Underground Man

To return to our subject. Each of our cities in founding colonies in the region round it, has become the mother of cities similar to itself, in which its own peculiar colour has been multiplied in different tints which reflect and render it more beautiful. It is thus with us that nations are formed whose differences no longer correspond to geographical accidents but to the diversity of the social aptitudes of human nature and of nothing else. Nay, more, in each of them the division of cities is founded on that of schools, the most flourishing of which, at any given moment, raises its particular town to the rank of capital, thanks to the all-powerful favour of the public.

The beginnings and devolution of power, questions which have so deeply agitated humanity of yore, arise with us in the most natural way in the world. There is always amid the crowd of our genius, a superior genius who is hailed as such by the almost unanimous acclamation of his pupils at first, and next of his comrades. A man is judged in fact by his peers and according to his productions, not by the incompetent or according to his electoral exploits. In the light of the intimate sense of corporate life which binds and cements us one to another, the elevation of such a dictator to the supreme magistracy has nothing humiliating about it for the pride of the senators who have elected him, and who are the chiefs of all the leading schools they themselves have created. The elector who is a pupil, the elector who is an intelligent and sympathetic admirer identifies himself with the object of his choice. Now it is the particular characteristic of a "Geniocratic" Republic to be based on admiration, not on envy, on sympathy, and not on dislike – on enlightenment, not on illusion.

Nothing is more delightful than a tour through our domains. Our towns, which are quite close to one another are severally connected by broad roads which are always illuminated and dotted with light and graceful monocycles, with trains without smoke or whistle, with pretty electric carriages which glide silently along, like gondolas between walls covered with admirable bas-reliefs, with charming inscriptions, with immortal fancies, the outpourings and accumulations of ten generations of wandering artists. Similarly one might have seen in the olden times the scanty remains of some convent where, in the course of ages the monks had translated their weariness of spirit into grinning figures, with hooded heads, into beasts from the Apocalypse, clumsily sculptured on the capitals of the little pilasters or around the stone chair of the Abbot. But what a distance lies between this monkish nightmare and this artistic revelation! At the very most the pretty little gallery which joined across the Arno, the museum of the Pitti Palace, with that of the Uffizi at Florence, could give our ancestors a faint idea of what we see.

If the corridors of our abode possess this wealth and splendour, what shall we say of the dwelling-places, or of the cities? They are filled with heaps of artistic marvels, of frescoes, enamels, gold and silver plate, bronzes and pictures, the acme and quintessence of musical emotions, of philosophic conceptions, of poetic dreams, enough to baffle all description, and weary all admiration. We have difficulty in believing that the labyrinth of galleries, subterranean palaces and marble catacombs, all named and numbered, whose manifold nomenclature recalls all the geography and history of the past, have been excavated in so few centuries. That is what perseverance can do! However accustomed we may be to this extraordinary sight, it still at times happens when wandering alone, during the hours of the siesta, in this sort of infinite cathedral, with its irregular and endless architecture, through this forest of lofty columns, massive or in close formation, displaying in turn the most diversified and grandiose styles, Egyptian, Greek, Byzantine, Arab, Gothic, and reminiscent of all the vanished and venerated floras and faunas, when it is not above all profoundly original … it happens, I repeat, that panting, and beside ourselves with ecstasy, we come to a standstill, like the traveller of yore when he entered the twilight of a virgin forest, or of the pillared hall of Karnak.

