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Title: The Simple Life
Author: Charles Wagner
Translator: Mary Louise Hendee
Release Date: October 20, 2007 [EBook #23092]
Language: English
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THE SIMPLE LIFE
By CHARLES WAGNER
_Author of The Better Way_
_Translated from the French by Mary Louise Hendee_
GROSSET & DUNLAP
Publishers, New York
Copyright, 1901, by
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
CONTENTS
Page
I. OUR COMPLEX LIFE 1
II. THE ESSENCE OF SIMPLICITY 15
III. SIMPLICITY OF THOUGHT 22
IV. SIMPLICITY OF SPEECH 39
V. SIMPLE DUTY 52
VI. SIMPLE NEEDS 68
VII. SIMPLE PLEASURES 80
VIII. THE MERCENARY SPIRIT AND SIMPLICITY 96
IX. NOTORIETY AND THE INGLORIOUS GOOD 111
X. THE WORLD AND THE LIFE OF THE HOME 128
XI. SIMPLE BEAUTY 139
XII. PRIDE AND SIMPLICITY IN THE INTERCOURSE OF MEN 151
XIII. THE EDUCATION FOR SIMPLICITY 167
XIV. CONCLUSION 188
THE SIMPLE LIFE
I
OUR COMPLEX LIFE
At the home of the Blanchards, everything is topsy-turvy, and with
reason. Think of it! Mlle. Yvonne is to be married Tuesday, and to-day
is Friday!
Callers loaded with gifts, and tradesmen bending under packages, come
and go in endless procession. The servants are at the end of their
endurance. As for the family and the betrothed, they no longer have a
life or a fixed abode. Their mornings are spent with dressmakers,
milliners, upholsterers, jewelers, decorators, and caterers. After that,
comes a rush through offices, where one waits in line, gazing vaguely at
busy clerks engulfed in papers. A fortunate thing, if there be time when
this is over, to run home and dress for the series of ceremonial
dinners--betrothal dinners, dinners of presentation, the settlement
dinner, receptions, balls. About midnight, home again, harassed and
weary, to find the latest accumulation of parcels, and a deluge of
letters--congratulations, felicitations, acceptances and regrets from
bridesmaids and ushers, excuses of tardy tradesmen. And the
_contretemps_ of the last minute--a sudden death that disarranges the
bridal party; a wretched cold that prevents a favorite cantatrice from
singing, and so forth, and so forth. Those poor Blanchards! They will
never be ready, and they thought they had foreseen everything!
Such has been their existence for a month. No longer possible to
breathe, to rest a half-hour, to tranquillize one's thoughts. _No, this
is not living!_
Mercifully, there is Grandmother's room. Grandmother is verging on
eighty. Through many toils and much suffering, she has come to meet
things with the calm assurance which life brings to men and women of
high thinking and large hearts. She sits there in her arm-chair,
enjoying the silence of long meditative hours. So the flood of affairs
surging through the house, ebbs at her door. At the threshold of this
retreat, voices are hushed and footfalls softened; and when the young
_fiancés_ want to hide away for a moment, they flee to Grandmother.
"Poor children!" is her greeting. "You are worn out! Rest a little and
belong to each other. All these things count for nothing. Don't let them
absorb you, it isn't worth while."
They know it well, these two young people. How many times in the last
weeks has their love had to make way for all sorts of conventions and
futilities! Fate, at this decisive moment of their lives, seems bent
upon drawing their minds away from the one thing essential, to harry
them with a host of trivialities; and heartily do they approve the
opinion of Grandmamma when she says, between a smile and a caress:
"Decidedly, my dears, the world is growing too complex; and it does not
make people happier--quite the contrary!"
* * * * *
I also, am of Grandmamma's opinion. From the cradle to the grave, in his
needs as in his pleasures, in his conception of the world and of
himself, the man of modern times struggles through a maze of endless
complication. Nothing is simple any longer: neither thought nor action;
not pleasure, not even dying. With our own hands we have added to
existence a train of hardships, and lopped off many a gratification. I
believe that thousands of our fellow-men, suffering the consequences of
a too artificial life, will be grateful if we try to give expression to
their discontent, and to justify the regret for naturalness which
vaguely oppresses them.
Let us first speak of a series of facts that put into relief the truth
we wish to show.
The complexity of our life appears in the number of our material needs.
It is a fact universally conceded, that our needs have grown with our
resources. This is not an evil in itself; for the birth of certain needs
is often a mark of progress. To feel the necessity of bathing, of
wearing fresh linen, inhabiting wholesome houses, eating healthful food,
and cultivating our minds, is a sign of superiority. But if certain
needs exist by right, and are desirable, there are others whose effects
are fatal, which, like parasites, live at our expense: numerous and
imperious, they engross us completely.
Could our fathers have foreseen that we should some day have at our
disposal the means and forces we now use in sustaining and defending our
material life, they would have predicted for us an increase of
independence, and therefore of happiness, and a decrease in competition
for worldly goods: they might even have thought that through the
simplification of life thus made possible, a higher degree of morality
would be attained. None of these things has come to pass. Neither
happiness, nor brotherly love, nor power for good has been increased.
In the first place, do you think your fellow-citizens, taken as a whole,
are more contented than their forefathers, and less anxious about the
future? I do not ask if they should find reason to be so, but if they
really are so. To see them live, it seems to me that a majority of them
are discontented with their lot, and, above all, absorbed in material
needs and beset with cares for the morrow. Never has the question of
food and shelter been sharper or more absorbing than since we are better
nourished, better clothed, and better housed than ever. He errs greatly
who thinks that the query, "What shall we eat, and what shall we drink,
and wherewithal shall we be clothed?" presents itself to the poor alone,
exposed as they are to the anguish of morrows without bread or a roof.
With them the question is natural, and yet it is with them that it
presents itself most simply. You must go among those who are beginning
to enjoy a little ease, to learn how greatly satisfaction in what one
has, may be disturbed by regret for what one lacks. And if you would see
anxious care for future material good, material good in all its
luxurious development, observe people of small fortune, and, above all,
the rich. It is not the woman with one dress who asks most insistently
how she shall be clothed, nor is it those reduced to the strictly
necessary who make most question of what they shall eat to-morrow. As an
inevitable consequence of the law that needs are increased by their
satisfaction, _the more goods a man has, the more he wants_. The more
assured he is of the morrow, according to the common acceptation, the
more exclusively does he concern himself with how he shall live, and
provide for his children and his children's children. Impossible to
conceive of the fears of a man established in life--their number, their
reach, and their shades of refinement.
From all this, there has arisen throughout the different social orders,
modified by conditions and varying in intensity, a common agitation--a
very complex mental state, best compared to the petulance of a spoiled
child, at once satisfied and discontented.
* * * * *
If we have not become happier, neither have we grown more peaceful and
fraternal. The more desires and needs a man has, the more occasion he
finds for conflict with his fellow-men; and these conflicts are more
bitter in proportion as their causes are less just. It is the law of
nature to fight for bread, for the necessities. This law may seem
brutal, but there is an excuse in its very harshness, and it is
generally limited to elemental cruelties. Quite different is the battle
for the superfluous--for ambition, privilege, inclination, luxury. Never
has hunger driven man to such baseness as have envy, avarice, and thirst
for pleasure. Egotism grows more maleficent as it becomes more refined.
We of these times have seen an increase of hostile feeling among
brothers, and our hearts are less at peace than ever.[A]
After this, is there any need to ask if we have become better? Do not
the very sinews of virtue lie in man's capacity to care for something
outside himself? And what place remains for one's neighbor in a life
given over to material cares, to artificial needs, to the satisfaction
of ambitions, grudges, and whims? The man who gives himself up entirely
to the service of his appetites, makes them grow and multiply so well
that they become stronger than he; and once their slave, he loses his
moral sense, loses his energy, and becomes incapable of discerning and
practicing the good. He has surrendered himself to the inner anarchy of
desire, which in the end gives birth to outer anarchy. In the moral life
we govern ourselves. In the immoral life we are governed by our needs
and passions. Thus little by little, the bases of the moral life shift,
and the law of judgment deviates.
For the man enslaved to numerous and exacting needs, possession is the
supreme good and the source of all other good things. It is true that in
the fierce struggle for possession, we come to hate those who possess,
and to deny the right of property when this right is in the hands of
others and not in our own. But the bitterness of attack against others'
possessions is only a new proof of the extraordinary importance we
attach to possession itself. In the end, people and things come to be
estimated at their selling price, or according to the profit to be drawn
from them. What brings nothing is worth nothing: he who has nothing, is
nothing. Honest poverty risks passing for shame, and lucre, however
filthy, is not greatly put to it to be accounted for merit.
Some one objects: "Then you make wholesale condemnation of progress, and
would lead us back to the good old times--to asceticism perhaps."
Not at all. The desire to resuscitate the past is the most unfruitful
and dangerous of Utopian dreams, and the art of good living does not
consist in retiring from life. But we are trying to throw light upon one
of the errors that drag most heavily upon human progress, in order to
find a remedy for it--namely, the belief that man becomes happier and
better by the increase of outward well-being. Nothing is falser than
this pretended social axiom; on the contrary, that material prosperity
without an offset, diminishes the capacity for happiness and debases
character, is a fact which a thousand examples are at hand to prove. The
worth of a civilization is the worth of the man at its center. When this
man lacks moral rectitude, progress only makes bad worse, and further
embroils social problems.
[A] The author refers to the unparalleled bitterness of the conflict in
France between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards.
* * * * *
This principle may be verified in other domains than that of material
well-being. We shall speak only of education and liberty. We remember
when prophets in good repute announced that to transform this wicked
world into an abode fit for the gods, all that was needed was the
overthrow of tyranny, ignorance, and want--those three dread powers so
long in league. To-day, other preachers proclaim the same gospel. We
have seen that the unquestionable diminution of want has made man
neither better nor happier. Has this desirable result been more nearly
attained through the great care bestowed upon instruction? It does not
yet appear so, and this failure is the despair of our national
educators.
Then shall we stop the people's ears, suppress public instruction, close
the schools? By no means. But education, like the mass of our age's
inventions, is after all only a tool; everything depends upon the
workman who uses it.... So it is with liberty. It is fatal or lifegiving
according to the use made of it. Is it liberty still, when it is the
prerogative of criminals or heedless blunderers? Liberty is an
atmosphere of the higher life, and it is only by a slow and patient
inward transformation that one becomes capable of breathing it.
All life must have its law, the life of man so much the more than that
of inferior beings, in that it is more precious and of nicer adjustment.
This law for man is in the first place an external law, but it may
become an internal law. When man has once recognized the inner law, and
bowed before it, through this reverence and voluntary submission he is
ripe for liberty: so long as there is no vigorous and sovereign inner
law, he is incapable of breathing its air; for he will be drunken with
it, maddened, morally slain. The man who guides his life by inner law,
can no more live servile to outward authority than can the full-grown
bird live imprisoned in the eggshell. But the man who has not yet
attained to governing himself can no more live under the law of liberty
than can the unfledged bird live without its protective covering. These
things are terribly simple, and the series of demonstrations old and new
that proves them, increases daily under our eyes. And yet we are as far
as ever from understanding even the elements of this most important law.
In our democracy, how many are there, great and small, who know, from
having personally verified it, lived it and obeyed it, this truth
without which a people is incapable of governing itself? Liberty?--it is
respect; liberty?--it is obedience to the inner law; and this law is
neither the good pleasure of the mighty, nor the caprice of the crowd,
but the high and impersonal rule before which those who govern are the
first to bow the head. Shall liberty, then, be proscribed? No; but men
must be made capable and worthy of it, otherwise public life becomes
impossible, and the nation, undisciplined and unrestrained, goes on
through license into the inextricable tangles of demagoguery.
* * * * *
When one passes in review the individual causes that disturb and
complicate our social life, by whatever names they are designated, and
their list would be long, they all lead back to one general cause, which
is this: _the confusion of the secondary with the essential_. Material
comfort, education, liberty, the whole of civilization--these things
constitute the frame of the picture; but the frame no more makes the
picture than the frock the monk or the uniform the soldier. Here the
picture is man, and man with his most intimate possessions--namely, his
conscience, his character and his will. And while we have been
elaborating and garnishing the frame, we have forgotten, neglected,
disfigured the picture. Thus are we loaded with external good, and
miserable in spiritual life; we have in abundance that which, if must
be, we can go without, and are infinitely poor in the one thing needful.
And when the depth of our being is stirred, with its need of loving,
aspiring, fulfilling its destiny, it feels the anguish of one buried
alive--is smothered under the mass of secondary things that weigh it
down and deprive it of light and air.
We must search out, set free, restore to honor the true life, assign
things to their proper places, and remember that the center of human
progress is moral growth. What is a good lamp? It is not the most
elaborate, the finest wrought, that of the most precious metal. A good
lamp is a lamp that gives good light. And so also we are men and
citizens, not by reason of the number of our goods and the pleasures we
procure for ourselves, not through our intellectual and artistic
culture, nor because of the honors and independence we enjoy; but by
virtue of the strength of our moral fibre. And this is not a truth of
to-day but a truth of all times.
At no epoch have the exterior conditions which man has made for himself
by his industry or his knowledge, been able to exempt him from care for
the state of his inner life. The face of the world alters around us, its
intellectual and material factors vary; and no one can arrest these
changes, whose suddenness is sometimes not short of perilous. But the
important thing is that at the center of shifting circumstance man
should remain man, live his life, make toward his goal. And whatever be
his road, to make toward his goal, the traveler must not lose himself in
crossways, nor hamper his movements with useless burdens. Let him heed
well his direction and forces, and keep good faith; and that he may the
better devote himself to the essential--which is to progress--at
whatever sacrifice, let him simplify his baggage.
II
THE ESSENCE OF SIMPLICITY
Before considering the question of a practical return to the simplicity
of which we dream, it will be necessary to define simplicity in its very
essence. For in regard to it people commit the same error that we have
just denounced, confounding the secondary with the essential, substance
with form. They are tempted to believe that simplicity presents certain
external characteristics by which it may be recognized, and in which it
really consists. Simplicity and lowly station, plain dress, a modest
dwelling, slender means, poverty--these things seem to go together.
Nevertheless, this is not the case. Just now I passed three men on the
street: the first in his carriage; the others on foot, and one of them
shoeless. The shoeless man does not necessarily lead the least complex
life of the three. It may be, indeed, that he who rides in his carriage
is sincere and unaffected, in spite of his position, and is not at all
the slave of his wealth; it may be also that the pedestrian in shoes
neither envies him who rides nor despises him who goes unshod; and
lastly, it is possible that under his rags, his feet in the dust, the
third man has a hatred of simplicity, of labor, of sobriety, and dreams
only of idleness and pleasure. For among the least simple and
straightforward of men must be reckoned professional beggars, knights of
the road, parasites, and the whole tribe of the obsequious and envious,
whose aspirations are summed up in this: to arrive at seizing a
morsel--the biggest possible--of that prey which the fortunate of earth
consume. And to this same category, little matter what their station in
life, belong the profligate, the arrogant, the miserly, the weak, the
crafty. Livery counts for nothing: we must see the heart. No class has
the prerogative of simplicity; no dress, however humble in appearance,
is its unfailing badge. Its dwelling need not be a garret, a hut, the
cell of the ascetic nor the lowliest fisherman's bark. Under all the
forms in which life vests itself, in all social positions, at the top as
at the bottom of the ladder, there are people who live simply, and
others who do not. We do not mean by this that simplicity betrays itself
in no visible signs, has not its own habits, its distinguishing tastes
and ways; but this outward show, which may now and then be
counterfeited, must not be confounded with its essence and its deep and
wholly inward source. _Simplicity is a state of mind._ It dwells in the
main intention of our lives. A man is simple when his chief care is the
wish to be what he ought to be, that is, honestly and naturally human.
And this is neither so easy nor so impossible as one might think. At
bottom, it consists in putting our acts and aspirations in accordance
with the law of our being, and consequently with the Eternal Intention
which willed that we should be at all. Let a flower be a flower, a
swallow a swallow, a rock a rock, and let a man be a man, and not a fox,
a hare, a hog, or a bird of prey: this is the sum of the whole matter.
Here we are led to formulate the practical ideal of man. Everywhere in
life we see certain quantities of matter and energy associated for
certain ends. Substances more or less crude are thus transformed and
carried to a higher degree of organization. It is not otherwise with the
life of man. The human ideal is to transform life into something more
excellent than itself. We may compare existence to raw material. What it
is, matters less than what is made of it, as the value of a work of art
lies in the flowering of the workman's skill. We bring into the world
with us different gifts: one has received gold, another granite, a third
marble, most of us wood or clay. Our task is to fashion these
substances. Everyone knows that the most precious material may be
spoiled, and he knows, too, that out of the least costly an immortal
work may be shaped. Art is the realization of a permanent idea in an
ephemeral form. True life is the realization of the higher
virtues,--justice, love, truth, liberty, moral power,--in our daily
activities, whatever they may be. And this life is possible in social
conditions the most diverse, and with natural gifts the most unequal. It
is not fortune or personal advantage, but our turning them to account,
that constitutes the value of life. Fame adds no more than does length
of days: quality is the thing.
Need we say that one does not rise to this point of view without a
struggle? The spirit of simplicity is not an inherited gift, but the
result of a laborious conquest. Plain living, like high thinking, is
simplification. We know that science is the handful of ultimate
principles gathered out of the tufted mass of facts; but what gropings
to discover them! Centuries of research are often condensed into a
principle that a line may state. Here the moral life presents strong
analogy with the scientific. It, too, begins in a certain confusion,
makes trial of itself, seeks to understand itself, and often mistakes.
But by dint of action, and exacting from himself strict account of his
deeds, man arrives at a better knowledge of life. Its law appears to
him, and the law is this: _Work out your mission._ He who applies
himself to aught else than the realization of this end, loses in living
the _raison d'être_ of life. The egoist does so, the pleasure-seeker,
the ambitious: he consumes existence as one eating the full corn in the
blade,--he prevents it from bearing its fruit; his life is lost.
Whoever, on the contrary, makes his life serve a good higher than
itself, saves it in giving it. Moral precepts, which to a superficial
view appear arbitrary, and seem made to spoil our zest for life, have
really but one object--to preserve us from the evil of having lived in
vain. That is why they are constantly leading us back into the same
paths; that is why they all have the same meaning: _Do not waste your
life,_ make it bear fruit; learn how to give it, in order that it may
not consume itself! Herein is summed up the experience of humanity, and
this experience, which each man must remake for himself, is more
precious in proportion as it costs more dear. Illumined by its light, he
makes a moral advance more and more sure. Now he has his means of
orientation, his internal norm to which he may lead everything back; and
from the vacillating, confused, and complex being that he was, he
becomes simple. By the ceaseless influence of this same law, which
expands within him, and is day by day verified in fact, his opinions and
habits become transformed.
Once captivated by the beauty and sublimity of the true life, by what is
sacred and pathetic in this strife of humanity for truth, justice, and
brotherly love, his heart holds the fascination of it. Gradually
everything subordinates itself to this powerful and persistent charm.
The necessary hierarchy of powers is organized within him: the essential
commands, the secondary obeys, and order is born of simplicity. We may
compare this organization of the interior life to that of an army. An
army is strong by its discipline, and its discipline consists in respect
of the inferior for the superior, and the concentration of all its
energies toward a single end: discipline once relaxed, the army suffers.
It will not do to let the corporal command the general. Examine
carefully your life and the lives of others. Whenever something halts
or jars, and complications and disorder follow, it is because the
corporal has issued orders to the general. Where the natural law rules
in the heart, disorder vanishes.
I despair of ever describing simplicity in any worthy fashion. All the
strength of the world and all its beauty, all true joy, everything that
consoles, that feeds hope, or throws a ray of light along our dark
paths, everything that makes us see across our poor lives a splendid
goal and a boundless future, comes to us from people of simplicity,
those who have made another object of their desires than the passing
satisfaction of selfishness and vanity, and have understood that the art
of living is to know how to give one's life.
III
SIMPLICITY OF THOUGHT
It is not alone among the practical manifestations of our life that
there is need of making a clearing: the domain of our ideas is in the
same case. Anarchy reigns in human thought: we walk in the woods,
without compass or sun, lost among the brambles and briars of infinite
detail.
When once man has recognized the fact that he has an aim, and that this
aim is _to be a man_, he organizes his thought accordingly. Every mode
of thinking or judging which does not make him better and stronger, he
rejects as dangerous.
And first of all he flees the too common contrariety of amusing himself
with his thought. Thought is a tool, with its own proper function: it
isn't a toy. Let us take an example. Here is the studio of a painter.
The implements are all in place: everything indicates that this
assemblage of means is arranged with view to an end. Throw the room open
to apes. They will climb on the benches, swing from the cords, rig
themselves in draperies, coif themselves with slippers, juggle with
brushes, nibble the colors, and pierce the canvases to see what is
behind the paint. I don't question their enjoyment; certainly they must
find this kind of exercise extremely interesting. But an atelier is not
made to let monkeys loose in. No more is thought a ground for acrobatic
evolutions. A man worthy of the name, thinks as he is, as his tastes
are: he goes about it with his whole heart, and not with that fitful and
sterile curiosity which, under pretext of observing and noting
everything, runs the risk of never experiencing a deep and true emotion
or accomplishing a right deed.
Another habit in urgent need of correction, ordinary attendant on
conventional life, is the mania for examining and analyzing one's self
at every turn. I do not invite men to neglect introspection and the
examination of conscience. The endeavor to understand one's own mental
attitudes and motives of conduct is an essential element of good living.
But quite other is this extreme vigilance, this incessant observation of
one's life and thoughts, this dissecting of one's self, like a piece of
mechanism. It is a waste of time, and goes wide of the mark. The man
who, to prepare himself the better for walking, should begin by making a
rigid anatomical examination of his means of locomotion, would risk
dislocating something before he had taken a step. You have what you need
to walk with, then forward! Take care not to fall, and use your forces
with discretion. Potterers and scruple-mongers are soon reduced to
inaction. It needs but a glimmer of common sense to perceive that man is
not made to pass his life in a self-centered trance.
