He also adored crowds and loved to mingle with
them, believing that in this way he joined himself to the All-Soul,
according to the fashion at that time in intellectual circles. This
fashion, as not infrequently happens, emphasised a general tendency of
the day; humanity turning to the swarm-idea. The most sensitive among
human insects,--artists and thinkers,--were the first to show these
symptoms, which in them seemed a sort of pose, so that the general
conditions of which they were a symptom were lost sight of.
The democratic evolution of the last forty years had established
popular government politically, but socially speaking had only brought
about the rule of mediocrity. Artists of the higher class at first
opposed this levelling down of intelligence,--but feeling themselves
too weak to resist they had withdrawn to a distance, emphasising their
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.
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