Ariel (6 page)

With relation to the conditions of the life of America, that duty of attaining the true conception of our social state is doubly needful. Our democracies grow rapidly by the continual addition of a vast cosmopolitan multitude, by a stream of
immigration which is merged with a nucleus already too weak to make active effort at assimilation and so contain the human flood by those dikes which an ancient solidity of social structure can alone provide, a secured political order, and the elements of a culture that has become deeply rooted. This rapid growth exposes our future to the dangers of a democratic degeneration which smothers under the blind force of the mass all idea of quality, deprives the social consciousness of all just notion of order, and, yielding its class organization to the rough hands of chance, causes the triumph of only the most ignoble, unjustifiable supremacies.

It is, of course, true that our selfish advantage—not the virtue of it alone— bids us be hospitable. Long since the need of peopling the emptiness of the desert made a famous publicist coin the phrase, “To govern is to populate.” But this famous aphorism contains a truth that must not be closely interpreted; it must not ascribe civilizing virtues to mere number.

To govern is to populate by assimilation, first of all, and then by education and selection. If the appearance and growth in a society of the highest human activities require a dense population, it is precisely because great numbers make possible the most complete division of labour, and the birth of elements of strong leadership which bring about the predominance of quality over quantity. .The multitude, the anonymous mass, is nothing by itself.

It will be an instrument of barbarity or of civilization according as it has or lacks the coefficient of high moral leadership. There is deep truth in Emerson’s paradox that every country on earth should, be judged by its minorities and not majorities. The civilization of a country acquires its grandeur, not by its manifestations of material prosperity and predomi
nance,
but by the higher order of thinking or of feeling made thereby possible. So Comte: it is senseless to pretend that excellence can ever be replaced by number, that by an accumulation of vulgar minds one may hit upon a brain of genius, or by the addition of many mediocre virtues get the equivalent of a deed of heroism. So our democracy, proclaiming the universality and equality of rights, will sanction the ignoble predominance of mere number unless it be careful highly to maintain the idea of human superiorities that are legitimate ; and to make authority, bound to a popular vote, not the exponent of an absolute equality, but (as I remember some young Frenchman said) ‘‘the consecration of a hierarchy based on liberty.”

The clash between the democratic rule and the higher life becomes a fatal reality when that rule imparts the disregard of even legitimate superiorities and the substitution of mechanical government for a
faith in heroism (in Carlyle’s sense). All in civilization that is more than material excellence, economic prosperity, is a height that will be levelled when moral authority is given to the average mind. Though there be no longer external invading hordes to hurl themselves upon the beacon lights of civilization with a might now devastating and now regenerating, the high cul
ture
of to-day should guard itself against the soft and gradual dissolvent work of those other crowds, pacific, even educated —the unescapable multitudes, of the vulgar, whose Attila might well be
personi
fied in “Mr. Homais,” whose heroism is shrewdness, ordered by an instinctive repugnance for what is great; whose device is the leveller. Immovable indifference and quantitative superiority are its attributes, the usual result of its labours; yet is it not entirely incapable of rising to epic heights, usually of anger, giving free reins to its antipathies. Charles Morice called it ‘‘those
phalanxes of ferocious Prudhommes who have for their device Mediocrity, and march together in their hatred of all that is extraordinary.”

Elevated to power, these Prudhommes will make of their triumphant will an organized hunting-party against all that shows aptitude or daring wing to fly high. Its social formula will be a democracy which leads to the consecration of Pope Anyone, the coronation of King Average. They will hate merit as a rebellion. In their dominion all noble superiority will be like a marble statue placed in a miry road to be spattered by the mud of any passing waggon. They will call the dogmatism of common sense, wisdom; mean avidness of heart, gravity; adaptation to the mediocre, sound judgment; and bad taste, manly indifference to trifles. Their notion of justice will lead them either to substitute in history the immortality of great men by the common forgetfulness
of all, or to preserve it with the equal memory of a Mithridates who knew the names of all his soldiers. Its manner of republicanism will resemble that of Fox, who used to submit his projects to the criterion of that member who seemed to him the most perfect type of the country gentleman, judging by the limitation of his faculties and the rudeness of his gestures. Then we shall be in that. Zo
ӧ
cracy that Baudelaire imagined, and Shakespeare’s
Titania,
kissing an ass’s head, will be the emblem of that liberty which calls but for the middling. Never could a tyrant’s conquest compass a more sinister end!

