Chapter X: On the Reign of the Heart 178 (3)

As for me, I know that Bernier is rich, and I have seen him smile in the hour of his wealth,--for the true wealth has its times of slumber and its awakenings. Bernier possesses something which is quite strange and almost inexpressible; it is a space, a white space, vast and virgin, and it is his power to be able to trace there certain harmonious lines which he alone knows how to trace in the right way.

Why have you never seen, why have you never been able to see Bernier at the moment when he begins his work, when the whole sickly light of the office seems concentrated on the beautiful white page? His face is serene, smiling, assured. He half closes his eyes and draws back his head; he holds, adroitly and elegantly, a certain chosen pen, flexible, with a good point, a pen that belongs to him alone, which he has prepared for himself and which he would throw away if some blundering fool happened to touch it. And then he begins!

His kingdom is ranged all about him: ink pure from all dust, a brightly lined ruler, a collection of pens with all sorts of points. He begins, and the black line obeys him, springs up, curves in, stops, bounds forward or falls back, prances, yields. Look at Bernier’s face: is it really the face of that poor wretch you have just described to me? No! No! It is the face of a masterful man, calm, sure of himself and his wealth, who is doing something that no one can do as well as he: across a snowy, limitless desert he directs, as if in a dream, a black line that advances, advances, now slowly, now dizzily, like time itself.

VII

You are willing to pay ten francs to see an acrobat or a trained dog. Perhaps you have never watched a spider about to prepare its web. In that case, do not miss the spectacle at the very next opportunity. When you have had a good glimpse of the extraordinary creature revolving about the center of the work and fastening, with its hind leg, so quickly and accurately, the thread that it unwinds in just the right quantity, you will be so delighted that you will want to show the marvel to all those you love.

It is strange what a contempt men have for the joys that are offered them freely. And yet this does not argue a shallowness in our natures: there is a certain beauty in our prizing an object just because it has cost us some trouble. You must not imagine, however, that the marvels of nature come for nothing: they cost patience, time and attention.

An unhealthy curiosity and the taste for anomalies incline us to take pleasure in seeing a creature perform an action for which its own organism seems unsuited. It palls very quickly. For a long time now, for example, the flight of aviators has ceased to excite our interest: we know all about that unmysterious machine; its very sound and its presence in the sky defile the silence and the space whose virginity was a refuge for us. On the other hand, I assure you I never cease to be fascinated by the mysterious manœuvers of a swarm of gnats, their interweaving curves, the spherical movement which, from instant to instant, transports the whole group of insects and seems the result of some secret password, and so many other subtle and profound mysteries that remain, for the imagination, full of allurement, full, one might say, of resources.

And do you think there is nothing disturbing in the beauty of the imperious flight of the great dragon-fly, in its sudden, meditative pauses, in its peremptory starts that lash the air like a supple, furious whip?

To whatever school of philosophy they belong, the great observers of natural phenomena, the Darwins, Lamarcks, Fabres, give us a magnificent lesson in love. But why do we nourish ourselves only on their harvests instead of providing our own? Why do we buy and read their books without drawing any real profit from them, without ever taking the trouble to look down at our own feet, without ever going to live, with the creatures of the sand and the grass, their minute, thrilling existence, in which everything would be for us full of novelty, discovery, suggestion?

VIII

The world is so generous and I feel my heart so full, so overflowing, that I do not even dream of arranging in order all these things I have to say to you. I should wish first of all to see your brow relax, to hear you say that you are less dispirited and that you refuse to be bored.

I should like to know all of you, and each in particular, to take you by the arm and walk with you through one of the streets of your town, or along the highroad if you live in the country. You would tell me of your cares and we should search together and see if there is indeed nothing in the universe for which you are especially destined, if there does not indeed exist, all ready for your wound, the precise balm that is necessary to anoint and heal it.

I came out this morning from my shelter of planks. The barren, chalky soil that surrounds it is surely the most sterile in all Champagne, but it had rained and the storm had brought up out of this miserable soil, which is almost without vegetation, all sorts of kindly odors. They were worth more than all the perfumes of Florida, for they were the humble gift of poverty.

At the end of next February I could show you, some morning, if the sun were out, the color of the birches against the blue of the winter sky. All the slender branches will seem ablaze with purple fire, and the sky, through this delicate flame, will survey you with an exquisite tenderness. You must wait, you must drink it in deeply, and not go on your way before you have understood it. From it you will be able to store up enough happiness to last you till another winter comes and gives birth once more to this prodigy of light.

Last year, during the hard summer months on the Aisne, I used to escape each day, for a second, toward the end of the afternoon, from the overheated tent where we carried on the bloody work of the ambulance. One of my comrades was in the habit of eating an apple at this hour. I used to ask him to be good enough to lend it to me for a moment. I loved to breathe its delicate, penetrating perfume which, every day, changed with the fruit. That was indeed a rare, a beautiful moment amid the fatigues of that concert of suffering and death.

