female egg of that rare butterfly attracts a throng of males to the spot where not one was seen before. This acuteness would be absurd if it merely served the emperor-moth to select a more delicate repast in the flowery flock or, in one way or another, to increase its pleasure and its spiritual advancement, the culture of its intelligence. It is an aid to the emperor-moth in making love. It is its aesthetic sense.

However, there are human natures, less diffuse or more refractory, in which the emotions do not react upon the centre of major sensibility, either because this centre is atrophied, or because the emotional current has encountered in its course an obstacle, a dyke, an impervious barrier. Let us, without examining too closely the aptness of the analogy, avail ourselves of the commonest and most striking comparisons. An electric current is thrown into a wire for the purpose of creating motion. The wire falls supported by a bit of wood and, instead of motion, heat is generated. The train which was to have been propelled burns. So the emotion, on its way towards the genital sense which it is meant to awaken, encounters a centre of resistance. It is broken, twists back upon itself, but becomes installed; and all the emotions of the same order, which pass by the same centre, will share the same fate. A wheel was to be turned, and we have fireworks. The species was to be preserved, and we have born the idea of beauty. Aesthetic emotion, even in its purest, most disinterested form, is, then, merely a deviation of the genital emotion. Aphrodite, who urged us to her cult, no longer troubles us. The woman has vanished. Noble forms are left, agreeable lines; but a horse also is beautiful, and a lion, and an ox. Fortunate short-circuit which has permitted us to reflect, to compare, to judge! The current hurled us on towards the sister of the goddess. Now it turns us from her, for she is less fair! It might be supposed that it is in the region of the intelligence the emotional current has become diffused, thus forming that mixture of emotion and intelligence which gives us the aesthetic sense. Intelligence is an accident. Genius is a catastrophe. We must carefully avoid even dreaming of a social state where health, equilibrium, equity, moderation, order would reign uniformly, where catastrophes would be impossible, and accidents very rare. Human intelligence is certainly the consequence of what we naïvely call evil. If the threads did not become cut and knotted, if emotion always attained its goal, men would be stronger and handsomer, and their houses would be as perfect as ant-hills. Only, the world would not exist.

III

Before returning to our point of departure, here is a résumé:

Two sorts of emotions share in the shaping of the aesthetic sense: emotions of a genesial nature, and all the other emotions whatsoever, in a proportion which varies infinitely with each man. The first are those which we feel when confronted with the perfect representation of our racial type. Apollo is beautiful, because he is the human male in all its purity. For the majority of men, every adventitious idea being rigorously excluded, the sight of the marble is agreeable because it evokes desire, either directly or, according to the sex, by counter-evocation. Stendhal's saying will be remembered: "Beauty is a promise of happiness." The sensualistic philosophy which enabled him to make this definition was not stupid. We shall be obliged to return to it, with science as a point of support. In short, it was then for the purpose of describing the "promise of happiness," that the word "beauty" was invented. And this word has been successively applied to everything that promised men the realization of one of their increasingly numerous and complex desires. Later, the emotional need having become extremely developed, it was also applied to all causes of emotion, even terrible or sanguinary; but these varied emotions, which make up the very life of man, have a goal—like the sense of smell in the emperor-moth. They penetrate us to make us remember that our one duty, as living creatures, is to conserve the species. Whatever sense they may have struck first, they recoil from it towards the centre of general sensibility. I think of those romantic lovers seen enveloped by the storm, possessing each other furiously, or of the gentle emotion of Tibullus, quam juvat immites.... The horrible, stupid, savage tragedies which delighted the Greeks and the French of the ancien régime were philters, and nothing more. If the great poets (like women, great poets have neither taste nor sense of disgust) had not taken the trouble to rethink the stories of Orestes, of Thyestes, of Polynices, we would deem these to be the delirious ravings of a society in its infancy or in its final decay. Not one of Racine's tragedies but has been played a hundred times in the criminal court by loathsome actors. You will find, if you look for them, in the special treatises of Ball and of Binet, and in popular works, examples of the transformation of any sensation whatsoever into sexual act. Here there are no categories, the field is unlimited. Men have been known for whom the smell of rotten apples gave strong and necessarily sexual emotions. Schiller always kept a stock in his table drawer; but, as he possessed a refractory passage in which the emotional currents were in large part broken, he made verses, when he had inhaled them, instead of making love.

Here, then, we have a whole class of men in whom the emotions, arrested halfway, are transformed into intelligence, into aesthetic taste, into religious feeling, into morality, into cruelty, according to the environment and the circumstances, and according to an exceedingly obscure system of dynamics. It may even be said that this transformation of the emotions takes place, more or less, in all men. The emotions may chance also to react almost equally in all directions, a notable part travelling towards the genital centres while enough remains en route to produce a great philosopher, a great artist, a great criminal. Love seems peculiarly connected with cruelty, either by its absence or by its excess. The mimetic of cruelty is precisely that of sexual love. Duchenne of Boulogne has proved that by his experiments. In types of men like Torquemada or Robespierre, the emotions do not reach the genital sense. They encounter an obstacle which shunts them off towards another centre. Instead of being transformed into the need for reproduction, they are transformed into the need for destruction. But there is the Neronian type and there is the Sadie type, in which sexuality and cruelty become exasperated simultaneously and are intertangled. There are men capable of stronger emotional shocks than other men. Though divided and distributed towards two goals, the current remains strong enough to produce acts of great intensity. The same phenomenon, though in a less sinister form, appears when intellectual power comes into play simultaneously with genital power. Every man capable of emotion is capable of love, and at the same time, either of cruelty, of intellectuality, or of religious sentiment; but the emotional current is sometimes entirely absorbed by one of the human activities, and we have one variety of extreme types, the other variety being furnished by men of a great emotional receptivity and, consequently, of a great diversity of aptitudes.

