mountains in spite of a full house and a neighboring village. No sound
is to be heard but the murmur of the flies. There is something very
striking in this calm. The middle of the day is like the middle of the
night. Life seems suspended just when it is most intense. These are the
moments in which one hears the infinite and perceives the ineffable.
Victor Hugo, in his “Contemplations,” has been carrying me from world
to world, and since then his contradictions have reminded me of the
convinced Christian with whom I was talking yesterday in a house near
by.... The same sunlight floods both the book and nature, the doubting
poet and the believing preacher, as well as the mobile dreamer, who, in
the midst of all these various existences, allows himself to be swayed
by every passing breath, and delights, stretched along the car of his
balloon, in floating aimlessly through all the sounds and shallows
of the ether, and in realizing within himself all the harmonies and
dissonances of the soul, of feeling, and of thought. Idleness and
contemplation! Slumber of the will, lapses of the vital force, indolence
of the whole being--how well I know you! To love, to dream, to feel,
to learn, to understand--all these are possible to me if only I may be
relieved from willing. It is my tendency, my instinct, my fault, my sin.
I have a sort of primitive horror of ambition, of struggle, of hatred,
of all which dissipates the soul and makes it dependent upon external
things and aims. The joy of becoming once more conscious of myself, of
listening to the passage of time and the flow of the universal life,
is sometimes enough to make me forget every desire, and to quench in
me both the wish to produce and the power to execute. Intellectual
Epicureanism is always threatening to overpower me. I can only combat it
by the idea of duty; it is as the poet has said:
“Ceux qui vivent, ce sont ceux qui luttent; ce sont
Ceux dont un dessein ferme emplit l’âme et le front,
Ceux qui d’un haut destin gravissent l’âpre cime,
Ceux qui marchent pensifs, épris d’un but sublime,
Ayant devant les yeux sans cesse, nuit et jour,
Ou quelque saint labeur ou quelque grand amour!”
[Footnote: Victor Hugo, “Les Chatiments.”]
_Five o’clock._--In the afternoon our little society met in general talk
upon the terrace. Some amount of familiarity and friendliness begins
to show itself in our relations to each other. I read over again with
emotion some passages of “Jocelyn.” How admirable it is!
“Il se fit de sa vie une plus mâle idée:
Sa douleur d’un seul trait ne l’avait pas vidée;
Mais, adorant de Dieu le sévère dessein,
Il sut la porter pleine et pure dans son sein,
Et ne se hâtant pas de la répandre toute,
Sa résignation l’épancha goutte à goutte,
Selon la circonstance et le besoin d’autrui,
Pour tout vivifier sur terre autour de lui.”
[Footnote: Epilogue of “Jocelyn.”]
The true poetry is that which raises you, as this does, toward heaven,
and fills you with divine emotion; which sings of love and death, of
hope and sacrifice, and awakens the sense of the infinite. “Jocelyn”
always stirs in me impulses of tenderness which it would be hateful
to me to see profaned by satire. As a tragedy of feeling, it has no
parallel in French, for purity, except “Paul et Virginie,” and I think
that I prefer “Jocelyn.” To be just, one ought to read them side by
side.
_Six o’clock._--One more day is drawing to its close. With the exception
of Mont Blanc, all the mountains have already lost their color. The
evening chill succeeds the heat of the afternoon. The sense of the
implacable flight of things, of the resistless passage of the hours,
seizes upon me afresh and oppresses me.
“Nature au front serein, comme vous oubliez!”
In vain we cry with the poet, “O time, suspend thy flight!”... And what
days, after all, would we keep and hold? Not only the happy days, but
the lost days! The first have left at least a memory behind them, the
others nothing but a regret which is almost a remorse....
_Eleven o’clock._--A gust of wind. A few clouds in the sky. The
nightingale is silent. On the other hand, the cricket and the river are
still singing.
August 9, 1862.--Life, which seeks its own continuance, tends to repair
itself without our help. It mends its spider’s webs when they have been
torn; it re-establishes in us the conditions of health, and itself heals
the injuries inflicted upon it; it binds the bandage again upon our
eyes, brings back hope into our hearts, breathes health once more into
our organs, and regilds the dream of our imagination. But for this,
experience would have hopelessly withered and faded us long before the
time, and the youth would be older than the centenarian. The wise part
of us, then, is that which is unconscious of itself; and what is
most reasonable in man are those elements in him which do not reason.
Instinct, nature, a divine, an impersonal activity, heal in us the
wounds made by our own follies; the invisible _genius_ of our life is
never tired of providing material for the prodigalities of the self.
The essential, maternal basis of our conscious life, is therefore that
unconscious life which we perceive no more than the outer hemisphere
of the moon perceives the earth, while all the time indissolubly and
eternally bound to it. It is our [Greek: antichoon], to speak with
Pythagoras.
November 7, 1862.--How malign, infectious, and unwholesome is the
eternal smile of that indifferent criticism, that attitude of ironical
contemplation, which corrodes and demolishes everything, that mocking
pitiless temper, which holds itself aloof from every personal duty
and every vulnerable affection, and cares only to understand without
committing itself to action! Criticism become a habit, a fashion, and
a system, means the destruction of moral energy, of faith, and of all
spiritual force. One of my tendencies leads me in this direction, but I
recoil before its results when I come across more emphatic types of
it than myself. And at least I cannot reproach myself with having ever
attempted to destroy the moral force of others; my reverence for life
forbade it, and my self-distrust has taken from me even the temptation
to it.
This kind of temper is very dangerous among us, for it flatters all
the worst instincts of men--indiscipline, irreverence, selfish
individualism--and it ends in social atomism. Minds inclined to mere
negation are only harmless in great political organisms, which go
without them and in spite of them. The multiplication of them among
ourselves will bring about the ruin of our little countries, for small
states only live by faith and will. Woe to the society where negation
rules, for life is an affirmation; and a society, a country, a nation,
is a living whole capable of death. No nationality is possible without
prejudices, for public spirit and national tradition are but webs woven
out of innumerable beliefs which have been acquired, admitted, and
continued without formal proof and without discussion. To act, we must
believe; to believe, we must make up our minds, affirm, decide, and
in reality prejudge the question. He who will only act upon a full
scientific certitude is unfit for practical life. But we are made
for action, and we cannot escape from duty. Let us not, then, condemn
prejudice so long as we have nothing but doubt to put in its place, or
laugh at those whom we should be incapable of consoling! This, at least,
is my point of view.
