Part 4

The Era of Mediocrity

The era of mediocrity in all things is beginning, and mediocrity freezes desire. Equality engenders uniformity; and evil is got rid of by sacrificing all that is excellent, remarkable, extraordinary. Everything becomes less coarse but more vulgar. The epoch of great men is passing away; the epoch of the ant-hill is upon us. The age of individualism is in danger of having no real individuals. Things are certainly progressing, but souls decline.

The point of view of Schleiermacher's "Monologues," which is also that of Emerson, is great indeed, but proud and egotistical, since the Self is made the centre of the universe. It is man rejoicing in himself, taking refuge in the inaccessible sanctuary of self-consciousness, and becoming almost a god. It is a triumph which is not far removed from impiety; it is a superhuman point of view which does away with humility; it is precisely the temptation to which man first succumbed when he desired to become his own master by becoming like the gods.

We are too much encumbered with affairs, too busy, too active; we even read too much. We must throw overboard all our cargo of anxieties, preoccupations and pedantry to recover youth, simplicity, childhood, and the present moment with its happy mood of gratitude. By that leisure which is far from idleness, by an attentive and recollected inaction, the soul loses her creases, expands, unfolds, repairs her injuries like a bruised leaf, and becomes once more new, spontaneous, true, original Reverie, like showers at night, refreshes the thoughts which have become worn and discoloured by the heat of day.

I have been walking in the garden in a fine autumnal rain. All the innumerable, wonderful symbols which the forms and colours of Nature afford charm me and catch at my heart. There is no country scene that is not a state of the soul, and whoever will read the two together will be astonished by their detailed similarity. Far truer is true poetry than science; poetry seizes at first glance in her synthetic way that essential thing which all the sciences put together can only hope to reach at the very end.

Lessons from the Greeks

How much we have to learn from our immortal forefathers, the Greeks; and how far better than we did they solve their problem! Their type was not ours, but how much better did they revere, cultivate and ennoble the man they knew! Beside them we are barbarians in a thousand ways, as in education, eloquence, public life, poetry, and the like. If the number of its accomplished men be the measure of a civilization, ours is far below theirs. We have not slaves beneath us, but we have them among us. Barbarism is not at our frontiers, but at our doors. We bear within us greater things, but we ourselves are how much smaller! Strange paradox: that their objective civilisation should have created great men as it were by accident, while our subjective civilisation, contrary to its express mission, turns out paltry halflings. Things are becoming majestic, but man is diminishing.

The Glory of Motherhood

A mother should be to her child as the sun in the heavens, a changeless and ever radiant star, whither the inconstant little creature, so ready with its tears and its daughter, so light, so passionate, so stormy, may come to calm and to fortify itself with heat and light. A mother represents goodness, providence, law, nay, divinity itself, under the only form in which childhood can meet with these high things. If, therefore, she is passionate, she teaches that God is capricious or despotic, or even that there are several gods in conflict. The child's religion depends on the way in which its mother and its father have lived, and not on the way in which they have spoken. The inmost tone of their life is precisely what reaches their child, who finds no more than comedy or empty thunder in their maxims, remonstrances and punishments. Their actual and central worship--that is what his instinct infallibly perceives. A child sees what we are, through all the fictions of what we would be.

It is curious to see, in discussions on speculative matters, how abstract minds, who move from ideas to facts, always do battle for concrete reality; while concrete minds, on the other hand, who move from facts to ideas, are usually the champions of abstract notions. The more intellectual nature trusts to an ethical theory; the more moral nature has an intellectualist morality.

The centre of life is neither in thought, nor in feeling, nor in will; nor even in consciousness in so far as it thinks, feels, or wills; for a moral truth may have been penetrated and possessed in all these ways, and yet escape us still. Far below our consciousness is our being, our substance, our nature. Those truths alone which have entered this profound region, and have become ourselves, and are spontaneous, involuntary, instinctive and unconscious--only these are really our life and more than our external possessions. Now, it is certain that we can find our peace only in life, and, indeed, only in eternal life; and eternal life is God. Only when the creature is one, by a unity of love, with his Creator--only then is he what he is meant to be.

The Secret of Perpetual Youth

There are two degrees of pride--one, wherein a man is self-complacent; the other, wherein he is unable to accept himself. Of these two degrees, the second is probably the more subtle.

The whole secret of remaining young in spite of years is to keep an enthusiasm burning within, by means of poetry, contemplation and charity, or, more briefly, by keeping a harmony in the soul. When everything is rightly ordered within us, we may rest in equilibrium with the work of God. A certain grave enthusiasm for the eternal beauty and order; a glowing mind and cloudless goodwill: these are, perhaps, the foundation of wisdom. How inexhaustible is the theme of wisdom! A peaceful aureole surrounds this rich conception. Wisdom includes all treasures of moral experience, and is the ripest fruit of a well-spent life. She never ages, for she is the very expression of order, and order is eternal. Only the wise man tastes all the savour of life and of every age, because only he can recognise their beauty, dignity and worth. To see all things in God, to make of one's own life a voyage to the ideal, to live with gratitude, recollection, kindness and courage--this was the admirable spirit of Marcus Aurelius. Add to these a kneeling humility and a devoted charity, and you have the wisdom of God's children, the undying joy of true Christians.