I requisitioned this imponderable part of another’s wealth; then I returned the apple to my comrade. I could have wished that you had all been with me to taste that poignant little joy.

When peace comes again, if you wish to see me in May, I will take you out under the great sycamore that is turning green at the bottom of the meadow. And there as you listen to the flying, the humming, the loving and the living of the millions of creatures that people its cool foliage, we shall set out together on a journey so rare that you will leave your heaviest sorrows along the way.

IX

Some years ago, a magazine undertook to ask a number of writers in what chosen spot they would like to pass a few beautiful hours. Emile Verhaeren answered:

“In a certain corner of the harbor of Hamburg.”

Verhaeren is among those who have revealed to us the mournful grandeur of city views, of factory towns, those places that seem accursed and from which one might think that happiness was forever exiled.

The aspirations of our souls are so plentiful, so tenacious, so fertile that we find something to console us, satisfy us, exalt us in those very spots where suffering rules tyrannically, where the valley of Gehenna is most precipitous.

I visited the docks of Liverpool with a sort of horror. There were tall brick buildings, their roofs lost in the smoke, windows covered with grime, their interiors nothing but monstrous heaps of cotton bales. Men were climbing about there like flies. Everything smelt of fog and mould. Narrow pavements, slimy with rain, ran along by the dry-docks where the steamers, like immense corpses, were being assailed by the frantic crowd. The workers toiled amid a bombardment of hammers, a whirl of sparks. The drills snarled like whipped cats. A hideous light, smothered by the smoke and the mist of the Mersey, drowned everything in its fetid flood.

And yet, since then, I have often dreamed of that terrible spot and felt the need of living there.

For two years I attended the wounded of the First Army Corps, all of them men from the north, stained by the coal on face and chest, men from the factories or the mines. I walked with them through the smiling landscapes of the Aisne, the Vesle, the Marne, when those lovely valleys had not yet been too much disfigured by the war. Certainly they all enjoyed the slopes with their gracious groves of trees, the beautiful cultivated fields, draped like many-colored shawls over the shoulders of the little hills, but they all thought most, with love and regret, of cylinders, mine shafts, machines, and a smoky horizon.

I can understand it: one’s native soil, one’s own habitude, the familiar human landscape, moulded upon the other and transfiguring it. Above everything we have to recognize that the soul is sensitive to many infinitely varied and often contradictory things. Grace of lines, rustic charm are qualities that attach us to a country; fierce and desolate grandeur is another such, and this indeed has almost the strongest nostalgic power of all.

When beauty seems to have abandoned the world, we must realize that it has first deserted our own hearts.

X

Between your five senses, open like the dazzling portholes on the side of a ship, do you really believe there is nothing, nothing but the void, the night, the dumb wall?

I do not know, I do not know.... I cannot believe....

The sound rises, rises like the skylark, and the ear rises with it. And then comes a moment when the sound still rises and the hearing stops, like those birds that do not frequent the loftiest altitudes.

Tell me, are they lost truly and forever, those sounds that hold sway at the gates of your soul, those sounds to which your senses are not equal?

Wait! Hope! Some day perhaps we shall know.

You will say to me: “The light is so beautiful, so beautiful! It adds luster to so many things that are dear to me. Have I any need to dream of other rays than these? My eyes have already so much to do that they are overcome by their delight. The beauty of sound and silence ceaselessly intoxicates my ear.”

True! Your soul has active purveyors. They do not leave it idle. They come and heap at its feet riches that demand its enthusiasm and its solicitude.

But often there is in your soul something your senses have not brought there, an exquisite joy, an inexpressible sadness. Do not forget that you live bathed in a multitude of rays to only some of which you are sensible. The others are perhaps not quite strange to you. What is passing, in contraband, across the frontiers of your being? Do not obstinately try to bring it under control. Submit, experience, be merely attentive and respectful to everything. Some day we shall perhaps know more things than we are able to divine now.

XI

One of the greatest delights of the religious faith is to abandon ourselves to gratitude, to be able to thank, from an overflowing heart, the moral being to whom we feel indebted for our wealth.

Why then, since I have long lost this faith, do I still feel each day, and several times a day, the great need of singing the canticle of Francis of Assisi, the lovely canticle in which he says:

Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, and unto all Thy creatures, especially
our gracious brother the sun, who gives us the day and through whom
Thou showest us Thy light. He is beautiful and radiant with a great
splendor. He is the symbol of Thee, Most High.

Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our sister the moon and the stars,
fashioned by Thee in the sky, clear, precious, and beautiful.

Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our mother the wind, and for the air
and the clouds, for the pure sky, and for all the time during which
Thou givest to thy creatures life and sustenance.

Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our sister the water, who is so
useful, precious and clean.

Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our brother the fire, through whom
Thou illuminest the night. He is lovely and gay, courageous and
strong.

