disdain and their isolation. They preached a sort of art, acceptable
only to the initiated. There is nothing finer than such a retreat when
one brings to it wealth of consciousness, abundance of feeling and
an outpouring soul, but the literary groups of the end of the XIXth
century were far removed from those fertile hermitages where robust
thoughts were concentrated. They cared much more to economise their
little store of intelligence than to renew it. In order to purify it
they had withdrawn it from circulation. The result was that it ceased
to be perceived. The common life passed on its way without bothering
its head further, leaving the artist caste to wither in a make-believe
refinement. The violent storms at the time of the excitement about the
Dreyfus Case did rouse some minds from this torpor, but when they came
out of their orchid-house the fresh air turned their heads and they
threw themselves into the great passing movement with the same
exaggeration that their predecessors had shown in withdrawing from
it. They believed that salvation was in the people, that in them was
virtue, even all good, and though they were often thwarted in their
efforts to get closer to them, they set flowing a current in the
thought of Europe. They were proud to call themselves the exponents
of the collective soul, but they were not victors but vanquished;
the collective soul made breaches in their ivory tower, the feeble
personalities of these thinkers yielded, and to hide their abdication
from themselves, they declared it voluntary. In the effort to convince
themselves, philosophers and aesthetics forged theories to prove that
the great directing principle was to abandon oneself to the stream
of a united life instead of directing it, or more modestly following
one's own little path in peace. It was a matter of pride to be no
longer oneself, to be no longer free to reason, for freedom was an old
story in these democracies. One gloried to be a bubble tossed on the
flood,--some said of the race and others of the universal life. These