We passed into a walkway ornamented with frightful antique moldings and mediocre but vast paintings; my guide stopped and turned his long jaundiced and almost hairless face toward me.
“Yes! You think that the promise we make, which you will take if you want to be admitted, is a derisory formality? I beg you—as a Frenchman, who, in consequence, doesn’t reason very often—to think about what a life might become in which all the actions…all of them, you understand…are only accomplished with attention, reflection and judgment.”
“It must be extremely tiresome!” I exclaimed. “The live we lead isn’t exactly full of fun; if it were to augment our annoyances, our cares, our preoccupations and our alarms, then it truly isn’t worth the trouble of changing. The sole charm of life, my dear colleague, it to let oneself live!”
“Not at all! The worst danger we face is that of thus abandoning ourselves to the suggestions of instinct and the illusions of sentiment!”
“I believe I perceive,” I replied, “that your club is a puritan society of temperance and continence, doubtless vegetarian, anti-alcohol, anti-tobacco, anti-everything you like: a union of neo-quakers forming one of the thousand varieties of the salvationist species.”
My man shrugged his shoulders and accelerated his pace. He opened a door in order to usher me into an empty, sonorous and chilly conference hall, in which the voice of an orator could not resound very often.
He pointed at the speaker’s podium and said: “It’s there that Reverend Lowster developed his idea for the first time, defined the action of our moral force and revealed the goal that we ought to pursue—a goal far more elevated than you suppose.”
“I’d be very grateful to you if, even though you think me unworthy, you’d care to acquaint me with it?”
My loquacious journalist did not need to be asked twice, and, taking Lowster’s place, he said:
“These are the Reverend’s own words: ‘God has said: multiply and increase. Now, what do we see today? We are multiplying, but we are decreasing. Why? Because, although we apply all our efforts to make our businesses prosper, we leave to nature—which is to say, to chance—the care of making our species prosper and our race increase. Blind nature goes straight ahead and sows life without worrying about the terrain on which it falls, without worrying about the consequences; whether the seed produces the blind or the lame, cretins or cripples, is irrelevant; all that matters is that it grows. Now, is it at hazard that the laborer throws seed into a field? No. If Scripture remade the base and vile calculation of interest, it would not say that our descendants ought to be the produce of a hazard too often regretted, but the beautiful harvest of a planned insemination, made in favorable conditions. Thus, to follow the path of God and work as honest Yankees for the future of our race: Leave nothing to chance!’”
This little sermon, pronounced in a pastoral tone, instead of enlightenment, served only to sow confusion in my mind, but, as I had noticed a number of old ladies in the reading room, I thought I understood.”
“I get it,” I said. “Your club is a model matrimonial agency.”
“Not at all! Listen to me closely: we want to found a race of elite men and women, capable of playing the formidable role that the future reserves for them; for that, we have such a mixture of bloodlines among the inhabitants of the Union that it’s indispensable to maintain a pure Yankee race.”
“I must say right away…I confess to your humbly that I would never have been able to suppose that the Reverend Lowther, in order to ameliorate the American race, would use a method more specifically reserved for the equine race.”
My amiable guide seemed indignant at my assumption. His jaundiced face blushed a prudish orange. He made one of those American grimaces that is to ours what a leaden cloud is to a light mist. Then his pursed lips let fall these scornful words: “Reverend Lowster does not understand selection in the same way as Parisian devils!”
“How the devil does he understand it, then? If he proscribes the game of love as a game of chance, and banishes all calculation, I don’t really see what’s left.”
“Moral force!”
I stared at my interlocutor. “My dear chap,” I said, “I know that you like to mystify those of our colleagues who come from the far side of the water to see what is happening here. In France, a number of investigations of the United States have appeared in which it is obvious that my compatriots have been played for fools by yours. I reply to you that mine will not be one of those, and that you will not claim the head of the correspondent of the Universal Informer with impunity.”
Having said that, in a slightly dry tone, I followed him into the lunch room.
There, I was not a little astonished to see young and elegant unmarried women, some with flame-colored hair and languid eyes, others brunettes with white complexions and fiery gazes—who, according to all the evidence, were pursuing violent flirtations with furiously enterprising gentlemen.
“Well, my dear friend,” I said, jogging the elbow of the Reverend Lowster’s disciple, “here are some individuals who see to me to have left their moral force in the cloakroom.”
“Don’t you believe it. They’re all good Yankees, for the most part special people. Some of them are worth I don’t know how many millions of dollars! None of them will allow themselves to be surprised by chance; they’re all too well aware of what they owe to the Republic, and are awaiting favorable conditions to endow it with elite citizens.”
My curiosity was boundless; I wanted to know what those conditions were, hoping one day to impart precious knowledge to my fatherland, which might perhaps permit it to regenerate itself too. But Reverend Lowster had gone into such minute detail and the conditions required, as listed by his disciple, were so numerous and so contradictory, that it seemed to me to be impossible, at first glance, that the two subjects indispensable to the…regeneration could ever encounter one another simultaneously in favorable conditions.