* * * * *
Beyond the element which is common to all men there is an element
which separates them. This element may be religion, country, language,
education. But all these being supposed common, there still remains
something which serves as a line of demarcation--namely, the ideal. To
have an ideal or to have none, to have this ideal or that--this is what
digs gulfs between men, even between those who live in the same family
circle, under the same roof or in the same room. You must love with the
same love, think with the same thought as some one else, if you are to
escape solitude.
Mutual respect implies discretion and reserve even in love itself; it
means preserving as much liberty as possible to those whose life we
share. We must distrust our instinct of intervention, for the desire
to make one’s own will prevail is often disguised under the mask of
solicitude.
How many times we become hypocrites simply by remaining the same
outwardly and toward others, when we know that inwardly and to ourselves
we are different. It is not hypocrisy in the strict sense, for we borrow
no other personality than our own; still, it is a kind of deception. The
deception humiliates us, and the humiliation is a chastisement which the
mask inflicts upon the face, which our past inflicts upon our present.
Such humiliation is good for us; for it produces shame, and shame gives
birth to repentance. Thus in an upright soul good springs out of evil,
and it falls only to rise again.
* * * * *
January 8, 1863.--This evening I read through the “Cid” and “Rodogune.”
My impression is still a mixed and confused one. There is much
disenchantment in my admiration, and a good deal of reserve in my
enthusiasm. What displeases me in this dramatic art, is the mechanical
abstraction of the characters, and the scolding, shrewish tone of
the interlocutors. I had a vague impression of listening to gigantic
marionettes, perorating through a trumpet, with the emphasis of
Spaniards. There is power in it, but we have before us heroic idols
rather than human beings. The element of artificiality, of strained
pomposity and affectation, which is the plague of classical tragedy, is
everywhere apparent, and one hears, as it were, the cords and pulleys of
these majestic _colossi_ creaking and groaning. I much prefer Racine and
Shakespeare; the one from the point of view of aesthetic sensation, the
other from that of psychological sensation. The southern theater can
never free itself from masks. Comic masks are bearable, but in the case
of tragic heroes, the abstract type, the mask, make one impatient. I can
laugh with personages of tin and pasteboard: I can only weep with the
living, or what resembles them. Abstraction turns easily to caricature;
it is apt to engender mere shadows on the wall, mere ghosts and puppets.
It is psychology of the first degree--elementary psychology--just as the
colored pictures of Germany are elementary painting. And yet with all
this, you have a double-distilled and often sophistical refinement: just
as savages are by no means simple. The fine side of it all is the manly
vigor, the bold frankness of ideas, words, and sentiments. Why is it
that we find so large an element of factitious grandeur, mingled with
true grandeur, in this drama of 1640, from which the whole dramatic
development of monarchical France was to spring? Genius is there, but it
is hemmed round by a conventional civilization, and, strive as he may,
no man wears a wig with impunity.
January 13, 1863.--To-day it has been the turn of “Polyeucte” and “La
Morte de Pompée.” Whatever one’s objections may be, there is something
grandiose in the style of Corneille which reconciles you at last even to
his stiff, emphatic manner, and his over-ingenious rhetoric. But it is
the dramatic _genre_ which is false. His heroes are rôles rather than
men. They pose as magnanimity, virtue, glory, instead of realizing
them before us. They are always _en scène_, studied by others, or by
themselves. With them glory--that is to say, the life of ceremony and of
affairs, and the opinion of the public--replaces nature--becomes nature.
They never speak except _ore rotundo_, in _cothurnus_, or sometimes on
stilts. And what consummate advocates they all are! The French drama is
an oratorical tournament, a long suit between opposing parties, on a day
which is to end with the death of somebody, and where all the personages
represented are in haste to speak before the hour of silence strikes.
Elsewhere, speech serves to make action intelligible; in French tragedy
action is but a decent motive for speech. It is the procedure calculated
to extract the finest possible speeches from the persons who are
engaged in the action, and who represent different perceptions of it at
different moments and from different points of view. Love and nature,
duty and desire, and a dozen other moral antitheses, are the limbs moved
by the wire of the dramatist, who makes them fall into all the tragic
attitudes. What is really curious and amusing is that the people of
all others the most vivacious, gay, and intelligent, should have always
understood the grand style in this pompous, pedantic fashion. But it was
inevitable.
April 8, 1863.--I have been turning over the 3,500 pages of “Les
Misérables,” trying to understand the guiding idea of this vast
composition. The fundamental idea of “Les Misérables” seems to be this.
Society engenders certain frightful evils--prostitution, vagabondage,
rogues, thieves, convicts, war, revolutionary clubs and barricades. She
ought to impress this fact on her mind, and not treat all those who
come in contact with her law as mere monsters. The task before us is to
humanize law and opinion, to raise the fallen as well as the vanquished,
to create a social redemption. How is this to be done? By enlightening
vice and lawlessness, and so diminishing the sum of them, and by
bringing to bear upon the guilty the healing influence of pardon.
At bottom is it not a Christianization of society, this extension of
charity from the sinner to the condemned criminal, this application to
our present life of what the church applies more readily to the other?
Struggle to restore a human soul to order and to righteousness by
patience and by love, instead of crushing it by your inflexible
vindictiveness, your savage justice! Such is the cry of the book. It
is great and noble, but it is a little optimistic and Rousseau-like.
According to it the individual is always innocent and society always
responsible, and the ideal before us for the twentieth century is a sort
of democratic age of gold, a universal republic from which war, capital
punishment, and pauperism will have disappeared. It is the religion and
the city of progress; in a word, the Utopia of the eighteenth century
revived on a great scale. There is a great deal of generosity in it,
mixed with not a little fanciful extravagance. The fancifulness consists
chiefly in a superficial notion of evil. The author ignores or pretends
to forget the instinct of perversity, the love of evil for evil’s sake,
which is contained in the human heart.
The great and salutary idea of the book, is that honesty before the law
is a cruel hypocrisy, in so far as it arrogates to itself the right
of dividing society according to its own standard into elect and
reprobates, and thus confounds the relative with the absolute. The
leading passage is that in which Javert, thrown off the rails, upsets
the whole moral system of the strict Javert, half spy, half priest--of
the irreproachable police-officer. In this chapter the writer shows us
social charity illuminating and transforming a harsh and unrighteous
justice. Suppression of the social hell, that is to say, of all
irreparable stains, of all social outlawries for which there is neither
end nor hope--it is an essentially religious idea.
