What does it signify in a world that is capable of everything? Amid the evil and the mediocre there will always shine forth consolingly something noble, something wondrous. Is it not shameful to predict the basest things so glibly only to close our eyes the more obstinately before the beauty that is unknown and unforeseen?
I assure you, in spite of all, that two lines of music can turn a multitude back and agitate the deepest springs of its behavior. If the miracle does not result from harmonious sounds, it will be borne, perhaps, of ten warm, rhythmical words, or the sight of a statue or the evocation of an image.
The worship of immediate realities leads us to those easy victories that intoxicate the coarse spirits. At times it results in irreparable disasters, for it inclines us to misprize those secret and delicate things that pave the way for the soul’s most daring flights and ventures.
Some other time I shall tell the story of the general who, in order to allay the grievances of his mutinous troops, offered them a cask of wine and, thanks to this blunder, suffered a defeat.
People who reason in a wholesale fashion get along successfully from day to day till the hour when a tiny error destroys their success forever.
III
If the thoughts of great men no longer cause miracles it is because they are too little understood, or are misunderstood, or are purposely distorted. You are mistaken if you think they are powerless because they are beautiful.
The war, which has crushed such great masses of men, has brought us face to face with this melancholy evidence, it has enabled us thoroughly to examine many individuals and to put many experiences to the proof. It has permitted us to measure the whole humiliation of moral civilization before that other, the scientific and industrial civilization which we might still better call practical civilization.
Gifted, serious, good men have said to me, “First of all one has to live. You can see, in the midst of this hurricane, what would become of a people weakened by idealism and given over to the works of the spirit. My son will study chemistry. The coming century will be a hard one, my son will perhaps never have the time to read Emerson or acquaint himself with the works of Bach! Too bad! But first of all one has to live.”
Does it not seem as if error had a dazzling power to seduce us and overwhelm us? Men are always hoping to conquer it by yielding to its demands. No one has the courage to turn his own steps away from its shifting shore. No one, for example, says to me: “The moral culture of the world is in peril. Mechanical progress monopolizes and swallows up all human energy. The generous soul of the best men is forgotten, in exile. Let us, with a common voice, with all our strength, summon it to come back to us, or let us go and die in exile with it, in an exile that is noble and pure.”