‘Dans les anciennes sociétés l’aristocracie de l’argent était contrepesée par l’aristocracie de la naissance, l’aristocracie de l’esprit, et l’aristocracie du cœur. Mais nous, en abandonnant jusqu’au souvenir même de ces distinctions, nous n’avons laissé subsister que celles que la fortune peut mettre entre les hommes.... Dans les anciennes sociétés la fortune comme la noblesse représentait quelque chose d’autre, si je puis ainsi dire, et de plus qu’elle-même. Elle était vraiment une force sociale parcequ’elle était une force morale. On s’enrichssiait honêtement: de telle sorte que la richesse représentait non-seulement, comme je crois que disent les économistes, le travail accumulé de trois ou quatre générations, mais encore toutes les vertus modestes qui perpétuent l’amour du travail dans une même famille, et querque chose enfin de plus haut, de plus noble, de plus rare que lout cela: le sacrifice de l’égoïsme à l’intérèt, la considération, la dignité du nom. Il n’y a plus d’effort, il n’y a même pas de travail, à l’origine d’un grand nombre de ces nouvelles fortunes, et l’on peut se demander s’il y a, seulement de l’intelligence. Mais, en revanche, il y a de l’audace, et surtout cette conviction que la richesse n’a pas de juges mais seulement des envieux et des adorateurs. C’est ce qui fait aujourd’hui l’immoralité toute particulière et toute nouvelle de cette adoration que nous professons publiquement pour lui. Le temps approche où il ne sera pas fâcheux, mais honteux, d’être pauvre.’
These words of the celebrated French critic, Brunetière, written apropos of La France Juive, are essentially true, even if truth is in them somewhat exaggerated, for in the middle ages riches were often acquired by violence, or pandering to vice in high places. The modern worship of riches per se is a vulgarity, and as he has said, it even amounts to a crime.
Such opinions as his are opposed to the temper of the age; are called reactionary[reactionary], old-fashioned and exclusive; but there is a great truth in them. If the edge were not rubbed off of personal dignity, if the bloom were not brushed off of good taste, and the appreciation of privacy and recueillement greatly weakened, all the personalities of the press and of society would never have been endured or permitted to attain the growth which they have attained. The faults of an age are begotten and borne out of itself; it suffers from what it creates. One looks in vain, in this age, for any indication of any new revolt against the bond of vulgarity, or return to more delicate, more dignified, more reserved manners of life. If socialism should have its way with the world (which is probable), it will not only be vulgar, it will be sordid; all loveliness will perish; and, with all ambition forbidden, heroism and greatness will be things unknown, and genius a crime against the divinity of the Eternal Mediocre. The socialism of Bakounine, of Marx, of Krapotkine, of Tolstoï, is the dreariest and dullest of all earthly things—an Utopia without an idea, a level as blank and hopeless as the dust plains of a Russian summer. It may be a vision, dreary as it is, which will one day be realised. There is hourly growing in the world a dull and sullen antagonism against all superiority, all pre-eminent excellence, whether of intellect, birth or manner; and this jealousy has the germs in it of that universal war on superiority which will be necessary to bring about the triumph of socialism. At present, society is stronger than the socialists; is stronger in Germany, in America, in Italy, in Russia, even in France; but how much longer it will have this superior strength who can say? Socialism being founded, not on love, as it pretends, but on hatred—hatred of superiority—appeals to a malignant instinct in human nature, in the mediocrity of human nature, which is likely to increase as the vast and terrible increase of population makes the struggle of existence more close and more desperate. Socialism will very possibly ravage and lay waste the earth like a hydra-headed Attila; but there will be nothing to be hoped for from it in aid of the graces, the charms, or the dignity of life. Were riches more careful of these, they would hold their own better in the contest with socialism. Were society more elegant, more self-respecting, more intelligent, more distinguished, it would give its defenders much more reason and strength to plead in favour of its preservation.