To those who on reading the ancient accounts of travels might perchance have regretted the wanderings of caravans across the deserts or the discoveries of new worlds, our universe can offer boundless excursions under the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans frozen to their very lowest depths. Venturesome explorers, I was going to say discoverers, have in every direction and in the easiest imaginable fashion honeycombed these immense ice-caps with endless passages much in the same way as the termites, according to our palæontologists, bored through the floors of our fathers. We extend at will these fantastic galleries of crystal, which, wherever they cross one another, form so many crystal palaces, by casting on the walls a ray of intense heat which makes them melt. We take good care to drain the water due to the liquefaction into one of those bottomless pits which here and there yawn hideously beneath our feet. Thanks to this method and the improvements it has undergone we have succeeded in cutting, hewing and carving the solidified sea-water. We are able to glide through it, to manoeuvre in it, to course through it on skates or velocipedes with an ease and agility that are always admired in spite of our being accustomed to it. The severe cold of these regions is scarcely tempered by millions of electric lamps which are mirrored in these emerald-green icicles with their velvet-like tints and renders a permanent stay impossible. It would even prevent us crossing them if, by good luck, the earliest pioneers had not discovered in them crowds of seals which had been caught while still alive by the freezing of the waters in which they remain imprisoned. Their carefully prepared skins have furnished us with warm clothing. Nothing is more curious than thus suddenly to catch sight of, as it were through a mysterious glass case, one of these huge marine animals, sometimes a whale, a shark or a devil fish, and that star-like flora which carpets the seas. Though appearing crystallized in its transparent prison, in its Elysium of pure brine, it has lost none of its secret charm, that was quite unknown to our ancestors. Idealised by its very lack of motion, immortalised by its death, it dimly shines here and there with gleams of pearl and mother of pearl in the twilight of the depths below, to the right, the left, beneath the feet or above the head of the solitary skater who roams with his lamp on his forehead in pursuit of the unknown. There is always something new to look forward to from these miraculous soundings, so different from the soundings of former time. Never a tourist has come home without having discovered some interesting object – a piece of wreckage, the steeple of some sunken town, a human skeleton to enrich our prehistoric museums, sometimes a shoal of sardines or cod. These splendid and timely reserves come in very handy for replenishing our bill of fare. But the chief fascination of such adventurous exploration is the sense of the boundless and the everlasting, of the unfathomable and the changeless by which one is arrested and overwhelmed in these bottomless depths. The savour of this silence and solitude, of this profound peace, the sequel to so many tempests, of this almost starless gloaming and twilight with its fleeting gleams, reposes the eye after our underground illuminations. I will not speak of the surprises which the hand of man has lavished there. At the moment when one least expects it one sees the submarine tunnel along which one is gliding, enlarged beyond all measure and transformed into a vast hall in which the fancy of our sculptors has found full play, a temple of vast dimensions with transparent pillars, with walls of enthralling beauty that the eye in ecstasy attempts to fathom. That is often the trysting place of friends and lovers, and the excursion begun in dreamy loneliness is continued in loving companionship.

But we have wandered long enough in these halls of mysteries. Let us return to our cities. One would look, by the bye, in vain for a city of lawyers there, or even, for a court of justice. There is no more arable land and therefore no more lawsuits about property or ancient rights. There are no more walls, and therefore no more lawsuits about party walls. As for felonies and misdemeanours, we do not know exactly why, but it is an obvious fact that with the spread of the cult of art they have disappeared as by enchantment, while formerly the progress of industrial life had tripled their numbers in half a century.

Man in becoming a town dweller has become really human. From the time that all sorts of trees and beasts, of flowers and insects no longer interpose between men, and all sorts of vulgar wants no longer hinder the progress of the truly human faculties, every one seems to be born well-bred, just as every one is born a sculptor or musician, philosopher or poet, and speaks the most correct language with the purest accent. An indescribable courtesy, skilled to charm without falsehood, to please without obsequiousness, the most free from fawning one has ever seen, is united to a politeness which has at heart the feeling, not of a social hierarchy to be respected, but of a social harmony to be maintained. It is composed not of more or less degenerate airs of the court, but of more or less faithful reflections of the heart. Its refinement is such as the race who lived on the surface of earth never even dreamed of. It permeates like a fragrant oil all the complicated and delicate machinery of our existence. No unsociableness, no misanthropy can resist it. The charm is too profound. The single threat of ostracism, I do not say of expulsion to the realms above, which would be a death sentence, but of banishment beyond the limits of the usual corporate life, is sufficient to arrest the most criminal natures on the slope of crime. There is in the slightest inflexion of voice, in the least inclination of the head of our women a special charm, which is not only the charm of former times, whether roguish kindness or kindly roguishness, but a refinement at once more exquisite and more healthful in which the constant practice of seeing and doing beautiful things or loving and being loved is expressed in an ineffable fashion.

VI
LOVE

Love, in fact, is the unseen and perennial source of this novel courtesy. The capital importance it has assumed, the strange forms it has worn, the unexpected heights to which it has risen, are perhaps the most significant characteristics of our civilisation. In the glittering and superficial epochs, age of paper and electro-plating, which immediately preceded our present era, love was held in check by a thousand childish needs, by the contagious mono-mania of unsightly and cumbersome luxury or of ceaseless globe-trotting, and by that other form of madness which has now disappeared, the so-called political ambition. It suffered accordingly an immense decline, relatively speaking. To-day it benefits from the destruction or gradual diminution of all the other principal impulses of the heart which have taken refuge and concentrated themselves in it as banished mankind has done in the warm bosom of the earth. Patriotism is dead, since there is no longer any native land, but only a native grot. Moreover the guilds which we enter as we please according to our vocations have taken the place of Fatherlands. Corporate spirit has exterminated patriotism. In the same fashion the school is on the road not to exterminate but to transform the family, which is only right and proper. The best that can be said for the parents of old was that they were compulsory and not always cost-free friends. One was not wrong in preferring in general to them friends who are a species of optional and unselfish relations. Maternal love itself has undergone a good many transformations among our women artists, and one must admit, sundry partial set backs.

