The individual is not logical, or good, or just; nor is he any other distinct thing; and this through the force of his own fatal actions, through the influence of the deviation in the earth’s axis, or for whatsoever other equally amusing cause. Everything individual is always found mixed, full of absurdities of perspective and picturesque contradictions,—contradictions and absurdities that shock us, because we insist on submitting individuals to principles which are not applicable to them.
If instead of wearing a cravat and a bowler hat, we wore feathers and a ring in our nose, all our moral notions would change.
People of today, remote from nature and nasal rings, live in an artificial moral harmony which does not exist except in the imagination of those ridiculous priests of optimism who preach from the columns of the newspapers. This imaginary harmony makes us abhor the contradictions, the incongruities of individuality, at least it forces us not to understand them.
Only when the individual discord ceases, when the attributes of an exceptional being are lost, when the mould is spoiled and becomes vulgarized and takes on a common character, does it obtain the appreciation of the multitude.
This is logical; the dull must sympathize with the dull; the vulgar and usual have to identify themselves with the vulgar and usual.
From a human point of view, perfection in society would be something able to safeguard the general interests and at the same time to understand individuality; it would give the individual the advantages of work in common and also the most absolute liberty; it would multiply the results of his labour and would also permit him some privacy. This would be equitable and satisfactory.
Our society does not know how to do either of these things; it defends certain persons against the masses, because it has injustice and privilege as its working system; it does not understand individuality, because individuality consists in being original, and the original is always a disturbing and revolutionary element.
A perfect democracy would be one which, disregarding hazards of birth, would standardize as far as possible the means of livelihood, of education, and even the manner of living, and would leave free the intelligence, the will, and the conscience, so that they might take their proper places, some higher than others. Modern democracy, on the contrary, tends to level all mentalities, and to impede the predominance of capacity, shading everything with an atmosphere of vulgarity. At the same time it aids some private interests to take their places higher than other private interests.
A great part of the collective antipathy for individuality proceeds from fear. Especially in our Southern countries strong individualities have usually been unquiet and tumultuous. The superior mob, like the lower ones, does not wish the seeds of Cæsars or of Bonapartes to flourish in our territories. These mobs pant for a spiritual levelling; for there is no more distinction between one man and another than a coloured button on the lapel or a title on the calling-card. Such is the aspiration of our truly socialist types; other distinctions, like valour, energy, virtue, are for the democratic steam-roller, veritable impertinences of nature.
Spain, which never had a complete social system and has unfolded her life and her art by spiritual convulsions, according as men of strength and action have come bursting forth, today feels herself ruined in her eruptive life, and longs to compete with other countries in their love for the commonplace and well-regulated and in their abhorrence for individuality.