But let us keep to the human average, and to the question of aesthetics. According to the quantity withdrawn from the emotional current, we shall, for example, have a spectator who retains from the tragedy its entire content of pure, robust beauty—who will go away in a state of intellectual emotion, less sensible to the murder than to the curve of the arm that struck the blow; to the curses and terrors, than the musical form which limits them, encloses them, gives them life. We shall also have a spectator who, in spite of a few glimmerings of intellectual emotion, leaves the theatre very much as he might a boxing-match or a bull-fight. There are the two extremes. One man, looking at a perfect statue, enjoys the grace of the curves, thinks: what a beautiful work! The other cries: what a beautiful woman! Between these two types there is a whole series of shading. For the man of average type, the idea of beauty scarcely exists. He will judge the work of art according to the intensity or the quality of his emotion. It gives him pleasure, or it leaves him cold, and that is all. It is this average type that determines success in art, the average type must be pleased. Its emotion must be stirred.

The representatives of the aesthetic caste also judge a work of art by the emotion it gives them, but this emotion is of a quite special order. It is the aesthetic emotion. For them those works alone that are capable of communicating the aesthetic thrill or emotion belong to art, to the category of beauty. Thus are excluded from art utilitarian, moralizing, social works possessing any purpose whatsoever outside this precise and exclusive goal, aesthetic emotion; also works of too sexual a type, whose appeal to genital exercise is over-direct, though they, too, respond—in their case with excessive clarity—to men's primitive notion of artistic beauty. In this way has been formed that aesthetic category which, eternally instable, ranging from realism to idealism (a certain idealism), from sentimentalism to brutality, from religious feeling to sensuality, remains, nevertheless, a closed garden.

Art is, then, that which gives a pure emotion,—that is to say, an emotion without vibrations beyond a limited group of cells. It is that which invites to neither virtue nor patriotism, nor debauch, nor peace, nor war, nor laughter, nor tears, nor anything other than art itself. Art is impassible, and as an old Italian poet said of love, non piange, nè ride. There is nothing about it either rational, or just, or consistent with any truth. It is a matter of the manners and customs of an intellectual caste. Born of an imperfection in the nervous system, the idea of beauty has picked up, on the way, all sorts of rules, prejudices, beliefs, habits, and it has constructed itself a canon whose form, without being absolute, fluctuates at any given moment between certain limits only. The restriction is necessary. All refined men of an epoch agree on the idea of beauty. To-day, for example, there are certain touchstones: Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rodin, Monet, Nietzsche. To admit that you are not moved by the Hands, by Hérodiade, by Eve, by the Cathédrales, by Zarathoustra, is to admit that you are devoid of aesthetic sensibility. But works of quite another tone were formerly admired by the same human group. From Ronsard to Victor Hugo, the principle of beauty was sought in imitation. Artists imitated the classics, the Italians, the Spaniards, the English. In the last century, it was the effort after originality; and this produced even a few years ago an excess of false notes, but a music less flat, on the whole, than that which had so long wearied the Muses. Not that the artist imitated less, but he did so in the illusion of creating something new, and illusion is almost always productive. France is, moreover, the country where the idea of beauty has undergone the greatest number of variations, since it is peopled by an animated, eager race always attentive to what is happening and ready to make the acquaintance of everything strange and new, reserving the right to laugh at this novelty, if it does not suit their temperament.

Our aesthetic sense, then, has its caprices. But, historically variable, it is consistent enough at any given moment. There is an aesthetic caste to-day. There was always one, and the history of French literature is little more than the catalogue raisonné of the works successively chosen by this caste. Successes are shaped in the street. Glory issues from cénacles. As there are no examples to the contrary, this clearly must be admitted to be a fact—also this, that the cénacles become disgusted with the glories that escape them, and start running the streets. A fact is always legitimate, since it is always logical; but we can always oppose to it the repugnances of our own sensibility, or of a group of sensibilities. That is the way of the crowd when led by certain educated mediocrities, who make good lawyers, since they hate the house which they are fighting, and which does not recognize them. To the often obscure reputation established by the aesthetic group, we see, then, incessantly opposed the celebrities of success. It is easy to dupe the people by showing them, on the one hand, the poor solitary lamp; on the other, the harsh glare of globes and the mad riot of tulips.

But the people have little need of encouragement. They go quite naturally towards that which dazzles them. This also is a fact, and this also is legitimate. The public, led by cunning shepherds, does wrong to despise the confused gleam of the stars; but the aesthetic caste does wrong to laugh at the people's pleasures. It also does wrong when it monopolizes certain words and refuses to call works of art those compositions which, no less than those which they themselves admire, have as their aim to stir emotion. It is a question of quality, not of essence. The aesthetic caste suffers less from seeing a poor thing applauded, than a real work disdained. Its judgment, so sure in scenting false art, suddenly weakens, and is angered, because a votary of the popular taste does not incline before its admirations. It is always a mistake to appeal to justice; but it is madness to appeal to the justice of a social group. We should abandon all that; and shut ourselves up in an opinion as in a tower. It would be easier to cut the throats of a hundred fanatical admirers of Quo Vadis? than to convince them, and far less fatiguing. Literary justice is an absurdity. It supposes emotional parity among men belonging to different physiological categories. A work is beautiful for those whom it moves. Sensibility is incorruptible—popular sensibility as well as that of the cénacles. It is as incorruptible as taste and as smell. It was formerly imagined that there was such a thing as taste—an absolute taste worshipped in a temple. Nothing is more ridiculous, nothing more tyrannical. Let us leave men to seek their pleasure freely. Some want to have their feelings harrowed, others their spleen banished, still others their heart pierced. Different instruments are needed for each of these operations. Art is a form of surgery whose case is well equipped, and a pharmacopeia filled with vials of every form and odour.

