Gabriel de Tarde - Underground Man

The zenith of human prosperity seemed to have been reached in the superficial and frivolous sense of the word. For the last fifty years, the final establishment of the great Asiatic-American-European confederacy, and its indisputable supremacy over what was still left, here and there, in Oceania and central Africa of barbarous tribes incapable of assimilation, had habituated all the nations, now converted into provinces, to the delights of universal and henceforth inviolable peace. It had required not less than 150 years of warfare to arrive at this wonderful result. But all these horrors were forgotten. True, there had been many terrific battles between armies of three and four million men, between trains with armour-clad carriages, flung, at full speed, against one another, and opening fire on every side; engagements between squadrons of sub-marines which blew one another up with electric discharges; between fleets of iron-clad balloons, harpooned and ripped up by aerial torpedoes, hurled headlong from the clouds, with thousands of parachutes which violently opened and enveloped each other in a storm of grape-shot as they fell together to earth. Yet of all this warlike mania there only remained a vague poetic remembrance. Forgetfulness is the beginning of happiness, as fear is the beginning of wisdom.

As a solitary exception to the general rule, the nations, after this gigantic blood-letting, did not experience the lethargy that follows from exhaustion, but the calm that the accession of strength produces. The explanation is easy. For about a hundred years the military selection committees had broken with the blind routine of the past and made it a practice to pick out carefully the strongest and best made among the young men, in order to exempt them from the burden of military service which had become purely mechanical, and to send to the depot all the weaklings who were good enough to fulfil the sorely diminished functions of the soldier and even of the non-commissioned officer. That was really a piece of intelligent selection; and the historian cannot conscientiously refuse gratefully to praise this innovation, thanks to which the incomparable beauty of the human race to-day has been gradually developed. In fact, when we now look through the glass cases of our museums of antiquities at those singular collections of caricatures which our ancestors used to call their photographic albums, we can confirm the vastness of the progress thus accomplished, if it is really true that we are actually descended from these dwarfs and scare-crows, as an otherwise trustworthy tradition attests.

From this epoch dates the discovery of the last microbes, which had not yet been analysed by the neo-Pasteurian school. Once the cause of every disease was known, the remedy was not long in becoming known as well, and from that moment, a consumptive or rheumatic patient, or an invalid of any kind became as rare a phenomenon as a double-headed monster formerly was, or an honest publican. Ever since that epoch we have dropped the ridiculous employment of those inquiries about health with which the conversations of our ancestors were needlessly interlarded, such as "How are you?" or "How do you do?" Short-sightedness alone continued its lamentable progress, being stimulated by the extraordinary spread of journalism. There was not a woman or a child, who did not wear a pince-nez . This drawback, which besides was only momentary, was largely compensated for by the progress it caused in the optician's art.

Alongside of the political unity which did away with the enmities of nations, there appeared a linguistic unity which rapidly blotted out the last differences between them. Already since the twentieth century the need of a single common language, similar to Latin in the Middle Ages, had become sufficiently intense among the learned throughout the whole world to induce them to make use of an international idiom in all their writings. At the end of a long struggle for supremacy with English and Spanish, Greek finally established its claims, after the break-up of the British Empire and the recapture of Constantinople by the Græco-Russian Empire. Gradually, or rather with the rapidity characteristic of all modern progress, its usage descended from strata to strata till it reached the lowest layers of society, and from the middle of the twenty-second century there was not a little child between the Loire and the River Amour who could not express itself with ease in the language of Demosthenes. Here and there a few isolated villages in the hollows of the mountains still persisted, in spite of the protests of their schoolmasters, to mangle the old dialect formerly called French, German, or Italian, but the sound of this gibberish in the towns would have raised a hearty laugh.

All contemporary documents agree in bearing witness to the rapidity, the depth, and the universality of the change which took place in the customs, ideas, and needs, and in all the forms of social life, thus reduced to a common level from one pole to the other, as a result of this unification of language. It seemed as if the course of civilisation had been hitherto confined within high banks and that now, when for the first time all the banks had burst, it readily spread over the whole globe. It was no longer millions but thousands of millions that the least newly discovered improvement in industry brought in to its inventor; for henceforth there was no barrier to stop in its star-like radiation the expansion of any idea, no matter where it originated. For the same reason it was no longer by hundreds but by thousands, that were reckoned the editions of any book, which appealed but moderately to the public taste, or the performance of a play which was ever so little applauded. The rivalry between authors had therefore risen to its fullest diapason. Their fancy, moreover, could find full scope, for the first effect of this deluge of universalised neo-Hellenism had been to overwhelm for ever all the pretended literatures of our rude ancestors. They became unintelligible, even to the very titles of what they were pleased to call their classical masterpieces, even to the barbarous names of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Hugo, who are now forgotten, and whose rugged verses are deciphered with such difficulty by our scholars. To plagiarise these folks whom hardly anyone could henceforth read, was to render them service, nay, to pay them too much honour. One did not fail to do so; and prodigious was the success of these audacious imitations which were offered as original works. The material thus to turn to account was abundant, and indeed inexhaustible.

Unfortunately for the young writers the ancient poets who had been dead for centuries, Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, had returned to life, a hundred times more hale and hearty than at the time of Pericles himself; and this unexpected competition proved a singular thorn in the side of the new-comers. It was in fact in vain that original geniuses produced on the stage such sensational novelties as Athalias, Hernanias, Macbethès ; the public often turned its back on them to rush off to performances of Oedipus Rex or the Birds (of Aristophanes). And Nanais , though a vigorous sketch of a novelist of the new school, was a complete failure owing to the frenzied success of a popular edition of the Odyssey. The ears of the people were saturated with Alexandrines classical, romantic, and the rest. They were bored by the childish tricks of cæsura and rhyme which sometimes attempted a see-saw effect by producing now a poor and now a full rhyme, or again made a pretence of hiding away and keeping out of sight in order to induce the hearer to hunt it out. The splendid, untrammelled, and exuberant hexameters of Homer, the stanzas of Sappho, the iambics of Sophocles, furnished them with unspeakable pleasure, which did the greatest harm to the music of a certain Wagner. Music in general fell to the secondary position to which it really belongs in the hierarchy of the fine arts. To make up for it, in the midst of this scholarly renaissance of the human spirit, there arose an occasion for an unexpected literary outburst which allowed poetry to regain its legitimate rank, that is to say, the foremost. In fact it never fails to flower again when language takes a new lease of life, and all the more so when the latter undergoes a complete metamorphosis, and the pleasure arises of expressing anew the eternal truisms.