Page:The inequality of human races (1915).djvu/11

 INTRODUCTION TO GOBINEAU'S "INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES"

Though many people have accused this age of irreligion, there is at least one point of similarity between modern Europe and that pre-Christian Era to which our present religion is due. Just as in ancient Palestine, there are living amongst us two kinds of prophets — the prophets of evil and disaster, and those of bliss, or, as Europe likes to call it, of "progress." As in Palestine of old the public usually sides with the lighter, the optimistic, the more comfortable sort of people, with the prophets of bliss, while Time and Fate invariably decide in favour of the sterner and gloomier individuals, the prophets of evil. In the world to-day as well as in Palestine of old, the prophets of bliss are the false prophets ; the prophets of evil, to-day as of yore, are the true ones. Such a true prophet was Count Arthur de Gobineau.

Even his friends — those few friends whom he gained at the end of his life — still thought him unduly pessimistic. Old Wagner, who introduced him to the German public, thought of brightening his gloom by a little Christian faith, hope, and charity, in order to make the pill more palatable to that great public, which he, the great Stage-manager, knew so well. Other Germans — Chamberlain, Schemann, and the Gobineau school — poured a great deal of water into his wine, sweetened it with patriotic syrups, adulterated it with their own pleasant inventions, which were all too readily swallowed by a gullible and credulous generation. But stern old Gobineau knew the world better than his young and cheerful offspring. He had seen through all that boisterous gaiety of the age, all its breathless labour, all its technical advancement, all its materialistic progress, and had diagnosed, behind it that muddle of moral values which our forefathers have bequeathed to us and which in our genera- tion has only become a greater muddle still. The catastrophe which Gobineau had prophesied to an Aristocracy which had