But love is left to us. Or rather, be it said without vanity, it is we who discovered and introduced it. Its name has preceded it by a good many centuries. Our ancestors gave it its name, but they spoke of it as the Hebrews spoke of the Messiah. It has revealed itself in our day. In our day it has become incarnate, it has founded the true religion, universal and enduring, that pure and austere moral which is indistinguishable from art. It has been favoured at the outset, beyond all doubt and beyond all expectation by the charm and beauty of our women, who are all differently yet almost equally accomplished. There is nothing natural left in our world below if it be not they. But it appears they have always been the most beautiful thing in nature even in the most unfavourable and ill-favoured ages. For we are assured that never was the graceful curve of hill or stream, of wave or rippling cornfield, that never was the hue of the dawn or of the Mediterranean equal in sweetness, in strength, in richness of visible music and harmony to the female form. There must therefore have been a special instinct which is quite incomprehensible which formerly retained the poor beside their natal river or rock and prevented their emigrating to the big towns, where they might well have hoped to admire at their ease tints and outlines of beauty assuredly far superior to the charm of the locality to whose attractions they fell a victim. At present there is no other country than the woman of one's affections; there is no other home-sickness than that caused by her absence.

But the foregoing is insufficient to explain the unparalleled power and persistence of our love which time intensifies more than it wears out, and consummates as it consumes it. Love, we now at last know, is like air, essential to life; we must look to it for health and not for mere nourishment. It is as the sun once was, we must use it to give us light, not allow it to dazzle us. It resembles that imposing temple that the fervour of our fathers raised in its honour when they worshipped it, unwittingly, at the Paris Opera-house. The most beautiful part of it is the staircase – when one mounts it. We have therefore attempted to make the staircase monopolise the whole edifice without leaving the tiniest room for the hall. The wise man, an ancient writer has said, is to the woman what the asymptote is to the curve, it draws ever nearer but never touches. It was a half crazy fellow named Rousseau who uttered this splendid aphorism and our society flatters itself that it has practised it far better than he. All the same the ideal thus outlined, we are compelled to confess, is rarely attained in all its entity. This degree of perfection is reserved for the most saintly souls, the ascetics, men and women, who wander together, two and two, in the most marvellous cloisters, in the most Raphaelesque cells in the city of painters, in a sort of artificial dusk produced by a coloured twilight in the midst of a throng of similar couples, and on the banks of a stream so to say of audacious and splendid revelations of the nude. They pass their life in feasting their eyes on these waves of beauty, the living bank of which is their own passion. Together they climb the fiery steps of the heavenly staircase to the very summit on which they halt. Then supremely inspired they set to work and produce masterpieces. Heroic lovers are they whose whole pleasure in love consists in the sublime joy of feeling their love growing within them, blissful because it is shared, inspiring because it is chaste.

But for the greater number of us it has been necessary to come down to the level of the insurmountable weakness of the old Adam. None the less the inelastic limits of our food supplies have made it a duty for us rigorously to guard against a possible excess in our population which has reached to-day fifty millions, a figure it can never exceed without danger. We have been obliged to forbid in general under the most severe penalties a practice which apparently was very common and indulged in ad libitum by our forefathers. Is it possible that after manufacturing the rubbish heaps of law with which our libraries are lumbered up, they precisely omitted to regulate the only matter considered worthy to-day of regulation? Can we conceive that it could ever have been permissible to the first comer without due authorisation to expose society to the arrival of a new hungry and wailing member – above all at a time when it was not possible to kill a partridge without a game licence, or to import a sack of corn without paying duty? Wiser and more far-sighted, we degrade, and in case of a second offence we condemn to be thrown into a lake of petroleum, whoever allows himself to infringe our constitutional law on this point, or rather we should say, should allow himself, for the force of public opinion has got the better of the crime and has rendered our penalties unnecessary. We sometimes, nay very often, see lovers who go mad from love and die in consequence. Others courageously get themselves hoisted by a lift to the gaping mouth of an extinct volcano and reach the outer air which in a moment freezes them to death. They have scarcely time to regard the azure sky – a magnificent spectacle, so they say – and the twilight hues of the still dying sun or the vast and unstudied disorder of the stars; then locked in each other's arms they fall dead upon the ice! The summit of their favourite volcano is completely crowned with their corpses which are admirably preserved always in twos, stark and livid, a living image still of love and agony, of despair and frenzy, but more often of ecstatic repose. They recently made an indelible impression on a celebrated traveller who was bold enough to make the ascent in order to get a glimpse of them. We all know how he has since died from the effects.

