Léon Hennique Novel

The democratic rabble is not the Crowd. Ignorant and naive, the Crowd joyfully commits and submits its numberless forces to acclaimed leaders, and it is the Crowd—in service to ideas it adores without understanding them—that has driven the great movements of history. It is the Crowd too, in its obscurity, that bestows what it does not possess: Glory. And it is the Crowd again, true as childhood, yielding to Fiction as the forest yields to wind, that thrills to the poets’ profound emotions, that listens, believes, gilds with the sincerity of its admiration and perpetuates beautiful legends—the Crowd, Shakespeare’s patron. The hollow, clamorous vanity of its individual members characterises the rabble. They know nothing, certainly, neither singly nor collectively, yet they claim, opine, dispute, judge. They have read the newspapers, and their implacable hatred of the Extraordinary sometimes lends them a semblance of logic. They pride themselves on atheism (at bottom, they resent the idea of God for being exceptional) and form a legion of savage Prudhommes with this single word for their entire ideal and gospel: MEDIOCRITY. Such is the fatal product of the “diffusion of enlightenment”—that enormous joke, that monstrous modern ecstasy!^(TN) We should count ourselves fortunate if the scattering of light has merely darkened the world’s horizon: it might have set it ablaze. But there is a confusion here: diffused light is not clarity; clarity does not allow itself to be dispersed. One may reflect and refract it, but one cannot give the sun a double.

Knowing the rabble’s instinct to be contrary to their tendencies, exceptional minds have withdrawn to leave the field clear for the triumphant mob. They remain strangers to all active social manifestation; they scarcely retain any taste save for the speculations of science, philosophy, art and literature. Is it really worth the effort, after all, to attempt directing the rabble? Can democracy be directed? How many years does this society have left? — In these exceptional minds, one senses the century gaining consciousness of itself, wavering between the fear that it stands at the world’s twilight and the hope that it stands at a new world’s dawn.

In any case, ever since the Crowd has been supplanted by the Public—that aristocracy of the rabble, that collection of people who take it upon themselves to think on their own account and, though it is not their destiny, to pronounce upon everything, possessing necessarily incomplete notions about everything—the Poets (to use this word in its broadest sense) stand condemned to solitude. How indeed could they please (they whom divine Intuition keeps within nature) intelligences corrupted by half-knowledge and cast into artifice? — The Public corrupts all it touches. It has so debased the Language that one might challenge any orator to make himself understood in France today if he speaks French, and reading the newspapers is instructive from this perspective¹. — It has made of the theatre, with the criminal complicity of dramatic authors, the turpitude we all know. Thus, successful playwrights have scarcely any rivals in the shame of popularity save fashionable novelists. — But the very breath of this Public, its very bearing, creates an atmosphere unbreathable for the Poet. These People are loud, sneering, argumentative, positive, utilitarian, cold, irreverent. One cannot take them in with grand words—nor with grand ideas. They harbour the same suspicions of Beauty, for the same reasons, as they do of God. The state of soul essential to understanding any work of art has become impossible for them. It would be foolish and vain to try to make these souls drunk on filth and lucre understand that to enter a Poet’s dream, one must forget the immediate interests of daily life, submit to his chosen tones and relations, be initiated into his particular vision, lend him sustained attention. All these efforts demand gifts the world has lost: innocence of spirit, serenity, reflection, freedom from passion—the gift of admiration!

Such were the qualities of the Crowd, and if it did not possess them innately, these were the Graces with which the influence of genius quickened it. It knew how to listen, watch and read, this ignorant Crowd, because it was free from the prejudices of the contemporary Public. It did not go to the theatre seeking the pleasures of happy digestion, but came in search of the great spiritual and sentimental—religious—happiness of a grand forgetting of life’s sadness. For the Crowd, Art was precisely what it did not know; it venerated in Poets the Magi who kept secrets it did not possess. Our Public addresses the Magi with familiar contempt, believes it knows everything and, from tender attachment to its error, lest it be disabused, recoils in horror from any attempt suspected of novelty. It is pitiful to see the gropings, the precautions, the prudences, all that infinitely small and painful diplomacy to which those who brought a Revelation to art have had to resign themselves when they must live by it—all the sacrifices one must make to the Demon of Concession! One must say that along this path some of the best—yes!—of contemporary writers have descended too low. Thanks to the exaggerated concessions they have made, which naturally result in encouraging and anchoring the stupid Public in its stupid tastes—whether for smut, that thing, alas! so very French, or for the most disgusting sentimentalism—they reduce newcomers to Literature either to finding something better still—to please!—in this race towards Nullity, or to adopting some ridiculous posture of protest, of austerity…