And common sense--do you not find what is designated by this name
becoming as rare as the common-sense customs of other days? Common sense
has become an old story. We must have something new--and we create a
factitious existence, a refinement of living, that the vulgar crowd has
not the wherewithal to procure. It is so agreeable to be distinguished!
Instead of conducting ourselves like rational beings, and using the
means most obviously at our command, we arrive, by dint of absolute
genius, at the most astonishing singularities. Better off the track than
on the main line! All the bodily defects and deformities that orthopedy
treats, give but a feeble idea of the humps, the tortuosities, the
dislocations we have inflicted upon ourselves in order to depart from
simple common sense; and at our own expense we learn that one does not
deform himself with impunity. Novelty, after all, is ephemeral. Nothing
endures but the eternal commonplace; and if one departs from that, it is
to run the most perilous risks. Happy he who is able to reclaim himself,
who finds the way back to simplicity.
Good plain sense is not, as is often imagined, the innate possession of
the first chance-comer, a mean and paltry equipment that has cost
nothing to anyone. I would compare it to those old folk-songs,
unfathered but deathless, which seem to have risen out of the very heart
of the people. Good sense is a fund slowly and painfully accumulated by
the labor of centuries. It is a jewel of the first water, whose value he
alone understands who has lost it, or who observes the lives of others
who have lost it. For my part, I think no price too great to pay for
gaining it and keeping it, for the possession of eyes that see and a
judgment that discerns. One takes good care of his sword, that it be not
bent or rusted: with greater reason should he give heed to his thought.
But let this be well understood: an appeal to common sense is not an
appeal to thought that grovels, to narrow positivism which denies
everything it cannot see or touch. For to wish that man should be
absorbed in material sensations, to the exclusion of the high realities
of the inner life, is also a want of good sense. Here we touch upon a
tender point, round which the greatest battles of humanity are waging.
In truth we are striving to attain a conception of life, searching it
out amid countless obscurities and griefs: and everything that touches
upon spiritual realities becomes day by day more painful. In the midst
of the grave perplexities and transient disorders that accompany great
crises of thought, it seems more difficult than ever to escape with any
simple principles. Yet necessity itself comes to our aid, as it has done
for the men of all times. The program of life is terribly simple, after
all, and in the fact that existence so imperiously forces herself upon
us, she gives us notice that she precedes any idea of her which we may
make for ourselves, and that no one can put off living pending an
attempt to understand life. Our philosophies, our explanations, our
beliefs are everywhere confronted by facts, and these facts, prodigious,
irrefutable, call us to order when we would deduce life from our
reasonings, and would wait to act until we have ended philosophizing. It
is this happy necessity that prevents the world from stopping while man
questions his route. Travelers of a day, we are carried along in a vast
movement to which we are called upon to contribute, but which we have
not foreseen, nor embraced in its entirety, nor penetrated as to its
ultimate aims. Our part is to fill faithfully the rôle of private, which
has devolved upon us, and our thought should adapt itself to the
situation. Do not say that we live in more trying times than our
ancestors, for things seen from afar are often seen imperfectly: it is
moreover scarcely gracious to complain of not having been born in the
days of one's grandfather. What we may believe least contestable on the
subject is this: from the beginning of the world it has been hard to see
clearly; right thinking has been difficult everywhere and always. In the
matter the ancients were in no wise privileged above the moderns, and it
might be added that there is no difference between men when they are
considered from this point of view. Master and servant, teacher and
learner, writer and artisan discern truth at the same cost. The light
that humanity acquires in advancing is no doubt of the greatest use; but
it also multiplies the number and extent of human problems. The
difficulty is never removed, the mind always encounters its obstacle.
The unknown controls us and hems us in on all sides. But just as one
need not exhaust a spring to quench his thirst, so we need not know
everything to live. Humanity lives and always has lived on certain
elemental _provisions_.
We will try to point them out. First of all, humanity lives by
confidence. In so doing it but reflects, commensurate with its conscious
thought, that which is the hidden source of all beings. An imperturbable
faith in the stability of the universe and its intelligent ordering,
sleeps in everything that exists. The flowers, the trees, the beasts of
the field, live in calm strength, in entire security. There is
confidence in the falling rain, in dawning day, in the brook running to
the sea. Everything that is seems to say: "I am, therefore I should be;
there are good reasons for this, rest assured."
So, too, mankind lives by confidence. From the simple fact that he is,
man has within him the sufficient reason for his being--a pledge of
assurance. He reposes in the power which has willed that he should be.
To safeguard this confidence, to see that nothing disconcerts it, to
cultivate it, render it more personal, more evident--toward this should
tend the first effort of our thought. All that augments confidence
within us is good, for from confidence is born the life without haste,
tranquil energy, calm action, the love of life and its fruitful labor.
Deep-seated confidence is the mysterious spring that sets in motion the
energy within us. It is our nutriment. By it man lives, much more than
by the bread he eats. And so everything that shakes this confidence is
evil--poison, not food.
Dangerous is every system of thought that attacks the very fact of life,
declaring it to be an evil. Life has been too often wrongly estimated in
this century. What wonder that the tree withers when its roots are
watered with corrosives. And there is an extremely simple reflection
that might be made in the face of all this negation. You say life is an
evil. Well; what remedy for it do you offer? Can you combat it, suppress
it? I do not ask you to suppress your own life, to commit suicide;--of
what advantage would that be to us?--but to suppress _life_, not merely
human life, but life at its deep and hidden origin, all this upspringing
of existence that pushes toward the light and, to your mind, is rushing
to misfortune; I ask you to suppress the will to live that trembles
through the immensities of space, to suppress in short the source of
life. Can you do it? No. Then leave us in peace. Since no one can hold
life in check, is it not better to respect it and use it than to go
about making other people disgusted with it? When one knows that certain
food is dangerous to health, he does not eat it, and when a certain
fashion of thinking robs us of confidence, cheerfulness and strength, we
should reject that, certain not only that it is a nutriment noxious to
the mind, but also that it is false. There is no truth for man but in
thoughts that are human, and pessimism is inhuman. Besides, it wants as
much in modesty as in logic. To permit one's self to count as evil this
prodigious thing that we call life, one needs have seen its very
foundation, almost to have made it. What a strange attitude is that of
certain great thinkers of our times! They act as if they had created the
world, very long ago, in their youth, but decidedly it was a mistake,
and they had well repented it.
Let us nourish ourselves from other meat; strengthen our souls with
cheering thoughts. What is truest for man is what best fortifies him.
* * * * *
If mankind lives by confidence, it lives also by hope--that form of
confidence which turns toward the future. All life is a result and an
aspiration, all that exists supposes an origin and tends toward an end.
Life is progression: progression is aspiration. The progress of the
future is an infinitude of hope. Hope is at the root of things, and must
be reflected in the heart of man. No hope, no life. The same power which
brought us into being, urges us to go up higher. What is the meaning of
this persistent instinct which pushes us on? The true meaning is that
something is to result from life, that out of it is being wrought a good
greater than itself, toward which it slowly moves, and that this painful
sower called man, needs, like every sower, to count on the morrow. The
history of humanity is the history of indomitable hope; otherwise
everything would have been over long ago. To press forward under his
burdens, to guide himself in the night, to retrieve his falls and his
failures, to escape despair even in death, man has need of hoping
always, and sometimes against all hope. Here is the cordial that
sustains him. Had we only logic, we should have long ago drawn the
conclusion: Death has everywhere the last word!--and we should be dead
of the idea. But we have hope, and that is why we live and believe in
life.
Suso, the great monk and mystic, one of the simplest and best men that
ever lived, had a touching custom: whenever he encountered a woman, were
she the poorest and oldest, he stepped respectfully aside, though his
bare feet must tread among thorns or in the gutter. "I do that," he
said, "to render homage to our Holy Lady, the Virgin Mary." Let us offer
to hope a like reverence. If we meet it in the shape of a blade of wheat
piercing the furrow; a bird brooding on its nest; a poor wounded beast,
recovering itself, rising and continuing its way; a peasant ploughing
and sowing a field that has been ravaged by flood or hail; a nation
slowly repairing its losses and healing its wounds--under whatever guise
of humanity or suffering it appears to us, let us salute it! When we
encounter it in legends, in untutored songs, in simple creeds, let us
still salute it! for it is always the same, indestructible, the immortal
daughter of God.
We do not dare hope enough. The men of our day have developed strange
timidities. The apprehension that the sky will fall--that acme of
absurdity among the fears of our Gallic forefathers--has entered our own
hearts. Does the rain-drop doubt the ocean? the ray mistrust the sun?
Our senile wisdom has arrived at this prodigy. It resembles those testy
old pedagogues whose chief office is to rail at the merry pranks or the
youthful enthusiasms of their pupils. It is time to become little
children once more, to learn again to stand with clasped hands and wide
eyes before the mystery around us; to remember that, in spite of our
knowledge, what we know is but a trifle, and that the world is greater
than our mind, which is well; for being so prodigious, it must hold in
reserve untold resources, and we may allow it some credit without
accusing ourselves of improvidence. Let us not treat it as creditors do
an insolvent debtor: we should fire its courage, relight the sacred
flame of hope. Since the sun still rises, since earth puts forth her
blossoms anew, since the bird builds its nest, and the mother smiles at
her child, let us have the courage to be men, and commit the rest to Him
who has numbered the stars. For my part, I would I might find glowing
words to say to whomsoever has lost heart in these times of disillusion:
Rouse your courage, hope on; he is sure of being least deluded who has
the daring to do that; the most ingenuous hope is nearer truth than the
most rational despair.
* * * * *
Another source of light on the path of human life is goodness. I am not
of those who believe in the natural perfection of man, and teach that
society corrupts him. On the contrary, of all forms of evil, the one
which most dismays me is heredity. But I sometimes ask myself how it is
that this effete and deadly virus of low instincts, of vices inoculated
in the blood, the whole assemblage of disabilities imposed upon us by
the past--how all this has not got the better of us. It must be because
of something else. This other thing is love.
Given the unknown brooding above our heads, our limited intelligence,
the grievous and contradictory enigma of human destiny, falsehood,
hatred, corruption, suffering, death--what can we think, what do? To all
these questions a sublime and mysterious voice has answered: _Love your
fellow-men._ Love must indeed be divine, like faith and hope, since she
cannot die when so many powers are arrayed against her. She has to
combat the natural ferocity of what may be called the beast in man; she
has to meet ruse, force, self-interest, above all, ingratitude. How is
it that she passes pure and scathless in the midst of these dark
enemies, like the prophet of the sacred legend among the roaring beasts?
It is because her enemies are of the earth, and love is from above.
Horns, teeth, claws, eyes full of murderous fire, are powerless against
the swift wing that soars toward the heights and eludes them. Thus love
escapes the undertakings of her foes. She does even better: she has
sometimes known the fine triumph of winning over her persecutors: she
has seen the wild beasts grow calm, lie down at her feet, obey her law.
At the very heart of the Christian faith, the most sublime of its
teachings, and to him who penetrates its deepest sense, the most human,
is this: To save lost humanity, the invisible God came to dwell among
us, in the form of a man, and willed to make Himself known by this
single sign: _Love._
Healing, consoling, tender to the unfortunate, even to the evil, love
engenders light beneath her feet. She clarifies, she simplifies. She has
chosen the humblest part--to bind up wounds, wipe away tears, relieve
distress, soothe aching hearts, pardon, make peace; yet it is of love
that we have the greatest need. And as we meditate on the best way to
render thought fruitful, simple, really conformable to our destiny, the
method sums itself up in these words: _Have confidence and hope; be
kind._
I would not discourage lofty speculation, dissuade any one whomsoever
from brooding over the problems of the unknown, over the vast abysses of
science or philosophy. But we have always to come back from these far
journeys to the point where we are, often to a place where we seem to
stand marking time with no result. There are conditions of life and
social complications in which the sage, the thinker, and the ignorant
are alike unable to see clearly. The present age has often brought us
face to face with such situations; I am sure that he who meets them with
our method will soon recognize its worth.
* * * * *
Since I have touched here upon religious ground, at least in a general
way, someone may ask me to say in a few simple words, what religion is
the best; and I gladly express myself on this subject. But it might be
better not to put the question in this form. All religions have, of
necessity, certain fixed characteristics, and each has its inherent
qualities or defects. Strictly speaking, then, they may be compared
among themselves: but there are always involuntary partialities or
foregone conclusions. It is better to put the question otherwise, and
ask: Is my own religion good, and how may I know it? To this question,
this answer: Your religion is good if it is vital and active, if it
nourishes in you confidence, hope, love, and a sentiment of the infinite
value of existence; if it is allied with what is best in you against
what is worst, and holds forever before you the necessity of becoming a
new man; if it makes you understand that pain is a deliverer; if it
increases your respect for the conscience of others; if it renders
forgiveness more easy, fortune less arrogant, duty more dear, the beyond
less visionary. If it does these things it is good, little matter its
name: however rudimentary it may be, when it fills this office it comes
from the true source, it binds you to man and to God.
But does it perchance serve to make you think yourself better than
others, quibble over texts, wear sour looks, domineer over others'
consciences or give your own over to bondage; stifle your scruples,
follow religious forms for fashion or gain, do good in the hope of
escaping future punishment?--oh, then, if you proclaim yourself the
follower of Buddha, Moses, Mahomet, or even Christ, your religion is
worthless--it separates you from God and man.
I have not perhaps the right to speak thus in my own name; but others
have so spoken before me who are greater than I, and notably He who
recounted to the questioning scribe the parable of the Good Samaritan. I
intrench myself behind His authority.
IV
SIMPLICITY OF SPEECH
Speech is the chief revelation of the mind, the first visible form that
it takes. As the thought, so the speech. To better one's life in the way
of simplicity, one must set a watch on his lips and his pen. Let the
word be as genuine as the thought, as artless, as valid: think justly,
speak frankly.
All social relations have their roots in mutual trust, and this trust is
maintained by each man's sincerity. Once sincerity diminishes,
confidence is weakened, society suffers, apprehension is born. This is
true in the province of both natural and spiritual interests. With
people whom we distrust, it is as difficult to do business as to search
for scientific truth, arrive at religious harmony, or attain to justice.
When one must first question words and intentions, and start from the
premise that everything said and written is meant to offer us illusion
in place of truth, life becomes strangely complicated. This is the case
to-day. There is so much craft, so much diplomacy, so much subtle
legerdemain, that we all have no end of trouble to inform ourselves on
the simplest subject and the one that most concerns us. Probably what I
have just said would suffice to show my thought, and each one's
experience might bring to its support an ample commentary with
illustrations. But I am none the less moved to insist on this point, and
to strengthen my position with examples.
Formerly the means of communication between men were considerably
restricted. It was natural to suppose that in perfecting and multiplying
avenues of information, a better understanding would be brought about.
Nations would learn to love each other as they became acquainted;
citizens of one country would feel themselves bound in closer
brotherhood as more light was thrown on what concerned their common
life. When printing was invented, the cry arose: _fiat lux!_ and with
better cause when the habit of reading and the taste for newspapers
increased. Why should not men have reasoned thus:--"Two lights illumine
better than one, and many better than two: the more periodicals and
books there are, the better we shall know what happens, and those who
wish to write history after us will be right fortunate; their hands will
be full of documents"? Nothing could have seemed more evident. Alas!
this reasoning was based upon the nature and capacity of the
instruments, without taking into account the human element, always the
most important factor. And what has really come about is this: that
cavilers, calumniators, and crooks--all gentlemen glib of tongue, who
know better than any one else how to turn voice and pen to account--have
taken the utmost advantage of these extended means for circulating
thought, with the result that the men of our times have the greatest
difficulty in the world to know the truth about their own age and their
own affairs. For every newspaper that fosters good feeling and good
understanding between nations, by trying to rightly inform its neighbors
and to study them without reservations, how many spread defamation and
distrust! What unnatural and dangerous currents of opinion set in
motion! what false alarms and malicious interpretations of words and
facts! And in domestic affairs we are not much better informed than in
foreign. As to commercial, industrial, and agricultural interests,
political parties and social tendencies, or the personality of public
men, it is alike difficult to obtain a disinterested opinion. The more
newspapers one reads, the less clearly he sees in these matters. There
are days when after having read them all, and admitting that he takes
them at their word, the reader finds himself obliged to draw this
conclusion:--Unquestionably nothing but corruption can be found any
longer--no men of integrity except a few journalists. But the last part
of the conclusion falls in its turn. It appears that the chroniclers
devour each other. The reader has under his eyes a spectacle somewhat
like the cartoon entitled, "The Combat of the Serpents." After having
gorged themselves with everything around them, the reptiles fall upon
each other, and there remain upon the field of battle two tails.
And not the common people alone feel this embarrassment, but the
cultivated also--almost everybody shares it. In politics, finance,
business--even in science, art, literature and religion, there is
everywhere disguise, trickery, wire-pulling; one truth for the public,
another for the initiated. The result is that everybody is deceived. It
is vain to be behind the scenes on one stage; a man cannot be there on
them all, and the very people who deceive others with the most ability,
are in turn deceived when they need to count upon the sincerity of their
neighbors.
The result of such practices is the degradation of human speech. It is
degraded first in the eyes of those who manipulate it as a base
instrument. No word is respected by sophists, casuists, and quibblers,
men who are moved only by a rage for gaining their point, or who assume
that their interests are alone worth considering. Their penalty is to be
forced to judge others by the rule they follow themselves: _Say what
profits and not what is true._ They can no longer take any one
seriously--a sad state of mind for those who write or teach! How lightly
must one hold his readers and hearers to approach them in such an
attitude! To him who has preserved enough honesty, nothing is more
repugnant than the careless irony of an acrobat of the tongue or pen,
who tries to dupe honest and ingenuous men. On one side openness,
sincerity, the desire to be enlightened; on the other, chicanery making
game of the public! But he knows not, the liar, how far he is misleading
himself. The capital on which he lives is confidence, and nothing equals
the confidence of the people, unless it be their distrust when once they
find themselves betrayed. They may follow for a time the exploiters of
their artlessness, but then their friendly humor turns to hate. Doors
which stood wide open offer an impassable front of wood, and ears once
attentive are deaf. And the pity is that they have closed not to the
evil alone, but to the good. This is the crime of those who distort and
degrade speech: they shake confidence generally. We consider as a
calamity the debasement of the currency, the lowering of interest, the
abolition of credit:--there is a misfortune greater than these: the loss
of confidence, of that moral credit which honest people give one
another, and which makes speech circulate like an authentic currency.
Away with counterfeiters, speculators, rotten financiers, for they bring
under suspicion even the coin of the realm. Away with the makers of
counterfeit speech, for because of them there is no longer confidence in
anyone or anything, and what they say and write is not worth a
continental.
You see how urgent it is that each should guard his lips, chasten his
pen, and aspire to simplicity of speech. No more perversion of sense,
circumlocution, reticence, tergiversation! these things serve only to
complicate and bewilder. Be men; speak the speech of honor. An hour of
plain-dealing does more for the salvation of the world than years of
duplicity.
* * * * *
A word now about a national bias, to those who have a veneration for
diction and style. Assuredly there can be no quarrel with the taste for
grace and elegance of speech. I am of opinion that one cannot say too
well what he has to say. But it does not follow that the things best
said and best written are most studied. Words should serve the fact, and
not substitute themselves for it and make it forgotten in its
embellishment. The greatest things are those which gain the most by
being said most simply, since thus they show themselves for what they
are: you do not throw over them the veil, however transparent, of
beautiful discourse, nor that shadow so fatal to truth, called the
writer's vanity. Nothing so strong, nothing so persuasive, as
simplicity! There are sacred emotions, cruel griefs, splendid heroisms,
passionate enthusiasms that a look, a movement, a cry interprets better
than beautifully rounded periods. The most precious possessions of the
heart of humanity manifest themselves most simply. To be convincing, a
thing must be true, and certain truths are more evident when they come
in the speech of ingenuousness, even weakness, than when they fall from
lips too well trained, or are proclaimed with trumpets. And these rules
are good for each of us in his every-day life. No one can imagine what
profit would accrue to his moral life from the constant observation of
this principle: Be sincere, moderate, simple in the expression of your
feelings and opinions, in private and public alike; never pass beyond
bounds, give out faithfully what is within you, and above all,
watch!--that is the main thing.
For the danger in fine words is that they live from a life of their own.
They are servants of distinction, that have kept their titles but no
longer perform their functions--of which royal courts offer us example.
You speak well, write well, and all is said. How many people content
themselves with speaking, and believe that it exempts them from acting!
And those who listen are content with having heard them. So it sometimes
happens that a life may in the end be made up of a few well-turned
speeches, a few fine books, and a few great plays. As for practicing
what is so magisterially set forth, that is the last thing thought of.
And if we pass from the world of talent to spheres which the mediocre
exploit, there, in a pell-mell of confusion, we see those who think that
we are in the world to talk and hear others talk--the great and hopeless
rout of babblers, of everything that prates, bawls, and perorates and,
after all, finds that there isn't talking enough. They all forget that
those who make the least noise do the most work. An engine that expends
all its steam in whistling, has nothing left with which to turn wheels.
Then let us cultivate silence. All that we can save in noise we gain in
power.
* * * * *
These reflections lead us to consider a similar subject, also very
worthy of attention: I mean what has been called "the vice of the
superlative." If we study the inhabitants of a country, we notice
differences of temperament, of which the language shows signs. Here the
people are calm and phlegmatic; their speech is jejune, lacks color.
Elsewhere temperaments are more evenly balanced; one finds precision,
the word exactly fitted to the thing. But farther on--effect of the sun,
the air, the wine perhaps--hot blood courses in the veins, tempers are
excitable, language is extravagant, and the simplest things are said in
the strongest terms.
