Part 6

Let any one say after this that novels do not assist civilization.--I will say nothing of the tobacco agents, grocers, and dealers in fried potatoes, who have a very great interest in this branch of literature, the paper used therein being, as a general rule, of a superior quality to that used by the newspapers.

Verily it is enough to make one split one's sides with laughter to hear messieurs the republican or Saint-Simonian utilitarians hold forth.--In the first place, I should be glad to know the exact meaning of that great lubberly substantive with which they daily lard the empty void of their columns, and which serves them as a sort of shibboleth and sacramental term:--Utility; what is the word, and to what is it applied?

There are two kinds of utilities, and the meaning of the word is always relative. What is useful for one is not for another. You are a cobbler, I am a poet.--It is useful for me to have my first line rhyme with my second.--A dictionary of rhymes is of great utility to me; you have no use for it in cobbling an old pair of boots, and it is fair to say that a cobbler's knife would be of no great use to me in writing an ode.--Now, you will remark that a cobbler is much above a poet, and that we could get along better without the latter than without the former. Without undertaking to cry down the illustrious profession of cobbler, which I honor equally with the profession of constitutional monarch, I will humbly confess that I should prefer to have my shoe down at heel rather than to have my lines haltingly rhymed, and that I should be more willing to go without boots than without poems. As I rarely go out, and walk more readily on my head than on my feet, I wear out fewer shoes than a virtuous republican who does nothing but run from one government department to another trying to induce somebody to toss him an office.

I know that there are those who prefer windmills to churches, and the bread that feeds the body to that that feeds the soul. To them I have nothing to say. They deserve to be economists in this world and also in the other.

Is there anything absolutely useful on this earth and in this life that we live? In the first place, there is very little use in one being on the earth and living. I challenge the most erudite of the band to say of what use we are, unless it be to subscribe neither to the Constitutionnel nor to a journal of any sort.

Secondly, the utility of our existence being admitted a priori, what are the really useful things to maintain it? A plate of soup and a bit of bread twice a day are all that we need to fill the stomach, in the strict acceptation of the word. The man for whom a coffin six feet by two will be enough and more than enough after his death, does not need much more space during his life. A hollow cube, seven or eight feet broad, long and deep, with a hole to breathe through, a single cell in the hive, is all that he needs to lodge him and to keep the rain from falling on his back. A quilt, rolled properly about his body, will protect him from the cold as well as, yes, better than, Staub's most stylish and elegant frock-coat.

With that a man can exist, theoretically. They say that one can live on twenty-five sous a day; but to keep from dying is not living; and I cannot see wherein a city organized on utilitarian principles would be more agreeable to live in than Père La Chaise.

Nothing beautiful is indispensable to life.--If flowers should be suppressed, the world would not suffer materially; and yet who could wish that there were no flowers? I would rather give up potatoes than roses, and I do not believe there is more than one utilitarian in the world capable of digging up a bed of tulips to make room for cabbages.

What good purpose does female beauty serve? Provided that a woman is well-developed physically, in a condition to receive a man and to produce children, she will always be good enough for the economist.

What is the use of music? or painting? Who would be foolish enough to prefer Mozart to Monsieur Carrel, Michael Angelo to the inventor of white mustard?

Nothing is really beautiful but that which cannot be made use of; everything that is useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and the needs of man are vile and disgusting, like his poor, weak nature.--The most useful part of a house is the privy.

I myself, with due respect to those gentlemen, am one of those to whom superfluities are necessaries--and my liking for people and things is in inverse ratio to the services they render me. I prefer a Chinese vase, covered with dragons and mandarins, which is of no use to me at all, to a certain other vase, which is useful to me; and that one of my talents which I prize most highly is my inability to guess riddles and charades. I would very willingly renounce my privileges as a Frenchman and a citizen to see an authentic painting by Raphael, or a beautiful nude woman: the Princess Borghese, for instance, when she posed for Canova, or Julia Grisi when she was in her bath. For my part I would gladly consent to the return of that cannibal of a Charles X., if he would bring me, from his castle in Bohemia, a hamper of Tokay or Johannisberg, and I would agree that the suffrage laws were broad enough, if some of the streets were more so and other things less so.--Although I am not a born dilettante, I prefer the noise of squeaking fiddles and bass drums to that of Monsieur le Président's bell. I would sell my trousers to buy a ring and my daily bread for sweetmeats.--The most becoming occupation for a polished man is, it seems to me, to do nothing, or to smoke his pipe or his cigar analytically. I also have a high regard for those who play at skittles and for those who write good poetry. You see that my principles are very far from being utilitarian, and that I shall never become editor of a virtuous newspaper unless I am converted, which would be droll enough.

