ive fire aroused by such a
perspective are attested by our exhibitions, and borne witness to by the
rich luxuriance of our annual art harvests. When we think of the
precisely opposite effects of ancient marriage, that institution of our
ancestors, more ridiculous still than their umbrellas, one can measure
the distance between this excessive and pretended exclusive _debitum
conjugale_ and our mode of union, at once free and regulated, energetic
and intermittent, passionate and restrained, the true corner-stone of
our regenerated humanity. The sufferings it imposes on those who are
sacrificed, the unsuccessful artists, is not for the latter a cause of
complaint. Their despair itself is dear to the desperate; for if they do
not die of it, they draw life and immortality from it and from the
bottomless pit of their inner depth of woe, they gather deathless
flowers, flowers of art or poesy for some, mystic roses for others. To
the latter perhaps is given at that moment, as they grope in their
inward darkness to touch most nearly the essence of things, and these
delights are so vivid that our artists and our metaphysical mystics
wonder whether art and philosophy were made to console love or if the
sole reason for love's existence is not to inspire art and the pursuit
of ultimate truth. This last opinion has generally prevailed.

The extent to which love has refined our habits, and to which our
civilisation based on love is superior in morality to the former
civilisation based on ambition and covetousness, was proved at the time
of the great discovery which took place in the Year of Salvation 194.
Guided by some mysterious inkling, some electric sense of direction, a
bold sapper by dint of forcing his way through the flanks of the earth
beyond the ordinary galleries suddenly penetrated into a strange open
space buzzing with human voices and swarming with human faces. But what
squeaky voices! What sallow complexions! What an impossible language
with no connection with our Greek! It was, without doubt, a veritable
underground America, quite as vast and still more curious. It was the
work of a little tribe of burrowing Chinese who had had, one imagines,
the same idea as our Miltiades. Much more practical than he, they had
hastily crawled underground without encumbering themselves with museums
and libraries, and there they had multiplied enormously. Instead of
confining themselves as we to turning to account the deposits of animal