IV
I shall speak to you again of all these things; we must talk a great deal more about the future if we wish to enter it without blindness, shame, and horror.
For the moment, glance at the people who surround us, the restless people we see on all sides. There are some of them who know what is beautiful. They rejoice in it, almost in secrecy, and despise those who do not share their faith. As for the others, they do not know it, and that is all one can say. They are, according to their several characters, ignorant and sceptical, or just simply ignorant. They see how works of art and the spirit miraculously survive the decadence and the prosperity of empires: that astonishes them without convincing them. Many divine that this has something to do with a secret and sacred power, but they do not dare and they do not know how to avail themselves of it. They catch glimpses of the feast of the heroes and they cannot realize that their place is marked and waiting for them.
Among my everyday companions are many educated men upon whom the universities have lavished their care and their degrees. Many of them are interested neither in their duties, nor in their comrades, nor, one would say, in their own thoughts. They play cards, read the papers, think about women and complain of ennui, for the war has enthroned boredom. And yet these souls, I assure you, are of good material and full of energy and resource.
What is to be done? How is one to introduce them to a larger, fuller life? How can one dare to do that without presumption, and also without fear of pomposity? How do it with affection, without lecturing them, without preaching to them? How be useful and friendly with simplicity? They have suffered, they have experience and obstinate views of their own. They do not believe that they have been dispossessed of anything. You have to listen very attentively to hear their soul groaning in the depths.
I spoke to one of them about music. He replied with an indifference in which there was a touch of discouragement; “For my part, I don’t understand music. It can’t interest me.” We went on talking and I discovered that he was strangely sensitive to architectual matters, that he had a very subtle understanding and lacked nothing but enlightenment, knowledge, to have applied himself to it with passionate interest.
It is usually that way. The field of moral activity is so large that it has in reserve for every soul a path of his own choice, accessible and full of allurement. I do not believe there is a single individual who cannot end by meeting, in the limitless realm of art, with a mode of expression that touches him, conforms quite accurately to his powers and tastes.