In order to reply to all these objections it is necessary above all to be well understood. As to minor innovations, and caprices that satisfy the need of movement of our organs, from the very fact that they are animate, it is certain that we are all very eager for these; in proportion of course to our sex, our age, and our degree of intellectual culture. The little child will be happy with a toy, he will experience fear or dread at the sight of a mask, of a large animal or even of a small one; I have seen children frightened by a sparrow, by a fly. Woman takes pleasure in disguising herself in a striking manner, in wearing new garments in which to attend great plays in the theatres, but she has a horror of new religious rites, and of new discoveries, to such a degree that a great number still refuse to use linen and knitted work made by machinery; sewing machines themselves find their way among them only very slowly. (Merlino.)
When it is claimed (Merlino) that savages love novelties, from the fact, related by Ellis, that some of them endeavored to procure Bibles, (taking them, perhaps, for playthings,) or arms of which they had seen the useful effects, their nature is misjudged; since even after many years passed in contact with European civilisation, after having worn its clothing and ornaments, they return naked to their forests, where a warm garment would certainly not be an object of embarrassment. To believe with Cardinal Massaia that they offer themselves voluntarily for vaccination, that they even ask it, is to ignore that even among ourselves, vaccination encounters a great number of adversaries. Does not Stanley relate that in his last journey, an epidemic of smallpox having broken out in the camp, many of the porters, although they saw that the vaccinated Zanzibaris did not die, refused to submit to vaccination?
According to Tarde, the superstitious admiration, the enthusiastic veneration by barbarous peoples of various forms of insanity, often baptised as prophetism and saintliness, scarcely accords with the aversion for novelties, that is to say for singularities, which I attribute to them too liberally. But the cause of that admiration is nothing else than the fear, the ignorance which leads them to take a disease for the inspiration of a God. Nevertheless, I am far from denying the influence of madmen in philoneism and in revolutions (as we shall see in the sequel of this article); yet if we observe the Santons of Africa and their obscenities, we see that it is not for their useful and innovating ideas that barbarians venerate madmen.
The Academician will admire a new species of snail, he will thrill with joy at the discovery of a Phœnician inscription that will enable him to learn the name of a tribal chief, he will go into ecstasies before a greater curvity given to a screw, but he will excommunicate the telephone, the telegraph, the railway, the new laws of Darwin.
The artist, also, will love to trace a new arabesque, to change to blue the prevailing color of the rose, but he will never attempt, directly, with success, new methods. The hatred by all the elevated and academical classes which still besets Zola, Balzac, and Flaubert, the action brought against the last named, and the universal scandals raised by De Goncourt, Boito, Rossini, and Verdi, are there to prove it. The first, at least, who attempts a new method in painting, in literature, etc., will encounter only hatred and contempt. And when we smile at models unchangeably fixed by Egyptian art, we do not think that the Madonna and the Jesus of our painters have not changed for eighteen centuries.
Horace wrote:
"Adeo sanctum est vetus omne poema.
* * * * *
Indignor quicquam reprehendi, non quia crasse
Compositum, illepideve putetur, sed quia nuper."
It is then not true, as is objected against me in France (Journal des Economistes, 1890), that in extending misoneism to the academies, its greatest intensity is excluded from among the ignorant. Each class, each caste has a proportionate ignorance, and a repugnance equally proportional for that of which it is ignorant. We have demonstrated it for genius itself, which is sublime on certain sides only to be the lowest on some others, and we could have a proof of it even in the opposition that the most ardent neophiles, the anarchists, make to this theory of misoneism, of which they are thus themselves a confirmation.