Scientists too have been guilty of many wrongs, and whilst maintaining the respect that is their due, these must be stated. Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists had begun that puerile and pernicious work of popularising the sciences: the names crowd upon my pen of writers who, in this century, have continued that task. I know that in the final analysis they cannot be held accountable for the disastrous results they never foresaw; I know that they are animated by good intentions, that they have obeyed that proselytising impulse which causes a new idea, as Carlyle says, to burn in men’s minds far more fiercely than gold burns in their pockets. But it is precisely such unreflecting ardours that precipitate societies into their decline. It is deplorable that our scientists have failed to understand that in popularising science they were decomposing it, that to entrust Principles to inferior memories is to expose them to the uncertainties of unauthoritative interpretations, erroneous commentaries, heterodox hypotheses. The Word enclosed in books is dead letter, and the books themselves may perish (yet the current they set in motion, the breath that emanates from them survives them), and what is to be done if they have breathed forth tempests and unleashed darkness? Such indeed is the clearest result of all this mass of popularisation. Through it our scientists are in the process of surrendering back to the great primordial Mystery the hard-won, successive conquests they had made upon it. Perhaps they follow the irresistible impulse of a supreme law, perhaps it is the grand law of Mind that it should return to ignorance today the inventions of yesterday only to reclaim them tomorrow and thus forever keep itself alert, perhaps such must be the history of our civilisation as it was the history of civilisations past. It is the eternal return of organised bodies to their primal elements which will restore them to life. But perhaps also greater prudence would guarantee Science greater longevity, by maintaining the secondary world longer in modesty. Besides, only the immediate results concern me here, and one must acknowledge that the popularisation of the sciences has contributed not a little to exacerbating people’s vanity. Since they have learnt the address of the bookseller who can procure for them at modest prices the explanation of Creation, since they have heard it said that everything reduces to A = B, the arrogance of imbeciles has grown considerably. Why should one speak to them further of the profundity of Myths and the beauty of Fables? They want nothing but formulae now, two and two make four, that’s all there is at the bottom of everything—and two and two make four have abolished the Grace of Mind. Mind! As if that were still the question! They want nothing but Intelligence now and, by a symbol all too clear, they have left to esprit—once the divine Spiritus—only the sense of a pun. — It is to this overflow of Science beyond its proper domain, that we owe a particular corruption of language, the invasion of pedantic words. There is no longer any peace for an honest man, since he is exposed to reading, to hearing where they have no business being, barbarous and cold vocables such as individuation, concept, etc. — From a more particular viewpoint, the popularisers especially of Exegeses are culpable. People have been terribly flattered to learn that Moses was merely a physician, Jesus merely a man—and the level of the world has been lowered thereby. Far more prudent, far more compassionate too towards human weaknesses were the priests of antiquity who kept within the prudent bounds of Esotericism what it was well the populace should not know, and served them beautiful fables wherein Truth wrapped itself in symbols. The ancient civilisations perished precisely from the intrusion of unworthy adepts into the college of Initiates: as ordinary men could not bear the full light of Initiation, they extinguished it. — But how have our moderns, ballasted with all the experience of history, failed to see that the very principle of popularisation is false! It must be clear and definitive, must it not? And what have they that is so definitive, when their lives are consumed in discussions about first principles? Inevitably, therefore, the scientist who speaks to others than his peers, he who propagates and popularises, is led to lend the authority of dogma to what has only the value of opinion—especially given that he must remain in generalities, without ever descending to that tenebrous depth streaked with lights where one feels Truth shimmer infinitely beneath the finger that presses it. What then is such popularisation but the popularisation of error? And this popularisation, moreover, must be clear, which is to say that the scientist must endeavour to spare the ignorant the pains of initiation. But at such a price Truth would remain incommunicable! By suppressing, between mystery and explanation, the initiation of research, one could only render the explanation itself mysterious. And this is what occurs. “Science consists in transporting mystery into explanation².” This is deceiving mankind; with revolting pretensions to the positive and a great apparatus of solid appearances, it is teaching people the habit of being satisfied with words. I do believe we have reached the time of which Swedenborg spoke: “Spiritual light has descended from the brain into the mouth, where it appears as the gleam of lips and the sound of speech is taken for Wisdom itself³.”

