And to do this one must often cope with a vulgar view of such relations: that anything that tends to soften the outlines of the social character or customs and sharpens the sense of beauty, to make of taste a delicate sensibility of the soul and of grace the universal form of action is (for such critics, disciples of the harsh and useful only) to depreciate all that is heroic, virile in the temper of society, on the one hand, and its positive utilitarian capacity on the other. In “The Toilers of the Sea” we read how the people of Jersey when they first saw a steamboat anathematized it on account of the tradition that fire and water are hostile elements; the common critique abounds with beliefs in similar enmities. If you propose to make common love of the beautiful, you must begin by making men understand the possibility of harmonic concert between all legitimate human activities; and that will be an easier task than to convert them straightway to a love of the beautiful, in itself. To make the mass of men unwilling to expel the swallows from the home, one must, as Pythagoras counselled, first convince them —not of the gracefulness of the bird or its legendary virtue—but that its nests will in no manner interfere with the durability of the shingles or tiles where they build!

To that conception of human life which is formed on the free and harmonious development of our nature, and therefore includes among its essential objects the satisfaction of our feeling for the beautiful, is opposed—as a rule for human conduct —the conception called utilitarian, under which our whole activities are governed by their relation to the immediate ends of self-interest. The blame of a narrow utilitarianism as the only monitor of the spirit of our century, meted out to it in the name of the ideal with all the rigours of Anathema, is based in part in the failure to recognize that its Titanic efforts for the subordination of the forces of Nature to the human will and for the extension of material well-being are a necessary labour to prepare, as by the laborious enrichment of an exhausted soil, for the flowering of future idealisms. The transitory predominance of that function of utility which has absorbed the agitated and feverish life of the last hundred years with its most potent energies explains, however, although it does not justify, many of the painful yearnings, many discontents and grievances of the intelligence, which show themselves either by a melancholy and exalted idealization of the past, or by a cruel despair of the future. For this there is one fruitful and well-adventured thought in the proposition of a certain group of thinkers of these last generations, among whom I need only cite again the noble figure of Guyau, who have tried to seal the definitive reconciliation of the conquests of the century with the renovation of many old human devotions, and have put into this blessed work as many treasures of love as of genius.

Often you will have heard attributed to two main causes that torrent of the spirit of utility which gives its note to the moral physiognomy of the present century, with its neglect of the aesthetic and disinterested view of life. The revelations of natural science, whose interpreters, favourable or the reverse, agree in destroying all ideality for its base, are one; the other is the universal diffusion and triumph of democratic ideas. I propose to speak to you exclusively of this latter cause; because I trust that your first initiation in the revelations of Science has been so directed as to preserve you from the danger of a vulgar interpretation. Upon democracy weighs the accusation of guiding humanity, by making it mediocre, to a Holy Empire of Utilitarianism. This accusation is reflected with vibrant intensity in the pages—for me always full of a suggestive charm—of the most amiable among the masters of the Modem Spirit: the seductive pages of Renan, to whose authority you have often heard me refer and of whom I may often speak again. Read Renan, those of you who have not done so already, and you will have to love him as I do. No one as he, among the modems, appears to me such a master “of that art of teaching with Grace” which Anatole France considers divine. No one so well as he has succeeded in combining irony with pity; even in the rigour of the analysis he can put the unction of the priest. And even when he teaches us to doubt, his exquisite gentleness sheds a balsam over the doubt itself. His thoughts ring in our minds with echoes ineffable, so vague as to remind one of sacred music. His infinite comprehension makes critics class him among those dilettantes of a light scepticism who wear the gown of the philosopher like the domino of a mask; but, once you penetrate his spirit, you will see that the vulgar tolerance of the mere sceptic differs from his as the hospitality of a worldly salon from the real spirit of charity.

This master holds, then, that high preoccupation with the ideal interests of our race is irreconcilable with the spirit of democracy. He believes that the conception of life in a society where that spirit dominates will gradually come to seek only material welfare, as the good most attainable for the greatest number. According to him, democracy is the enthronement of Caliban, Ariel can but be vanquished by its triumph. Many others who most care for aesthetic culture and select spirit are, of a like mind. Thus Bourget thinks that universal triumph of democratic institutions will make civilization lose in profundity what it gains in extension. He sees its necessary end in the empire of individual mediocrity. “Who says democracy voices the evolution of individual tendencies and the devolution of culture.” These judgments have a lively interest for us Americans who love the cause and consequence of that Revolution which in our America is entwined with the glory of its origin, and believe instinctively in the possibility of a noble and rare individual life which need never sacrifice its dignity to the caprices of the rabble. To confront the problem one must first recognize that if democracy do not uplift its spirit by a strong ideal interest which it shares with its preoccupation by material interests, it does lead, and fatally, to the favouring of mediocrity, and lacks, more than any other social system, barriers within which it may safely seek the higher culture. Abandoned to itself, without the constant rectification of some active moral sanction which shall purify and guide its motives to the dignifying of life—democracy will, gradually, extinguish the idea of any superiority which may not be turned into a more efficient training for the war of interests. It is then the most ignoble form of the brutalities of power. Spiritual preference, exaltation of life by unselfish motive, good taste and art and manners, and the admiration of all that is worthy and of good repute, will then alike vanish unprotected when social equality has destroyed all grades of excellence without replacing them with others that shall also rule by moral influence and the light of reason.

Any equality of conditions in the order of society, like homogeneity in nature, is but an unstable equilibrium. From that moment when democracy shall have worked its perfect work of negation by the levelling of unjust superiorities, the equality so won should be but a starting-point. Its affirmation remains; and the affirmation of democracy and its glory consist in arousing in itself by fit incentives the revelation and the mastery of the true superiorities of men.

With relation to the conditions of the life of America, that duty of attaining the true conception of our social state is doubly needful. Our democracies grow rapidly by the continual addition of a vast cosmopolitan multitude, by a stream of immigration which is merged with a nucleus already too weak to make active effort at assimilation and so contain the human flood by those dikes which an ancient solidity of social structure can alone provide, a secured political order, and the elements of a culture that has become deeply rooted.