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Arrived at the second station of our Calvary, instead of abandoning ourselves to sterile contemplations, let us be more and more attentive to the teachings of destiny. The guarantee of our liberty lies in the progress of our torture. Between the hundred-headed hydra, division of labor, and the unconquered dragon, machinery, what will become of humanity?
VOLUPTUOUSNESS, PASSION FOR POWER, and SELFISHNESS: these three things have hitherto been best cursed, and have been in worst and falsest repute these three things will I weigh humanly well. Well! Here is my promontory, and there is the sea IT rolleth hither unto me, shaggily and fawningly, the old, faithful, hundred-headed dog-monster that I love! Well!
Is it at all probable that Tennyson can ever be to any other age what he has been to this? Tennyson marks an expiring age, the sunset of the feudal world. He did not share the spirit to which the future belongs. There was not one drop of democratic blood in his veins. To him, the people were an hundred-headed beast.
Has the destroying element exhausted itself; or does it only rest, like the hundred-headed Hydra, to break forth with renewed strength, and desolate those regions which, pushed to the verge of the sea-shore, encircle the sterile interior as a modest wreath?
Poets and philosophers and statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the hosts of unoriginal men. Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck them.
And in this respect Balzac in no wise contributed to what he foresaw and, so to speak, prophesied the growing stress of the struggle for life in domains political, social, financial, industrial, the coming of uncrowned kings greater in puissance than monarchs of yore, the reign of not one despot but many, the generalization of intrigue, the replacement of ancient disorders by others of equal or increased virulence and harder to remedy, hundred-headed hydras to combat, most difficult of herculean tasks.
There might then have been some sense in trying to get at them, in spite of the hundred-headed dragon. But, as I have already told you, it was quite a common thing with young persons, when tired of too much peace and rest, to go in search of the garden of the Hesperides. And once the adventure was undertaken by a hero who had enjoyed very little peace or rest since he came into the world.
Here and there, too, some creeping species, with their branches full of thorns, formed a perfect thicket; one might almost have fancied that they were a hundred-headed hydra. "We might almost imagine we were in a hot-house full of rich-growing plants and golden-colored flowers," said Sumichrast to me.
Now the hundred-headed Cerberus of the press is silenced, and skulks into its dark lair, beaten and silenced, but not ashamed of the filthy dribblings of its lying tongue. Now all the talk, articles, and "leaders" go for nothing, since Mr. Goldrich acknowledges "the priest is right; she is his sister."
To-day beauty is beggared, and power is lusterless.... And taste? Taste is a hundred-headed Hydra, roaring with a hundred tongues!" "While in the old days in Cairo it only roared with the tongues of Mamelukes?" Arlee suggested, a glint of mischief in her smile. He nodded. "It should be the concern of nobles not of the rabble. That is why I should hate your America where the rabble prevail."
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