Praise unto Thee, O Lord, for our mother the earth, who sustains us
and nourishes us, and brings forth divers fruits and flowers of a
thousand colors and the grass.

A poet has transposed these divine strophes into the harmony of French verse and sings thus:

I shall praise you, Lord, for having made so lovely and so bright
This world where you wish us to await our life.

Now, I know very well that in this world I am not awaiting life, I am living. I know very well that it is here I must live and lose no time about it. My gratitude is all the more pressing, all the more intense.

What if it does rise to an empty heaven, that infinite gratitude!

It will not be lost. And is that heaven ever empty to which we breathe out so many dreams, where there trembles so much beauty!

The sweetest of human voices has said: “Lay up for yourselves in heaven the treasures that do not perish.” Perhaps we shall be pardoned if we dare to murmur: “Lay up for yourselves, in this world, the treasures that do not perish.”

They will not perish, these treasures, O my son, and all you whom I love, they will not perish if you thirst to discover them only that you may share them with others, that you may bequeath them to a devout posterity.

They will not perish if they find their being, their supreme reason, in that region of the soul where believers have raised up the tabernacle of a God.

V
THE LYRICS OF LIFE

I

During the cruellest hours, when the war about me has been heaping agony upon agony, when I have been able to find nothing, nothing to which I could any longer attach my confidence and my need of hope, I have often been surprised to find, running through my head, one of those airs that I know so well, those airs that I love and that escort my soul, like watchful and radiant personages, through the chaos of the days. And I would think bitterly: “Just fifteen quite simple notes! but they carry a meaning so beautiful, so profound, so commanding that they would suffice, I am certain, to resolve all conflicts, to discourage all hatreds, if men knew them well enough to sing them all together with the same attentive tenderness.”

It may be that the philosophy which absorbs you is one that leaves no room for indulgence. Perhaps you feel yourself full of bitterness for your fellows, perhaps you have made up your mind not to see in the activity of the living any but motives of greed and covetousness. Do not laugh! Do not be in too great haste to prove yourself right! Above everything, do not rejoice in being right in so dismal a fashion.

I say it again, if certain pages of Beethoven were better known to those who suffer and slaughter one another they would succeed in disarming many a resentment, they would restore to many a tense face a soft, ineffable smile.

If you do not believe this, you are not accustomed to living among simple people, you have never watched an irrepressible class of little children whom their master dominates and calms by making them sing, you have never heard a multitude of people intoning a hymn in some cathedral, you have never seen a great flood of workingmen, in some foul slum, break into the rhythm of a revolutionary song, perhaps you have never even seen a poor man weeping because a violin had just recalled to him his youth and the obscure thoughts he believed he had never in all his life confessed to anyone.

Think of all these things and then form some notion of what it is the thoughts of the great masters can do with the soul. Why, why is it not better known, this thing which is, indeed, knowledge and revelation itself? Why does it not reign over the empires, this which is sovereignty, grandeur, majesty? Why is it not more ardently invoked in the hour of crisis, this that teaches, equally well, fruitful doubt and serene resolution?

II

True, he who says ecstatically, “The world is governed by love, goodness, generous passions,” surrenders himself to a childish error. But he who cries, “The whole world is enslaved by egoism, violence and base passions,” speaks foolishly.

As we look about us, we might perhaps imagine that from one or the other of these two moral attitudes there is no escape. Must we believe that the spirit of system has such an irresistible hold over everyone who sets about the business of living?

The world! The world! It is much more beautiful and complex than that. It always upsets our prearrangements, and that is why we cherish it so dearly. But we also love to foresee things, and system seems to arrange them so that we can.

What does it signify in a world that is capable of everything? Amid the evil and the mediocre there will always shine forth consolingly something noble, something wondrous. Is it not shameful to predict the basest things so glibly only to close our eyes the more obstinately before the beauty that is unknown and unforeseen?

I assure you, in spite of all, that two lines of music can turn a multitude back and agitate the deepest springs of its behavior. If the miracle does not result from harmonious sounds, it will be borne, perhaps, of ten warm, rhythmical words, or the sight of a statue or the evocation of an image.

The worship of immediate realities leads us to those easy victories that intoxicate the coarse spirits. At times it results in irreparable disasters, for it inclines us to misprize those secret and delicate things that pave the way for the soul’s most daring flights and ventures.

Some other time I shall tell the story of the general who, in order to allay the grievances of his mutinous troops, offered them a cask of wine and, thanks to this blunder, suffered a defeat.

People who reason in a wholesale fashion get along successfully from day to day till the hour when a tiny error destroys their success forever.

III

If the thoughts of great men no longer cause miracles it is because they are too little understood, or are misunderstood, or are purposely distorted. You are mistaken if you think they are powerless because they are beautiful.

The war, which has crushed such great masses of men, has brought us face to face with this melancholy evidence, it has enabled us thoroughly to examine many individuals and to put many experiences to the proof. It has permitted us to measure the whole humiliation of moral civilization before that other, the scientific and industrial civilization which we might still better call practical civilization.

