Underground Man

by Gabriel de Tarde

  But what shall I say of art and poetry? Here to be just, praise must become panegyric. Let us limit ourselves to indicating the general tendency of the transformations that have taken place. I have related what has become of our architecture which has been turned “outside in,” so to say, and brought into keeping with its surroundings, the idealised image in stone, the essence and consummation of former Nature. I shall not return to the subject. But I must still say a word about this immortal and overflowing population of statues, this wealth of frescoes, enamels, and bronzes which in concert with our poetry celebrate in this architectural transfiguration of the nether world the apotheosis of love. There would be an interesting study to make on the gradual metamorphoses that the genius of our painters and sculptors has imposed for the last three centuries on these traditional types of lions, horses, tigers, birds, trees and flowers, with which it is never weary of disporting itself, without being either helped or hindered by the sight of any animal or any plant. Never, in fact, have our artists, who protest strongly against being taken for photographers, depicted so many plants, animals and landscapes, than since these were no more. Similarly, they have never painted or sculptured so many draperies, since everyone goes about almost naked, while formerly at the time when humanity wore clothes the nude abounded in art. Does it mean that nature, now dead and formerly alive, from which our great masters drew their subjects and themes, has become a simple hieroglyphic and coldly conventional alphabet? No. Daughter to-day of tradition and no longer of productive nature, humanised and harmonised, she has a still firmer hold on the heart. If she recalls to each his day-dreams rather than his recollections, his imaginings rather than his impressions, his admiration as an artist rather than his terror as a child, she is only the better calculated to fascinate and subdue. She has for us the profound and intimate charm of an old legend, but it is a legend in which one believes.

  Nothing is more inspiring. Such must have been the mythology of the worthy Homer when his hearers in the Cyclades still believed in Aphrodite and Pallas, in the Dioscuri and the Centaurs, of whom he spoke to them and wrung from them tears of sheer delight. Thus our poets make us weep, when they speak to us now of azure skies, of the sea-girt horizon, of the perfume of roses, of the song of birds, of all those objects that our eye has never seen, our ear has never heard, of which all our senses are ignorant, yet our mind conjures them up within us by a strange instinct at the least suggestion of love.

  And when our painters show us these horses whose legs grow ever slimmer, these swans whose necks become ever rounder and longer, these vines whose leaves and branches grow ever more intricate with their lace-like edges and arabesques interwoven round still more exquisite birds, a matchless emotion rises within us such as a young Greek might have felt before a bas-relief crowded with fauns and nymphs or with Argonautes bearing off the Golden Fleece, or with Nereids sporting around the cup of Amphitrite.

  If our architecture in spite of all its splendours seems but a simple foil of our other fine arts, they in their turn, however admirable, have the air of being barely worthy to illustrate our poetry and literature graven on stone. But in our poetry and even in our literature there are glories which in comparison with less obvious beauty are as the corona is to the ovary, or the frame to the picture. Read our romantic dramas and epics in which all ancient history is magically unrolled down to the heroic struggle and love story of Miltiades. You will decide that nothing more sublime could ever be written. Read also our idylls, our elegies, our epigrams inspired by antiquity, and our poetry of every kind written in a dozen dead languages which when desired revive in order to vivify with their clear notes and their manifold harmonies, the pleasure of our ear, to accompany, so to say, with their rich orchestration in English, German, Swedish, Arabic, Italian and French, the music of our pure Attic. You will imagine nothing more fascinating than this renaissance and transfiguration of forgotten idioms, once the glory of antiquity. As for our dramas and our poems which are often at once the collective and individual work of a school, incarnate in its chief and animated with a single idea like the sculptures of the Parthenon, there is nothing comparable in the masterpieces of Sophocles or Homer. What the extinct species of nature formerly alive are to our painters and sculptors, the no less extinct sentiments of former human nature are to our dramatists. Jealousy, ambition, patriotism, fanaticism, the mad lust of battle, the exalted love of family, the pride of an illustrious name, all the vanished passions of the heart when called up upon the stage, no longer cause tears or terror in a single soul, any more than the heraldic tigers and lions painted up on our public squares frighten our children. But in a new accent with quite a different ring, they speak to us their ancient language; and to tell the truth, they are only a grand piano on which our new passions play. Now there is but a single passion for all its thousand names, as there is above but a single sun. It is love, the soul of our soul and source of our art. That is the true sun which will never fail us, which is never weary of touching and reanimating with the light of its countenance its lower creations of yore, the first-born incarnations of the heart, in order to make them young once more, in order to re-gild them with its dawns, and reincarnadine them with its setting splendours; almost in the same fashion as it sufficed the other sun to compass with a single ray that august summons to deck the earth, addressed to every ancient plant of the field, awakening it to bloom anew, that grand yearly transformation scene, so deceptive and entrancing, which they named the Spring, when there was still a Spring to name!

