I
Let us not forget that we live in pregnant and decisive times. It is
probable that our descendants will envy us the dawn through which,
without knowing it, we are passing, just as we envy those who took part
in the age of Pericles, in the most glorious days of Roman greatness and
in certain hours of the Italian Renascence. The splendid dust that
clouds the great movements of men shines brightly in the memory, but
blinds those who raise it and breathe it, hiding from them the direction
of their road and, above all, the thought, the necessity or the instinct
that leads them.
It concerns us to take account of this. The web of daily life varies
little throughout the centuries in which men have attained a certain
facility of existence. This web, in which the surface occupied by boons
and evils remains much the same, shows through it either light or dark
according to the predominant idea of the generation that unfolds it.
And, whatever its form or its disguise may be, this idea always reduces
itself, in the ultimate issue, to a certain conception of the universe.
Private or public calamity and prosperity have but a fleeting influence
on the happiness and unhappiness of mankind, so long as they do not
modify the general ideas with which it is nurtured and enlightened on
the subject of its gods, of infinity, of the great unknown and of the
world's economy. Hence, we must seek there, rather than in wars and
civil troubles, if we would know whether a generation have passed in
darkness or in light, in distress or in joyfulness. There we see why one
people, which underwent many reverses, has left us numberless evidences
of beauty and of gladness, whereas another, which was naturally rich or
often victorious, has bequeathed to us only the monuments of a dull and
awe-struck life.