Gifted, serious, good men have said to me, “First of all one has to live. You can see, in the midst of this hurricane, what would become of a people weakened by idealism and given over to the works of the spirit. My son will study chemistry. The coming century will be a hard one, my son will perhaps never have the time to read Emerson or acquaint himself with the works of Bach! Too bad! But first of all one has to live.”

Does it not seem as if error had a dazzling power to seduce us and overwhelm us? Men are always hoping to conquer it by yielding to its demands. No one has the courage to turn his own steps away from its shifting shore. No one, for example, says to me: “The moral culture of the world is in peril. Mechanical progress monopolizes and swallows up all human energy. The generous soul of the best men is forgotten, in exile. Let us, with a common voice, with all our strength, summon it to come back to us, or let us go and die in exile with it, in an exile that is noble and pure.”

IV

I shall speak to you again of all these things; we must talk a great deal more about the future if we wish to enter it without blindness, shame, and horror.

For the moment, glance at the people who surround us, the restless people we see on all sides. There are some of them who know what is beautiful. They rejoice in it, almost in secrecy, and despise those who do not share their faith. As for the others, they do not know it, and that is all one can say. They are, according to their several characters, ignorant and sceptical, or just simply ignorant. They see how works of art and the spirit miraculously survive the decadence and the prosperity of empires: that astonishes them without convincing them. Many divine that this has something to do with a secret and sacred power, but they do not dare and they do not know how to avail themselves of it. They catch glimpses of the feast of the heroes and they cannot realize that their place is marked and waiting for them.

Among my everyday companions are many educated men upon whom the universities have lavished their care and their degrees. Many of them are interested neither in their duties, nor in their comrades, nor, one would say, in their own thoughts. They play cards, read the papers, think about women and complain of ennui, for the war has enthroned boredom. And yet these souls, I assure you, are of good material and full of energy and resource.

What is to be done? How is one to introduce them to a larger, fuller life? How can one dare to do that without presumption, and also without fear of pomposity? How do it with affection, without lecturing them, without preaching to them? How be useful and friendly with simplicity? They have suffered, they have experience and obstinate views of their own. They do not believe that they have been dispossessed of anything. You have to listen very attentively to hear their soul groaning in the depths.

I spoke to one of them about music. He replied with an indifference in which there was a touch of discouragement; “For my part, I don’t understand music. It can’t interest me.” We went on talking and I discovered that he was strangely sensitive to architectual matters, that he had a very subtle understanding and lacked nothing but enlightenment, knowledge, to have applied himself to it with passionate interest.

It is usually that way. The field of moral activity is so large that it has in reserve for every soul a path of his own choice, accessible and full of allurement. I do not believe there is a single individual who cannot end by meeting, in the limitless realm of art, with a mode of expression that touches him, conforms quite accurately to his powers and tastes.

V

You see I have waited a long time before pronouncing the word. I must at last make up my mind to call art by its name. Listen and do not confuse modesty with timidity.

The past century has produced important artists in every country in the world. That was a beautiful, fertile and truly generous century! And yet it witnessed the birth of a misunderstanding that grows more obdurate, that increases as it grows older. Should one ever allow a misunderstanding to grow old?

The romantic writers and, following them, all the artists of their epoch, intoxicated with their own genius, honored art as a religion. It was natural enough since at that moment, as we know, mankind was beginning to detach itself from its divinities, and it is hard to live without God. I cannot bring myself to condemn that enthusiasm. I love art too well, and I shall always hold it as one of the distinguishing marks of man and one of the greatest things in this world.

But the priests of this new God have acted like all priests: they have hurled anathemas and brought in a reign of intolerance. They have grown mad with pride, when there was reason and when there was no reason for it. They have cried out at all hours of the day, “Away, profane ones!” Many of them, who have had very noble souls, have discouraged, as if designedly, those whom their radiant face has fascinated. Others, instead of struggling, have held the epoch responsible for their ill-fortune. All of them, poets, painters, musicians, have let it be understood that they exercised a divine power and that the mass of men must only wonder and be silent, without themselves attempting anything of the sort.

No doubt there is a certain virtue in this attitude; it has lavished solitary consolations on those who have turned their backs on fashion.

The worthiest heirs of these illustrious men have confirmed their tradition. They have devised a splendid isolation, raised up a tower of ivory and dug all about it a moat that every day grows deeper. They have also stirred up childish and shame-faced adversaries with a desire for the commonest sort of popularity, and the confirmation of billboard success.

Yet humanity is waiting and longs to be treated neither as intruders nor as children.

VI

It cannot be said any longer that pure art is of no use: it helps us to live.

It helps us to live, in the most practical manner and every day.

Every moment you make instinctive, reiterated, and forcible appeals to all the forms of art. And that not only in order to express your thought, but still more and above all to shape your thought, to think your thought.

