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Title: The Heart's Domain
Author: Duhamel, Georges
Language: English
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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
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The book cover was modified by the Transcriber and has been added to
the public domain.
A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated
variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used
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Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.
* * * * *
THE
HEART’S DOMAIN
BY
GEORGES DUHAMEL
Author of “CIVILIZATION, 1914-1917,” etc.
TRANSLATED BY
ELEANOR STIMSON BROOKS
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1919
Copyright, 1919, by
THE CENTURY CO.
_Published, September, 1919_
TO
MY SON BERNARD
PREFACE
I am beginning a book with what sounds like a very ambitious title.
I wish to say at once that I have no qualifications to discuss
political, historical or economic matters. I leave to the scholars
who are versed in these redoubtable questions the task of explaining,
skilfully and definitely, the great misery that has befallen our time.
I thus at the same time renounce most of the opportunities and
obligations of my title.
But I wish, with all my heart, to pursue with a few people of good will
a friendly discussion the object of which remains, in spite of all, the
heart’s domain, or the possession of the world.
The possession of the world is not decided by guns. It is the noble
work of peace. It is not involved in the struggle which is now rending
society.
Even so, men will find themselves engaged in an undertaking that will
threaten to overwhelm them with suffering and despair.
Fate has assigned to me during the war a place and a task of such a
character that misery has been the only thing I have seen; it has been
my study and my enemy every moment. I must be forgiven for thinking of
it with a persistence that is like an obsession.
The whole intelligence of the world is absorbed by the enterprise and
the necessities of the war; there is little chance of rousing it now
from this in favor of the happiness of the race, in favor of that
happiness which is compromised for the future and destroyed for the
present. It is to the heart one must address oneself. It is to all the
generous hearts that one must make one’s appeal.
So, if I am spurred by an ambition, it is to beg the world to seek
once more whatever can lighten the present and the future distress of
mankind, to seek the springs of interest that exist for the soul in a
life harassed with difficulties, perils and disillusionments, to honor
more than ever the faithful and incorruptible resources of the inner
life.
* * * * *
The inner life!
It has never ceased to shine, a precious, quivering flame, devoting
all its ardor in a struggle against the breath of these great events,
resisting this tempest which has had no parallel.
It has never ceased to shine, but its shy and faithful light trembles
in a sort of crypt into which we fear to venture.
What has happened has seized upon us as upon its prey. During the
first months of the war, during the first years perhaps, all our
physical and moral energies were overwhelmed in this maelstrom. How,
indeed, could one refuse oneself to the appetite of the monster? We did
not even try to snatch from him our hours of leisure, our dreams. We
simply abandoned such things, as we abandoned our plans, our welfare,
and the whole of our existence.
You remember! It was a time when solitude found us more shaken, more
disarmed, than peril. We reproached ourselves for distracting a single
one of our thoughts from the universal distress. We gave ourselves day
and night to this agonizing world; and when our work was suspended,
when the wild beast unloosed its clutch, as if in play, and we returned
for a few minutes to ourselves, we did not always dare to look the
quivering inner flame in the face. What it lighted up in us seemed at
times too foreign to our anxiety, or too filled with limpid serenity.
And so we returned to our wretchedness, experiencing it to the point of
intoxication, to the point of despair.
When I think of the year 1915, it seems to me that I still hear all
those noble comrades saying to me with a sort of dejection: “I can’t
think of anything else! I can neither read, nor work, nor seek to
distract myself to any purpose. When I’m off duty I think about these
days, I think about them unceasingly, till I feel seasick, till I feel
dizzy. I’ve just had two hours of liberty. Once upon a time I should
have given them to Pascal or to Tolstoy. Today I have employed them
in reading some documentary works on the manufacture of torpedoes and
on European colonial methods. They are subjects that will always be
outside my line, subjects I shall never be interested in. But how can I
think of anything else?”
Perhaps it is not a question of thinking of anything else. It is not a
question of turning one’s back on the time, but rather of looking it in
the face, calmly and collectedly.
When the first great excitement had passed away, those who had the
wisdom and the courage to return assiduously to themselves found their
inner life ennobled, augmented, enriched. For it does not cease to
labor on in the depths of us. It is at once ourselves and something
other than ourselves, better than ourselves. Like certain of our organs
which are endowed with a marvelous independence and pursue a vigilant
activity in the midst of our agitations and our sleep, the inner life
comes to its fruitage even though we are full of ingratitude and
indifference towards it. It is the faithful spouse who keeps the home
radiant, arranges every comfort and spins at the wheel, behind the
door, awaiting our return.
And behold we are returning!
To be sure, the storm still roars on. It grows greater, more furious,
more unending. Never has it seemed more complex, more grave, more
difficult. Peril has taken up its abode with us. Every sort of opinion
holds up its head and vehemently solicits our belief.
But we have found once more the key and the path to the secret refuge.
Nothing could turn us aside now. Nothing could prevent us at certain
hours from plunging into solitude, there to find again the equilibrium,
the harmony and those moral riches which we know, after the ruin of so
many things, are alone efficacious, alone durable.
For long months now I have realized, watching the men with whom I live,
that they are waiting for words of quietude, words of rest and love.
They are like parched soil at the end of a blazing summer: they long to
slake their thirst and grow green again.
In vain have destruction, disorder and death tried to break up the
sublime and familiar colloquy that every being pursues with the better
part of himself. That colloquy revives, it begins again, in the very
midst of the battle, among the odors and the groans of the hospital.
Nevertheless, the daily work is done, well done; duty is properly
weighed and accomplished; the soul simply is unwilling any longer to
renounce its meditation upon all that is profound, imperishable, and
immaterial in the present.
Tell me that we are going to labor in concert once more at the
exploitation of our inner fortune. Tell me that we are going to labor
to save from shipwreck that part of us which, in spite of all our
errors, uncertainties, crimes and disillusionments, remains truly noble
and worthy of eternity.
* * * * *
I am able to undertake this essay thanks to the leisure moments the war
has been willing to grant me. It is not purely the fruit of solitary
meditations. I do not live alone: my chosen comrades surround me; they
share with me the confused space of our dwelling; we share together all
the thoughts that fill this space.
Friendship has accomplished the miracle of transforming into a
communion what, without it, would have remained a promiscuity.
I have a feeling that I am expressing the desires and the thoughts of
many men. Very soon, those who are here will be going to sleep; I shall
continue my writing, but with the secret certitude of not being alone
in the task, of carrying with me their tacit assent. I feel that I have
been entrusted with a sort of mandate.
I have no library, no documents. But do we need books in order to
converse together of the things that form the very substance of our
existence? Does it not suffice to consult our souls? Do we need any
other guarantee than our devout desire in order to lift an open hand
and make, for all those who await it in their solitude, the sign of
concord and of hope?
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE HOPE OF HAPPINESS 3
II POVERTY AND RICHES 21
III THE POSSESSION OF OTHERS 33
IV ON DISCOVERING THE WORLD 69
V THE LYRICS OF LIFE 94
VI SORROW AND RENUNCIATION 110
VII THE SHELTER OF LIFE 126
VIII THE CHOICE OF THE GRACES 146
IX APOSTLESHIP 160
X ON THE REIGN OF THE HEART 178
THE HEART’S DOMAIN
THE HEART’S DOMAIN
I
THE HOPE OF HAPPINESS
I
It was necessary for me to pass middle age in order to become convinced
that happiness was the object of my life, as it is the object of all
humanity, as it is the object of the whole world of living things.
At first sight, that statement seems self-evident. And yet many a time
have I questioned my friends, my relatives, my chance companions on
this subject and I have received the most contradictory replies.
Many seemed taken unawares and, overwhelmed with their various
burdens, would not trouble to seek an object: they were in pursuit of
happiness without naming it. Others, excited by the play of argument,
acknowledged as the object of life all sorts of states or manners
of being which are nothing but steps toward happiness, means good
or bad of seeking it, such as movement, stoical indifference, or
prayer. Others confused the end with the object and named death. Still
others, maddened by their misery, gave it as their bitter conclusion
that unhappiness is the actual destiny of man, and these confused the
obstacle with the aim. Finally, there were some who gave to happiness
names dictated by their aspirations, their culture, their accustomed
manner of using words, and called it God, or eternal life, or the
salvation of the soul.
As for me, in spite of all, I am sure that happiness is the object of
life. This certitude has come to me altogether from within, not from
outside events, and not from the spectacle of other men. Like all the
certitudes of the inner life, it is obstinate and even aggressive.
All objections seem simply made to fortify it. It dominates them
all. I have not been able even to imagine a new certitude that could
invalidate or replace this one.
Upon reflection, the path and the end are identical. Happiness is not
only the aim, the reason of life, it is its means, its expression, its
essence. It is life itself.
II
One might well doubt this. The whole of humanity at this moment utters
one despairing, heart-rending cry. It bellows like a wounded beast of
burden, it simply does not understand its wound.
All convictions and all certitudes are at one another’s throats. How
can we recognize them, with that lost look they have, that blood that
soils and disfigures them? In the hurricane, opinions, uprooted, have
lost their soil and their sap. They drift like autumn thistles, dry
thistles that yet have power to tear the skin. Men no longer know
anything but their insurmountable suffering, a suffering that has no
limit and seems to be without reason. They groan and desire nothing but
to be alleviated. Will a century of pious tenderness suffice to bathe,
drain, close the vast wound?
Without delay, O streaming wound, your living flesh must be stanched
and bathed. From now on, no matter how long you bleed, you must be
anointed and protected, and if you are opened up again ten times, ten
times must you be anointed anew and covered once more.
Yet, do not doubt it, humanity even in this terrible hour seeks for
nothing but its own happiness. It rushes forward, by instinct, like a
herd that smells the salt-lick and the spring. But it will suffocate
rather than not enjoy everything together and at once.
Happiness?
God! who has given it this painful and ridiculous idea? What were
they about, the priests, the scientists, and the people who write
the books? What has been taught the children of men that they could
have been made to believe that war brings happiness to anyone? Let
them declare themselves, those who have assured the poor in spirit
that their happiness depends upon the possession of a province, an
iron-mine, or a foaming arm of the sea between two distant continents!
It is thus that they have all set out for the conquest of happiness,
since that is destiny, and there has been placed in their hands
precisely what was certain to destroy happiness forever.
And yet, if you will bear with me, we need not lose all hope. So long
as there is a single wall-flower to tremble in the coming Aprils over
the ruins of the world, let us repeat from the depths of our hearts:
“Happiness, you are truly my end and the reason for my being, I know it
through my own tears.”
III
I went, lately, to a laboratory, in the heart of a wilderness of glass
and porcelain, haunted with inhuman odors. A friend dwelt there. I saw
a great crystal cask full of distilled water; the sunlight quivered
through it freely and majestically. There, I thought, is the desert.
That water contained nothing, it was unfitted for life, it was as empty
as a dead world.
But then we scratched the bottom of the cask and looked at it with
the microscope. Little round, green algæ were growing in that desert.
A current of air had carried the germs, and they had increased and
multiplied. There where there was nothing to seize upon, they had yet
found something. The taste of barren glass, a few stray grains of dust,
that soulless water, that sunlight, they had asked for nothing more in
order to subsist and work out their humble joy.
I thought of this virtue of life, this perseverance, as of a hymn to
happiness, a silent hymn prevailing over the roars of the conquest.
Nothing discourages life except, perhaps, the excess of itself.
If Europe, too rich and too beautiful, is to be henceforth the vessel
of all the sorrows, it is because happiness has assumed an unclean
mask: the mask of pleasure. For pleasure is not joy.
Patience! The whole world has not been poisoned.
I know of mosses that succeed in living upon acids. The antiseptics,
whose property it is to destroy living things, are at times invaded by
these obstinate fungi which encamp there, acclimatize themselves and
modestly fulfil their destiny.
One must have confidence in happiness. One must have more confidence
than ever, for never was happiness more greatly lacking to the mass of
men. So cruelly is the world astray, so immensely, so evidently, too,
that we cannot wait for the consummation to denounce it and reprove it.
Like those algæ, those mosses, those laborious lichens that attach to
the very ruins themselves their infinite need of happiness, let us seek
our joy in the distress of the present and make it open for us, like a
plant beaten by the winds, in the desert of a blasted world.
IV
You must understand that this concerns happiness and not pleasure, or
well-being, or enjoyment, or the delight of the senses.
All cultivated people have created different words to designate these
different things. All have committed their moralists to the task of
preserving simple souls from a confusion which our instincts favor.
Delight of the senses, you who are the eternally unsatisfactory, is it
true, intangible one, that you will always deceive us and that we shall
always seek for happiness through you?
What seductiveness is not yours, O you who smile with the lips of love,
O mysterious phantom of joy? How you lure us and enchain us! Well you
know how to array yourself, at times, in the appearance of a sacred
mission, a religious duty!
No, you are not happiness, divine though you are! To live without you
is a bitter misfortune, but you are not happiness!
Why does happiness command us to sacrifice you often, to mistrust you
always?
There is no happiness without harmony; you know this very well, you who
are delicious disorder itself, death, laughter, strife.
Happiness is our homeland. You are only the burning country we long
for, the tropical isle where our dreams exile themselves, never to
return.
Happiness is our true kingdom. Delight of the senses, let your slaves
hymn your praise.
V
During the summer of 1916 I found among the meadows of the Marne a
flower that had three odors. It is a very common flower in France: it
adorns a low and spiny plant which the peasants call “_arrête-bœuf_.”
Toward midday, at the hour when the sun exasperates all its creatures,
this flower exhales three different odors: the first is soft, fresh and
resembles the perfume of the sweet pea; the second is sharp and makes
one think of phosphor irritant, of a flame; the third is the secret
breath of love. This miraculous flower really has all three of these
odors at once, but we perceive them more easily one at a time because
we are not worthy of all this wealth.
This little discovery descended upon my weary head like a benediction.
At that time we were leaving the miseries of Verdun behind and were
just on the point of plunging into those of the Somme. The intermediate
rest depressed us and enervated us by turns. In the walks across the
fields which we took with our comrades, I grew accustomed every day to
gather a root of _arrête-bœuf_ and offer it, as a gift, to those who
accompanied me, so that they might share my discovery.
Some of them, anxious about the world and their own fortune, took
pleasure in this modest marvel. They breathed in with these perfumes
the inexhaustible variety of the lavish universe. They distinguished
and recognized, smilingly, the three odors of this one being. They
honored these three ambassadors whom a people of unknown virtues had
assigned to them. They interpreted as a revelation the little signs
of the latent opulence which challenges and disdains the majority of
bewildered men.
But others remained insensible to this delicate prayer, and these I
thought of with chagrin as of men who had no care for the welfare of
their own souls.
I know quite well you will say, “There is no relation between this
flower and the welfare of the soul.” But this relation does exist,
emphatically and definitely. Truth shines out of every merest trifle
that goes to make up the world. We must fasten our eyes ardently upon
it, as if it were a light shining through the branches, and march
forward.
I am sure, we are all sure, that happiness is the very reason for our
existence. Let it be added at once that happiness is founded upon
possession, that is to say, upon the perfect and profound understanding
of something.
For this reason men who have a high conception of happiness aspire to
the complete and definite knowledge of an absolute, a perfection which
they name God. The desire for eternal life is a boundless need of
possession.
Equally noble is the passionate desire of certain men to understand, to
possess themselves, to have such an exact and merciless conception of
their moral and physical nature as will give them some sort of mastery
over it.
It is indeed a beautiful destiny to pursue the understanding of the
external world with the weapons and the arguments of a science that is
not the slave of conquest. Men who achieve this may indeed be called
just.
Others wish to possess a house, a field, a pair of earrings, an
automobile. For them possession is not understanding, it is above
all else an exclusive and almost solitary enjoyment. They deceive
themselves about happiness and about possession. They deceive
themselves to the actual point of war, massacre and destruction.
If we wish it, we may possess the whole universe, and it is in this
possession that we shall find the salvation of our souls. We may
possess, for example, that unknown something which walks by the
road-side, the color of the forest of pointed firs that rises sharply
against the southern horizon, the thoughts of Beethoven, our dreams
by night, the conception of space, our memories, our future, the odor
and the weight of objects, our grief at this moment and thousands and
thousands of other things besides.
Is my soul immortal? Alas! how can I still linger in this ancient,
ingenuous hope? There are millions who, like me, can no longer give
reasonable credence to such an impossible happiness.
But does my soul exist? Every thought bears witness that it does, and
this life of ours too, and the inexplicable life that is all about us.
When Christians speak of the salvation of the soul, they are thinking
of all sorts of assurances and precautions in regard to that future
life which remains the greatest charm of religion and at the same time
its most wonderful weapon.
We can give a humbler but more immediate meaning to this expression.
First of all, not to be ignorant of our own souls!
To think about the soul, to think about it at least once in the
confusion of every crowded day, is indeed the beginning of salvation.
To think with perseverance and respect of the soul, to enrich it
unceasingly, that will be our sanctity.
VI
We have all known those men who, at the first break of day, while they
are still half awake and barely rested, fling themselves into the
stress of business. They pass all day from one man to another in a sort
of blind, buzzing frenzy. They are ceaselessly reaching out to take, to
appropriate for themselves. If a moment of solitude offers itself, they
pull note-books out of their pockets and begin figuring. Between whiles
they eat, drink and seek a sort of sleep that is more arid than death.
Looking at these unfortunates, who are often men of great importance,
one would imagine their souls were like decrepit poor relations,
relegated to some corner of their personality, with which they never
concern themselves.
I was once returning from the country on a train with a young surgeon
on whom that cruel fortune which we call success was beginning to
smile. I can still see him, breathless and almost stupefied, on the
seat facing me. He had been talking to me of his work, of how he spent
his time, with a restless excitement which the noise of the train
hammered and disjointed and gave a sort of rhythm to. Evening was
falling. It gave me pleasure to look at the young poplars in the valley
beside the track, their foliage and slender trunks transfigured by
the sunset. My friend looked at them also, and suddenly he murmured:
“It’s true! I’m no longer interested in those things, I no longer pay
attention to anything.” Through the fatigue and anxiety of his affairs,
through the jingling calculation of his profits, he suddenly caught a
glimpse of his error, of his real poverty. His repudiated soul stirred
in the depths of his being as the infant stirs in its mother’s womb.
It is constantly awakening in this way and timidly reclaiming its
rights. Often, an unexpected word strikes us, a word that comes from
it and reveals it. I have as a work-fellow a quiet, studious young man
who takes life “seriously,” that is to say, in such a fashion that he
gets himself into a fine state of mind and will die, perhaps, without
having known, without having saved, the soul with which he is charged.
At the beginning of the month of June of this year 1918, I found myself
hard at work during one of those overwhelming afternoons that seem, on
our barren Champagne, like a white furnace, a glistening desert. There
were many wounded and the greater part had been uncared for for several
days; the barrack that served us as an operating-hall was overcrowded;
our task was a tragic one; the demon of war had imprisoned us under
his knee. We felt crushed, exasperated, swamped in these immediate
realities. Between two wounded men, as I was soaping my gloves, I saw
my young comrade looking far away through a little window and his gaze
was suddenly bathed with calm and peace. “What are you looking at?” I
said to him. “Oh! nothing,” he replied; “only I’m resting myself on
that little tuft of verdure down there: it refreshes me so much.”
VII
It seems childish and paradoxical to oppose to all the concrete and
formidable realities that are considered as the hereditary wealth of
mankind an almost purely ideal world of joys that have no price, that
remain outside all our bargainings, that are unstable, often fugitive,
and always relative in appearance, whenever we put them to the test.
Yet they alone are absolute, they alone are true. Where they are
lacking there may be a place for amusement, there is no place for true
happiness. They alone are capable of assuring the salvation of the
soul. We ought to labor passionately to find them, to amass them as the
veritable treasures of humanity.
The future we are permitted to glimpse seems the very negation of
happiness and the ruin of the soul.
If this is true, we must examine it with open minds and then, with all
our strength, refuse it.
Just this moment, when the struggle for mastery goes on, to the great
peril of the soul, among the peoples, just this moment I choose
for saying: “Let us think of the salvation of our souls.” And this
salvation is not a matter of the future but of the present hour. Let
us recognize the existence of the soul; it is thus that we shall save
it. Let us give it the freedom of the city in a world where everything
conspires to silence or destroy it. If it is true that this withdraws
us from that struggle for existence, the clamor of which assails our
ears, well, even so, I believe it is better to die than to remain in a
universe from which the soul is banished. But we shall have occasion to
speak more than once of this.
Let us not forget that happiness is our one aim. Happiness is, above
all, a thing of the spirit, and we shall only deserve it at the price
of the honors we render to the noblest part of our being.
VIII
There are people who have said to me, “My happiness lies in this very
hurly-burly, this brutish labor, this frantic agitation which you
spurn. Outside this turmoil of business and society, I am bored. I need
it. I need it in order to divert my thoughts.”
No doubt! No doubt! But what have you done with your life that it has
become necessary to divert your thoughts? What have you made of your
past, what do you hope from your future when this alcohol, this opium,
has become necessary to you?
You must understand me, there is no question, if you are built as an
athlete, of letting your muscles deteriorate. There is no question,
if you have a great thirst for controversy, a natural aptitude for
struggle, of letting that thirst go unsatisfied, that aptitude
uncultivated. The question is simply one of harmoniously employing all
these fine gifts, of enriching yourself with those real treasures the
universe bestows on those who wish to take them, and not of wearing out
your radiant strength in the labors of a street-porter, a galley-slave
or an executioner.
Here is a man who says to me: “My happiness! My happiness! But it
consists in never thinking of my soul.” What a sad thing! And how
gravely one must have offended others and one’s own self to have
reached that point!
For where shall he who loves torment, passionate restlessness,
uncertainty, and remorse discover these terrible blessings if it is not
in the depths of his own hateful ego?
IX
If anyone tells you something strange about the world, something you
have never heard before, do not laugh but listen attentively; make him
repeat it, make him explain it: no doubt there is something there worth
taking hold of.
The cult of the soul is a perpetual discovery of itself and the
universe which it reflects. The purest happiness is not a stable and
final frame of mind, it is an equilibrium produced by an incessant
compromise which has to be adroitly reëstablished; it is the reward
of a constant activity; it increases in proportion to the daily
corrections one brings to it.
One must not cling obstinately to one’s own interpretations of the
world but unceasingly renew the flowers on the altar.
In quite another order of ideas I think of those old-fashioned
manufacturers who are immovably set against trying any of the new
machines and perish in their stubbornness. That is nothing but a
comparison: to justify the machine folly is quite the opposite of my
desire. I simply wish to show that routine affects equally the things
of the mind and of the heart, that it is a very formidable thing.
Kipling, I believe, tells the story of a Hindu colony that was
decimated by famine. The poor folk let themselves die of hunger without
touching the wheat that had been brought for them, because they had
been used to eating millet.
If the sacred lamp of happiness some day comes to lack the ritual oil,
we shall not let it go out; we shall surely find something with which
to feed it, something that will serve for light and heat.
X
The will to happiness attains its perfection in the mature man. With
adolescence it passes through a redoubtable crisis.
Nietzsche says: “There is less melancholy in the mature man than in the
young man.” It is true.
Very young people cultivate sadness as something noble. They do
not readily forgive themselves for not being always sad. They have
discovered the mysterious isle of melancholy and do not wish to escape
from it again. They love everything about that black magician and his
attitudes and his tears and his nostalgia and his romantic beauty. They
have a fierce disdain for vulgar pleasures and take refuge in sadness
because they do not yet know the splendor and majesty of joy.
But in their own fashion, which is full of disdain, reserve and
ingenuous complexity, they do not any the less seek for happiness.
With age happiness appears as truly the sole, serene study of man. As
he rests upon the moral possession of the world, he believes that with
time and experience he can remain insensible to the wearing out of his
bodily organs.
He who knows how to be happy and to win forgiveness for his happiness,
how enviable he is!--the only true model among those that are wise.
It is now, just now, that these things ought to be said, in the hour
when our old continent bleeds in every member, in the hour when our
future seems blotted out by the menace of every sort of servitude and
of a hopeless labor that will know neither measure nor redemption.
II
POVERTY AND RICHES
I
The Christian doctrine, which has all the beauties, has all the
audacities too. It has endeavored to make the sublime and daring notion
prevail among the mass of men that salvation is reserved for the
poor. What a magnificent thing! And if this religion of poverty has
degenerated in the course of the centuries, with what consolation has
it not bathed those thrice-happy souls whom an unbroken faith guides
through misery and humiliation!
