Gabriel de Tarde

“ One should read the portrait which he has limned with a bold brush of the last man, sole survivor and heir of a hundred successive civilisations, left to himself yet self-sufficient in the midst of his immense stores of science and art. He is happy as a god because he is omniscient and omnipotent, because he has just discovered the true answer of the Great Enigma, yet dying because he cannot survive humanity. By means of an explosive substance of extraordinary potency he blows up the globe with himself in order to sow the immensity of space with the last remnants of mankind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 sky.... ”

“ Up there innumerable races of mankind under ground, buried, to their supreme joy, in the catacombs of invisible stars, encourage us by their example. Let us act like them, let us like them withdraw to the interior of our planet. Like them, let us bury ourselves in order to rise again, and like them let us carry with us into our tomb, all that is worthy to survive of our previous existence. It is not merely bread alone that man has need of. He must live to think, and not merely think to live. ”

“ M. Tarde gives his world the unexpected, but it comes, not insidiously as a unique difference in every individual and item concerned, but from without. Just as Humanity, handsome and charming, has grouped itself pleasantly, rationally, and in the best of taste for ever in its studios, in its salons, at its little green tables, at its tables d'hôte, in its cabinets particuliers—the sun goes out! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus lifelessness, death, the void in movement would be the rule; and life the exception! Thus the nine-tenths, the ninety-nine hundredths, perhaps, of the solar systems, would idly revolve like senseless and gigantic mill-wheels, a useless encumbrance of space. That is impossible and idiotic, that is blasphemous. Let us have more faith in the unknown! Truth, here as everywhere else, is without doubt the antipodes of appearance. ”

“ Who is the true founder of Sociology? Auguste Comte? No, Menenius Agrippa. This great man understood that government is the stomach, not the head of the social organism. Now, the merit of a stomach is to be good and ugly, useful and repulsive to the eye, for if this indispensable organ were agreeable to look upon, it would be much to be feared that people would meddle with it and nature would not have taken such care to conceal and defend it. What sensible person prides himself on having a beautiful digestive apparatus, a lovely liver or elegant lungs? ”

“ All that glitters is not gold. These splendid constellations which attempt to dazzle us are themselves relatively barren. Their light, what is it? A transient glory, a ruinous luxury, an ostentatious squandering of energy, born of illimitable senselessness. But when the stars have sown their wild oats, then the serious task of their life begins, they develop their inner resources. For frozen and sunless without, they literally preserve in their inviolate centres their unquenchable fire, defended by the very layers of ice. ”

“ With all the energy of my heart, which does not come from the sun—that energy which comes from the earth, from our mother earth buried there below, far, far away, for ever hidden from our eyes—I protest against this vain theory, and against so many articles of faith and religion which I have been obliged hitherto to endure in silence. (Slight murmurs from the centre.) The earth is the contemporary of the sun, and not its daughter; the earth was formerly a luminous star like the sun, only sooner extinct. It is only on the surface that the earth is devoid of movement, frozen and paralysed. ”

“ Youth, beauty, genius, love, infinite treasures of science and art, writers whose pens were of pure gold, artists with marvellous technique, singers one raved about, all that was left of refinement and culture on the earth, was concentrated in this last knot of human beings, which blossomed under the snow like a tuft of rhododendrons, or of Alpine roses at the foot of some mountain summit. ”

“ At its first appearance, the idea of Miltiades had been hailed, and rightly enough, as a flash of genius. But for him, but for his energy, and his eloquence, which was placed at the service of his imagination, but for his forcefulness, his charm, and his perseverance, which seconded his energy, let us add, but for the profound passion that Lydia, the noblest and most valiant of women, had been able to inspire in him, and which increased his heroism tenfold, humanity would have suffered the fate of all the other animal or vegetable species. ”

“ It is imperative that it should cease. It is time to follow Empedocles, Ulysses, Æneas, Dante, to the gloomy abodes of the underworld, to plunge mankind again in the fountain from which it sprang, to effect the complete restoration of the exiled soul to the land of its birth! (Applause here and there.) Besides, there is but this alternative: life underground or death. The sun is failing us: let us dispense with the sun. The plan, which it remains for me to propose, has been worked out for several months past by the most eminent men. ”

“ 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! ”

“ An insufferable sameness of colour, a depressing monotony, a sickening insipidity were the distinctive note of all the acts of the government. People laughed, grew excited, waxed indignant, and got used to it. The result was that at the end of a certain time it was impossible to meet an office-seeker or a politician, that is to say, an artist or literary man, out of his element and in search of the beautiful in an alien sphere, who did not turn his back on the pursuit of a government appointment in order to return to rhyming, sculpture and painting. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The sun was a capricious luminary which went out and was relit at variable hours, shone when it felt disposed, sometimes was eclipsed, or hid itself behind the clouds when one had most need of it, or pitilessly blinded one at the very moment one yearned for shade! Every night,—do we really realise the full force of the inconvenience?—every night the sun commanded social life to desist and social life desisted. ”

“ In this incomparable plain of Chaldea watered by a second Nile there was another still more beautiful and fertile Egypt awaiting resurrection and metamorphosis, an infinite expanse extending as far as the eye could see, to be covered with striking public buildings constructed with magical speed, with a teeming and throbbing population, with golden harvests beneath a sky of changeless blue, with an iron net-work of railways radiating from the town of Nebuchadnesor to the furthest ends of Europe, Africa and Asia, and crossing the Himalayas, the Caucasus, and the Sahara. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We are interested indeed, but at the same time we feel it is outside us and beyond us. To turn one's attention to it is at once to get an effect of presumption, strain, and extravagant absurdity. It is like picking up a spade to attack a mountain, and one's instinct is to put oneself right in the eyes of one's fellow-men at once, by a few unmistakably facetious flourishes. It is the same instinct really as that protective "foolery" in which schoolboys indulge when they embark upon some hopeless undertaking, or find themselves entirely outclassed at a game. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In place of so many pairs of animals which take up so much room, of so many useless seeds, we will carry with us into our retreat the harmonious garland of all the truths in perfect accord with one another; of all artistic and poetic beauties, which are all members one of another, united like sisters, which human genius has brought to light in the course of ages and multiplied thereafter in millions of copies: all of which will be destroyed save a single one, which it will be our task to guarantee against all danger of destruction. ”