Their ideal man is not ours, but they
understood infinitely better than we how to reverence, cultivate and
ennoble the man whom they knew. In a thousand respects we are still
barbarians beside them, as Beranger said to me with a sigh in 1843:
barbarians in education, in eloquence, in public life, in poetry, in
matters of art, etc. We must have millions of men in order to produce a
few elect spirits: a thousand was enough in Greece. If the measure of a
civilization is to be the number of perfected men that it produces, we
are still far from this model people. The slaves are no longer below us,
but they are among us. Barbarism is no longer at our frontiers; it lives
side by side with us. We carry within us much greater things than they,
but we ourselves are smaller. It is a strange result. Objective
civilization produced great men while making no conscious effort toward
such a result; subjective civilization produces a miserable and
imperfect race, contrary to its mission and its earnest desire. The
world grows more majestic but man diminishes. Why is this?
We have too much barbarian blood in our veins, and we lack measure,
harmony and grace. Christianity, in breaking man up into outer and
inner, the world into earth and heaven, hell and paradise, has
decomposed the human unity, in order, it is true, to reconstruct it more
profoundly and more truly.
Pages:
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150