And if you make a prophet of your neighbour who preaches the belittling lesson of the mediocre, if you make him your hero and seek your salvation in his bureaucratic content—you will encounter that rancorous, implacable hostility against all that is beautiful, all that is dignified or delicate in the spirit of humanity which,

even more than its brutal shedding of blood, is so repugnant in the Jacobite tyranny. Before its tribunal the wisdom of a Lavoisier, the genius of a Chenier, the dignity of a Malesherbes, become only faults; amid the' shouting of its Conventions we hear the cry, Distrust that man, he has written a book! Confounding the idea of democratic simplicity with Rousseau's state of nature, it would take the vignette of his first edition as symbolic of the antinomy between democracy and culture, that famous diatribe against the arts and sciences in the name of morality; a satyr, rudely seizing the torch of Prometheus from his hands, only to learn that its flame is mortal to him who touches it!

Equalitarian ferocity has not, indeed, yet shown itself in the democratic development of our century, nor opposed in brutal manner the serenity and liberty of our intellectual growth. But like some savage beast now domesticated, its later
progeny have changed their native ferocity to an artful and ignoble tameness, equalitarianism; and this mild tendency to all that is utilitarian or vulgar may fairly be blamed upon the democracy of the nineteenth century. No sensitive or sagacious mind has ever studied this without anxiously considering some of its results in their social and their political aspect. Contemporary thought, while rejecting that false conception of equality that made the delirium of the French Revolution, has yet maintained a severe scrutiny of the very theory of democracy, which you, who are about to create the future, must begin with; not necessarily to upset, but to educate, the spirit of our time.

Since our century began to assume independence, personal liberty in the evolution of its ideas, German idealist philosophy has rectified the equalitarian Utopia of the eighteenth century and again exalted, albeit with too much
Cesarism,
the
part played in history by individual greatness. Comte’s positivism, not recognizing in the democratic equality anything but a transitory wiping out of ancient class systems, and denying with equal conviction the definitive efficiency of popular rule, sought in the principles of natural classification a basis for that social classification which should be the substitute for the hierarchies recently destroyed. The criticism of the democratic
régime
took a severer form in the generation of Taine and Renan: to this modem Athenian the only equality which appealed was one like that of Athens, ‘‘an equality of demigods.’’ And as to Taine, he wrote “the Origin of contemporary France”; and if, on the one hand, his conception of society as an organism leads him logically to reject all idea of uniformity opposed to the principles of dependent and subordinate organisms, on the other his fine instinct for intellectual selection leads him to abomi
nate
the invasion of the heights by the multitude. Already the great voice of Carlyle had preached against irreverent levelling, and for heroism; meaning by that word any noble superiority; and Emerson echoed this idea in the bosom of the most positivist of democracies. The new science spoke of natural selection as a necessity of all progress; and in art, where the feeling for the exquisite has its most obvious application, those notes reverberated which seek to express the feeling of what we may call the estrangement of the spirit to modem conditions of life. Nor to hear them is it necessary to copy that Parnassian spirit of a delicate and feeble stock which an aristocratic disdain for the present drives to reclusion in the past. Of the constant inspirations of Flaubert—from whom springs directly the most democratized of all the modern schools—none is more intense than his hatred for a mediocrity animated by the spirit of
leveling
and the tyranny of mass. And within contemporary Scandinavian literature, so much preoccupied by social questions, the same idea most often occurs. Ibsen weaves the lofty harangue of his Stockmann upon the affirmation that “compact majorities are the greatest danger to liberty and truth.” And the awesome Nietzsche opposes to the ideal of a mediatized humanity that of supermen who surge above its level like a tidal wave. A lively desire for a reform of the social system which shall make secure the leading of the heroic life and assure to its thought a purer atmosphere of dignity and just consideration is now everywhere apparent, and promises to be a fundamental note in the harmonies of the coming century.