If the type of speech varies with climate, it differs also with epochs.
Compare the language, written or spoken, of our own times with that of
certain other periods of our history. Under the old _régime_, people
spoke differently than at the time of the Revolution, and we have not
the same language as the men of 1830, 1848, or the Second Empire. In
general, language is now characterized by greater simplicity: we no
longer wear perukes, we no longer write in lace frills: but there is one
significant difference between us and almost all of our ancestors--and
it is the source of our exaggerations--our nervousness. Upon
over-excited nervous systems--and Heaven knows that to have nerves is no
longer an aristocratic privilege!--words do not produce the same
impression as under normal conditions. And quite as truly, simple
language does not suffice the man of over-wrought sensibilities when he
tries to express what he feels. In private life, in public, in books, on
the stage, calm and temperate speech has given place to excess. The
means that novelists and playwrights employ to galvanize the public mind
and compel its attention, are to be found again, in their rudiments, in
our most commonplace conversations, in our letter-writing, and above all
in public speaking. Our performances in language compared to those of a
man well-balanced and serene, are what our hand-writing is compared to
that of our fathers. The fault is laid to steel pens. If only the truth
were acknowledged!--Geese, then, could save us! But the evil goes
deeper; it is in ourselves. We write like men possessed: the pen of our
ancestors was more restful, more sure. Here we face one of the results
of our modern life, so complicated and so terribly exhaustive of energy.
It leaves us impatient, breathless, in perpetual trepidation. Our
hand-writing, like our speech, suffers thereby and betrays us. Let us go
back from the effect to the cause, and understand well the warning it
brings us!
What good can come from this habit of exaggerated speech? False
interpreters of our own impressions, we can not but warp the minds of
our fellow-men as well as our own. Between people who exaggerate, good
understanding ceases. Ruffled tempers, violent and useless disputes,
hasty judgments devoid of all moderation, the utmost extravagance in
education and social life--these things are the result of intemperance
of speech.
* * * * *
May I be permitted, in this appeal for simplicity of speech, to frame a
wish whose fulfilment would have the happiest results? I ask for
simplicity in literature, not only as one of the best remedies for the
dejection of our souls--_blasés_, jaded, weary of eccentricities--but
also as a pledge and source of social union. I ask also for simplicity
in art. Our art and our literature are reserved for the privileged few
of education and fortune. But do not misunderstand me. I do not ask
poets, novelists, and painters to descend from the heights and walk
along the mountain-sides, finding their satisfaction in mediocrity; but,
on the contrary, to mount higher. The truly popular is not that which
appeals to a certain class of society ordinarily called the common
people; the truly popular is what is common to all classes and unites
them. The sources of inspiration from which perfect art springs are in
the depths of the human heart, in the eternal realities of life before
which all men are equal. And the sources of a popular language must be
found in the small number of simple and vigorous forms which express
elementary sensations, and draw the master lines of human destiny. In
them are truth, power, grandeur, immortality. Is there not enough in
such an ideal to kindle the enthusiasm of youth, which, sensible that
the sacred flame of the beautiful is burning within, feels pity, and to
the disdainful adage, _Odi profanum vulgus_, prefers this more humane
saying, _Misereor super turbam_. As for me, I have no artistic
authority, but from out the multitude where I live, I have the right to
raise my cry to those who have been given talents, and say to them:
Labor for men whom the world forgets, make yourselves intelligible to
the humble, so shall you accomplish a work of emancipation and peace; so
shall you open again the springs whence those masters drew, whose works
have defied the ages because they knew how to clothe genius in
simplicity.
V
SIMPLE DUTY
When we talk to children on a subject that annoys them, they call our
attention to some pigeon on the roof, giving food to its little one, or
some coachman down in the street who is abusing his horse. Sometimes
they even maliciously propose one of those alarming questions that put
the minds of parents on the rack; all this to divert attention from the
distressing topic. I fear that in the face of duty we are big children,
and, when that is the theme, seek subterfuges to distract us.
The first sophism consists in asking ourselves if there is such a thing
as duty in the abstract, or if this word does not cover one of the
numerous illusions of our forefathers. For duty, in truth, supposes
liberty, and the question of liberty leads us into metaphysics. How can
we talk of liberty so long as this grave problem of free-will is not
solved? Theoretically there is no objection to this; and if life were a
theory, and we were here to work out a complete system of the universe,
it would be absurd to concern ourselves with duty until we had clarified
the subject of liberty, determined its conditions, fixed its limits.
But life is not a theory. In this question of practical morality, as in
the others, life has preceded hypothesis, and there is no room to
believe that she ever yields it place. This liberty--relative, I admit,
like everything we are acquainted with, for that matter--this duty whose
existence we question, is none the less the basis of all the judgments
we pass upon ourselves and our fellow-men. We hold each other to a
certain extent responsible for our deeds and exploits.
The most ardent theorist, once outside of his theory, scruples not a
whit to approve or disapprove the acts of others, to take measures
against his enemies, to appeal to the generosity and justice of those he
would dissuade from an unworthy step. One can no more rid himself of the
notion of moral obligation than of that of time or space; and as surely
as we must resign ourselves to walking before we know how to define this
space through which we move and this time that measures our movements,
so surely must we submit to moral obligation before having put our
finger on its deep-hidden roots. Moral law dominates man, whether he
respects or defies it. See how it is in every-day life: each one is
ready to cast his stone at him who neglects a plain duty, even if he
allege that he has not yet arrived at philosophic certitude. Everybody
will say to him, and with excellent reason: "Sir, we are men before
everything. First play your part, do your duty as citizen, father, son;
after that you shall return to the course of your meditations."
However, let us be well understood. We should not wish to turn anyone
away from scrupulous research into the foundations of morality. No
thought which leads men to concern themselves once more with these grave
questions, could be useless or indifferent. We simply challenge the
thinker to find a way to wait till he has unearthed these foundations,
before he does an act of humanity, of honesty or dishonesty, of valor or
cowardice. And most of all do we wish to formulate a reply for all the
insincere who have never tried to philosophize, and for ourselves when
we would offer our state of philosophic doubt in justification of our
practical omissions. From the simple fact that we are men, before all
theorizing, positive, or negative, about duty, we have the peremptory
law to conduct ourselves like men. There is no getting out of it.
But he little knows the resources of the human heart, who counts on the
effect of such a reply. It matters not that it is itself unanswerable;
it cannot keep other questions from arising. The sum of our pretexts for
evading duty is equal to the sum of the sands of the sea or the stars of
heaven.
We take refuge, then, behind duty that is obscure, difficult,
contradictory. And these are certainly words to call up painful
memories. To be a man of duty and to question one's route, grope in the
dark, feel one's self torn between the contrary solicitations of
conflicting calls, or again, to face a duty gigantic, overwhelming,
beyond our strength--what is harder! And such things happen. We would
neither deny nor contest the tragedy in certain situations or the
anguish of certain lives. And yet, duty rarely has to make itself plain
across such conflicting circumstances, or to be struck out from the
tortured mind like lightning from a storm-cloud. Such formidable shocks
are exceptional. Well for us if we stand staunch when they come! But if
no one is astonished that oaks are uprooted by the whirlwind, that a
wayfarer stumbles at night on an unknown road, or that a soldier caught
between two fires is vanquished, no more should he condemn without
appeal those who have been worsted in almost superhuman moral conflicts.
To succumb under the force of numbers or obstacles has never been
counted a disgrace.
So my weapons are at the service of those who intrench themselves
behind the impregnable rampart of duty ill-defined, complicated or
contradictory. But it is not that which occupies me to-day; it is of
plain, I had almost said easy duty, that I wish to speak.
* * * * *
We have yearly three or four high feast days, and many ordinary ones:
there are likewise some very great and dark combats to wage, but beside
these is the multitude of plain and simple duties. Now, while in the
great encounters our equipment is generally adequate, it is precisely in
the little emergencies that we are found wanting. Without fear of being
misled by a paradoxical form of thought, I affirm, then, that the
essential thing is to fulfil our simple duties and exercise elementary
justice. In general, those who lose their souls do so not because they
fail to rise to difficult duty, but because they neglect to perform that
which is simple. Let us illustrate this truth.
He who tries to penetrate into the humble underworld of society is not
slow to discover great misery, physical and moral. And the closer he
looks, the greater number of unfortunates does he discover, till in the
end this assembly of the wretched appears to him like a great black
world, in whose presence the individual and his means of relief are
reduced to helplessness. It is true that he feels impelled to run to the
succor of these unfortunates, but at the same time he asks himself,
"What is the use?" The case is certainly heartrending. Some, in despair,
end by doing nothing. They lack neither pity nor good intention, but
these bear no fruit. They are wrong. Often a man has not the means to do
good on a large scale, but that is not a reason for failing to do it at
all. So many people absolve themselves from any action, on the ground
that there is too much to do! They should be recalled to simple duty,
and this duty in the case of which we speak is that each one, according
to his resources, leisure and capacity, should create relations for
himself among the world's disinherited. There are people who by the
exercise of a little good-will have succeeded in enrolling themselves
among the followers of ministers, and have ingratiated themselves with
princes. Why should you not succeed in forming relations with the poor,
and in making acquaintances among the workers who lack somewhat the
necessities of life? When a few families are known, with their
histories, their antecedents and their difficulties, you may be of the
greatest use to them by acting the part of a brother, with the moral and
material aid that is yours to give. It is true, you will have attacked
only one little corner, but you will have done what you could, and
perhaps have led another on to follow you. Instead of stopping at the
knowledge that much wretchedness, hatred, disunion and vice exist in
society, you will have introduced a little good among these evils. And
by however slow degrees such kindness as yours is emulated, the good
will sensibly increase and the evil diminish. Even were you to remain
alone in this undertaking, you would have the assurance that in
fulfilling the duty, plain as a child's, which offered itself, you were
doing the only reasonable thing. If you have felt it so, you have found
out one of the secrets of right living.
In its dreams, man's ambition embraces vast limits, but it is rarely
given us to achieve great things, and even then, a quick and sure
success always rests on a groundwork of patient preparation. Fidelity in
small things is at the base of every great achievement. We too often
forget this, and yet no truth needs more to be kept in mind,
particularly in the troubled eras of history and in the crises of
individual life. In shipwreck a splintered beam, an oar, any scrap of
wreckage, saves us. On the tumbling waves of life, when everything seems
shattered to fragments, let us not forget that a single one of these
poor bits may become our plank of safety. To despise the remnants is
demoralization.
You are a ruined man, or you are stricken by a great bereavement, or
again, you see the fruit of toilsome years perish before your eyes. You
cannot rebuild your fortune, raise the dead, recover your lost toil, and
in the face of the inevitable, your arms drop. Then you neglect to care
for your person, to keep your house, to guide your children. All this is
pardonable, and how easy to understand! But it is exceedingly dangerous.
To fold one's hands and let things take their course, is to transform
one evil into worse. You who think that you have nothing left to lose,
will by that very thought lose what you have. Gather up the fragments
that remain to you, and keep them with scrupulous care. In good time
this little that is yours will be your consolation. The effort made will
come to your relief, as the effort missed will turn against you. If
nothing but a branch is left for you to cling to, cling to that branch;
and if you stand alone in defense of a losing cause, do not throw down
your arms to join the rout. After the deluge a few survivors repeopled
the earth. The future sometimes rests in a single life as truly as life
sometimes hangs by a thread. For strength, go to history and Nature.
From the long travail of both you will learn that failure and fortune
alike may come from the slightest cause, that it is not wise to neglect
detail, and, above all, that we must know how to wait and to begin
again.
In speaking of simple duty I cannot help thinking of military life, and
the examples it offers to combatants in this great struggle. He would
little understand his soldier's duty who, the army once beaten, should
cease to brush his garments, polish his rifle, and observe discipline.
"But what would be the use?" perhaps you ask. Are there not various
fashions of being vanquished? Is it an indifferent matter to add to
defeat, discouragement, disorder, and demoralization? No, it should
never be forgotten that the least display of energy in these terrible
moments is a sign of life and hope. At once everybody feels that all is
not lost.
During the disastrous retreat of 1813-1814, in the heart of the winter,
when it had become almost impossible to present any sort of appearance,
a general, I know not who, one morning presented himself to Napoleon, in
full dress and freshly shaven. Seeing him thus, in the midst of the
general demoralization, as elaborately attired as if for parade, the
Emperor said: _My general, you are a brave man!_
* * * * *
Again, the plain duty is the near duty. A very common weakness keeps
many people from finding what is near them interesting; they see that
only on its paltry side. The distant, on the contrary, draws and
fascinates them. In this way a fabulous amount of good-will is wasted.
People burn with ardor for humanity, for the public good, for righting
distant wrongs; they walk through life, their eyes fixed on marvelous
sights along the horizon, treading meanwhile on the feet of passers-by,
or jostling them without being aware of their existence.
Strange infirmity, that keeps us from seeing our fellows at our very
doors! People widely read and far-travelled are often not acquainted
with their fellow-citizens, great or small. Their lives depend upon the
coöperation of a multitude of beings whose lot remains to them quite
indifferent. Not those to whom they owe their knowledge and culture, not
their rulers, nor those who serve them and supply their needs, have ever
attracted their attention. That there is ingratitude or improvidence in
not knowing one's workmen, one's servants, all those in short with whom
one has indispensable social relations--this has never come into their
minds. Others go much farther. To certain wives, their husbands are
strangers, and conversely. There are parents who do not know their
children: their development, their thoughts, the dangers they run, the
hopes they cherish, are to them a closed book. Many children do not know
their parents, have no suspicion of their difficulties and struggles, no
conception of their aims. And I am not speaking of those piteously
disordered homes where all the relations are false, but of honorable
families. Only, all these people are greatly preoccupied: each has his
outside interest that fills all his time. The distant duty--very
attractive, I don't deny--claims them entirely, and they are not
conscious of the duty near at hand. I fear they will have their trouble
for their pains. Each person's base of operations is the field of his
immediate duty. Neglect this field, and all you undertake at a distance
is compromised. First, then, be of your own country, your own city, your
own home, your own church, your own work-shop; then, if you can, set out
from this to go beyond it. That is the plain and natural order, and a
man must fortify himself with very bad reasons to arrive at reversing
it. At all events, the result of so strange a confusion of duties is
that many people employ their time in all sorts of affairs except those
in which we have a right to demand it. Each is occupied with something
else than what concerns him, is absent from his post, ignores his trade.
This is what complicates life. And it would be so simple for each one to
be about his own matter.
* * * * *
Another form of simple duty. When damage is done, who should repair it?
He who did it. This is just, but it is only theory, and the consequence
of following the theory would be the evil in force until the malefactors
were found and had offset it. But suppose they are not found? or suppose
they can not or will not make amends?
The rain falls on your head through a hole in the roof, or the wind
blows in at a broken window. Will you wait to find the man who caused
the mischief? You would certainly think that absurd. And yet such is
often the practice. Children indignantly protest, "I didn't put it
there, and I shall not take it away!" And most men reason after the same
fashion. It is logic. But it is not the kind of logic that makes the
world move forward.
On the contrary, what we must learn, and what life repeats to us daily,
is that the injury done by one must be repaired by another. One tears
down, another builds up; one defaces, another restores; one stirs up
quarrels, another appeases them; one makes tears to flow, another wipes
them away; one lives for evil-doing, another dies for the right. And in
the workings of this grievous law lies salvation. This also is logic,
but a logic of facts which makes the logic of theories pale. The
conclusion of the matter is not doubtful; a single-hearted man draws it
thus: given the evil, the great thing is to make it good, and to set
about it on the spot; well indeed if Messrs. the Malefactors will
contribute to the reparation; but experience warns us not to count too
much on their aid.
* * * * *
But however simple duty may be, there is still need of strength to do
it. In what does this strength consist, or where is it found? One could
scarcely tire of asking. Duty is for man an enemy and an intruder, so
long as it appears as an appeal from without. When it comes in through
the door, he leaves by the window; when it blocks up the windows, he
escapes by the roof. The more plainly we see it coming, the more surely
we flee. It is like those police, representatives of public order and
official justice, whom an adroit thief succeeds in evading. Alas! the
officer, though he finally collar the thief, can only conduct him to the
station, not along the right road. Before man is able to accomplish his
duty, he must fall into the hands of another power than that which says,
"Do this, do that; shun this, shun that, or else beware!"
This is an interior power; it is love. When a man hates his work, or
goes about it with indifference, all the forces of earth cannot make
him follow it with enthusiasm. But he who loves his office moves of
himself; not only is it needless to compel him, but it would be
impossible to turn him aside. And this is true of everybody. The great
thing is to have felt the sanctity and immortal beauty in our obscure
destiny; to have been led by a series of experiences to love this life
for its griefs and its hopes, to love men for their weakness and their
greatness, and to belong to humanity through the heart, the intelligence
and the soul. Then an unknown power takes possession of us, as the wind
of the sails of a ship, and bears us toward pity and justice. And
yielding to its irresistible impulse, we say: _I cannot help it,
something is there stronger than I._ In so saying, the men of all times
and places have designated a power that is above humanity, but which may
dwell in men's hearts. And everything truly lofty within us appears to
us as a manifestation of this mystery beyond. Noble feelings, like great
thoughts and deeds, are things of inspiration. When the tree buds and
bears fruit, it is because it draws vital forces from the soil, and
receives light and warmth from the sun. If a man, in his humble sphere,
in the midst of the ignorance and faults that are his inevitably,
consecrates himself sincerely to his task, it is because he is in
contact with the eternal source of goodness. This central force
manifests itself under a thousand forms. Sometimes it is indomitable
energy; sometimes winning tenderness; sometimes the militant spirit that
grasps and uproots the evil; sometimes maternal solicitude, gathering to
its arms from the wayside where it was perishing, some bruised and
forgotten life; sometimes the humble patience of long research. All that
it touches bears its seal, and the men it inspires know that through it
we live and have our being. To serve it is their pleasure and reward.
They are satisfied to be its instruments, and they no longer look at the
outward glory of their office, well knowing that nothing is great,
nothing small, but that our life and our deeds are only of worth because
of the spirit which breathes through them.
VI
SIMPLE NEEDS
When we buy a bird of the fancier, the good man tells us briefly what is
necessary for our new pensioner, and the whole thing--hygiene, food, and
the rest--is comprehended in a dozen words. Likewise, to sum up the
necessities of most men, a few concise lines would answer. Their régime
is in general of supreme simplicity, and so long as they follow it, all
is well with them, as with every obedient child of Mother Nature. Let
them depart from it, complications arise, health fails, gayety vanishes.
Only simple and natural living can keep a body in full vigor. Instead of
remembering this basic principle, we fall into the strangest
aberrations.
What material things does a man need to live under the best conditions?
A healthful diet, simple clothing, a sanitary dwelling-place, air and
exercise. I am not going to enter into hygienic details, compose menus,
or discuss model tenements and dress reform. My aim is to point out a
direction and tell what advantage would come to each of us from ordering
his life in a spirit of simplicity. To know that this spirit does not
rule in our society we need but watch the lives of men of all classes.
Ask different people, of very unlike surroundings, this question: What
do you need to live? You will see how they respond. Nothing is more
instructive. For some aboriginals of the Parisian asphalt, there is no
life possible outside a region bounded by certain boulevards. There one
finds the respirable air, the illuminating light, normal heat, classic
cookery, and, in moderation, so many other things without which it would
not be worth the while to promenade this round ball.
On the various rungs of the bourgeois ladder people reply to the
question, what is necessary to live? by figures varying with the degree
of their ambition or education: and by education is oftenest understood
the outward customs of life, the style of house, dress, table--an
education precisely skin-deep. Upward from a certain income, fee, or
salary, life becomes possible: below that it is impossible. We have seen
men commit suicide because their means had fallen under a certain
minimum. They preferred to disappear rather than retrench. Observe that
this minimum, the cause of their despair, would have been sufficient for
others of less exacting needs, and enviable to men whose tastes are
modest.
On lofty mountains vegetation changes with the altitude. There is the
region of ordinary flora, that of the forests, that of pastures, that of
bare rocks and glaciers. Above a certain zone wheat is no longer found,
but the vine still prospers. The oak ceases in the low regions, the pine
flourishes at considerable heights. Human life, with its needs, reminds
one of these phenomena of vegetation.
At a certain altitude of fortune the financier thrives, the club-man,
the society woman, all those in short for whom the strictly necessary
includes a certain number of domestics and equipages, as well as several
town and country houses. Further on flourishes the rich upper middle
class, with its own standards and life. In other regions we find men of
ample, moderate, or small means, and very unlike exigencies. Then come
the people--artisans, day-laborers, peasants, in short, the masses, who
live dense and serried like the thick, sturdy growths on the summits of
the mountains, where the larger vegetation can no longer find
nourishment. In all these different regions of society men live, and no
matter in which particular regions they flourish, all are alike human
beings, bearing the same mark. How strange that among fellows there
should be such a prodigious difference in requirements! And here the
analogies of our comparison fail us. Plants and animals of the same
families have identical wants. In human life we observe quite the
contrary. What conclusion shall we draw from this, if not that with us
there is a considerable elasticity in the nature and number of needs?
Is it well, is it favorable to the development of the individual and his
happiness, and to the development and happiness of society, that man
should have a multitude of needs, and bend his energies to their
satisfaction? Let us return for a moment to our comparison with inferior
beings. Provided that their essential wants are satisfied, they live
content. Is this true of men? No. In all classes of society we find
discontent. I leave completely out of the question those who lack the
necessities of life. One cannot with justice count in the number of
malcontents those from whom hunger, cold, and misery wring complaints. I
am considering now that multitude of people who live under conditions at
least supportable. Whence comes their heart-burning? Why is it found not
only among those of modest though sufficient means, but also under
shades of ever-increasing refinement, all along the ascending scale,
even to opulence and the summits of social place? They talk of the
contented middle classes. Who talk of them? People who, judging from
without, think that as soon as one begins to enjoy ease he ought to be
satisfied. But the middle classes themselves--do they consider
themselves satisfied? Not the least in the world. If there are people at
once rich and content, be assured that they are content because they
know how to be so, not because they are rich. An animal is satisfied
when it has eaten; it lies down and sleeps. A man also can lie down and
sleep for a time, but it never lasts. When he becomes accustomed to this
contentment, he tires of it and demands a greater. Man's appetite is not
appeased by food; it increases with eating. This may seem absurd, but it
is strictly true.