At the very least, it seems evident that between the whole of a society thus kneaded with error and souls enamoured of Truth and Beauty, no alliance is possible.

With the Crowd—that treasury of instinctive forces, the Crowd, capable of errors too, easily seduced by whatever glitters (but by what truly glitters!)—the Poet was in natural communion: the union of a soul with its body! The Spirit breathed life at will into docile matter. Far from being merely half-educated, the Crowd embraced her ignorance, and this very embrace placed her in a state of perpetual spiritual receptivity: through the sincere virtue of its unknowing, the Crowd knew everything. This is only seemingly paradoxical: until our modern age, it is the Crowd who writes history and inspires thinkers—the crowd plus one man. All-and-One: here is the authentic and universal author of those great deeds that live in our memories. The Crowd with Peter the Hermit, the Crowd with Saint Louis—they made the Crusades… The Crowd with Louis XI made France… The Crowd with the Trouvères, the Crowd with Villon—they made the French language.

And here is not the least of those Mysteries that give the mind pause, this double phenomenon, attested throughout the history of linguistics: the omnipotence and fecundity of the Crowd in creating words and their alliances, construction, syntax, the whole genius of Language, whilst the learned⁴, attempting the same task, have proved impotent and barren, reduced in all their collaboration on this grand work to merely cataloguing popular inventions. Worse, they have presumed to add their own contrivances, those laborious productions of theirs, rigid with half-digested Greek and Latin learnt by rote, whose unassimilated chunks appear wholesale in the new word (that antique novelty!). That is Greek or Latin; that is not French⁵.

The public has inherited none of the great virtues of the Crowd, least of all its verbal fecundity, having lost that spontaneous leap of the soul found in those who remain unspoilt and readily marvel at the world—intuitive beings whose very breath creates the atmosphere essential for the birth of Myths.

Myths are no more, nor Fables. Our readers and spectators ask us to celebrate the time-worn platitudes they have been turning over in their minds since time immemorial. Yet Poets come precisely to speak what has never yet been heard. Our readers and spectators want to recognise themselves in our works, to find their own thoughts reflected there along with a mirror of ‘everyday life’. Yet Poets dwell in Dreams where passers-by cannot gain entry without undergoing some form of initiation, brief or lengthy, dreams that stand in direct opposition to The Daily Grind. But the passer-by has no time to waste; business calls, and he demands to understand everything immediately. He insists that the Poet’s first duty is to ‘adopt his point of view’, to offer him fare that’s quickly and easily digested, nothing that might trouble his mind with overly weighty thoughts. ‘After all, what is literature if not a pastime for the educated, an after-dinner diversion?…’

Have you never regarded with a touch of melancholy those railway bookstalls which, if we are to believe them, gather together the masterpieces of contemporary literature? The format is convenient, portable; the print large enough not to strain the eyes; the text clear enough not to strain the mind. Le Roi des montagnes, for instance, or Le cas de M. Guérin—pleasant, ‘easy-going’ works, not without a dash of irony, just enough to give the style that extra fillip to make it ‘flow’ even faster. This railway library strikes me as deeply telling, perfectly suited to the tastes of an age that considers spiritual needs secondary and, believing it ‘saves time’—to what end, alas!—by doing two things at once, now only wants to read whilst ‘on the go’, and only ‘easy-going’ things at that. And with both the taste and necessity for travel ever increasing, this library has a bright future ahead, since ‘literature is the expression of society’.

TN: Morice is saying that this pretentious, ignorant rabble is the disastrous outcome of the “diffusion of enlightenment”—the democratic spread of education and knowledge that was such a cherished ideal of the Enlightenment and 19th century. He’s being deeply ironic: what was meant to elevate humanity has instead produced a mob of pseudo-intellectuals who have read the newspapers and think they know everything. The “enormous joke” and “monstrous modern ecstasy” are his sardonic descriptions of how society celebrates this “diffusion of enlightenment” as progress, when in his view it has actually created something grotesque—a mass of mediocre people with just enough half-knowledge to be dangerous, but not enough wisdom to recognize their limitations.