Love, in fact, is the unseen and perennial source of this novel courtesy. The capital importance it has assumed, the strange forms it has worn, the unexpected heights to which it has risen, are perhaps the most significant characteristics of our civilisation. In the glittering and superficial epochs, age of paper and electro-plating, which immediately preceded our present era, love was held in check by a thousand childish needs, by the contagious mono-mania of unsightly and cumbersome luxury or of ceaseless globe-trotting, and by that other form of madness which has now disappeared, the so-called political ambition. It suffered accordingly an immense decline, relatively speaking. To-day it benefits from the destruction or gradual diminution of all the other principal impulses of the heart which have taken refuge and concentrated themselves in it as banished mankind has done in the warm bosom of the earth. Patriotism is dead, since there is no longer any native land, but only a native grot. Moreover the guilds which we enter as we please according to our vocations have taken the place of Fatherlands. Corporate spirit has exterminated patriotism. In the same fashion the school is on the road not to exterminate but to transform the family, which is only right and proper. The best that can be said for the parents of old was that they were compulsory and not always cost-free friends. One was not wrong in preferring in general to them friends who are a species of optional and unselfish relations. Maternal love itself has undergone a good many transformations among our women artists, and one must admit, sundry partial set backs.

But love is left to us. Or rather, be it said without vanity, it is we who discovered and introduced it. Its name has preceded it by a good many centuries. Our ancestors gave it its name, but they spoke of it as the Hebrews spoke of the Messiah. It has revealed itself in our day. In our day it has become incarnate, it has founded the true religion, universal and enduring, that pure and austere moral which is indistinguishable from art. It has been favoured at the outset, beyond all doubt and beyond all expectation by the charm and beauty of our women, who are all differently yet almost equally accomplished. There is nothing natural left in our world below if it be not they. But it appears they have always been the most beautiful thing in nature even in the most unfavourable and ill-favoured ages. For we are assured that never was the graceful curve of hill or stream, of wave or rippling cornfield, that never was the hue of the dawn or of the Mediterranean equal in sweetness, in strength, in richness of visible music and harmony to the female form. There must therefore have been a special instinct which is quite incomprehensible which formerly retained the poor beside their natal river or rock and prevented their emigrating to the big towns, where they might well have hoped to admire at their ease tints and outlines of beauty assuredly far superior to the charm of the locality to whose attractions they fell a victim. At present there is no other country than the woman of one's affections; there is no other home-sickness than that caused by her absence.

But the foregoing is insufficient to explain the unparalleled power and persistence of our love which time intensifies more than it wears out, and consummates as it consumes it. Love, we now at last know, is like air, essential to life; we must look to it for health and not for mere nourishment. It is as the sun once was, we must use it to give us light, not allow it to dazzle us. It resembles that imposing temple that the fervour of our fathers raised in its honour when they worshipped it, unwittingly, at the Paris Opera-house. The most beautiful part of it is the staircase—when one mounts it. We have therefore attempted to make the staircase monopolise the whole edifice without leaving the tiniest room for the hall. The wise man, an ancient writer has said, is to the woman what the asymptote is to the curve, it draws ever nearer but never touches. It was a half crazy fellow named Rousseau who uttered this splendid aphorism and our society flatters itself that it has practised it far better than he. All the same the ideal thus outlined, we are compelled to confess, is rarely attained in all its entity. This degree of perfection is reserved for the most saintly souls, the ascetics, men and women, who wander together, two and two, in the most marvellous cloisters, in the most Raphaelesque cells in the city of painters, in a sort of artificial dusk produced by a coloured twilight in the midst of a throng of similar couples, and on the banks of a stream so to say of audacious and splendid revelations of the nude. They pass their life in feasting their eyes on these waves of beauty, the living bank of which is their own passion. Together they climb the fiery steps of the heavenly staircase to the very summit on which they halt. Then supremely inspired they set to work and produce masterpieces. Heroic lovers are they whose whole pleasure in love consists in the sublime joy of feeling their love growing within them, blissful because it is shared, inspiring because it is chaste.

But for the greater number of us it has been necessary to come down to the level of the insurmountable weakness of the old Adam. None the less the inelastic limits of our food supplies have made it a duty for us rigorously to guard against a possible excess in our population which has reached to-day fifty millions, a figure it can never exceed without danger. We have been obliged to forbid in general under the most severe penalties a practice which apparently was very common and indulged in ad libitum by our forefathers. Is it possible that after manufacturing the rubbish heaps of law with which our libraries are lumbered up, they precisely omitted to regulate the only matter considered worthy to-day of regulation? Can we conceive that it could ever have been permissible to the first comer without due authorisation to expose society to the arrival of a new hungry and wailing member—above all at a time when it was not possible to kill a partridge without a game licence, or to import a sack of corn without paying duty? Wiser and more far-sighted, we degrade, and in case of a second offence we condemn to be thrown into a lake of petroleum, whoever allows himself to infringe our constitutional law on this point, or rather we should say, should allow himself, for the force of public opinion has got the better of the crime and has rendered our penalties unnecessary. We sometimes, nay very often, see lovers who go mad from love and die in consequence. Others courageously get themselves hoisted by a lift to the gaping mouth of an extinct volcano and reach the outer air which in a moment freezes them to death. They have scarcely time to regard the azure sky—a magnificent spectacle, so they say—and the twilight hues of the still dying sun or the vast and unstudied disorder of the stars; then locked in each other's arms they fall dead upon the ice! The summit of their favourite volcano is completely crowned with their corpses which are admirably preserved always in twos, stark and livid, a living image still of love and agony, of despair and frenzy, but more often of ecstatic repose. They recently made an indelible impression on a celebrated traveller who was bold enough to make the ascent in order to get a glimpse of them. We all know how he has since died from the effects.