People talk very seriously—that is, without laughing—of initiating the people to art. In less vague terms, corresponding to a certain scientific reality, this would mean so shaping the physiology of men in general, that emotion, instead of reaching the genital centre, spreads towards the aesthetic centre. The enterprise is not of the easiest. Poor people! How it is made game of, and how stupid, in their goodness of heart, are its intellectual masters! These really believe that taste for painting, for music, for poetry, is learned like orthography or geography! And suppose it could be, and suppose a few admirations had been imparted to a few workmen. What does it matter that the people do not admire what we admire? They would have the same right to ask us to share their enthusiasms. There is no absolute aesthetic. That which moves us is beautiful; but we can be moved only in the measure of our emotional receptivity, and according to the state of our nervous system. Insensibility to what we call beauty,—a very complex idea, the moment we leave the human form,—would seem, on the whole, to be merely the sign of a healthy organism, of a normal brain, in which the nervous currents go straight to their goal, without turning aside. But this simple state is rare. All men are capable of receiving certain aesthetic emotions, and all are eager for them; but almost no man is concerned with the quality of this emotion. The important thing is to be moved. No other monument since the cathedrals—perhaps since the pyramids—has so' stirred human sensibility as the Eiffel Tower. Confronted with all that junk reared on high, stupidity itself became lyric, fools meditated, wild asses dreamed. From those heights swept down, as it were, a storm of emotions. An attempt was made to divert it, but it was too late. Success had arrived. The more admiration a work receives, the more beautiful it becomes for the multitude. It becomes beautiful and almost alive. Emotional waves, starting from it, come, like combers, to break upon a people drunk and panting. The whole organism holds carnival. Stupid and beautiful, the genius of the species smiles in the shade.

Such is the social rôle of art. It is immense. There is an Australian bird which builds, as its nest, a big cabin where it spreads all the shining pebbles it finds. The male, amid the mosaic, dances a grave minuet before his troubled companion. This is art surprised at its obscure birth—at the very moment of its intimate association with the expansion of the genital instinct. A red pebble gives an emotion to a bird, and this emotion heightens its desire. Such is the social rôle of art. The people—and by the people, I here mean the mass of men—must admire. They must experience aesthetic emotions, must quiver with long nervous vibrations, must have rich and complicated loves; but, what matters it whence comes the cloud, so long as it rains!

I have merely wished to show the legitimacy of all aesthetic emotion, whatever its source, and of all success, whatever its quality; but I shall be readily believed if I confess that I retain my preferences for a certain form of art, for a certain expression of beauty. I depart in this respect from the common sentiment, that I do not believe it useful to generalize opinions, to teach admirations. To force admiration is almost as wicked as to force an entrance. It is for each man to procure himself the emotion he needs, and the morality which suits him. Apuleius's ass wanted to crop roses, because by so doing he would resume the human form. It is a very good idea to crop roses. It is one way to achieve freedom.

1901.

THE VALUE OF EDUCATION

Without being as widespread as it might be, and as it will be, education is very, much in vogue. We live less and less, and we learn more and more. Sensibility surrenders to intelligence. I have seen a man laughed at because he examined a dead leaf attentively and with pleasure. No one would have laughed to hear a string of botanical terms muttered with regard to it; but there are some men who, while not ignorant of the handbooks, believe that true science should be felt first as a pleasure. It is not the fashion. The fashion is to learn in books alone, and from the lips of those who recite books.

Cornelius Agrippa, who possessed all the learning of his time, and more, amused himself by writing a "Paradox on the uncertainty, vanity, and abuse of the sciences."[1] This might be rewritten to-day, but on another note. For a science does not have to be uncertain, vain and abusive in order to be useless to one who cultivates it; and, on the other hand, the certainty of a science, its interest and its legitimacy, do not confer upon it an absolute right to mental governance. We would even gladly agree as to the absurdity of a debate upon the certainty or uncertainty of the sciences. Some are aleatory, but the light-minded or interested alone call them so. The word science involves, by definition, the idea of objective truth, and we must abide by that, without further dispute, even conceding this objective truth, whatever repugnance may be felt for the indissoluble union of two words which then become ironical.

It is, moreover, a question not of science, but of education, for which science furnishes the matter or the pretext. What is the value of education? What sort of superiority can it confer upon an average intelligence? If education be sometimes a ballast, is it not more often a burden? Is it not also, and still more often, a sack of salt which melts upon the ass's shoulders in the first storms of life? And so on.

Education is of two sorts, according as it is useful or decorative. Even astrology can become a practical science, if the astrologer finds his daily bread in it; but what good can it do a magistrate to know geometry if not perhaps to warp his mind? Everything that concerns his trade—draughtsmanship and archaeology, even, and all notions of this order—will prove profitable to an intelligent carpenter; but of what use could an aesthetic theory be to him if not perhaps to hamper his activity? When it does not find some practical application or turn itself into cash, education is an ingot sleeping in a glass case. It is useless, not very interesting, and quite devoid of beauty.

There is much talk, in certain political circles, of integral education. This means, doubtless, that everybody should be taught everything—also, that a vague universal notion would be a great benefit, a great comfort for any intelligence whatsoever; but, in this reasoning, there is a confusion between matter and form. The intelligence, which has a general and common form, has also a particular form for each individual. Just as there are several memories, so there are several intelligences; and each of these intelligences, modified by its own physiology, determines the individual intellect. Far from its being a good thing to teach everybody everything, it seems clear that a given intelligence can, without danger to its very structure, receive only those kinds of notions which enter it without effort. If we were accustomed to attach to words only those relative meanings they admit of, integral education would signify the sort of education compatible with the unknown morphology of a brain. In the majority of cases the quantity of this education would amount to nothing, since most intelligences cannot be cultivated.

At least by the methods at present employed, which may be summed up in a single word—abstraction. It has come to be admitted in teaching circles that life can be known only as speech. Whether the subject be poetry or geography, the method is the same—a dissertation which sums up the subject and pretends to represent it. Education has at length become a methodical catalogue of words, and classification takes the place of knowledge.

The most active, intelligent man can acquire only a very small number of direct, precise notions. These are, however, the only ones of any real depth. Teaching gives nothing but education. Life gives knowledge. Education has at least this advantage, that it is generalized, sublimated knowledge and thus capable of containing, in small bulk, a great quantity of notions; but, in the majority of minds, this too condensed food remains inert and fails to ferment. What is called general culture is usually nothing but a collection of purely abstract mnemonic acquisitions which the intelligence is incapable of projecting upon the plane of reality. Without a very lively and universally active imagination, notions confided to the memory dry up in a dead soil. Water and sun are required to soften and ripen the sprouting seed.