You find yourself in the midst of a landscape, and there is an image at the back of your eye. The manner in which you accept and interpret this image bears the mark of your personality and also of a crowd of other personalities which you call to your aid without knowing it.

The day when the painters of our continent invented that convention we call perspective, they modified and determined, for many long years, our way of seeing things. It must be recognized equally that since the reign of impressionism we have understood, possessed in a new way, the colors of the world.

You live in a sonorous universe where everything is rhythm, tone, number and harmony: human voices, the great sounds of nature, the artificial uproar of society envelopes you in a vibrant and complex network that you ought unceasingly to decipher and translate. Well, this you cannot do without submitting to the influence of the great souls who have occupied themselves with these things. The understanding of movements, harmonies, rhythms, only comes to you at the moment when the musicians reveal their secret to you, since they have been able, in some fashion, to interest you in them.

And this is true in regard to everything. If you discover something in your environment, if you perceive an interesting harmony between two beings, a curious relation between two ideas, you will succeed in throwing them into relief, in giving happy expression to them, only by means of the poet’s art, and if you cannot find terms and images of your own, you can freely borrow them from Hugo, from Baudelaire, from those unknown artists who have elaborated the common language of men.

We do not think alone. Resign yourself, therefore, to being the delighted prisoner of a vast, human system from which you cannot escape without error and loss. Become, with good grace, the friend and the guest of great men.

VII

They will introduce you to a profound, passionate, lyrical life. They will aid you to possess the world. Art is not simply a manner of moving the pencil, the pen or the bow. It is not a secret, technical process. It is, above everything else, a way of living.

If your business is to grow wheat or to smelt copper, perform it with interest and skill. That will render service to other men whose function is to assemble colors, shapes, words or sounds. They will know how to render service to you, in their own fashion, repay you in turn. But do not imagine that their works are destined merely to divert your leisure. They have a more sacred, a more beautiful mission: that of placing you in possession of your own wealth.

Art is the supreme gift that men make of their discoveries, their riches.

No one has possessed the world better than Lucretius, Shakespeare or Goethe. What do you know of Croesus, who heaped up his gold to such an abnormal and monstrous degree? Nothing has remained of that chimerical fortune but a vague memory. But the fortune of Rembrandt has become and will remain the fortune of our race.

To follow the example of these masters is not so much to try, with pen or palette in hand, to imitate them, as to understand with them, and thanks to them, what they have understood.

This cannot hurt your pride or hinder the expansion of your own personality. Quite the contrary. This studious humility is the surest path toward the conquest of your own soul. The anatomists will explain to you that the human embryo adopts successively, in its quick evolution, all the forms the species has known before its actual flowering. This great law rules also in the moral order, and do not count on escaping it. It is by first knowing the world through the masters that you will succeed some day in grasping it in your hands, dominating it yourself.

Ambition is an intoxicating passion, but to go to school to genius is a prudent measure and a sweet experience, too.

VIII

If you are unhappy, oppressed, if you have melancholy doubts of your future, of your ability, of your power to love, and if nothing in heaven replies to your prayer, to your need for deliverance, remember that you are not abandoned without resource. Men remain to you. The best among them have made for your consolation, for your redemption, statues, books and songs.

Open one of these books, therefore, and plunge into it! Sink into it as into a cool forest, as into a deep, running brook.

A man is speaking to you of himself or of the world. Read! Read on! Little by little the harmonious voice envelopes you, cradles you, lifts you up and suddenly bears you away. The tightness in your throat seems to relax, you breathe with a sort of fervor and exaltation. Generous tears start to your eyes or your whole soul shakes with laughter.

This great and wholesome exaltation people attribute to the miraculous presence of beauty. No doubt, no doubt! But that vague and simple explanation is an almost mythical one.

For you must realize that the man with whom you have just been having a sort of intimate colloquy has comforted you and carried you out of yourself mainly because he has been able to prove to you that you were neither abandoned, nor destitute, nor truly disgraced. He has seemed to you great but, in recalling to you that you are of the same race as himself, he has effaced himself before you. He has given you happy, courageous, new thoughts, and you have suddenly seen that you were thinking them also. For a second you have both communed together. And you have felt yourself once more in possession of a treasure that was escaping you.

It is true, all these thoughts are your own, since it is enough for you to see them in writing to recognize them. It is true, you too have your grandeur, your nobility and infinite resources. How could you have forgotten it for a moment? It is enough for you to open that book or to hum that song to remember it. It is true, your life also is astonishing and full of adventures. How did you fall into that despair? What did that discouragement signify?

IX

During the winter of 1917, I made the acquaintance of a young provincial musician who was serving in the same unit with me. At Soissons we found a room where we were able to meet and play together.

Our new comrade was a simple man with a country accent.

