Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, a terrible disease progressively swept over civilization. Seventeen centuries of consistently frustrated Christian aspirations and five centuries of forever postponed pagan aspirations (Catholicism having failed as Christianity, the Renaissance having failed as paganism, and the Reformation having failed as a universal phenomenon), the shipwreck of all that had been dreamed, the paltriness of all that had been achieved, the sadness of living a life too miserable to be shared by others, and other people’s lives too miserable for us to want to share – all of this fell over souls and poisoned them. Minds were filled with a horror of all action, which could be contemptible only in a contemptible society. The soul’s higher activities languished; only its baser, more organic functions flourished. The former having stagnated, the latter began to govern the world.

Thus was born a literature and art made of the lower elements of thought – Romanticism. And with it, a social life made of the lower elements of action – modern democracy.

Souls born to rule had no recourse but to abstain. Souls born to create, in a society where creative forces were flagging, had no world to mould to their will besides the social world of their dreams, the introspective sterility of their own soul.

We apply the name ‘Romantics’ both to the great men who failed and to the little men who showed themselves for what they were. But the only similarity between the two is in their overt sentimentality, which in the former denotes an inability to make active use of the intelligence, while in the latter it denotes the lack of intelligence itself. A Chateaubriand and a Hugo, a Vigny and a Michelet, are products of the same age. But Chateaubriand is a great soul that was diminished, Hugo a little soul that was inflated by the winds of the day. Vigny is a genius that had to flee, Michelet a woman that was forced to be a man of genius. In the father of them all, Jean Jacques Rousseau, the two tendencies coincide. He possessed, in equal measure, the intelligence of a creator and the sensibility of a slave. His social sensibility infected his theories, which his intelligence merely set forth with clarity. His intelligence served only to bemoan the tragedy of coexisting with such a sensibility.

Rousseau is the modern man, but more complete than any modern man. From the weaknesses that made him fail, he extracted – alas for him and for us! – the forces that made him triumph. The part of him that went forward conquered, but when he entered the city, the word ‘Defeat’ could be read at the bottom of his victory banners. And in the part of him that stayed behind, incapable of fighting to conquer, there were crowns and sceptres, a ruler’s majesty and a conqueror’s glory – his legitimate inner destiny.

II We were born into a world that has suffered from a century and a half of renunciation and violence – the renunciation of superior men and the violence of inferior men, which is their victory.

No superior trait can assert itself in the modern age, whether in action or in thought, in the political sphere or in the theoretical sphere.

The downfall of aristocratic influence has created an atmosphere of brutality and indifference towards the arts, such that a refined sensibility has nowhere to take refuge. Contact with life is ever more painful for the soul, and all efforts are ever more arduous, because the outer conditions for making an effort are forever more odious.

The downfall of classical ideals made all men potential artists, and therefore bad artists. When art depended on solid construction and the careful observance of rules, few could attempt to be artists, and a fair number of these were quite good. But when art, instead of being understood as creation, became merely an expression of feelings, then anyone could be an artist, because everyone has feelings.