It is better to know nothing than to know badly, or little, which is the same thing. But do we know what ignorance is? So many things have to be learned in order to appreciate and understand it! Those who might enjoy ignorance, since they possess it, are under too many illusions concerning themselves to find any frank refreshment in it; and those who would be glad to do so, have left their first innocence too far behind them. There have been moments of civilization when men knew everything. It was not much. Was it much less than all the science of to-day? This relativity may well make us reflect upon the value of education. It will aid us also to indicate its true character. Education is never other than relative. It ought, then, to be practical.

M. Barrès, in his last novel,[2] makes a deputy of Burdeau's type say: "Virtue, like patriotism, is a dangerous element to arouse in the masses." To these two abstractions should, perhaps, be added all the others, in order to decree a general ostracism against every idea that has not first been defined. And this would not mean the proscription of virtues or of patriotic sentiments, but simply this, that nothing is worse for the health of an average intelligence than playing with abstract words—than that false verbal science which is at once found inapplicable on entering real life. It is not a matter of being virtuous; how realize a word which is the synthesis of several contradictory ideals? It is a matter of accommodating one's nature to the vital conditions and moral traditions of his environment. It is not a matter of being patriotic. It is a matter of defending, against strange beasts, the purity of the spring where one drinks. It is not a matter of knowing the abstract principle in which the broad river of general ideas may find its source. It is a matter of making life at once an act of faith and an act of prudence. It is a matter first and foremost of preserving enough simplicity to breathe joyfully the social air, and enough suppleness to obey, without cowardice, the elementary laws of life.

Life is a series of sensations bound together by states of consciousness. Unless your organism is such that the abstract notion redescends towards the senses the moment it has been understood; unless the word Beauty gives you a visual sensation; unless handling ideas gives you a physical pleasure, almost like caressing a shoulder or a fabric, let ideas alone. When a miller has no grist, he shuts his sluices and sleeps, or goes and takes a walk. He never dreams of running his mill when it is empty, and wearing out his stones grinding air. Education is often nothing but the wind raised by the whirling of the bolts, and felt as words.

Teaching, from top to bottom—from the official to the popular universities, from the village school to the École Normale—is little else than a phrase-factory. The most valuable of all is the primary school, where one learns to read and write—acquisitions, not of a science, but of a new sense. If there were cut from the programme of the rest everything useless—everything inapplicable to life or to some profession or trade—scarcely enough would be left for eighteen months' schooling.

The greater part of the people still escape the tortures of listening to gentlemen who recite books. The children of the poor, freed from the scholastic prison, learn a trade, which is an enhancement of one's self, and begin to live at an age when their rich brothers still spend their time handling words which correspond to nothing real—tools which sculpture the eternal void.[3] This is about to be remedied, and here is the subject of a night lecture in a people's university: "The Development of the Idea of Justice in Antiquity." Even supposing—what is little likely—that the professor said nothing on this subject that could not be absorbed by a healthy intelligence, of what use could such a discourse possibly be to a popular audience, and what could such an audience derive from it applicable to its own humble existence? Less, assuredly, than from the old-fashioned sermons which were not afraid to flout its vices and to play upon its cowardice to keep it from low pleasures. But the clergy of the lay religion is grave and disdainful of facts. Souls speak to souls. The ideal descends upon the people. The first Christians at least met both to pray and to eat in fraternal union. After the repast, some arose to utter prophecies. The modern prophets live only on abstractions, and they gladly share this economical and ridiculous food with their brethren.

The man who has slowly acquired a science, has, aside from the social advantages which it offers him, conferred, by that very fact, a special force and agility upon his organs of attention. He possesses not only the desired science, but a whole hunting outfit in good condition, and all ready for new quarry. When he has carefully and patiently acquired a foreign language, he can afterwards, with far less effort, master the other languages of the same family. But, if he has had recourse to some time-saving method, the acquisition no longer possesses its proper value, and may even deteriorate more or less rapidly. Water, boiled very quickly, grows cold equally fast—a fact ignored by the manufacturer who had set up public boilers. By the time it had crossed the street, the water was as cold as if it had come from a cool spring. It is for this same reason that quick teaching by the lecture system is so particularly useless. The listener learns to believe and not to reason, which would still be a way of acting and of living.

Educational baggage is composed almost entirely of beliefs. Literature and science are taught like a catechism. Life is the school of prudent doubt. The school is a pretentious church. Every professor is equipped with an arsenal of aphorisms. The youth who refuses to let himself be made a target is despised. The inversion of logical values is carried to the point where certain intellectual acts—resistance to scientific faith, Cartesian reserve—are considered signs of unintelligence.

M. Jules de Gaultier has invented a new Manichaeism whose prudent employment will prove very useful in clearing up certain questions.[4] To the vital instinct he opposes the instinct of knowledge; but the former is not the good principle, any more than the latter is the bad principle. They have both their rôle in the work of civilization; for, if the latter develops in man the need to know at the expense of the forces which conserve his vital energy, it permits the intelligence, at the same time, the better to enjoy both itself and the life of the feelings. The spontaneous and unconscious genius of growing races refuses obedience to neither of these great instincts. Life does not exhaust its energy, which is immutable, but the modes of energy which it has assumed. We tire of feeling before we tire of knowing. This is what Leibnitz has naïvely expressed, and what has been repeated with him by all those whose intelligence is the vulture: "It is not necessary to live, but it is necessary to think." When this aphorism reaches the people, it means that the decadent vital instinct has begun to give up the struggle. The glorious flowering-time has arrived, but the plant will die once the insect horde has fertilized it and the wind has borne its seed to a virgin soil.

An ignorant mass forms a magnificent reserve of life in a people. Our civilization has failed to recognize this. It is an immense field of little flowers which exhausts the earth's vigour for the sake of a senseless effulgence.