But there has never been a religion which has been able to found itself
upon renunciation without compensation. Is he poor, this man who
consents to go unclad, roofless, unfed, up to the day when there will
be showered upon him all the riches of the kingdom of God? Has he no
thought of a supreme gift, of a magnificent possession, the man to whom
his master, in person, has given the command: “Lay up your treasures in
heaven, where they will not be lost”?
He does not exist, the hopeless being who does not hunger for some
treasure, even if it is an imaginary one, even an unreal one, even one
that is lost in a bewildering future.
In what an abyss of poverty should we groan if our kingdom were not of
this world and were nowhere outside the world, either?
And now a generation of men has come that no longer believes in the
supernatural felicities of the future life and seems no longer to
have anything to hope from a world consumed by hatred and given over
inevitably, for long years, to confusion, destitution, egotistical
passions.
In truth, the programmes of the social factions have no consolation
for us, there is nothing in them that speaks of love and the true
blessings; all these monuments of eloquence bring us back to hatred and
anguish.
The most generous of them only give us glimpses of new struggles, new
sheddings of blood, when our age is drunk with crime and fatigue. To
whichever side the individual turns he finds himself crushed, scoffed
at, sacrificed to insatiable, hostile gods.
A few years ago Maeterlinck wrote: “Up to the present men have left one
religion to enter another; but when we abandon ours, it is not to go
anywhere. That is a new phenomenon, with unknown consequences, in the
midst of which we live.”
Having quoted these words, I hasten to add that the war is no
particular consequence of this moral state of the world. The question
of religion is not involved at all. The priests are quite ready to
abuse these easy oppositions in order to obtain arguments in favor of
their cause. But they know well enough, alas! that if the teaching
of Christ stigmatizes wars, the religions have only contributed to
multiply and aggravate them. They know very well that, in the conflict
that now divides the earth, the religions have shown themselves
enslaved to the states. No one has wished to take up the wallet and
staff of the dead Tolstoy.
Humanity seems poorer and more truly disinherited than ever. Its
kingdom is in itself and in everything that surrounds it; but it has
sold it for a morsel of bread. And how can one reproach it for this? It
is very hungry and its heart is not open to beauty.
II
We shall seek together the materials of our happiness. Together we
shall pile up all those marvelous little things that must constitute
our patrimony, our wealth.
We shall have great misfortunes and we shall often be bitterly
deceived. It is because the war has succeeded in depriving the simplest
and the most sacred things of the light of eternity. That is not the
least consequence of the catastrophe. We must make a painful effort to
recover that light and clear it of its blemishes. Silence, solitude,
the sky, the vestiture of the earth, all the riches of the poor have
been sullied as if forever. The works of art have been mutilated. They
have taken refuge under the earth where they seem to veil their faces.
We ought to seek and gather together the debris so that we can take up
and love in secret every day the fragments of our liberties.
We ought to think unceasingly of that “mean landscape” of which Charles
Vildrac has spoken in one of his most beautiful poems. It is an
unfruitful landscape, despoiled, denatured by the sad labor of men, and
apparently worn out;--
But even so you found, if you sought there,
One happy spot where the grass grew rich,
Even so you heard, if you listened,
The whisper of leaves
And the birds pursuing one another.
And if you had enough love,
You could even ask of the wind
Perfumes and music ...
We shall have enough love! That shall be the principle and source of
our wealth.
And so we shall not have a whole life of poverty. When love, that is to
say, grace, abandons us, we shall perhaps know hours of poverty. That
will help us all the better to understand our hours of opulence, and
all the better cherish them.
III
If you wish, we can divide our task, enumerate the coffers in which we
are to pile our treasures.
First of all, let us stop over a word. We have said: to possess is to
know. The definition may seem to you arbitrary. On the chance of this I
open my little pocket dictionary, which is the whole library I have as
a soldier, and read: “To possess: to have for oneself, in one’s power,
to know to the bottom.” Let us accept that. We shall see, page by page,
if it is possible for us to satisfy these naïve, direct definitions.
What is most certain to attract our glance, when we look about us, is
the world of men, our fellow-creatures. Their figures are certainly the
most affecting spectacle that can be offered us. Their acts undoubtedly
constitute, owing to a natural inclination and an indestructible
solidarity, the chief object of our curiosity. Good! We shall possess
them first of all. We shall possess this inexhaustible fund of other
people.
We shall feel no shame then in contemplating, with a noble desire,
whatever strikes our senses, the animals, that is to say, the plants,
the material universe of stones and waters, the sky and even the
populous stars. These, too, ought to be well worth possessing!
Already our wealth seems immense. Our ambition is still greater:
we must possess our dreams. But have not illustrious men made more
beautiful dreams than ours? Yes, and these men are called Shakespeare,
Dante, Rembrandt, Goethe, Hugo, Rodin; there are a hundred of them,
even more; their works form the royal crown of humanity. We shall
possess that crown. It is for us it was forged, for us it was
bejewelled with immortal joys.
It would be vain to extend our possession only into space. It overruns
time: we possess the past, that is to say, our memories, and the future
in our hopes.
And then we also possess, and in the strictest sense of all, our
sorrows, our griefs, our despair, if that supreme and terrible treasure
is reserved for us.
Finally, there will be times when we possess nothing but an idea, but
this may perhaps be the idea of the absolute or the infinite. If it is
given us to possess God, then, no doubt, nothing else will be necessary
to us.
Every time that we possess the world purely we shall find that we have
touched an almost unhoped for happiness, for it is always being offered
to us and we do not think of it: we shall possess ourselves.
We shall share all our riches with our companions: that shall be our
apostolate. And we shall manage in some way to resist the seductions
or the commands of a society that is going to ruin, a society that is
even more unhappy and abused than corrupt. If, in consequence, we are
permitted to glimpse, even if only for the space of a minute, a little
more happiness about us, a little more happiness than there is at
present, we shall at last be so happy as to accept death with joy.
IV
The greatest of all joys is to give happiness, and those who do not
know it have everything to learn about life. The annals of humanity
abound with illustrious deeds aptly proving that generosity enriches
first of all those who practise it.
Not to mention any celebrated instance, I shall tell you one simple
little tale. It is of the truth I live on, my daily bread.
Just now, not far from me, there is a young English soldier from the
neighborhood of York who is so severely wounded in the lower part of
the stomach that the natural functions of the body have been completely
upset and he has been reduced to a state of terrible suffering.
And yet, when I went to see him this morning, this boy gave me an
extraordinary smile, his very first, a smile full of delicacy and hope,
a smile of resurrection.
Presently I learned the cause of this great joy. The dying man pulled
from under his pillow a cigarette he had hidden there, which he had
secretly saved for me and now gave me.
V
There are many who preach an unpretentious life and the sweetness
of possessing a little garden. The most magnificent of gardens is
insignificant compared with this world in which nothing is refused
us. Accepting the little garden we should have the air of those
dispossessed kings who lose an empire to be ironically dowered with a
small island.
If we find it pleasant to employ our muscles in digging the earth,
there are a thousand spots where we can easily practise this wholesome
and fruitful exercise. But we shall never really possess a single clod
of earth because a legal deed has declared that it belongs exclusively
to us. The world itself! Our love demands the whole world; the rocks,
the clouds, the great trees along the highway, the darting flight of
birds, receding into the evening, the rustling verdure high above that
wall that vainly strives to shut in the private property of someone
else, the shining glory of those flowers we glimpse through the iron
railings of a park, and even that very wall and railing themselves.
According to the stretch of our wings, the scope of our desires, we
shall possess whatever our hands touch with ardor and respect, whatever
delights our eyes from the summits of mountains, whatever our thoughts
bring back from their travels through legendary lands.
To possess the world is purely a question of the intensity of our
understanding of it. One does not possess things on their surfaces but
in their depths; but the spirit alone can penetrate into the depths,
and for the spirit there is no barrier.
Many men to whom the law allows the gross, official possession of a
statue, a gem, a beautiful horse or a province wear themselves out
fulfilling a rôle to which no human being has received a call. Every
moment they perceive with bitterness that men who have no legal title
whatever to these material goods draw from them a delight that is
superior to the enjoyment they themselves get from them as absolute
owners. They often find, in this way, that a friend appreciates their
beautiful pictures better than they do, that a groom is a better judge
of their own stables, that a passer-by draws out of “their landscape” a
purer joy than theirs and more original ideas. They take their revenge
by obstinately confusing the usage of a thing with its possession.
Jesus said that the rich man renounced the kingdom of God. He renounces
many other things as well. For if he shuts himself up within his proud
walls, he abandons the marvelous universe for a small fragment of it;
and if he is actually curious about the universe, if he appreciates
its significance, how can he consent without guilt to hide a portion of
it away from the contemplation of others?
In order to express the gross and exclusive possession of things
society has invented various words and phrases that betray the weak
efforts of men to appropriate for themselves, in spite of everything,
in spite of the laws of love, the riches that remain the prerogative of
all. They speak, for example, of “disposing of a piece of property,”
which means having it subject to our pleasure, being able to do as
we choose with it. The sacrilegious vanity of this view of the world
gives the possessor, as his supreme right, the power to destroy his
own treasure. He could not, indeed, have a greater right than that.
But what sort of desperate possession is it, I ask, that considers the
destruction of the object possessed as the supreme manifestation of
power?
The world has long known and still knows slavery. Lords and masters
claimed the extravagant right of disposing of other human beings.
They all insisted, as a mark of authority, on their right of dealing
death to their slaves. But truly, what was the power of these despots
compared with the deep, sensitive, voluntary bond that united Plato to
Socrates, or John to Christ?
Epictetus suffered at the hands of Epaphroditus. For all that,
Epaphroditus was not able to prevent his slave from reigning, through
his thought, over the centuries. Epaphroditus’ right of possession
seems to us ridiculous and shameful. Who can fairly envy him when so
many centuries have passed judgement on him?
VI
Every philosophy has given magnificent expression to these immortal
truths. What can we add to the words of Epictetus, of Marcus Aurelius,
of Christ in regard to the vanity of those riches which alone society
admits to be of value?
But the poets have said to us, “Do not abandon the world, for it
abounds in pure and truly divine joys that will be lost if you do not
harvest them!”
The road that ought to be sweet for us to follow crosses now that of
the Christians, now that of the Stoics. We may stop now at the Garden
of Olives, now at the threshold of that small house without a door,
without furnishings, where the master of Arrien used to live.
Our road will lead us even more often through wild, solitary places, or
to the pillow of some man who sleeps in the earth, or to the smiling
dwelling of some humble friend, or again into the melodious shadow
where the souls of Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach forever dwell.
We shall not struggle with the mass of deluded man to possess the
known, so long as the unknown remains without a master. We shall give
up crude material possession in order to dream all the better of
spiritual possession.
No, we cannot any longer renounce our kingdom when it calls to us, when
for us it sings, hosanna!
And those of us who already have their place in the kingdom of heaven
must not hesitate to demand their share of this world also; for the
world has been given to all men so that each man, with the help of all
the rest, may possess the whole of it.
III
THE POSSESSION OF OTHERS
I
In the exile of the war I have fifteen comrades, and we live side by
side like seamen on the deck of a ship. Everything brings us together:
work, sleep, play, food and danger. Even our quarrels reunite us, for,
in order to quarrel well, you have to know your man: between strangers
disputes have little savor.
I never chose these men for my companions, as I once thought I had a
right to do. They have been given to me like a handful of fruit of
which some is juicy and some green. They have been taken at random,
as if by a drag of that net which respects nothing, from the swarming
species of man. Thanks, therefore, to the blind and divine world which
has thrown the net into the flood!
They are my treasure, my study, and my daily task. They are my purpose,
my horizon, my torment, and my recompense.
Although far from my own people, far from those with whom I have
carried on my life, I could not feel myself destitute, abandoned; the
world is not empty for me since I have these fifteen men to manage,
this cherished problem to ponder, this soil to work over, this vintage
for the winepress.
I accept the gift, the restless opulence, the fifteen glances that open
on fifteen different heavens where there shine neither the same seasons
nor the same stars, those fifteen proud, vindictive souls whom I must
win over and subdue like wild horses.
To be sure, a few of these men are frank, level in temperament, as
plain to the eye as a smooth pebble on the beach; one touches them,
holds them, grasps them in a moment like a big piece of silver in the
hollow of the hand. But so many others are changeable, furtive, so many
others are rough like ore in which only the fissures glisten and betray
the inner nobility.
The more unresponsive and secretive they seem, without any obvious
beauty, the more resolved I find I am to look upon them as a treasure,
to search through them as if they were a soil that is full of wealth.
There are some of them that I love, there are some whom I think that I
do not love. What does it matter! The interest I devote to them is not
in the least dependent on the throbs of my heart. That one who never
speaks and conceals, under his obstinate forehead, two little eyes
of green glass,--certainly he does not naturally arouse my affection.
Nevertheless, how different is the attention with which I regard him
from the curiosity of a scientist watching the stirrings of fish in an
aquarium! It makes me think, that attention, rather of the dizzy joy of
the miser who weighs a gold-piece, the effigy on which doesn’t please
him. Gold, nevertheless!
True! How could I feel bored with these faces turned toward me, with
this choir of human voices singing, each in its own familiar key, yet
blending into the masculine clamor of an orchestra?
Everything they say is precious; less so, however, than what they keep
to themselves. The reasons they give for their actions astonish me
at times; those they do not confess, especially those of which they
themselves are ignorant, always fill me with passionate interest. A
word, fallen from their lips like a piece of paper from an unknown
pocket, arrests me and sets me dreaming for long days. About them
I build up daring and yet fragile hypotheses which they either
obligingly support or destroy with a careless gesture. I always begin
again, delighting in it; it is my recreation. I enjoy finding that my
hypotheses are right, for that satisfies my pride; I enjoy finding I am
wrong, for that reveals to me leafy depths in my park that are still
unexplored.
And then I know that only a small part of their nature is involved
in our intercourse. The rest branches off, ramifies out into the
perspectives of the world. I think of it as of that side of the moon
which men will never see. I reconstruct with a pious, a burning
patience that life of theirs which is outside this, their true life,
endlessly complicated, linked by a thousand tentacles with a thousand
other unknown lives. So must Cuvier’s mind have wandered as he turned
and returned a fossil tooth, the only vestige of some vast, unknown
organism.
There is all this in people, and then there is the past that each one
has, his own past, his ancestors, the prodigious combination of actions
and of souls of which he is the result. And there is his future, the
unexplored desert toward which he stretches out anxious tentacles, and
into which I dare to venture, I, the stranger, with trembling heart,
the tiny lantern in my hand.
These are my riches today. They are inalienable: a man may flee from an
indiscretion, he cannot escape the grip of contemplation and love. Even
if he desired it, his very struggles would reveal his movements, betray
the deepest secrets of his being, deliver him over bound hand and foot.
As for myself, eager to hoard up my treasure, I give myself up without
a struggle. Rich in others, I yield myself into their hands. And if, in
spite of myself, I attempt some evasion, am I not sure to render the
prey all the more desirable, all the more beautiful?
II
They say of curiosity that it was the beginning of science. That is not
praise enough, it sounds rather like an excuse.
What is more human, more touching than this religious reaching out
toward the unknown, this sort of instinct which makes us divine and
attack the mystery?
To take pride in not being curious! One might as well take pride in
some ridiculous infirmity. It is true that even that is in the order of
things normal, and that vanity finds its nourishment where it can.
Doubtless there is a sort of curiosity which is both weak and cowardly.
It is that of men who dare not remain alone a moment face to face with
themselves; they take refuge in loquacity and in reading the daily
newspapers. Their fashion of interesting themselves in everything that
goes on is a confession that they are unable to become interested in
anything eternal. They depend as if for nourishment on that noise which
those who have nothing to say are always making. They are like children
who cannot amuse themselves alone, or like stupid monarchs who fear
nothing so much as silence and their own thoughts, the emptiness of
their own thoughts!
And then there are the easy-going people. They want to know everything,
the number of your maternal aunt’s children, the price of the furniture
and the wages of the servants. They want to know everything and they
will never know anything. Their life is spent in forced smiles and in
gracefully holding a cup of tea.
Their souls contain vast lists of names, dates and other miserable
things. They go through life like beasts of burden, weighed down under
loads that have no value.
There are maniacs, too, perverts, freaks, people that are full of
curiosity about a postage stamp, the handle of an umbrella; but of
these I dare not say anything, for I remember an old and very wise
master who used to say to us with a smile: “You who are entering upon
scientific careers must begin right away to think about collections,
even if you have to collect boxes of matches.”
To tell the truth, is it our business to be wise, to be learned?
Hardly! It is our business to be rich.
Well, then, there are not two kinds of curiosity. Let us leave out of
the question all those dull stupidities we dare to call by this name.
The curious man seems strangely uninterested in that which excites
the loquacity of trivial souls. He does not trouble himself to find
out the year in which a house was built, or the honors accorded to
the architect; he dreams in secret of the tastes, the passions of
the man who had that little, low window pierced on the north side and
that black tree with its twisted branches planted at the edge of the
pond. He does not ask a young woman the name of her dressmaker, but
trembles at the thought of understanding what made her choose that
disturbing dress to wear this particular day. He does not question his
mistress about her opinion of him, but seeks passionately to understand
the opinion he has at this moment of her. He does not hasten to ask
his travelling companions about their professions and the political
opinions they uphold, because, as he watches their faces, he is
studying discreetly and sympathetically the meaning of the little
wrinkle that moves between their brows, or the significance of a
glance, its source and its object. He does not solicit confidences, he
receives them almost without wishing to; they come naturally to him; he
is their sure and deep receptacle.
Curious about all this vast world, he seems especially concerned with
its image in himself. He bears his curiosity like a sacred gift and
exercises it, or rather honors it, as one would perform the rites of a
cult.
Do not say you would not wish to be that man. You who feel pride in
possessing yourself of a secret, in drawing out a confession, in
meriting the confidence of another man, must realize that it is a
marvelous fortune to be thus the tenderly imperious confidant who
cannot be denied, though often the rest of the world knows nothing of
it. And it is possible for you, even if you cannot become such a man
at once, at least to labor to become one. Begin, with this in view,
to deliver yourself from your little servile curiosities. Let us work
together for this future. Let us enter so deeply into ourselves that
people will say of us, “That man is not curious about anything.” From
that moment we shall have begun to chant the hymn of the great, the
divine curiosity.
III
The possession of others is a passion, that is to say, it is an ordeal,
a painful effort. This supreme joy, like all the joys to which we
attach value, is born out of suffering.
We must experience men in order to know them, and our neighbor for
whom, or through whom, we have never had to endure any anguish, has
surprises in store for us, or else escapes us altogether: that is
almost a truism.
Like all others, this treasure cannot be acquired without effort,
without bitterness; but it knows no decay, it never ceases to grow
through the mere play of the forces of our life and seems as if
sheltered from the blows of fate. It does not, like money, depreciate
in value or serve ignoble ends. It only returns to oblivion.
It is not strictly personal. It can be shared and bequeathed. Since
it escapes destruction and death, it can become the most precious of
heritages; it has this superiority over money, that its transmission is
really valid only after it has been in some sort of way reconquered.
It must fall into worthy hands that will know how to work to preserve,
cultivate and build it up again. In certain points it resembles what we
call experience.
To suffer, first of all! That is surely one of the grandeurs of our
race, and we truly love our blessings for what they have cost us in
tears, in sweat, in blood.
It is repugnant to the spirit to admit that anything can be a blessing
which the war has given. The desperate folly of the Western world has
engendered and still holds in reserve such great misfortunes that we
cannot ransack all these ruins, these heaps of bones, with any hope of
extracting from them, as rag pickers do with their hooks, some fragment
that is good, some useful bit of waste. No! There is no excuse for
this ferocious, immeasurable stupidity. And yet, men have suffered so
terribly from one another that they have learned to know one another,
that is to say, to possess one another mutually. In spite of my own
denials, let me save this bit of wreckage from the general disaster.
That is indeed one blessing so dearly bought that we shall not
willingly give it up. And I do not speak here only of those who have
fought against each other; I speak also of those who have fought side
by side, who have shed their blood for the same cause and under the
same standards.
Companions have been given us, imposed upon us, association with whom,
even when casual and transitory, would once have seemed impossible to
us. Living as free men, we sought to control the inevitable as far
as possible, to choose our own road and avoid those whose opinions
or points of view about the universe were likely to offend our own.
We thus made use of that liberty for the most part in order to humor
our irritable feelings, to lull our souls to sleep in a precarious
security, and restrict the area of our inward activity.
Then came the war and we had not only to suffer from the enemy, to
endure unforeseen attacks in regions of ourselves that we considered
invulnerable, but to suffer still more from our own messmates, from
those who commanded us and especially those whom we commanded.
Could it have been otherwise? No! No! If that suffering had been spared
us, we should not have been men, we should not have gone to war, we
should not have been those divine animals whom it is so beautiful and
so shameful to be and whom we cannot help being.
We have been told that all suffering is sterile, hopeless and without
redemptive power. That it only serves to nourish hatred. But how
marvelous it is when it engenders understanding, that is to say,
possession, that is to say, love!
I have observed that for many men, except in actual bodily encounter,
combat face to face, the enemy has lost all individual or specific
character and has become almost confounded with the great hostile
forces of nature: lightning, fire, tidal waves. The bullet coming
from so far away, the shell hurled from beyond the horizon, all these
mortal powers are simply like a form of blind destiny. In spite of
daily lessons in hatred, in spite of vociferations, these men die
courageously, with a resigned despair, without hatred.
But with other, less noble souls, the tendency to aversion and
quarreling, thus turned back from the enemy, seeks its objects in their
immediate surroundings and finds them, creates them, alas!
My comrades, my comrades, if the uncertainty of your spirit, your
agony, the rebelliousness of your afflicted flesh urges you to seek
those who are responsible, do not look too angrily upon those who are
about you, do not, in your aberration, accuse Houtelette because he is
a chatterbox, Exmelin because he is an egoist, or Blèche because he is
a rude, morose commander. Do not place your misery to the account of
Méry, who is so slow in obeying, and be willing to admit that Maurin is
not to blame for everything because his opinions are not the same as
yours. At least, if you must draw your circle of animosity, make it so
close about you that it contains only yourselves, and seek first of all
in yourselves the causes of your unhappiness.
Better still, apply yourselves to looking your suffering in the face,
putting it, with insight and precision, to the proof.
You know that a loathsome drink almost ceases to be loathsome when you
drink it without haste but with a desire to appreciate the precise
quality of its bitterness. Exactly in this same manner you should
endeavor to measure, to study your suffering. Instead of abhorring it,
try in a way to understand it; it will become interesting, curious, I
dare not say lovable.
If Méry carries out your orders badly, consider systematically how he
can be made to become, in spite of himself, a really good servant. If
Blèche exercises his authority in a way that incessantly wounds you,
interest yourself in his brutality, try to analyze his movements, his
expressions, his familiar habits, and you will then be in a better
position, not to escape from him indeed, but to avoid at times the
sting, the cut of his peremptoriness. You will make him restless by
doing this, and you will set him thinking. It is not necessary for him
to fear you, it is enough for him to recognize in you a free force with
which he has to reckon, a force it is wise to propitiate. Meanwhile,
to use a colloquialism, “you’ve got him.” Every time you have obliged
him to be less arrogant, more just with you, you can say that you have
“had” him, as the soldiers so admirably put it.
This possession costs a certain amount of work. But you are willing to
toil eight hours in order to earn ten francs that do not remain for a
single day between your fingers; you can certainly afford a few minutes
of your effort and your soul to acquire a treasure of which nothing
will ever be able to deprive you.
IV
The very rich man owns several estates. There is always one that he
prefers, that he frequents and cultivates by choice. There are others
where he goes only from time to time, at the solicitation of some state
of his soul which inclines him to seek, for a period, the mountains, or
the ocean, or the open country. There are some, finally, which he does
not love at all but of which, nevertheless, he will not dispossess
himself because they are part of his fortune.
It is so with you who possess a family, friends, comrades, and
adversaries. It is so with you who are able to draw, without let
or hindrance, from the immense well of humankind. You must refuse
nothing; you must accept everything, find out the value of everything,
store everything away. The world of men is a rich patrimony, the
exploitation of which is expressly confided to you. You must not be a
bad administrator, you must make all your land bring forth its fruit.
Choose every day what is necessary to you, for you are the master.
You must know, besides, how to accept the inevitable and take chances,
for you are nothing but a man.
