Underground Man

V

REGENERATION

It does not fall within the scope of my rapid sketch to relate date by date the laborious vicissitudes of humanity since its settlement within the planet from the year 1 of the era of Salvation to the year 596, in which I write these lines in chalk on slabs of schist. I should only like to bring out for my contemporaries, who might very well fail to notice them (for we barely observe what we have always before our eyes), the distinctive and original features of this modern civilisation of which we are so justly proud. Now that after many abortive trials and agonizing convulsions it has succeeded in taking its final shape, we can clearly establish its essential characteristics. It consists in the complete elimination of living nature, whether animal or vegetable, man only excepted. That has produced, so to say, a purification of society. Secluded thus from every influence of the natural milieu into which it was hitherto plunged and confined, the social milieu was for the first time able to reveal and display its true virtues, and the real social bond appeared in all its vigour and purity. It might be said that destiny had desired to make in our case an extended sociological experiment for its own edification by placing us in such extraordinarily unique conditions.1 The problem, in a way, was to learn, what would social man become if committed to his own keeping, yet left to himself – furnished with all the intellectual acquisitions accumulated through a remote past by human geniuses, but deprived of the assistance of all other living beings, nay, even of those beings half endowed with life, that we call rivers and seas and stars, and thrown back on the conquered, yet passive forces of chemical, inorganic and lifeless Nature, which is separated from man by too deep a chasm to exercise on him any action from the social point of view. The problem was to learn what this humanity would do when restricted to man, and obliged to extract from its own resources, if not its food supplies, yet at least all its pleasures, all its occupations, all its creative inspirations. The answer has been given, and we have realised at the same time what an unsuspected drag the terrestrial fauna and flora had hitherto been on the progress of humanity.

At first human pride and the faith of man in himself hitherto held in check by the constant presence, by the profound sense of the superiority of the forces round it, rebounded with a force of elasticity really appalling. We are a race of Titans. But, at the same time, whatever enervating element there might have been in the air of our grottoes has been thereby victoriously combated. Otherwise our air is the purest that man has ever breathed; all the bad germs with which the atmosphere was loaded were killed by the cold. Far from being attacked by anæmia as some predicted, we live in a state of habitual excitement maintained by the multiplicity of our relations and of our "social tonics" (friendly shakes of the hand, talks, meetings with charming women, etc.). With a certain number among us it passes into a state of unintermittent delirium under the name of Troglodytic fever. This new malady, whose microbe has not yet been discovered, was unknown to our forefathers, thanks perhaps to the stupefying (or soothing, if you prefer it) influence of natural and rural distractions. Rural! what a strange anachronism! Fishermen, hunters, ploughmen, and shepherds – do we really understand to-day the meaning of these words? Have we for a moment reflected on the life of that fossil creature who is so frequently mentioned in books of ancient history and who was called the peasant? The habitual society of this curious creature which comprised half or three-quarters of the population was not man, but four-footed beasts, pot herbs and green crops, which, owing to the conditions necessary for their production in the country (yet another word which has become meaningless) condemned him to live a wild, solitary life, far from his fellows. As for his herds, they were acquainted with the charms of social life, but he had not the slightest inkling of what it meant.

The towns, to which people were so astonished that there should be a desire to emigrate, were the only centres, rare and widely scattered as they were, in which life in society was then known. But to what extent does it not appear to have been adulterated, and attenuated by animal and vegetable life? Another fossil peculiar to these regions is the artisan. Was the relation of the worker to his employer, of the artisan class to the other classes of the population, of these classes between themselves a really social relation? Not the least in the world! Certain sophists, who were called economists, and who were to our sociologists of to-day what the alchemists formerly were to the chemists or the astrologers to the astronomers, had given credit, it is true, to this error – that society essentially consists in an exchange of services. From this point of view, which, moreover, is quite out of date, the social bond could never be closer than that between the ass and the ass driver, the ox and drover, the sheep and the shepherd. Society, we now know, consists in the exchange of reflections. Mutually to ape one another, and by dint of accumulated apings diversely combined to create an originality is the important thing. Reciprocal service is only an accessory. That is why the urban life of former days being principally founded on the organic and natural, rather than on the social relation of producer to consumer, or of workman to employer, was itself only a very imperfect kind of social life, and accordingly the source of endless disagreements.