Such ideas, even in the attenuated form of images, may seem barbarous to those who believe in the "benefits of education"; but it begins to be easier to find adjectives than arguments to regenerate this ancient and almost exhausted theme. Hearing so many journalists and deputies speak of education as a sovereign elixir, it is clear that they have tasted it at the sound, authentic source—that of the handbooks and the encyclopedias—but not from those detestable jars in which the evil genius of analysis slumbers. The true science, the "gay science," is singularly poisonous. It is quite as poisonous as it is salutary. It contains as many doubts as there are specks of gold in Danzig brandy. One never knows just where the intoxication produced by this heady liquor may lead an intelligence not too strong or too sceptical.

Compared with science, education is so slight a thing that it scarcely merits a name. What are elementary notions of chemistry worth, when we think of the chemist who handles bodies, composing and decomposing them, who counts the molecules and weighs the atoms? And what difference does it make whether a hundred thousand bachelors know the elements of the air? But already they know it no longer. Had they been taught to breathe, they would, perhaps, have escaped two or three diseases, a predisposition to which, or whose germs, they transmit joyfully to their children. It is necessary (despite a celebrated irony) to have a chemistry and chemical industries, but not to teach the man in the street the obscure principles of a vain science.

This is only an example, but it could be extended to almost all the elements of general culture. An average brain to-day resembles those experimental gardens in which flourish specimens of all the flora. Yet this garden has its special utility, whereas brains rich in little of everything are good for nothing. The ground has not even been turned into a parterre, but into a herbarium, and the dried plants are so commonplace, so defective, that they can be put to no decent use. The majority of the flower-beds, at least, should have been reserved for a profound and passionate culture. When this is done, the dead corners of the garden acquire once more a certain importance. They furnish manure and mould to warm the heart of the living garden.

We do not, then, pretend to say that general culture is useless. It is indispensable as an auxiliary and a reserve, but as such only, and on condition that the general, superficial culture is accompanied by one or more sections of intensive culture. Alone, it has no value. If from the average level, we descend to the little gardens of the people, we now see, replacing rank but luxuriant grass, mere sickly growths already frozen by life. All the natural flora has been weeded out, and what was sown instead, in a soil poorly cleared and prepared, has been unable to come up because there was neither sun nor water. The sole interest of these ridiculous little kitchen-gardens is a tree, which is often tall and stately—some chestnut or linden. This is the trade in which the man has resolutely perfected himself. One of these trees alone is worth all the general cultures which have relegated it to a stony corner. It dominates them by its utility and by its beauty.

Man's justification in life is that he is a function. His days on earth must produce a result. That is why we shall eternally regret the abolishing of the trades by the extreme division of labour. Industrial civilization has withdrawn from a vast number of men the pleasure that they used to find in their work. A high salary may make a man satisfied to have worked, but it does not give him satisfaction in the work itself, the joy of employing the present hour in the realization of a definite object. Industry has operated against the artisan to the advantage of the idler, and also to the advantage of capital against labour. Any mechanical invention whatsoever has been more harmful to humanity than a century of war. The hedemonic value of muscular activity has been so far diminished that the only moments when workmen are conscious of living are those when the normal man relaxes—the moments of repose; and, necessarily, the temptation has been to dilate these hours of negative sensation to the point of absorbing in them the whole pleasure of living. Alcohol has afforded the means.

In order to suppress this source of excitation, people with good intentions but unhealthy minds—that is to say, out of touch with reality—have contemplated opposing the pleasure of learning to the pleasure of drinking. If such a task were possible, physiological intoxication would be replaced by cerebral intoxication, and that would not be a very desirable result. To follow a day of muscular effort with an evening of intellectual effort, is to double the total fatigue without real profit to the man subjected to such a régime. Consider the poor wretch who, after ten hours of shoving a block of wood under the sharp teeth of a circular saw, comes back, after a picked-up supper, to listen to a gentleman address him on the holiness of justice! But justice would require the preacher to take turns with the artisan in shoving the blocks of wood and in comfortably studying the fruitful principles of social charlatanism. Poor people who, with their instinctive need of priests, believe themselves victors because, having denied a dogma, they now applaud the moral aspect of this same dogma, but deformed by hypocrisy and hatred! It is through education—a very ancient invention—that the clergy has dominated the people and the world; and it is through education also, that the lay preachers are determined to clip the last claws of the vital instinct.

For all these teachers teach desperately the negation of life. They infect the healthy section of the people with their own unhealthy habits of receiving sensation only by reflex, of watching in a glass the life they dare not encounter, and they do so with a certain good faith. The real object of this education is the implanting of a morality—a singular morality, whose precepts are almost entirely negative. By weakening the will to live, to the profit of an instable cerebrality, they fashion those enervated, obedient, docile generations which are the dream of second-rate tyrants. At the very moment when a race needs, merely to persist, all the forces of which its instinct is perhaps still the depository, they pour out for it, though in an impoverished, poisoned form, that very liquor with which the Roman apostles tamed the surplus energy of the barbarians. If a rationalistic or religious protestantism were to pre-empt the sovereign place of our traditional, pagan Catholicism, we should share the fate of those conquered peoples.

But how is it possible not to be tempted to furnish rules of conduct along with rules of grammar? All we ask is that these precepts should not be depressants, but that the young should find in them, on the contrary, an incitement to activity—to all the activities. Education, in itself, is nothing. It can be judged only when its surroundings are examined by the light of this torch. A torch is useful, not because of its light, but because of the object on which its light falls. We see also an oven methodically heated with brushwood and faggots; but this heat is merely a sterile blaze if, when it dies down, the dough of the eternal bread be not given it to bake.