He played the violin carefully and with talent. Often, during our concerts, we watched his face as it bent over the instrument, and it seemed to us that in those moments that humble violinist was in communion with the great souls of Bach, Beethoven, and Franck, that he was holding a brotherly and affectionate conversation with them. I felt then that he had nothing to envy in the princes of this world. And it is a fact, I believe, that he did not envy them anything.

Do not tell me that you do not know how to play any instrument. That signifies nothing. There are two skilful professional musicians in my group who play their instruments only just enough to enable them not to lose practice for their calling. They are a sort of mechanician. As for you, you have a heart, ears, and a memory. And that’s the main thing.

Believe that what you hold in your memory is more precious than everything else, for you carry that with you wherever you go, through all your days.

Do you think I can ever bore myself, with all those thousands of airs that sing in my head, that secretly accompany all my thoughts and offer a sort of harmonious comment upon all the acts of my life?

If this does not seem possible to you, remember that you possess the immense library of humankind and all its museums. Think of all you have read and admired. Think of it with pride and affection. Think of all that remains to you to see and to read and tell yourself how marvelous it is to be so ignorant as to have such riches in reserve, to have such treasures to conquer.

Amid the ordeals and the disillusionments of your existence, lift your soul every day toward those divine brothers who are our masters, and repeat with a proud humility: “It is sweet to sit down at your feast! And how good to think that it is to you we owe our opulence and our prosperity!”

VI
SORROW AND RENUNCIATION

I

If, concerning an old man, some one said to us: “He has been perfectly happy all his life, he is going to die without ever having suffered,” we should be incredulous at first; then, if we were obliged to admit the truth of the remark, we should feel for this old man not so much envy as pity. With our astonishment would be mingled, in spite of all, something a little like contempt.

Happiness is our aim, the final reason for our living. But is it fair to say that sorrow is opposed to happiness?

There are sorrows that one cannot, that one should not, escape. They are the very price we pay for happiness. It is by means of them that we travel toward our own development. They prepare us for joy and render us worthy of it. Without them, could we ever know that we were happy?

If I believed, O my unknown friend for whom today I am hoping these consolations, if I believed that you could reach happiness, that is to say, the harmonious prosperity of your soul, without experiencing any agonies, I should not undertake to praise your suffering. But you suffer, I know it, and you are called to other sufferings. Henceforth I shall not refrain from praising what wounds you. For one does not console anyone by depreciating his grief, but by showing him how beautiful, how rare, how desirable it is, and your suffering can truly be called that.

I do not dream, then, of depriving you of your wealth. I only hope that you will be able to appreciate its full value. I beg that you will pardon me if I chance to hurt you by placing my hand upon your wound. I do it, you may be sure, with the affection and the solicitude of a man who has consecrated his life to such tasks.

They will tell you, my friend, that I am seeking to flatter your distress by reasonings that are full of guile, that I am singing to lull you to sleep and deceive you, that I am dressing in the gilded clothes of an age that is past the black demon that torments you. Let me still have your confidence: I have only one ambition,--it is your own greatest joy. I could not lead you astray without shame and without deceiving myself; for are you not indeed myself, O my friend?

II

There are some material fortunes which humble and reasonable men do not desire because they divine, in spite of the pleasures that result from them, what a crushing load they are.

By contrast, among the spiritual riches that we are able to possess, grief seems surrounded by a simple aureole. It is tyrannical, redoubtable, mutilating; its favorites are its victims. It does not descend upon its chosen ones with the softness of a dove, it pounces like a bird of prey, and those whom it carries off into the sky bear upon their sides the marks of its clenched claws.

But it is the sign of life; of all our possessions it is the last to leave us, it is the one that escorts us to the brink of the abyss.

It gives us the measure of man. He who has not suffered always seems to us a little like a child or a pauper.

The bitterness of men who have been often visited by sorrow is so truly a treasure that, if they could, they would not rid themselves of it for anything in the world: it resembles authority.

Through his tears, through his martyrdom, he who is charged with a great sorrow feels that he is the abode of some terrible thing that is also sacred and majestic. Great griefs command our respect. Before them knees tremble and heads bow as in the presence of thrones and tabernacles.

He who has suffered greatly makes us feel timid and humble before him. He knows things that we can only guess. We gaze upon him with passionate admiration as upon a traveller who has journeyed over oceans and explored far countries. It is at the time of his first wounds that the young man discovers his soul and plumbs his inner nobility.

Our grief is so precious a blessing that for its sake we dread inquisitive contacts. We preserve it jealously from the touch of those who might, through clumsiness or stupidity, debase this terrible and precious treasure. We long only that people should leave us alone with this bitter possession! Let them beware of frustrating us when they imagine that they are working for our relief!

When sorrow leaves us too soon, we feel a sort of shame and think less well of ourselves: it shone out of its shadowy casket, out of the deepest depths of the chest where we heap up our true treasures, and now, behold, it has vanished! We find ourselves almost miserable and utterly dispossessed.