If it has been possible for us to realise the most perfect and the most intense social life that has ever been seen, it is thanks to the extreme simplicity of our strictly so-called wants. At a time when man was "panivorous" and omnivorous, the craving for food was broken up into an infinity of petty ramifications. To-day it is confined to eating meat which has been preserved in the best of refrigerators. Within the space of an hour each morning, a single member of society by the employment of our ingenious transport machinery feeds a thousand of his kind. The need of clothing has been pretty nearly abolished by the softness of an ever constant climate, and, we must also admit it, by the absence of silkworms and of textile plants. That would perhaps be a disadvantage were it not for the incomparable beauty of our bodies, which lends a real charm to this grand simplicity of costume. Let us observe, however, that it is fairly customary to wear coats of asbestos spangled with mica, of silver interwoven and enriched with gold, in which the refined and delicate charms of our women appear as though moulded in metal, rather than completely screened from view. This metallic iridescence with its infinite tints has a most delightful effect. These are, however, costumes that never wear out. How many clothiers, milliners, tailors, and drapery establishments are thereby abolished at a single stroke! The need of shelter remains, it is true, but it has been greatly reduced. One is no longer obliged to sleep at "starlight-hotel". When a young man grows weary of the life in common which has hitherto sufficed him in the spacious working-drawing-room of his fellows, and desires for matrimonial reasons to have a dwelling to himself, he has only to apply the boring-machine somewhere against the rocky wall and his cell is excavated in a few days. There is no rent and few articles of furniture. The joint-stock furniture, which is magnificent, is almost the only one of which the pair of lovers make use.

The quota of absolute necessities being thus reduced to almost nothing, the quota of superfluities has been able to be extended to almost everything. Since we live on so little, there remains abundant time for thought. A minimum of utilitarian work and a maximum of æsthetic, is surely civilisation itself in its most essential element. The room left vacant in the heart by the reduction of our wants is taken up by the talents – those artistic, poetic, and scientific talents which, as they day by day multiply and take deeper root, become really and truly acquired wants. They really spring, however, from a necessity to produce, and not from a necessity to consume. I underline this difference. The manufacturer is ever toiling, not for his own pleasure nor for that of the world about him, of his fellow-men or his natural rivals, but for a society different from his own – on mutual terms, but that is immaterial. His work, therefore, constitutes a non-social, an almost anti-social relationship with those who are not of his kind, to the great hurt and hindrance of his relations with those who are. The increasing intensity of his work tends to accentuate and not to attenuate the dissimilarities between the different grades of society, which act as an obstacle to the general reunion. We have clearly seen the truth of this in the course of the twentieth century of the ancient era, when the whole population was divided into trades-unions of the different professions, which waged desperate warfare on one another, and whose members in the bosom of each union hated one another as only brothers can.

But for the scientist, the artist, the lover of beauty in all its forms, to produce is a passion, to consume is only a taste. For every artist has a dilettante double. But his dilettantism in respect to arts other than his own only plays by comparison a secondary part in his life. The artist creates through sheer delight, and he alone creates for such motives.

We can now comprehend the depth of the truly social revolution which was accomplished from the days when the æsthetic activity, by dint of ever growing, ended by vanquishing utilitarian activity. Henceforth in place of the relation of producer to consumer has been substituted, as preponderating element in human dealings, the relation of the artist to the art-lover. The ancient social ideal was to seek amusement or self-satisfaction apart and to render mutual service. For this we substitute the following: to be one's own servant and mutually to delight one another. Henceforward, to insist once more, society reposes, not on the exchange of services, but on the exchange of admiration or criticism, of favourable or unfavourable judgments. The anarchical regime of greed in all its forms has been succeeded by the autocratic government of enlightened opinion which has become supreme. For our worthy ancestors deceived themselves finely when they persuaded themselves that social progress led to what they termed freedom of thought. We have something better; we possess the joy and the strength of the mind which attains a certainty of its own, founded, as it is, on its only sure basis, the unanimity of other minds on certain essential matters. On this rock we can rear the highest constructions of thought, nay, the most gigantic systems of philosophy.