Education is a means, and not an end. It is painfully absurd to learn for learning's sake, to burn for the sake of burning. The very song of the birds is not in vain. During the periods of sexual calm the great love concerts are rehearsed. Considered as the precise instrument of a future work, education may have a very great, even absolute importance. It may be the necessary condition of certain intellectual achievements. It will be the staff of the intelligence; but, offered to a second-rate brain, directed simply and solely to the enlargement of the memory, it has no power to regenerate sick cells. It will rather serve to crush them. It will make them dull. It will divert from the natural needs of life the activities merely meant for daily exercise. Education ballasts unstable genius, giving it subjects for comparison and motives for reflection. To genius already established, it affords a little of that uneasiness which is the source of irony. It is sometimes a support for certitude, sometimes the cause of gravitation towards doubt. But it has an influence only upon intelligences in action or capable of action. It does not determine, it inclines. Above all, it does not create intelligence. We are constantly offered examples of men who, educated in all that is taught, remain mediocrities, and who, though they have written for twenty years, have not even learned how to write. And, on the other hand, there are others who know but one trade, and who have read nothing but life. Their lucidity sometimes shames even genius.

1900.

WOMEN AND LANGUAGE

Women's rôle in the work of civilization is so great that it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the edifice is reared on the shoulders of these frail caryatides. Women know things that have never been written or taught, and without which almost the whole equipment of our daily life would be rendered useless. In 1814, some Cossacks, who had discovered a supply of stockings, drew them on directly over their boots—a general example of our commonest acts, had not women, for centuries of centuries, been the patient teachers of childhood. This rôle is so natural that it seems humble. We are struck only by what is extraordinary. The powerful machinery of a woolen-mill overwhelms us. Who has ever felt moved at the sight of the simple play of a pair of knitting-needles? Yet, compared with these little sticks, the greatest power-loom becomes insignificant. It represents a particular civilization. The wooden or steel needles represent absolute civilization. In every field the essential should be distinguished from the accessory. In civilization women's part represents the essential.

It is easier to feel this than to prove it, for it is a question precisely of those acts which pass unperceived along life's path—of all sorts of things which are never mentioned, because they are not observed or because their importance is not understood. Thus physiology was long unknown, while curiosity was occupied with monsters. The continuous phenomenon ceases to exist for our senses. It was a city-dweller, or a prisoner, or a blind man suddenly restored to sight, who first noted natural beauty. There is an external physiology which disappears in habit. Analyzed, it reveals the most important voluntary act of our lives—voluntary, in the sense that they are contingent compared with the primordial movements of the life of a species; voluntary, if the will be regarded as the consciousness of an unconscious effort.

Whether sense or faculty, speech cannot logically be separated from hearing, but the education of the ear is much less perceptible than that of the vocal apparatus. They can thus be considered separately, or at least without observing a precise order in acquisitions which are entangled like all the activities of life. Moving, hearing, seeing, speaking—all these are connected. Imitation imposes itself upon all the functions at the same time, though an appreciable order of birth can be established for each of them. This order is of little moment in a study where it is question, not of the intelligence which receives, but of the intelligence which gives—of the exterior and not of the interior psychological life.

Speech is feminine. Poets and orators are feminine types. To speak is to do woman's work. Because woman speaks as a bird sings, she alone is capable of teaching the language. When the child attempts to imitate the sounds it has heard, the woman is there to watch him, to smile at him, and to encourage him. There is established a mute working contract between these two beings, and what patience the one who knows displays in guiding the one who tries! The first words pronounced by a child correspond in its mind to no object, to no sensation. The child, at this moment of its life, is a parrot, and nothing more. It imitates. It speaks because it hears others speaking. If the world were silent around it, speech would remain congealed in its brain. Thence the importance of a woman's prattle—an importance far greater than that of the most beautiful poems and of the profoundest philosophies. The function which makes man a man is the special work of the woman. A child reared by a very feminine and very talkative woman is formed rather for speech and, consequently, for psychologic consciousness. Left to the care of a taciturn man, the same child would develop very slowly—so slowly, perhaps, that it would never attain the full limits of its practical intelligence.

Were it possible to assign an origin to language, one would say that woman had created it; but the secret of all origins will forever escape us. Birds sing, the dog barks, man speaks. It is not easier to imagine a dumb man than a dumb dog or a dumb finch; and if these species formerly existed without a voice, it is not easy to see why they should have acquired an organ which many other animals, including the birds of the South Polar regions, get along very well without. If language were learned or acquired—if, in order to recover its first traces, the celebrated roots, it were enough to find the common mother of Latin and Sanskrit, of Greek and of Anglo-Saxon—it is not easy to see why the dog does not converse with his master otherwise than with his tail, his eyes and his yelping. But the dog will never speak, because the genius of an animal species is as rigorously determined as the forms of the crystalline species.

The view that the oldest language was composed of five or six hundred monosyllables, is now without value, though it had a certain force. It gave weight to several hypotheses whose absurdity was not at first evident. Yet nothing had ever been observed in any real language resembling an even unconscious reservoir of roots. Words are born of each other by derivation, coming into the world sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, than the original word. This derivation is always dominated by a real, living concrete sense. No man whose mind has not been spoiled by special studies, has the sense of roots. The ba, be, bi, bo, bu of the alphabets, are, according to the theory, so many roots; but a series of kindred meanings has not been attributed to each of these sounds. They are capable, even in the same language, of expressing them all, either by chance, or according to a logic whose laws are undeterminable.

The primitive element in speech is not the word but the phrase. Man's spoken phrase is instinctive, like the sung phrase of the bird, like the yelped phrase of the dog. The word is a product of analysis.

In order to give the word priority over the phrase, the older school started from this idea, namely, that the word is created after the thing has been perceived, man acting as a nomenclator, as a professor of botany who gives names to sprigs of moss. The reality is different. The child stammers words before knowing the objects of which these words are the signs. It is possible that man spoke—chattered—a long time before a fixed relation became established between things and the familiar sounds issuing from his mouth.

Thousands of languages can thus have been chattered successively on thousands of territories—languages lacking precision, essentially musical, a succession of phrases in which certain sounds only corresponded to realities; but these sounds, in spite of their importance, in spite of their utilitarian and representative value, may be supposed to have been at first almost as fugitive as the rest of the speech. An unwritten language never survives the generation which created it. Among savages each generation remakes its language so completely that the grandfather is a stranger among his own grandchildren.