Yet the spirit of democracy is essentially, for our civilization, a principle against which it were idle to rebel. The discontent we feel for the imperfections of its actual historic
form
has often led us to judge unjustly what it has that is both final and fruitful. Thus Renan's wisdom of the aristocrat it is which formulates the most explicit condemnation of its fundamental principle, equality-of-rights, which he believes to be permanently contrary to any possible government of intellectual superiority. He even goes so far as to call it, in a forceful image, “the antipodes of the path of God—since God has not willed that all should live in the same degree of spiritual life." These unjust paradoxes, together with his famous ideal of an omnipotent oligarchy of wise men, are like the exaggerated image in a nightmare of some true thought that has obsessed our waking hours. Failure to recognize the real work of democracy because it has not yet succeeded in reconciling its principle of equality with social safeguards for that of
selection
, is as to ignore the parallel labour of science because, when interpreted in the narrow manner of a certain school, it has
occasionally wrought harm to the spirit of poetry or religion. Democracy and science are indeed the two props on which our civilization rests, the two Fates that spin our future; as Bourget phrases it, “In them we are, we live, we move.”

As it is impossible, therefore, to hope with Renan for a more positive consecration of the moral superiorities, the realization of a hierarchy of reason, any effective dominion of the loftier gifts of intelligence and free will which shall be based on the destruction of that democratic equality,—the only thing left us is to bethink us how to educate, reform, democracy itself. We must seek “how gradually to inculcate in popular feeling and custom the idea of that necessary subordination, the sense of true superiorities, the instinctive yet conscious cultivation of all that multiplies the cipher of human worth in the eye of reason.

Popular education thus acquires its su
preme
interest considered in its relation to such a work, and with thought for the future.
¹
And it is at school where we first mould the clay of the multitude; there come the first and broadest manifestations of social equity; schools consecrated to the equal right of all to learning and the most efficient measures for superior attainment. They have to round out a noble task — to make the sense for order and the will for justice prime objects of its instruction; the realization of all that Authority which is legitimate.

¹
“Plus l'instruction
se répand,
plus
elle
doit faire de part aux i
d
é
es genérales
et
généreuses.
On croit
que
1'instruction populaire doit
ê
tre terre-á-terre.
C’est
le
contraire qui est
la vérité.''

Fouillée:
L' Id
é
e modern du droit,
Libre, 5, iv

v

There is no distinction more easily lost sight of in the popular mind than that between equality of opportunity and actual equality — of influence or of power — among members of organized society. All have the same right to aspire to a moral superiority which may justify and explain
an effective one; but only those who have really achieved the former should be rewarded by the latter. The true and worthy notion of equality rests on the assumption that all reasonable beings are endowed by nature with faculties capable of a noble development. The duty of the State consists in seeing that all its members are so placed as to be able to seek without favour their own
best;
in so arranging things as to bring to light each human superiority, wherever it exists. In such wise, after the initial equality, inequality, when it comes,
will
be justified; few it will be sanctioned either by the mysterious powers of nature or the deserving merit of volition. So understood, democratic equality, far from antagonizing a choice of either customs or ideas, will become the useful instrument of that spiritual election, the native soil for culture. For it is born of intellectual energy; as Tocqueville said, poesy and eloquence, the graces of the mind, the
flashes
of the imagination, all these gifts of the soul, scattered from the heavens at hazard, are co-workers in' the labour of democracy and serve it even when they belong to its enemies; for they tend to bring into relief the natural—not the inherited— greatness of which man’s spirit is capable. Emulation, the most powerful spur of all that urge to action, as well in thought as in other human activities, needs as well equality at the starting-point in order to produce at the finish that inequality which gives the palm to the apter scholar or the greater man. And the democratic regime can carry in its bosom both these two conditions of emulation only when it does not degenerate into a levelling equality, but is content to look forward to it only as a glorious ideal, a counsel of perfection, a future equality of all men in their common ascent to the highest culture possible.