The Fascination of Love

Woman would be loved without reason, without analysis; not because she is beautiful, or good, or cultivated, or gracious, or spiritual, but because she exists. Every analysis seems to her an attenuation and a subordination of her personality to something which dominates and measures it. She rejects it therefore, and rightly rejects it. For as soon as one can say "because," one is no longer under the spell; one appreciates or weighs, and at least in principle one is free. If the empire of woman is to continue, love must remain a fascination, an enchantment; once her mystery is gone, her power is gone also. So love must appear indivisible, irreducible, superior to all analysis, if it is to retain those aspects of infinitude, of the supernatural and the miraculous, which constitute its beauty. Most people hold cheaply whatever they understand, and bow down only before the inexplicable. Woman's triumph is to demonstrate the obscurity of that male intelligence which thinks itself so enlightened; and when women inspire love, they are not without the proud joy of this triumph. Their vanity is not altogether baseless; but a profound love is a light and a calm, a religion and a revelation, which in its turn despises these lesser triumphs of vanity. Great souls wish nothing but the great, and all artifices seem shamefully puerile to one immersed in the infinite.

Man's Useless Yearning

Eternal effort is the note of modern morality. This painful restless "becoming" has taken the place of harmony, equilibrium, joy, that is to say, of "being." We are all fauns and satyrs aspiring to become angels, ugly creatures labouring at our embellishment, monstrous chrysalids trying to become butterflies. Our ideal is no longer the tranquil beauty of the soul, it is the anguish of Laocoon fighting with the hydra of evil. No longer are there happy and accomplished men; we are candidates, indeed, for heaven, but on earth galley-slaves, and we row away our life in the expectation of harbour. It seems possible that this perfecting of which we are so proud is nothing else but a pretentious imperfection.

The "becoming" seems rather negative than positive; it is the lessening of evil, but is not itself the good; it is a noble discontent, but is by no means felicity. This ceaseless pursuit of an endless end is a generous madness, but is not reason; it is the yearning for what can never be, a touching malady, but it is not wisdom. Yet there is none who may not achieve harmony; and when he has it, he is within the eternal order, and represents the divine thought at least as clearly as a flower does, or a solar system. Harmony seeks nothing that is outside herself. She is exactly that which she should be; she expresses goodness, order, law, truth, honour; she transcends time and reveals the eternal.

Memories of the Golden Age

In the world of society one must seem to live on ambrosia and to know none but noble thoughts. Anxiety, want, passion, simply do not exist. All realism is suppressed as brutal. It is a world which amuses itself with the flattering illusion that it lives above the clouds and breathes mythological air. That is why all vehemence, the cry of Nature, all suffering, thoughtless familiarity, and every frank sign of love shock this delicate medium like a bombshell; they shatter this collective fabric, this palace of clouds, this enchanted architecture, just as shrill cockcrow scatters the fairies into hiding. These fine receptions are unconsciously a work of art, a kind of poetry, by which cultivated society reconstructs an idyll that is age-long dead. They are confused memories of the golden age, or aspirations after a harmony which mundane reality has not in it to give.

Goethe Under the Lash

I cannot like Goethe: he has little soul. His understanding of love, religion, duty, patriotism, is paltry and even shocking. He lacks an ardent generosity. A central dryness, an ill-cloaked egoism show through his supple and rich talent. True, this selfishness of his at least respects everyone's liberty and applauds all originality; but it helps no one, troubles itself for no one, bears no one's burden; in a word, it lacks charity, the great Christian virtue. To his mind perfection lies in personal nobility, and not in love. His keynote is æsthetic and not moral. He ignores sanctity, and has never so much as reflected on the terrible problem of evil. He believes in the opportunity of the individual, but neither in liberty nor in responsibility. He is a stranger to the social and political aspirations of the multitude; he has no more thought for the disinherited, the feeble, the oppressed, than Nature has.

The profound disquiet of our era never touches Goethe; discords do not affect the deaf. Whoso has never heard the voice of conscience, regret and remorse, cannot even guess at the anxiety of those who have two masters, two laws, and belong to two worlds, the world of Nature and the world of Liberty. His choice is already made; his only world is Nature. But it is far otherwise with humanity. For men hear indeed the prophets of Nature, but they hear also the voice of Religion; the joy of life attracts them, but devotion moves them also; they no longer know whether they hate or adore the crucifix.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Jealousy is a terrible thing; it resembles love, but is in every way its contrary; the jealous man desires, not the good of the loved one, but her dependence on him and his triumph over her. Love is the forgetfulness of Self; but jealousy is the most passionate form of egoism, the exaltation of the despotic, vain and greedy Self, which cannot forget and subordinate itself. The contrast is complete.

The man of fifty years, contemplating the world, finds in it certainly some new things; but a thousand times more does he find old things furbished up, and plagiarisms and modifications rather than improvements. Almost everything in the world is a copy of a copy, a reflection of a reflection; and any real success or progress is as rare to-day as it has ever been. Let us not complain of it, for only so can the world last. Humanity advances at a very slow pace; that is why history continues. It may be that progress fans the torch to burn away; perhaps progress accelerates death. A society which should change rapidly would only arrive the sooner at its catastrophe. Yes, progress must be the aroma of life, and not its very substance.

To renounce happiness and think only of duty; to enthrone conscience where the heart has been: this willing immolation is a noble thing. Our nature jibes at it, but the better self will submit to it. To hope for justice is the proof of a sickly sensibility; we ought to be able to do without justice. A virile character consists in just that independence. Let the world think of us what it will; that is its affair, not ours. Our business is to act as if our country were grateful, as if the world judged in equity, as if public opinion could see the truth, as if life were just, and as if men were good.