And the fact that those who make the most outcry are almost always those
who should find the best reasons for contentment, proves unquestionably
that happiness is not allied to the number of our needs and the zeal we
put into their cultivation. It is for everyone's interest to let this
truth sink deep into his mind. If it does not, if he does not by
decisive action succeed in limiting his needs, he risks a descent,
insensible and beyond retreat, along the declivity of desire.
He who lives to eat, drink, sleep, dress, take his walk,--in short,
pamper himself all that he can--be it the courtier basking in the sun,
the drunken laborer, the commoner serving his belly, the woman absorbed
in her toilettes, the profligate of low estate or high, or simply the
ordinary pleasure-lover, a "good fellow," but too obedient to material
needs--that man or woman is on the downward way of desire, and the
descent is fatal. Those who follow it obey the same laws as a body on an
inclined plane. Dupes of an illusion forever repeated, they think: "Just
a few steps more, the last, toward the thing down there that we covet;
then we will halt." But the velocity they gain sweeps them on, and the
further they go the less able they are to resist it.
Here is the secret of the unrest, the madness, of many of our
contemporaries. Having condemned their will to the service of their
appetites, they suffer the penalty. They are delivered up to violent
passions which devour their flesh, crush their bones, suck their blood,
and cannot be sated. This is not a lofty moral denunciation. I have
been listening to what life says, and have recorded, as I heard them,
some of the truths that resound in every square.
Has drunkenness, inventive as it is of new drinks, found the means of
quenching thirst? Not at all. It might rather be called the art of
making thirst inextinguishable. Frank libertinage, does it deaden the
sting of the senses? No; it envenoms it, converts natural desire into a
morbid obsession and makes it the dominant passion. Let your needs rule
you, pamper them--you will see them multiply like insects in the sun.
The more you give them, the more they demand. He is senseless who seeks
for happiness in material prosperity alone. As well undertake to fill
the cask of the Danaïdes. To those who have millions, millions are
wanting; to those who have thousands, thousands. Others lack a
twenty-franc piece or a hundred sous. When they have a chicken in the
pot, they ask for a goose; when they have the goose, they wish it were a
turkey, and so on. We shall never learn how fatal this tendency is.
There are too many humble people who wish to imitate the great, too many
poor working-men who ape the well-to-do middle classes, too many
shop-girls who play at being ladies, too many clerks who act the
club-man or sportsman; and among those in easy circumstances and the
rich, are too many people who forget that what they possess could serve
a better purpose than procuring pleasure for themselves, only to find in
the end that one never has enough. Our needs, in place of the servants
that they should be, have become a turbulent and seditious crowd, a
legion of tyrants in miniature. A man enslaved to his needs may best be
compared to a bear with a ring in its nose, that is led about and made
to dance at will. The likeness is not flattering, but you will grant
that it is true. It is in the train of their own needs that so many of
those men are dragged along who rant for liberty, progress, and I don't
know what else. They cannot take a step without asking themselves if it
might not irritate their masters. How many men and women have gone on
and on, even to dishonesty, for the sole reason that they had too many
needs and could not resign themselves to simple living. There are many
guests in the chambers of Mazas who could give us much light on the
subject of too exigent needs.
Let me tell you the story of an excellent man whom I knew. He tenderly
loved his wife and children, and they all lived together, in France, in
comfort and plenty, but with little of the luxury the wife coveted.
Always short of money, though with a little management he might have
been at ease, he ended by exiling himself to a distant colony, leaving
his wife and children in the mother country. I don't know how the poor
man can feel off there; but his family has a finer apartment, more
beautiful toilettes, and what passes for an equipage. At present they
are perfectly contented, but soon they will be used to this
luxury--rudimentary after all. Then Madam will find her furniture common
and her equipage mean. If this man loves his wife--and that cannot be
doubted--he will migrate to the moon if there is hope of a larger
stipend. In other cases the rôles are reversed, and the wife and
children are sacrificed to the ravenous needs of the head of the family,
whom an irregular life, play, and countless other costly follies have
robbed of all dignity. Between his appetites and his rôle of father he
has decided for the former, and he slowly drifts toward the most abject
egoism.
This forgetfulness of all responsibility, this gradual benumbing of
noble feeling, is not alone to be found among pleasure-seekers of the
upper classes: the people also are infected. I know more than one little
household, which ought to be happy, where the mother has only pain and
heartache day and night, the children are barefoot, and there is great
ado for bread. Why? Because too much money is needed by the father. To
speak only of the expenditure for alcohol, everybody knows the
proportions that has reached in the last twenty years. The sums
swallowed up in this gulf are fabulous--twice the indemnity of the war
of 1870. How many legitimate needs could have been satisfied with that
which has been thrown away on these artificial ones! The reign of wants
is by no means the reign of brotherhood. The more things a man desires
for himself, the less he can do for his neighbor, and even for those
attached to him by ties of blood.
* * * * *
The destruction of happiness, independence, moral fineness, even of the
sentiment of common interests--such is the result of the reign of needs.
A multitude of other unfortunate things might be added, of which not the
least is the disturbance of the public welfare. When society has too
great needs, it is absorbed with the present, sacrifices to it the
conquests of the past, immolates to it the future. After us the deluge!
To raze the forests in order to get gold; to squander your patrimony in
youth, destroying in a day the fruit of long years; to warm your house
by burning your furniture; to burden the future with debts for the sake
of present pleasure; to live by expedients and sow for the morrow
trouble, sickness, ruin, envy and hate--the enumeration of all the
misdeeds of this fatal régime has no end.
On the other hand, if we hold to simple needs we avoid all these evils
and replace them by measureless good. That temperance and sobriety are
the best guardians of health is an old story. They spare him who
observes them many a misery that saddens existence; they insure him
health, love of action, mental poise. Whether it be a question of food,
dress, or dwelling, simplicity of taste is also a source of independence
and safety. The more simply you live, the more secure is your future;
you are less at the mercy of surprises and reverses. An illness or a
period of idleness does not suffice to dispossess you: a change of
position, even considerable, does not put you to confusion. Having
simple needs, you find it less painful to accustom yourself to the
hazards of fortune. You remain a man, though you lose your office or
your income, because the foundation on which your life rests is not your
table, your cellar, your horses, your goods and chattels, or your money.
In adversity you will not act like a nursling deprived of its bottle and
rattle. Stronger, better armed for the struggle, presenting, like those
with shaven heads, less advantage to the hands of your enemy, you will
also be of more profit to your neighbor. For you will not rouse his
jealousy, his base desires or his censure, by your luxury, your
prodigality, or the spectacle of a sycophant's life; and, less absorbed
in your own comfort, you will find the means of working for that of
others.
VII
SIMPLE PLEASURES
Do you find life amusing in these days? For my part, on the whole, it
seems rather depressing, and I fear that my opinion is not altogether
personal. As I observe the lives of my contemporaries, and listen to
their talk, I find myself unhappily confirmed in the opinion that they
do not get much pleasure out of things. And certainly it is not from
lack of trying; but it must be acknowledged that their success is
meagre. Where can the fault be?
Some accuse politics or business; others social problems or militarism.
We meet only an embarrassment of choice when we start to unstring the
chaplet of our carking cares. Suppose we set out in pursuit of pleasure.
There is too much pepper in our soup to make it palatable. Our arms are
filled with a multitude of embarrassments, any one of which would be
enough to spoil our temper. From morning till night, wherever we go, the
people we meet are hurried, worried, preoccupied. Some have spilt their
good blood in the miserable conflicts of petty politics: others are
disheartened by the meanness and jealousy they have encountered in the
world of literature or art. Commercial competition troubles the sleep of
not a few. The crowded curricula of study and the exigencies of their
opening careers, spoil life for young men. The working classes suffer
the consequences of a ceaseless industrial struggle. It is becoming
disagreeable to govern, because authority is diminishing; to teach,
because respect is vanishing. Wherever one turns there is matter for
discontent.
And yet history shows us certain epochs of upheaval which were as
lacking in idyllic tranquillity as is our own, but which the gravest
events did not prevent from being gay. It even seems as if the
seriousness of affairs, the uncertainty of the morrow, the violence of
social convulsions, sometimes became a new source of vitality. It is not
a rare thing to hear soldiers singing between two battles, and I think
myself nowise mistaken in saying that human joy has celebrated its
finest triumphs under the greatest tests of endurance. But to sleep
peacefully on the eve of battle or to exult at the stake, men had then
the stimulus of an internal harmony which we perhaps lack. Joy is not in
things, it is in us, and I hold to the belief that the causes of our
present unrest, of this contagious discontent spreading everywhere, are
in us at least as much as in exterior conditions.
To give one's self up heartily to diversion one must feel himself on a
solid basis, must believe in life and find it within him. And here lies
our weakness. So many of us--even, alas! the younger men--are at
variance with life; and I do not speak of philosophers only. How do you
think a man can be amused while he has his doubts whether after all life
is worth living? Besides this, one observes a disquieting depression of
vital force, which must be attributed to the abuse man makes of his
sensations. Excess of all kinds has blurred our senses and poisoned our
faculty for happiness. Human nature succumbs under the irregularities
imposed upon it. Deeply attainted at its root, the desire to live,
persistent in spite of everything, seeks satisfaction in cheats and
baubles. In medical science we have recourse to artificial respiration,
artificial alimentation, and galvanism. So, too, around expiring
pleasure we see a crowd of its votaries, exerting themselves to reawaken
it, to reanimate it Most ingenious means have been invented; it can
never be said that expense has been spared. Everything has been tried,
the possible and the impossible. But in all these complicated alembics
no one has ever arrived at distilling a drop of veritable joy. We must
not confound pleasure with the instruments of pleasure. To be a painter,
does it suffice to arm one's self with a brush, or does the purchase at
great cost of a Stradivarius make one a musician? No more, if you had
the whole paraphernalia of amusement in the perfection of its
ingenuity, would it advance you upon your road. But with a bit of
crayon a great artist makes an immortal sketch. It needs talent or
genius to paint; and to amuse one's self, the faculty of being happy:
whoever possesses it is amused at slight cost. This faculty is destroyed
by scepticism, artificial living, over-abuse; it is fostered by
confidence, moderation and normal habits of thought and action.
An excellent proof of my proposition, and one very easily encountered,
lies in the fact that wherever life is simple and sane, true pleasure
accompanies it as fragrance does uncultivated flowers. Be this life
hard, hampered, devoid of all things ordinarily considered as the very
conditions of pleasure, the rare and delicate plant, joy, flourishes
there. It springs up between the flags of the pavement, on an arid wall,
in the fissure of a rock. We ask ourselves how it comes, and whence: but
it lives; while in the soft warmth of conservatories or in fields richly
fertilized you cultivate it at a golden cost to see it fade and die in
your hand.
Ask actors what audience is happiest at the play; they will tell you the
popular one. The reason is not hard to grasp. To these people the play
is an exception, they are not bored by it from over-indulgence. And,
too, to them it is a rest from rude toil. The pleasure they enjoy they
have honestly earned, and they know its cost as they know that of each
sou earned by the sweat of their labor. More, they have not frequented
the wings, they have no intrigues with the actresses, they do not see
the wires pulled. To them it is all real. And so they feel pleasure
unalloyed. I think I see the sated sceptic, whose monocle glistens in
that box, cast a disdainful glance over the smiling crowd.
"Poor stupid creatures, ignorant and gross!"
And yet they are the true livers, while he is an artificial product, a
mannikin, incapable of experiencing this fine and salutary intoxication
of an hour of frank pleasure.
Unhappily, ingenuousness is disappearing, even in the rural districts.
We see the people of our cities, and those of the country in their turn,
breaking with the good traditions. The mind, warped by alcohol, by the
passion for gambling, and by unhealthy literature, contracts little by
little perverted tastes. Artificial life makes irruption into
communities once simple in their pleasures, and it is like phylloxera to
the vine. The robust tree of rustic joy finds its sap drained, its
leaves turning yellow.
Compare a _fête champêtre_ of the good old style with the village
festivals, so-called, of to-day. In the one case, in the honored setting
of antique costumes, genuine countrymen sing the folk songs, dance
rustic dances, regale themselves with native drinks, and seem entirely
in their element. They take their pleasure as the blacksmith forges, as
the cascade tumbles over the rocks, as the colts frisk in the meadows.
It is contagious: it stirs your heart. In spite of yourself you are
ready to cry: "Bravo, my children. That is fine!" You want to join in.
In the other case, you see villagers disguised as city folk,
countrywomen made hideous by the modiste, and, as the chief ornament of
the festival, a lot of degenerates who bawl the songs of music halls;
and sometimes in the place of honor, a group of tenth-rate barnstormers,
imported for the occasion, to civilize these rustics and give them a
taste of refined pleasures. For drinks, liquors mixed with brandy or
absinthe: in the whole thing neither originality nor picturesqueness.
License, indeed, and clownishness, but not that _abandon_ which
ingenuous joy brings in its train.
* * * * *
This question of pleasure is capital. Staid people generally neglect it
as a frivolity; utilitarians, as a costly superfluity. Those whom we
designate as pleasure-seekers forage in this delicate domain like wild
boars in a garden. No one seems to doubt the immense human interest
attached to joy. It is a sacred flame that must be fed, and that throws
a splendid radiance over life. He who takes pains to foster it
accomplishes a work as profitable for humanity as he who builds bridges,
pierces tunnels, or cultivates the ground. So to order one's life as to
keep, amid toils and suffering, the faculty of happiness, and be able to
propagate it in a sort of salutary contagion among one's fellow-men, is
to do a work of fraternity in the noblest sense. To give a trifling
pleasure, smooth an anxious brow, bring a little light into dark
paths--what a truly divine office in the midst of this poor humanity!
But it is only in great simplicity of heart that one succeeds in
filling it.
We are not simple enough to be happy and to render others so. We lack
the singleness of heart and the self-forgetfulness. We spread joy, as we
do consolation, by such methods as to obtain negative results. To
console a person, what do we do? We set to work to dispute his
suffering, persuade him that he is mistaken in thinking himself unhappy.
In reality, our language translated into truthful speech would amount to
this: "You suffer, my friend? That is strange; you must be mistaken, for
I feel nothing." As the only human means of soothing grief is to share
it in the heart, how must a sufferer feel, consoled in this fashion?
To divert our neighbor, make him pass an agreeable hour, we set out in
the same way. We invite him to admire our versatility, to laugh at our
wit, to frequent our house, to sit at our table; through it all, our
desire to shine breaks forth. Sometimes, also, with a patron's
prodigality, we offer him the beneficence of a public entertainment of
our own choosing, unless we ask him to find amusement at our home, as we
sometimes do to make up a party at cards, with the _arrière-pensée_ of
exploiting him to our own profit. Do you think it the height of
pleasure for others to admire us, to admit our superiority, and to act
as our tools? Is there anything in the world so disgusting as to feel
one's self patronized, made capital of, enrolled in a claque? To give
pleasure to others and take it ourselves, we have to begin by removing
the ego, which is hateful, and then keep it in chains as long as the
diversions last. There is no worse kill-joy than the ego. We must be
good children, sweet and kind, button our coats over our medals and
titles, and with our whole heart put ourselves at the disposal of
others.
Let us sometimes live--be it only for an hour, and though we must lay
all else aside--to make others smile. The sacrifice is only in
appearance; no one finds more pleasure for himself than he who knows
how, without ostentation, to give himself that he may procure for those
around him a moment of forgetfulness and happiness.
When shall we be so simply and truly _men_ as not to obtrude our
personal business and distresses upon the people we meet socially? May
we not forget for an hour our pretensions, our strife, our distributions
into sets and cliques--in short, our "parts," and become as children
once more, to laugh again that good laugh which does so much to make the
world better?
* * * * *
Here I feel drawn to speak of something very particular, and in so doing
to offer my well-disposed readers an opportunity to go about a splendid
business. I want to call their attention to several classes of people
seldom thought of with reference to their pleasures.
It is understood that a broom serves only to sweep, a watering-pot to
water plants, a coffee-mill to grind coffee, and likewise it is supposed
that a nurse is designed only to care for the sick, a professor to
teach, a priest to preach, bury, and confess, a sentinel to mount guard;
and the conclusion is drawn that the people given up to the more serious
business of life are dedicated to labor, like the ox. Amusement is
incompatible with their activities. Pushing this view still further, we
think ourselves warranted in believing that the infirm, the afflicted,
the bankrupt, the vanquished in life's battle, and all those who carry
heavy burdens, are in the shade, like the northern slopes of mountains,
and that it is so of necessity. Whence the conclusion that serious
people have no need of pleasure, and that to offer it to them would be
unseemly; while as to the afflicted, there would be a lack of delicacy
in breaking the thread of their sad meditations. It seems therefore to
be understood that certain persons are condemned to be _always_ serious,
that we should approach them in a serious frame of mind, and talk to
them only of serious things: so, too, when we visit the sick or
unfortunate; we should leave our smiles at the door, compose our face
and manner to dolefulness, and talk of anything heartrending. Thus we
carry darkness to those in darkness, shade to those in shade. We
increase the isolation of solitary lives and the monotony of the dull
and sad. We wall up some existences as it were in dungeons; and because
the grass grows round their deserted prison-house, we speak low in
approaching it, as though it were a tomb. Who suspects the work of
infernal cruelty which is thus accomplished every day in the world! This
ought not to be.
When you find men or women whose lives are lost in hard tasks, or in the
painful office of seeking out human wretchedness and binding up wounds,
remember that they are beings made like you, that they have the same
wants, that there are hours when they need pleasure and diversion. You
will not turn them aside from their mission by making them laugh
occasionally--these people who see so many tears and griefs; on the
contrary, you will give them strength to go on the better with their
work.
And when people whom you know are in trial, do not draw a sanitary
cordon round them--as though they had the plague--that you cross only
with precautions which recall to them their sad lot. On the contrary,
after showing all your sympathy, all your respect for their grief,
comfort them, help them to take up life again; carry them a breath from
the out-of-doors--something in short to remind them that their
misfortune does not shut them off from the world.
And so extend your sympathy to those whose work quite absorbs them, who
are, so to put it, tied down. The world is full of men and women
sacrificed to others, who never have either rest or pleasure, and to
whom the least relaxation, the slightest respite, is a priceless good.
And this minimum of comfort could be so easily found for them if only
we thought of it. But the broom, you know, is made for sweeping, and it
seems as though it could not be fatigued. Let us rid ourselves of this
criminal blindness which prevents us from seeing the exhaustion of those
who are always in the breach. Relieve the sentinels perishing at their
posts, give Sisyphus an hour to breathe; take for a moment the place of
the mother, a slave to the cares of her house and her children;
sacrifice an hour of our sleep for someone worn by long vigils with the
sick. Young girl, tired sometimes perhaps of your walk with your
governess, take the cook's apron, and give her the key to the fields.
You will at once make others happy and be happy yourself. We go
unconcernedly along beside our brothers who are bent under burdens we
might take upon ourselves for a minute. And this short respite would
suffice to soothe aches, revive the flame of joy in many a heart, and
open up a wide place for brotherliness. How much better would one
understand another if he knew how to put himself heartily in that
other's place, and how much more pleasure there would be in life!
* * * * *
I have spoken too fully elsewhere of systematizing amusements for the
young, to return to it here in detail.[B] But I wish to say in substance
what cannot be too often repeated: If you wish youth to be moral, do not
neglect its pleasures, or leave to chance the task of providing them.
You will perhaps say that young people do not like to have their
amusements submitted to regulations, and that besides, in our day, they
are already over-spoiled and divert themselves only too much. I shall
reply, first, that one may suggest ideas, indicate directions, offer
opportunities for amusement, without making any regulations whatever. In
the second place, I shall make you see that you deceive yourselves in
thinking youth has too much diversion. Aside from amusements that are
artificial, enervating and immoral, that blight life instead of making
it bloom in splendor, there are very few left to-day. Abuse, that enemy
of legitimate use, has so befouled the world, that it is becoming
difficult to touch anything but what is unclean: whence watchfulness,
warnings and endless prohibitions. One can hardly stir without
encountering something that resembles unhealthy pleasure. Among young
people of to-day, particularly the self-respecting, the dearth of
amusements causes real suffering. One is not weaned from this generous
wine without discomfort. Impossible to prolong this state of affairs
without deepening the shadow round the heads of the younger generations.
We must come to their aid. Our children are heirs of a joyless world. We
bequeath them cares, hard questions, a life heavy with shackles and
complexities. Let us at least make an effort to brighten the morning of
their days. Let us interest ourselves in their sports, find them
pleasure-grounds, open to them our hearts and our homes. Let us bring
the family into our amusements. Let gayety cease to be a commodity of
export. Let us call in our sons, whom our gloomy interiors send out into
the street, and our daughters, moping in dismal solitude. Let us
multiply anniversaries, family parties, and excursions. Let us raise
good humor in our homes to the height of an institution. Let the
schools, too, do their part. Let masters and students--school-boys and
college-boys--meet together oftener for amusement. It will be so much
the better for serious work. There is no such aid to understanding one's
professor as to have laughed in his company; and conversely, to be well
understood a pupil must be met elsewhere than in class or examination.