But what is unheard of and unexampled in our day is for a woman in love to abandon herself to her lover before the latter has under her inspiration produced a masterpiece which is adjudged and proclaimed as such by his rivals. For here we have the indispensable condition to which legitimate marriage is subordinated. The right to have children is the monopoly and supreme recompense of genius. It is besides a powerful lever for the uplifting and exaltation of the race. Futhermore a man can only exercise it exactly the same number of times as he produces works worthy of a master. But in this respect some indulgence is shown. It even happens pretty frequently that touched by pity for some grand passion that disposes only of a mediocre talent, the affected admiration of the public partly from sympathy and partly from condescension accords a favourable verdict to works of no intrinsic value. Perhaps there are also (in fact there is no doubt about it) for common use other methods of getting round the law.

Ancient society reposed on the fear of punishment, on a penal system which has had its day. Ours, it is clear, is based on the expectation of happiness. The enthusiasm and creative fire aroused by such a perspective are attested by our exhibitions, and borne witness to by the rich luxuriance of our annual art harvests. When we think of the precisely opposite effects of ancient marriage, that institution of our ancestors, more ridiculous still than their umbrellas, one can measure the distance between this excessive and pretended exclusive debitum conjugale and our mode of union, at once free and regulated, energetic and intermittent, passionate and restrained, the true corner-stone of our regenerated humanity. The sufferings it imposes on those who are sacrificed, the unsuccessful artists, is not for the latter a cause of complaint. Their despair itself is dear to the desperate; for if they do not die of it, they draw life and immortality from it and from the bottomless pit of their inner depth of woe, they gather deathless flowers, flowers of art or poesy for some, mystic roses for others. To the latter perhaps is given at that moment, as they grope in their inward darkness to touch most nearly the essence of things, and these delights are so vivid that our artists and our metaphysical mystics wonder whether art and philosophy were made to console love or if the sole reason for love's existence is not to inspire art and the pursuit of ultimate truth. This last opinion has generally prevailed.

The extent to which love has refined our habits, and to which our civilisation based on love is superior in morality to the former civilisation based on ambition and covetousness, was proved at the time of the great discovery which took place in the Year of Salvation 194. Guided by some mysterious inkling, some electric sense of direction, a bold sapper by dint of forcing his way through the flanks of the earth beyond the ordinary galleries suddenly penetrated into a strange open space buzzing with human voices and swarming with human faces. But what squeaky voices! What sallow complexions! What an impossible language with no connection with our Greek! It was, without doubt, a veritable underground America, quite as vast and still more curious. It was the work of a little tribe of burrowing Chinese who had had, one imagines, the same idea as our Miltiades. Much more practical than he, they had hastily crawled underground without encumbering themselves with museums and libraries, and there they had multiplied enormously. Instead of confining themselves as we to turning to account the deposits of animal carcasses, they had shamelessly given themselves up to ancestral cannibalism. They were thus enabled, seeing the thousand of millions of Chinese destroyed and buried beneath the snow, to give full vent to their prolific instincts. Alas! who knows if our own descendants will not one day be reduced to this extremity? In what promiscuity, in what a slough of greed, falsehood and robbery were these unfortunates living! The words of our language refuse to depict their filth and coarseness. With infinite pains they raised underground diminutive vegetables in diminutive beds of soil they had brought thither together with diminutive pigs and dogs.... These ancient servants of mankind appeared very disgusting to our new Christopher Columbus. These degraded beings (I speak of the masters and not of the animals, for the latter belong to a breed that has been much improved by those who raised them) had lost all recollection of the Middle Empire and even of the surface of the earth. They heartily laughed when some of our savants sent on a mission to them spoke to them of the firmament, the sun, the moon and the stars.... They listened, however, to the end of these accounts, then in an ironical tone they asked our envoys: "Have you seen all that?" And the latter unfortunately could not reply to the question, since no one among us has seen the sky except the lovers who go to die together.

Now, what did our settlers do at the sight of such cerebral atrophy? Several proposed, it is true, to exterminate these savages who might well become dangerous owing to their cunning and to their numbers, and to appropriate their dwelling-place after a certain amount of cleaning and painting and the removal of numerous little bells. Others proposed to reduce them to the status of slaves or servants in order to shift on to them all our menial work. But these two proposals were rejected. An attempt was made to civilize and to render less savage these poor cousins, and once the impossibility of any success in that direction had been ascertained the partition was carefully blocked up.

VII