Construct a scale, a clear, harmonious keyboard. Like an organist you
must know the right moment to pull the stop of the oboe and unloose
the thunder of the bass. The pipes are not at fault: it is for you
to become a good musician. The face of Guillaumin suits you in the
morning, and his ideas rejuvenate you like fresh water. The eloquence
of Maurin is like a tonic in your hours of recreation. But there are
desolate evenings when what you undoubtedly need is the deep voice of
Cauchois and his affectionate silence.
V
In spite of the legendary ages, in spite of the religions, in spite
of the poets, in spite of the marvelous traditions and, above all, in
spite of our own deepest aspirations, we must unquestionably abandon
the hope of an occult correspondence between souls.
It is a renunciation that it is hard to admit. Every day events envelop
us that seem to revive the vanished perfume of mystery. Our reason is
in no haste to dissipate these clouds, to pierce these appearances: too
well they soothe the irritating need of not being quite solitary in the
interior of ourselves, of not being quite exiles in an inaccessible
desert.
That nothing outside our senses can reveal to us the proximity of a
beloved person, the danger that is approaching him, the death that is
coming to clasp him, is an extremity to which we find ourselves reduced
without ever submissively making up our minds to it.
A few courageous men have halted before this mountain and undertaken to
lift it. Let us leave them toiling in the shadow; let us aid them, if
not by our effort, at least by our silence, and wait.
Let us wait, but let us not cease to go forth to other battles. The
unknown never fails us. And as for what we shall choose, there is
so much in the unknown to allure us, to enchant us! If we give up
surmounting one obstacle another will always rise before our feet. From
obstacle to obstacle we shall always be led to the foot of the same
wall. We shall consume our whole life in the struggle, knowing that the
very interest of life lies in that struggle and in those obstacles.
Now and then, detached by great efforts of the pickaxe and the mattock,
a fragment of the somber mountain rolls at our feet. We stop it with
rapture, we examine it, we lift it with a sort of sadness, in order to
try its weight. There is no victory that demands so great a price or
seems to us more desolate. It is as if we roused ourselves to a frenzy
to destroy the unknown in order that our success might fill us with
bitterness. Happily, the unknown is always there.
I find myself alone with the person who of all the world is the closest
to me, the best loved, the most perfectly chosen. The silence exhales a
light perfume, a unique perfume that seems that of our kindred souls.
Oh! how we should like to believe that the essences of our beings,
delivered at last, might communicate and unite with each other in the
intermediate space, in the impassable abyss!
At this very moment we surprise in one another’s eyes a common
thought. Simultaneously, it escapes our lips with a sort of rapturous
precipitancy, as if we were afraid of not arriving at exactly the same
moment at the _rendez-vous_, as if we wished, with the harmonious
precision of a well-rehearsed duet, to confess together some matchless
certainty.
We are happy, filled with astonishment.... But I am not deceived.
I do not yet hold it, palpitating, for good and all, between my
fingers, the proof that has been so long sought for. Not yet, this day,
have I met face to face either God or the immortal soul.
Only too well I know that some slight sound, some rhythm outside us,
the beating of a bird’s wing, the boring of an insect in the old wood
of the furniture, the sigh of the wind under the door,--that it is one
of these things which has suddenly set our souls in tune, awakened the
echoes of affinity in the abysses of our two separate selves. We have
so many memories in common, we have so carefully matched our tastes,
we have so well unified our material world and tried to blend even our
futures together that the very touch of the violinist’s bow suffices to
make us vibrate in harmony.
But there must be the touch of the bow, there must be the perfume,
so faint that one experiences its suggestions without being sure of
its presence; perhaps there is necessary only one of those obscure
phenomena which pass the limit of our senses in the twilight where our
inadequate organs can only gropingly divine the world.
This is our meager certainty. Very well! Let us not reject it in our
spite; for it has its depth, its beauty. We must make it our own, force
it to enrich us.
Where the exercise of the intelligence seems to result in the fatal
imprisonment of the soul within itself, love enables us to see how
the soul can reach beyond its own limits into time and space. In vain
does the intelligence prove to us that all this is only an illusion.
That illusion is beautiful; let us make up our minds to give it shape.
Through its very longings to escape from its confines, the soul may
perhaps succeed in breaking them, and it is to love without a doubt
that it will owe the miracle of its deliverance.
We possess only an imperfect means of communion. So be it! Let us labor
tenderly to perfect that means. It is thus that the creators of science
and industry labor, and we must admit that their stubbornness has
succeeded in making a very great evil out of a small one. Let us not be
less ingenious! This sinister progress ought to give us encouragement:
moral civilization deserves as much care as the other sort.
With our brothers, our wives, our friends, let us freely seek to have
so many things in common, let us strive so passionately to understand
one another, that our thoughts, ceaselessly pressing toward this goal,
may continually experience the sense of infinity and eternity.
There lies our path; if it urges us to possess the largest portion we
can of the human world, let us first begin by intimately possessing
what we love. This possession I am sure is the only real one. They
knew it very well, those desperate men who have loved fiercely the
mere bodies of women without ever receiving the real gift that can be
yielded in a glance, from a distance, with the swiftness of lightning.
VI
There are men who set out from their homes in the morning in the
pursuit of wealth. They walk with their eyes on the pavement, they
fling themselves furiously into all sorts of petty labors. They dream
of lost money, princely gifts, scandalous inheritances, lotteries.
They think of gold as of an inaccessible woman whom they can strike
down and ravish in a corner. They return home in the evening worn out,
exasperated, famished, as poor as ever. They have not even seen the
face of the man who sat next them in the subway. That face itself was a
fortune.
Do you seek out your friend because, on occasion, he can lend you the
sum you foresee you are going to need, because he can speak to some
cabinet official on your behalf, because he is a jovial host? If that
is the case, you are a slave, you possess nothing. Do you, on the
contrary, love him for that way of smiling he has that so delights you,
for the candor and tenderness his hesitating voice betrays, his gift
of tears and his stormy repentances? If this is so, you are very rich:
that man is yours and he is a treasure worth having.
Can you recall the use you made of your first five-franc piece? Most
assuredly not! But you will never forget a certain expression which, in
your eyes, distorted or made more beautiful some well-loved face when
you were a little child. That has, and always will have, a place among
your treasures: that day you really learned something of importance,
and you have never ceased since to recall the victory and turn it to
account.
If you have little inclination to squander your fortune, what is to
prevent you from assembling it under one title-deed? A single face,
a single soul, is yet an inestimable estate. One may believe one has
exhausted all one’s resources, but one is always deceived, for like the
earth, the human landscape is always perpetually laboring and bears
fruit every season.
The peasant who possesses only an acre is full of pride nevertheless,
for he knows that his possession goes down to the very center of the
earth.
For many years I have watched the same face, like the faithful horizon
stretched across the aperture of a window. It contrives, that face,
a thousand things, it expresses and reflects a thousand things, I
alone know its touching beauty, since I alone am able to reap all its
harvests, since I alone cannot, without a glance, allow the tiniest
flower of every day to die.
VII
It is not wholly within your power to be without enemies; it behooves
you, indeed, not to lack adversaries. Above all, it behooves you to
know your adversaries. From that to conquering them is but a short
step. From that to loving them is no step at all.
Do not dread an experience too much; consider your adversary
attentively and try to imagine his motives, those that he declares as
well as those that he conceals, those that he invents as well as those
of which he is ignorant. Think long enough and with enough intensity to
understand these reasons, and even to discover new ones of which your
adversary has not thought; this will not be difficult for you if you
have any knowledge of yourself.
Then make a strong effort to put yourself, in spirit, in the place of
him you are combatting. Do not go so far as to detest yourself, but do
not refuse this opportunity of judging yourself severely. For a test:
perhaps you have entered upon this experience with your teeth and fists
clenched; stop when you find that you are smiling and that your hands
are relaxed.
One has no idea how much this exercise inclines one to justice, how
profitable it is and how destructive of hatred. Too much imagination
would perhaps lead you to neglect your own cause; stop in time,
therefore, unless you wish to become, as the spectators may decide,
either a fool or a hero.
For my part, I have no hesitation in counselling such a practice: it
teaches one to conquer, to conquer smilingly. It teaches one to know
one’s adversary. And then, too, it is good as everything is good that
forestalls and destroys hatred.
There is only one single thing in the world that is, perhaps, really
hateful, stupidity. But even that is disputable, and moreover it is
always a presumptuous assertion.
Happy is the man who has no enemies. But, I repeat, he who has no
adversaries, he who has not accepted those that life offers him, or has
not been able to procure any of his own will, is ignorant of a great
source of wealth.
There is but small merit in understanding those whom we love; there is
a great, a crowningly bitter pleasure, in penetrating a soul that is
hostile to us, in making it our own by main force, in colonizing it.
Not to choose our friends, that is to be too self-denying, too modest.
Not to choose our adversaries, that is altogether too stupid; it is
inexcusable.
A voice whispers in my ear: “We do not choose our vermin, we do not
choose our mad dogs....” Alas, no! but that is quite another matter.
VIII
Every time I hear someone use the word “promiscuity,” I recall an
experience I once had. An experience,--that is a great deal to say, it
was such a slight affair after all.
It was in the days when there still used to be in Paris those omnibuses
with upper stories. I was returning home quite late, on one of those
fresh, airy nights when one suddenly draws in, through the fetid breath
of the streets, a gust that comes from afar and seems unwilling to
let itself be defiled, obliterated. I was dreaming all alone, quite
to myself, about things of no interest to anyone but myself, but that
happily filled the infinite space of the world.
Through the depths of this reverie I became aware of a slight,
muffled blow against my right shoulder. This did not rouse me from
my own absorption. A second time the blow came, followed by a soft,
continuous contact. It gave me a disagreeable sensation.
By my side there was a young boy of sixteen or seventeen, dressed like
an apprentice. The uncertain glimmer of the street-lamps lighted up
his pale, weary face. His eyes were closed and he seemed overwhelmed
with sleep. I noticed that every few moments his head, swaying with the
jolts of the vehicle, would strike against my shoulder. He would raise
it up with an instinctive movement, only to let it fall back the more
heavily the next moment. Once he let it lie there. At the time I was
so lost in my dreams that the animal in me alone rose to its defense:
I pushed the young lad gently back into his place. It was trouble
lost; the next second he abandoned himself anew against my shoulder
with a sort of desperate ingenuousness. I pushed him back two or three
times, then I gave it up and tried, in spite of this slight burden, to
continue my glorious excursion in the interior of my own self.
But I did not succeed. An extraordinary, unforeseen, unknown sensation
was sweeping over me. It was a penetrating animal warmth. It came
from that head propped against my shoulder, and also from a certain
frail, bent arm which I felt slowly digging into my side. The little
apprentice was sound asleep.
I bent down my face and felt his breath like that of a child passing
in little puffs over my cheek and my chin. From that moment on, I
ceased completely to think of my important personal affairs and I had
only one anxiety: to see to it that the boy did not awaken.
I do not know how long this sleep lasted: I was warm with a strange,
delicate warmth; I had a sense of well-being, I was absorbed, I was
penetrating into an unknown universe, as vast, as starry as my own. I
could not understand how this contact could have offended me at first,
even disgusted me. I had torn off the prickly shell and was tasting,
like a nourishing kernel, that human presence and companionship. I was
happy and interested.
We reached a place where there were shouts and lights. The little
fellow sat up with a start, rubbed his eyes and ran stumbling towards
the stairway and disappeared; he had not even seen me.
He did not know what I owed him and that he would never be forgotten.
IX
One must not, at first sight, say that a man is uninteresting and that
his face is expressionless. One might as well say that the water of a
river is empty when it swarms with vegetable and animal life.
In one’s manner of listening to a man there may be prejudice and
suspicion, there must not be indifference or indolence. The soul has,
in its arsenal, lenses, microscopes, and powerful sources of light for
exploring objects to their depths, through their transparencies, into
the innermost recesses of their organs.
At the beginning of the war I lived for two years with a comrade who
was invariably silent and indolent; his handsome face remained always
so gloomy, his actions remained so devoid of purpose and significance,
that I despaired of ever making him my prey; I was simply never touched
with a desire to get hold of him.
Then a day came when I heard him greet some happening with a word,
pronounced in such a challenging tone that I decided to undertake the
expedition. I spent days and days at it, with the pickaxe, mattock,
and little lantern of the miner. I have thought of him ever since with
stupefaction, as of those subterranean, half-explored chasms where one
finds rivers, colonnades, domes, blind animals and terrible shapes of
stone.
The nature of the object should not discourage one’s interest. The
viper is a dangerous and vindictive creature. The naturalists who have
been able to study it have only been able to do so because they have
studied with passion, that is to say, with love.
So much to tell you that that sort of zoological curiosity you may
bring to the study of your neighbor no more authorizes cruelty than it
allows you to dispense with affection.
Extreme attention resembles affection. Contemplation is pure love.
X
It is after my own taste that I mean to enjoy my possessions.
First, I wish to have part possession of my companions. There is no
question of my being the only one to possess them, or of my limiting my
empire to one or two of them. What I plan is to undertake each conquest
separately. This word, we shall see, does not signify seduction, but
a knowledge that is full of respect, a profound, lasting interest, an
enthusiasm, a passionate contemplation.
Observe them, your comrades: say you have twenty-three of them; you
will find through them twenty-three distinct representations of
yourself, and that in spite of yourself, through the mere play of
everyday life. One of them knows chiefly your tireless patience;
another, who works beside you all day, knows that you are painstaking
and irritable; he is, however, ignorant of what a third, the friend
of your fireside, knows,--that you are a careful and anxious father.
There are others for whom you are, above all, a soul torn by religion
or a mind familiar with everything that concerns social questions,
or a great lover of reading. Others, finally, see in you only a good
billiard-player, or a crack shot, or a courteous companion.
You are, of course, all these things. The totality of these various
aspects is, indeed, you, provided that we add also many other qualities
that no one suspects. But each one of your comrades sees an aspect of
you that is different from what his neighbor sees. For this reason,
avoid confusion, avoid mixing things. Be lavish of yourself in every
sense, but begin by being prudent, careful of your resources and
skilful in the art of grouping them.
One day you were having an affectionate conversation with Maurin. You
were delighted with one another, delighted to be together, satisfied
with your fellowship, your mutual possession. You were not talking
of anything very private. But then Blèche came up, Blèche with whom
you have such profitable, such intimate talks, and all the charm of
Maurin’s company disappeared without your being able to compensate
yourself with the usual pleasure you take in the society of Blèche.
This was because, in the presence of both, you could not give each one
what you are accustomed to give him, nor could you ask from him what he
gives only to you.
These combinations, like those of the chemists, demand much care and
judgment. Don’t protest! Don’t exclaim that such notions are too
subtle, too complex: you do not receive all your friends pell-mell.
However much of an epicure you may be, you still give more attention
to the selection of your guests than to the composition of the menu.
Of what importance is the most delicate fare in comparison with the
delight the conversation of carefully chosen human beings gives us?
That is why, when you are sure of two persons for whom you feel an
interest that borders on passion, you experience such a delicious
anxiety at the moment of presenting them to one another, of bringing
them together in your presence.
You are like the maker of fireworks who is about to mix changeable
substances with explosive properties in his mortar. You weigh them
carefully and combine them in well-defined proportions. You take time
preparing each of the spiritual elements of this mixture.
And when the union is accomplished, you seem to be saying to each of
them: “I have prepared a magnificent gift for you. Come, now, and know
one another.”
Your heart throbs, because each of them is not only going to know the
other but is going to learn to know you through the eyes of the other.
Could there be a better reason for living?
XI
However brief may be the intercourse we have with a man, we always come
away from it somewhat modified: we find we are a little greater than
we were before, or a little less great, better or worse, exalted or
diminished.
I have learned this from having, in the course of my life, approached
many men, both famous and obscure, who do not dream what I owe them or
the harm they have been able to do me.
We instinctively recognize and classify individuals according to this
faculty they have, some of drawing us out, others of crushing us. It
is a faculty they usually exert without knowing it, even against their
will: they are tonic or depressing just as one is short or tall, just
as one has black eyes or green. But the comparison breaks down in this
respect, that it is always possible to modify the reaction we produce
on others.
In this matter we exhibit a special sensibility that may be compared
to the tropisms which push plants up toward the light or make them
struggle against gravitation. We go toward some and flee from others,
regardless of our interests or our prejudices.
The man whose companionship we seek because it stimulates us is not
necessarily he who strives to give us a good opinion of ourselves.
Often he is taciturn, sometimes surly, occasionally ironical and
cutting. Nevertheless, there emanates from his whole person something
like approbation, a confession of confidence. Even if he insists,
harshly, noisily, upon calling attention to our faults, he does not
make us despair of ourselves and our future. And if he never speaks to
us about ourselves we yet know, by some imperceptible gesture, by some
tone in his voice, by a gleam in his eye, that he is interested in us.
Every time we leave him we like him better, we like ourselves better,
we like all humanity better, we look at everything with a smile, we are
as full of plans as a tree in April.
The other sort of man, on the contrary, is forever deluding himself.
He pursues before our very eyes an end which we see, with grief and
bitterness, he regularly fails to attain. Whatever he does, whatever
he says, he always shows us that he is a stranger to us, that he is
superior and that we do not interest him. Even in his manner of wishing
to give us his attention, he exhibits a certain difficulty in seeing
us at all. If he tries to seem talkative, important, majestic, his
natural gifts turn against him; his cordiality disgusts us, his bearing
irritates us, his self-importance makes us want to laugh. We cannot
forgive him anything, and especially the fact that we always leave him
with the same vague depression, the same disgust of life, and the same
distrust of our own undertakings. What we are always escapes him, and
although what he is does not escape us, we are discouraged by him all
the same.
We must be the first of these two men, he who is, amid all things,
in spite of all things, a rich man, he whom the poet of the _Livre
d’amour_ justly called “a conqueror.”
XII
You must not violate your gifts, you must simply study their
possibilities. It is what we do with trees and animals in which we are
able to instil virtues they do not seem to possess at all naturally.
However humble your position in society may be, however great your
poverty, in the crude sense men give to this word, you may none the
less become rich and successful without so much as leaving the room
where you are in conversation with your comrade, your wife or your
favorite adversary. Find your study there. You have observed that when
two men meet they begin by sacrificing to the old custom of enquiring
briefly about one another’s health and affairs, after which, without
waiting for the other’s reply, each one begins to speak of himself.
This is such an old usage that they do not even know they are doing it.
Each one speaks of himself for a few moments, then allows the other
to talk about himself for about the same length of time. When this has
gone on long enough they separate, and each preserves for his partner
a vague feeling of gratitude, not so much because he has listened as
because he has made a pretense of listening to matters that were of no
concern to him.
This fact suggests a great lesson. The majority of men suffer from a
sort of neglect, they suffer from not being possessed by anyone, from
offering themselves in vain. Stretch out your hand and seize them.
Learn to say the word that will assure you the mastery, the domination.
It is inconceivable that so many spirits, tormented by the need for
power, by the passion for authority, should waste and sterilize
themselves in order to hoard money, win rank, obtain a title. They gain
nothing from it but a pride that withers them; they clasp only the
shadow of what they pursue.
Seek a little and you will soon find that they are legion who ask
nothing better than to cast themselves into your nets. Do not believe
that they are always the mediocre victims. It is not only the wretched
who wish to be understood and consoled. There are many sceptics who
await with anguish the touch of a hand to deliver them from their
scepticism. There are many happy men, too, who cannot bear to be alone
with their happiness, for man has even more need of help in joy than
in sorrow.
It has often happened, while walking with a comrade, a stranger or
an adversary, that I would find him hard, defiant, rebellious at
every touch. Thereupon, I would set out openly, under his very eye,
to capture him. I would begin to speak to him about himself. I would
say to him: “The unique things about you are....” And I would confide
to him everything I thought about him, being particularly careful to
say nothing more about myself. I would interest myself in him, not
fictitiously--that is a barren and a perilous game--but with all my
heart, with all my intelligence. I would tell him what I knew, what
I already possessed of him, his virtues and his faults. Confused or
irritated, he would come to my feet, he would appear as if before a bar
to give thanks or to plead, to show his claws or to purr. The things I
had said to him might be very severe; I still felt that he was grateful
to me for having cared about him, even in order to attack him. No
longer was he in any haste to leave me. Often he would come back on
the days that followed and make me unexpected visits; though I could
see that he was provoked, I knew nevertheless that he had come to pay
homage, to attest that he was a faithful subject.
“The unique things about you are”.... That is a chance phrase. There
are others, there are a thousand of them. When you are ready, a grip
of the hand or some other human sign may take its place. I remember the
story of a certain prefect who, having no worse enemy than a traitor in
his department, had the happy thought one day of asking him to have a
drink and going away without paying for it. This extraordinary proof of
confidence attached the man to him forever.
Not that all your victims will be so tremblingly easy. There are proud
souls who set a high price on their conquest, fantastic and sick souls
whom one has to seize suddenly and overthrow almost before they are
aware of it.
You must set the time and choose the hour of the attack.
Do not accost the business man in the roar of the Exchange; attempt
the field rather at the hour when, wearied, he is counting over and
reckoning his disillusionments. Do not seize the man of action on the
battlefield, but in the moment of leisure when he does not know what to
do with his solitude.
What marvelous opportunities must the shy Las Casas have glimpsed at
Saint Helena, even though he was pursuing other aims!
I once saw a simple soul publicly congratulate a master surgeon whose
skill had for long years placed him above all felicitations. And the
celebrated man blushed, bowed, gave in.
A successful lawyer said to me one day: “Each one of my clients
imagines that I think only of him, that I occupy myself exclusively
with him.”
Remember, too, that certain women never capitulate twice: they never
forgive themselves for having yielded completely even for a moment. The
same thing is true with others who are offended with you because you
have “taken” them by force. Do not regret this sacrifice too much: it
leaves a beautiful jewel in your casket.
Truly the whole vast race of men belongs to you.
Take and eat, you cannot find more noble food.
See, there is the world you must conquer. It is not that for whose
possession proud peoples are driven to declare war; it is indeed quite
another world than that which Satan showed Jesus from the summit of the
mountain.
IV
ON DISCOVERING THE WORLD
I
The world contains not one single object that might not be a source
of happiness. Sorrow springs from this, that man outdoes himself in
misusing everything. He turns against his own body or his own spirit
all sorts of things that seem well made for his joy.
Every being contains an unbelievable store of happiness, and this one
virtue reveals the angle from which he ought to be judged.
Your true business man makes a practice of weighing everything in terms
of gold: a human being, a field of wheat, a beam, a precious stone.
His tables of value are false, but the principle of valuation remains
none the less efficacious, fundamental. The mistake of these persons
is in testing everything by a single measure, in reducing everything
to this gold which enables them to seek their chosen pleasure. If it
is drink, or woman, they transmute an orchard into wine or into women,
losing terribly by the exchange. They thus produce a sort of analogy
to what the physicists call the degradation of energy: little by
little, the traffickers degrade their pleasures until they obtain those
they prefer. But happiness is higher than this: it cannot be degraded,
bought, transmuted. It is a pure relationship between the soul and the
world. It will never be the mere object of a transaction. Many are the
men who have fastened their hope, their future upon the acquisition
of some material good only to experience after years of effort and
privation a burning disillusion. That is because happiness is too proud
and free a thing to obey the commands of merchants. It follows laws of
its own that seem like inspirations, it does not come at the bidding
of business men. The castle we have coveted so long may open at the
appointed hour; joy will not take up its abode there unless we have
deserved it.
It must be repeated again: the principle of evaluation is at the base
of our moral life. But each thing should be valued in itself and for
itself.
A tuft of violets is worth a great deal for its perfume and its beauty,
it can bring joy or consolation to a great many hearts. But it has only
the slightest commercial value; estimated in terms of building lumber
or freestone it signifies nothing, or virtually nothing.
That so many men should cut and sell wood, shape and barter the stone
of which our houses are built, go gathering violets through the May
thickets to sell them to townsfolk, is undoubtedly right and necessary.
The real question is quite a different one: we must first possess
for their own sakes all the blessings that are offered us, and not
obstinately transform them, without an important reason, beyond our
strict needs, at the risk of forever losing our understanding and our
true possession of them.
It is almost a truism that men who are obliged by their profession
to handle, store or sell substances famous for their power of giving
pleasure, perfumes, fruits, silks, end by losing all appreciation of
them and even by contracting a disgust and contempt for them. Cooks
have no appetite. Let us not be cooks, then, in the presence of this
vast world; let us know how to preserve or restore to each object its
original savor and significance.