And who will furnish the money? What a question! That is exactly the
error. Pleasure and money: people take them for the two wings of the
same bird! A gross illusion! Pleasure, like all other truly precious
things in this world, cannot be bought or sold. If you wish to be
amused, you must do your part toward it; that is the essential. There is
no prohibition against opening your purse, if you can do it, and find it
desirable. But I assure you it is not indispensable. Pleasure and
simplicity are two old acquaintances. Entertain simply, meet your
friends simply. If you come from work well done, are as amiable and
genuine as possible toward your companions, and speak no evil of the
absent, your success is sure.
[B] See "Youth," the chapter on "Joy."
VIII
THE MERCENARY SPIRIT AND SIMPLICITY
We have in passing touched upon a certain wide-spread prejudice which
attributes to money a magic power. Having come so near enchanted ground
we will not retire in awe, but plant a firm foot here, persuaded of many
truths that should be spoken. They are not new, but how they are
forgotten!
I see no possible way of doing without money. The only thing that
theorists or legislators who accuse it of all our ills have hitherto
achieved, has been to change its name or form. But they have never been
able to dispense with a symbol representative of the commercial value of
things. One might as well wish to do away with written language as to do
away with money. Nevertheless, this question of a circulating medium is
very troublesome. It forms one of the chief elements of complication in
our life. The economic difficulties amid which we still flounder, social
conventionalities, and the entire organization of modern life, have
carried gold to a rank so eminent that it is not astonishing to find the
imagination of man attributing to it a sort of royalty. And it is on
this side that we shall attack the problem.
The term money has for appendage that of merchandise. If there were no
merchandise there would be no money; but as long as there is merchandise
there will be money, little matter under what form. The source of all
the abuses which centre around money lies in a lack of discrimination.
People have confused under the term and idea of merchandise, things
which have no relation with one another. They have attempted to give a
venal value to things which neither could have it nor ought to. The idea
of purchase and sale has invaded ground where it may justly be
considered an enemy and a usurper. It is reasonable that wheat,
potatoes, wine, fabrics, should be bought and sold, and it is perfectly
natural that a man's labor procure him rights to life, and that there be
put into his hands something whose value represents them; but here
already the analogy ceases to be complete. A man's labor is not
merchandise in the same sense as a sack of flour or a ton of coal. Into
this labor enter elements which cannot be valued in money. In short,
there are things which can in no wise be bought: sleep, for instance,
knowledge of the future, talent. He who offers them for sale must be
considered a fool or an impostor. And yet there are gentlemen who coin
money by such traffic. They sell what does not belong to them, and
their dupes pay fictitious values in veritable coin. So, too, there are
dealers in pleasure, dealers in love, dealers in miracles, dealers in
patriotism, and the title of merchant, so honorable when it represents a
man selling that which is in truth a commodity of trade, becomes the
worst of stigmas when there is question of the heart, of religion, of
country.
Almost all men are agreed that to barter with one's sentiments, his
honor, his cloth, his pen, or his note, is infamous. Unfortunately this
idea, which suffers no contradiction as a theory, and which thus stated
seems rather a commonplace than a high moral truth, has infinite trouble
to make its way in practice. Traffic has invaded the world. The
money-changers are established even in the sanctuary, and by sanctuary I
do not mean religious things alone, but whatever mankind holds sacred
and inviolable. It is not gold that complicates, corrupts, and debases
life; it is our mercenary spirit.
The mercenary spirit resolves everything into a single question: _How
much is that going to bring me?_ and sums up everything in a single
axiom: _With money you can procure anything._ Following these two
principles of conduct, a society may descend to a degree of infamy
impossible to describe or to imagine.
_How much is it going to bring me?_ This question, so legitimate while
it concerns those precautions which each ought to take to assure his
subsistence by his labor, becomes pernicious as soon as it passes its
limits and dominates the whole life. This is so true that it vitiates
even the toil which gains our daily bread. I furnish paid labor; nothing
could be better: but if to inspire me in this labor I have only the
desire to get the pay, nothing could be worse. A man whose only motive
for action is his wages, does a bad piece of work: what interests him is
not the doing, it's the gold. If he can retrench in pains without
lessening his gains, be assured that he will do it. Plowman, mason,
factory laborer, he who loves not his work puts into it neither interest
nor dignity--is, in short, a bad workman. It is not well to confide
one's life to a doctor who is wholly engrossed in his fees, for the
spring of his action is the desire to garnish his purse with the
contents of yours. If it is for his interest that you should suffer
longer, he is capable of fostering your malady instead of fortifying
your strength. The instructor of children who cares for his work only so
far as it brings him profit, is a sad teacher; for his pay is
indifferent, and his teaching more indifferent still. Of what value is
the mercenary journalist? The day you write for the dollar, your prose
is not worth the dollar you write for. The more elevated in kind is the
object of human labor, the more the mercenary spirit, if it be present,
makes this labor void and corrupts it. There are a thousand reasons to
say that all toil merits its wage, that every man who devotes his
energies to providing for his life should have his place in the sun, and
that he who does nothing useful, does not gain his livelihood, in short,
is only a parasite. But there is no greater social error than to make
gain the sole motive of action. The best we put into our work--be that
work done by strength of muscle, warmth of heart, or concentration of
mind--is precisely that for which no one can pay us. Nothing better
proves that man is not a machine than this fact: two men at work with
the same forces and the same movements, produce totally different
results. Where lies the cause of this phenomenon? In the divergence of
their intentions. One has the mercenary spirit, the other has singleness
of purpose. Both receive their pay, but the labor of the one is barren;
the other has put his soul into his work. The work of the first is like
a grain of sand, out of which nothing comes through all eternity; the
other's work is like the living seed thrown into the ground; it
germinates and brings forth harvests. This is the secret which explains
why so many people have failed while employing the very processes by
which others succeed. Automatons do not reproduce their kind, and
mercenary labor yields no fruit.
* * * * *
Unquestionably we must bow before economic facts, and recognize the
difficulties of living: from day to day it becomes more imperative to
combine well one's forces in order to succeed in feeding, clothing,
housing, and bringing up a family. He who does not rightly take account
of these crying necessities, who makes no calculation, no provision for
the future, is but a visionary or an incompetent, and runs the risk of
sooner or later asking alms from those at whose parsimony he has
sneered. And yet, what would become of us if these cares absorbed us
entirely? if, mere accountants, we should wish to measure our effort by
the money it brings, do nothing that does not end in a receipt, and
consider as things worthless or pains lost whatever cannot be drawn up
in figures on the pages of a ledger? Did our mothers look for pay in
loving us and caring for us? What would become of filial piety if we
asked it for loving and caring for our aged parents?
What does it cost you to speak the truth? Misunderstandings, sometimes
sufferings and persecutions. To defend your country? Weariness, wounds
and often death. To do good? Annoyance, ingratitude, even resentment.
Self-sacrifice enters into all the essential actions of humanity. I defy
the closest calculators to maintain their position in the world without
ever appealing to aught but their calculations. True, those who know how
to make their "pile" are rated as men of ability. But look a little
closer. How much of it do they owe to the unselfishness of the
simple-hearted? Would they have succeeded had they met only shrewd men
of their own sort, having for device: "No money, no service?" Let us be
outspoken; it is due to certain people who do not count too rigorously,
that the world gets on. The most beautiful acts of service and the
hardest tasks have generally little remuneration or none. Fortunately
there are always men ready for unselfish deeds; and even for those paid
only in suffering, though they cost gold, peace, and even life. The part
these men play is often painful and discouraging. Who of us has not
heard recitals of experiences wherein the narrator regretted some past
kindness he had done, some trouble he had taken, to have nothing but
vexation in return? These confidences generally end thus: "It was folly
to do the thing!" Sometimes it is right so to judge; for it is always a
mistake to cast pearls before swine; but how many lives there are whose
sole acts of real beauty are these very ones of which the doers repent
because of men's ingratitude! Our wish for humanity is that the number
of these foolish deeds may go on increasing.
* * * * *
And now I arrive at the _credo_ of the mercenary spirit. It is
characterized by brevity. For the mercenary man, the law and the
prophets are contained in this one axiom: _With money you can get
anything._ From a surface view of our social life, nothing seems more
evident. "The sinews of war," "the shining mark," "the key that opens
all doors," "king money!"--If one gathered up all the sayings about the
glory and power of gold, he could make a litany longer than that which
is chanted in honor of the Virgin. You must be without a penny, if only
for a day or two, and try to live in this world of ours, to have any
idea of the needs of him whose purse is empty. I invite those who love
contrasts and unforeseen situations, to attempt to live without money
three days, and far from their friends and acquaintances--in short, far
from the society in which they are somebody. They will gain more
experience in forty-eight hours than in a year otherwise. Alas for some
people! they have this experience thrust upon them, and when veritable
ruin descends around their heads, it is useless to remain in their own
country, among the companions of their youth, their former colleagues,
even those indebted to them. People affect to know them no longer. With
what bitterness do they comment on the creed of money:--With gold one
may have what he will; without it, impossible to have anything! They
become pariahs, lepers, whom everyone shuns. Flies swarm round cadavers,
men round gold. Take away the gold, nobody is there. Oh, it has caused
tears to flow, this creed of gain! bitter tears, tears of blood, even
from those very eyes which once adored the golden calf.
And with it all, this creed is false, quite false. I shall not advance
to the attack with hackneyed tales of the rich man astray in a desert,
who cannot get even a drop of water for his gold; or the decrepit
millionaire who would give half he has to buy from a stalwart fellow
without a cent, his twenty years and his lusty health. No more shall I
attempt to prove that one cannot buy happiness. So many people who have
money and so many more who have not would smile at this truth as the
hardest ridden of saws. But I shall appeal to the common experience of
each of you, to make you put your finger on the clumsy lie hidden
beneath an axiom that all the world goes about repeating.
Fill your purse to the best of your means, and let us set out for one of
the watering-places of which there are so many. I mean some little town
formerly unknown and full of simple folk, respectful and hospitable,
among whom it was good to be, and cost little. Fame with her hundred
trumpets has announced them to the world, and shown them how they can
profit from their situation, their climate, their personality. You start
out, on the faith of Dame Rumor, flattering yourself that with your
money you are going to find a quiet place to rest, and, far from the
world of civilization and convention, weave a bit of poetry into the
warp of your days.
The beginning is good. Nature's setting and some patriarchal costumes,
slow to disappear, delight you. But as time passes, the impression is
spoiled. The reverse side of things begins to show. This which you
thought was as true antique as family heirlooms, is naught but trickery
to mystify the credulous. Everything is labeled, all is for sale, from
the earth to the inhabitants. These primitives have become the most
consummate of sharpers. Given your money, they have resolved the problem
of getting it with the least expense to themselves. On all sides are
nets and traps, like spider-webs, and the fly that this gentry lies
snugly in wait for is _you_. This is what twenty or thirty years of
venality has done for a population once simple and honest, whose contact
was grateful indeed to men worn by city life. Home-made bread has
disappeared, butter comes from the dealer, they know to an art how to
skim milk and adulterate wine; they have all the vices of dwellers in
cities without their virtues.
As you leave, you count your money. So much is wanting, that you make
complaint. You are wrong. One never pays too dear for the conviction
that there are things which money will not buy.
You have need in your house of an intelligent and competent servant:
attempt to find this _rara avis_. According to the principle that with
money one may get anything, you ought, as the position you offer is
inferior, ordinary, good, or exceptional, to find servants unskilled,
average, excellent, superior. But all those who present themselves for
the vacant post are listed in the last category, and are fortified with
certificates to support their pretensions. It is true that nine times
out of ten, when put to the test, these experts are found totally
wanting. Then why did they engage themselves with you? They ought in
truth to reply as does the cook in the comedy, who is dearly paid and
proves to know nothing.
"Why did you hire out as a _cordon bleu_?
_It was to get bigger commissions."_
That is the great affair. You will always find people who like to get
big wages. More rarely you find capability. And if you are looking for
probity, the difficulty increases. Mercenaries may be had for the
asking; faithfulness is another thing. Far be it from me to deny the
existence of faithful servants, at once intelligent and upright. But you
will encounter as many, if not more, among the illy paid as among those
most highly salaried. And it little matters where you find them, you may
be sure that they are not faithful in their own interest; they are
faithful because they have somewhat of that simplicity which renders us
capable of self-abnegation.
We also hear on all sides the adage that money is the sinews of war.
There is no question but that war costs much money, and we know
something about it. Does this mean that in order to defend herself
against her enemies and to honor her flag, a country need only be rich?
In olden time the Greeks took it upon themselves to teach the Persians
the contrary, and this lesson will never cease to be repeated in
history. With money ships, cannon, horses may be bought; but not so
military genius, administrative wisdom, discipline, enthusiasm. Put
millions into the hands of your recruiters, and charge them to bring you
a great leader and an army. You will find a hundred captains instead of
one, and a thousand soldiers. But put them under fire: you will have
enough of your hirelings! At least one might imagine that with money
alone it is possible to lighten misery. Ah! that too is an illusion from
which we must turn away. Money, be the sum great or small, is a seed
which germinates into abuses. Unless there go with it intelligence,
kindness, much knowledge of men, it will do nothing but harm, and we run
great risk of corrupting both those who receive our bounty and those
charged with its distribution.
* * * * *
Money will not answer for everything: it is a power, but it is not
all-powerful. Nothing complicates life, demoralizes man, perverts the
normal course of society like the development of venality. Wherever it
reigns, everybody is duped by everybody else: one can no longer put
trust in persons or things, no longer obtain anything of value. We would
not be detractors of money, but this general law must be applied to it:
_Everything in its own place._ When gold, which should be a servant,
becomes a tyrannical power, affronting morality, dignity and liberty;
when some exert themselves to obtain it at any price, offering for sale
what is not merchandise, and others, possessing wealth, fancy that they
can purchase what no one may buy, it is time to rise against this gross
and criminal superstition, and cry aloud to the imposture: "Thy money
perish with thee!" The most precious things that man possesses he has
almost always received gratuitously: let him learn so to give them.
IX
NOTORIETY AND THE INGLORIOUS GOOD
One of the chief puerilities of our time is the love of advertisement.
To emerge from obscurity, to be in the public eye, to make one's self
talked of--some people are so consumed with this desire that we are
justified in declaring them attacked with an itch for publicity. In
their eyes obscurity is the height of ignominy: so they do their best to
keep their names in every mouth. In their obscure position they look
upon themselves as lost, like ship-wrecked sailors whom a night of
tempest has cast on some lonely rock, and who have recourse to cries,
volleys, fire, all the signals imaginable, to let it be known that they
are there. Not content with setting off crackers and innocent rockets,
many, to make themselves heard at any cost, have gone to the length of
perfidy and even crime. The incendiary Erostratus has made numerous
disciples. How many men of to-day have become notorious for having
destroyed something of mark; pulled down--or tried to pull down--some
man's high reputation; signalled their passage, in short, by a scandal,
a meanness, or an atrocity!
This rage for notoriety does not surge through cracked brains alone, or
only in the world of adventurers, charlatans and pretenders generally;
it has spread abroad in all the domains of life, spiritual and material.
Politics, literature, even science, and--most odious of
all--philanthropy and religion are infected. Trumpets announce a good
deed done, and souls must be saved with din and clamor. Pursuing its way
of destruction, the rage for noise has entered places ordinarily silent,
troubled spirits naturally serene, and vitiated in large measure all
activity for good. The abuse of showing everything, or rather, putting
everything on exhibition; the growing incapacity to appreciate that
which chooses to remain hidden, and the habit of estimating the value of
things by the racket they make, have come to corrupt the judgment of the
most earnest men, and one sometimes wonders if society will not end by
transforming itself into a great fair, with each one beating his drum in
front of his tent.
Gladly do we quit the dust and din of like exhibitions, to go and
breathe peacefully in some far-off nook of the woods, all surprise that
the brook is so limpid, the forest so still, the solitude so enchanting.
Thank God there are yet these uninvaded corners. However formidable the
uproar, however deafening the babel of merry-andrews, it cannot carry
beyond a certain limit; it grows faint and dies away. The realm of
silence is vaster than the realm of noise. Herein is our consolation.
* * * * *
Rest a moment on the threshold of this infinite world of inglorious
good, of quiet activities. Instantly we are under the charm we feel in
stretches of untrodden snow, in hiding wood-flowers, in disappearing
pathways that seem to lead to horizons without bourn. The world is so
made that the engines of labor, the most active agencies, are everywhere
concealed. Nature affects a sort of coquetry in masking her operations.
It costs you pains to spy her out, ingenuity to surprise her, if you
would see anything but results and penetrate the secrets of her
laboratories. Likewise in human society, the forces which move for good
remain invisible, and even in our individual lives; what is best in us
is incommunicable, buried in the depths of us. And the more vital are
these sensibilities and intuitions, confounding themselves with the very
source of our being, the less ostentatious they are: they think
themselves profaned by exposure to the light of day. There is a secret
and inexpressible joy in possessing at the heart of one's being, an
interior world known only to God, whence, nevertheless, come impulses,
enthusiasms, the daily renewal of courage, and the most powerful motives
for activity among our fellow men. When this intimate life loses in
intensity, when man neglects it for what is superficial, he forfeits in
worth all that he gains in appearance. By a sad fatality, it happens
that in this way we often become less admirable in proportion as we are
more admired. And we remain convinced that what is best in the world is
unknown there; for only those know it who possess it, and if they speak
of it, in so doing they destroy its charm.
There are passionate lovers of nature whom she fascinates most in
by-places, in the cool of forests, in the clefts of cañons, everywhere
that the careless lover is not admitted to her contemplation. Forgetting
time and the life of the world, they pass days in these inviolate
stillnesses, watching a bird build its nest or brood over its young, or
some little groundling at its gracious play. So to seek the good within
himself--one must go where he no longer finds constraint, or pose, or
"gallery" of any sort, but the simple fact of a life made up of wishing
to be what it is good for it to be, without troubling about anything
else.
May we be permitted to record here some observations made from life? As
no names are given, they cannot be considered indiscreet.
In my country of Alsace, on the solitary route whose interminable ribbon
stretches on and on under the forests of the Vosges, there is a
stone-breaker whom I have seen at his work for thirty years. The first
time I came upon him, I was a young student, setting out with swelling
heart for the great city. The sight of this man did me good, for he was
humming a song as he broke his stones. We exchanged a few words, and he
said at the end: "Well, good-by, my boy, good courage and good luck!"
Since then I have passed and repassed along that same route, under
circumstances the most diverse, painful and joyful. The student has
finished his course, the breaker of stones remains what he was. He has
taken a few more precautions against the seasons' storms: a rush-mat
protects his back, and his felt hat is drawn further down to shield his
face. But the forest is always sending back the echo of his valiant
hammer. How many sudden tempests have broken over his bent back, how
much adverse fate has fallen on his head, on his house, on his country!
He continues to break his stones, and, coming and going I find him by
the roadside, smiling in spite of his age and his wrinkles, benevolent,
speaking--above all in dark days--those simple words of brave men, which
have so much effect when they are scanned to the breaking of stones.
It would be quite impossible to express the emotion the sight of this
simple man gives me, and certainly he has no suspicion of it. I know of
nothing more reassuring and at the same time more searching for the
vanity which ferments in our hearts, than this coming face to face with
an obscure worker who does his task as the oak grows and as the good God
makes his sun to rise, without asking who is looking on.
I have known, too, a number of old teachers, men and women who have
passed their whole life at the same occupation--making the rudiments of
human knowledge and a few principles of conduct penetrate heads
sometimes harder than the rocks. They have done it with their whole
soul, throughout the length of a hard life in which the attention of men
had little place. When they lie in their unknown graves, no one
remembers them but a few humble people like themselves. But their
recompense is in their love. No one is greater than these unknown.
How many hidden virtues may one not discover--if he know how to
search--among people of a class he often ridicules without perceiving
that in so doing he is guilty of cruelty, ingratitude and stupidity: I
mean old maids. People amuse themselves with remarking the surprising
dress and ways of some of them--things of no consequence, for that
matter. They persist also in reminding us that others, very selfish,
take interest in nothing but their own comfort and that of some cat or
canary upon which their powers of affection center; and certainly these
are not outdone in egoism by the most hardened celibates of the stronger
sex. But what we oftenest forget is the amount of self-sacrifice hidden
modestly away in so many of these truly admirable lives. Is it nothing
to be without home and its love, without future, without personal
ambition? to take upon one's self that cross of solitary life, so hard
to bear, especially when there is added the solitude of the heart? to
forget one's self and have no other interests than the care of the old,
of orphans, the poor, the infirm--those whom the brutal mechanism of
life casts out among its waste? Seen from without, these apparently tame
and lusterless lives rouse pity rather than envy. Those who approach
gently sometimes divine sad secrets, great trials undergone, heavy
burdens beneath which too fragile shoulders bend; but this is only the
side of shadow. We should learn to know and value this richness of
heart, this pure goodness, this power to love, to console, to hope, this
joyful giving up of self, this persistence in sweetness and forgiveness
even toward the unworthy. Poor old maids! how many wrecked lives have
you rescued, how many wounded have you healed, how many wanderers have
you gently led aright, how many naked have you clothed, how many orphans
have you taken in, and how many strangers, who would have been alone in
the world but for you--you who yourselves are often remembered of no
one. I mistake. Someone knows you; it is that great mysterious Pity
which keeps watch over our lives and suffers in our misfortunes.
Forgotten like you, often blasphemed, it has confided to you some of its
heavenliest messages, and that perhaps is why above your gentle comings
and goings, we sometimes seem to hear the rustling wings of ministering
angels.
* * * * *
The good hides itself under so many different forms, that one has often
as much pains to discover it as to unearth the best concealed crimes. A
Russian doctor, who had passed ten years of his life in Siberia,
condemned for political reasons to forced labor, used to find great
pleasure in telling of the generosity, courage and humanity he had
observed, not only among a large number of the condemned, but also
among the convict guards. For the moment one is tempted to exclaim:
Where will not the good hide away! And in truth life offers here great
surprises and embarrassing contrasts. There are good men, officially so
recognized, quoted among their associates, I had almost said guaranteed
by the Government or the Church, who can be reproached with nothing but
dry and hard hearts; while we are astonished to encounter in certain
fallen human beings, the most genuine tenderness, and as it were a
thirst for self-devotion.
