, they yet follow the worst--alas!

* * * * *

Such a sorrow is to-day profound and universal; there where vice
abounds, sorrow superabounds. It is no longer that melancholy born of
the insufficiency of external reality, once for all recognized, that
felt by Obermann and proud romanticists; but a humble, narrow, ragged
rancor, mixed with disdain, with disgust, born of our insufficiency to
ourselves, perceived thoroughly. Never, I believe, have we been more
generally sad than in these times. And it is that which saves us; I find
here our greatness. He alone is lost who feels himself at ease and
healthful in evil; consciences without anxiety are the only hopeless
ones. Let us hope then, for it cannot be denied that we feel we are very
ill. It is apparent that we are in labor with something which shall be
our cure. The symptoms of this painful labor are not lacking. The works
which are appearing now, pre-eminent in form, but obscure and hesitating
in principles, bear signs of the stress in which they were conceived;
soon they will seem merely specious. In the poetry, romance, painting,
music, of to-day, how many exquisite works are born, not of energy
guided by love, but only of a dream of energy, a dream of love, on the
shores of inconsolable exile! The truth is, we no longer know what to
become; when any one of the antique misfortunes strikes us,--death,
abandonment, ruin,--we no longer bear it as our fathers did. We no
longer know the dignified, peaceful mournings of old; but under an
unexpected stroke, the torment, the complicated rending in the heart,
show that it has been secretly undermined. We feel indeed divided within
ourselves, and we need to be unified; but the inward unification is
possible only for the absolutely debauched or the absolutely good man;
there is no _via media_; half-virtue rends us....

Our spiritual life being in truth miracle and mystery, I do not know how
to explain what each one knows so well; I do not know how there is
developed within us that sublime state known and described under
different names by Socrates, Plato, Plotinus, Epictetus, Marcus
Aurelius, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Tauler, the author of the
'Imitation,' Shelley, Emerson, Tolstoy: but I know that such a state,
which we all know by experience, merits alone the name of positive
morality.... Well then, history shows that what is true of each one of
us personally, is true of society.

THE C