The error, at present recognised, of those ancient visionaries called socialists was their failure to see that this life in common, this intense social life, they dreamt of so ardently, had for its indispensable condition the æsthetic life and the universal propagation of the religion of truth and beauty. The latter assumes the drastic lopping off of numerous personal wants. Consequently in rushing, as they did, into an exaggerated development of commercial life, they were marching in the opposite direction to their own goal.

They must have begun, I am well aware, by uprooting the fatal habit of eating bread, which made man a slave to the tyrannical whims of a plant, of beasts which were necessary for the manuring of this plant, and of other plants which served as fodder for their beasts… But as long as this unhappy craving was rampant and they refrained from combating it, it was obligatory to abstain from arousing others which were not less anti-social, that is to say, not less natural. It was far better to leave men at the ploughtail than to attract them to the factory, for the dispersion and isolation of individualist types are more preferable to bringing them together, which can only result in setting them by the ears. But let us hurry on. All the advantages for which we are indebted to our anti-natural position are now clear. We alone have realised all the quintessence of refinement and reality, of strength and of sweetness, that the social life contains. Formerly, here and there, in a few rare cases in the midst of deserts an individual had certainly had a distant foretaste of this ineffable thing, not to mention three or four salons in the eighteenth century under the ancient regime, two or three painters' studios, one or two green-rooms. They represented, in a way, imperceptible cores of social protoplasm lost amid a mass of foreign matter. But this marrow has become the entire bone at present. Our cities, all in all, are one vast workshop, household and reception hall. And this has happened in the simplest and most inevitable manner in the world. Following the law of separation of the old Herbert Spencer, the selection of heterogeneous talents and vocations was bound to take place of its own accord. In fact, at the end of a century there was already underground in course of development and continuous excavation a city of painters, a city of sculptors, a city of musicians, of poets, of geometricians, of physicists, of chemists, even of naturalists, of psychologists, of scientific or æsthetic specialists of every kind, except, strictly speaking, in philosophy. For we were obliged after several attempts to give up the idea of founding or maintaining a city of philosophers, notably owing to the incessant trouble caused by the tribe of sociologists who are the most unsociable of mankind.

Let us not forget, by the way, to mention the city of "sappers" (we no longer speak of architects), whose speciality is to work out the plans for excavating and repairing all our crypts and to direct the carrying out of the work by our machines. Quitting the hackneyed paths of former architecture, they have created in every detail our modern architecture so profoundly original of which nothing could give an idea to our forefathers. The public building of the ancient architect was a kind of massive and voluminous work of art. It was entirely a thing by itself. Its exterior, and especially its front, occupied his attention far more than the inside. For the modern architect the interior alone exists, and each work is linked on to those which have gone before. None stands by itself. They are only an extension and ramification, one of another, an endless continuation like the epics of the East. The work of the ancient architect with its misplaced individuality, with its symmetry, which gave it a mock air of being a living thing, yet only rendered it more out of keeping with the surrounding landscape, the more symmetrical and more skilfully designed it was, produced the effect of a verse in prose, or of a hackneyed theme in a fantasia. Its special function was to represent correctness, coldness, and stiffness amid the luxuriant disorder of nature and the freedom of the other arts. But to-day, instead of being the most tight-laced of the arts, architecture is the freest and most wanton of them all. It is the chief element of picturesqueness in our life, its artificial and veritably artistic scenery lends to all the masterpieces of our painters and sculptors the horizon of its perspective, the sky of its vaults, the tangled vegetation of its innumerable colonnades, whose shafts are a copy of the idealised trunk of all the antique essence of tree-life, whose capitals imitate the idealised form of all the antique flowers. Here is nature winnowed and perfected, which has become human in order to delight humanity, and which humanity has deified in order to shelter love beneath its shade. This perfection has only been, however, attained after much groping in the dark. Many falls of rock, occasioned by foolhardy excavations, which unduly reduced the number of supports, swallowed up whole towns during the first two centuries. They will serve for our descendants as Pompeii to rediscover. At the least shock produced by earthquakes (the only natural plague which engages our attention), a few cases of crushing to death still occur here and there, but such accidents are very rare.

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.