If the towns have destroyed much, they will perhaps create still more. In their melting-pot professions, races, religions, nations, languages are blended:
...les Babels enfin réalisées
Et les peuples fondus et la cité commune
Et les langues se dissolvant en une.[17]
'The old order changeth, giving place to new'; and we must not ask whether the new is better than the old; we must trust that it is so. The feverish convulsions of the great cities, this unrest, this screaming torment, cannot be in vain. For they, these pains and convulsions, are only the birth-throes of the new. But he who has been the first to feel, with a glad presentiment, this pain of the masses, this fermentation, as joy, this unrest as hope, must himself be an authentic new man, one of those who are called to give a poetic answer to all the complaints and questions of our time.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (Les Villes Tentaculaires).
[2] Ibid. (Ibid.).
[3] 'La Foule' (Les Visages de la Vie).
[4] 'Les Villes' (Les Flambeaux Noirs).
[5] 'L'Âme de la Ville' (Les Villes Tentaculaires).
[6] 'La Ville' (Les Campagnes Hallucinées).