nt absurdity. It is like picking up a spade to attack a
mountain, and one's instinct is to put oneself right in the eyes of
one's fellow-men at once, by a few unmistakably facetious flourishes. It
is the same instinct really as that protective "foolery" in which
schoolboys indulge when they embark upon some hopeless undertaking, or
find themselves entirely outclassed at a game.

The same instinct one finds in the facetious "parley vous Francey" of a
low class Englishman who would in secret like very much to speak French,
but in practice only admits such an idea as a laughable absurdity. To
give a concrete form to your sociological speculations is to strip them
of all their poor pretensions, and leave them shivering in palpable
inadequacy. It is not because the question is unimportant, but because
it is so overwhelmingly important that this jesting about the Future,
this fantastic and "ironical" fiction goes on. It is the only medium to
express the vague, ill-formed, new ideas with which we are all
labouring. It does not give any measure of our real sense of the
proportion of things that the Future should appear in our literature as
a sort of comic rally and harlequinade after the serious drama of the
Present--in which the heroes and heroines of the latter turn up again in
novel and undignified positions; but it seems to be the only method at
present available by which we may talk about our race's material Destiny
at all.

M. Tarde, in this special case before us, pursues a course of elusive
ironies; sometimes he jests at contemporary ideas by imagining them in
burlesque realisation, sometimes he jests at contemporary facts by
transposing them into strange surroundings, sometimes he broaches
fancies of his own chiefly for their own sake, yet with the well-managed
literary equivalent of the palliating laugh of conversational
diffidence. It is interesting to remark upon the clearness, the French
reasonableness and order of his conceptions throughout. He thinks, as
the French seem always to think, in terms of a humanity at once more
lucid and more limited than the mankind with which we English have to
deal. There are no lapses, no fogs and mysteries, no total inadequacies,
no brutalities and left-handedness--and no dark gleams of the divinity,
about these amused bright people of five hundred years ahead, who are
overtaken by the great solar catastrophe. They have established a world
state and eliminated the ugly and feeble