The erudition, the talent, the brilliancy of execution, shown in the
book are astonishing, bewildering almost. Its faults are to be found in
the enormous length allowed to digressions and episodical dissertations,
in the exaggeration of all the combinations and all the theses, and,
finally, in something strained, spasmodic, and violent in the style,
which is very different from the style of natural eloquence or of
essential truth. Effect is the misfortune of Victor Hugo, because he
makes it the center of his aesthetic system; and hence exaggeration,
monotony of emphasis, theatricality of manner, a tendency to force and
over-drive. A powerful artist, but one with whom you never forget the
artist; and a dangerous model, for the master himself is already grazing
the rock of burlesque, and passes from the sublime to the repulsive,
from lack of power to produce one harmonious impression of beauty. It is
natural enough that he should detest Racine.
But what astonishing philological and literary power has Victor Hugo! He
is master of all the dialects contained in our language, dialects of
the courts of law, of the stock-exchange, of war, and of the sea,
of philosophy and the convict-gang, the dialects of trade and of
archaeology, of the antiquarian and the scavenger. All the bric-à-brac
of history and of manners, so to speak, all the curiosities of soil,
and subsoil, are known and familiar to him. He seems to have turned
his Paris over and over, and to know it body and soul as one knows the
contents of one’s pocket. What a prodigious memory and what a lurid
imagination! He is at once a visionary and yet master of his dreams;
he summons up and handles at will the hallucinations of opium or of
hasheesh, without ever becoming their dupe; he makes of madness one
of his tame animals, and bestrides, with equal coolness, Pegasus or
Nightmare, the Hippogriff or the Chimera. As a psychological phenomenon
he is of the deepest interest. Victor Hugo draws in sulphuric acid,
he lights his pictures with electric light. He deafens, blinds, and
bewilders his reader rather than he charms or persuades him. Strength
carried to such a point as this is a fascination; without seeming to
take you captive, it makes you its prisoner; it does not enchant
you, but it holds you spellbound. His ideal is the extraordinary, the
gigantic, the overwhelming, the incommensurable. His most characteristic
words are _immense, colossal, enormous, huge, monstrous_. He finds a
way of making even child-nature extravagant and bizarre. The only thing
which seems impossible to him is to be natural. In short, his passion
is grandeur, his fault is excess; his distinguishing mark is a kind of
Titanic power with strange dissonances of puerility in its magnificence.
Where he is weakest is, in measure, taste, and sense of humor: he
fails in _esprit_, in the subtlest sense of the word. Victor Hugo is a
gallicized Spaniard, or rather he unites all the extremes of south and
north, the Scandinavian and the African. Gaul has less part in him than
any other country. And yet, by a caprice of destiny, he is one of the
literary geniuses of France in the nineteenth century! His resources are
inexhaustible, and age seems to have no power over him. What an infinite
store of words, forms, and ideas he carries about with him, and what a
pile of works he has left behind him to mark his passage! His eruptions
are like those of a volcano; and, fabulous workman that he is, he goes
on forever raising, destroying, crushing, and rebuilding a world of his
own creation, and a world rather Hindoo than Hellenic.
He amazes me: and yet I prefer those men of genius who awaken in me the
sense of truth, and who increase the sum of one’s inner liberty. In
Hugo one feels the effort of the laboring Cyclops; give me rather the
sonorous bow of Apollo, and the tranquil brow of the Olympian Jove.
His type is that of the Satyr in the “Légende des Siècles,” who
crushes Olympus, a type midway between the ugliness of the faun and the
overpowering sublimity of the great Pan.
May 23, 1863.--Dull, cloudy, misty weather; it rained in the night
and yet the air is heavy. This somber reverie of earth and sky has
a sacredness of its own, but it fills the spectator with a vague and
stupefying _ennui_. Light brings life: darkness may bring thought, but
a dull daylight, the uncertain glimmer of a leaden sky, merely make one
restless and weary. These indecisive and chaotic states of nature are
ugly, like all amorphous things, like smeared colors, or bats, or the
viscous polyps of the sea. The source of all attractiveness is to be
found in character, in sharpness of outline, in individualization. All
that is confused and indistinct, without form, or sex, or accent, is
antagonistic to beauty; for the mind’s first need is light; light means
order, and order means, in the first place, the distinction of the
parts, in the second, their regular action. Beauty is based on reason.
August 7, 1863.--A walk after supper, a sky sparkling with stars, the
Milky Way magnificent. Alas! all the same my heart is heavy. At bottom
I am always brought up against an incurable distrust of myself and of
life, which toward my neighbor has become indulgence, but for myself
has led to a _régime_ of absolute abstention. All or nothing! This is
my inborn disposition, my primitive stuff, my “old man.” And yet if some
one will but give me a little love, will but penetrate a little into my
inner feeling, I am happy and ask for scarcely anything else. A child’s
caresses, a friend’s talk, are enough to make me gay and expansive.
So then I aspire to the infinite, and yet a very little contents me;
everything disturbs me and the least thing calms me. I have often
surprised in my self the wish for death, and yet my ambitions for
happiness scarcely go beyond those of the bird: wings! sun! a nest! I
persist in solitude because of a taste for it, so people think. No, it
is from distaste, disgust, from shame at my own need of others, shame at
confessing it, a fear of passing into bondage if I do confess it.
September 2, 1863.--How shall I find a name for that subtle feeling
which seized hold upon me this morning in the twilight of waking? It was
a reminiscence, charming indeed, but nameless, vague, and featureless,
like the figure of a woman seen for an instant by a sick man in the
uncertainty of delirium, and across the shadows of his darkened room. I
had a distinct sense of a form which I had seen somewhere, and which had
moved and charmed me once, and then had fallen back with time into the
catacombs of oblivion. But all the rest was confused: place, occasion,
and the figure itself, for I saw neither the face nor its expression.
The whole was like a fluttering veil under which the enigma--the secret
of happiness--might have been hidden. And I was awake enough to be sure
that it was not a dream.