We then found ourselves perched side by side on those high bar-stools without which one cannot drink a good cocktail. And it was not by chance, as you can imagine, that we started drinking. My transatlantic colleague had observed my fit of bad temper, and, perhaps fearing that I might see through the whole bluff of morally regenerative heroism, that I might perceive the all-too-human realities behind that décor of evangelical respectability, wanted to get back into my good graces. Perhaps he had judged it prudent thus to facilitate the acceptance of explanations that really were a little difficult to swallow.
I had listened to him without saying a word, and when he had finished, I paused for a while with my nose in my glass, wondering whether I ought to get indignant or laugh.
This Reverend was a brave and worthy pastor, whose sincerity, so far as I was concerned, as not subject to a shadow of a doubt, but who, in wanting to reconcile divine precepts and worldly restrictions, had not seen any further than his apostolic and regenerative zeal. Obviously, he was not the first who had sought to tame nature by means of will-power; the others, it is true, had not preached a crusade against chance or founded a club—but they weren’t Americans! More modern than all those saintly individuals, Lowster had not entered into an overt conflict with nature; he merely aspired to domesticate it. Like the engineers who had taken possession of the lightning in order to serve as the motor of industrial progress, he had taken possession of that other lightning which is love, in order to make it serve for the amelioration of his race. The project was grandiose; the execution seemed to me to leave much to be desired.
“That’s made you think,” my companion went on, thinking that he had triumphed over my skepticism.
“Yes,” I replied. “Everything you’ve told me is very wisely thought out—but don’t you fear that Reverend Lowster of Cincinnati, in obedience to God’s second principle, has misunderstood the first, and that, in trying to ensure the physical and intellectual development of the race, he might injure its multiplication?”
“Multiplication is the affair
of the masses, of the poor, the wretched, manual workers—proletarians, in a word—who, as the name indicates, whatever we say and whatever we do, will always pullulate. We reserve ourselves, for giving birth only to a few geniuses—leaders of men.”
“I don’t doubt that in future, posterity will be very grateful to you for the efforts you’re making to elevate it to presently-inaccessible heights of human thought; unfortunately, the results seem to me to be rather problematic.”
“Why is that?”
“Because you’re demanding from your initiates a sacrifice beyond their moral force.”
“One can always be master of one’s sentiments.”
“That’s possible; but Scripture itself recognizes that certain temperaments are subject to an insatiable avidity, and...”
“For those, ‘there are accommodations with heaven,’” said my Yankee, softly, in excellent French.52
“Of course!” I cried. “Now I understand how the New Life Club works!”
“Would you like me to put you up for membership?”
“No, there’s no need,” I said, shaking his hand. “Only, when you’ve created the geniuses, be good enough to send me a telegram.”
III. The Professor
Finding myself at an American exhibition, hazard linked me in conversation with a young Yankee, very blond, very tall, very muscular and exceedingly clean-shaven, who passed indifferently and stiffly, looking straight ahead, through the midst of the most authentic marvels. When I expressed my astonishment at the scant interest he seemed to be taking in the enormous exhibition he said:
“All that you see here: these incomparable works of art, these titanic achievements, these stupefying inventions, this colossal effort of human genus; is nothing—nothing!—compared to the discovery of Professor Fuss. Remember the name of that great genius, which, in a few years time, will equal those of Galileo and Newton, if it does not surpass them.”
“Tell me quickly,” I demanded, “of what the discovery of this illustrious scientist consists.”
“A man of science first and foremost, Professor Fuss is a patient observer and a meticulous experimenter. He does not want to reveal anything of his endeavors before having checked and rechecked the results of his research and acquired absolute certainty.”
“Can’t you at least indicate the direction his research is oriented?”
“That’s impossible. I promised to maintain secrecy. Go see him; he’s a very affable man, and perhaps for you—who are French, and hence skeptical—he’ll make an exception to the reserve he maintains with his compatriots, whom he knows to be too prompt to enthusiasm and too prone to put a discovery into action before it is complete.”
“Where does this extraordinary men live? I’ll go as soon as possible.”
“He’s quite simply the Professor of Experimental Physiology at the Free University of Denver, Colorado. Mention my name when you introduce yourself and you’ll be well-received, I can assure you.”
The young Yankee scribbled a few words on a card, which he handed to me, and for which I thanked him with the sincere effusion of a reporter notified of an unknown prodigy, an impending sensational event or a strange, mysterious and formidable person to interview.
Two days later, I took the train to Denver, and, scarcely having disembarked, took a taxi to the Free University, which occupied a series of veritable palaces in the middle of an immense park. Fortunately, Professor Fuss was in his. I sent him my card, along with the one the young Yankee had given me. A few minutes later, a gentleman whom one would not readily have taken for a flunkey took me to a kind of bar. In the middle, standing on crooked legs, was a small man, certainly of mixed race, with a large forehead and energetic features, whose singularly keen eyes and disquieting rictus rendered him strange. In a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his braces showing, he seemed to be awaiting a sparring-partner for a boxing bout. That was Professor Fuss.