* * * * *
I should like to speak next--apropos of the inglorious good--of a class
that to-day it is thought quite fitting to treat with the utmost
one-sidedness. I mean the rich. Some people think the last word is said
when they have stigmatized that infamy, capital. For them, all who
possess great fortunes are monsters gorged with the blood of the
miserable. Others, not so declamatory, persist, however, in confounding
riches with egoism and insensibility. Justice should be visited on these
errors, be they involuntary or calculated. No doubt there are rich men
who concern themselves with nobody else, and others who do good only
with ostentation; indeed, we know it too well. But does their inhumanity
or hypocrisy take away the value of the good that others do, and that
they often hide with a modesty so perfect?
I knew a man to whom every misfortune had come which can strike us in
our affections. He had lost a beloved wife, had seen all his children
buried, one after another. But he had a great fortune, the result of his
own labor. Living in the utmost simplicity, almost without personal
wants, he spent his time in searching for opportunities to do good, and
profiting by them. How many people he surprised in flagrant poverty,
what means he combined for relieving distress and lighting up dark
lives, with what kindly thoughtfulness he took his friends unawares, no
one can imagine. He liked to do good to others and enjoy their surprise
when they did not know whence the relief came. It pleased him to repair
the injustices of fortune, to bring tears of happiness in families
pursued by mischance. He was continually plotting, contriving,
machinating in the dark, with a childish fear of being caught with his
hand in the bag. The greater part of these fine deeds were not known
till after his death; the whole of them we shall never know.
He was a socialist of the right sort! for there are two kinds of them.
Those who aspire to appropriate to themselves a part of the goods of
others, are numerous and commonplace. To belong to their order it
suffices to have a big appetite. Those who are hungering to divide their
own goods with men who have none, are rare and precious, for to enter
this choice company there is need of a brave and noble heart, free from
selfishness, and sensitive to both the happiness and unhappiness of its
fellows. Fortunately the race of these socialists is not extinct, and I
feel an unalloyed satisfaction in offering them a tribute they never
claim.
I must be pardoned for dwelling upon this. It does one good to offset
the bitterness of so many infamies, so many calumnies, so much
charlatanism, by resting the eyes upon something more beautiful,
breathing the perfume of these stray corners where simple goodness
flowers.
A lady, a foreigner, doubtless little used to Parisian life, just now
told me with what horror the things she sees here inspire her:--these
vile posters, these "yellow" journals, these women with bleached hair,
this crowd rushing to the races, to dance-halls, to roulette tables, to
corruption--the whole flood of superficial and mundane life. She did not
speak the word Babylon, but doubtless it was out of pity for one of the
inhabitants of this city of perdition.
"Alas, yes, madam, these things are sad, but you have not seen all."
"Heaven preserve me from that!"
"On the contrary, I wish you could see everything; for if the dark side
is very ugly, there is so much to atone for it. And believe me, madam,
you have simply to change your quarter, or observe at another hour. For
instance, take the Paris of early morning. It will offer much to correct
your impressions of the Paris of the night. Go see, among so many other
working people, the street-sweepers, who come out at the hour when the
revellers and malefactors go in. Observe beneath these rags those
caryatid bodies, those austere faces! How serious they are at their work
of sweeping away the refuse of the night's revelry. One might liken
them to the prophets at Ahasuerus's gates. There are women among them,
many old people. When the air is cold they stop to blow their fingers,
and then go at it again. So it is every day. And they, too, are
inhabitants of Paris.
"Go next to the faubourgs, to the factories, especially the smaller
ones, where the children or the employers labor with the men. Watch the
army of workers marching to their tasks. How ready and willing these
young girls seem, as they come gaily down from their distant quarters to
the shops and stores and offices of the city. Then visit the homes from
which they come. See the woman of the people at her work. Her husband's
wages are modest, their dwelling is cramped, the children are many, the
father is often harsh. Make a collection of the biographies of lowly
people, budgets of modest family life: look at them attentively and
long.
"After that, go see the students. Those who have scandalized you in the
streets are numerous, but those who labor hard are legion--only they
stay at home, and are not talked about. If you knew the toil and dig of
the Latin Quarter! You find the papers full of the rumpus made by a
certain set of youths who call themselves students. The papers say
enough of those who break windows; but why do they make no mention of
those who spend their nights toiling over problems? Because it wouldn't
interest the public. Yes, when now and then one of them, a medical
student perhaps, dies a victim to professional duty, the matter has two
lines in the dailies. A drunken brawl gets half a column, with every
detail elaborated. Nothing is lacking but the portraits of the
heroes--and not always that!
"I should never end were I to try to point out to you all that you must
go to see if you would see all: you would needs make the tour of society
at large, rich and poor, wise and ignorant. And certainly you would not
judge so severely then. Paris is a world, and here, as in the world in
general, the good hides away while the evil flaunts itself. Observing
only the surface, you sometimes ask how there can possibly be so much
riff-raff. When, on the contrary, you look into the depths, you are
astonished that in this troublous, obscure and sometimes frightful life
there can be so much of virtue."
* * * * *
But why linger over these things? Am I _not_ blowing trumpets for those
who hold trumpet-blowing in horror? Do not understand me so. My aim is
this--to make men think about unostentatious goodness; above all, to
make them love it and practice it. The man who finds his satisfaction in
things which glitter and hold his eyes, is lost: first, because he will
thus see evil before all else; then, because he gets accustomed to the
sight of only such good as seeks for notice, and therefore easily
succumbs to the temptation to live himself for appearances. Not only
must one be resigned to obscurity, he must love it, if he does not wish
to slip insensibly into the ranks of figurants, who preserve their parts
only while under the eyes of the spectators, and put off in the wings
the restraints imposed on the stage. Here we are in the presence of one
of the essential elements of the moral life. And this which we say is
true not only for those who are called humble and whose lot it is to
pass unremarked; it is just as true, and more so, for the chief actors.
If you would not be a brilliant inutility, a man of gold lace and
plumes, but empty inside, you must play the star rôle in the simple
spirit of the most obscure of your collaborators. He who is nothing
worth except on hours of parade, is worth less than nothing. Have we the
perilous honor of being always in view, of marching in the front ranks?
Let us take so much the greater care of the sanctuary of silent good
within us. Let us give to the structure whose façade is seen of our
fellow-men, a wide foundation of simplicity, of humble fidelity. And
then, out of sympathy, out of gratitude, let us stay near our brothers
who are unknown to fame. We owe everything to them--do we not? I call to
witness everyone who has found in life this encouraging experience, that
stones hidden in the soil hold up the whole edifice. All those who
arrive at having a public and recognized value, owe it to some humble
spiritual ancestors, to some forgotten inspirers. A small number of the
good, among them simple women, peasants, vanquished heroes, parents as
modest as they are revered, personify for us beautiful and noble living;
their example inspires us and gives us strength. The remembrance of them
is forever inseparable from that conscience before which we arraign
ourselves. In our hours of trial, we think of them, courageous and
serene, and our burdens lighten. In clouds they compass us about, these
witnesses invisible and beloved who keep us from stumbling and our feet
from falling in the battle; and day by day do they prove to us that the
treasure of humanity is its hidden goodness.
X
THE WORLD AND THE LIFE OF THE HOME
In the time of the Second Empire, in one of our pleasantest
sub-prefectures of the provinces, a little way from some baths
frequented by the Emperor, there was a mayor, a very worthy man and
intelligent too, whose head was suddenly turned by the thought that his
sovereign might one day descend upon his home. Up to this time he had
lived in the house of his fathers, a son respectful of the slightest
family traditions. But when once the all-absorbing idea of receiving the
Emperor had taken possession of his brain, he became another man. In
this new light, what had before seemed sufficient for his needs, even
enjoyable, all this simplicity that his ancestors had loved, appeared
poor, ugly, ridiculous. Out of the question to ask an Emperor to climb
this wooden staircase, sit in these old arm-chairs, walk over such
superannuated carpets. So the mayor called architect and masons;
pickaxes attacked walls and demolished partitions, and a drawing-room
was made, out of all proportion to the rest of the house in size and
splendor. He and his family retired into close quarters, where people
and furniture incommoded each other generally. Then, having emptied his
purse and upset his household by this stroke of genius, he awaited the
royal guest. Alas, he soon saw the end of the Empire arrive, but the
Emperor never.
The folly of this poor man is not so rare. As mad as he are all those
who sacrifice their home life to the demands of the world. And the
danger in such a sacrifice is most menacing in times of unrest. Our
contemporaries are constantly exposed to it, and constantly succumbing.
How many family treasures have they literally thrown away to satisfy
worldly ambitions and conventions; but the happiness upon which they
thought to come through these impious immolations always eludes them.
To give up the ancestral hearth, to let the family traditions fall into
desuetude, to abandon the simple domestic customs, for whatever return,
is to make a fool's bargain; and such is the place in society of family
life, that if this be impoverished, the trouble is felt throughout the
whole social organism. To enjoy a normal development, this organism has
need of well-tried individuals, each having his own value, his own
hall-mark. Otherwise society becomes a flock, and sometimes a flock
without a shepherd. But whence does the individual draw his
originality--this unique something, which, joined to the distinctive
qualities of others, constitutes the wealth and strength of a community?
He can draw it only from his own family. Destroy the assemblage of
memories and practices whence emanates for each home an atmosphere in
miniature, and you dry up the sources of character, sap the strength of
public spirit.
It concerns the country that each home be a world, profound, respected,
communicating to its members an ineffaceable moral imprint. But before
pursuing the subject further, let us rid ourselves of a
misunderstanding. Family feeling, like all beautiful things, has its
caricature, which is family egoism. Some families are like barred and
bolted citadels, their members organized for the exploitation of the
whole world. Everything that does not directly concern them is
indifferent to them. They live like colonists, I had almost said
intruders, in the society around them. Their particularism is pushed to
such an excess that they make enemies of the whole human race. In their
small way they resemble those powerful societies, formed from time to
time through the ages, which possess themselves of universal rule, and
for which no one outside their own community counts. This is the spirit
that has sometimes made the family seem a retreat of egoism which it was
necessary to destroy for the public safety. But as patriotism and
jingoism are as far apart as the east from the west, so are family
feeling and clannishness.
* * * * *
Here we are talking of right family feeling, and nothing else in the
world can take its place; for in it lie in germ all those fine and
simple virtues which assure the strength and duration of social
institutions. And the very base of family feeling is respect for the
past; for the best possessions of a family are its common memories. An
intangible, indivisible and inalienable capital, these souvenirs
constitute a sacred fund that each member of a family ought to consider
more precious than anything else he possesses. They exist in a dual
form: in idea and in fact. They show themselves in language, habits of
thought, sentiments, even instincts, and one sees them materialized in
portraits, furniture, buildings, dress, songs. To profane eyes, they are
nothing; to the eyes of those who know how to appreciate the things of
the family, they are relics with which one should not part at any price.
But what generally happens in our day? Worldliness wars upon the
sentiment of family, and I know of no strife more impassioned. By great
means and small, by all sorts of new customs, requirements and
pretensions, the spirit of the world breaks into the domestic sanctuary.
What are this stranger's rights? its titles? Upon what does it rest its
peremptory claims? This is what people too often neglect to inquire.
They make a mistake. We treat the invader as very poor and simple people
do a pompous visitor. For this incommoding guest of a day, they pillage
their garden, bully their children and servants, and neglect their
work. Such conduct is not only wrong, it is impolitic. One should have
the courage to remain what he is, in the face of all comers.
The worldly spirit is full of impertinences. Here is a home which has
formed characters of mark, and is forming them yet. The people, the
furnishings, the customs are all in harmony. By marriage or through
relations of business or pleasure, the worldly spirit enters. It finds
everything out of date, awkward, too simple, lacking the modern touch.
At first it restricts itself to criticism and light raillery. But this
is the dangerous moment. Look out for yourself; here is the enemy! If
you so much as listen to his reasonings, to-morrow you will sacrifice a
piece of furniture, the next day a good old tradition, and so one by one
the family heirlooms dear to the heart will go to the bric-a-brac
dealer--and filial piety with them.
In the midst of your new habits and in the changed atmosphere, your
friends of other days, your old relatives, will be expatriated. Your
next step will be to lay them aside in their turn; the worldly spirit
leaves the old out of consideration. At last, established in an
absolutely transformed setting, even you will view yourself with
amazement. Nothing will be familiar, but surely it will be correct; at
least the world will be satisfied!--Ah! that is where you are mistaken!
After having made you cast out pure treasure as so much junk, it will
find that your borrowed livery fits you ill, and will hasten to make you
sensible of the ridiculousness of the situation. Much better have had
from the beginning the courage of your convictions, and have defended
your home.
Many young people when they marry, listen to this voice of the world.
Their parents have given them the example of a modest life; but the new
generation thinks it affirms its rights to existence and liberty, by
repudiating ways in its eyes too patriarchal. So these young folks make
efforts to set themselves up lavishly in the latest fashion, and rid
themselves of useless property at dirt-cheap prices. Instead of filling
their houses with objects which say: Remember! they garnish them with
quite new furnishings that as yet have no meaning. Wait, I am wrong;
these things are often symbols, as it were, of a facile and superficial
existence. In their midst one breathes a certain heady vapor of
mundanity. They recall the life outside, the turmoil, the rush. And were
one sometimes disposed to forget this life, they would call back his
wandering thought and say: Remember!--in another sense: Do not forget
your appointment at the club, the play, the races! The home, then,
becomes a sort of half-way house where one comes to rest a little
between two prolonged absences; it isn't a good place to stay. As it has
no soul, it does not speak to yours. Time to eat and sleep, and then off
again! Otherwise you become as dull as a hermit.
We are all acquainted with people who have a rage for being abroad, who
think the world would no longer go round if they didn't figure on all
sides of it. To stay at home is penal; there they cease to be in view. A
horror of home life possesses them to such a degree that they would
rather pay to be bored outside than be amused gratuitously within.
In this way society slowly gravitates toward life in herds, which must
not be confounded with public life. The life in herds is somewhat like
that of swarms of flies in the sun. Nothing so much resembles the
worldly life of a man as the worldly life of another man. And this
universal banality destroys the very essence of public spirit. One need
not journey far to discover the ravages made in modern society by the
spirit of worldliness; and if we have so little foundation, so little
equilibrium, calm good sense and initiative, one of the chief reasons
lies in the undermining of the home life. The masses have timed their
pace by that of people of fashion. They too have become worldly. Nothing
can be more so than to quit one's own hearth for the life of saloons.
The squalor and misery of the homes is not enough to explain the current
which carries each man away from his own. Why does the peasant desert
for the inn the house that his father and grandfather found so
comfortable? It has remained the same. There is the same fire in the
same chimney. Whence comes it that it lights only an incomplete circle,
when in olden times young and old sat shoulder to shoulder? Something
has changed in the minds of men. Yielding to dangerous impulses, they
have broken with simplicity. The fathers have quitted their post of
honor, the wives grow dull beside the solitary hearth, and the children
quarrel while waiting their turn to go abroad, each after his own fancy.
We must learn again to live the home life, to value our domestic
traditions. A pious care has preserved certain monuments of the past. So
antique dress, provincial dialects, old folk songs have found
appreciative hands to gather them up before they should disappear from
the earth. What a good deed, to guard these crumbs of a great past,
these vestiges of the souls of our ancestors! Let us do the same for our
family traditions, save and guard as much as possible of the
patriarchal, whatever its form.
* * * * *
But not everyone has traditions to keep. All the more reason for
redoubling the effort to constitute and foster a family life. And to do
this there is need neither of numbers nor a rich establishment. To
create a home you must have the spirit of home. Just as the smallest
village may have its history, its moral stamp, so the smallest home may
have its soul. Oh! the spirit of places, the atmosphere which surrounds
us in human dwellings! What a world of mystery! Here, even on the
threshold the cold begins to penetrate, you are ill at ease, something
intangible repulses you. There, no sooner does the door shut you in than
friendliness and good humor envelop you. It is said that walls have
ears. They have also voices, a mute eloquence. Everything that a
dwelling contains is bathed in an ether of personality. And I find proof
of its quality even in the apartments of bachelors and solitary women.
What an abyss between one room and another room! Here, all is dead,
indifferent, commonplace: the device of the owner is written all over
it, even in his fashion of arranging his photographs and books: All is
the same to me! There, one breathes in animation, a contagious joy in
life. The visitor hears repeated in countless fashions: "Whoever you
are, guest of an hour, I wish you well, peace be with you!"
Words can do little justice to the subject of home, tell little about
the effect of a favorite flower in the window, or the charm of an old
arm-chair where the grandfather used to sit, offering his wrinkled hands
to the kisses of chubby children. Poor moderns, always moving or
remodeling! We who from transforming our cities, our houses, our customs
and creeds, have no longer where to lay our heads, let us not add to the
pathos and emptiness of our changeful existence by abandoning the life
of the home. Let us light again the flame put out on our hearths, make
sanctuaries for ourselves, warm nests where the children may grow into
men, where love may find privacy, old age repose, prayer an altar, and
the fatherland a cult!
XI
SIMPLE BEAUTY
Someone may protest against the nature of the simple life in the name of
esthetics, or oppose to ours the theory of the service of luxury--that
providence of business, fostering mother of arts, and grace of civilized
society. We shall try, briefly, to anticipate these objections.
It will no doubt have been evident that the spirit which animates these
pages is not utilitarian. It would be an error to suppose that the
simplicity we seek has anything in common with that which misers impose
upon themselves through cupidity, or narrow-minded people through false
austerity. To the former the simple life is the one that costs least; to
the latter it is a flat and colorless existence, whose merit lies in
depriving one's self of everything bright, smiling, seductive.
It displeases us not a whit that people of large means should put their
fortune into circulation instead of hoarding it, so giving life to
commerce and the fine arts. That is using one's privileges to good
advantage. What we would combat is foolish prodigality, the selfish use
of wealth, and above all the quest of the superfluous on the part of
those who have the greatest need of taking thought for the necessary.
The lavishness of a Mæcenas could not have the same effect in a society
as that of a common spendthrift who astonishes his contemporaries by the
magnificence of his life and the folly of his waste. In these two cases
the same term means very different things--to scatter money broadcast
does not say it all; there are ways of doing it which ennoble men, and
others which degrade them. Besides, to scatter money supposes that one
is well provided with it. When the love of sumptuous living takes
possession of those whose means are limited, the matter becomes
strangely altered. And a very striking characteristic of our time is
the rage for scattering broadcast which the very people have who ought
to husband their resources. Munificence is a benefit to society, that we
grant willingly. Let us even allow that the prodigality of certain rich
men is a safety-valve for the escape of the superabundant: we shall not
attempt to gainsay it. Our contention is that too many people meddle
with the safety-valve when to practice economy is the part of both their
interest and their duty: their extravagance is a private misfortune and
a public danger.
* * * * *
So much for the utility of luxury.
We now wish to explain ourselves upon the question of esthetics--oh!
very modestly, and without trespassing on the ground of the specialists.
Through a too common illusion, simplicity and beauty are considered as
rivals. But simple is not synonymous with ugly, any more than sumptuous,
stylish and costly are synonymous with beautiful. Our eyes are wounded
by the crying spectacle of gaudy ornament, venal art and senseless and
graceless luxury. Wealth coupled with bad taste sometimes makes us
regret that so much money is in circulation to provoke the creation of
such a prodigality of horrors. Our contemporary art suffers as much from
the want of simplicity as does our literature--too much in it that is
irrelevant, over-wrought, falsely imagined. Rarely is it given us to
contemplate in line, form, or color, that simplicity allied to
perfection which commands the eyes as evidence does the mind. We need to
be rebaptized in the ideal purity of immortal beauty which puts its seal
on the masterpieces; one shaft of its radiance is worth more than all
our pompous exhibitions.
* * * * *
Yet what we now have most at heart is to speak of the ordinary esthetics
of life, of the care one should bestow upon the adornment of his
dwelling and his person, giving to existence that luster without which
it lacks charm. For it is not a matter of indifference whether man pays
attention to these superfluous necessities or whether he does not: it is
by them that we know whether he puts soul into his work. Far from
considering it as wasteful to give time and thought to the perfecting,
beautifying and poetizing of forms, I think we should spend as much as
we can upon it. Nature gives us her example, and the man who should
affect contempt for the ephemeral splendor of beauty with which we
garnish our brief days, would lose sight of the intentions of Him who
has put the same care and love into the painting of the lily of an hour
and the eternal hills.
But we must not fall into the gross error of confounding true beauty
with that which has only the name. The beauty and poetry of existence
lie in the understanding we have of it. Our home, our table, our dress
should be the interpreters of intentions. That these intentions be so
expressed, it is first necessary to have them, and he who possesses them
makes them evident through the simplest means. One need not be rich to
give grace and charm to his habit and his habitation: it suffices to
have good taste and good-will. We come here to a point very important to
everybody, but perhaps of more interest to women than to men.
Those who would have women conceal themselves in coarse garments of the
shapeless uniformity of bags, violate nature in her very heart, and
misunderstand completely the spirit of things. If dress were only a
precaution to shelter us from cold or rain, a piece of sacking or the
skin of a beast would answer. But it is vastly more than this. Man puts
himself entire into all that he does; he transforms into types the
things that serve him. The dress is not simply a covering, it is a
symbol. I call to witness the rich flowering of national and provincial
costumes, and those worn by our early corporations. A woman's toilette,
too, has something to say to us. The more meaning there is in it, the
greater its worth. To be truly beautiful, it must tell us of beautiful
things, things personal and veritable. Spend all the money you possess
upon it, if its form is determined by chance or custom, if it has no
relation to her who wears it, it is only toggery, a domino.
