Chapter 1

Ah, minds, be useful! Be of some service. Do not be fastidious when it is necessary to be efficient and good. Art for art may be beautiful, but art for progress is more beautiful yet. To dream revery is well, to dream Utopia is better. Ah, you must think? Then think of making man better. You must dream? Here is the dream for you, —the ideal. The prophet seeks solitude, but not isolation. He unravels and untwists the threads of humanity, tied and rolled in a skein in his soul; he does not break them. He goes into the desert to think—of whom? Of the multitude. It is not to the forests that he speaks; it is to the cities, It is not at the grass bending to the wind that he looks; it is at man. It is not against lions that he wars; it is against tyrants. Woe to thee, Ahab! woe to thee, Hosea! woe to you, kings! woe to you, Pharaohs! is the cry of the great solitary one. Then he weeps.

For what? For that eternal captivity of Babylon, undergone by Israel formerly, undergone by Poland, by Roumania, by Hungary, by Venice to-day. He grows old, the good and dark thinker; he watches, he lies in wait, he listens, he looks, —ear in the silence, eye in the night, claw half stretched toward the wicked. Go and speak to him, then, of art for art, to that cenobite of the ideal. He has his aim, and he walks straight toward it; and his aim is this: improvement. He devotes himself to it.

He does not belong to himself; he belongs to his apostleship. He is intrusted with that immense care, —the progress of the human race. Genius is not made for genius, it is made for man. Genius on earth is God giving himself. Each time that a masterpiece appears, it is a distribution of God that takes place. The masterpiece is a variety of the miracle. Thence, in all religions, and among all peoples, comes faith in divine men. They deceive themselves, those who think that we deny the divinity of Christs.

At the point now reached by the social question, everything should be action in common. Forces isolated frustrate one another; the ideal and the real strengthen each other. Art necessarily aids science. These two wheels of progress should turn together.

Generation of new talents, noble group of writers and poets, legion of young men, O living posterity of my country, your elders love and salute you! Courage! let us consecrate ourselves. Let us devote ourselves to the good, to the true, to the just. In that there is goodness.

Some pure lovers of art, affected by a preoccupation which in its way has its dignity and nobleness, discard this formula, “Art for progress,” the Beautiful Useful, fearing lest the useful should deform the beautiful. They tremble lest they should see attached to the fine arms of the Muse the coarse hands of the drudge. According to them, the ideal may become perverted by too much contact with reality. They are solicitous for the sublime if it is lowered as far as humanity. Ah, they are mistaken.

The useful, far from circumscribing the sublime, increases it. The application of the sublime to human things produces unexpected chefs-d’œuvre. The useful, considered in itself and as an element combining with the sublime, is of several kinds; there is the useful which is tender, and there is the useful which is indignant. Tender, it refreshes the unfortunate and creates the social epopee; indignant, it flagellates the wicked, and creates the divine satire. Moses hands the rod to Jesus; and after having caused the water to gush from the rock, that august rod, the very same, drives the vendors from the sanctuary.