Aha!” he said to me. “You’re a Frenchman, and a journalist. I’m doubly pleased to meet you. It’s lunch time; if you’d like to come with me, it’s no trouble. Choose what you please; the victuals you see here are at your disposal.”
My Yankee had not deceived me; the professor had an ironic affability. Once having greeted me, however, without paying any more attention to me, he attacked a ham, detaching a large slice therefrom, which he set about consuming, while muttering bitterly.
“Oh, France…I know it. I’ve been there, to France. What a sad country! The French really are the worst people. An exhausted race, finished. There are no longer any people or ideas there—nothing!”
I tried to protest and cite the names of our most eminent and respected masters.
“Get away! Scientific smugglers all! Because they dress themselves up with titles and are heaped with honors, they think they’re something! No, they’re donkeys, pack-donkeys—and what’s worse, impotent. And as, in spite of their stupid pride, they sense their inferiority, they force themselves by any means to prevent the hatching of genius. Any slightly elevated concept surpasses them, any boldness confuses them. Not only don’t they dare to confront the questions that emerge from the banal cycle of our familiar knowledge, but they deny others the right to search the unknown, to go any further in the science of life. And they laugh—yes, Monsieur, they laugh and shrug their shoulders—when a man like me comes to talk to them about research as simple, as logical and as far-reaching as that to which I devote myself. How stupid!”
His words were pierced by an evident rancor. I inferred that the illustrious professor most have been turned away, more or less politely, by our official scientists. I came to their defense hotly, affirming that there must have been a misunderstanding, and that, on the contrary, our great masters were often very quick to appropriate a foreigner’s ideas, and that, in any case, their well-known courtesy was not in accordance with what he was saying about them. I made an effort to get back to the point, and asked him, if it was not too great an indiscretion on my part, to indicate to me, as a layman, if not the actual nature of his research, at least the objective toward which it was directed.
“I’m work,” he replied, “for the improvement of the human race.”
“An admirable problem,” I exclaimed, “but how arduous! For centuries now, elite thinkers have been striving to find a solution for it, and we haven’t glimpsed one yet.”
“Because they’re going about it the wrong way,” the professor replied, curtly.
“Really?” I said, giving my voice the flattering, respectful and pressing inflexion of an interlocutor burning to know more.
The little man poured the contents of various bottles into a tall glass, added ice cubes and stirred it slowly. A sarcastic smile cleared the grimace from his face.
“Well,” he said, “you Frenchmen, since your Revolution, imagine you can arrive at that improvement by means of words and phrases. Wrong, Monsieur—a grave error. If the prejudice inherent in your race weren’t blinding you, you’d recognize, as I do, that in your country, in spite of the efforts of legislators, the moral level is unchanging, intellectualism is stagnating and inferiority remains. The German have tried scientific culture, and the English physical culture, without achieving better results. The history of all times and all nations proves to us that we rotate invincibly in the same circle, fall back into the same errors and the same faults as our predecessors; and everything leads us to believe that our heirs will do the same. In any case, that observation can only astonish a superficial observer; for anyone who knows, can see and can reason, it’s obvious that it can’t be otherwise.”
Emphasizing every word, Professor Fuss repeated: “It can’t be otherwise,” and set about absorbing the iced mixture in small sips.
“Dare I demand, Master, why that is?”
“It’s simply because our brain isn’t capable of anything more. It’s so crammed and stuffed with knowledge of all sorts that it’s no longer possible to get the slightest new idea into it. Cranial capacity
has its limits; they’re bursting!”
“But you, Professor, are living proof to the contrary?”
“The man of genius is an exception. It has been said, quite justly, that he’s a monster. His case is a subject of teratology; I’m not talking about that. I’m concerned with normal brains. Well, in France, for example, you talk a great deal of implanting general ideas in the minds of your compatriots: of universal good will, humanity, justice, solidarity and I don’t know what else. It’s absurd! It’s tantamount to wanting the contents to be greater than the container. These conceptions are treated as utopian, and that’s perfectly reasonable. Before demanding a machine to produce more, it’s imperative to increase its power. Before trying to inculcate more elevated notions into individuals, it’s necessary to enlarge their skulls.”
With these concluding words, Professor Fuss stood up. Terrified by the operation of enlargement to which the little man wanted to subject our poor normal heads, I wondered anxiously whether he might have lost his own. I looked at him attentively. Nothing in his tortured expression—that of a scientist—his strict attitude, his cold and correct elocution indicated derangement. I risked a question.
“Undoubtedly it would be desirable to augment cranial capacity, but I can’t quite see what orthopedic apparatus one could employ to obtain such a result?”
Investigations of the Future Page 15