  And so for our highly refined writers, all that I have just praised a moment ago has no value if their heart is left untouched. They would give for one true and personal note all these feats of skill and sleight of hand. What they look for under the most grandiose conceptions and stage effects, and under the most audacious novelties in rhyme; what they adore on bended knee when they have found it, is a short passage, a line, half a line, on which an imperceptible hint of profound passion, or the most fleeting phase, though unexpressed, of love in joy, in suffering or in death has left its impress. Thus at the beginning of humanity each tint of the dawn or the dusk, each hour of the day was, for the first man who gave it a name, a new solar god who soon possessed worshippers, priests and temples of his own. But to analyse sensations after the manner of the old-fashioned erotic writers gives us no trouble. The real difficulty and merit lie in gathering along with our mystics, from the lowest depths of sorrow, its flowers of ecstasy, the pearls and coral that lie at the bottom of its sea, and to enrich the soul in its own eyes. Our purest poetry thus joins hands with our most profound psychology. One is the oracle, the other the dogma of one and the same religion.

  And yet is it credible? In spite of its beauty, harmony and incomparable charm, our society has also its malcontents. There are here and there certain recusants who declare they are soaked and saturated with the essence, so remarkably pure and so much above proof, of our excessive and compulsory society. They find our realm of beauty too static, our atmosphere of happiness too tranquil. In vain to please them we vary from time to time the intensity and colouring of our illuminations and ventilate our colonnades with a kind of refreshing breeze. They persist in condemning as monotonous our day devoid of clouds or night; our year, devoid of seasons; our towns devoid of country-life. Very curiously when the month of May comes round, this feeling of restlessness which they alone experience at ordinary times, becomes contagious and well-nigh general. And so it is the most melancholy and least busy month of the year. One would say that the Spring driven from every place, from the gloomy immensity of the heavens and from the frozen surface of the earth has, as we, sought refuge under ground; or rather that her wandering ghost returns at stated seasons to visit us and tantalise us by her haunting presence. It is then that the city of the musicians grows full and their music becomes so sweet, pathetic, mournful, and desperately harrowing that we see lovers by hundreds at a time take each other by the hand and go up to gaze upon the death-dealing s
ky. ... In reference to this I ought to say that there was recently a false alarm caused by a madman who pretended he had seen the sun coming back to life and melting the ice. At this news which had not been otherwise confirmed, quite a considerable portion of the population became unsettled and gave itself up to the pleasing task of forming plans for an early exodus. Such unhealthy and revolutionary dreams evidently only serve to foment artificial discontent.

  Luckily a scholar in rumaging in a forgotten corner of the archives put his hand on a big collection of phonographic and cinematographic records which had been amassed by an ancient collector. Interpreted by the phonograph and cinematograph together, these cylinders and films have enabled us suddenly to hear all the former sounds in nature accompanied by their corresponding sights, the thunder, the winds, the mountain torrents, the murmurs that accompany the dawn, the monotonous cry of the osprey and the long drawn out lament of the nightingale amid the manifold whisperings of night. At this resurrection of another age to the ear and eye, of extinct species and vanished phenomena, an immense astonishment quickly followed by an immense disillusion arose among the most ardent partisans of a return to the ancient regime. For that was not what one had hitherto believed on the strength of what even the most realist poets and novelists had told us. It was something infinitely less ravishing and less worthy of our regret. The song of the nightingale above all provoked a most unpleasant surprise. We were all angry with it for showing itself so inferior to its reputation. Assuredly the worst of our concerts is more musical than this so-called symphony of nature with full orchestral accompaniment.