But what is unheard of and unexampled in our day is for a woman in love to abandon herself to her lover before the latter has under her inspiration produced a masterpiece which is adjudged and proclaimed as such by his rivals. For here we have the indispensable condition to which legitimate marriage is subordinated. The right to have children is the monopoly and supreme recompense of genius. It is besides a powerful lever for the uplifting and exaltation of the race. Futhermore a man can only exercise it exactly the same number of times as he produces works worthy of a master. But in this respect some indulgence is shown. It even happens pretty frequently that touched by pity for some grand passion that disposes only of a mediocre talent, the affected admiration of the public partly from sympathy and partly from condescension accords a favourable verdict to works of no intrinsic value. Perhaps there are also (in fact there is no doubt about it) for common use other methods of getting round the law.

Ancient society reposed on the fear of punishment, on a penal system which has had its day. Ours, it is clear, is based on the expectation of happiness. The enthusiasm and creative fire aroused by such a perspective are attested by our exhibitions, and borne witness to by the rich luxuriance of our annual art harvests. When we think of the precisely opposite effects of ancient marriage, that institution of our ancestors, more ridiculous still than their umbrellas, one can measure the distance between this excessive and pretended exclusive debitum conjugale and our mode of union, at once free and regulated, energetic and intermittent, passionate and restrained, the true corner-stone of our regenerated humanity. The sufferings it imposes on those who are sacrificed, the unsuccessful artists, is not for the latter a cause of complaint. Their despair itself is dear to the desperate; for if they do not die of it, they draw life and immortality from it and from the bottomless pit of their inner depth of woe, they gather deathless flowers, flowers of art or poesy for some, mystic roses for others. To the latter perhaps is given at that moment, as they grope in their inward darkness to touch most nearly the essence of things, and these delights are so vivid that our artists and our metaphysical mystics wonder whether art and philosophy were made to console love or if the sole reason for love's existence is not to inspire art and the pursuit of ultimate truth. This last opinion has generally prevailed.

The extent to which love has refined our habits, and to which our civilisation based on love is superior in morality to the former civilisation based on ambition and covetousness, was proved at the time of the great discovery which took place in the Year of Salvation 194. Guided by some mysterious inkling, some electric sense of direction, a bold sapper by dint of forcing his way through the flanks of the earth beyond the ordinary galleries suddenly penetrated into a strange open space buzzing with human voices and swarming with human faces. But what squeaky voices! What sallow complexions! What an impossible language with no connection with our Greek! It was, without doubt, a veritable underground America, quite as vast and still more curious. It was the work of a little tribe of burrowing Chinese who had had, one imagines, the same idea as our Miltiades. Much more practical than he, they had hastily crawled underground without encumbering themselves with museums and libraries, and there they had multiplied enormously. Instead of confining themselves as we to turning to account the deposits of animal carcasses, they had shamelessly given themselves up to ancestral cannibalism. They were thus enabled, seeing the thousand of millions of Chinese destroyed and buried beneath the snow, to give full vent to their prolific instincts. Alas! who knows if our own descendants will not one day be reduced to this extremity? In what promiscuity, in what a slough of greed, falsehood and robbery were these unfortunates living! The words of our language refuse to depict their filth and coarseness. With infinite pains they raised underground diminutive vegetables in diminutive beds of soil they had brought thither together with diminutive pigs and dogs… These ancient servants of mankind appeared very disgusting to our new Christopher Columbus. These degraded beings (I speak of the masters and not of the animals, for the latter belong to a breed that has been much improved by those who raised them) had lost all recollection of the Middle Empire and even of the surface of the earth. They heartily laughed when some of our savants sent on a mission to them spoke to them of the firmament, the sun, the moon and the stars… They listened, however, to the end of these accounts, then in an ironical tone they asked our envoys: "Have you seen all that?" And the latter unfortunately could not reply to the question, since no one among us has seen the sky except the lovers who go to die together.

Now, what did our settlers do at the sight of such cerebral atrophy? Several proposed, it is true, to exterminate these savages who might well become dangerous owing to their cunning and to their numbers, and to appropriate their dwelling-place after a certain amount of cleaning and painting and the removal of numerous little bells. Others proposed to reduce them to the status of slaves or servants in order to shift on to them all our menial work. But these two proposals were rejected. An attempt was made to civilize and to render less savage these poor cousins, and once the impossibility of any success in that direction had been ascertained the partition was carefully blocked up.