In impressions like these we recognize the last trace of things which
are sinking out of sight and call within us, of memories which are
perishing. It is like a shimmering marsh-light falling upon some vague
outline of which one scarcely knows whether it represents a pain or a
pleasure--a gleam upon a grave. How strange! One might almost call
such things the ghosts of the soul, reflections of past happiness, the
_manes_ of our dead emotions. If, as the Talmud, I think, says, every
feeling of love gives birth involuntarily to an invisible genius or
spirit which yearns to complete its existence, and these glimmering
phantoms, which have never taken to themselves form and reality, are
still wandering in the limbo of the soul, what is there to astonish us
in the strange apparitions which sometimes come to visit our pillow? At
any rate, the fact remains that I was not able to force the phantom
to tell me its name, nor to give any shape or distinctness to my
reminiscence.
What a melancholy aspect life may wear to us when we are floating down
the current of such dreamy thoughts as these! It seems like some vast
nocturnal shipwreck in which a hundred loving voices are clamoring for
help, while the pitiless mounting wave is silencing all the cries one
by one, before we have been able, in this darkness of death, to press a
hand or give the farewell kiss. Prom such a point of view destiny looks
harsh, savage, and cruel, and the tragedy of life rises like a rock in
the midst of the dull waters of daily triviality. It is impossible not
to be serious under the weight of indefinable anxiety produced in us by
such a spectacle. The surface of things may be smiling or commonplace,
but the depths below are austere and terrible. As soon as we touch upon
eternal things, upon the destiny of the soul, upon truth or duty, upon
the secrets of life and death, we become grave whether we will or no.
Love at its highest point--love sublime, unique, invincible--leads us
straight to the brink of the great abyss, for it speaks to us directly
of the infinite and of eternity. It is eminently religious; it may even
become religion. When all around a man is wavering and changing, when
everything is growing dark and featureless to him in the far distance of
an unknown future, when the world seems but a fiction or a fairy tale,
and the universe a chimera, when the whole edifice of ideas vanishes in
smoke, and all realities are penetrated with doubt, what is the fixed
point which may still be his? The faithful heart of a woman! There he
may rest his head; there he will find strength to live, strength to
believe, and, if need be, strength to die in peace with a benediction on
his lips. Who knows if love and its beatitude, clear manifestation as it
is of the universal harmony of things, is not the best demonstration
of a fatherly and understanding God, just as it is the shortest road by
which to reach him? Love is a faith, and one faith leads to another. And
this faith is happiness, light and force. Only by it does a man enter
into the series of the living, the awakened, the happy, the redeemed--of
those true men who know the value of existence and who labor for
the glory of God and of the truth. Till then we are but babblers and
chatterers, spendthrifts of our time, our faculties and our gifts,
without aim, without real joy--weak, infirm, and useless beings, of no
account in the scheme of things. Perhaps it is through love that I shall
find my way back to faith, to religion, to energy, to concentration. It
seems to me, at least, that if I could but find my work-fellow and my
destined companion, all the rest would be added unto me, as though to
confound my unbelief and make me blush for my despair. Believe, then, in
a fatherly Providence, and dare to love!
November 25, 1863.--Prayer is the essential weapon of all religions.
He who can no longer pray because he doubts whether there is a being
to whom prayer ascends and from whom blessing descends, he indeed is
cruelly solitary and prodigiously impoverished. And you, what do you
believe about it? At this moment I should find it very difficult to
say. All my positive beliefs are in the crucible ready for any kind of
metamorphosis. Truth above all, even when it upsets and overwhelms
us! But what I believe is that the highest idea we can conceive of the
principle of things will be the truest, and that the truest truth
is that which makes man the most wholly good, wisest, greatest, and
happiest.
My creed is in transition. Yet I still believe in God, and the
immortality of the soul. I believe in holiness, truth, beauty; I believe
in the redemption of the soul by faith in forgiveness. I believe in
love, devotion, honor. I believe in duty and the moral conscience. I
believe even in prayer. I believe in the fundamental intuitions of the
human race, and in the great affirmations of the inspired of all ages. I
believe that our higher nature is our truer nature.
Can one get a theology and a theodicy out of this? Probably, but just
now I do not see it distinctly. It is so long since I have ceased to
think about my own metaphysic, and since I have lived in the thoughts of
others, that I am ready even to ask myself whether the crystallization
of my beliefs is necessary. Yes, for preaching and acting; less for
studying, contemplating and learning.
December 4, 1863.--The whole secret of remaining young in spite of
years, and even of gray hairs, is to cherish enthusiasm in one’s self
by poetry, by contemplation, by charity--that is, in fewer words, by
the maintenance of harmony in the soul. When everything is in its right
place within us, we ourselves are in equilibrium with the whole work of
God. Deep and grave enthusiasm for the eternal beauty and the
eternal order, reason touched with emotion and a serene tenderness of
heart--these surely are the foundations of wisdom.
Wisdom! how inexhaustible a theme! A sort of peaceful aureole surrounds
and illumines this thought, in which are summed up all the treasures of
moral experience, and which is the ripest fruit of a well-spent life.
Wisdom never grows old, for she is the expression of order itself--that
is, of the Eternal. Only the wise man draws from life, and from every
stage of it, its true savor, because only he feels the beauty, the
dignity, and the value of life. The flowers of youth may fade, but the
summer, the autumn, and even the winter of human existence, have their
majestic grandeur, which the wise man recognizes and glorifies. To see
all things in God; to make of one’s own life a journey toward the ideal;
to live with gratitude, with devoutness, with gentleness and courage;
this was the splendid aim of Marcus Aurelius. And if you add to it the
humility which kneels, and the charity which gives, you have the whole
wisdom of the children of God, the immortal joy which is the heritage of
the true Christian. But what a false Christianity is that which slanders
wisdom and seeks to do without it! In such a case I am on the side of
wisdom, which is, as it were, justice done to God, even in this life.
The relegation of life to some distant future, and the separation of
the holy man from the virtuous man, are the signs of a false religious
conception. This error is, in some degree, that of the whole Middle
Age, and belongs, perhaps, to the essence of Catholicism. But the true
Christianity must purge itself from so disastrous a mistake. The eternal
life is not the future life; it is life in harmony with the true order
of things--life in God. We must learn to look upon time as a movement of
eternity, as an undulation in the ocean of being. To live, so as to keep
this consciousness of ours in perpetual relation with the eternal, is
to be wise; to live, so as to personify and embody the eternal, is to be
religious.
