Above the Battle
refashions its gossamer web? Vois-tu pas que tu es moi? said the old Hugo to one of his enemies.…
The true man of culture is not he who makes of himself and his ideal the centre of the universe, but who looking around him sees, as in the sky the stream of the Milky Way, thousands of little flames which flow with his own; and who seeks neither to absorb them nor to impose upon them his own course, but to give himself the religious persuasion of their value and of the common source of the fire by which all alike are fed. Intelligence of the mind is nothing without that of the heart. It is nothing also without good sense and humour—good sense which shows to every people and to every being their place in the universe—and humour which is the critic of misguided reason, the soldier who, following the chariot to the Capitol, reminds Cæsar in his hour of triumph that he is bald.
Journal de Genève, December 4, 1914.
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