It wields, no doubt, a considerable influence, but only because it is exclusively the reflection of the opinions of crowds and of their incessant variations.Become a mere agency for the supply of information, the press has renounced all endeavour to enforce an idea or a doctrine.It follows all the changes of public thought, obliged to do so by the necessities of competition under pain of losing its readers.The old staid and influential organs of the past, such as the Constitutionnel, the Debats, or the Siecle, which were accepted as oracles by the preceding generation, have disappeared or have become typical modern papers, in which a maximum of news is sandwiched in between light articles, society gossip, and financial puffs.There can be no question to-day of a paper rich enough to allow its contributors to air their personal opinions, and such opinions would be of slight weight with readers who only ask to be kept informed or to be amused, and who suspect every affirmation of being prompted by motives of speculation.Even the critics have ceased to be able to assure the success of a book or a play.They are capable of doing harm, but not of doing a service.The papers are so conscious of the uselessness of everything in the shape of criticism or personal opinion, that they have reached the point of suppressing literary criticism, confining themselves to citing the title of a book, and appending a "puff" of two or three lines.[22] In twenty years' time the same fate will probably have overtaken theatrical criticism.
[22] These remarks refer to the French newspaper press.--Note of the Translator.
The close watching of the course of opinion has become to-day the principal preoccupation of the press and of governments.The effect produced by an event, a legislative proposal, a speech, is without intermission what they require to know, and the task is not easy, for nothing is more mobile and changeable than the thought of crowds, and nothing more frequent than to see them execrate to-day what they applauded yesterday.
This total absence of any sort of direction of opinion, and at the same time the destruction of general beliefs, have had for final result an extreme divergency of convictions of every order, and a growing indifference on the part of crowds to everything that does not plainly touch their immediate interests.Questions of doctrine, such as socialism, only recruit champions boasting genuine convictions among the quite illiterate classes, among the workers in mines and factories, for instance.Members of the lower middle class, and working men possessing some degree of instruction, have either become utterly sceptical or extremely unstable in their opinions.
The evolution which has been effected in this direction in the last twenty-five years is striking.During the preceding period, comparatively near us though it is, opinions still had a certain general trend; they had their origin in the acceptance of some fundamental belief.By the mere fact that an individual was a monarchist he possessed inevitably certain clearly defined ideas in history as well as in science, while by the mere fact that he was a republican, his ideas were quite contrary.A monarchist was well aware that men are not descended from monkeys, and a republican was not less well aware that such is in truth their descent.It was the duty of the monarchist to speak with horror, and of the republican to speak with veneration, of the great Revolution.There were certain names, such as those of Robespierre and Marat, that had to be uttered with an air of religious devotion, and other names, such as those of Caesar, Augustus, or Napoleon, that ought never to be mentioned unaccompanied by a torrent of invective.Even in the French Sorbonne this ingenuous fashion of conceiving history was general.[23]
[23] There are pages in the books of the French official professors of history that are very curious from this point of view.They prove too how little the critical spirit is developed by the system of university education in vogue in France.I cite as an example the following extracts from the "French Revolution"of M.Rambaud, professor of history at the Sorbonne:
"The taking of the Bastille was a culminating event in the history not only of France, but of all Europe; and inaugurated a new epoch in the history of the world!"With respect to Robespierre, we learn with stupefaction that "his dictatorship was based more especially on opinion, persuasion, and moral authority; it was a sort of pontificate in the hands of a virtuous man!" (pp.91 and 220.)At the present day, as the result of discussion and analysis, all opinions are losing their prestige; their distinctive features are rapidly worn away, and few survive capable of arousing our enthusiasm.The man of modern times is more and more a prey to indifference.
The general wearing away of opinions should not be too greatly deplored.That it is a symptom of decadence in the life of a people cannot be contested.It is certain that men of immense, of almost supernatural insight, that apostles, leaders of crowds--men, in a word, of genuine and strong convictions--exert a far greater force than men who deny, who criticise, or who are indifferent, but it must not be forgotten that, given the power possessed at present by crowds, were a single opinion to acquire sufficient prestige to enforce its general acceptance, it would soon be endowed with so tyrannical a strength that everything would have to bend before it, and the era of free discussion would be closed for a long time.Crowds are occasionally easy-going masters, as were Heliogabalus and Tiberius, but they are also violently capricious.A civilisation, when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long.Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference with respect to all general beliefs.