The modern leveler, after having done away with conventional
inequalities, with arbitrary privilege and historical injustice, goes
still farther, and rebels against the inequalities of merit, capacity,
and virtue. Beginning with a just principle, he develops it into an
unjust one. Inequality may be as true and as just as equality: it
depends upon what you mean by it. But this is precisely what nobody
cares to find out. All passions dread the light, and the modern zeal for
equality is a disguised hatred which tries to pass itself off as love.
Liberty, equality--bad principles! The only true principle for humanity
is justice, and justice toward the feeble becomes necessarily protection
or kindness.
April 2, 1864.--To-day April has been displaying her showery caprices.
We have had floods of sunshine followed by deluges of rain, alternate
tears and smiles from the petulant sky, gusts of wind and storms. The
weather is like a spoiled child whose wishes and expression change
twenty times in an hour. It is a blessing for the plants, and means
an influx of life through all the veins of the spring. The circle of
mountains which bounds the valley is covered with white from top to toe,
but two hours of sunshine would melt the snow away. The snow itself is
but a new caprice, a simple stage decoration ready to disappear at the
signal of the scene-shifter.
How sensible I am to the restless change which rules the world. To
appear, and to vanish--there is the biography of all individuals,
whatever may be the length of the cycle of existence which they
describe, and the drama of the universe is nothing more. All life is
the shadow of a smoke-wreath, a gesture in the empty air, a hieroglyph
traced for an instant in the sand, and effaced a moment afterward by a
breath of wind, an air-bubble expanding and vanishing on the surface of
the great river of being--an appearance, a vanity, a nothing. But this
nothing is, however, the symbol of the universal being, and this passing
bubble is the epitome of the history of the world.
The man who has, however imperceptibly, helped in the work of the
universe, has lived; the man who has been conscious, in however small a
degree, of the cosmical movement, has lived also. The plain man serves
the world by his action and as a wheel in the machine; the thinker
serves it by his intellect, and as a light upon its path. The man of
meditative soul, who raises and comforts and sustains his traveling
companions, mortal and fugitive like himself, plays a nobler part still,
for he unites the other two utilities. Action, thought, speech, are the
three modes of human life. The artisan, the savant, and the orator,
are all three God’s workmen. To do, to discover, to teach--these three
things are all labor, all good, all necessary. Will-o’-the-wisps that we
are, we may yet leave a trace behind us; meteors that we are, we may yet
prolong our perishable being in the memory of men, or at least in the
contexture of after events. Everything disappears, but nothing is lost,
and the civilization or city of man is but an immense spiritual pyramid,
built up out of the work of all that has ever lived under the forms of
moral being, just as our calcareous mountains are made of the debris
of myriads of nameless creatures who have lived under the forms of
microscopic animal life.
April 5, 1864.--I have been reading “Prince Vitale” for the second time,
and have been lost in admiration of it. What wealth of color, facts,
ideas--what learning, what fine-edged satire, what _esprit_, science,
and talent, and what an irreproachable finish of style--so limpid, and
yet so profound! It is not heartfelt and it is not spontaneous, but all
other kinds of merit, culture, and cleverness the author possesses.
It would be impossible to be more penetrating, more subtle, and less
fettered in mind, than this wizard of language, with his irony and his
chameleon-like variety. Victor Cherbuliez, like the sphinx, is able to
play all lyres, and takes his profit from them all, with a Goethe-like
serenity. It seems as if passion, grief, and error had no hold on this
impassive soul. The key of his thought is to be looked for in Hegel’s
“Phenomenology of Mind,” remolded by Greek and French influences.
His faith, if he has one, is that of Strauss-Humanism. But he is
perfectly master of himself and of his utterances, and will take good
care never to preach anything prematurely.
What is there quite at the bottom of this deep spring?
In any case a mind as free as any can possibly be from stupidity and
prejudice. One might almost say that Cherbuliez knows all that he
wishes to know, without the trouble of learning it. He is a calm
Mephistopheles, with perfect manners, grace, variety, and an exquisite
urbanity; and Mephisto is a clever jeweler; and this jeweler is a subtle
musician; and this fine singer and storyteller, with his amber-like
delicacy and brilliancy, is making mock of us all the while. He takes a
malicious pleasure in withdrawing his own personality from scrutiny and
divination, while he himself divines everything, and he likes to make us
feel that although he holds in his hand the secret of the universe,
he will only unfold his prize at his own time, and if it pleases him.
Victor Cherbuliez is a little like Proudhon and plays with paradoxes, to
shock the _bourgeois_. Thus he amuses himself with running down Luther
and the Reformation in favor of the Renaissance. Of the troubles of
conscience he seems to know nothing. His supreme tribunal is reason.
At bottom he is Hegelian and intellectualist. But it is a splendid
organization. Only sometimes he must be antipathetic to those men of
duty who make renunciation, sacrifice, and humility the measure of
individual worth.
July, 1864.--Among the Alps I become a child again, with all the
follies and _naïveté_ of childhood. Shaking off the weight of years, the
trappings of office, and all the tiresome and ridiculous caution with
which one lives, I plunge into the full tide of pleasure, and amuse
myself sans façon, as it comes. In this careless light-hearted mood, my
ordinary formulas and habits fall away from me so completely that I feel
myself no longer either townsman, or professor, or savant, or bachelor,
and I remember no more of my past than if it were a dream. It is like a
bath in Lethe.
It makes me really believe that the smallest illness would destroy my
memory, and wipe out all my previous existence, when I see with what
ease I become a stranger to myself, and fall back once more into
the condition of a blank sheet, a _tabula rasa_. Life wears such a
dream-aspect to me that I can throw myself without any difficulty into
the situation of the dying, before whose eyes all this tumult of images
and forms fades into nothingness. I have the inconsistency of a fluid,
a vapor, a cloud, and all is easily unmade or transformed in me;
everything passes and is effaced like the waves which follow each other
on the sea. When I say all, I mean all that is arbitrary, indifferent,
partial, or intellectual in the combinations of one’s life. For I feel
that the things of the soul, our immortal aspirations, our deepest
affections, are not drawn into this chaotic whirlwind of impressions. It
is the finite things which are mortal and fugitive. Every man feels it
OH his deathbed. I feel it during the whole of life; that is the only
difference between me and others. Excepting only love, thought, and
liberty, almost everything is now a matter of indifference to me, and
those objects which excite the desires of most men, rouse in me
little more than curiosity. What does it mean--detachment of soul,
disinterestedness, weakness, or wisdom?
