After Jesus as God we shall come back to faith in the God of Jesus.
_Five o'clock_ P. M.--I have been for a long walk through Cezargues,
Eseri, and the Yves woods, returning by the Pont du Loup. The weather
was cold and gray. A great popular merrymaking of some sort, with its
multitude of blouses, and its drums and fifes, has been going on
riotously for an hour under my window. The crowd has sung a number of
songs, drinking songs, ballads, romances, but all more or less heavy and
ugly. The muse has never touched our country people, and the Swiss race
is not graceful even in its gayety. A bear in high spirits--this is what
one thinks of. The poetry it produces, too, is desperately vulgar and
commonplace. Why? In the first place, because, in spite of the pretenses
of our democratic philosophies, the classes whose backs are bent with
manual labor are aesthetically inferior to the others. In the next
place, because our old rustic peasant poetry is dead, and the peasant,
when he tries to share the music or the poetry of the cultivated
classes, only succeeds in caricaturing it, and not in copying it.
Democracy, by laying it down that there is but one class for all men,
has in fact done a wrong to everything that is not first-rate. As we can
no longer without offense judge men according to a certain recognized
order, we can only compare them to the best that exists, and then they
naturally seem to us more mediocre, more ugly, more deformed than
before.
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