I say “restore” intentionally, for the world seems to be more and more
turning from its true sense, that is to say, its human sense, the only
one for us.
A stone is a beautiful thing, beautiful from all points of view; its
grain, its color, its brilliancy, its hardness are all so many virtues
that exercise and satisfy our senses, excite our reflections. We have a
thousand noble uses, speculative or practical, to which we can put such
an object. We shall be the kings of the universe if we assert boldly
that we find in these uses and in our joy the very destiny of the
stone.
I remember seeing hills that had been disemboweled by a bombardment
and were sown with long splinters of twisted iron; the base of a
monstrous shell appeared before me, one day, under these conditions,
and it seemed to me truly inhuman, this product of the work of men: the
noble metal, with which so many good and beautiful things can be made,
took on a hateful appearance. Man had achieved the mournful miracle of
denaturing nature, rendering it ignoble and criminal.
Truly, we are equally guilty every time we turn an object aside from
its mission, which is altogether one of happiness. We are guilty again
every time we fail to extract, for others and for ourselves, all the
happiness an object holds in store and only asks to be allowed to yield.
II
It is because every fragment of the earth is a source of happiness that
men ceaselessly dream of winning that source for their own profit.
They do not wish to have all humanity refresh itself, plunge its
feverish face and lips in the cool waters.
Once the springs were the delight and the wealth of whole peoples;
they were conducted magnificently along majestically proportioned
aqueducts; their liquid opulence, crossing valleys and mountains,
entered the cities with a great outburst of architectural joy; it shone
and sparkled in the sunlight from a thousand embellished apertures
before it went to bathe and nourish the people.
The statues of the gods watched over this treasure.
Today, the most beautiful springs are guarded by railings; one goes to
a wicket and pays in order to drink there.
In the same way, all the springs of joy seem to have been sequestered
for the profit of a few people.
This is not always for the sake of gain. In most cases it is simply for
exclusiveness. The man who owns something capable of giving joy naïvely
imagines that he will be happier if he is the only one to drink from
this inexhaustible breast. He becomes infatuated with it and thinks of
nothing but how to shut up his treasure. He puts up a wall and provides
it with fragments of sharp glass, so that the wall may show its teeth,
so that it may be not only defensive but, in some sense, offensive. At
times, yawning with ennui in the very midst of his material prosperity,
he makes an opening in the wall, only to correct this imprudence with
a ditch; and from behind this he seems to say, “Now see how rich I
am; look and proclaim it in a loud voice, you who pass by, for I am
beginning not to be so sure of it myself.”
To shut up a picture, a beautiful tree, a sumptuous tapestry for one’s
own exclusive benefit is, after all, only a trifling folly; but there
are some who undertake to capture a river, a mountain, a horizon, the
sea.
A few years ago, I visited the shore of the Mediterranean, between
Cannes and Menton. I was struck by a strange thing: the road that
follows the edge of the sea, at the foot of the hills, through a
thousand natural beauties, continually loses sight of the waves; it
seems as if pushed back, held aside.
People have appropriated the horizon; they have driven their fortune
like a wedge between the divine sea and the road of the common folk.
They wish to be the only ones to possess the ocean, dawn, the gold and
sapphire of moon, the tempests and the thunders of the open sea.
Do not be alarmed, mistaken brothers, do not tremble; we shall not
throw down your walls. Live in peace in your sumptuous prison, our
portion remains so beautiful and so great that we shall never exhaust
it.
Close your gates, you will not shut in the perfume of your shrubbery,
nor all the wind, nor all the sky. You will not imprison the fragrant
odor of your flower-beds. We shall breathe them, as we pass, lovingly,
and continue on our way. We shall go on still further, for we have many
things to acquaint ourselves with, we divine so many, many of them that
a whole life is short in the light of such a destiny. But if it pleases
you to join our vagabond company you will discover, perhaps, the
other side of your own walls, which are hung with flax-weed and wild
geranium. The road that skirts them outside leads to joy also.
And besides, one does not find these ingenuous walls everywhere. The
greed of men has not yet subjected all the beauty of things. You have
snatched up in your fingers a fleeting draught of water: the ocean does
not seem to be aware of it.
You must understand that we really possess nothing by ourselves. Veil,
if you wish, the faces of your women and visit every day the gold in
the depths of your vaults. Exclusiveness yields you no wealth save that
which is dead and unproductive.
But he is truly rich for whom life is a perpetual discovery.
III
Discovery! It seems as if this word were one of a cluster of magic
keys, one of those keys that make all doors open before our feet.
We know that to possess is to understand, to comprehend. That, in a
supreme sense, is what discovery means.
To understand the world can well be compared to the peaceful, enduring
wealth of the great landowner; to make discoveries is, in addition to
this, to come into sudden, overflowing riches, to have one of those
sudden strokes of fortune which double a man’s capital by a windfall
that seems like an inspiration.
The life of a child who grows up unconstrainedly is a chain of
discoveries, an enriching of each moment, a succession of dazzling
surprises.
I cannot go on without thinking of the beautiful letter I received
today about my little boy; it said: “Your son knows how to find
extraordinary riches, inexhaustible treasures, even in the barrenest
fields, and when I set him on the grass, I cannot guess the things
he is going to bring out of it. He has an admirable appreciation of
the different kinds of soil; if he finds sand he rolls in it, buries
himself in it, grabs up handfuls and flings them delightedly over his
hair. Yesterday he discovered a molehole, and you cannot imagine all
the pleasure he took in it. He also knows the joys of a slope which
one can descend on one’s feet, or head over heels, or by rolling, and
which is also splendid for somersaults. Every rise of ground interests
him, and I wish you could see him pushing his cart up them. There is
a little ditch where on the edge he likes to lie with his feet at
the bottom and his body pressed tight against the slope. He played
interminably, the other day, on top of a big stone; he kept stroking
it, he had truly found a new pleasure there. And as for me, I find my
wealth in watching him discover all these things.”
It is thus a child of fifteen months gives man lessons in appreciation.
Unfortunately, most systems of education do their best to substitute
hackneyed phrases for the sense of discovery. A series of conventions
are imposed on the child; he ceases to discover and experience the
objects in the world in pinning them down with dry, formal labels by
the help of which he can recognize them. He reduces his moral life
little by little to the dull routine of classifying pins and pegs, and
in this fashion begins the journey to maturity.
Discover! You must discover in order to be rich! You must not be
satisfied to accept the night good-humoredly, to go to sleep after a
day empty of all discovery. There are no small victories, no negligible
discoveries: if you bring back from your day’s journey the memory of
the white cloud of pollen the ripe plantain lets fall, in May, at the
stroke of your switch, it may be little, but your day is not lost. If
you have only encountered on the road the tiny urn of jade which the
moss delightedly balances at the end of its frail stem, it may seem
little, but be patient! Tomorrow will perhaps be more fruitful. If for
the first time you have seen a swarm of bees go by in search of a hive,
or heard the snapping pods of the broom scattering its seeds in the
heat, you have nothing to complain of, and life ought to seem beautiful
to you. If, on that same day, you have also enriched your collection of
humanity with a beautiful or an interesting face, confess that you will
go to sleep upon a treasure.
IV
There will be days when you will be like a peaceful sovereign seated
under a tree: the whole world will come to render homage to you and
bring you tribute. Those will be your days of contemplation.
There will be days when you will have to take your staff and wallet
and go and seek your living along the highways. On these days you must
be contented with what you gain from observing, from hunting; have no
fear: it will be beautiful.
It is sweet to receive; it is thrilling to take. You must, by turns,
charm and compel the universe. When you have gazed long at the tawny
rock, with its lichens, its velvety mosses, it is most amusing to
lift it up: then you will discover its weight and the little nest of
orange-bellied salamanders that live there in the cool.
You have only to lie among the hairy mints and the horse-tails to
admire the religious dance of the dragon-fly going to lay its eggs
in the brook, or to hear in early June the clamorous orgy of the
tree-toads, drunk with love; and it is very pleasant, too, to dip one’s
hands in the water, to stir the gravel at the bottom, whence bubble up
a thousand tiny, agile existences, or to pick the fleshy stalk of the
water-lily that lifts its tall head out of the depths.
There are people who have passed a plant a thousand times without ever
thinking of picking one of its leaves and rubbing it between their
fingers. Do this always and you will discover hundreds of new perfumes.
Each of these perfumes may seem quite insignificant, and yet when you
have breathed it once, you wish to breathe it again; you think of it
often, and something has been added to you.
It is an unending game and it resembles love, this possession of a
world that now yields itself, now conceals itself. It is a serious, a
divine game.
Marcus Aurelius, whose philosophy cannot be called futile, does not
hesitate, amid many austere counsels, to urge his friends to the
contemplation of those natural spectacles that are always so rich in
meaning and suggestion: “Everything that comes forth from the works of
nature,” he writes, “has its grace and beauty. The face wrinkles in
middle age, the very ripe olive is almost decomposed, but the fruit
has, for all that, a unique beauty. The bending of the corn toward the
earth, the bushy brows of the lion, the foam that drips from the mouth
of the wild boar and many other things, considered by themselves, are
far from being beautiful; nevertheless, since they are accessory to the
works of nature, they embellish them and add a certain charm. Thus a
man who has a sensitive soul, and who is capable of deep reflection,
will see, in whatever exists in the world, hardly anything that is not
pleasant in his eyes, since it is related, in some way, to the totality
of things.”
This philosopher is right as the poets are right. As our days permit
us, let us reflect and observe, let us never cease to see in each
fragment of the great whole a pure source of happiness. Like children
drawn into a marvelous dance, let us not relax our hold upon the hand
that sustains us and directs us.
V
Chalifour was a locksmith. I knew him in my childhood. You would have
said that he was just a simple country laborer. Why has he left the
memory of a rich and powerful man? His image will always be for me that
of the “master of metals.”
He worked in a mean, encumbered room, full of the pungent, acrid
odor of the forge, which seemed to me a sort of annex to those other
underground vaults that used to be peopled by the earth-spirits.
How I loved to see him, with his little apron of blackened leather!
He would seize a bar of iron and this iron at once became his. He had
his own way of handling the object of his labor that was full of love
and authority. His gnarled hands touched everything with a mixture of
respect and daring; I used to admire them as if they were the somber
workmen of some sovereign power.
It seemed as if some pact had been made between Chalifour and the hard
metal, which gave the man complete mastery over the material. One might
have thought that solemn vows had been exchanged.
I see him again with his pensive air working the panting bellows
and watching the metal whose incandescence was almost transparent.
I see him at the anvil: the hammer, handled forcefully, delicately,
obeying like a subject demon. I see him before the drill, starting
the great wheel, following the measured exigencies of a ceremonial
rite. Especially I see him before the smoky window with its pale flood
of light, surveying, with that fine smile under his white beard, the
conquered piece of metal, the creature of his will, which he had
charged with destiny.
O ancient laborer, great, simple man, how rich and enviable you were,
you who aspired to just one thing: to do well what you were doing, to
possess intimately the object of your toil! No one better than you has
understood the ponderous, obedient iron, no one than you has worked it
with greater love and constancy.
Somewhere there exists, I believe, an unhappy man eaten up with nerves
and stomach-disorder. He lives crouched up against his telephone, and
sends his orders to all the stock exchanges of the world. People call
him the “iron king,” for some reason that has to do with finance. I
don’t believe he has ever touched or weighed a morsel of real iron. Let
us smile, Chalifour! Let us smile, my master!
VI
I should like to tell you about Bernier, too. They say he is a very
poor man because his coat is all shiny from wear and his shoes have the
weary, wretched look of things that have never been young, because the
sweat of many summers has soaked and stained the ribbon of his hat and
his baggy trousers give him the air of always kneeling.
Bernier has a poor little drooping moustache with nothing glorious
about it. You know only too well that he earns a hundred and twenty
francs a month in some government bureau and that people say of him,
“He’s a poor devil with a miserable job.”
As for me, I know that Bernier is rich, and I have seen him smile in
the hour of his wealth,--for the true wealth has its times of slumber
and its awakenings. Bernier possesses something which is quite
strange and almost inexpressible; it is a space, a white space, vast
and virgin, and it is his power to be able to trace there certain
harmonious lines which he alone knows how to trace in the right way.
Why have you never seen, why have you never been able to see Bernier
at the moment when he begins his work, when the whole sickly light of
the office seems concentrated on the beautiful white page? His face is
serene, smiling, assured. He half closes his eyes and draws back his
head; he holds, adroitly and elegantly, a certain chosen pen, flexible,
with a good point, a pen that belongs to him alone, which he has
prepared for himself and which he would throw away if some blundering
fool happened to touch it. And then he begins!
His kingdom is ranged all about him: ink pure from all dust, a brightly
lined ruler, a collection of pens with all sorts of points. He begins,
and the black line obeys him, springs up, curves in, stops, bounds
forward or falls back, prances, yields. Look at Bernier’s face: is it
really the face of that poor wretch you have just described to me? No!
No! It is the face of a masterful man, calm, sure of himself and his
wealth, who is doing something that no one can do as well as he: across
a snowy, limitless desert he directs, as if in a dream, a black line
that advances, advances, now slowly, now dizzily, like time itself.
VII
You are willing to pay ten francs to see an acrobat or a trained dog.
Perhaps you have never watched a spider about to prepare its web. In
that case, do not miss the spectacle at the very next opportunity. When
you have had a good glimpse of the extraordinary creature revolving
about the center of the work and fastening, with its hind leg, so
quickly and accurately, the thread that it unwinds in just the right
quantity, you will be so delighted that you will want to show the
marvel to all those you love.
It is strange what a contempt men have for the joys that are offered
them freely. And yet this does not argue a shallowness in our natures:
there is a certain beauty in our prizing an object just because it has
cost us some trouble. You must not imagine, however, that the marvels
of nature come for nothing: they cost patience, time and attention.
An unhealthy curiosity and the taste for anomalies incline us to take
pleasure in seeing a creature perform an action for which its own
organism seems unsuited. It palls very quickly. For a long time now,
for example, the flight of aviators has ceased to excite our interest:
we know all about that unmysterious machine; its very sound and its
presence in the sky defile the silence and the space whose virginity
was a refuge for us. On the other hand, I assure you I never cease to
be fascinated by the mysterious manœuvers of a swarm of gnats, their
interweaving curves, the spherical movement which, from instant to
instant, transports the whole group of insects and seems the result of
some secret password, and so many other subtle and profound mysteries
that remain, for the imagination, full of allurement, full, one might
say, of resources.
And do you think there is nothing disturbing in the beauty of the
imperious flight of the great dragon-fly, in its sudden, meditative
pauses, in its peremptory starts that lash the air like a supple,
furious whip?
To whatever school of philosophy they belong, the great observers of
natural phenomena, the Darwins, Lamarcks, Fabres, give us a magnificent
lesson in love. But why do we nourish ourselves only on their harvests
instead of providing our own? Why do we buy and read their books
without drawing any real profit from them, without ever taking the
trouble to look down at our own feet, without ever going to live,
with the creatures of the sand and the grass, their minute, thrilling
existence, in which everything would be for us full of novelty,
discovery, suggestion?
VIII
The world is so generous and I feel my heart so full, so overflowing,
that I do not even dream of arranging in order all these things I have
to say to you. I should wish first of all to see your brow relax, to
hear you say that you are less dispirited and that you refuse to be
bored.
I should like to know all of you, and each in particular, to take you
by the arm and walk with you through one of the streets of your town,
or along the highroad if you live in the country. You would tell me of
your cares and we should search together and see if there is indeed
nothing in the universe for which you are especially destined, if there
does not indeed exist, all ready for your wound, the precise balm that
is necessary to anoint and heal it.
I came out this morning from my shelter of planks. The barren, chalky
soil that surrounds it is surely the most sterile in all Champagne, but
it had rained and the storm had brought up out of this miserable soil,
which is almost without vegetation, all sorts of kindly odors. They
were worth more than all the perfumes of Florida, for they were the
humble gift of poverty.
At the end of next February I could show you, some morning, if the sun
were out, the color of the birches against the blue of the winter sky.
All the slender branches will seem ablaze with purple fire, and the
sky, through this delicate flame, will survey you with an exquisite
tenderness. You must wait, you must drink it in deeply, and not go on
your way before you have understood it. From it you will be able to
store up enough happiness to last you till another winter comes and
gives birth once more to this prodigy of light.
Last year, during the hard summer months on the Aisne, I used to escape
each day, for a second, toward the end of the afternoon, from the
overheated tent where we carried on the bloody work of the ambulance.
One of my comrades was in the habit of eating an apple at this hour.
I used to ask him to be good enough to lend it to me for a moment. I
loved to breathe its delicate, penetrating perfume which, every day,
changed with the fruit. That was indeed a rare, a beautiful moment amid
the fatigues of that concert of suffering and death.
I requisitioned this imponderable part of another’s wealth; then I
returned the apple to my comrade. I could have wished that you had all
been with me to taste that poignant little joy.
When peace comes again, if you wish to see me in May, I will take you
out under the great sycamore that is turning green at the bottom of
the meadow. And there as you listen to the flying, the humming, the
loving and the living of the millions of creatures that people its cool
foliage, we shall set out together on a journey so rare that you will
leave your heaviest sorrows along the way.
IX
Some years ago, a magazine undertook to ask a number of writers in
what chosen spot they would like to pass a few beautiful hours. Emile
Verhaeren answered:
“In a certain corner of the harbor of Hamburg.”
Verhaeren is among those who have revealed to us the mournful grandeur
of city views, of factory towns, those places that seem accursed and
from which one might think that happiness was forever exiled.
The aspirations of our souls are so plentiful, so tenacious, so fertile
that we find something to console us, satisfy us, exalt us in those
very spots where suffering rules tyrannically, where the valley of
Gehenna is most precipitous.
I visited the docks of Liverpool with a sort of horror. There were tall
brick buildings, their roofs lost in the smoke, windows covered with
grime, their interiors nothing but monstrous heaps of cotton bales.
Men were climbing about there like flies. Everything smelt of fog and
mould. Narrow pavements, slimy with rain, ran along by the dry-docks
where the steamers, like immense corpses, were being assailed by the
frantic crowd. The workers toiled amid a bombardment of hammers, a
whirl of sparks. The drills snarled like whipped cats. A hideous
light, smothered by the smoke and the mist of the Mersey, drowned
everything in its fetid flood.
And yet, since then, I have often dreamed of that terrible spot and
felt the need of living there.
For two years I attended the wounded of the First Army Corps, all of
them men from the north, stained by the coal on face and chest, men
from the factories or the mines. I walked with them through the smiling
landscapes of the Aisne, the Vesle, the Marne, when those lovely
valleys had not yet been too much disfigured by the war. Certainly
they all enjoyed the slopes with their gracious groves of trees, the
beautiful cultivated fields, draped like many-colored shawls over the
shoulders of the little hills, but they all thought most, with love and
regret, of cylinders, mine shafts, machines, and a smoky horizon.
I can understand it: one’s native soil, one’s own habitude, the
familiar human landscape, moulded upon the other and transfiguring
it. Above everything we have to recognize that the soul is sensitive
to many infinitely varied and often contradictory things. Grace of
lines, rustic charm are qualities that attach us to a country; fierce
and desolate grandeur is another such, and this indeed has almost the
strongest nostalgic power of all.
When beauty seems to have abandoned the world, we must realize that it
has first deserted our own hearts.
X
Between your five senses, open like the dazzling portholes on the side
of a ship, do you really believe there is nothing, nothing but the
void, the night, the dumb wall?
I do not know, I do not know.... I cannot believe....
The sound rises, rises like the skylark, and the ear rises with it. And
then comes a moment when the sound still rises and the hearing stops,
like those birds that do not frequent the loftiest altitudes.
Tell me, are they lost truly and forever, those sounds that hold sway
at the gates of your soul, those sounds to which your senses are not
equal?
Wait! Hope! Some day perhaps we shall know.
You will say to me: “The light is so beautiful, so beautiful! It adds
luster to so many things that are dear to me. Have I any need to dream
of other rays than these? My eyes have already so much to do that
they are overcome by their delight. The beauty of sound and silence
ceaselessly intoxicates my ear.”
True! Your soul has active purveyors. They do not leave it idle. They
come and heap at its feet riches that demand its enthusiasm and its
solicitude.
But often there is in your soul something your senses have not brought
there, an exquisite joy, an inexpressible sadness. Do not forget that
you live bathed in a multitude of rays to only some of which you
are sensible. The others are perhaps not quite strange to you. What
is passing, in contraband, across the frontiers of your being? Do
not obstinately try to bring it under control. Submit, experience,
be merely attentive and respectful to everything. Some day we shall
perhaps know more things than we are able to divine now.
XI
One of the greatest delights of the religious faith is to abandon
ourselves to gratitude, to be able to thank, from an overflowing heart,
the moral being to whom we feel indebted for our wealth.
Why then, since I have long lost this faith, do I still feel each day,
and several times a day, the great need of singing the canticle of
Francis of Assisi, the lovely canticle in which he says:
Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, and unto all Thy creatures, especially
our gracious brother the sun, who gives us the day and through whom
Thou showest us Thy light. He is beautiful and radiant with a great
splendor. He is the symbol of Thee, Most High.
Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our sister the moon and the stars,
fashioned by Thee in the sky, clear, precious, and beautiful.
Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our mother the wind, and for the air
and the clouds, for the pure sky, and for all the time during which
Thou givest to thy creatures life and sustenance.
Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our sister the water, who is so
useful, precious and clean.
Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our brother the fire, through whom
Thou illuminest the night. He is lovely and gay, courageous and
strong.
Praise unto Thee, O Lord, for our mother the earth, who sustains us
and nourishes us, and brings forth divers fruits and flowers of a
thousand colors and the grass.
A poet has transposed these divine strophes into the harmony of French
verse and sings thus:
I shall praise you, Lord, for having made so lovely and so bright
This world where you wish us to await our life.
Now, I know very well that in this world I am not awaiting life, I am
living. I know very well that it is here I must live and lose no time
about it. My gratitude is all the more pressing, all the more intense.
What if it does rise to an empty heaven, that infinite gratitude!
It will not be lost. And is that heaven ever empty to which we breathe
out so many dreams, where there trembles so much beauty!
The sweetest of human voices has said: “Lay up for yourselves in heaven
the treasures that do not perish.” Perhaps we shall be pardoned if we
dare to murmur: “Lay up for yourselves, in this world, the treasures
that do not perish.”
They will not perish, these treasures, O my son, and all you whom I
love, they will not perish if you thirst to discover them only that
you may share them with others, that you may bequeath them to a devout
posterity.
They will not perish if they find their being, their supreme reason, in
that region of the soul where believers have raised up the tabernacle
of a God.
V
THE LYRICS OF LIFE
I
During the cruellest hours, when the war about me has been heaping
agony upon agony, when I have been able to find nothing, nothing to
which I could any longer attach my confidence and my need of hope, I
have often been surprised to find, running through my head, one of
those airs that I know so well, those airs that I love and that escort
my soul, like watchful and radiant personages, through the chaos of the
days. And I would think bitterly: “Just fifteen quite simple notes! but
they carry a meaning so beautiful, so profound, so commanding that they
would suffice, I am certain, to resolve all conflicts, to discourage
all hatreds, if men knew them well enough to sing them all together
with the same attentive tenderness.”
It may be that the philosophy which absorbs you is one that leaves no
room for indulgence. Perhaps you feel yourself full of bitterness for
your fellows, perhaps you have made up your mind not to see in the
activity of the living any but motives of greed and covetousness. Do
not laugh! Do not be in too great haste to prove yourself right! Above
everything, do not rejoice in being right in so dismal a fashion.
I say it again, if certain pages of Beethoven were better known to
those who suffer and slaughter one another they would succeed in
disarming many a resentment, they would restore to many a tense face a
soft, ineffable smile.
If you do not believe this, you are not accustomed to living among
simple people, you have never watched an irrepressible class of little
children whom their master dominates and calms by making them sing,
you have never heard a multitude of people intoning a hymn in some
cathedral, you have never seen a great flood of workingmen, in some
foul slum, break into the rhythm of a revolutionary song, perhaps you
have never even seen a poor man weeping because a violin had just
recalled to him his youth and the obscure thoughts he believed he had
never in all his life confessed to anyone.