September 19, 1864.--I have been living for two hours with a noble
soul--with Eugénie de Guérin, the pious heroine of fraternal love. How
many thoughts, feelings, griefs, in this journal of six years! How
it makes one dream, think and live! It produces a certain homesick
impression on me, a little like that of certain forgotten melodies
whereof the accent touches the heart, one knows not why. It is as though
far-off paths came back to me, glimpses of youth, a confused murmur
of voices, echoes from my past. Purity, melancholy, piety, a thousand
memories of a past existence, forms fantastic and intangible, like
the fleeting shadows of a dream at waking, began to circle round the
astonished reader.
September 20, 1864.--Read Eugénie de Guérin’s volume again right and
left with a growing sense of attraction. Everything is heart, force,
impulse, in these pages which have the power of sincerity and a
brilliance of suffused poetry. A great and strong soul, a clear mind,
distinction, elevation, the freedom of unconscious talent, reserve and
depth--nothing is wanting for this Sévigné of the fields, who has to
hold herself in with both hands lest she should write verse, so strong
in her is the artistic impulse.
October 16, 1864.--I have just read a part of Eugénie de Guérin’s
journal over again. It charmed me a little less than the first time. The
nature seemed to me as beautiful, but the life of Eugénie was too empty,
and the circle of ideas which occupied her, too narrow.
It is touching and wonderful to see how little space is enough for
thought to spread its wings in, but this perpetual motion within the
four walls of a cell ends none the less by becoming wearisome to minds
which are accustomed to embrace more objects in their field of vision.
Instead of a garden, the world; instead of a library, the whole of
literature; instead of three or four faces, a whole people and all
history--this is what the virile, the philosophic temper demands. Men
must have more air, more room, mere horizon, more positive knowledge,
and they end by suffocating in this little cage where Eugenie lives and
moves, though the breath of heaven blows into it and the radiance of the
stars shines down upon it.
October 27, 1864. (_Promenade de la Treille_).--The air this morning was
so perfectly clear and lucid that one might have distinguished a figure
on the Vouache. [Footnote: The Vouache is the hill which bounds the
horizon of Geneva to the south-west.] This level and brilliant sun had
set fire to the whole range of autumn colors; amber, saffron, gold,
sulphur, yellow ochre, orange, red, copper-color, aquamarine, amaranth,
shone resplendent on the leaves which were still hanging from the boughs
or had already fallen beneath the trees. It was delicious. The martial
step of our two battalions going out to their drilling-ground, the
sparkle of the guns, the song of the bugles, the sharp distinctness of
the house outlines, still moist with the morning dew, the transparent
coolness of all the shadows--every detail in the scene was instinct with
a keen and wholesome gayety.
There are two forms of autumn: there is the misty and dreamy autumn,
there is the vivid and brilliant autumn: almost the difference between
the two sexes. The very word autumn is both masculine and feminine. Has
not every season, in some fashion, its two sexes? Has it not its minor
and its major key, its two sides of light and shadow, gentleness
and force? Perhaps. All that is perfect is double; each face has two
profiles, each coin two sides. The scarlet autumn stands for vigorous
activity: the gray autumn for meditative feeling. The one is expansive
and overflowing; the other still and withdrawn. Yesterday our thoughts
were with the dead. To-day we are celebrating the vintage.
November 16, 1864.--Heard of the death of--. Will and intelligence
lasted till there was an effusion on the brain which stopped everything.
A bubble of air in the blood, a drop of water in the brain, and a man
is out of gear, his machine falls to pieces, his thought vanishes, the
world disappears from him like a dream at morning. On what a spider
thread is hung our individual existence! Fragility, appearance,
nothingness. If it were for our powers of self-detraction and
forgetfulness, all the fairy world which surrounds and draws us would
seem to us but a broken spectre in the darkness, an empty appearance,
a fleeting hallucination. Appeared--disappeared--there is the whole
history of a man, or of a world, or of an infusoria.
Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner prism by which we
decompose being and life, the mode under which we perceive successively
what is simultaneous in idea. The eye does not see a sphere all at once
although the sphere exists all at once. Either the sphere must turn
before the eye which is looking at it, or the eye must go round the
sphere. In the first case it is the world which unrolls, or seems to
unroll in time; in the second case it is our thought which successively
analyzes and recomposes. For the supreme intelligence there is no time;
what will be, is. Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the
use of finite creatures. God permits them, that he may not be alone.
They are the mode under which creatures are possible and conceivable.
Let us add that they are also the Jacob’s ladder of innumerable steps
by which the creation reascends to its Creator, participates in being,
tastes of life, perceives the absolute, and can adore the fathomless
mystery of the infinite divinity. That is the other side of the
question. Our life is nothing, it is true, but our life is divine. A
breath of nature annihilates us, but we surpass nature in penetrating
far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the changeless and the eternal.
To escape by the ecstasy of inward vision from the whirlwind of time,
to see one’s self _sub specie eterni_ is the word of command of all the
great religions of the higher races; and this psychological possibility
is the foundation of all great hopes. The soul may be immortal because
she is fitted to rise toward that which is neither born nor dies, toward
that which exists substantially, necessarily, invariably, that is to say
toward God.
To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we
must be able to guess what will interest; we must learn to read the
childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the
key, we keep up the attraction and vary the song.
The germs of all things are in every heart, and the greatest criminals
as well as the greatest heroes are but different modes of ourselves.
Only evil grows of itself, while for goodness we want effort and
courage.
Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all
rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts,
where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the
secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or
less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the
universe.
A man takes to “piety” from a thousand different reasons--from imitation
or from eccentricity, from bravado or from reverence, from shame of the
past or from terror of the future, from weakness and from pride, for
pleasure’s sake or for punishment’s sake, in order to be able to judge,
or in order to escape being judged, and for a thousand other reasons;
but he only becomes truly religious for religion’s sake.