Instead of awarding a Monthyon prize as a reward of virtue, I would prefer to give, like Sardanapalus, that great philosopher who has been so misunderstood, a handsome premium to the man who should invent a new form of pleasure; for enjoyment seems to me the true aim of life and the only useful thing in the world. God has so willed it, for it was He who made women, perfumes, light, lovely flowers, good wines, prancing horses, greyhounds, and Angora cats; nor did he say to his angels: "Be virtuous," but: "Love;" and he gave us a mouth, more sensitive than the rest of the skin, with which to kiss women, eyes uplifted to see the light, a subtle sense of smell to inhale the soul of flowers, well-knit thighs to press the sides of stallions and fly swifter than thought without railroad or steamboat, delicate hands with which to caress the long head of the greyhound, the velvety back of the cat, and the gleaming shoulders of creatures of doubtful virtue; in a word, he bestowed only upon us the threefold, glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, of striking a light, and of making love at all seasons, which distinguishes us from the brute much more than the custom of reading newspapers and drawing maps.

Mon Dieu! what an idiotic thing is this alleged perfectibility of the human race that is being dinned into our ears! One would say in truth that man is a machine susceptible of improvements, and that the more careful adjustment of a wheel, a counterpoise more conveniently placed, might make it work more smoothly and more handily. When they have succeeded in giving man a double stomach, so that he can chew his cud like an ox, and eyes in the back of his head, like Janus, so that he can see those who stick out their tongues at him behind his back, and contemplate his unworthiness in a less uncomfortable position than that of the Venus Callipyges at Athens, and in planting wings on his shoulder blades so that he will not be obliged to pay six sous to ride in an omnibus; when they have given him a new organ, well and good: then the word perfectibility will begin to mean something.

Since all these fine ameliorations, what has been done that was not done as well and better before the deluge?

Have we succeeded in drinking more than they drank in the days of ignorance and barbarism--old style? Alexander, the doubtful friend of the fair Hephæstion, was no small drinker, although there was no Journal des Connaissances Utiles in his day, and I am unable to conceive how any utilitarian, unless he should become oïnopic and more puffed out than the younger Lepeintre or a hippopotamus, could drain the great beaker which he called Hercules' cup. The Maréchal de Bassompierre, who emptied his long boot to the health of the Thirteen Cantons, seems to me a singularly estimable personage in his way and very hard to improve upon. What economist will enlarge our stomachs so that they will hold as many beefsteaks as the late Milo of Crotona, who ate an ox? The bill of fare at Véfour's Café Anglais, or at any other culinary celebrity's that you choose, seems to me very ill-supplied and commonplace compared to the menu of Trimalcion's dinner.--At whose table in these days are a sow and her twelve shoats served on a single platter? Who has eaten muræna and lampreys fattened on man? Do you really think that Brillat-Savarin has improved upon Apicius? Could Vitellius's big tripe-man find at Chevet's the wherewithal to fill his famous Minerva's shield with pheasants' and peacocks' brains, tongues of flamingoes and scarus livers?--The oysters you eat at the Rocher de Cancale are such a great delicacy compared with the oysters of Lucrin, for which a lake was made expressly.--The little establishments in the suburbs kept by the marquises of the Regency were wretched little boxes, if we compare them with the villas of the Roman patricians at Baiæ, Capri, and Tibur. The Cyclopean splendor of the great voluptuaries who erected everlasting monuments for a day's pleasure should cause us to fall flat on our faces before the genius of antiquity and erase forever from our dictionaries the word perfectibility.

Has a new capital crime been invented? Unfortunately there are only seven of them as before, the number of the just man's backslidings for one day, which is very moderate.--Indeed, I do not think that after a century of progress, at the rate we are travelling, any lover would be capable of renewing the thirteenth labor of Hercules.--Can a man be agreeable to his divinity a single time oftener than in the days of Solomon? Many very illustrious scholars and very respectable ladies answer that question in the negative, and aver that amiability is on the wane. Very good! if that is so, why do you talk of progress?--I know that you will tell me that there is an Upper Chamber and a Lower Chamber, that you hope that everybody will soon be an elector and the number of representatives doubled or trebled. Do you think that there are not enough mistakes in grammar made in the national tribune as it is, and that the deputies are not numerous enough for the vile work they have to do? I can hardly understand the utility of quartering two or three hundred provincials in a wooden barrack, with a ceiling painted by Monsieur Fragonard, there to botch and bungle nobody knows how many absurd or atrocious little laws.--What difference does it make whether it is a sabre, a holy-water sprinkler, or an umbrella that governs us?--It is a club all the same, and I am amazed that progressive men should dispute as to the kind of club that is to make their shoulders tingle, when it would be much more progressive and less expensive to break it and throw the pieces to all the devils.