But society is on the whole both stupid and vulgar. It scarcely knows the good from the bad in anything. If a fashion is set, it follows the fashion sheepishly, without knowing why it does so. It has neither genuine conscience, nor genuine taste. It will stone A. for what it admires in B., and will crucify Y. for what it smilingly condones in Z. It has no true standard for anything. It is at once hypercritical and over-indulgent. What it calls its taste is but a purblind servility. It will take the deformed basset-hound as a pet, and neglect all the beautiful canine races; it will broil in throngs on a bare strip of sand, and avoid all the lovely places by wood and sea; it will worship a black rose, and never glance at all the roses which nature has made. If only Fashion decree, the basset-hound, the bare sand, and the black rose are to it the idols of the hour. It has no consistency; it will change the Japanese for the Rococo, the Renaissance for the Queen Anne, the Watteau for the Oriental, or mix them all together, at the mere weathercock dictate of fashion or caprice. It has no more consistency in its code of morals; it will ask Messalina anywhere as long as a prince speaks to her and she is the fashion; if the prince ceases to speak and she ceases to be the fashion, it puts up its fan at her vices, and scores her name out of its visiting list. There is no reality in either its pretensions to morality or good taste.
When we think of the immense potentialities and capabilities of society, of all that it might become, of all that it might accomplish, and behold the monotony of insipid folly, of ape-like imitation, of consummate hypocrisy, in which it is content to roll on through the course of the years, one cannot but feel that, if its ultimate doom be to be swallowed up and vomited forth again, lifeless and shapeless, by the dragon of socialism, it will have no more than its due; that it will fall through its own sloth and vileness as the empire of Rome fell under the hordes of the barbarians.
That charming writer Gustave Droz has said that railways are at once the symbol and the outcome of the vulgarity of the age; and that whoever lets himself be shot through space like a parcel through a tube, and condescends to eat in a crowd at a station buffet, cannot by any possibility retain dignity of appearance or elegance of manners. The inelegant scrambling and pushing, and elbowing and vociferating of a modern railway station form an exact and painful image of this restless, rude and gregarious century.
Compare the stately progress of a Queen Elizabeth, or a Louis Quatorze through the provinces, calm, leisurely, dignified, magnificent, with the modern monarch or prince always in movement as if he were a commis-voyageur, interviewed ridiculously on a square of red carpet on a station platform, and breathlessly listening to a breathless mayor’s silly and verbose address of welcome; then rushing off, as if he were paid so much an hour, to be jostled at a dog show, hustled at an agricultural exhibition, and forced to shake hands with the very politicians who have just brought before the House the abolition of the royal prerogative. It is not the question here of whether royalty is, or is not, better upheld or abolished; but so long as royalty exists, and so long as its existence is dear to many millions, and esteemed of benefit by them, it is infinitely to be regretted that it should have lost, as it has lost, all the divinity which should hedge a king.
Recent publications of royal feelings and royal doings may be of use to the enemies of royalty by showing what twaddling nothings fill up its day; but to royalty itself they can only be belittleing and injurious in a great degree, whilst the want of delicacy which could give to the public eye such intimate revelations of personal emotions and struggles with poverty, as the publication of the Letters of the Princess Alice of England made public property, is so staring and so strange that it seems like the public desecration of a grave.
Books, in which the most trivial and personal details are published in print by those who should veil their faces like the Latin in sorrow and veil them in their purples, could only be possible in an age in which vulgarity has even reached up and sapped the very foundations of all thrones. One cannot but feel pity for the poor dead princess, who would surely have writhed under such indignity, when one sees in the crudeness and cruelty of print her homely descriptions of suckling her children and struggling with a narrow purse, descriptions so plainly intended for no eyes but those of the person to whom they were addressed. Better—how much better!—have buried with her those humble letters in which the soul is seen naked as in its prayer-closet, and which are no more fit to be dragged out into the garish day of publicity than the bodily nakedness of a chaste woman is fit to be pilloried in a market-place. I repeat, only an age intensely and despairingly vulgar could have rendered the publication of such letters as those royal letters to royal persons possible. Letters of intimacy are the most sacred things of life; they are the proofs of the most intimate trust and confidence which can be placed in us; and to make them public is to violate all the sweetest sanctities of life and of death.
La pudeur de l’âme is forever destroyed where such exposure of feelings, the most intimate and the most personal, becomes possible. In the preface to those letters it is said that the public will in these days know everything about us, and therefore it is better that they should know the truth from us. Not so; this attitude is indeed submission to the mob: it is unveiling the bosom in the market-place. Any amount of calumny cannot destroy dignity; but dignity is forever destroyed when it condescends to call in the multitude to count its tears and see its kisses.