  Thus has been quelled by an ingenious expedient entirely unknown to former governments, this first and only attempt at rebellion. May it be the last. A certain leaven of discord is beginning, alas, to contaminate our ranks, and our moralists observe not without apprehension sundry symptoms which indicate the relaxation of our morals. The growth in our population is very disquieting, notably since certain chemical discoveries, following upon which we have been too much in a hurry to declare that bread might be made of stones, and that it was no longer worth while to husband our food supplies or to trouble ourselves to maintain at a certain limit the number of mouths to feed.

  Simultaneously with the increase in the number of children, there is a diminution in the number of masterpieces. Let us hope that this lamentable movement will soon abate. If the sun once more, as after the different glacial epochs, succeeds in awakening from his lethargy and regains fresh strength, let us pray that only a small part of our population, that which is the most light-headed, the most unruly, and the most deeply attacked by incurable “matrimonialitis,” will avail itself of the seeming yet deceptive advantages offered by this open air cure and will make a dash upwards for the freedom of those inclement climes! But this is highly improbable if one reflects on the advanced age of the sun and the danger of those relapses common to old age. It is still less desirable. Let us repeat in the words of Miltiades our august ancestor, blessed are those stars which are extinct, that is to say, the almost entire number of those which people space. Radiance, as he truly said, is to the stars what the flowering season is to the plants. After having flowered, they begin to bear fruit. Thus, doubtless, weary of expansion and the useless squandering of their strength through the infinite void, the stars collect the germs of higher life in order to fertilize them in the depth of their bosom. The deceptive brilliancy of these widely scattered stars, so relatively few in number, which are still alight, which have not finished sowing what Miltiades called their wild oats of light and heat, prevented the first race of men from thinking of this, to wit of the numberless and tranquil multitude of dark stars to whom this radiance served as a cloak. But as for us, delivered from their spell and freed from this immemorial optical delusion, we continue firmly to believe that, among the stars as among mankind, the most brilliant are not the best, and that the same causes have brought about elsewhere the same results, compelling other races of men to hide themselves in the bosom of their earth, and there in peace to pursue the happy course of their destiny under unique conditions of absolute independence and purity, that in short in the heavens as on the earth true happiness lives concealed.

  NOTE ON TARDE

  GABRIEL TARDE was originally a member of the legal profession. For a long time he was examining magistrate at Sarlat. His works on sociology and criminology revealed him to the public. He was appointed head of the Statistical bureau at the Ministry of Justice, a post in which he was able to obtain first hand the most precious documents for his social studies. Later he was elected to the chair of modern philosophy at the College of France, then he was elected member of the Academy of moral and political sciences in the philosophical section. He died in 1904.

  Tarde wrote a great deal. His flexibility of spirit and style add charm to his work on technical subjects. In criminology his principal works are: “The Philosophy of Punishment,” “The Professional Criminal,” “Comparative Criminality” (1898) ;—then come the political works, such as “The Transformation of Power” (1899). His “Transformation of Law” dates from 1894. His study in social psychology entitled “Opinion and the Masses” appeared in 1901. His most celebrated work is perhaps “The Laws of Imitation” (1900) which was preceded by his “Social Logic” (1898) and his “Universal Opposition” (1897).

  According to Tarde the social phenomena proceed from individual inventions which in their turn are the offspring of imitation: the latter is for Tarde a capital factor in social life. Original ideas or inventions germinate ceaselessly in the social milieu, but only some, either by their superior adaptability or through the peculiar authority of their inventor, are accepted by the public as a whole. Sociology is thus reduced to a Psychology of the processus of invention and imitations. This explains why the great effort of Tarde has been to discover the “Laws of Invention.” Thereby he has given in sociology a preponderating place to the individual, and the accidental, and has thus separated himself from the most general tendencies of thought in our times which are those of Comte.

  The style of Tarde is abstract but supple. This fragment of future History forms a kind of exception to his general work which is very abstract. Tarde reveals himself in it one of the masters of literary French. The style is picturesque, intense, broad, even periodic, novel in respect to the thought, and entirely classical in its purity.

  Joseph Manchon.

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