January 11, 1865.--It is pleasant to feel nobly--that is to say, to live
above the lowlands of vulgarity. Manufacturing Americanism and Caesarian
democracy tend equally to the multiplying of crowds, governed by
appetite, applauding charlatanism, vowed to the worship of mammon and
of pleasure, and adoring no other God than force. What poor samples of
mankind they are who make up this growing majority! Oh, let us
remain faithful to the altars of the ideal! It is possible that the
spiritualists may become the stoics of a new epoch of Caesarian rule.
Materialistic naturalism has the wind in its sails, and a general moral
deterioration is preparing. NO matter, so long as the salt does not lose
its savor, and so long as the friends of the higher life maintain the
fire of Vesta. The wood itself may choke the flame, but if the flame
persists, the fire will only be the more splendid in the end. The great
democratic deluge will not after all be able to effect what the invasion
of the barbarians was powerless to bring about; it will not drown
altogether the results of the higher culture; but we must resign
ourselves to the fact that it tends in the beginning to deform and
vulgarize everything. It is clear that aesthetic delicacy, elegance,
distinction, and nobleness--that atticism, urbanity, whatever is suave
and exquisite, fine and subtle--all that makes the charm of the
higher kinds of literature and of aristocratic cultivation--vanishes
simultaneously with the society which corresponds to it. If, as Pascal,
[Footnote: The saying of Pascal’s alluded to is in the _Pensées_, Art.
xi. No. 10: “A mesure qu’on a plus d’esprit on trouve qu’il y a plus
d’hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de différence
entre les hommes.”] I think, says, the more one develops, the more
difference one observes between man and man, then we cannot say that the
democratic instinct tends to mental development, since it tends to make
a man believe that the pretensions have only to be the same to make the
merits equal also.
March 20, 1865.--I have just heard of fresh cases of insubordination
among the students. Our youth become less and less docile, and seem to
take for their motto, “Our master is our enemy.” The boy insists upon
having the privileges of the young man, and the young man tries to keep
those of the _gamin_. At bottom all this is the natural consequence of
our system of leveling democracy. As soon as difference of quality
is, in politics, officially equal to zero, the authority of age, of
knowledge, and of function disappears.
The only counterpoise of pure equality is military discipline. In
military uniform, in the police court, in prison, or on the execution
ground, there is no reply possible. But is it not curious that the
_régime_ of individual right should lead to nothing but respect for
brute strength? Jacobinism brings with it Caesarism; the rule of the
tongue leads to the rule of the sword. Democracy and liberty are not one
but two. A republic supposes a high state of morals, but no such state
of morals is possible without the habit of respect; and there is no
respect without humility. Now the pretension that every man has the
necessary qualities of a citizen, simply because he was born twenty-one
years ago, is as much as to say that labor, merit, virtue, character,
and experience are to count for nothing; and we destroy humility when
we proclaim that a man becomes the equal of all other men, by the
mere mechanical and vegetative process of natural growth. Such a claim
annihilates even the respect for age; for as the elector of twenty-one
is worth as much as the elector of fifty, the boy of nineteen has no
serious reason to believe himself in any way the inferior of his elder
by one or two years. Thus the fiction on which the political order of
democracy is based ends in something altogether opposed to that which
democracy desires: its aim was to increase the whole sum of liberty; but
the result is to diminish it for all.
The modern state is founded on the philosophy of atomism. Nationality,
public spirit, tradition, national manners, disappear like so many
hollow and worn-out entities; nothing remains to create movement but the
action of molecular force and of dead weight. In such a theory liberty
is identified with caprice, and the collective reason and age-long
tradition of an old society are nothing more than soap-bubbles which the
smallest urchin may shiver with a snap of the fingers.
Does this mean that I am an opponent of democracy? Not at all. Fiction
for fiction, it is the least harmful. But it is well not to confound its
promises with realities. The fiction consists in the postulate of all
democratic government, that the great majority of the electors in a
state are enlightened, free, honest, and patriotic--whereas such a
postulate is a mere chimera. The majority in any state is necessarily
composed of the most ignorant, the poorest, and the least capable; the
state is therefore at the mercy of accident and passion, and it always
ends by succumbing at one time or another to the rash conditions which
have been made for its existence. A man who condemns himself to live
upon the tight-rope must inevitably fall; one has no need to be a
prophet to foresee such a result.
“[Greek: Aridton men udor],” said Pindar; the best thing in the world
is wisdom, and, in default of wisdom, science. States, churches, society
itself, may fall to pieces; science alone has nothing to fear--until at
least society once more falls a prey to barbarism. Unfortunately this
triumph of barbarism is not impossible. The victory of the socialist
Utopia, or the horrors of a religious war, reserve for us perhaps even
this lamentable experience.
April 3, 1865.--What doctor possesses such curative resources as those
latent in a spark of happiness or a single ray of hope? The mainspring
of life is in the heart. Joy is the vital air of the soul, and grief is
a kind of asthma complicated by atony. Our dependence upon surrounding
circumstances increases with our own physical weakness, and on the other
hand, in health there is liberty. Health is the first of all liberties,
and happiness gives us the energy which is the basis of health. To
make any one happy, then, is strictly to augment his store of being, to
double the intensity of his life, to reveal him to himself, to ennoble
him and transfigure him. Happiness does away with ugliness, and even
makes the beauty of beauty. The man who doubts it, can never have
watched the first gleams of tenderness dawning in the clear eyes of
one who loves; sunrise itself is a lesser marvel. In paradise, then,
everybody will be beautiful. For, as the righteous soul is naturally
beautiful, as the spiritual body is but the _visibility_ of the soul,
its impalpable and angelic form, and as happiness beautifies all that
it penetrates or even touches, ugliness will have no more place in the
universe, and will disappear with grief, sin, and death.
To the materialist philosopher the beautiful is a mere accident, and
therefore rare. To the spiritualist philosopher the beautiful is the
rule, the law, the universal foundation of things, to which every form
returns as soon as the force of accident is withdrawn. Why are we ugly?
Because we are not in the angelic state, because we are evil, morose,
and unhappy.
Heroism, ecstasy, prayer, love, enthusiasm, weave a halo round the brow,
for they are a setting free of the soul, which through them gains force
to make its envelope transparent and shine through upon all around
it. Beauty is, then, a phenomenon belonging to the spiritualization of
matter. It is a momentary transfiguration of the privileged object or
being--a token fallen from heaven to earth in order to remind us of
the ideal world. To study it, is to Platonize almost inevitably. As a
powerful electric current can render metals luminous, and reveal their
essence by the color of their flame, so intense life and supreme joy
can make the most simple mortal dazzlingly beautiful. Man, therefore, is
never more truly man than in these divine states.