Ultra-fashionable dress, which completely masks feminine personality
under designs of pure convention, despoils it of its principal
attraction. From this abuse it comes about that many things which women
admire do as much wrong to their beauty as to the purses of their
husbands and fathers. What would you say of a young girl who expressed
her thoughts in terms very choice, indeed, but taken word for word from
a phrase-book? What charm could you find in this borrowed language? The
effect of toilettes well-designed in themselves but seen again and
again on all women indiscriminately, is precisely the same.
I can not resist citing here a passage from Camille Lemonnier, that
harmonizes with my idea.
"Nature has given to the fingers of woman a charming art, which she
knows by instinct, and which is peculiarly her own--as silk to the worm,
and lace-work to the swift and subtle spider. She is the poet, the
interpreter of her own grace and ingenuousness, the spinner of the
mystery in which her wish to please arrays itself. All the talent she
expends in her effort to equal man in the other arts, is never worth the
spirit and conception wrought out through a bit of stuff in her skillful
hands.
"Well, I wish that this art were more honored than it is. As education
should consist in thinking with one's mind, feeling with one's heart,
expressing the little personalities of the inmost, invisible _I_,--which
on the contrary are repressed, leveled down by conformity,--I would that
the young girl in her novitiate of womanhood, the future mother, might
early become the little exponent of this art of the toilet, her own
dressmaker in short--she who one day shall make the dresses of her
children. But with the taste and the gift to improvise, to express
herself in that masterpiece of feminine personality and skill--_a gown_,
without which a woman is no more than a bundle of rags."
The dress you have made for yourself is almost always the most becoming,
and, however that may be, it is the one that pleases you most. Women of
leisure too often forget this; working women, also, in city and country
alike. Since these last are costumed by dressmakers and milliners, in
very doubtful imitation of the modish world, grace has almost
disappeared from their dress. And has anything more surely the gift to
please than the fresh apparition of a young working girl or a daughter
of the fields, wearing the costume of her country, and beautiful from
her simplicity alone?
These same reflections might be applied to the fashion of decorating and
arranging our houses. If there are toilettes which reveal an entire
conception of life, hats that are poems, knots of ribbon that are
veritable works of art, so there are interiors which after their manner
speak to the mind. Why, under pretext of decorating our homes, do we
destroy that personal character which always has such value? Why have
our sleeping-rooms conform to those of hotels, our reception-rooms to
waiting-rooms, by making predominant a uniform type of official beauty?
What a pity to go through the houses of a city, the cities of a country,
the countries of a vast continent, and encounter everywhere certain
forms, identical, inevitable, exasperating by their repetition! How
esthetics would gain by more simplicity! Instead of this luxury in job
lots, all these decorations, pretentious but vapid from iteration, we
should have an infinite variety; happy improvisations would strike our
eyes, the unexpected in a thousand forms would rejoice our hearts, and
we should rediscover the secret of impressing on a drapery or a piece of
furniture that stamp of human personality which makes certain antiques
priceless.
Let us pass at last to things simpler still; I mean the little details
of housekeeping which many young people of our day find so unpoetical.
Their contempt for material things, for the humble cares a house
demands, arises from a confusion very common but none the less
unfortunate, which comes from the belief that beauty and poetry are
within some things, while others lack them; that some occupations are
distinguished and agreeable, such as cultivating letters, playing the
harp; and that others are menial and disagreeable, like blacking shoes,
sweeping, and watching the pot boil. Childish error! Neither harp nor
broom has anything to do with it; all depends on the hand in which they
rest and the spirit that moves it. Poetry is not in things, it is in us.
It must be impressed on objects from without, as the sculptor impresses
his dream on the marble. If our life and our occupations remain too
often without charm, in spite of any outward distinction they may have,
it is because we have not known how to put anything into them. The
height of art is to make the inert live, and to tame the savage. I would
have our young girls apply themselves to the development of the truly
feminine art of giving a soul to things which have none. The triumph of
woman's charm is in that work. Only a woman knows how to put into a home
that indefinable something whose virtue has made the poet say, "The
housetop rejoices and is glad." They say there are no such things as
fairies, or that there are fairies no longer, but they know not what
they say. The original of the fairies sung by poets was found, and is
still, among those amiable mortals who knead bread with energy, mend
rents with cheerfulness, nurse the sick with smiles, put witchery into
a ribbon and genius into a stew.
* * * * *
It is indisputable that the culture of the fine arts has something
refining about it, and that our thoughts and acts are in the end
impregnated with that which strikes our eyes. But the exercise of the
arts and the contemplation of their products is a restricted privilege.
It is not given to everyone to possess, to comprehend or to create fine
things. Yet there is a kind of ministering beauty which may make its way
everywhere--the beauty which springs from the hands of our wives and
daughters. Without it, what is the most richly decorated house? A dead
dwelling-place. With it the barest home has life and brightness. Among
the forces capable of transforming the will and increasing happiness,
there is perhaps none in more universal use than this beauty. It knows
how to shape itself by means of the crudest tools, in the midst of the
greatest difficulties. When the dwelling is cramped, the purse limited,
the table modest, a woman who has the gift, finds a way to make order,
fitness and convenience reign in her house. She puts care and art into
everything she undertakes. To do well what one has to do is not in her
eyes the privilege of the rich, but the right of all. That is her aim,
and she knows how to give her home a dignity and an attractiveness that
the dwellings of princes, if everything is left to mercenaries, cannot
possess.
Thus understood, life quickly shows itself rich in hidden beauties, in
attractions and satisfactions close at hand. To be one's self, to
realize in one's natural place the kind of beauty which is fitting
there--this is the ideal. How the mission of woman broadens and deepens
in significance when it is summed up in this: to put a soul into the
inanimate, and to give to this gracious spirit of things those subtle
and winsome outward manifestations to which the most brutish of human
beings is sensible. Is not this better than to covet what one has not,
and to give one's self up to longings for a poor imitation of others'
finery?
XII
PRIDE AND SIMPLICITY IN THE INTERCOURSE OF MEN
It would perhaps be difficult to find a more convincing example than
pride to show that the obstacles to a better, stronger, serener life are
rather in us than in circumstances. The diversity, and more than that,
the contrasts in social conditions give rise inevitably to all sorts of
conflicts. Yet in spite of this how greatly would social relations be
simplified, if we put another spirit into mapping out our plan of
outward necessities! Be well persuaded that it is not primarily
differences of class and occupation, differences in the outward
manifestations of their destinies, which embroil men. If such were the
case, we should find an idyllic peace reigning among colleagues, and all
those whose interests and lot are virtually equivalent. On the contrary,
as everyone knows, the most violent shocks come when equal meets equal,
and there is no war worse than civil war. But that which above all
things else hinders men from good understanding, is pride. It makes a
man a hedgehog, wounding everyone he touches. Let us speak first of the
pride of the great.
What offends me in this rich man passing in his carriage, is not his
equipage, his dress, or the number and splendor of his retinue: it is
his contempt. That he possesses a great fortune does not disturb me,
unless I am badly disposed: but that he splashes me with mud, drives
over my body, shows by his whole attitude that I count for nothing in
his eyes because I am not rich like himself--this is what disturbs me,
and righteously. He heaps suffering upon me needlessly. He humiliates
and insults me gratuitously. It is not what is vulgar within me, but
what is noblest that asserts itself in the face of this offensive pride.
Do not accuse me of envy; I feel none; it is my manhood that is wounded.
We need not search far to illustrate these ideas. Every man of any
acquaintance with life has had numerous experiences which will justify
our dictum in his eyes. In certain communities devoted to material
interests, the pride of wealth dominates to such a degree that men are
quoted like values in the stock market. The esteem in which a man is
held is proportionate to the contents of his strong box. Here "Society"
is made up of big fortunes, the middle class of medium fortunes. Then
come people who have little, then those who have nothing. All
intercourse is regulated by this principle. And the relatively rich man
who has shown his disdain for those less opulent, is crushed in turn by
the contempt of his superiors in fortune. So the madness of comparison
rages from the summit to the base. Such an atmosphere is ready to
perfection for the nurture of the worst feeling; yet it is not wealth,
but the spirit of the wealthy that must be arraigned.
Many rich men are free from this gross conception--especially is this
true of those who from father to son are accustomed to ease--yet they
sometimes forget that there is a certain delicacy in not making
contrasts too marked. Suppose there is no wrong in enjoying a large
superfluity: is it indispensable to display it, to wound the eyes of
those who lack necessities, to flaunt one's magnificence at the doors of
poverty? Good taste and a sort of modesty always hinder a well man from
talking of his fine appetite, his sound sleep, his exuberance of
spirits, in the presence of one dying of consumption. Many of the rich
do not exercise this tact, and so are greatly wanting in pity and
discretion. Are they not unreasonable to complain of envy, after having
done everything to provoke it?
But the greatest lack is that want of discernment which leads men to
ground their pride in their fortune. To begin with, it is a childish
confusion of thought to consider wealth as a personal quality; it would
be hard to find a more ingenuous fashion of deceiving one's self as to
the relative value of the container and the thing contained. I have no
wish to dwell on this question: it is too painful. And yet one cannot
resist saying to those concerned: "Take care, do not confound what you
possess with what you are. Go learn to know the under side of worldly
splendor, that you may feel its moral misery and its puerility." The
traps pride sets for us are too ridiculous. We should distrust
association with a thing that makes us hateful to our neighbors and robs
us of clearness of vision.
He who yields to the pride of riches, forgets this other point, the most
important of all--that possession is a public trust. Without doubt,
individual wealth is as legitimate as individual existence and liberty.
These things are inseparable, and it is a dream pregnant with dangers
that offers battle to such fundamentals of life. But the individual
touches society at every point, and all he does should be done with the
whole in view. Possession, then, is less a privilege of which to be
proud than a charge whose gravity should be felt. As there is an
apprenticeship, often very difficult to serve, for the exercise of every
social office, so this profession we call wealth demands an
apprenticeship. To know how to be rich is an art, and one of the least
easy of arts to master. Most people, rich and poor alike, imagine that
in opulence one has nothing to do but to take life easy. That is why so
few men know how to be rich. In the hands of too many, wealth, according
to the genial and redoubtable comparison of Luther, is like a harp in
the hoofs of an ass. They have no idea of the manner of its use.
So when we encounter a man at once rich and simple, that is to say, who
considers his wealth as a means of fulfilling his mission in the world,
we should offer him our homage, for he is surely mark-worthy. He has
surmounted obstacles, borne trials, and triumphed in temptations both
gross and subtle. He does not fail to discriminate between the contents
of his pocketbook and the contents of his head or heart, and he does
not estimate his fellow-men in figures. His exceptional position, instead
of exalting him, makes him humble, for he is very sensible of how far he
falls short of reaching the level of his duty. He has remained a
man--that says it all. He is accessible, helpful, and far from making of
his wealth a barrier to separate him from other men, he makes it a means
for coming nearer and nearer to them. Although the profession of riches
has been so dishonored by the selfish and the proud, such a man as this
always makes his worth felt by everyone not devoid of a sense of
justice. Each of us who comes in contact with him and sees him live, is
forced to look within and ask himself the question, "What would become
of me in such a situation? Should I keep this modesty, this naturalness,
this uprightness which uses its own as though it belonged to others?" So
long as there is a human society in the world, so long as there are
bitterly conflicting interests, so long as envy and egoism exist on the
earth, nothing will be worthier of honor than wealth permeated by the
spirit of simplicity. And it will do more than make itself forgiven; it
will make itself beloved.
* * * * *
More dangerous than pride inspired by wealth is that inspired by power,
and I mean by the word every prerogative that one man has over another,
be it unlimited or restricted. I see no means of preventing the
existence in the world of men of unequal authority. Every organism
supposes a hierarchy of powers--we shall never escape from that law. But
I fear that if the love of power is so wide-spread, the spirit of power
is almost impossible to find. From wrong understanding and misuse of it,
those who keep even a fraction of authority almost everywhere succeed in
compromising it.
Power exercises a great influence over him who holds it. A head must be
very well balanced not to be disturbed by it. The sort of dementia which
took possession of the Roman emperors in the time of their world-wide
rule, is a universal malady whose symptoms belong to all times. In every
man there sleeps a tyrant, awaiting only a favorable occasion for
waking. Now the tyrant is the worst enemy of authority, because he
furnishes us its intolerable caricature, whence come a multitude of
social complications, collisions and hatreds. Every man who says to
those dependent on him: "Do this because it is my will and pleasure,"
does ill. There is within each one of us something that invites us to
resist personal power, and this something is very respectable. For at
bottom we are equal, and there is no one who has the right to exact
obedience from me because he is he and I am I: if he does so, his
command degrades me, and I have no right to suffer myself to be
degraded.
One must have lived in schools, in work-shops, in the army, in
Government offices, he must have closely followed the relations between
masters and servants, have observed a little everywhere where the
supremacy of man exercises itself over man, to form any idea of the
injury done by those who use power arrogantly. Of every free soul they
make a slave soul, which is to say the soul of a rebel. And it appears
that this result, with its social disaster, is most certain when he who
commands is least removed from the station of him who obeys. The most
implacable tyrant is the tyrant himself under authority. Foremen and
overseers put more violence into their dealings than superintendents and
employers. The corporal is generally harsher than the colonel. In
certain families where madam has not much more education than her maid,
the relations between them are those of the convict and his warder. And
woe everywhere to him who falls into the hands of a subaltern drunk with
his authority!
We forget that the first duty of him who exercises power is humility.
Haughtiness is not authority. It is not we who are the law; the law is
over our heads. We only interpret it, but to make it valid in the eyes
of others, we must first be subject to it ourselves. To command and to
obey in the society of men, are after all but two forms of the same
virtue--voluntary servitude. If you are not obeyed, it is generally
because you have not yourself obeyed first.
The secret of moral ascendancy rests with those who rule with
simplicity. They soften by the spirit the harshness of the fact. Their
authority is not in shoulder-straps, titles or disciplinary measures.
They make use of neither ferule nor threats, yet they achieve
everything. Why? Because we feel that they are themselves ready for
everything. That which confers upon a man the right to demand of another
the sacrifice of his time, his money, his passions, even his life, is
not only that he is resolved upon all these sacrifices himself, but that
he has made them in advance. In the command of a man animated by this
spirit of renunciation, there is a mysterious force which communicates
itself to him who is to obey, and helps him do his duty.
In all the provinces of human activity there are chiefs who inspire,
strengthen, magnetize their soldiers: under their direction the troops
do prodigies. With them one feels himself capable of any effort, ready
to go through fire, as the saying has it; and if he goes, it is with
enthusiasm.
* * * * *
But the pride of the exalted is not the only pride; there is also the
pride of the humble--this arrogance of underlings, fit pendant to that
of the great. The root of these two prides is the same. It is not alone
that lofty and imperious being, the man who says, "I am the law," that
provokes insurrection by his very attitude; it is also that pig-headed
subaltern who will not admit that there is anything beyond his
knowledge.
There are really many people who find all superiority irritating. For
them, every piece of advice is an offense, every criticism an
imposition, every order an outrage on their liberty. They would not
know how to submit to rule. To respect anything or anybody would seem to
them a mental aberration. They say to people after their fashion:
"Beyond us there is nothing."
To the family of the proud belong also those difficult and
supersensitive people who in humble life find that their superiors never
do them fitting honor, whom the best and most kindly do not succeed in
satisfying, and who go about their duties with the air of a martyr. At
bottom these disaffected minds have too much misplaced self-respect.
They do not know how to fill their place simply, but complicate their
life and that of others by unreasonable demands and morbid suspicions.
When one takes the trouble to study men at short range, he is surprised
to find that pride has so many lurking-places among those who are by
common consent called the humble. So powerful is this vice, that it
arrives at forming round those who live in the most modest circumstances
a wall which isolates them from their neighbors. There they are,
intrenched, barricaded with their ambitions and their contempts, as
inaccessible as the powerful of earth behind their aristocratic
prejudices. Obscure or illustrious, pride wraps itself in its dark
royalty of enmity to the human race. It is the same in misery and in
high places--solitary and impotent, on guard against everybody,
embroiling everything. And the last word about it is always this: If
there is so much hostility and hatred between different classes of men,
it is due less to exterior conditions than to an interior fatality.
Conflicting interests and differences of situation dig ditches between
us, it is true, but pride transforms the ditches into gulfs, and in
reality it is pride alone which cries from brink to brink: "There is
nothing in common between you and us."
* * * * *
We have not finished with pride, but it is impossible to picture it
under all its forms. I feel most resentful against it when it meddles
with knowledge and appropriates that. We owe our knowledge to our
fellows, as we do our riches and power. It is a social force which ought
to be of service to everybody, and it can only be so when those who know
remain sympathetically near to those who know not. When knowledge is
turned into a tool for ambition, it destroys itself.
And what shall we say of the pride of good men? for it exists, and makes
even virtue hateful. The just who repent them of the evil others do,
remain in brotherhood and social rectitude. But the just who despise
others for their faults and misdeeds, cut themselves off from humanity,
and their goodness, descended to the rank of an ornament for their
vanity, becomes like those riches which kindness does not inform, like
authority untempered by the spirit of obedience. Like proud wealth and
arrogant power, supercilious virtue also is detestable. It fosters in
man traits and an attitude provocative of I know not what. The sight of
it repels instead of attracting, and those whom it deigns to distinguish
with its benefits feel as though they had been slapped in the face.
To resume and conclude, it is an error to think that our advantages,
whatever they are, should be put to the service of our vanity. Each of
them constitutes for him who enjoys it an obligation and not a reason
for vainglory. Material wealth, power, knowledge, gifts of the heart and
mind, become so much cause for discord when they serve to nourish
pride. They remain beneficent only so long as they are the source of
modesty in those who possess them.
Let us be humble if we have great possessions, for that proves that we
are great debtors: all that a man has he owes to someone, and are we
sure of being able to pay our debts?
Let us be humble if we sit in high places and hold the fate of others in
our hands; for no clear-sighted man can fail to be sensible of unfitness
for so grave a rôle.
Let us be humble if we have much knowledge, for it only serves to better
show the vastness of the unknown, and to compare the little we have
discovered for ourselves with the amplitude of that which we owe to the
pains of others.
And, above all, let us be humble if we are virtuous, since no one should
be more sensible of his defects than he whose conscience is illumined,
and since he more than anyone else should feel the need of charity
toward evil-doers, even of suffering in their stead.
* * * * *
"And what about the necessary distinctions in life?" someone may ask.
"As a result of your simplifications, are you not going to destroy that
sense of the difference between men which must be maintained if society
exists at all?"
I have no mind to suppress distinctions and differences. But I think
that what distinguishes a man is not found in his social rank, his
occupation, his dress or his fortune, but solely in himself. More than
any other our own age has pricked the vain bubble of purely outward
greatness. To be somebody at present, it does not suffice to wear the
mantle of an emperor or a royal crown: what honor is there in wielding
power through gold lace, a coat of arms or a ribbon? Not that visible
signs are to be despised; they have their meaning and use, but on
condition that they cover something and not a vacuum. The moment they
cease to stand for realities, they become useless and dangerous. The
only true distinction is superior worth. If you would have social rank
duly respected, you must begin by being worthy of the rank that is your
own; otherwise you help to bring it into hatred and contempt. It is
unhappily too true that respect is diminishing among us, and it
certainly is not from a lack of lines drawn round those who wish to be
respected. The root of the evil is in the mistaken idea that high
station exempts him who holds it from observing the common obligations
of life. As we rise, we believe that we free ourselves from the law,
forgetting that the spirit of obedience and humility should grow with
our possessions and power. So it comes about that those who demand the
most homage make the least effort to merit the homage they demand. This
is why respect is diminishing.
The sole distinction necessary is the wish to become better. The man who
strives to be better becomes more humble, more approachable, more
friendly even with those who owe him allegiance. But as he gains by
being better known, he loses nothing in distinction, and he reaps the
more respect in that he has sown the less pride.
XIII
THE EDUCATION FOR SIMPLICITY
The simple life being above all else the product of a direction of mind,
it is natural that education should have much to do with it.
In general but two methods of rearing children are practiced: the first
is to bring them up for ourselves; the second, to bring them up for
themselves.
In the first case the child is looked upon as a complement of the
parents: he is part of their property, occupies a place among their
possessions. Sometimes this place is the highest, especially when the
parents value the life of the affections. Again, where material
interests rule, the child holds second, third, or even the last place.
In any case he is a nobody. While he is young, he gravitates round his
parents, not only by obedience, which is right, but by the subordination
of all his originality, all his being. As he grows older, this
subordination becomes a veritable confiscation, extending to his ideas,
his feelings, everything. His minority becomes perpetual. Instead of
slowly evolving into independence, the man advances into slavery. He is
what he is permitted to be, what his father's business, religious
beliefs, political opinions or esthetic tastes require him to be. He
will think, speak, act, and marry according to the understanding and
limits of the paternal absolutism. This family tyranny may be exercised
by people with no strength of character. It is only necessary for them
to be convinced that good order requires the child to be the property of
the parents. In default of mental force, they possess themselves of him
by other means--by sighs, supplications, or base seductions. If they
cannot fetter him, they snare his feet in traps. But that he should live
in them, through them, for them, is the only thing admissible.
Education of this sort is not the practice of families only, but also of
great social organizations whose chief educational function consists in
putting a strong hand on every new-comer, in order to fit him, in the
most iron-bound fashion, into existing forms. It is the attenuation,
pulverization and assimilation of the individual in a social body, be it
theocratic, communistic, or simply bureaucratic and routinary. Looked at
from without, a like system seems the ideal of simplicity in education.
Its processes, in fact, are absolutely simplistic, and if a man were not
somebody, if he were only a sample of the race, this would be the
perfect education. As all wild beasts, all fish and insects of the same
genus and species have the same markings, so we should all be identical,
having the same tastes, the same language, the same beliefs, the same
tendencies. But man is not simply a specimen of the race, and for that
reason this sort of education is far from being simple in its results.
