Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/408

396 fads: literary fads like Maeterlinck or the Decadents; philosophic fads like pessimism or anarchism, religious fads like spiritualism or theosophy; hygienic fads like vegetarianism, "glaming," "fresh air," mush diet, or water cure; medical fads like lymph, tuberculin, and serum; personal fads like short hair for women, pet lizards, face enamel, or hypodermic injections of perfumery. And of these orders of fads each has a clientèle of its own.

In many cases we can explain vogue entirely in terms of novelty fascination and mob mind. But even when the new thing is a step in progress and can make its way by sheer merit, it does not escape becoming a fad. It will have its penumbral ring of imitators. So there is something of the fad even in bicycling, massage, antisepsis, skiagraphy, or physical culture. Indeed, it is sometimes hard to distinguish the fad from the enthusiastic welcome and prompt vogue accorded to a real improvement. For the uninitiate the only touchstone is time. Here as elsewhere "persistence in consciousness" is the test of reality. The mere novelty, soon ceasing to be novel, bores people and must yield to a fresh sensation; the genuine improvement, on the other hand, meets a real need and therefore lasts.

Unlike the craze, the fad does not spread in a medium specially prepared for it by excitement. It can not rely on heightened suggestibility. Its conquests, therefore, imply something above mere volume of suggestion. They imply prestige. The fad owes half its power over minds to the prestige that in this age attaches to the new. Here lies the secret of much that is puzzling.

The great mass of men have always had their lives ruled by usage and tradition. Not for them did novelties chase each other across the surface of society. The common folk left to the upper ten thousand the wild scurry after ruling fancy or foolery of the hour. In their sports, their sweethearting, their mating, their child-rearing, their money-getting, their notions of right and duty, they ran on quietly in the ruts deeply grooved out by generations of men. But a century or so ago it was found that this habit of "back"-look opposed to needed reforms the brutish ignorance, the crass stupidity, and the rhinoceros hide of bigotry of the unenlightened masses. Accordingly, the idea of the humanitarian awakening that accompanied the French Revolution was to lift the common folk—the third estate—from the slough of custom to the plane of choice and self-direction. And for a hundred years the effort has been to explode superstition, to diffuse knowledge, to spread light, and to free man from the spell of the past and turn his gaze forward.

The attempt has succeeded. The era of obscurantism is forever past. With school and book and press progress has been taught till with us the most damning phrase is "Behind the