s not
leave him by the way. Let him not lower himself to this wretched
expedient of spoiling the ideal to accommodate himself to the wants of
human weakness, and to turn out mind in order to play more easily with
the heart. Let him not take us back to our infancy, to make us buy, at
the cost of the most precious acquisitions of the understanding, a repose
that can only last as long as the slumber of our spiritual faculties; but
let him lead us on to emancipation, and give us this feeling of higher
harmony which compensates for all his troubles and secures the happiness
of the victor! Let him prepare as his task an idyl that realizes the
pastoral innocence, even in the children of civilization, and in all the
conditions of the most militant and excited life; of thought enlarged by
culture; of the most refined art; of the most delicate social
conventionalities--an idyl, in short, that is made, not to bring back man
to Arcadia, but to lead him to Elysium.

This idyl, as I conceive it, is the idea of humanity definitely
reconciled with itself, in the individual as well as in the whole of
society; it is union freely re-established between inclination and duty;
it is nature purified, raised to its highest moral dignity; in short, it
is no less than the ideal of beauty applied to real life. Thus, the
character of this idyl is to reconcile perfectly all the contradictions
between the real and the ideal, which formed the matter of satirical and
elegiac poetry, and, setting aside their contradictions, to put an end to
all conflict between the feelings of the soul. Thus, the dominant
expression of this kind of poetry would be calm; but the calm that
follows the accomplishment, and not that of indolence--the calm that
comes from the equilibrium re-established between the faculties, and not
from the suspending of their exercise; from the fulness of our strength,
and not from our infirmity; the calm, in short, which is accompanied in
the soul by the feeling of an infinite power. But precisely because idyl
thus conceived removes all idea of struggle, it will be infinitely more
difficult than it was in two previously-named kinds of poetry to express
movement; yet this is an indispensable condition, without which poetry
can never act on men's souls. The most perfect unity is required, but
unity ought not to wrong variety; the heart must be satisfied, but
without the inspiration ceasing on that account. The solution of this
problem is pr