As the floor of valleys is raised by the denudation and washing down of
the mountains, what is average will rise at the expense of what is
great. The exceptional will disappear. A plateau with fewer and fewer
undulations, without contrasts and without oppositions, such will be the
aspect of human society. The statistician will register a growing
progress, and the moralist a gradual decline: on the one hand, a
progress of things; on the other, a decline of souls. The useful will
take the place of the beautiful, industry of art, political economy of
religion, and arithmetic of poetry. The spleen will become the malady of
a leveling age.
Is this indeed the fate reserved for the democratic era? May not the
general well-being be purchased too dearly at such a price? The creative
force which in the beginning we see forever tending to produce and
multiply differences, will it afterward retrace its steps and obliterate
them one by one? And equality, which in the dawn of existence is mere
inertia, torpor, and death, is it to become at last the natural form of
life? Or rather, above the economic and political equality to which the
socialist and non-socialist democracy aspires, taking it too often for
the term of its efforts, will there not arise a new kingdom of mind, a
church of refuge, a republic of souls, in which, far beyond the region
of mere right and sordid utility, beauty, devotion, holiness, heroism,
enthusiasm, the extraordinary, the infinite, shall have a worship and an
abiding city? Utilitarian materialism, barren well-being, the idolatry
of the flesh and of the "I," of the temporal and of mammon, are they to
be the goal if our efforts, the final recompense promised to the labors
of our race? I do not believe it.
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