O Corse à cheveux plats, que la France était belle
Au soleil de Messidor!
His own lips framed the words involuntarily, attempting the accent long unheard. “Au soleil de Messidor, au soleil de Messidor” … and his wife and children stared after him as, thrusting the half-eaten bowl aside, he rose and went out, muttering gibberish. They were not unused to these fits in the housefather, to the change in his eyes, the sudden forgetting of their presence; but never lost their fear of them as something uncanny and inexplicable.
With these masterful rushes of the past came often an infinite melancholy; which was not so much a regret for what had been as a sense of the pity of oblivion. So that he would lie outstretched with his face to the earth, rebellious at the thought that with him and a few of his own generation must pass all knowledge of human achievement, the very memory of that which had once been glorious. … Not only the memory of actual men whose fame had once been blown about the world; but the memory of sound, of music, and of marvels in stone, uplifted by the skill of generations; the memory of systems, customs, laws, wrought wisely by the hand of experience; and of fanciful people, more real than living men and women. With him and his like would pass not only Leonardo, Caesar and the sun of Messidor, but Rosalind, d’Artagnan and Faust; the heroes, the merrymen, the women loved and loving who, created of dreams, had shared the dead world with their fellows created of dust. … Once deemed immortal, they had been slain by science as surely as their fellows of dust.
At times he pondered vaguely whether he might not save the memory of some of them alive by teaching his children to love them; but in the end he realized that, as we grasp nothing save through ourselves and our own relation to it, the embodied desires and beauty of an inconceivable age would be meaningless to his young barbarians.
If he ceased to believe in the survival of life as he had known it and a civilization that would reach out and claim him, there were times when he believed, or almost believed, that somewhere in the vastness of the great round world a remnant must hold fast to its inheritance; when it was inconceivable that all men living could be sunk in brutishness or vowed to the creed of utter ignorance. Hunger and blind terror—(he knew, for he had seen it)—could reduce the highest to the level of the beast; but with the passing of terror and the satisfaction of the actual needs of the body, there awakens the hunger of the mind. Somewhere in the vastness of the great, round world must be those who, because they craved for more than full stomachs and daily security, still clung to the power which is knowledge. Little groups and companies that chance had brought together or good fortune saved from destruction; resourceful men who had striven with surrounding anarchy and worsted it, and, having worsted it, were building their civilization. … And in the very completeness of surrounding anarchy, the very depth of surrounding brutishness, would lie their opportunity and chance of supremacy, their power of enforcing their will.
If such groups, such future nations, existed, he asked himself how they would build? What manner of world they would strive for—knowing what they knew? … This, at least, was certain: it would not be the world of their fathers, of their own youth. They had seen their civilization laid waste by the agency of science combined with human passion; hence, if they rejected the alternative of ignorance and held to their perilous treasure of science, their problem was the mastery of passion.
He came to believe that the problem—like all others—had been faced in forgotten generations; that old centuries had learned the forgotten lesson that the Ruin was teaching anew. To a race that had realized the peril of knowledge there would be two alternatives only; renunciation—the creed of blind ignorance and savagery—or the guarding of science as a secret treasure, removed from all contact with the flame that is human emotion. There had been elder and long-past civilizations in which knowledge was a mystery, the possession and the privilege of a caste; tradition had come down to us of ancient wisdom which might only be revealed to the initiate. … A blind fear massacred its scientific men, a wiser fear exalted them and set them apart as initiates. When science and human emotion between them had wrought the extreme of destruction and agony, there passed the reckless and idealistic dream of a world where all might be enlightened; the aim and tradition of