The man who beats a retreat before a great ordeal fills us with distrust and pity. Something in us rejoices that he has not suffered. But something regrets that he has not given his measure, that he has not been the hero, the potent, exceptional man we hoped he would be. And that is not a mere perversion of our need for the spectacular: we are not less exacting with ourselves.

When sorrow comes to us, and we manage to escape it, the first sense of deliverance we feel is marred by an obscure, obstinate regret, as if we had lost an opportunity to enrich ourselves.

Tell me, what man among us did not, at the outset of the present great catastrophe, interrogate his own fate with a double anguish: the anguish to know what sufferings were in store for him, the fear also that he might not suffer enough, that he might not receive, and quickly, an adequate share of the ordeal.

III

This religious respect we experience in the face of grief gives its meaning and beauty to the feeling of sympathy.

We do not wish to admit that a great grief can live side by side with us without demanding that we should share it. As a man of lowly station wistfully approaches the table of princes, so we revolve about the grief of others in the hope of being invited to partake of it.

It is an overmastering impulsion that rises from the depths of our natures. The eagerness we are able to bring to the sharing of others’ joys is but lukewarm beside the insurmountable urge that makes us share in their sorrow.

This is because our taste for joy is stamped with a keen quality of reserve, an irreducible delicacy. The joy even of those who are nearest to us can easily become repugnant to us. We are too proud to seem eager for it. True grief, on the contrary, attracts us, fascinates us. It disarms our critical sense and leaves us only an obscure feeling of envy.

Sympathy stirs us gently without overwhelming us; it is for this reason too that we find it so full of savor.

Although we recoil from the terrors of the leading part, sympathy permits us to play passionately the rôle of supernumeraries.

It is not we who are struck down and yet we can taste the mystic horror of the wound. The chosen victim bestows alms upon us and we accept them without shame. We have the perfume of the Host on our lips and it is not our blood that has paid the sacrifice. We are the guests at a sumptuous and tragic feast. We bear the reflected light of the great funeral pyre, without undergoing the flames and the destruction.

That explains our leaning toward those works of art that find their strength and their subjects in human grief. It is for this reason, surely, that we love so dearly to shed tears at the theater. The great artists have drawn from grief their most beautiful inspirations. We vow eternal gratitude to those who can revive in us a faithful image of our torments and call them back to our forgetful souls, to those who know so well how to give us a foretaste of the delights that future suffering has in store for us.

IV

Not all griefs exalt us and add to us. There are some that are sterile, withering, unconfessable.

Such griefs bring only misery and impoverishment. In the moral order they stand for debts and failures. However great may be our blind indulgence for ourselves, we cannot, on principle, impute them to ourselves. They do not bear the stamp of destiny but of our own baseness.

Who, indeed, would wish to share them with us, when we do not even let them appear?

Who would wish to associate himself with our weaknesses, our shames, our jealousies, our betrayals? Who can feel sympathy for a grief that disavows everything pure and generous that exists in us? No mention is made of these griefs in the Beatitudes.

Christ himself might ask us to kiss the face of a leper. But what charity could so sacrifice itself as to embrace our shame and our degradation?

That is the cup we must put away from our lips.

V

The stoics pursue their strange happiness with an impassibility that is worse than death. Epictetus writes: “If you love an earthen vessel, tell yourself that you love an earthen vessel, for then if that vessel is broken you will not be troubled by it. If you love your son or your wife, tell yourself that you love a mortal being, for then if that being chance to die you will not be troubled by it.”

Comes our wisdom at such a price? If so, I renounce and abhor it. Better trouble and sorrow than this inhuman serenity!

Certainly I willingly renounce the earthen vessel; the sound of its breaking will never be loud enough to interrupt the conversation our souls pursue. But those dear faces that are my horizon, my heaven and my homeland, can I think without anguish of losing them forever? How irreparably I should despise myself if, on that condition, I succeeded in winning my own salvation!

This philosophy is poor, forsaken, desperate, rather than truly wise. It renounces, by degrees, everything, for the sake of an ironical peace. It withdraws from life the least debatable motives for continuing it. It seeks to close the heart to sorrow. But since that remains inevitable, it is better to love it, better to make an ally of it, better to conquer it by main strength and possess it intimately.

Dryness of heart cannot be a good thing. What, is everything to be taken away from me, even my grief, even that grief which remains to us when all other blessings have been ravished away?

The resources of philosophy are poor and destitute unless the heart can anoint them, sanctify them, and invest them with its own supreme authority.

VI

The fanaticism of grief is a fact so profoundly human that religions and governments have exploited it successfully. This almost mystical passion flourishes so well among peoples that are permeated with the ancient traditions of suffering and renunciation!

Nevertheless, the path does not lie through this sublime error, which is altogether too favorable for the enterprises of criminal ambition.

