The poetic idea which this movement in lines produces is the hypothesis of a vast, immense, complex but eurythmic being, of a creature full of genius, suffering and sighing all human sighs and all human ambitions.
Civilized races, that always speak so stupidly of savages and barbarians, soon, as d'Aurevilly says, you will no longer be good enough to be idolaters. Stoicism, religion that has but one sacrament: suicide!
Conceive a canvas for a lyric or fairy buffoonery, for a pantomime, and transplant it into a serious novel. Bathe the whole in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere,—in the atmosphere of the great days. Let there be something soothing,—something even serene, in passion. Regions of pure poetry.
XXV
What is not a priesthood nowadays? Youth itself is a priesthood—so youth tells us.
Man, i.e., every one, is so naturally depraved that he suffers less from the universal abasement than from the establishment of a sensible hierarchy.
XXVI
The world is coming to an end. The only reason for which it can continue is that it exists. How weak that reason is, compared to all that announce the opposite, particularly to this: What has the world henceforth to do beneath the sky? For, supposing that it continue to exist materially, would it be an existence worthy of the name and of the Historical Dictionary? I do not say that the world will be reduced to the expedients and the comic disorder of the South American Republics, that perhaps we shall return to the savage state, and that we shall go, across the grassy ruins of our civilization, seeking our pasture, gun in hand. No; for these adventures presuppose a remnant of vital energy, echo of the earliest ages. New example and new victims of the inexorable moral laws, we shall perish by that through which we thought to live. The mechanical will so have Americanized us, progress will so have atrophied all our spiritual side, that naught, in the sanguine, sacrilegious or unnatural dreams of the Utopians can be compared to the actual outcome. I ask every thinking man to show me what of life remains. Of religion, I believe it useless to speak and to seek the remnants, since to take the trouble to deny God is the only scandal in that field. Property virtually disappeared with the suppression of the right of the first-born; but the time will come when humanity, like an avenging ogre, will snatch their last morsel from those who think they are the legitimate heirs of the revolutions. Still, that will not be the supreme ill.
The human imagination can conceive, without too much trouble, republics or other community states, worthy of some glory, if directed by consecrated men, by definite aristocrats. But it is not particularly in political institutions that there will be manifest the universal ruin, or the universal progress; for the name matters little. It will be in the debasement of the heart. Need I say that the little of the political remaining will writhe painfully in the embrace of the general bestiality, and that governments will be forced, in order to maintain themselves and to create a phantom of order, to revert to means which will make our actual humanity shudder, although so hardened? Then, the son will flee from his family not at eighteen years, but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will flee, not in search of heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner in a tower, not to immortalize a garret by sublime thoughts, but to establish a trade, to amass wealth, and to compete with his infamous papa, founder and stockholder of a journal which will spread the light and which will cause the century to be looked upon as an abettor of superstition. Then, the wanderers, the outcasts, those who have had several lovers, and who were once called angels, in recognition of the heedlessness which shines, light of luck, in their existence logical as evil—then these, I say, will be no more than a pitiless wisdom, a wisdom that will condemn all, lacking money, all, even the faults of the senses! Then, that which will resemble virtue, what do I say?—all that is not ardor toward Plutus will be considered enormously ridiculous. Justice, if in that fortunate period justice can still exist, will interdict all citizens who cannot make a fortune. Your wife, O Bourgeois! your chaste partner, whose legitimacy is the poetry of your existence, thenceforth, introducing into legality an irreproachable infamy, zealous and loving guardian of your strongbox, will be no more than the ideal of the kept woman. Your daughter, with infantile hopes of marriage, will dream in her cradle of selling herself for a million, and you yourself, O Bourgeois, still less poet than you are to-day, you will see nothing amiss; you will regret naught. For there are things in men that strengthen and prosper as others weaken and decline; and, thanks to the progress of the times, you will have left of your entrails only the viscera! These times are perhaps quite near; who knows even that they have not come, and that the thickness of our skins is not the only obstacle that prevents us from appreciating the environment in which we breathe?
As for me, who sometimes feel in me the ridicule of a prophet, I know that I shall never find in myself the charity of a doctor. Lost in this vile world, jostled by the crowds, I am as a tired man who sees behind him, in the depths of the years, only disillusion and bitterness and ahead, only a storm that carries nothing new, neither knowledge nor grief. The evening that man Stole from fate a few hours of pleasure, cradled in his digestion, forgetful—as far as possible—of the past, content with the present and resigned to the future, intoxicated with his sangfroid and his dandyism, proud of being less base than those who passed, he said, watching the smoke of his cigar: "What does it matter to me where these consciences are going?"