If this primitive chattering be admitted, it will readily be admitted also that woman must have had a large share in it, while arousing the mind of the males by her laughter and her attention. Woman has little capacity for verbal innovation. Among so many excellent women writers, none has ever created a language in the sense of which this is said of Ronsard, of Montaigne, of Chateaubriand, or of Victor Hugo; but she repeats well—often better than a man—what was said before her. Born to conserve, she performs her rôle to perfection. Eternally, unwearyingly she rekindles from the failing torch a new torch identical with the old. It is in the hands of women—dancers in life's ballet, or melancholy vestals in deep caverns—that the lampada vitai shine. What woman has been historically, she will always be and she has always been, from before history even.

Certain words became fixed in the primitive chattering. This was the work of woman. Destined to attention by the monotony of her domestic labour,[1] she rebelled against the useless renewal of terms. Her life became complicated in those lands where the game was abundant, where nature was fertile. Men's needs increased with their wealth, and with them, woman's occupations. Having to work more, she had less time to listen to songs and speeches. Novelties succeeding each other too rapidly, upset her. She corrected the language of men who, in their turn, became disconcerted. Thus were born the words in common use, and thus the fixed sounds corresponding to realities in man's spoken song gradually grew in number.

Woman, whose memory is excellent, had also, from the earliest times, no doubt, retained the most musical, the most rhythmical parts of speech—some combination of phrases resembling those melopeias repeated insatiably by Negroes. Man created. Woman learned by heart. If a civilized country were one day to reach that state of mind in which every novelty is at once welcomed and substituted for traditional ideas and methods—if the past were to yield constantly to the future—then, after a period of frenzied curiosity, men would be observed falling into the apathy of the tourist who never glances twice at the same object. In order to recover their grip, they would be obliged to seek refuge in a purely animal existence, and civilization would perish. Such a fate seems to have overtaken ancient peoples, so eager to renew their pleasures that their passing has left but hypothetical traces. Excess of activity, far more than torpor, has caused the decay of many Asiatic civilizations. Wherever woman has been unable to intervene and to oppose the influence of her passivity to the arrogance of the young males, the race has exhausted itself in fugitive essays. We can, then, be sure that, wherever a durable civilization has been organized, woman was its cornerstone.

Arising, as a reciter, before the creator, woman formed a repertory, a library, archives. The first song-book was woman's memory, and it is the same with the first collection of tales, the first bundle of documents.

However, the invention of writing came, like all progress, successively, to diminish woman's importance as archivist. Since everything that seemed worth remembering was fixed by signs on durable matter, it became woman's duty and pleasure to perpetuate what men condemned to oblivion. She has performed faithfully a task that matter has almost always betrayed; and so it is that tales which were never written, and which assuredly go back to the earliest ages, have come down to us. Women who had been entertained by them as children, entertained their own children with them in turn. In spite of the efforts of rational pedagogy, which would like to substitute the history of the French Revolution, or that of the founding of the German Empire, for Tom Thumb, mothers still put their good children to sleep with blue story or red, of love or of blood. But this oral literature, whose themes are so much more numerous than those of written literature, has been found to possess the greatest beauty, and consequently a supreme importance. We owe the salvaging of this treasure to woman's conservative genius.

She conserved also the songs, the tunes (and the dances accompanying them) which man sheds at the very moment when he leaves his youth. For him they are futilities, and he never gives them another thought. For woman, they are means of pleasing and she remembers them always. When hope has departed, she falls back upon them to live again the happy days of her youth. Thus do old women keep their hearts young.

Women do not seem to have had a great share in the invention of tales and of songs. They have preserved, which is a way of creating. Yet one finds, nevertheless, the mark of their mind in certain variants. Their tendency was to tone down the end of a tale, to quiet the effervescence of a song too rollicking. This invention saved the life of many of these small things, by making them available to children, whose memory is an exceedingly sure casket.

Along with literature women saved a whole collection of notions difficult to determine. It is not a question of the long string of superstitions, but of the element of practical science contained in these superstitions, these beliefs, these traditions. To estimate the importance of this chapter of human knowledge, one should make a sort of examination of his own consciousness. Then, after long reflection, he will be able to distinguish between things learned from books, and those which, while never written, everyone knows. What is truly indispensable for the conduct of life has been taught us by women—the petty rules of politeness, those acts which win us the cordiality or deference of others; those words which assure us a welcome; those attitudes which must be varied according to the character and the situation; all social strategy. It is listening to women that teaches us to speak to men, to worm our way into their will. For those alone who know how to please, can teach the art of pleasing.

Even before he speaks, a child knows the value of a smile. It is his first language, and nothing proves that it is absolutely instinctive. The animal has only those attitudes which are the sign of a need. Some are beautiful, some are pretty, but none are voluntary.

The smallest child's smile often veils an intention. Woman has taught it the mystery of exchanges, and the fact that a friendly gesture can win food and other things essential to life. The little girl, better disposed than the boy to appreciate this teaching, knows the value of curving lips and of the wave of her rosy hand, long before knowledge of the vocal signs has permitted her tender brain the most elementary reasoning. It is, then, in her case, pure imitation; but the act is favoured by recollection of the end already obtained by the first attempt, and we have here a very curious and obscure example of an effect determining its cause in physiological unconsciousness.

Since women have little in their lives but passional relations, this very primitive play remains the basis of their social tactics. Men feel progressively the need of complicating this elementary science, but it always remains for them a supreme resource. To touch his conqueror, to please him—such is the last argument of the conquered.

All mimetic art is the work of women. Even when she is silent, a woman continues to speak—often with a sincerity which her words lack. Even when she is motionless she continues to speak, and she is often more eloquent then than with words or with gestures. The form of her body makes her breathing a language. The rhythm of her bosom betrays the state of her soul and the degree of her emotion. No speech finds a man more sensitive. But their eyes have at their disposal a keyboard still more extended, though less effective. With her eyes, with the varied curves of her mute mouth, woman can express her inmost thought. The eye pales or kindles, lifts or lowers its look, and it spells desire or disdain, anger or promise—so many pages understood by man the moment he has an interest in reading them. To these gleams and these movements, the play of the eyelids adds its value. This play is affirmative, negative, interrogative. It utters a short and decisive yes, or a yes of languor and abandon. It questions in the tone of anger or of complaining. It refuses with a half-abrupt closing of the pupil, which veils the eyes without closing them. But how many other shades there are, and how rich in speech the smile is, also! The whole woman speaks. She is language incarnate.