The only one of you who has any common sense is a madman, a great genius, an imbecile, a divine poet far above Lamartine, Hugo, and Byron; it is Charles Fourrier, the phalansterian, who is all that in his single person: he alone is logical and has the courage to carry his theory through to its inevitable consequence.--He asserts, without hesitation, that man will soon have a tail fifteen feet long with an eye at the end of it; that surely is progress and will permit us to do a thousand fine things we could not do before, such as killing elephants without striking a blow, balancing ourselves on trees without swings, as handily as the most expert ape, doing without sunshade or umbrella by raising the tail above the head like a plume, as squirrels do, who get along very well without umbrellas; and other prerogatives too numerous to mention. Several phalansterians claim that they already have a little tail that asks nothing better than to grow longer, if only God gives them length of days.

Charles Fourrier has invented as many species of animals as George Cuvier, the great naturalist. He invented horses that will be thrice the size of elephants, dogs as large as tigers, fish capable of feeding more people than the three small fishes of the Saviour, which the incredulous Voltaireans believe were poissons d'Avril, and I the text of a noble parable. He has built cities beside which Rome, Tyre, and Babylon are simply mole-hills; he has piled Babels one upon another and built spiral stairways ascending among the clouds to a greater height than all those in John Martinn's engravings; he has conceived I cannot say how many orders of architecture and new sauces; he has drawn a plan for a theatre which would seem immense even to Romans of the Empire, and prepared a dinner menu that Lucius or Nomentanus might have deemed sufficient for a dinner to their friends; he promises to create new forms of pleasure and to develop the organs and the senses; he is to make women fairer and more voluptuous, men more robust and sturdy; he guarantees you children and proposes to reduce the population of the world so that every one will be in easy circumstances; which is more reasonable than to urge paupers to make other paupers, with the idea of shooting them down in the streets when they breed too fast and sending them bullets instead of bread.

Progress is possible in no other way.--All the rest is bitter mockery, buffoonery without wit, which is not even calculated to deceive gullible fools.

The phalanstery is really a step in advance of the abbey of Thélème, and definitely relegates the earthly paradise to the ranks of those things that are altogether superannuated and old-fashioned. The Thousand and One Nights and Madame d'Aulnay's Tales alone can contend successfully with the phalanstery. What fertility! what invention! There is material there from which to supply marvels for three thousand cartloads of romantic or classic poems; and our versifiers, whether academicians or not, are paltry inventors compared to Monsieur Charles Fourrier, the inventor of startling attractions.--This idea of making use of impulses which people have hitherto sought to repress, is most assuredly a lofty and powerful idea.

Ah! you say that we are making progress!--Suppose that a volcano should open its maw to-morrow at Montmartre, and should make a winding-sheet of ashes and a tomb of lava for Paris, as Vesuvius once did for Stabia, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, and that, some thousand years hence, the antiquaries of that day should make excavations and exhume the corpse of the dead city, tell me what monument would remain standing to bear witness to the splendor of the mighty entombed, the Gothic Notre-Dame?--They would form truly a fine idea of our artistic development when they cleared away the rubbish from the Tuileries, redecorated by Monsieur Fontaine! The statues on Pont Louis XV. would look splendid in the museums of those days. And were it not for the pictures of the ancient schools and the statues of antiquity or the Renaissance crowded together in the gallery of the Louvre, that long shapeless conduit; were it not for the ceiling by Ingres, which would show that Paris was not a Barbary camp or a village of Welches or Topinamboux, the things that would be unearthed from the ruins would be very interesting.--Short swords carried by National Guardsmen, firemen's helmets, coins struck from pyriform dies, that is the kind of thing they would find instead of the beautiful, curiously-carved weapons that the Middle Ages left in the recesses of their towers and ruined tombs, the medallions that fill the Etruscan vases and pave the cellars of all Roman buildings. As for our wretched veneered furniture, all the cheap boxes, naked and ugly and shabby, that we call commodes or secretaries, and all our shapeless, fragile utensils,--I trust that time would have been compassionate enough to destroy the last vestige of them.