Think of all these things and then form some notion of what it is
the thoughts of the great masters can do with the soul. Why, why
is it not better known, this thing which is, indeed, knowledge and
revelation itself? Why does it not reign over the empires, this which
is sovereignty, grandeur, majesty? Why is it not more ardently invoked
in the hour of crisis, this that teaches, equally well, fruitful doubt
and serene resolution?
II
True, he who says ecstatically, “The world is governed by love,
goodness, generous passions,” surrenders himself to a childish error.
But he who cries, “The whole world is enslaved by egoism, violence and
base passions,” speaks foolishly.
As we look about us, we might perhaps imagine that from one or the
other of these two moral attitudes there is no escape. Must we believe
that the spirit of system has such an irresistible hold over everyone
who sets about the business of living?
The world! The world! It is much more beautiful and complex than that.
It always upsets our prearrangements, and that is why we cherish it so
dearly. But we also love to foresee things, and system seems to arrange
them so that we can.
What does it signify in a world that is capable of everything? Amid
the evil and the mediocre there will always shine forth consolingly
something noble, something wondrous. Is it not shameful to predict the
basest things so glibly only to close our eyes the more obstinately
before the beauty that is unknown and unforeseen?
I assure you, in spite of all, that two lines of music can turn a
multitude back and agitate the deepest springs of its behavior. If
the miracle does not result from harmonious sounds, it will be borne,
perhaps, of ten warm, rhythmical words, or the sight of a statue or the
evocation of an image.
The worship of immediate realities leads us to those easy victories
that intoxicate the coarse spirits. At times it results in irreparable
disasters, for it inclines us to misprize those secret and delicate
things that pave the way for the soul’s most daring flights and
ventures.
Some other time I shall tell the story of the general who, in order to
allay the grievances of his mutinous troops, offered them a cask of
wine and, thanks to this blunder, suffered a defeat.
People who reason in a wholesale fashion get along successfully from
day to day till the hour when a tiny error destroys their success
forever.
III
If the thoughts of great men no longer cause miracles it is because
they are too little understood, or are misunderstood, or are purposely
distorted. You are mistaken if you think they are powerless because
they are beautiful.
The war, which has crushed such great masses of men, has brought
us face to face with this melancholy evidence, it has enabled us
thoroughly to examine many individuals and to put many experiences
to the proof. It has permitted us to measure the whole humiliation of
moral civilization before that other, the scientific and industrial
civilization which we might still better call practical civilization.
Gifted, serious, good men have said to me, “First of all one has to
live. You can see, in the midst of this hurricane, what would become
of a people weakened by idealism and given over to the works of the
spirit. My son will study chemistry. The coming century will be a
hard one, my son will perhaps never have the time to read Emerson or
acquaint himself with the works of Bach! Too bad! But first of all one
has to live.”
Does it not seem as if error had a dazzling power to seduce us and
overwhelm us? Men are always hoping to conquer it by yielding to its
demands. No one has the courage to turn his own steps away from its
shifting shore. No one, for example, says to me: “The moral culture of
the world is in peril. Mechanical progress monopolizes and swallows up
all human energy. The generous soul of the best men is forgotten, in
exile. Let us, with a common voice, with all our strength, summon it
to come back to us, or let us go and die in exile with it, in an exile
that is noble and pure.”
IV
I shall speak to you again of all these things; we must talk a great
deal more about the future if we wish to enter it without blindness,
shame, and horror.
For the moment, glance at the people who surround us, the restless
people we see on all sides. There are some of them who know what is
beautiful. They rejoice in it, almost in secrecy, and despise those
who do not share their faith. As for the others, they do not know it,
and that is all one can say. They are, according to their several
characters, ignorant and sceptical, or just simply ignorant. They see
how works of art and the spirit miraculously survive the decadence and
the prosperity of empires: that astonishes them without convincing
them. Many divine that this has something to do with a secret and
sacred power, but they do not dare and they do not know how to avail
themselves of it. They catch glimpses of the feast of the heroes and
they cannot realize that their place is marked and waiting for them.
Among my everyday companions are many educated men upon whom the
universities have lavished their care and their degrees. Many of them
are interested neither in their duties, nor in their comrades, nor, one
would say, in their own thoughts. They play cards, read the papers,
think about women and complain of ennui, for the war has enthroned
boredom. And yet these souls, I assure you, are of good material and
full of energy and resource.
What is to be done? How is one to introduce them to a larger, fuller
life? How can one dare to do that without presumption, and also without
fear of pomposity? How do it with affection, without lecturing them,
without preaching to them? How be useful and friendly with simplicity?
They have suffered, they have experience and obstinate views of their
own. They do not believe that they have been dispossessed of anything.
You have to listen very attentively to hear their soul groaning in the
depths.
I spoke to one of them about music. He replied with an indifference
in which there was a touch of discouragement; “For my part, I don’t
understand music. It can’t interest me.” We went on talking and I
discovered that he was strangely sensitive to architectual matters,
that he had a very subtle understanding and lacked nothing but
enlightenment, knowledge, to have applied himself to it with passionate
interest.
It is usually that way. The field of moral activity is so large that it
has in reserve for every soul a path of his own choice, accessible and
full of allurement. I do not believe there is a single individual who
cannot end by meeting, in the limitless realm of art, with a mode of
expression that touches him, conforms quite accurately to his powers
and tastes.
V
You see I have waited a long time before pronouncing the word. I must
at last make up my mind to call art by its name. Listen and do not
confuse modesty with timidity.
The past century has produced important artists in every country in
the world. That was a beautiful, fertile and truly generous century!
And yet it witnessed the birth of a misunderstanding that grows more
obdurate, that increases as it grows older. Should one ever allow a
misunderstanding to grow old?
The romantic writers and, following them, all the artists of their
epoch, intoxicated with their own genius, honored art as a religion.
It was natural enough since at that moment, as we know, mankind was
beginning to detach itself from its divinities, and it is hard to live
without God. I cannot bring myself to condemn that enthusiasm. I love
art too well, and I shall always hold it as one of the distinguishing
marks of man and one of the greatest things in this world.
But the priests of this new God have acted like all priests: they have
hurled anathemas and brought in a reign of intolerance. They have grown
mad with pride, when there was reason and when there was no reason
for it. They have cried out at all hours of the day, “Away, profane
ones!” Many of them, who have had very noble souls, have discouraged,
as if designedly, those whom their radiant face has fascinated. Others,
instead of struggling, have held the epoch responsible for their
ill-fortune. All of them, poets, painters, musicians, have let it be
understood that they exercised a divine power and that the mass of men
must only wonder and be silent, without themselves attempting anything
of the sort.
No doubt there is a certain virtue in this attitude; it has lavished
solitary consolations on those who have turned their backs on fashion.
The worthiest heirs of these illustrious men have confirmed their
tradition. They have devised a splendid isolation, raised up a tower
of ivory and dug all about it a moat that every day grows deeper. They
have also stirred up childish and shame-faced adversaries with a desire
for the commonest sort of popularity, and the confirmation of billboard
success.
Yet humanity is waiting and longs to be treated neither as intruders
nor as children.
VI
It cannot be said any longer that pure art is of no use: it helps us to
live.
It helps us to live, in the most practical manner and every day.
Every moment you make instinctive, reiterated, and forcible appeals
to all the forms of art. And that not only in order to express your
thought, but still more and above all to shape your thought, to think
your thought.
You find yourself in the midst of a landscape, and there is an image at
the back of your eye. The manner in which you accept and interpret this
image bears the mark of your personality and also of a crowd of other
personalities which you call to your aid without knowing it.
The day when the painters of our continent invented that convention we
call perspective, they modified and determined, for many long years,
our way of seeing things. It must be recognized equally that since the
reign of impressionism we have understood, possessed in a new way, the
colors of the world.
You live in a sonorous universe where everything is rhythm, tone,
number and harmony: human voices, the great sounds of nature, the
artificial uproar of society envelopes you in a vibrant and complex
network that you ought unceasingly to decipher and translate. Well,
this you cannot do without submitting to the influence of the
great souls who have occupied themselves with these things. The
understanding of movements, harmonies, rhythms, only comes to you at
the moment when the musicians reveal their secret to you, since they
have been able, in some fashion, to interest you in them.
And this is true in regard to everything. If you discover something
in your environment, if you perceive an interesting harmony between
two beings, a curious relation between two ideas, you will succeed in
throwing them into relief, in giving happy expression to them, only by
means of the poet’s art, and if you cannot find terms and images of
your own, you can freely borrow them from Hugo, from Baudelaire, from
those unknown artists who have elaborated the common language of men.
We do not think alone. Resign yourself, therefore, to being the
delighted prisoner of a vast, human system from which you cannot escape
without error and loss. Become, with good grace, the friend and the
guest of great men.
VII
They will introduce you to a profound, passionate, lyrical life. They
will aid you to possess the world. Art is not simply a manner of moving
the pencil, the pen or the bow. It is not a secret, technical process.
It is, above everything else, a way of living.
If your business is to grow wheat or to smelt copper, perform it with
interest and skill. That will render service to other men whose
function is to assemble colors, shapes, words or sounds. They will know
how to render service to you, in their own fashion, repay you in turn.
But do not imagine that their works are destined merely to divert your
leisure. They have a more sacred, a more beautiful mission: that of
placing you in possession of your own wealth.
Art is the supreme gift that men make of their discoveries, their
riches.
No one has possessed the world better than Lucretius, Shakespeare or
Goethe. What do you know of Croesus, who heaped up his gold to such an
abnormal and monstrous degree? Nothing has remained of that chimerical
fortune but a vague memory. But the fortune of Rembrandt has become and
will remain the fortune of our race.
To follow the example of these masters is not so much to try, with pen
or palette in hand, to imitate them, as to understand with them, and
thanks to them, what they have understood.
This cannot hurt your pride or hinder the expansion of your own
personality. Quite the contrary. This studious humility is the surest
path toward the conquest of your own soul. The anatomists will explain
to you that the human embryo adopts successively, in its quick
evolution, all the forms the species has known before its actual
flowering. This great law rules also in the moral order, and do not
count on escaping it. It is by first knowing the world through the
masters that you will succeed some day in grasping it in your hands,
dominating it yourself.
Ambition is an intoxicating passion, but to go to school to genius is a
prudent measure and a sweet experience, too.
VIII
If you are unhappy, oppressed, if you have melancholy doubts of your
future, of your ability, of your power to love, and if nothing in
heaven replies to your prayer, to your need for deliverance, remember
that you are not abandoned without resource. Men remain to you. The
best among them have made for your consolation, for your redemption,
statues, books and songs.
Open one of these books, therefore, and plunge into it! Sink into it as
into a cool forest, as into a deep, running brook.
A man is speaking to you of himself or of the world. Read! Read on!
Little by little the harmonious voice envelopes you, cradles you, lifts
you up and suddenly bears you away. The tightness in your throat seems
to relax, you breathe with a sort of fervor and exaltation. Generous
tears start to your eyes or your whole soul shakes with laughter.
This great and wholesome exaltation people attribute to the miraculous
presence of beauty. No doubt, no doubt! But that vague and simple
explanation is an almost mythical one.
For you must realize that the man with whom you have just been having
a sort of intimate colloquy has comforted you and carried you out of
yourself mainly because he has been able to prove to you that you were
neither abandoned, nor destitute, nor truly disgraced. He has seemed
to you great but, in recalling to you that you are of the same race as
himself, he has effaced himself before you. He has given you happy,
courageous, new thoughts, and you have suddenly seen that you were
thinking them also. For a second you have both communed together. And
you have felt yourself once more in possession of a treasure that was
escaping you.
It is true, all these thoughts are your own, since it is enough for
you to see them in writing to recognize them. It is true, you too have
your grandeur, your nobility and infinite resources. How could you have
forgotten it for a moment? It is enough for you to open that book or to
hum that song to remember it. It is true, your life also is astonishing
and full of adventures. How did you fall into that despair? What did
that discouragement signify?
IX
During the winter of 1917, I made the acquaintance of a young
provincial musician who was serving in the same unit with me. At
Soissons we found a room where we were able to meet and play together.
Our new comrade was a simple man with a country accent.
He played the violin carefully and with talent. Often, during our
concerts, we watched his face as it bent over the instrument, and
it seemed to us that in those moments that humble violinist was in
communion with the great souls of Bach, Beethoven, and Franck, that he
was holding a brotherly and affectionate conversation with them. I felt
then that he had nothing to envy in the princes of this world. And it
is a fact, I believe, that he did not envy them anything.
Do not tell me that you do not know how to play any instrument. That
signifies nothing. There are two skilful professional musicians in my
group who play their instruments only just enough to enable them not to
lose practice for their calling. They are a sort of mechanician. As for
you, you have a heart, ears, and a memory. And that’s the main thing.
Believe that what you hold in your memory is more precious than
everything else, for you carry that with you wherever you go, through
all your days.
Do you think I can ever bore myself, with all those thousands of airs
that sing in my head, that secretly accompany all my thoughts and offer
a sort of harmonious comment upon all the acts of my life?
If this does not seem possible to you, remember that you possess the
immense library of humankind and all its museums. Think of all you have
read and admired. Think of it with pride and affection. Think of all
that remains to you to see and to read and tell yourself how marvelous
it is to be so ignorant as to have such riches in reserve, to have such
treasures to conquer.
Amid the ordeals and the disillusionments of your existence, lift your
soul every day toward those divine brothers who are our masters, and
repeat with a proud humility: “It is sweet to sit down at your feast!
And how good to think that it is to you we owe our opulence and our
prosperity!”
VI
SORROW AND RENUNCIATION
I
If, concerning an old man, some one said to us: “He has been perfectly
happy all his life, he is going to die without ever having suffered,”
we should be incredulous at first; then, if we were obliged to admit
the truth of the remark, we should feel for this old man not so much
envy as pity. With our astonishment would be mingled, in spite of all,
something a little like contempt.
Happiness is our aim, the final reason for our living. But is it fair
to say that sorrow is opposed to happiness?
There are sorrows that one cannot, that one should not, escape. They
are the very price we pay for happiness. It is by means of them that we
travel toward our own development. They prepare us for joy and render
us worthy of it. Without them, could we ever know that we were happy?
If I believed, O my unknown friend for whom today I am hoping these
consolations, if I believed that you could reach happiness, that is
to say, the harmonious prosperity of your soul, without experiencing
any agonies, I should not undertake to praise your suffering. But you
suffer, I know it, and you are called to other sufferings. Henceforth
I shall not refrain from praising what wounds you. For one does not
console anyone by depreciating his grief, but by showing him how
beautiful, how rare, how desirable it is, and your suffering can truly
be called that.
I do not dream, then, of depriving you of your wealth. I only hope that
you will be able to appreciate its full value. I beg that you will
pardon me if I chance to hurt you by placing my hand upon your wound. I
do it, you may be sure, with the affection and the solicitude of a man
who has consecrated his life to such tasks.
They will tell you, my friend, that I am seeking to flatter your
distress by reasonings that are full of guile, that I am singing to
lull you to sleep and deceive you, that I am dressing in the gilded
clothes of an age that is past the black demon that torments you. Let
me still have your confidence: I have only one ambition,--it is your
own greatest joy. I could not lead you astray without shame and without
deceiving myself; for are you not indeed myself, O my friend?
II
There are some material fortunes which humble and reasonable men do not
desire because they divine, in spite of the pleasures that result from
them, what a crushing load they are.
By contrast, among the spiritual riches that we are able to possess,
grief seems surrounded by a simple aureole. It is tyrannical,
redoubtable, mutilating; its favorites are its victims. It does not
descend upon its chosen ones with the softness of a dove, it pounces
like a bird of prey, and those whom it carries off into the sky bear
upon their sides the marks of its clenched claws.
But it is the sign of life; of all our possessions it is the last to
leave us, it is the one that escorts us to the brink of the abyss.
It gives us the measure of man. He who has not suffered always seems to
us a little like a child or a pauper.
The bitterness of men who have been often visited by sorrow is so truly
a treasure that, if they could, they would not rid themselves of it for
anything in the world: it resembles authority.
Through his tears, through his martyrdom, he who is charged with a
great sorrow feels that he is the abode of some terrible thing that is
also sacred and majestic. Great griefs command our respect. Before
them knees tremble and heads bow as in the presence of thrones and
tabernacles.
He who has suffered greatly makes us feel timid and humble before
him. He knows things that we can only guess. We gaze upon him with
passionate admiration as upon a traveller who has journeyed over oceans
and explored far countries. It is at the time of his first wounds that
the young man discovers his soul and plumbs his inner nobility.
Our grief is so precious a blessing that for its sake we dread
inquisitive contacts. We preserve it jealously from the touch of those
who might, through clumsiness or stupidity, debase this terrible and
precious treasure. We long only that people should leave us alone with
this bitter possession! Let them beware of frustrating us when they
imagine that they are working for our relief!
When sorrow leaves us too soon, we feel a sort of shame and think less
well of ourselves: it shone out of its shadowy casket, out of the
deepest depths of the chest where we heap up our true treasures, and
now, behold, it has vanished! We find ourselves almost miserable and
utterly dispossessed.
The man who beats a retreat before a great ordeal fills us with
distrust and pity. Something in us rejoices that he has not suffered.
But something regrets that he has not given his measure, that he has
not been the hero, the potent, exceptional man we hoped he would be.
And that is not a mere perversion of our need for the spectacular: we
are not less exacting with ourselves.
When sorrow comes to us, and we manage to escape it, the first sense of
deliverance we feel is marred by an obscure, obstinate regret, as if we
had lost an opportunity to enrich ourselves.
Tell me, what man among us did not, at the outset of the present
great catastrophe, interrogate his own fate with a double anguish:
the anguish to know what sufferings were in store for him, the fear
also that he might not suffer enough, that he might not receive, and
quickly, an adequate share of the ordeal.
III
This religious respect we experience in the face of grief gives its
meaning and beauty to the feeling of sympathy.
We do not wish to admit that a great grief can live side by side with
us without demanding that we should share it. As a man of lowly station
wistfully approaches the table of princes, so we revolve about the
grief of others in the hope of being invited to partake of it.
It is an overmastering impulsion that rises from the depths of our
natures. The eagerness we are able to bring to the sharing of others’
joys is but lukewarm beside the insurmountable urge that makes us
share in their sorrow.
This is because our taste for joy is stamped with a keen quality of
reserve, an irreducible delicacy. The joy even of those who are nearest
to us can easily become repugnant to us. We are too proud to seem eager
for it. True grief, on the contrary, attracts us, fascinates us. It
disarms our critical sense and leaves us only an obscure feeling of
envy.
Sympathy stirs us gently without overwhelming us; it is for this reason
too that we find it so full of savor.
Although we recoil from the terrors of the leading part, sympathy
permits us to play passionately the rôle of supernumeraries.
It is not we who are struck down and yet we can taste the mystic horror
of the wound. The chosen victim bestows alms upon us and we accept
them without shame. We have the perfume of the Host on our lips and it
is not our blood that has paid the sacrifice. We are the guests at a
sumptuous and tragic feast. We bear the reflected light of the great
funeral pyre, without undergoing the flames and the destruction.
That explains our leaning toward those works of art that find their
strength and their subjects in human grief. It is for this reason,
surely, that we love so dearly to shed tears at the theater. The great
artists have drawn from grief their most beautiful inspirations. We vow
eternal gratitude to those who can revive in us a faithful image of
our torments and call them back to our forgetful souls, to those who
know so well how to give us a foretaste of the delights that future
suffering has in store for us.
IV
Not all griefs exalt us and add to us. There are some that are sterile,
withering, unconfessable.
Such griefs bring only misery and impoverishment. In the moral order
they stand for debts and failures. However great may be our blind
indulgence for ourselves, we cannot, on principle, impute them to
ourselves. They do not bear the stamp of destiny but of our own
baseness.
Who, indeed, would wish to share them with us, when we do not even let
them appear?
Who would wish to associate himself with our weaknesses, our shames,
our jealousies, our betrayals? Who can feel sympathy for a grief that
disavows everything pure and generous that exists in us? No mention is
made of these griefs in the Beatitudes.
Christ himself might ask us to kiss the face of a leper. But what
charity could so sacrifice itself as to embrace our shame and our
degradation?
That is the cup we must put away from our lips.
V
The stoics pursue their strange happiness with an impassibility that
is worse than death. Epictetus writes: “If you love an earthen vessel,
tell yourself that you love an earthen vessel, for then if that vessel
is broken you will not be troubled by it. If you love your son or your
wife, tell yourself that you love a mortal being, for then if that
being chance to die you will not be troubled by it.”
Comes our wisdom at such a price? If so, I renounce and abhor it.
Better trouble and sorrow than this inhuman serenity!
Certainly I willingly renounce the earthen vessel; the sound of its
breaking will never be loud enough to interrupt the conversation our
souls pursue. But those dear faces that are my horizon, my heaven and
my homeland, can I think without anguish of losing them forever? How
irreparably I should despise myself if, on that condition, I succeeded
in winning my own salvation!
This philosophy is poor, forsaken, desperate, rather than truly wise.
It renounces, by degrees, everything, for the sake of an ironical
peace. It withdraws from life the least debatable motives for
continuing it. It seeks to close the heart to sorrow. But since that
remains inevitable, it is better to love it, better to make an ally of
it, better to conquer it by main strength and possess it intimately.
Dryness of heart cannot be a good thing. What, is everything to be
taken away from me, even my grief, even that grief which remains to us
when all other blessings have been ravished away?
The resources of philosophy are poor and destitute unless the heart
can anoint them, sanctify them, and invest them with its own supreme
authority.
VI
The fanaticism of grief is a fact so profoundly human that religions
and governments have exploited it successfully. This almost mystical
passion flourishes so well among peoples that are permeated with the
ancient traditions of suffering and renunciation!
Nevertheless, the path does not lie through this sublime error, which
is altogether too favorable for the enterprises of criminal ambition.
Sorrow cannot be a thing that one covets. It is, it ought to be, simply
a thing that one accepts. Like certain terrible dignities, like certain
overwhelming honors, one receives it, one does not seek it. Destiny
brings a sufficient burden of mourning and cruelty, it should not be
tempted. The noble life demands that we shall be courageous, it does
not require us to be foolhardy. To him who “seeks while he groans,”
suffering will never be wanting.
At this hour the whole world is intoxicated with it, satiated, it would
seem, for all time. At this hour there rises an immense cry of pity and
supplication.
All generous souls are wounded to the quick and stagger. It is
not in the moment when they beg for mercy that one would desire a
superaddition of martyrdom. It is enough to assume the sanguinary
wealth with which we are overwhelmed.
No one will ever be deprived of it who lives for love. We shall all be
honored according to our merits. And we shall know that grief is its
own reward; for it is in sorrow and abnegation that our soul becomes
supremely aware of the beauty of the world and of its own virtues.
We cannot ask to be indemnified for our riches....
VII
In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children!
It is true! Our child was born in sorrow, in your sorrow, O my friend!
I am jealous because of it. Forgive me!
Forgive me, for your part is more beautiful than mine, inasmuch as it
contains more suffering. Let me look upon you with envy. Let me think
of my own lot with regret.
You have borne, you have brought forth, you have nourished. It was not
in my side that this little body lay. It is not my flesh this tender,
greedy mouth has clung to. I have known nothing of that suffering. You
have kept it all for yourself. I have only picked up the crumbs, like a
beggar, like a pauper.
I have not suffered! I have not suffered enough! I look on my happiness
as upon something usurped. It is your happiness that I share. It is
your wealth that overflows even upon me.
I know that a day may come when we shall both suffer together because
of this son. But whatever may be our common anguish, you will always
keep the first place, you will always walk before me. You have forever
outdistanced me along the shining road.
How can I help regarding you with envy, I who have not suffered enough?
VIII
Exalted spirits, struck by our many resemblances to the beasts, have
striven to find what was the distinguishing mark of man. It is a noble
solicitude, for wheresoever the mark of men may be it is that way we
must go. If we really possess a characteristic virtue of which the
animals are deprived, it is that which we must exalt, in order to be
completely, proudly, men.
Pascal said: “Man is obviously made to think; and his whole dignity,
his whole merit, and his whole duty lies in thinking rightly.”
Can we indeed believe that no other being has this grandeur to any
degree? Are we so sure that “a tree does not know it is miserable”?
Even art, which may turn out to be the instrument of our redemption,
is not certainly the lot of our race alone. Song and the dance triumph
among the animals and often appear like the beautiful inventions of a
gratuitous activity, with no other end than themselves and the emotions
they give or interpret.
In renunciation, perhaps, lies our distinction, the trait which stamps
us and sets us apart.
I say “perhaps,” because animals also offer us examples of abnegation.
Sacrifice beautifies even their habits. With them, too, the individual
sacrifices himself for the group, the hero sacrifices itself for the
race. At the moment when I am writing these lines we are in autumn; a
swarm of bees is dying of cold on a branch beside me. They are dying
with a sort of resignation, in order that their hive, so poor in
resources, may survive the winter.
Why not share, then, with these humble victims, our most beautiful
quality? Why refuse to possess something in common with them, since it
is a virtue? Why cut ourselves off haughtily from the rest of life?
Over and above this, the renunciation that has no particular or general
motive of interest, the pure and absolute renunciation which is a
heroic folly, is undoubtedly our business. I am not speaking now of the
renunciation of the better religions, the renunciation that counts on
celestial rewards, but of the renunciation which is an end in itself,
which finds in itself its own sorrowful recompense.
IX
Can we ever forget, my friend, that woman who was the lesson of your
youth, your counsellor and your example?
She lived in that dark, low room where you so loved to go and to which
you used to show me the way, a way that seemed to me that of veneration
itself.
Disillusionments, griefs, sickness and, without doubt, a great need
for renunciation had gradually sequestered her in that unlovely place
of refuge, encumbered with old books and full of the odor of dust. She
seemed cut off from the world; but in the shadow of that retreat her
eye sparkled so vivaciously, she spoke with so melodious a voice that
the world pursued her who had abandoned it even into her retirement:
the friendship of young people, that friendship which is so pure and
spontaneous, was for her a constant testimony. This was the only thing
she would not renounce, her only ornament, her last elegance, her
possession.
Year by year death came to snatch from her affection those of her own
blood. Every sort of happiness withdrew from her as she retired into
her abode, light itself she dreaded more and more, and more and more
renounced.
Every time we passed through her little door, so slow in opening, we
had at first an insurmountable feeling of being suffocated, for we were
still intoxicated with our radiant life, our destiny and our ambitions.
But soon our eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, our souls recognized
the humble, penetrating odor of the hangings, and we found again
that beautiful, commanding glance, that voice with its supernatural
freshness.
Her malady struck her new blows. This woman who still possessed the
space of three rooms had to shut herself in one of them. And then,
even of this she possessed no more than a corner. Her world was only a
little wall and the wood of an old bed.
That ardent eye still shone. That spiritual voice still prevailed. One
day the voice faltered and sank, like a ship disabled in a storm which
gives up all resistance.
That day we were sad, sad, we who had not learned to renounce.
X
Delivered from romanticism, the nineteenth century toward its close and
the twentieth century at its beginning, exalted an image full of the
pride of physical life, of impetuous health.
Never had humanity seemed more intoxicated with its carnal development,
with its splendid animality, than at the very moment when the war broke
out. Our humanity! behold it now, covered with wounds so deep that for
long decades the sight of them will baffle us and fill our pity with
despair.
Behold it now, like a vast race of invalids. It creeps over a world
where now there are more graveyards than villages.
We have had an unparalleled experience of sorrow and renunciation.
And yet the desire for happiness is deeply rooted: the unanimous voice
to which our world listens repeats, from amid the sobs: “We shall
renounce nothing!”
To him who listens with an attentive ear, it says again, it says
particularly: “We shall renounce nothing, not even renunciation!”
But let us leave this immense grief to itself. Let us leave it to
satiate and appease itself with its own contemplation--Silence!
VII
THE SHELTER OF LIFE
I
Two immense worlds remain faithful to me when the others discourage or
betray me. Two refuges open to my heart when it is weary, faltering or
harassed with temptation.
I should like very much to tell you about them, since you are my
friend. I can tell you, since you have nothing to envy me, since you
bear within yourself two such worlds, two kingdoms that will submit to
you undividedly, without contest.
Yesterday I was watching some prisoners working. They were pushing the
trunk of a tree lashed to a cart. Sweat was rolling down their faces,
for the heat was great, the slope steep and the load heavy. An armed
soldier was watching them. Large letters were printed on their clothes
to proclaim their servitude. And I thought: they live, they do not look
too unhappy, they do not seem crushed by their condition. And if this
is so, it is not because they have the placidity of beasts. No! Look
at their eyes, listen to their voices. It is precisely because they
are men and they carry everywhere with them two refuges, whither the
gaoler cannot follow them, two precious possessions that no punitive
discipline can snatch from them: their future and their memories.
The longer I watch, from close by, those men who, for four years have
led the inhuman life of the army, the better I understand the meaning
of their incredible patience: between the future and the remembered
past they have the air of awaiting the passage of a storm. They are
gulping down, you would say, hastily and with closed eyes, this
bitter and criminal present, in order to reserve their hearts all the
better for the things of the future and the past. One feels in their
conversation only these two luminous existences. They seek and unite
them unceasingly above the bloody abyss. I have also observed that, in
the concerts they give themselves to cheer their periods of rest, their
souls always return, with the same rapture, to their former way of
living, to their old sons, their familiar ways of being sad or joyous.
The artistic attempts that are carried on to interest them, at the
bottom of their hearts, in the formidable present, remain sterile and,
as it were, dry.
They seem to reply, silently: “What have all these things to do with
us? Isn’t it enough for us to live them? Isn’t it enough for us to
do them, every day with our blood and tears? Give us back our dear
kingdom. Give back to our souls that memory which is their most
imperishable and marvelous possession.”
II
Between the future and the remembered past, man is left to struggle
with what he possesses least, the present.
And yet this present is lavish of all sorts of materials that we
can transform into riches. It is our liquid fortune, mobile and in
circulation. It is the well-filled purse upon which we draw for our
daily needs.
It reaches us out of the depths of time, like a great river, loaded
with sailing-ships and steamers, deep, flowing, beautiful with all its
reflections, and rolling gold in its sands.
But it has its rages, its whims, its cruelties. According to the
season, it overflows and desolates the land or suddenly dries up and
deserts the fields that it refreshed with its floods!
So be it! If the present refuses to yield its manna, we will draw upon
our last resources. If the times overwhelm us with bitterness, we will
flee to our refuges, where we have nothing to fear from intruders or
masters or tormentors.
Common-sense folk, who have the secret of debasing life in the name
of a reason that is more mischievous than actual stupidity, are in
the habit of devoting an almost superstitious worship to the present
reality. To tell the truth, they are greatly afraid that the taste for
memory and hope will turn young men away from that immediate action
which is necessary for the conquest and preservation of material wealth.
They honor with great pomp the origins in the past of those traditions
that are favorable to them; and the way they invoke and prepare for the
future loads the present with chains and shackles.
They dread, in reverie, an enemy of action. As if there were any great
actions that have not their source in great dreams!
These people deceive themselves. They sacrifice an unequalled
consolation to the needs of a fleeting fortune. But do not imagine that
the failure of their fortune leaves these men utterly abandoned: the
refuges open gladly, even for those who have despised them.
III
An intimate friend once said to me, as he watched his little son
playing: “You see; he’s no longer the baby you knew last year. He’s
another child. I have been cheated of the one I had last year. I shall
never have him again. I have lost a child.”
O dear, big heart, how beautiful and how unjust those words are! How
human! How they overflow with ingratitude and with adoration!
You know quite well that every object that appears on the horizon of
our souls has, for us, two existences. One is sudden, sharp, almost
always penetrated with an intense and, so to say, corrosive flavor:
that is the existence of the present. Men agree in recognizing that its
duration is hardly measurable. But the other existence is perennial, as
ample as the measure of our life and our thoughts; in this sense it is
almost infinite.
Thus each moment of the present survives in memory for years, and
doubtless for centuries, since posterity can gather up and prolong the
best of our acts and our works.
It is true, my friend, that each moment dispossesses us, even of the
object we never withdraw our arms from. The miser, infatuated with
his material riches, may well suffer agony of mind over them, but we,
we? Do we not know that each moment restores to us, transfigured, all
the treasures it has snatched away from us? It robs us of the frailer
blessings, it offers us imperishable blessings, less mortal than
ourselves.
You have conquered one whole happy day. Contemplate without regret
the sleep that marks its end, for you will continue to live this day
during all the rest of jour life. And if this day was truly beautiful,
do you not know that others after you will continue to live it, down,
ever farther down, the succession of the years?
Let your son grow, without too much anxiety, like a beautiful tree:
the child he was once, the child he was but now, the child he is at
present, you will not lose them, O insatiable heart! They will escort
you toward old age, like a beloved multitude that increases every day
and cannot die.
Owing to the war, I have seen my own child only seven times, and each
time I have hardly recognized him. Seven times I have believed him
lost. I know now that I have seven lovely images in my soul, seven
children to adorn and hearten my solitude.
IV
There are beauties which the present fails to appreciate. That is
natural, because it is greedy, disordered, care-ridden. Memory exists
to see that justice is done. To it falls the divine rôle of restoring
and, at times, pardoning. (It is memory which, in the last resort,
vindicates and judges. It is in its light that things appear to us
under the aspect of eternity.)
None of our thoughts would be really happy that had not received the
approbation of memory, that did not find themselves sealed at last
with its sovereign imprint. We do not know the true value of our
moments until they have undergone the test of memory. Like the images
the photographer plunges into a golden bath, our sentiments take on
color; and only then, after that recoil and that transfiguration, do
we understand their real meaning and enjoy them in all their tranquil
splendor.
Days of ours that had seemed to us dull and hopeless show themselves in
memory luminous and decisive. Journeys undertaken without eagerness,
without enthusiasm, and without any of the freshness of surprise,
become, from a distance, fruitful in revelations and discoveries.
Every reality develops with time a thousand aspects of itself that
are just as real, as charged with meaning and consequence, as the
original aspect. We cannot foretell what memory will contrive for
us. It is a treasure all the more precious and unexpected because it
is so independent of our rudimentary logic. For the logic of memory
is more subtle than ours; it seems entirely free from our miserable
calculations; it draws its inspirations from our true interests, which
we ourselves are forever misapprehending. The slow task it pursues
testifies to so rare a virtue and so munificent a wisdom that man,
struck with his own unworthiness, might well seek there the signs of a
divine intervention.
Sometimes it is a friend, whom we have misunderstood or misjudged, who
takes on in memory his true aspect and his true stature and reveals the
profound influence which, without our knowing it, he has exercised over
our thoughts.
Sometimes it is a word which we heard at first with an inattentive or
distrustful ear, and which we find again engraved in letters of gold
over the portico of the secret temple where we love to collect our
thoughts.
Like some skilful goldsmith, memory seizes the materials that our life
accumulates haphazard. It submits them to the touchstone, fashions
them, embellishes them and imprints upon them that mysterious sheen
which gives them their distinctive meaning and their value.
V
The cult of memory should not turn us away from the present out of
which memory itself draws its nourishment.
We sometimes meet men of whom plain people say, with profound wisdom,
“Their mind is elsewhere.” It is true; they are the timid and tormented
souls who have early sought in memory a refuge which nothing, it seems,
could ever make them renounce.
Let us beware of troubling this retreat. Some day, perhaps, we may long
for one like it. But however deeply one may seem to have taken refuge
in memory, one cannot escape the clutch, the invasion of the present.
It is best, therefore, and with all the strength that is in us, to
accept, honor, love this present as the principal source of our riches.
If the true cult of memory were a less exceptional moral usage, many
men would hesitate to create bad memories for themselves; for our worst
memories are not those of our sufferings, our ordeals, our privations,
but of our shameful acts, our cowardices and our betrayals.
Our weakness lasted only a moment; must we really, for thirty years,
feel the hostile stare of that moment resting heavily upon us? Who
knows? Hope, even so, in the clemency of memory, which is able to
mitigate and pardon everything. It is indulgent and full of pity. In a
world given over to spite and reprisals, it remains the only inviolable
refuge of the outcast, as the cathedrals used to be in the days of the
right of sanctuary.
For him who descends with true fervor into his own depths, memory
always preserves some corner pure from all baseness. Do we not know,
moreover, that in order to console us memory consents to work in
concert even with its enemy, forgetfulness?
VI
Who can dispute with us the world of memory? No one! And who would
dare, without fear, to do so? It is because we are more ardently
attached to this possession than to any other.
At times, a clumsy or malevolent hand succeeds in smirching one of
our dear memories. Then we experience an indignation and a despair as
lasting and profound as if these sentiments recognized their cause in
the loss or the fall of a loved being.
Happily this criminal work implies a rarely evil spirit, a sort of
perverse genius of which humanity is none too prodigal. And then our
memory is a territory too vast, too mountainous, too impregnable as a
whole for the rage of hostile destruction to be able to defile or mar
large portions of it. The best of our memories thus remain in safety
and for us alone. Besides, we keep careful watch around this fortune.
Our great memories are actual moral personages, so necessary to our
happiness that we bear them under a sacred arch, sheltered from
all injury, from all contact. It is into this solitude that we go
ceaselessly to question them, invoke them, call them to witness.
A past in common does not always give memories in common, so true it
is that the heart defends itself, in its innermost retreat, as the
physical self defends its flesh against the intrusions of the stranger.
It sometimes happens that men find pleasure in recalling in our
presence the episodes of an existence that was passed, by themselves
or by them and us, in companionship. It is then that we measure the
road our soul has travelled on its solitary path: these things of which
they speak to us, these deeds which, it seems, we have performed, these
landscapes which they remember having crossed in our company, we no
longer recognize; we do not even wish to recognize them. We smile in
an embarrassed, awkward, unhappy way. Our whole attitude says: “Is it
really true that we have drunk from the same cup? For all that, it was
not the same wine we drank, and my intoxication is not yours.”
We cannot give to one who is dear to us a greater proof of love than
to admit him to the intimacy of our memories. We have need of all our
tenderness to help us to introduce another soul into the subterranean
basilica, to lead that soul as close as possible to the refuge where,
in spite of all, there is only room for one.
Perfect communion in memory is an extraordinary favor, and an
admonition. If it is given to you to enjoy it, open your arms and
receive one elect soul.
VII
No doubt you have had the experience, when passing through a country
where you were travelling for the first time, of stopping short, as
you rounded a mountain, before some unknown horizon, and finding it
strangely familiar.
No doubt you have had the experience of arriving at night in a dark
square where you knew you had never been before, and briskly finding
your way through it, just as if you were resuming some old habit.
At times the spectacle of a smiling valley arrests you at the top
of some hill. You thought you knew nothing of this country, and yet
strange and sure impressions guide you; they are like old memories. You
advance, and behold, you are looking at everything as if you recognized
it. That road which winds between the pastures, as supple and sinuous
as a beautiful river of yellow water,--you are almost certain you
have followed it long ago, in some misty, far-off existence which,
nevertheless, is not your own.
There are times, too, when you are dreaming, as you sit alone, and
suddenly a memory passes over you: the memory of some act the man you
are surely never performed. Yet it is not a fabrication, an invention.
You know, you feel, that it is a personal memory. A memory of what
world? Of what life?
Do not reject this shadowy treasure, and do not tremble! Do not
accept complacently the explanations of the superstitious or of the
pseudo-scientists. The flesh of your flesh was not born yesterday.
Something survives in it that is contemporaneous with all the
generations. Many a revelation awaits us. Let us keep for them a soul
that is accessible, experienced, and not too distrustful.
VIII
Do not imagine that to possess memory is to possess a dead world.
Among your friends there is surely one who has a house and a garden.
From time to time he invites you to visit him. Every time you enter
his house you observe some striking change: he has connected two parts
of the building which till then had no means of communication. He has
planted some new trees. The old elms are flourishing. Some rosebushes
have died. Urns have been set out on the lawn. The life of men, of
animals, of plants has drawn the inanimate world into its toils,
modeled it, sculptured it, forced it to take part in the movement of
the soul.
It is in like fashion that the domains of memory cultivate themselves
and live. They are not ruins, inalterable, rigid, fixed forever in the
ice of some past epoch. Life still penetrates and moves them; they do
not cease to share in its enterprises, its labors, its festivals.
When a man has opened for you several times the same gate in the wall,
when several times he has related the same adventure to you, with
intervals of a few months or a few years, observe closely the spots
to which he leads you and the persons to whom he presents you. Every
time you will find new things, you will find that roads have been laid
out, underbrush cut down, windows opened and unexpected supernumeraries
called in.
Is it true then that that was a dead tale, wrapped up in what we call
the shroud of the past?
The world of “living memory” is so indissolubly bound up with our
resolutions and our acts that in accumulating memories we feel we are
preparing, erecting our future itself.
IX
There is another refuge!
“What makes hope so intense a pleasure,” writes M. Bergson, “is that
the future, which we fashion to suit ourselves, appears to us at one
and the same time under a multitude of forms, all equally smiling,
equally possible. Even if the most desirable of them all is realized,
we must have sacrificed the others, and we shall have lost much. The
idea of the future, pregnant with infinite possibilities, is therefore
more fertile than the future itself, and that is why we find more
charm in hope than in possession, in reverie than in reality.”
The idea of the future alone interests us: that alone is our treasure,
that alone is endowed with existence. It is that indeed which we call
the future. And if M. Bergson, at the end of these admirable lines,
creates a distinction between the future and the idea of the future, he
does not make us forget that he has just, and as if by design, caused
the confusion; for what “we fashion to suit ourselves” is the idea of
the future, and nothing else. But, following the example of M. Bergson,
let us call our idea of the future the future itself.
This idea is our cherished fortune. Certainly we take a passionate
interest in seeking, in what flows out of the present, something that
resembles the realization of our dreams. And yet their realization,
like their failure, marks, in every sense, their end, their exhaustion.
And that is insupportable to us. Whatever fate the present reserves for
our imaginings, we labor every day, as fast as time devours them and
destroys them by making them finite, to push them further back into the
infinite, to prolong them, to reconstruct them, so that we may never
have less of a future at our disposal.
This need of a future, which has no other connection than our hope with
the rugged actuality of the present, is so deep-rooted, so generally
human a thing, that one cannot contemplate it without a respect which
is almost religious. In order that this future, so pregnant with
dreams, should be as necessary as it is to the moral life of most
men, it must represent a truly incomparable treasure. The embrace we
throw around it is the close and powerful embrace we reserve for those
possessions that lie nearest our hearts. And, since we have already
detached the word “possession” from the gross meaning that is usually
attributed to it, let us say that the possession of a dream, when it
assures our happiness, is a reality less debatable and less illusory
than the possession of a coal-mine or a field of wheat.
But as there is no possession without conquest, without effort, we must
merit our dreams and cultivate them lovingly.
If people who have taken the mould of reason reproach us with
distracting for a moment the men of that practical reality which
pretends to be preparing the future, we are ready to reply to them:
“Glance at those men to whom our words are addressed. You know that
they are crushed with fatigue and privation. They have experienced
every danger and every sort of weariness. By what right will you hinder
them from taking refuge in a world which is henceforth the least
contestable of their domains? Do not, on their account, be afraid of
reverie; it could never fill them with as much bitterness as does this
modern reality of which you are the unpunished builders.
“If you are not weary of glimpsing your future through the
specifications, the account-books, the cage-bars, and the unbreathable
fumes of industrialism, at least allow these to cherish a marvelous
and, in spite of all its disappointments, an efficacious future. It
is not a question of forgetting life,--that is too beautiful and too
desirable, but rather of amplifying and fertilizing it. Whatever may
be the outcome of a generous dream, it always ennobles the man who has
entertained it. Allow the unhappy to be rich in a possession that costs
them only love and simple faith. Do not let your reason dispossess them
of the only treasure that your greed has not been able to snatch from
them. It is the cult of the future and of memory that sustains man in
the uncertainty of the present hour. If he walks by instinct towards
these refuges, do not turn him aside, and think, O priests of reason,
of the warning of Pascal: ‘It is on the knowledge of the heart and of
the instincts that Reason has to lean, and establish there the whole of
her discourse’.”
X
I have seen thousands of men suffer and die. Every day I see new ones
enter the somber arena and struggle. My part is to help them in this
torment, to assure them aid and hope. I have a wide experience of these
things now and I know that men are never denied a future, even when
life is on the point of betraying them.
Philosophers and poets, led astray by religion or by a mystical passion
for death, have given the severe counsel that we should never conceal
from the dying the approach of their annihilation. It is a theoretical
view of charity, an artificial, mischievous doctrine that does not
stand the test, that should not be put to the test. Its partisans
suspect falsehood where there is only pity and modesty, for it is not
the part of man to be so proud of his own judgment as to take away from
someone with the certitude of life that fabulous future which is more
precious than life itself.
I remember, in 1915, a wounded man, who had just received the visit
of a priest moved by praiseworthy intentions and a clumsy exaltation,
saying to me suddenly, “I know now that I am going to die!” and
beginning to weep terribly. I went to see the priest and reproached him
for his behavior. “What!” that eloquent man replied haughtily, “do you
who are incapable of preserving this unhappy man’s earthly life blame
me for assuring him his future life?” Alas! Alas! I still think of the
sobs of that wounded man; they were those of one who has just lost his
supreme wealth and to whom nothing else can make amends.
Soldiers who, in the full vigor of their youth, suffer a severe,
a final mutilation experience at first that is like a veritable
amputation of their future, so true is it that every part of our
physical self is intimately bound up with the labors of our dream.
Then, with surprising rapidity, and long before the disorder of the
tissues has been exorcised, one sees them filling in the moral breach,
raising up the crumbled wall, propping it hastily and reconstructing,
quite as new but quite complete and tightly shut, the sacred fortress
outside which their soul remains vulnerable and disarmed.
In truth, the man who is condemned to death is still rich in the
future, even when his body sinks, ten times pierced by bullets, even
when he has only one drop of blood left, one flickering spark of life.
XI
O present hour, magnificent, foaming fountain, you know very well that
we shall be faithful to you! With your thousand animated faces, your
landscapes, your problems, your combats and that heavy burden of
jostling ideas you carry with you, you will always attract us, you will
see us all together drinking of your waters.
But when you no longer contain for us anything but anger and hatred,
greed and cruelty, then indeed we must each of us abandon you and turn
to our refuges; we must each of us withdraw into the Thebaid where all
things still respond to our voice, to our voice alone.
May our fate preserve us from the greatest of all misfortunes! May our
refuges never lose in our eyes their virtue and their security! This
supreme affliction at times befalls us, and it is then that our souls,
exiled from their homeland, must set themselves humbly to the search
for the lost grace.
VIII
THE CHOICE OF THE GRACES
I
What man, tell me, what man, were he suddenly delivered from disgust
with himself, from terror of the world, from the sadness of an age that
is without pity, from remorse for a thing he has done, from the fear
of things he has to do, what man, suffering from one of these evils,
or from several of them or from all at once, would not experience an
immense relief, would not feel a certain absolution for the errors of
the universe, a certain alleviation of his own in the contemplation of
this little osier-bed which I descry this evening, at the turning of a
lane?
What is there so profound, so divine in that scene?
Nothing, nothing, no doubt. Everything, perhaps. For who would venture
to maintain that there is anything in the world that might not be a
sign for my heart and yet be nothing more? I was following a stone
wall, an indecipherable wall at present, without significance, without
compassion, an enemy. It shut in my view and my thoughts, it was
covered with cold mosses and all the dampness of winter. And then, all
at once, the wall ended and there was a little valley crowned with
these osiers. Yes, I mean crowned, for it seemed as if all its desires
had been granted, all its aspirations satisfied, all its prayers
fulfilled.
Thousands of crimson branches rose in a chorus toward heaven, like
clusters of some smooth, straight, up-springing coral. All the branches
rose together, with one brotherly impulse, like the desires of a world
freed from ambitions and vowed to the one, the noblest ambition of
all. But why seek for words, why strive to paint it? Surely it was not
the flaming sap of the young shoots any more than the little rivulets
smoking like censers at their feet,--it was neither of these things
that promised relief and deliverance. It was the entire world that
manifested itself in this, its smallest fragment, just as the most
secretive man will betray himself by the trembling of his little finger
or the flutter of an eyelash.
II
I was once saved by the tarpaulin of a humble delivery wagon. That
tarpaulin certainly knew no more about it than did the men who owned
it, or had the use of it here below. There are, in every object,
qualities we are ignorant of and that are precisely those through which
this object fulfils its most beautiful rôle in the universe, those
to which it inclines as if toward some miraculous purpose, which are
indeed its vocation and its true destiny.
I remember it was a morning in February, one of those hopeless mornings
which we feel do not deserve the evening and will hardly attain
it. I do not know what I had done to myself or to my men to have
so completely lost all courage and purpose; but that morning I was
certainly the most destitute of beings and the least worthy of an act
of grace.
Yet for all that, grace was shown me, for that marvelous tarpaulin
appeared. It was of heavy canvas, yellow and green. Its color, its
folds, its whole appearance, the form it concealed, in fact I know not
what element in it, showed me that I still could live, that my faults
were forgiven me, that nothing about me was irremediable.
I am willing to pass for a man who is eager for forgiveness, a man who
is satisfied with little. We wish to set our own value on everything,
as if the things of the spirit meant the same thing as money, as
if they did not depend upon quite another spirit than that of the
accountants and geometricians.
I met a priest,--it was since the war began,--with whom I often talked
about penance and contrition. I asked him one day what price he would
ask for the remission of the heaviest burden on one’s conscience. He
answered without hesitation: “Three paters and three aves.” This man
was corrupted by the customs of the world and its authorities. He
filled me with a sort of desire to insult him, and I confess I gave
him some rude shocks. Since then I have reflected. I have not become
reconciled to the memory of that priest, but I believe that grace
touches us in a most unforeseen way; it shines out suddenly, without
any reason, like the radiant blue in a sky where one has not expected
it. It manifests itself without regard to the efforts we make to
deserve it, and the occasions it selects are not in proportion to our
distress. But how sovereign it is, how much the most desirable of all
blessings!
Remember, remember! you were walking through the streets, a prey to
some irremediable pain. Your poverty seemed unlimited, for it could
not be palliated by more money, an improvement in your health or the
renewal of a broken friendship. And yet, nevertheless, you suddenly
breathed in the wind an imperceptible odor, familiar, charged with
memories, you suddenly encountered in the color of a house, or in the
look of an unknown face, some mysterious sign, and you felt that your
wealth had been given back to you, that it flowed through you once
more as the saving blood returns to the heart of the dying man.
I was walking one day along the banks of the Aisne, the prey of an
illimitable mental torture which, just because there was no reason
for it, seemed incurable. The image of a bridge in the water suddenly
gave me back my confidence in myself and my accustomed joyousness. It
was only a reflection; but never believe those who tell you that these
things are nothing but reflections.
III
When a man who is cruelly wounded in his body or his spirit preserves a
cheerful faith and never ceases to be the master of his misfortune, I
say that he has grace.
When a true man is able, for an hour, to contemplate without uneasiness
his own thoughts and actions, I say that he is touched with grace, and
I hope that hour may last a day and that day an entire life.
Like a sailing-vessel that stretches through the air its slender,
vibrant cables, probes the sky with its strong and supple masts, offers
to the wind, at ever-varying angles, the white resistance of its sails
and marvelously dominates all the forces of the air while seeming to
obey them, the man who possesses grace enjoys a communion that is
profound, perfect, exquisite, not only with whatever in the world is
perceptible to us, but above all with what is unknown.
That man weighs much in the baskets of the winnower. That man does not
see only within the limits of his own flesh. He fills in his own self
almost the whole universe, participates gloriously in the infinite.
I know that it often happens that the beautiful ship sees its sails
sinking in distress and no longer feels its ropes trembling in the
wind. The time comes when it stops painfully in the stupor and
indifference of noon.
The time comes when the rich man suddenly finds himself on Job’s
dung-heap. The time comes when, without reason, grace deserts the heart.
Wait expectantly, with sails spread like an ear, with rigging firm, and
perhaps, where others less trustful would find themselves abandoned,
you will perceive a certain relenting breeze.
You must never lose contact with the universe if you wish to live in
the state of grace.
IV
Welcome your own true thought, whatever may be the hour at which it
visits you. If it chooses to rouse you in the middle of the night, rise
to do it honor and look at it with clear eyes.
There are some who have just missed an hour of greatness because they
preferred to slumber under the warm eiderdown. The spirit called them
in a low voice, in the darkness of the cold room; they did not rise
and they will never know what they might have become. They will try
to console themselves by thinking they have dreamed; will they ever
console themselves?
There are some who, suddenly, through the mist of tobacco smoke, have
seen their souls, like some long-awaited supernatural being, watching
them.
At the moment they were playing cards or reading their paper; they
thought: “Wait, I’ll join you in a moment.” The game ended, or the
paper thrown aside, the visitor had departed.
They rushed forth in pursuit, their hearts convulsed with shame and
anguish. Alas! the deep melancholy glance will perhaps never shine
upon them again. Perhaps they will never again come face to face with
themselves.
In the midst of pleasure, when you are enjoying the company of a woman
or the conversation of bold, intelligent men, if you chance to hear the
voice of solitude singing like a siren at your feet, leave everything
to flee with her.
V
When Epictetus said: “Our good and evil exist only in our own will,”
he misstated the problem. That is one way of solving it, but more
often it is a way of assuming that it has been solved, an expedient for
passing it over.
I am not happy today; I am not pleased with myself, I am not pleased
with anyone; I feel quite certain that everything I undertake will be a
failure, above all, above all, I do not want to undertake anything; I
view all things with an unprofitable eye, an irritable and apparently
dried-up soul. I am driven to suffer myself and make others suffer.
Oh! I am without grace! I know it and I am far from admiring myself.
Secretly I long to feel grace at last descending on my head and
shoulders like a mantle of soft sunshine, like the honeyed perfume that
falls from the lime-trees.
What does that old man want? Why does he repeat with a sort of
obstinacy: “It depends upon you to make a good use of every event”?
No doubt it depends upon me!
But what are we to do when nothing can be blamed upon events? And what
when, indeed, there are no events.
Is it true that it depends upon me to be myself at such times also?
Answer me, great, silent trees! Answer me, fir-tree, weighted down
with sleet and dreaming--Heine has told me--of the palm consumed with
burning heat in the tropics.
“Drive out,” replies the philosopher, “drive out your desires and your
fears and you will never again suffer tyranny.”
True; but I have only one fear: not to be the best man I may; only one
desire, not to give in to myself.
The sage shrugs his shoulders and then says in a gentle voice: “Bear
and forbear.” And he is not thinking only of the storms that come from
without.
He says this because he well knows that in order to be happy one must
be visited by grace.
All the stoics have drawn up rules of virtue. Not one has suggested the
means that will give us the strength to apply them. For the wish is
not enough. The gift is necessary, that secret impulse which is grace
itself.
VI
Praise be to thee, divine world, that hast delivered me from anger by
revealing to me in time that trembling blossom of the convolvulus!
Praise be to thee, divine world, that, at the very limit of my fatigue,
in the midst of my perils, hast chosen mysterious ways to light me with
an inner smile!
Millions of unhappy men who are suffering at this moment on the fields
of distracted Europe are aware that at the blackest moment of distress
a strange consolation can penetrate them; it is as if the fingers
clutching one’s heart suddenly relaxed their grip. There are some who
call this God. Many others give no name to the miracle, but long for it
on their knees all the same.
The voice no longer speaks from the burning bush. Sometimes it is the
sound of last year’s leaves still rustling in the branches of an oak.
Sometimes there is no sound; only the speaking glance of a veronica in
ecstasy among the April fields.
I am quite willing to bear, but I do not wish to forbear. I do not wish
not to meet grace halfway, not to seek for it in the night flooded with
frosty perfumes, in the tossing forest where two interlocked branches
groan through the long hours, on the plateau haunted with thistles that
labor with feverish piety to perpetuate their innumerable lineage.
I ask only to be allowed to interrogate the earth like those who seek
minerals and water-courses, and to experience every morning the green
ascent of the spring-time over the rocky slopes.
I do not know by what path joy will come; I ask only to be permitted,
none the less, to go to meet it, for truly I cannot sit here by this
mile-post at the cross-roads, and placidly await it.
One joy has come to me during the war, one that is undoubtedly the
greatest joy of my life: that of having a child. My reason did not
revolt at it, it did not dare to tell me that it was foolhardy to
desire a child at a time when the human world was left without defense
against confusion, disorder and crime. Yes, I rejoiced to have a
man-child born to me now when the future of men seems to be corrupted
for long years to come. I even hailed the child as a savior. You see,
the paths of joy are as unknown to us as those of grace.
I shall not forbear, therefore, and when I feel my heart bleeding from
an unjust wound I shall go with respectful steps and recover myself in
the world of solitude. I shall not ask in the name of justice, I shall
not insist, I shall not importune; I shall wait until it manifests
itself and sets me free, I shall wait until at last it bestows upon
me the grace which, like a fine sap, like mother’s milk, it always
contains.
Solitude! I can still conquer it among a hundred thousand chattering
companions; I know how to sing to myself little songs that surround me
with the silence of the steppes.
I will go back again to the ravine where, the whole summer long, a
blackbird I know of whistles that same liquid song that grows purer and
more perfect from week to week. Ten notes are his whole career and his
reason for being. Perhaps on a day that music will be just what my soul
needs to recover its flight, like a stranded bark which a lazy wave has
just set floating.
I will go back to the spots where I have been happy, and I do not think
this will be very imprudent; for, like the perfume a woman leaves in
her garments, like a drop of wine in the bottom of a glass, a little
happiness often remains attached to things.
I shall go out again behind the hamlet, where I know that every morning
a couple of turtle-doves mingle a plaint that secretly cuts the
silence, hollows it with a melodious tunnel.
And I shall stretch myself out there, my face to the sky, like a
well-exposed vine that longs to ripen some fine fruit.
I am saying what I shall do, with the sole purpose, with the deep
desire, that you will all do the same, and that you will each turn to
your favorite star; and all this with the earnest desire that you will
not be content to remain sheep marked, without redemption, for the
knife.
It requires little at times. The soul is not more exacting than the
body. I have seen exhausted soldiers whom a single swallow of brandy
raised up again to the heights of courage. I have seen seriously
wounded men brought back to life when their bodies were turned a little
in order to facilitate the uncertain flow of the blood.
The soul is no less fragile, no less sensitive. If the western view
keeps you sad, turn lightly to the south. We do not know what the
divine world holds in store.
VII
Happy are those who are able to pray. It is thus that Christians
solicit grace.
It is easy to fall on one’s knees; but to be able to pray one must
already possess that grace which one implores. It is so great a gift,
the gift of prayer, that it is almost indelicate to desire anything
else from it.
To drink is a small matter. To be thirsty is everything.
Why do the Christians, who counsel us to pray in order to obtain
grace, never tell us what we must do in order to be able to pray? It
is not for nothing, nevertheless, that they arrange the play of light
and shade through their stained-glass windows, the odor of stones and
incense, the silence of the vaults and the propitiatory sights of the
organ, all those harmonious snares set for the wandering prayer.
As for me, I shall take a staff and go out seeking the solitude of the
world. If this world is a city street at dawn,--that will do! A misty
dock, its outline broken by rails and masts,--that will do! A sunken
road, lighted by the flowering broom,--that will do! The court of a
barrack, the muddy enclosure of a prison-camp, oh! pitiful as it may
seem to me, may it still seem good!
If I can walk, straight before me or far and wide, I can pray. If I can
see a scrap of the sky, I can pray. And with all nature offered to my
soul, I can pray, I can pray in spite of everything and as if without
willing it. I must see that osier-bed, or the radiant awning of that
wagon, or the image of the bridge in the water. I must hear the moaning
of those interlaced branches; then I am able to feel myself bathed in
grace.
Grace! It is indeed the fleeting consciousness man has of his divinity.
And now, now especially, and more than ever, we say to ourselves, man
must have faith in his divinity!
IX
APOSTLESHIP
I
The beautiful legend of the multiplication of the loaves of bread is
miraculous only in the material order to which we try to confine it.
But the infinite multiplication of moral nourishment is our daily
spectacle, our joy, our encouragement.
We know that the possession of material goods inclines us to
exclusiveness, solitary satisfaction: if I wish to share with you this
beautiful apple I hold in my hand, I must make up my mind to enjoy only
half of it myself. And if there are four of us the part each one has
will be proportionally reduced. Ah! blessed would be the wonder-worker
who could refresh us all with a single glass of water, stay us all with
a single mouthful of bread.
That miracle flashes forth every day before our eyes. All moral wealth
seems to increase by being possessed in common. The more a truth is
spread abroad the more its beauty, its prestige, and in a way its
efficacy, grows. The veneration a hundred peoples throw round a
painting of da Vinci’s, a song of Glück’s, or a saying of Spinoza’s
has not partitioned these lovely treasures but has added to their
importance and their glory, has developed and opened up the whole
sum of joy that lies latent in them. Great ideas have such radiant
strength! They cross space and time like avalanches: they carry along
with them whatever they touch. They are the only riches that one shares
without ever dividing them.
This fact invites each one of us to make himself the modest and
persevering apostle of his own truths, the propagator of his
discoveries, the dispenser of his moral riches. Our own interest
demands it imperatively, no less than the interest of others. We shall
never be really happy until we have admitted and converted to our joy
those whom we love; and we shall love them all the better for having
brought them some joy, for being among the causes of their comfort.
The journeys we have made alone without companions leave us a memory
that is melancholy and without warmth. It is because we have had no
one to whom we could communicate our admiration, our wonder. Seated
alone before the most majestic landscapes, we have had no one to whom
we could express our enthusiasm, and deprived of this expansion it has
been stunted, it has remained, we might say, poor. Sharing it would
have enriched it.
We love solitude, indeed; it is the cold and silent fountain at which
our soul is purified and confirmed. But what would it profit us to have
amassed great riches, by the help of solitude, if we had no one to whom
to offer them?
It is because he feels this anxiety that man seeks a lasting union.
Among a thousand generosities, love offers him the opportunity to enjoy
companionship without renouncing solitude. A happy home is the solitude
of many a soul. The man who has entered into a beautiful union is sure
of at least one person to whom he can give the best that he possesses.
II
Perhaps you will say to me: “How can I be an apostle when I have in
myself only a wavering faith? I would enjoy being generous, but I
am obliged to beg from the generosity of others. Such advice is for
those rich souls who, precisely because they are rich, have no need of
advice. It is with this kind of fortune as it is with money, it crowns
those who already possess it! My soul is poor and timid; what sort of
comfort would it be for other souls that are poor and timid also?”
O my friend, how deceived you are in yourself! How much like
ingratitude your modesty seems! First of all, let me tell you that
the heart that doubts its resources is rich without knowing it. The
passion of humility weighs it down; let it free itself without
becoming proud! In the realm of the intelligence, you have surely
observed, it is only actual imbeciles who never doubt their faculties.
The man who can admit his own insufficiency at once gives proof of a
rare perspicacity. In the same way, if you think you are poor it is
because you are not. The only natures that are truly arid are those who
do not recognize and never will recognize their own sterility.
This morning you went out at dawn to take up your duties. In the marsh
that slumbers along the edge of the road there were such delicate green
and purple reflections that you were struck by them. You spoke to me
about them, very subtly and sensitively, as soon as you were able to
see me. You were generous with me. You shared your good fortune with
me. Thank you!
Who spoke to me about Faisne’s unhappiness? Who suddenly opened my eyes
and made me realize the profound misery of that soul? It was you! I
am still touched by your affectionate insight, I still marvel at your
fortune.
You remember that night when we were lying stretched out together in
the fields, looking up at a sky that was rippling with milky light.
You said nothing to me, but I understood that evening that you were
possessed, to the point of intoxication, with an immense, terrible
idea, that of infinity. Thanks to your silence, I shared with you that
overwhelming treasure.
Who lent me that beautiful Swedish book I did not know? Who spoke to me
so enthusiastically about it? It was you, you again!
Who sings to me, when I am tired, that song as poignant and serene as
a breath that has come from beyond the midnight oceans? You know very
well, my friend, it is you.
I could tell you of a thousand instances of your generosity, a thousand
apostolic words that have issued from your lips.
Ah! my friend, can you disavow such riches? Can you show at the same
time such bitterness and such prodigality?
Every day you discover a means of transforming into happiness the
elements that others possess and neglect. Do not hesitate, therefore:
show them the fruitful use they ought to make of their blessings.
And do not ask any other recompense than the pleasure of having been
the giver, the initiator.
The total amount of joy that prevails on the face of our world is of
great importance to you and to me. One must always labor to augment it,
whoever the direct beneficiaries may be. There is no one who, in the
end, will not catch its echo, who will not receive his own personal
profit from it.
And that is also why, in the present immense misery of the world, the
selfish pleasure-seekers feel themselves ill at ease, even when their
untimely pleasures are seen by nobody.
III
If you will, we can begin with the resolution never to undeceive anyone
who thinks he possesses anything.
There are some who make it their care and pride to deprive their
neighbors of those illusions that Ibsen calls “the vital illusions.”
The characteristic of these illusions is that they cannot be replaced.
To tear them away leaves a man mutilated, without any possible
reparation.
Young people, assuredly, have a very exuberant sap and all sorts of
encumbering shoots. Skillful and careful shears may well cut off, here
and there, these over-greedy branches--and the tree will bear heavier
and more fragrant fruit.
But can you without guilt take away his wealth from that old man whose
illusion is his only pleasure? Beware of cutting off all its leaves
from that old trunk that will never bring forth again and has nothing
but its foliage with which to subsist and feel the sun.
Distrust those men who have what is like a false passion for truth.
They are swollen with presumptuous vanity. They do not know that real
truth exists only where there is faith, even faith without an object.
Of what importance is the object? It is in faith itself that our
grandeur lies.
In my childhood, I often used to stop in to see a certain humble,
white-haired shopkeeper. She vegetated in a dark little shop and was
always sitting behind her window, where the dust lay thick over the
toys and trinkets. Her business was very poor, but she loved to say at
night: “The passers-by were very good today. They looked in the window
a great deal.”
I noticed, in fact, that nearly all who went by turned toward the dark
shop a long, dreamy look, full of unusual interest, that sometimes
caused them to stop short.
One day, as I was myself passing before the poor little display, I
suddenly understood what it was the passers-by looked at so kindly: it
was their own faces reflected in the dark window-pane.
I was still very young, but I realized vaguely that it would never do
to disclose this disastrous discovery to my old friend.
IV
But this passive good will is not enough. It is not enough not to harm
things. Marcus Aurelius, I believe, has said; “One is often as unjust
in doing nothing as in doing what one does.” You must understand,
therefore, that not to share your inner fortune is, in some sort, to
rob those who surround you.
We must first declare our blessings: we must try to do this without
shame and without arrogance. Those who enjoy an intense and efficacious
inner life draw from it a great deal of pride; they would gladly
communicate it if they did not know that these treasures seem
ridiculous to the common men; it is really shame, therefore, that
prevents them from being proud.
In spite of the cry of Hamlet, it is through words that one discovers
and possesses the world.
The rhetoricians have done their work so well that at times words seem
dry, empty of pulp, empty of juice. They are no longer nourishing food,
they are discordant sounds.
It needs only a little confidence and generosity to restore their
meaning and their weight. Then they become precious and faithful. We
call them, like devoted persons, to our aid; they come at once out of
the shadow and show themselves docile to our wishes.
Marcus Aurelius, of whom we have just spoken, has said this also: “I
wish always to define or describe the object that presents itself to my
thoughts, so as to see, distinctly and in its nakedness, what it is in
its substance, considered as a whole, and separately in all its parts,
so as to be able to tell myself its true name as well as the true names
of the parts of which it is composed and into which it can be resolved.
For nothing is so suited to elevate the soul as to analyze as much as
possible, with method and justice, everything that one meets with in
life, and always to examine each object so as to be able to recognize
at once to what order of things it belongs, of what, use it is, and
what is its importance in the universe and, relatively, to man.”
It is with words that this task is accomplished.
I have noted another beautiful expression on this subject; it is from
M. Anatole France. “Words,” he says, “are ideas.... I think the highest
race in the world is that which has the best syntax. It often happens
that men cut each other’s throats over words they do not understand. If
they understood each other they would embrace each other.”
Be very sure then that the words of which we make use are deserving of
all our care, all our respect. They are the witnesses of our thoughts.
They will betray us if we degrade them to base uses.
Choose them with great tenderness; that is a quality as enviable as
precision. And by means of these choice words, loyally express your
fortune.
Tell what you have discovered, what you know. In affirming your
possession you render it sure, positive. You labor for others and for
yourself. You give form to your treasure and yield it, as if perfected,
to those who truly wish to avail themselves of it.
V
Yes, in acting in this way, you are also working for your own profit.
Do not let us leave this burning subject too quickly.
If I were not afraid of giving a conviction the form of a whim, I
should say: “You do your work and it does good to you.”
Among the ideas that are dear to you and that you are glad to
express are not only certainties, verified results, the testimony of
experience. There are many wishes, many longings, too. By virtue of
being enunciated, these end by reacting upon you, by gently imprisoning
you. When you speak of virtue, or happiness, or the spirit of adventure
or courage, you further certain things that are indeed your own; you
further also many other things that you passionately wish to have
become your own, your unique and recognized quality. By virtue of
expressing them, it comes to pass that they in turn react upon you; a
moment arrives when you are morally constrained to become the product
of your opinions. In this sense your work does for you the good that
you have done for it.
Admit, therefore, that if it pleases you to see and to paint your life
in generous, harmonious colors, it is inevitable that harmony and
generosity should little by little imprint their stamp on your serious
thoughts and on your acts.
Therefore speak, speak of your dream. Every time someone tells you:
“You do not live up to what you say,” think, with a smile: “Not yet,
undoubtedly; but I feel sure that one day my words, that is to say, my
thoughts, will prove to be truer than my vagaries.”
When you have tried and proved this method, you will attempt to bestow
it upon others.
To that end strive to win a reputation among uncertain, hesitating
people. Be prudent: this is the time when it is of great importance to
choose the right ideas and words. But if you see one of your companions
torn between two opposing reputations, imprison him in the better of
the two.
I once knew a man who had done many good acts and a considerable number
of reprehensible ones. One day, when I saw him hesitating between
these two different tendencies, I began to address certain phrases to
him that opened somewhat like this: “You who are so good.... You who
have done such and such fine things.” ... And the result was that that
man became really good, in order not to betray the reputation he had
gained.
I foresee that you are about to pronounce the word vanity. Stop a
moment! It is not a base stratagem that causes a barren soul to bring
forth a fine harvest. If I had called the attention of that man to what
was mean and sordid in his character, he would have perhaps become a
villain altogether, and that would have been a shame for him, for me,
and for everybody.
VI
We have discovered together, you will recall, that the world is offered
to all men that it may be possessed by each with the help of all. You
see, then, that in your modest rôle of apostle there is a means of
making others rich while securing their help for your own undertakings.
Estimate your wealth according to the importance of what you give.
Dispossess yourself boldly. Everything will be returned to you at the
right time and a hundredfold.
If the great apostles were able to bring the good news, it was because
they had faith; but nothing could have exalted their faith more than to
bring the good news.
If you have been interested in something you have read, in a walk, if
you have been astonished at some spectacle, invite all those whom you
know to read what you have read, to take that walk, to contemplate
that spectacle. Show some discernment in your invitations. Distrust
the sceptics a little, the ironical, cruel, or contradictory spirits.
Distrust them, but do not abandon them: they are the strayed sheep
whose return ought to rejoice your heart supremely. When you have made
them admit: “Yes, there’s something really fine! Yes, there’s something
interesting, there’s something worth the pain of living!” you may fall
asleep with a smile; your day will not have been lost.
At times, you will make a discovery so rare, so delicate that, by some
secret warning, you will know it cannot be communicated, that it is
strictly individual, that it ought to remain as a private relation
between the world and your soul. In that case, keep your own counsel.
Perhaps a day will come when your thought will have gained in precision
through being amplified; on that day you will be mysteriously informed
that your treasure has lost its private character, that it has become
suitable for sustaining your communion with others. When that day
comes, speak forth. Until that day, however, be patient; do not
fall into the error of those spirits who are called obscure because
they offer us impressions that have been insufficiently ripened and
experienced, impressions that are not for all humanity.
On the other hand, when someone offers you one of these obscure
impressions, do not reject it, do not laugh with disdain. Force
yourself to feel what has been pictured for you in this faulty fashion.
You will do your partner a service in visualizing his discovery, and
you will perhaps be able to increase your own stock. Perhaps there will
be something worth seizing and understanding at the bottom of it.
Always seek communion. It is the most precious thing men possess. In
this respect, the symbol of the religions is indeed full of majesty.
Where there is communion there is something that is more than human,
there is surely something divine.
When you deem that you have grasped a truth do not forget, in
communicating it to others, that there are two conditions of truth. Any
truth one receives is but a small fortune in comparison with the value
of that which one experiences. Therefore persuade those you love into
the experiencing of truths, into the religious, courageous, persistent
experiencing of the well-beloved truth.