Her children will first be actors. Like their mother, they will learn how to speak at the start with everything that is silent—precious acquisition. Darwin found the first sketch of emotional expression in animals. There is an important element of instinct in the human mimetic. Woman has cultivated these primitive movements, has refined and multiplied them. To the signs of the true emotions have come to be added the signs of the false emotions, and then only has a language been created. Animal expression of the emotions is not a language, for it would be incapable of making believe. True language begins with the lie. There is a real meaning in the famous saying that language was given to man to disguise his thought. The lie, which is the sole external proof of psychological consciousness, is also the sole proof that signs are language, and not unconscious mimetic. The lie is the very basis of language and its absolute condition. Analysis of linguistic facts proves this clearly enough, since every word contains a metaphor, and since every metaphor is a transposition of reality, when it is not a wilful, premeditated falsehood. But, taking language such as it appears to us, and supposing each word to correspond to an object, it may be said that, if there existed a man who had never lied, that man never spoke. It is not, in fact, speaking, to say "I am afraid," or "I am cold," when you are afraid, or are cold. It is expressing an emotion or a sensation by means of verbal signs analogous to the trembling of the animal famished or frozen. But if, on the contrary, denying his emotion or his sensation, the man who is cold says "I am warm," and the man who is hungry says "I am not hungry," he speaks. Whether he employ words, gestures or written signs, it is by this, by the lie—that is to say, by consciousness—that the man is recognized. Lie, let it be understood, here signifies expression of an imaginary sensation. It is a matter of psychology, not of morality—separate domains.

If woman is language, she should be lie, and also consciousness. All three are connected and form but one. The first of these points has never been studied, but popular opinion favours it. Not only do women speak more readily than men, they employ a better syntax, a less haphazard vocabulary, their pronunciation is excellent. One feels that language is their element. The second point, the lie, is not disputed; but women are reproached with it, whereas it is the consequence of another gift and, moreover, an assertion of their spiritual nature. Women lie more than men. Then it is because they have a greater sentiment of independence, a livelier consciousness; and here we have reached the third point, without, it seems to me, a minute demonstration being necessary.

The hysterical lie has been spoken of. It is probable that there is an error here, not in the terms, but in the intention which has brought them together. If unconscious life is meant, it is an absurdity. The lie is, on the contrary, the very sign of consciousness, and there can be no lie save where there is full and active consciousness. A distempered sensation, expressed as felt, should not be confused with the intentional travestying of the exposition of a true sensation—the first term of the series with the last. The animal never lies. How could it? It is forced to express its sensation just as he feels it. If it wishes to bite, the dog curves his lips, shows his teeth. If you see it hold back, play the hypocrite, lie, it is because, through its contact with man, it has perhaps acquired a rudiment of consciousness—because its acquired education comes, at such a moment, into conflict with its instinct. Moreover, ruse—especially when applied to defence, or to the search for food—is something quite different from the lie. It is the acute form of prudence. The true lie is purposeless, without other utility than the assertion of a superior detachment. It presents itself as a negation of the ties that attach man to reality, in which respect it approaches poetry and art, of which it is one of the elements. Art is born, like the lie, of a lively consciousness of the sensations and emotions. It declares a state of extreme sensibility, together with a tendency to repel that reality whereby a man's senses were wounded. Art, whatever its form, implies a profound knowledge of the signs, and the will to transpose them, without reference to their customary concordances. The artist is he who lies superiorly—better than other men. If he lies with speech, he is the poet; with inarticulate sounds, the musician; with forms whose attitudes he fixes, the sculptor, and his art is merely the extreme development of the language of motion (of which the dancer represents a very fugitive stage); with lines and colours, the painter, and what does this last do if not restore to primitive hieroglyphics their true aspect and all their natural scope? Art is a language, and it is only that.

But if woman is language, how do women happen to have played so inconspicuous a part in the supreme activity of language? Critics, to flatter them, have alleged some sort of lateral heredity whereby it is demonstrated that, as the daughters of mothers less and less cultivated, going back through the centuries, it is not surprising that their aptitudes are inferior to those of the males. This is not to be taken seriously. For, if it be true that genius and talent are often directly related with anterior cultures, there are also sudden aptitudes developed by the environment. Why should not a girl find this aptitude in her flesh, like her brother? Moreover, for thousands of years now, women have been taught music. Yet it is perhaps the art in which they have least created. The cause lies deeper. Woman is language, but language is useful. Her rôle is not to create, but to conserve. She accomplishes this task marvellously. She creates neither poems nor statues, but she creates the creators of the poems and of the statues. She teaches them language, which is the condition of their science, the lie which is the condition of their art, the consciousness which gives them their genius. When the child, about the age of six or seven, leaves the woman's hands, the man is already man. He speaks, and that is man in his entirety.

Woman's great intellectual task is teaching the language. The grammarians and their substitutes, school-teachers and professors, fancy that they are the masters of language, and that, without their intervention, men's language would perish in confusion and incoherence. They have been maintained for ages in this illusion, yet there is none more ridiculous. Women are the elementary, and poets the superior artisans of language, both unconscious of their function. The intervention of grammarians is almost always bad, unless it limit itself to a statement of the facts—unless it dare restore to the hands of women and of poets an influence which science could exert only with injustice. Here are some children who speak. They are going to school to have a lesson in grammar. They speak, and employ all the forms of the verb, all the shades of syntax, easily and correctly. They speak, but here now is the school, and the master succeeds in teaching them the nature of the imperfect subjunctive. For a function, the pedagogue has substituted a notion. He has replaced the act by consciousness of the act, the word by its definition. He teaches grammar. He does not teach language.