Once, this whim of erecting a magnificent, pretentious monument took possession of us. In the first place we were obliged to borrow the plan from the old Romans; and even before it was finished, our Panthéon tottered on its legs like a child with the rickets and staggered like a drunken man, so that we had to give it crutches of stone, otherwise it would have measured its shameful length on the ground, in sight of all the world, and would have given the nations something to laugh at for more than a hundred francs.--We thought it better to set up an obelisk on one of our squares; we had to go and filch it at Luxor, and we were two years bringing it home. Old Egypt lined its roads with obelisks as we line ours with poplars; it carried bundles of them under its arm as the market-gardener carries bunches of asparagus, and carved a monolith from the sides of its mountains of granite more easily than we make tooth-picks or ear-picks. A few centuries ago Raphael was living and Michael Angelo; now we have Monsieur Paul Delaroche, all because we are progressing.--You boast of your Opéra; ten Opéras like yours could dance a saraband in a Roman circus. Monsieur Martin, himself, with his tame tiger and his poor gouty lion, sound asleep like a subscriber to the Gazette, makes a very poor showing beside the gladiator of antiquity. Take your benefit performances that last till two o'clock in the morning--what do they amount to when you think of the games that lasted a hundred days, of the plays in which real ships really fought in real water; in which thousands of men conscientiously cut one another in pieces;--aye, turn pale O heroic Franconi!--in which, when the sea retired, the desert arrived with its roaring tigers and lions, awe-inspiring supernumeraries who did duty but once; in which the leading rôle was taken by some robust, athletic Dacian or Pannonian whom they would very often have found it embarrassing to produce at the end of the play, his sweetheart being a lovely and dainty Numidian lioness who had fasted for three days?--Does it not seem to you that the rope-dancing elephant was superior to Mademoiselle Georges? Do you suppose Mademoiselle Taglioni is a better dancer than Arbuscula, and Perrot better than Bathyllus? I am convinced that Roscius could have given points to Bocage, excellent actor though he is,--Galeria Coppiola played ingénue rôles when she was more than a hundred years old. It is fair to say that the oldest of our jeunes premières is but little more than sixty, and that Mademoiselle Mars shows no sign of progress in that direction: they had three or four thousand gods in whom they believed, and we have only one and we hardly believe in him; that is a strange kind of progress.--Was not Jupiter a better man than Don Juan and a much more successful seducer? Verily, I cannot see what we have discovered or even improved.

After the progressive journalists, as if to serve as a foil to them, come the blasé journalists, who are usually twenty or twenty-two years old, who have never left their quarter and have as yet lain only with their housekeeper. Everything bores them, tires them out; they are sated, blasé, used up, inaccessible. They know beforehand what you are going to say to them; they have seen, felt, heard, experienced everything that it is possible to see, feel, hear, and experience; the human heart has no corner so dark that they have not held a lantern to it. They say to you with marvellous self-possession: "The human heart is not like that; women are not made so; that character is falsely drawn;"--or else: "What's this! always love or hatred! always men and women! Can't you talk about something else? Why, man is worn threadbare, and woman, more so, since Monsieur de Balzac took a hand.

"'Who will deliver us from men and women?'

"Do you think your fable is new, monsieur? it is new after the fashion of the Pont-Neuf: nothing in the world could be more common; I read it somewhere or other;--when I was out at nurse or somewhere else; it's been dinned into my ears for ten years.--By the way, monsieur, understand that there's nothing I don't know, that everything is worn threadbare for me, and that even if your idea were as virginal as the Virgin Mary, I would swear, none the less, that I had seen it prostituting itself on street corners to the vilest scribblers and the most contemptible pedants."

Journalists of that stamp are responsible for Jocko, Le Monstre Vert, Les Lions de Mysore, and a thousand other charming conceits.

They are constantly complaining of being obliged to read books and see plays. Apropos of a paltry vaudeville, they will talk about flowering almond-trees, limes that perfume the air, the breezes of spring, the odor of the young foliage; they set up for lovers of nature after the style of young Werther, and yet they have never set foot outside of Paris and could not tell a cabbage from a beet.--If it is winter, they prate about the joys of the domestic fireside, and the crackling fire, and the andirons, and the slippers, and the reverie and the state between sleeping and waking; they never fail to quote Tibullus's famous line: