eclared that the
future lies in the hand of the schoolmaster, and busied himself with
educational questions. He desired that society should labor without
relaxation at the elevation of the moral and intellectual level, at
coining science, at putting ideas into circulation, at increasing the
mind in youthful persons, and he feared lest the present poverty of
method, the paltriness from a literary point of view confined to two
or three centuries called classic, the tyrannical dogmatism of official
pedants, scholastic prejudices and routines should end by converting our
colleges into artificial oyster beds. He was learned, a purist, exact,
a graduate of the Polytechnic, a close student, and at the same time,
thoughtful "even to chimaeras," so his friends said. He believed in
all dreams, railroads, the suppression of suffering in chirurgical
operations, the fixing of images in the dark chamber, the electric
telegraph, the steering of balloons. Moreover, he was not much alarmed
by the citadels erected against the human mind in every direction, by
superstition, despotism, and prejudice. He was one of those who think
that science will eventually turn the position. Enjolras was a chief,
Combeferre was a guide. One would have liked to fight under the one and
to march behind the other. It is not that Combeferre was not capable of
fighting, he did not refuse a hand-to-hand combat with the obstacle, and
to attack it by main force and explosively; but it suited him better to
bring the human race into accord with its destiny gradually, by means of
education, the inculcation of axioms, the promulgation of positive laws;
and, between two lights, his preference was rather for illumination than
for conflagration. A conflagration can create an aurora, no doubt, but
why not await the dawn? A volcano illuminates, but daybreak furnishes a
still better illumination. Possibly, Combeferre preferred the whiteness
of the beautiful to the blaze of the sublime. A light troubled by smoke,
progress purchased at the expense of violence, only half satisfied this
tender and serious spirit. The headlong precipitation of a people into
the truth, a '93, terrified him; nevertheless, stagnation was still
more repulsive to him, in it he detected putrefaction and death; on the
whole, he preferred scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the
cesspool, and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon. In
short, he desired neither halt nor haste. While his