Sorrow cannot be a thing that one covets. It is, it ought to be, simply a thing that one accepts. Like certain terrible dignities, like certain overwhelming honors, one receives it, one does not seek it. Destiny brings a sufficient burden of mourning and cruelty, it should not be tempted. The noble life demands that we shall be courageous, it does not require us to be foolhardy. To him who “seeks while he groans,” suffering will never be wanting.

At this hour the whole world is intoxicated with it, satiated, it would seem, for all time. At this hour there rises an immense cry of pity and supplication.

All generous souls are wounded to the quick and stagger. It is not in the moment when they beg for mercy that one would desire a superaddition of martyrdom. It is enough to assume the sanguinary wealth with which we are overwhelmed.

No one will ever be deprived of it who lives for love. We shall all be honored according to our merits. And we shall know that grief is its own reward; for it is in sorrow and abnegation that our soul becomes supremely aware of the beauty of the world and of its own virtues.

We cannot ask to be indemnified for our riches....

VII

In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children!

It is true! Our child was born in sorrow, in your sorrow, O my friend! I am jealous because of it. Forgive me!

Forgive me, for your part is more beautiful than mine, inasmuch as it contains more suffering. Let me look upon you with envy. Let me think of my own lot with regret.

You have borne, you have brought forth, you have nourished. It was not in my side that this little body lay. It is not my flesh this tender, greedy mouth has clung to. I have known nothing of that suffering. You have kept it all for yourself. I have only picked up the crumbs, like a beggar, like a pauper.

I have not suffered! I have not suffered enough! I look on my happiness as upon something usurped. It is your happiness that I share. It is your wealth that overflows even upon me.

I know that a day may come when we shall both suffer together because of this son. But whatever may be our common anguish, you will always keep the first place, you will always walk before me. You have forever outdistanced me along the shining road.

How can I help regarding you with envy, I who have not suffered enough?

VIII

Exalted spirits, struck by our many resemblances to the beasts, have striven to find what was the distinguishing mark of man. It is a noble solicitude, for wheresoever the mark of men may be it is that way we must go. If we really possess a characteristic virtue of which the animals are deprived, it is that which we must exalt, in order to be completely, proudly, men.

Pascal said: “Man is obviously made to think; and his whole dignity, his whole merit, and his whole duty lies in thinking rightly.”

Can we indeed believe that no other being has this grandeur to any degree? Are we so sure that “a tree does not know it is miserable”?

Even art, which may turn out to be the instrument of our redemption, is not certainly the lot of our race alone. Song and the dance triumph among the animals and often appear like the beautiful inventions of a gratuitous activity, with no other end than themselves and the emotions they give or interpret.

In renunciation, perhaps, lies our distinction, the trait which stamps us and sets us apart.

I say “perhaps,” because animals also offer us examples of abnegation. Sacrifice beautifies even their habits. With them, too, the individual sacrifices himself for the group, the hero sacrifices itself for the race. At the moment when I am writing these lines we are in autumn; a swarm of bees is dying of cold on a branch beside me. They are dying with a sort of resignation, in order that their hive, so poor in resources, may survive the winter.

Why not share, then, with these humble victims, our most beautiful quality? Why refuse to possess something in common with them, since it is a virtue? Why cut ourselves off haughtily from the rest of life?

Over and above this, the renunciation that has no particular or general motive of interest, the pure and absolute renunciation which is a heroic folly, is undoubtedly our business. I am not speaking now of the renunciation of the better religions, the renunciation that counts on celestial rewards, but of the renunciation which is an end in itself, which finds in itself its own sorrowful recompense.

IX

Can we ever forget, my friend, that woman who was the lesson of your youth, your counsellor and your example?

She lived in that dark, low room where you so loved to go and to which you used to show me the way, a way that seemed to me that of veneration itself.

Disillusionments, griefs, sickness and, without doubt, a great need for renunciation had gradually sequestered her in that unlovely place of refuge, encumbered with old books and full of the odor of dust. She seemed cut off from the world; but in the shadow of that retreat her eye sparkled so vivaciously, she spoke with so melodious a voice that the world pursued her who had abandoned it even into her retirement: the friendship of young people, that friendship which is so pure and spontaneous, was for her a constant testimony. This was the only thing she would not renounce, her only ornament, her last elegance, her possession.

Year by year death came to snatch from her affection those of her own blood. Every sort of happiness withdrew from her as she retired into her abode, light itself she dreaded more and more, and more and more renounced.

Every time we passed through her little door, so slow in opening, we had at first an insurmountable feeling of being suffocated, for we were still intoxicated with our radiant life, our destiny and our ambitions.

But soon our eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, our souls recognized the humble, penetrating odor of the hangings, and we found again that beautiful, commanding glance, that voice with its supernatural freshness.

Her malady struck her new blows. This woman who still possessed the space of three rooms had to shut herself in one of them. And then, even of this she possessed no more than a corner. Her world was only a little wall and the wood of an old bed.