Men so vary from one another, that numberless methods have to be
invented to repress, stupefy, and extinguish individual thought. And one
never arrives at it then but in part, a fact which is continually
deranging everything. At each moment, by some fissure, some interior
force of initiative is making a violent way to the light, producing
explosions, upheavals, all sorts of grave disorders. And where there are
no outward manifestations, the evil lies dormant; beneath apparent order
are hidden dumb revolt, flaws made by an abnormal existence, apathy,
death.
The system is evil which produces such fruit, and however simple it may
appear, in reality it brings forth all possible complications.
* * * * *
The other system is the extreme opposite, that of bringing up children
for themselves. The rôles are reversed: the parents are there for the
child. No sooner is he born than he becomes the center. White-headed
grandfather and stalwart father bow before these curls. His lisping is
their law. A sign from him suffices. If he cries in the night, no
fatigue is of account, the whole household must be roused. The new-comer
is not long in discovering his omnipotence, and before he can walk he is
drunken with it. As he grows older all this deepens and broadens.
Parents, grandparents, servants, teachers, everybody is at his command.
He accepts the homage and even the immolation of his neighbor: he treats
like a rebellious subject anyone who does not step out of his path.
There is only himself. He is the unique, the perfect, the infallible.
Too late it is perceived that all this has been evolving a master; and
what a master! forgetful of sacrifices, without respect, even pity. He
no longer has any regard for those to whom he owes everything, and he
goes through life without law or check.
This education, too, has its social counterpart. It flourishes wherever
the past does not count, where history begins with the living, where
there is no tradition, no discipline, no reverence; where those who know
the least make the most noise; where those who stand for public order
are alarmed by every chance comer whose power lies in his making a great
outcry and respecting nothing. It insures the reign of transitory
passion, the triumph of the inferior will. I compare these two
educations--one, the exaltation of the environment, the other of the
individual; one the absolutism of tradition, the other the tyranny of
the new--and I find them equally baneful. But the most disastrous of all
is the combination of the two, which produces human beings
half-automatons, half-despots, forever vacillating between the spirit
of a sheep and the spirit of revolt or domination.
Children should be educated neither for themselves nor for their
parents: for man is no more designed to be a personage than a specimen.
They should be educated for life. The aim of their education is to aid
them to become active members of humanity, brotherly forces, free
servants of the civil organization. To follow a method of education
inspired by any other principle, is to complicate life, deform it, sow
the seeds of all disorders.
When we would sum up in a phrase the destiny of the child, the word
future springs to our lips. The child is the future. This word says
all--the sufferings of the past, the stress of to-day, hope. But when
the education of the child begins, he is incapable of estimating the
reach of this word; for he is held by impressions of the present. Who
then shall give him the first enlightenment and put him in the way he
should go? The parents, the teachers. And with very little reflection
they perceive that their work does not interest simply themselves and
the child, but that they represent and administer impersonal powers and
interests. The child should continually appear to them as a future
citizen. With this ruling idea, they will take thought for two things
that complement each other--for the initial and personal force which is
germinating in the child, and for the social destination of this force.
At no moment of their direction over him can they forget that this
little being confided to their care must become _himself_ and a
_brother_. These two conditions, far from excluding each other, never
exist apart. It is impossible to be brotherly, to love, to give one's
self, unless one is master of himself; and reciprocally, none can
possess himself, comprehend his own individual being, until he has first
made his way through the outward accidents of his existence, down to the
profound springs of life where man feels himself one with other men in
all that is most intimately his own.
To aid a child to become himself and a brother it is necessary to
protect him against the violent and destructive action of the forces of
disorder. These forces are exterior and interior. Every child is menaced
from without not only by material dangers but by the meddlesomeness of
alien wills; and from within, by an exaggerated idea of his own
personality and all the fancies it breeds. There is a great outward
danger which may come from the abuse of power in educators. The right of
might finds itself a place in education with extreme facility. To
educate another, one must have renounced this right, that is to say,
made abnegation of the inferior sentiment of personal importance, which
transforms us into the enemies of others, even of our own children. Our
authority is beneficent only when it is inspired by one higher than our
own. In this case it is not only salutary, but also indispensable, and
becomes in its turn the best guarantee against the greater peril which
threatens the child from within--that of exaggerating his own
importance. At the beginning of life the vividness of personal
impressions is so great, that to establish an equilibrium, they must be
submitted to the gentle influence of a calm and superior will. The true
quality of the office of educator is to represent this will to the
child, in a manner as continuous and as disinterested as possible.
Educators, then, stand for all that is to be respected in the world.
They give to the child impressions of that which precedes it, outruns
it, envelops it: but they do not crush it; on the contrary, their will
and all the influence they transmit, become elements nutritive of its
native energy. Such use of authority as this, cultivates that fruitful
obedience out of which free souls are born. The purely personal
authority of parents, masters and institutions is to the child like the
brushwood beneath which the young plant withers and dies. Impersonal
authority, the authority of a man who has first submitted himself to the
time-honored realities before which he wishes the individual fancy of
the child to bend, resembles pure and luminous air. True it has an
activity, and influences us in its manner, but it nourishes our
individuality and gives it firmness and stability. Without this
authority there is no education. To watch, to guide, to keep a firm
hand--such is the function of the educator. He should appear to the
child not like a barrier of whims, which, if need be, one may clear,
provided the leap be proportioned to the height of the obstacle; but
like a transparent wall through which may be seen unchanging realities,
laws, limits, and truths against which no action is possible. Thus
arises respect, which is the faculty of conceiving something greater
than ourselves--respect, which broadens us and frees us by making us
more modest. This is the law of education for simplicity. It may be
summed up in these words: to make _free_ and _reverential_ men, who
shall be _individual_ and _fraternal_.
* * * * *
Let us draw from this principle some practical applications.
From the very fact that the child is the future, he must be linked to
the past by piety. We owe it to him to clothe tradition in the forms
most practical and most fit to create a deep impression: whence the
exceptional place that should be given in education to the ancients, to
the cult of remembrance of the past, and by extension, to the history of
the domestic rooftree. Above all do we fulfil a duty toward our children
when we give the place of honor to the grandparents. Nothing speaks to a
child with so much force, or so well develops his modesty, as to see his
father and mother, on all occasions, preserve toward an old grandfather,
often infirm, an attitude of respect. It is a perpetual object lesson
that is irresistible. That it may have its full force, it is necessary
for a tacit understanding to obtain among all the grown-up members of
the family. To the child's eyes they must all be in league, held to
mutual respect and understanding, under penalty of compromising their
educational authority. And in their number must be counted the servants.
Servants are big people, and the same sentiment of respect is injured in
the child's disregard of them as in his disregard of his father or
grandfather. The moment he addresses an impolite or arrogant word to a
person older than himself, he strays from the path that a child ought
never to quit; and if only occasionally the parents neglect to point
this out, they will soon perceive by his conduct toward themselves, that
the enemy has found entrance to his heart.
We mistake if we think that a child is naturally alien to respect,
basing this opinion on the very numerous examples of irreverence which
he offers us. Respect is for the child a fundamental need. His moral
being feeds on it. The child aspires confusedly to revere and admire
something. But when advantage is not taken of this aspiration, it gets
corrupted or lost. By our lack of cohesion and mutual deference, we, the
grown-ups, discredit daily in the child's eyes our own cause and that of
everything worthy of respect. We inoculate in him a bad spirit whose
effects then turn against us.
This pitiful truth nowhere appears with more force than in the relations
between masters and servants, as we have made them. Our social errors,
our want of simplicity and kindness, all fall back upon the heads of our
children. There are certainly few people of the middle classes who
understand that it is better to part with many thousands of dollars than
to lead their children to lose respect for servants, who represent in
our households the humble. Yet nothing is truer. Maintain as strictly as
you will conventions and distances,--that demarkation of social
frontiers which permits each one to remain in his place and to observe
the law of differences. That is a good thing, I am persuaded, but on
condition of never forgetting that those who serve us are men and women
like ourselves. You require of your domestics certain formulas of speech
and certain attitudes, outward evidence of the respect they owe you. Do
you also teach your children and use yourselves manners toward your
servants which show them that you respect their dignity as individuals,
as you desire them to respect yours? Here we have continually in our
homes an excellent ground for experiment in the practice of that mutual
respect which is one of the essential conditions of social sanity. I
fear we profit by it too little. We do not fail to exact respect, but
we fail to give it. So it is most frequently the case that we get only
hypocrisy and this supplementary result, all unexpected,--the
cultivation of pride in our children. These two factors combined heap up
great difficulties for that future which we ought to be safeguarding. I
am right then in saying that the day when by your own practices you have
brought about the lessening of respect in your children, you have
suffered a sensible loss.
Why should I not say it? It seems to me that the greater part of us
labor for this loss. On all sides, in almost every social rank, I notice
that a pretty bad spirit is fostered in children, a spirit of reciprocal
contempt. Here, those who have calloused hands and working-clothes are
disdained; there, it is all who do not wear blue jeans. Children
educated in this spirit make sad fellow-citizens. There is in all this
the want of that simplicity which makes it possible for men of good
intentions, of however diverse social standing, to collaborate without
any friction arising from the conventional distance that separates them.
If the spirit of caste causes the loss of respect, partisanship, of
whatever sort, is quite as productive of it. In certain quarters
children are brought up in such fashion that they respect but one
country--their own; one system of government--that of their parents and
masters; one religion--that which they have been taught. Does anyone
suppose that in this way men can be shaped who shall respect country,
religion and law? Is this a proper respect--this respect which does not
extend beyond what touches and belongs to ourselves? Strange blindness
of cliques and coteries, which arrogate to themselves with so much
ingenuous complacence the title of schools of respect, and which,
outside themselves, respect nothing. In reality they teach: "Country,
religion, law--we are all these!" Such teaching fosters fanaticism, and
if fanaticism is not the sole anti-social ferment, it is surely one of
the worst and most energetic.
* * * * *
If simplicity of heart is an essential condition of respect, simplicity
of life is its best school. Whatever be the state of your fortune, avoid
everything which could make your children think themselves more or
better than others. Though your wealth would permit you to dress them
richly, remember the evil you might do in exciting their vanity.
Preserve them from the evil of believing that to be elegantly dressed
suffices for distinction, and above all do not carelessly increase by
their clothes and their habits of life, the distance which already
separates them from other children: dress them simply. And if, on the
contrary, it would be necessary for you to economize to give your
children the pleasure of fine clothes, I would that I might dispose you
to reserve your spirit of sacrifice for a better cause. You risk seeing
it illy recompensed. You dissipate your money when it would much better
avail to save it for serious needs, and you prepare for yourself, later
on, a harvest of ingratitude. How dangerous it is to accustom your sons
and daughters to a style of living beyond your means and theirs! In the
first place, it is very bad for your purse; in the second place it
develops a contemptuous spirit in the very bosom of the family. If you
dress your children like little lords, and give them to understand that
they are superior to you, is it astonishing if they end by disdaining
you? You will have nourished at your table the declassed--a product
which costs dear and is worthless.
Any fashion of instructing children whose most evident result is to
lead them to despise their parents and the customs and activities among
which they have grown up, is a calamity. It is effective for nothing but
to produce a legion of malcontents, with hearts totally estranged from
their origin, their race, their natural interests--everything, in short,
that makes the fundamental fabric of a man. Once detached from the
vigorous stock which produced them, the wind of their restless ambition
drives them over the earth, like dead leaves that will in the end be
heaped up to ferment and rot together.
Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds, but by an evolution slow
and certain. In preparing a career for our children, let us imitate her.
Let us not confound progress and advancement with those violent
exercises called somersaults. Let us not so bring up our children that
they will come to despise work and the aspirations and simple spirit of
their fathers: let us not expose them to the temptation of being ashamed
of our poverty if they themselves come to fortune. A society is indeed
diseased when the sons of peasants begin to feel disgust for the fields,
when the sons of sailors desert the sea, when the daughters of
working-men, in the hope of being taken for heiresses, prefer to walk
the streets alone rather than beside their honest parents. A society is
healthy, on the contrary, when each of its members applies himself to
doing very nearly what his parents have done before him, but doing it
better, and, looking to future elevation, is content first to fulfill
conscientiously more modest duties.[C]
[C] This would be the place to speak of work in general, and of its
tonic effect upon education. But I have discussed the subject in my
books _Justice_, _Jeunesse_, and _Vaillanos_. I must limit myself to
referring the reader to them.
* * * * *
Education should make independent men. If you wish to train your
children for liberty, bring them up simply, and do not for a moment fear
that in so doing you are putting obstacles in the way of their
happiness. It will be quite the contrary. The more costly toys a child
has, the more feasts and curious entertainments, the less is he amused.
In this there is a sure sign. Let us be temperate in our methods of
entertaining youth, and especially let us not thoughtlessly create for
them artificial needs. Food, dress, nursery, amusements--let all these
be as natural and simple as possible. With the idea of making life
pleasant for their children, some parents bring them up in habits of
gormandizing and idleness, accustom them to sensations not meant for
their age, multiply their parties and entertainments. Sorry gifts these!
In place of a free man, you are making a slave. Gorged with luxury, he
tires of it in time; and yet when for one reason or another his
pleasures fail him, he will be miserable, and you with him: and what is
worse, perhaps in some capital encounter of life, you will be ready--you
and he together--to sacrifice manly dignity, truth, and duty, from sheer
sloth.
Let us bring up our children simply, I had almost said rudely. Let us
entice them to exercise that gives them endurance--even to privations.
Let them belong to those who are better trained to fatigue and the earth
for a bed than to the comforts of the table and couches of luxury. So we
shall make men of them, independent and staunch, who may be counted on,
who will not sell themselves for pottage, and who will have withal the
faculty of being happy.
A too easy life brings with it a sort of lassitude in vital energy. One
becomes blasé, disillusioned, an old young man, past being diverted. How
many young people are in this state! Upon them have been deposited, like
a sort of mold, the traces of our decrepitude, our skepticism, our
vices, and the bad habits they have contracted in our company. What
reflections upon ourselves these youths weary of life force us to make!
What announcements are graven on their brows!
These shadows say to us by contrast that happiness lies in a life true,
active, spontaneous, ungalled by the yoke of the passions, of unnatural
needs, of unhealthy stimulus; keeping intact the physical faculty of
enjoying the light of day and the air we breathe, and in the heart, the
capacity to thrill with the love of all that is generous, simple and
fine.
* * * * *
The artificial life engenders artificial thought, and a speech little
sure of itself. Normal habits, deep impressions, the ordinary contact
with reality, bring frankness with them. Falsehood is the vice of a
slave, the refuge of the cowardly and weak. He who is free and strong is
unflinching in speech. We should encourage in our children the hardihood
to speak frankly. What do we ordinarily do? We trample on natural
disposition, level it down to the uniformity which for the crowd is
synonymous with good form. To think with one's own mind, feel with one's
own heart, express one's own personality--how unconventional, how
rustic!--Oh! the atrocity of an education which consists in the
perpetual muzzling of the only thing that gives any of us his reason for
being! Of how many soul-murders do we become guilty! Some are struck
down with bludgeons, others gently smothered with pillows! Everything
conspires against independence of character. When we are little, people
wish us to be dolls or graven images; when we grow up, they approve of
us on condition that we are like all the rest of the world--automatons:
when you have seen one of them you've seen them all. So the lack of
originality and initiative is upon us, and platitude and monotony are
the distinctions of to-day. Truth can free us from this bondage: let
our children be taught to be themselves, to ring clear, without crack or
muffle. Make loyalty a need to them, and in their gravest failures, if
only they acknowledge them, account it for merit that they have not
covered their sin.
To frankness let us add ingenuousness, in our solicitude as educators.
Let us have for this comrade of childhood--a trifle uncivilized, it is
true, but so gracious and friendly!--all possible regard. We must not
frighten it away: when it has once fled, it so rarely comes back!
Ingenuousness is not simply the sister of truth, the guardian of the
individual qualities of each of us; it is besides a great informing and
educating force. I see among us too many practical people, so called,
who go about armed with terrifying spectacles and huge shears to ferret
out naïve things and clip their wings. They uproot ingenuousness from
life, from thought, from education, and pursue it even to the region of
dreams. Under pretext of making men of their children, they prevent
their being children at all;--as if before the ripe fruit of autumn,
flowers did not have to be, and perfumes, and songs of birds, and all
the fairy springtime.
I ask indulgence for everything naïve and simple, not alone for the
innocent conceits that flutter round the curly heads of children, but
also for the legend, the folk song, the tales of the world of marvel and
mystery. The sense of the marvellous is in the child the first form of
that sense of the infinite without which a man is like a bird deprived
of wings. Let us not wean the child from it, but let us guard in him the
faculty of rising above what is earthy, so that he may appreciate later
on those pure and moving symbols of vanished ages wherein human truth
has found forms of expression that our arid logic will never replace.
XIV
CONCLUSION
I think I have said enough of the spirit and manifestations of the
simple life, to make it evident that there is here a whole forgotten
world of strength and beauty. He can make conquest of it who has
sufficient energy to detach himself from the fatal rubbish that trammels
our days. It will not take him long to perceive that in renouncing some
surface satisfactions and childish ambitions, he increases his faculty
of happiness and his possibilities of right judgment.
These results concern as much the private as the public life. It is
incontestable that in striving against the feverish will to shine, in
ceasing to make the satisfaction of our desires the end of our activity,
in returning to modest tastes, to the true life, we shall labor for the
unity of the family. Another spirit will breath in our homes, creating
new customs and an atmosphere more favorable to the education of
children. Little by little our boys and girls will feel the enticement
of ideals at once higher and more realizable. And transformation of the
home will in time exercise its influence on public spirit. As the
solidity of a wall depends upon the grain of the stones and the
consistence of the cement which binds them together, so also the energy
of public life depends upon the individual value of men and their power
of cohesion. The great desideratum of our time is the culture of the
component parts of society, of the individual man. Everything in the
present social organism leads us back to this element. In neglecting it
we expose ourselves to the loss of the benefits of progress, even to
making our most persistent efforts turn to our own hurt. If in the midst
of means continually more and more perfected, the workman diminishes in
value, of what use are these fine tools at his disposal? By their very
excellence to make more evident the faults of him who uses them without
discernment or without conscience. The wheelwork of the great modern
machine is infinitely delicate. Carelessness, incompetence or corruption
may produce here disturbances of far greater gravity than would have
threatened the more or less rudimentary organism of the society of the
past. There is need then of looking to the quality of the individual
called upon to contribute in any measure to the workings of this
mechanism. This individual should be at once solid and pliable, inspired
with the central law of life--to be one's self and fraternal. Everything
within us and without us becomes simplified and unified under the
influence of this law, which is the same for everybody and by which each
one should guide his actions; for our essential interests are not
opposing, they are identical. In cultivating the spirit of simplicity,
we should arrive, then, at giving to public life a stronger cohesion.
The phenomena of decomposition and destruction that we see there may all
be attributed to the same cause,--lack of solidity and cohesion. It will
never be possible to say how contrary to social good are the trifling
interests of caste, of coterie, of church, the bitter strife for
personal welfare, and, by a fatal consequence, how destructive these
things are of individual happiness. A society in which each member is
preoccupied with his own well-being, is organized disorder. This is all
that we learn from the irreconcilable conflicts of our uncompromising
egoism.
We too much resemble those people who claim the rights of family only to
gain advantage from them, not to do honor to the connection. On all
rounds of the social ladder we are forever putting forth claims. We all
take the ground that we are creditors: no one recognizes the fact that
he is a debtor, and our dealings with our fellows consist in inviting
them, in tones sometimes amiable, sometimes arrogant, to discharge their
indebtedness to us. No good thing is attained in this spirit. For in
fact it is the spirit of privilege, that eternal enemy of universal law,
that obstacle to brotherly understanding which is ever presenting itself
anew.
* * * * *
In a lecture delivered in 1882, M. Renan said that a nation is "a
spiritual family," and he added: "The essential of a nation is that all
the individuals should have many things in common, and also that all
should have forgotten much." It is important to know what to forget and
what to remember, not only in the past, but also in our daily life. Our
memories are lumbered with the things that divide us; the things which
unite us slip away. Each of us keeps at the most luminous point of his
souvenirs, a lively sense of his secondary quality, his part of
agriculturist, day laborer, man of letters, public officer, proletary,
bourgeois, or political or religious sectarian; but his essential
quality, which is to be a son of his country and a man, is relegated to
the shade. Scarcely does he keep even a theoretic notion of it. So that
what occupies us and determines our actions, is precisely the thing that
separates us from others, and there is hardly place for that spirit of
unity which is as the soul of a people.
So too do we foster bad feeling in our brothers. Men animated by a
spirit of particularism, exclusiveness, and pride, are continually
clashing. They cannot meet without rousing afresh the sentiment of
division and rivalry. And so there slowly heaps up in their remembrance
a stock of reciprocal ill-will, of mistrust, of rancor. All this is bad
feeling with its consequences.
It must be rooted out of our midst. Remember, forget! This we should say
to ourselves every morning, in all our relations and affairs. Remember
the essential, forget the accessory! How much better should we discharge
our duties as citizens, if high and low were nourished from this spirit!
How easy to cultivate pleasant remembrances in the mind of one's
neighbor, by sowing it with kind deeds and refraining from procedures of
which in spite of himself he is forced to say, with hatred in his heart:
"Never in the world will I forget!"
The spirit of simplicity is a great magician. It softens asperities,
bridges chasms, draws together hands and hearts. The forms which it
takes in the world are infinite in number; but never does it seem to us
more admirable than when it shows itself across the fatal barriers of
position, interest, or prejudice, overcoming the greatest obstacles,
permitting those whom everything seems to separate to understand one
another, esteem one another, love one another. This is the true social
cement, that goes into the building of a people.
THE END.
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