These passages of arms for the sake of progress often suffer shipwreck, and we have just explained why.
The crowd is restive in the presence of the impulses of paladins.
Heavy masses, the multitudes which are fragile because of their very weight, fear adventures; and there is a touch of adventure in the ideal.
Moreover, and we must not forget this, interests which are not very friendly to the ideal and the sentimental are in the way.
Sometimes the stomach paralyzes the heart.
The grandeur and beauty of France lies in this, that she takes less from the stomach than other nations: she more easily knots the rope about her loins.
She is the first awake, the last asleep.
She marches forwards.
She is a seeker.
This arises from the fact that she is an artist.
The ideal is nothing but the culminating point of logic, the same as the beautiful is nothing but the summit of the true.
Artistic peoples are also consistent peoples.
To love beauty is to see the light.
That is why the torch of Europe, that is to say of civilization, was first borne by Greece, who passed it on to Italy, who handed it on to France.
Divine, illuminating nations of scouts!
Vit?lampada tradunt.
It is an admirable thing that the poetry of a people is the element of its progress.
The amount of civilization is measured by the quantity of imagination.
Only, a civilizing people should remain a manly people.
Corinth, yes; Sybaris, no.
Whoever becomes effeminate makes himself a bastard.
He must be neither a dilettante nor a virtuoso: but he must be artistic.
In the matter of civilization, he must not refine, but he must sublime.
On this condition, one gives to the human race the pattern of the ideal.
The modern ideal has its type in art, and its means is science.
It is through science that it will realize that august vision of the poets, the socially beautiful.
Eden will be reconstructed by A+B.
At the point which civilization has now reached, the exact is a necessary element of the splendid, and the artistic sentiment is not only served, but completed by the scientific organ; dreams must be calculated.
Art, which is the conqueror, should have for support science, which is the walker; the solidity of the creature which is ridden is of importance.
The modern spirit is the genius of Greece with the genius of India as its vehicle; Alexander on the elephant.
Races which are petrified in dogma or demoralized by lucre are unfit to guide civilization.
Genuflection before the idol or before money wastes away the muscles which walk and the will which advances.
Hieratic or mercantile absorption lessens a people’s power of radiance, lowers its horizon by lowering its level, and deprives it of that intelligence, at once both human and divine of the universal goal, which makes missionaries of nations.
Babylon has no ideal; Carthage has no ideal.
Athens and Rome have and keep, throughout all the nocturnal darkness of the centuries, halos of civilization.
France is in the same quality of race as Greece and Italy.
She is Athenian in the matter of beauty, and Roman in her greatness.
Moreover, she is good.
She gives herself.
Oftener than is the case with other races, is she in the humor for self-devotion and sacrifice.
Only, this humor seizes upon her, and again abandons her. And therein lies the great peril for those who run when she desires only to walk, or who walk on when she desires to halt.
France has her relapses into materialism, and, at certain instants, the ideas which obstruct that sublime brain have no longer anything which recalls French greatness and are of the dimensions of a Missouri or a South Carolina.
What is to be done in such a case?
The giantess plays at being a dwarf; immense France has her freaks of pettiness.
That is all.
To this there is nothing to say.
Peoples, like planets, possess the right to an eclipse.
And all is well, provided that the light returns and that the eclipse does not degenerate into night.
Dawn and resurrection are synonymous.
The reappearance of the light is identical with the persistence of the I.