Pardon, great poets! who are now but ashes and who sleep in peace!  Pardon, ye demigods, for I am only a child who suffers.  But while I write all this I can not but curse you.  Why did you not sing of the perfume of flowers, of the voices of nature, of hope and of love, of the vine and the sun, of the azure heavens and of beauty?  You must have understood life, you must have suffered; the world was crumbling to pieces about you; you wept on its ruins and you despaired; your mistresses were false; your friends calumniated, your compatriots misunderstood; your heart was empty; death was in your eyes, and you were the Colossi of grief.  But tell me, noble Goethe, was there no more consoling voice in the religious murmur of your old German forests?  You, for whom beautiful poesy was the sister of science, could not they find in immortal nature a healing plant for the heart of their favorite?  You, who were a pantheist, and antique poet of Greece, a lover of sacred forms, could you not put a little honey in the beautiful vases you made; you who had only to smile and allow the bees to come to your lips?  And thou, Byron, hadst thou not near Ravenna, under the orange-trees of Italy, under thy beautiful Venetian sky, near thy Adriatic, hadst thou not thy well-beloved?  Oh, God!  I who speak to you, who am only a feeble child, have perhaps known sorrows that you have never suffered, and yet I believe and hope, and still bless God.

When English and German ideas had passed thus over our heads there ensued disgust and mournful silence, followed by a terrible convulsion.  For to formulate general ideas is to change saltpetre into powder, and the Homeric brain of the great Goethe had sucked up, as an alembic, all the juice of the forbidden fruit.  Those who did not read him, did not believe it, knew nothing of it.  Poor creatures!  The explosion carried them away like grains of dust into the abyss of universal doubt.

It was a denial of all heavenly and earthly facts that might be termed disenchantment, or if you will, despair; as if humanity in lethargy had been pronounced dead by those who felt its pulse.  Like a soldier who is asked:  “In what do you believe?” and who replies:  “In myself,” so the youth of France, hearing that question, replied:  “In nothing.”

Then formed two camps:  on one side the exalted spirits, sufferers, all the expansive souls who yearned toward the infinite, bowed their heads and wept; they wrapped themselves in unhealthful dreams and nothing could be seen but broken reeds in an ocean of bitterness.  On the other side the materialists remained erect, inflexible, in the midst of positive joys, and cared for nothing except to count the money they had acquired.  It was but a sob and a burst of laughter, the one coming from the soul, the other from the body.

This is what the soul said: