He, the man with compressed lips and brow sombre with thought, ruled the unchained elements, became lord of the anarchy, and dictated laws to a universe. But with iron finger he tore open the veins of humanity to mark upon the race the brand of slavery. The world bled from a thousand wounds, and upon each he marked the name "Napoleon."
Then, wan as the moon floats in the sky when the glow of the setting sun is blazing in the horizon, the sovereign of the world in his bloody splendor confronted the pallid shadow of the Crucified One, also robed in a royal mantle, still wet with the blood He had voluntarily shed. They gazed silently at each other--but the usurper turned pale.
At last, at the moment he imagined himself most like Him, God hurled the rival god into the deepest misery and disgrace. The enemy of the world was conquered, and popular hatred, so long repressed, at last freed from the unbearable restraint, poured forth upon the lonely grave at St. Helena its foam of execration and curses. Then the conqueror in Oberammergau extended His arms in pardon, saying to him also: "Verily I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise."
A time of peace now dawned, the century of thought. After the great exertions of the war of liberation, a truce in political life followed, and the nations used it to make up for what they had lost in the development of civilization during the period of political strife. A flood of ideas inundated the world. All talent, rejoicing in the mental activity which had so long lain dormant, was astir. There was rivalry and conflict for the prize in every department. The rising generation, conscious of newly awakening powers, dared enterprise after enterprise and with each waxed greater. With increasing production, the power of assimilation also increased. Everything grand created in other centuries was drawn into the circle of their own nation as if just discovered. That for which the enlightened minds of earlier days had vainly toiled, striven, bled, now bloomed in luxuriant harvests, and the century erected monuments to those who had been misjudged and adorned them with the harvest garland garnered from the seeds which they had sowed in tears.
What Galvani and Salomon de Cäus, misunderstood and unheard, had planned, now made their triumphal passage across the earth as a panting steam engine or a flashing messenger of light, borne by and bearing ideas.
The century which produced a Schiller and a Goethe first understood a Shakespeare, Sophocles and Euripides rose from the graves where they had lain more than a thousand years, archæology brought the buried world of Homer from beneath the earth, a Canova, a Thorwaldsen, a Cornelius, Kaulbach, and all the great masters of the Renaissance of our time, took up the brushes and chisels of Phidias, Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Rubens, which had so long lain idle. What Aristotle had taught a thousand, and Winckelmann and Lessing a hundred years before, the knowledge of the laws of art, the appreciation of the beautiful, was no longer mere dead capital in the hands of learned men, but circulated in the throbbing veins of a vigorously developing civilization; it demanded and obtained the highest goal.
The circle between the old and the new civilization has closed, every chasm has been bridged. There is an alternate action of old and new forces, a common labor of all the nations and the ages, as if there was no longer any division of time and space, as if there was but one eternal art, one eternal science. Ascending humanity has trodden matter under foot, conquered science, made manufactures useful, and transfigured art.
But this light which has so suddenly flamed through the world also casts its shadows. Progress in art and science matures the judgment, but judgment becomes criticism and criticism negation. The dualism which permeates all creation, the creative and the destructive power, the principle of affirmation and of denial, cannot be shut out even now, but must continue the old contest which has never yet been decided. Critical analysis opposes faith, materialism wars against idealism, pessimism contends with optimism. The human race has reached the outermost limit of knowledge, but this does not content it in its victorious career, it wishes to break through and discover the God concealed behind. Even the heart of a God must not escape the scalpel which nothing withstood. But the barrier is impenetrable. And one party, weary of the fruitless toil, pulls back the aspiring ones. "Down to matter, whence you came. What are you seeking? Science has attained the highest goal, she has discovered the protoplasm whence all organism proceeded. What is the Creator of modern times? A physiological--chemical, vital function within the substance of a cell. Will ye pray to this, suffer for this, ye fools?"
Others turn in loathing from this cynical interpretation of scientific results and throw themselves into the arms of beauty, seeking in it the divinity, and others still wait, battling between earth and heaven, in the dim belief of being nearest to the goal.
It is a tremendous struggle, as though the earth must burst under the enormous pressure of power demanding room, irreconcilable contrasts.