Chapter IV: Part 4

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 It finds everything out of date, awkward, too simple, lacking the modern touch.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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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"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.

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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_.

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Let us draw from this principle some practical applications.