VII
One dreams of a life in which everyone would be the apostle of what he
possesses and where all would be the disciples of each.
If you wish to be an apostle, begin by never mislaying any of your
wealth.
I once had a friend who said to me almost every day: “This morning I
had a beautiful thought; but I can’t find it again, I’ve forgotten it,
I’ve lost it.”
You have a purse to contain your money; condescend to have a scrap of
paper on which you can put your thoughts, where you can set them in
order. It is a slight means to what will eventually be a great end. Be
economical of your treasures so that you may be lavish of them at the
opportune moment. Do not lose what you wish to give away.
You are like the seeker after gold, on your knees by the bank of a
river that rolls with sand and with nuggets.
The rushing flood of your soul flows by, and you watch it with fear
and delight. Every sort of thing is in it: mud, grass, gold, flowers,
formless and nameless debris. Gather to one side what you deem worthy
to be preserved, do not let it escape in the torrent.
This mass of thoughts that crowd and elbow one another, this storm that
tumbles its way over you, this unending dream that you have when you
are awake, when your soul abandons itself to its natural, spontaneous
impulses, there, indeed, is matter to terrify you! So many things
appear and are swallowed up again that scandalize or horrify you; so
many contradictions bewilder you, so many jewels shine furtively forth,
that you are by turns filled with consternation, stupefied, dazzled.
You must choose among all these things. You must draw out of the
current what you recognize as of value to you, and let the rest sink.
I beg you, keep the reckoning of your own soul. Keep a little book in
your pocket that is carefully brought up to date. And do not trust
your memory; it is a net full of holes; the most beautiful prizes slip
through it.
You must not have too much fear of not being up to your task when you
are approaching great problems and great works.
That is something worth meditating for him who sets himself to
obtaining possession of the world, who wishes to invite his companions
to do the same.
Though it may have all the appearance of naïveté, confidence is less to
be feared than the terror of ridicule that paralyzes so many souls at
the beginning of the most beautiful adventures.
The fear of enthusiasm does as much harm as obvious wickedness.
It is better to pass for a simpleton and become the laughing-stock of
the disillusioned than to miss the opportunity to serve as the apostle
of one’s beloved verities. It is better to squander one’s fortune than
to run the risk of being the only one to profit from it. There will
always be a farthing to fall into eager hands.
The main thing is to be, above everything else, a man of good will.
The true enemy, if there is any such, is the pharisee, the man of
outward observance, he who adopts every religion as a matter of
fashion, who speaks frequently and passionately of his soul in the same
way in which he speaks of his necktie.
VIII
If you are only two against a thousand in leading this beautiful, pure
life, rejoice that there are at least two of you and do not despair of
your course of action.
Is it not Renan who has uttered this profound saying: “The great things
in any race are usually accomplished by the minority”?
Do not rejoice because there are slaves. Let their example be a fearful
warning to you; let it fill you with an overmastering desire to free
them from servitude.
To the apostle Paul is ascribed that disquieting utterance of the
conquering soldier: “Oportet hæreses esse.”
Yes, undoubtedly, whoever wishes to fight needs an enemy.
The dazzling chance of such conquests is not, alas, the thing you will
be most likely to miss. But every conquest is vain that does not tend
toward peace.
One thinks with ecstasy of the joy of a universal communion, from
which no one would be left out, in which no one would be the victim.
Must there be heretics? Yes! To convince them, but not to vanquish
them, and still less to put them to the stake.
X
ON THE REIGN OF THE HEART
“The knowledge of external things does not make up for me, in times
of affliction, for my ignorance of the moral world; but my knowledge
of the moral world always consoles me for my ignorance of external
things.”--_Pascal_.
I
It has come, the time of affliction!
Whatever may be the outcome of this war, it marks a period of profound
despair for humanity. However great may be the pride of victory,
however generous such a victory may be, under whatever light the
distant consequences may be presented to us, we live, none the less, in
a blighted age, on an earth that will be devastated for long years, in
the midst of a society that is decimated, ruined, crushed by its wounds.
Among all our disillusionments, if there is one that remains especially
painful to us it is the sort of bankruptcy of which our whole
civilization is convicted.
Man had never been prouder than at the beginning of the twentieth
century of the discoveries he had realized in the domain of what
Pascal called “the external sciences.”
We must admit that there was some excuse for this intoxication, this
error. In its struggle with matter, humanity had experienced a success
that was so daring, so disconcerting, and above all so repeated that it
lost a just conception of its adversary and forgot that its principal
enemy was itself.
Events have recalled this to it in a flash. In the last year or two it
has expressed its discomfiture through millions of simple lips. It has
asked with anguish how “a century so advanced in civilization” could
give birth to this demoralizing catastrophe. Stupefied, it sees turning
against itself all those inventions which, it had been told, were made
for its happiness. For hardly one is absent. Even those that seemed
the highest in moral significance, even they, have contributed in some
degree to the disaster. Only the fear of creating an uncontrollable
situation has prevented certain of the belligerents from forming an
alliance with the very germs of epidemic diseases and thus debasing the
noblest of all the acquisitions of science.
A doubt has grown up in all hearts: what, after all, is this
civilization from which we draw such pride and which we claim the
right to impose upon the peoples of the other continents? What is this
thing that has suddenly revealed itself as so cruel, so dangerous, as
destitute of soul as its own machines?
Eyes have been opened, spirits have been illuminated: never did
barbarism, in all its brutality and destructiveness, attain results as
monstrous as those of which our industrial and scientific civilization
has proved itself capable. Is it indeed anything but a travesty on
barbarism?
What inclines one to believe this is that the peoples which have
dedicated to the gods of the factory and the laboratory the most
fervent and the most vainglorious worship have shown themselves in this
way by far the cruellest, the most fertile in inhumane and disgraceful
inventions.
M. Bergson has said, of the intelligence, that it is “characterized by
a natural incomprehension of life.” To this one might add: and by a
complete incomprehension of happiness, which is the very aim of life.
With its retinue of ingenious inventions and clever complications, the
intelligence plays the part of something irresponsible or criminal in
the great disorder of the world. It seems not only incapable of giving
happiness to men, but actually adapted to bewilder them, corrupt them,
set them quarreling. It knows how to provoke conflicts; it is unable
either to exorcise them or to resolve them.
Scientific and industrial civilization based upon the intelligence is
condemned. For long years it has monopolized and distracted all human
energies. Its reign has ended in an immense defeat.
II
It is toward the resources of the heart that our hope turns. Betrayed
by this clever intelligence, whose formidable works have at times the
very look of stupidity itself, we aspire to the reign of the heart; all
our desires turn toward a moral civilization, such as is alone capable
of exalting us, satisfying us, protecting us, assuring us the true
burgeoning of our race.
It is by juggling with words that people have been able to attach the
idea of true progress to the development of the mechanical, chemical
or biological sciences. True progress concerns nothing but the soul,
it remains independent of the expedients and the practices of science.
This latter is able to triumph even when the true progress, the ascent
of mankind toward happiness, is interrupted and thwarted in its
profoundest tendencies.
There are not lacking people to tell us that the war will mark with
precision the advent of a new world, that it has bought in the blood
and the flame the moral elevation necessary for a fruitful and final
peace. We cannot share this optimism of official eloquence. It is
not the performance of tasks of murder that opens to men the road
to justice and converts them to good customs. Humanity must grow
unaccustomed to crime, and it is not the armed intelligence that can
accomplish this miracle. The pacifying work of the war will remain
in peril if everything that is healthy and generous in humanity does
not labor to dethrone this scientific civilization which still abuses
society after having reduced it to helplessness.
I consider as negligible the objection of the stoics who say that these
miseries do not depend upon us and that we ought obstinately to seek
our happiness through them, isolate our happiness from the surrounding
degradation. No! These miseries do depend upon us. In spite of its
disdainful nobility, the stoic resignation has here too much the look
of egoism.
This moral civilization, when its hour comes, will revive Christianity
and propagate it; it will not leave the human race in the abandonment
of the desperate misery of today.
III
The naturalists and the sociologists have contributed to spread
this idea that moral progress is, for individuals, a function of
the anatomical complex, and for societies of the complex of habits,
institutions and industries. It is on this understanding that they have
undertaken the classification of species and arranged the various
human hierarchies.
That is a view entirely external to things, it cannot be verified
as regards individual thought, it is a sheer fabrication as regards
collectivities: the war is a bloody refutation of it.
If we mean by moral progress that which affects the conditions of
happiness, nothing permits us to conjecture what advantages have been
realized in this direction by the vegetable and animal organisms that
have not chosen us as confidents. Habits, as we observe them, cannot be
a criterion, even if we admit that we ought to seek for evidence among
them; they seem as if designed to baffle all theories.
Those animals whose anatomical structure closely resembles ours, not
to say that it is exactly analogous to ours, such as cattle and sheep,
give proof of a moral activity that is insignificant beside the real
genius shown by the bee and so many other insects whose nervous systems
are still rudimentary in comparison with those of the mammals.
Certain sea animals, the barnacles, have suffered, because of their
sedentary existence, an anatomical regression. We know that the mobile
larvæ of the barnacles possess more complicated organisms than those
of the adult and stationary animal. To conclude from that that this
anatomical regression is a lowering of the species is to assume a great
deal, and it is to accord to movement a very debatable significance.
There exist species of plant life, especially among the conifers
and the ferns, which, for thousands of centuries, seem to have
remained in an almost stable anatomical and functional stage. These
species are none the less very widely scattered and very long-lived,
very adaptable. They offer an outward appearance of happiness and
prosperity. On the other hand, nothing permits us to affirm that
certain species, like the orchids, which have undergone a delirious
evolution resulting in forms of extreme anatomical complexity, have
attained a true progress, have improved, that is to say, their moral
destiny: we see them subject to innumerable external servitudes. Their
reproduction, even, is only possible thanks to the intervention of
outside agencies and is fraught with perils. A seductive argument that
smacks of anthropomorphism inclines us to believe that these species,
intoxicated with their material difficulties, ought to have a less free
and less serene philosophical existence.
The complexity of the individual organism, which corresponds strictly
to the political, economic and scientific complexity of societies, adds
neither to the possibilities of life, nor to its scope of activity, nor
to its hopes.
Certain fish, the pleuronectes, have sought their salvation in a very
bold, precocious development that ends in a displacement of their
eyes, of their mouth and in a profound disorder of their original
symmetry. Looking at them, one has the impression that this development
has thrown them into an impasse, into a _cul-de-sac_ from which it
would be difficult for them to escape into a new evolution; one has
the impression that this whole biological stratagem has considerably
restricted the destiny of the species.
Besides, and the naturalists know it very well, the species that are
most highly evolved, most differentiated, to employ the consecrated
expression, are in a certain sense the oldest species, imprisoned
in their own tradition and scarcely to be counted upon for a new
adaptation, a profound reformation of their organs and their habits.
IV
This digression, too long for our restlessness, but too succinct in
view of the facts it involves, raises several criticisms.
One might, in the first place, object that evolution is a thing which
species undergo and which they cannot influence themselves. If that is
true, humanity finds itself forced into an adventure against which it
is puerile and presumptuous to contend.
This attitude implies a submissive fatalism that denies both our sense
of experience and our thirst for perfection. We are apt to construe
our lessons in such a way as to draw instruction from them. We have
shown this in many moments of crisis, and we feel a certain repugnance
to thinking that we cannot turn to our own profit the most majestic
lesson that has ever been given to men.
Certain minds, on the other hand, have concluded that humanity is
altogether too old, too highly evolved a species to be capable of ever
again renouncing what is fundamental in its inveterate intellectual
traditions, its scientific acquisitions and the customs that have
sprung from them.
If this conception of the world did not appear as if stamped with
lassitude and scepticism, it would seem to leave us in the presence
of a desperate alternative: either the acceptance of a life without
restraint, given over to every sort of folly, exposed to every sort
of lapse into crime, or the solitary search for an oblivion that only
waits for death.
But will the peoples who have struggled so fiercely for their material
interests remain disarmed in the face of the moral danger that
threatens the very morning of the race, will they undertake nothing
truly efficacious for the sake of posterity?
That is the anxiety that haunts generous souls today.
The political arrangements that will mark the end of this war will be
of no real interest if the minds that control the spiritual direction
of the peoples do not labor, from now on-and in the future, to modify
the meaning of the ideas of progress and civilization.
We cannot believe that humanity is so deeply sunk in its convictions
and its intellectual habits as to remain forever incapable of sudden
change and reform.
The human world has already passed through important crises; it has
already been forced several times to reshape the idea it had formed of
culture and civilization.
It has always been amid its ruins that it has meditated the conditions
of a new life. If it is true that ruins demand the revolution of
customs, let us admit that the heart of man has never been more
urgently entreated than today.
In any case, there is no question of giving up those customs that
form an integral part of our vital economy. It would be fantastic to
consider the regeneration of a society that was deprived, for example,
of the means of communication which have obtained for a century and
which we could scarcely abandon now without suicide. But it is fair to
consider how great and dangerous is the hold of the false needs which
the study of the “external sciences” creates in us and not to permit
our ideal activity to be blindly enslaved any longer by our material
ingenuity.
There exist in our nature ardent forces that one cannot condemn
without appeal and that will manifest themselves against all discipline.
The passion of the sciences must be deeply-rooted when we see men, in
love with love, peace, humanity, consecrating themselves, as if in
their own despite, under the cover of some abstract sophistry, to tasks
whose results may contribute seriously to the wretchedness and the
debasement of society.
If one might gather together all the faculties of the spirit for the
single cause of happiness!
At least, and from now on, let us cease to consider that the monstrous
development of industrial science represents civilization; otherwise
let us withdraw from this word its whole moral significance and seek
another for the needs of our ideal.
Let us cease humiliating moral culture, the only pledge we have of
peace and happiness, before the irresponsible and unruly genius that
haunts the laboratories. Scientific civilization, let us say, to
allow it to keep this name for a moment, has been for us so prodigal
in bitterness that we can no longer abandon it uncontrolled to its
devouring activity. We must make use of it as a servant and cease any
longer to adore it as a goddess.
V
We must revise all our definitions, all our values, our whole
vocabulary.
All fervent spirits should set themselves to this work, and their task
will be all the heavier the more widely extended they are assured their
influence will be.
We must strive to make our stunned humanity realize that happiness does
not consist in travelling at the rate of sixty miles an hour, rising
up into the air on a machine or talking under the ocean, but above all
else in being rich in beautiful thoughts, contented with its work,
honored with warm affections.
We must restore the cult of the arts which contribute to the
purification of the soul, which are consoling in times of affliction
and remain, by their nature, incapable of serving ignoble ends.
We must employ our strength to altering the meaning of the words
“riches,” “possessions,” “authority,” to showing that they are things
of the soul and that the material acceptance of these terms corresponds
to realities that are perfidious and ironical. We must at the same time
transform the ideas of benevolence and ambition, open a new career to
these virtues, create for them new ends and new satisfactions. Those
who consider such a program with irony or scepticism make a great
mistake. Its realization may seem illusory, but it will undoubtedly
become a necessity. The material goods at the disposal of humanity will
find themselves considerably reduced both by the destruction of which
they have been the object and by the long arrest of the production of
them.
Their rarity and their growing expensiveness will be the source of
grave and almost insoluble conflicts, which new effusions of blood will
only make more venomous.
Humanity can hurl against this terrible future a defiance full of
grandeur. It can, under the influence of its spiritual masters, seek
its happiness in a wise and passionate transformation of its desires.
Let us not urge it toward resignation but toward the conquest of the
true riches, those that assure it the moral possession of the world.
VI
The economists, whose science the war has so often tested, are laboring
to define what will be the conditions of life in the period that will
follow the world war; their estimates leave little room for the hope of
an agreeable and easy material existence; they hold over the mass of
men, conquered and conquerors alike, the menace of desperate labor and
slight and wretched returns.
These learned researches, added to the similar conclusions of common
sense, do not seem to discourage the laborious race of men. They have
been told they must work, and even now, while they are struggling
against a hundred fearful perils, they are mentally preparing to earn
their difficult living, if only the war does not take away their lives.
The modern industrial monster sets these conditions in advance. We
already know that competition will be pitiless, we know too that
enjoyment will only be for the highest bidder. Individuals, at the
sight of this future, mutually urge one another to be stubborn. The
world is preparing to take up again, obstinately, the old order that
has cost it so many trials. As yet no one speaks of a new life.
There will be so many voices to praise these desperate resolutions, so
many books will be written to persuade men to persevere in their old
hatreds that a timid voice may well raise itself to protest against the
consummation of the error.
A man whom I love and esteem above all others once said to me:
“When peace is signed and I return home, I shall have to give up all
the distractions I used to have if I wish to work as much as will be
necessary to recover a situation as good as the one I had before.”
Believe me, O my friend who said these words to me, I love work too
well to blame your decision; but I was thinking only of your happiness,
and it was of your situation that you spoke to me. Are you sure that
they are rightly related, those two words, those two ideas? What do you
hope from the future if you are not going to allow a large place in it
to the soul?
What compensation will be left for our passion of today if we take up
all our prejudices again, if we return to our own vomit?
The old civilization seems condemned. To break with it, we must first
of all seek our individual satisfaction outside money, our happiness
outside the whirlpool of pleasure. We must flee deliberately from the
tyranny of luxury. In this way even the events of the present oblige
us to seek our true path. Must we keep blindly and obstinately to the
ways of slavery? We have slighted the best sources of interest, joy and
wealth; shall we misprize them now that they remain the only fresh and
faithful things in the aridity of our time? Shall we neglect our souls
again to seek a false fortune that can only betray us? Shall we contend
with exasperated brutes over possessions we know to be unstable and
deceptive?
No! No! Here should lie the lesson and the one benefit of this war:
that we should undeceive ourselves about ourselves and about our ends!
Let us not devote our courage to choosing a ferocious discipline
devoid of the ideal. Let us once for all reject our calculating and
demoralizing intelligence. Let us organize, in the peace that returns,
the reign of the heart.
VII
The search for happiness cannot ignore the conditions of the material
life. Undoubtedly, well-being, comfort, dispose us to a happy view
of things; but will they ever replace what a poet has called “the
contented heart”?
The Anglo-American peoples, susceptible as they are to all the moral
and religious revolutions, have applied themselves to altering the
original sense of simple well-being so as to identify it with luxurious
comfort. That is a way of giving a moral aspect to pleasure, making an
honest bargain with the corruptions of money.
The exigencies of this sort of life have largely contributed to
involving these peoples in a frenzied whirlwind of business that wears
a man out and bewilders him. The anonymous writer of the “Letters of
an Elderly American to a Frenchman” says to my countrymen: “Your most
beautiful country-houses and your best hotels are occupied most of the
time by foreigners, while your own people have to content themselves
with miserable little cheap holes. Isn’t it absurd!” Perhaps, O Elderly
American, but that absurdity is dear to my heart. May the God of
journeys always turn my path away from the tainted spots where rise
those buildings in which the existence you think so enviable is passed.
If we are to consecrate our friendship we ought to discuss the value
of words: what you call happiness does not tempt me.
The love of nature, the taste for those simple, healthy joys that were
so vaunted by the philosophers of our eighteenth century have been the
laughing-stock of our contemporary writers. A laughable excess has led,
by reaction, to a furious and ignoble excess.
The dramatists and novelists of our time who, by the quality of their
opinions or by their political positions are ostensibly laboring for
a moral or religious end, have betrayed, in most of their works, a
servile and ill-concealed love of luxury. It is useless to give names;
let us say only that none of the modern novels of certain of our
authors lack those descriptions and professions of faith that reveal
the quivering longing of the pauper for the delights and enjoyments on
which all his eager desires are fixed.
It is partly to the influence of this literature that our old world
owes the headlong rush of all classes of humanity toward those
pleasures that are only the phantoms of happiness and will never be
anything else.
If genius wishes to consecrate itself to a labor that is truly
reconstructive, truly pacific, it must discover other subjects for its
works.
VIII
If the future laws governing labor do not allow enough time for the
cultivation and the flourishing of the soul, a sacred struggle will
become inevitable.
The organizers of the modern world, who have shown themselves powerless
to avert war and did not realize the vanity of our old civilization,
do not yet seem to foresee the urgency of radical changes in the moral
education of the peoples.
They continue to talk to us about the superhuman efforts we must make
in order to redeem their faults.
No one shrinks before these efforts. Society is weary of crime but not
of peaceful tasks. Everyone prepares with joyous energy to take up his
former position and his tools again.
It rests with us all to mitigate the severity of economic conflicts by
working to transform the current idea of happiness.
The possessors of material wealth have, in general, for centuries,
given to those whom they employ and direct so scandalous and basely
immoral an example that they themselves are the principal fomenters of
the attacks which they will henceforth have to undergo.
In the machinery of modern industry, work has lost a great many of its
attractive virtues: all the methods in force tend to diminish the part
played by the soul and the heart, and the workman, imprisoned in an
almost mechanical function, no longer expects from work the personal
satisfaction he once obtained; as a poet has said: “His empty labor is
the fate he fights against.”
Certain American methods have based their theory upon a clever sophism;
they exaggerate the automatic under the pretext of thus cutting short
the length of the work. That is not a happy solution, to cut short the
hours of labor by emptying it of all joy, of all professional interest.
It is better to undertake a long piece of work with relish than to
hurry through a short task with repugnance.
The specialization that is rendered necessary by the very extent
of scientific and industrial activity remains a dangerous thing,
especially among an old race of encyclopedists like ourselves.
However that may be, the peoples consent to yield themselves to the
discretion of the modern world. May the monster leave them some scraps
of a liberty that is still honorable enough for them to think of
cultivating their souls. There will not be lacking men of good will
who will be glad to devote themselves to directing this liberty, to
transforming the meaning and the demands of joy, propagating a culture
which, unlike those old errors, will support education more readily
than instruction,--men who will more often address themselves to the
heart than to the disastrous reason.
IX
France has suffered, suffers and will suffer more deeply than all
the other countries of the world. She is at once the altar and the
holocaust. She has sacrificed her men, her cities, and her soil. It is
in the heart of her beautiful fields that the devastating storm whirls
and roars.
In the depths of my soul I hope that, because of this great grief, it
will be France that will give the signal for redemption. I hope that
the reign of the heart will begin just here where the old civilization
will leave imperishable traces of its murderous folly.
The resources of the French people in perseverance, in self-reliance,
in goodness, in subtle delicacy are so great that one feels a word
would suffice to rally all hearts and give them their bearings. One
feels that at the mere phrase “moral civilization” thousands and
thousands of noble heads will nod approval, thousands of hands will
reach out to find each other.
People who have obstinate views on the political meaning of wars,
on the eminently economic nature of the peril that has been run
by humanity, and on the efficacy of the industrial and scientific
civilization, will not fail to proclaim that France ought first of
all to return to its furious task and apply itself to surpassing the
peoples that have outstripped it along this path.
But France has always been the country of initiation and revelation. It
is the chosen land of spiritual revolutions. May the bloody baptism it
has received give it precedence in the discussion of the future!
Do you wish it to lose the glorious rank it holds in the moral order,
at the head of the nations, that it may fall in line behind the peoples
who are enslaved by automatism and swear allegiance to a worn-out,
condemned, bankrupt social and economic religion?
If the destiny of our country is to make a humanity that is plunged in
affliction give ear to the words of peace, consolation and love, let it
accomplish this beautiful mission, let it teach the other peoples the
generous laws of the true possession of the world.
X
My work is finished, and now the time has come for me to part with it.
It is going off into this misty autumn night. My heart is both glad and
sorrowful.
It is going away from me, henceforth to follow a destiny of its own
that will no longer depend only upon my love.
I shall turn to other duties, I shall assume other cares. A voice tells
me that they will always be the same duties, the same cares, and that
there is no longer but one great task for men, one single task with a
hundred radiant aspects.
It is late. The night is drawing to a close; it is calm and yet
penetrated with a vast, subdued murmur of joy. They say it is one of
the last nights of the war.
I hear about me the panting breath of the wounded. There are several
hundred of them; they are sleeping or longing for sleep and rest. Their
burning breath is like a lamentation. Many of them will never see the
peace they have so dearly bought. They are perhaps the wounded of the
last battle, the last victims, the last martyrs.
Over the whole face of the world souls are suffering with them, for
them, souls which the angel of death laboring here this night will not
deliver.
My work is finished. It begins to withdraw from me. If it can bring any
consolation to a single one of these suffering souls, let me believe
that it has fulfilled its destiny.
THE END
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