The ideal, after all, is truer than the real: for the ideal is the
eternal element in perishable things: it is their type, their sum, their
_raison d’être_, their formula in the book of the Creator, and therefore
at once the most exact and the most condensed expression of them.
April 11, 1865.--I have been measuring and making a trial of the new
gray plaid which is to take the place of my old mountain shawl. The old
servant which has been my companion for ten years, and which recalls to
me so many poetical and delightful memories, pleases me better than its
brilliant successor, even though this last has been a present from a
friendly hand. But can anything take the place of the past, and have
not even the inanimate witnesses of our life voice and language for us?
Glion, Villars, Albisbrunnen, the Righi, the Chamossaire, and a hundred
other places, have left something of themselves behind them in the
meshes of this woolen stuff which makes a part of my most intimate
history. The shawl, besides, is the only _chivalrous_ article of dress
which is still left to the modern traveler, the only thing about him
which may be useful to others than himself, and by means of which he may
still do his _devoir_ to fair women! How many times mine has served them
for a cushion, a cloak, a shelter, on the damp grass of the Alps, on
seats of hard rock, or in the sudden cool of the pinewood, during the
walks, the rests, the readings, and the chats of mountain life! How many
kindly smiles it has won for me! Even its blemishes are dear to me, for
each darn and tear has its story, each scar is an armorial bearing. This
tear was made by a hazel tree under Jaman--that by the buckle of a strap
on the Frohnalp--that, again, by a bramble at Charnex; and each time
fairy needles have repaired the injury.
“Mon vieux manteau, que je vous remercie
Car c’est à vous que je dois ces plaisirs!”
And has it not been to me a friend in suffering, a companion in good and
evil fortune? It reminds me of that centaur’s tunic which could not be
torn off without carrying away the flesh and blood of its wearer. I am
unwilling to give it up; whatever gratitude for the past, and whatever
piety toward my vanished youth is in me, seem to forbid it. The warp
of this rag is woven out of Alpine joys, and its woof out of human
affections. It also says to me in its own way:
“Pauvre bouquet, fleurs aujourd’hui fanées!”
And the appeal is one of those which move the heart, although profane
ears neither hear it nor understand it.
What a stab there is in those words, _thou hast been_! when the sense
of them becomes absolutely clear to us. One feels one’s self sinking
gradually into one’s grave, and the past tense sounds the knell of our
illusions as to ourselves. What is past is past: gray hairs will never
become black curls again; the forces, the gifts, the attractions of
youth, have vanished with our young days.
“Plus d’amour; partant plus de joie.”
How hard it is to grow old, when we have missed our life, when we have
neither the crown of completed manhood nor of fatherhood! How sad it
is to feel the mind declining before it has done its work, and the body
growing weaker before it has seen itself renewed in those who might
close our eyes and honor our name! The tragic solemnity of existence
strikes us with terrible force, on that morning when we wake to find
the mournful word _too late_ ringing in our ears! “Too late, the sand is
turned, the hour is past! Thy harvest is unreaped--too late! Thou
hast been dreaming, forgetting, sleeping--so much the worse! Every
man rewards or punishes himself. To whom or of whom wouldst thou
complain?”--Alas!
April 21, 1865. (_Mornex_).--A morning of intoxicating beauty, fresh
as the feelings of sixteen, and crowned with flowers like a bride. The
poetry of youth, of innocence, and of love, overflowed my soul. Even
to the light mist hovering over the bosom of the plain--image of that
tender modesty which veils the features and shrouds in mystery the
inmost thoughts of the maiden--everything that I saw delighted my eyes
and spoke to my imagination. It was a sacred, a nuptial day! and the
matin bells ringing in some distant village harmonized marvelously with
the hymn of nature. “Pray,” they said, “and love! Adore a fatherly and
beneficent God.” They recalled to me the accent of Haydn; there was in
them and in the landscape a childlike joyousness, a naïve gratitude,
a radiant heavenly joy innocent of pain and sin, like the sacred,
simple-hearted ravishment of Eve on the first day of her awakening in
the new world. How good a thing is feeling, admiration! It is the bread
of angels, the eternal food of cherubim and seraphim.
I have not yet felt the air so pure, so life-giving, so ethereal, during
the five days that I have been here. To breathe is a beatitude. One
understands the delights of a bird’s existence--that emancipation from
all encumbering weight--that luminous and empyrean life, floating in
blue space, and passing from one horizon to another with a stroke of
the wing. One must have a great deal of air below one before one can
be conscious of such inner freedom as this, such lightness of the whole
being. Every element has its poetry, but the poetry of air is liberty.
Enough; to your work, dreamer!
May 30, 1865.--All snakes fascinate their prey, and pure wickedness
seems to inherit the power of fascination granted to the serpent.
It stupefies and bewilders the simple heart, which sees it without
understanding it, which touches it without being able to believe in it,
and which sinks engulfed in the problem of it, like Empedocles in Etna.
_Non possum capere te, cape me_, says the Aristotelian motto. Every
diminutive of Beelzebub is an abyss, each demoniacal act is a gulf
of darkness. Natural cruelty, inborn perfidy and falseness, even in
animals, cast lurid gleams, as it were, into that fathomless pit of
Satanic perversity which is a moral reality.
Nevertheless behind this thought there rises another which tells me that
sophistry is at the bottom of human wickedness, that the majority of
monsters like to justify themselves in their own eyes, and that the
first attribute of the Evil One is to be the father of lies. Before
crime is committed conscience must be corrupted, and every bad man who
succeeds in reaching a high point of wickedness begins with this. It
is all very well to say that hatred is murder; the man who hates is
determined to see nothing in it but an act of moral hygiene. It is to
do himself good that he does evil, just as a mad dog bites to get rid of
his thirst.
To injure others while at the same time knowingly injuring one’s self is
a step farther; evil then becomes a frenzy, which, in its turn, sharpens
into a cold ferocity.
Whenever a man, under the influence of such a diabolical passion,
surrenders himself to these instincts of the wild or venomous beast he
must seem to the angels a madman--a lunatic, who kindles his own Gehenna
that he may consume the world in it, or as much of it as his devilish
desires can lay hold upon. Wickedness is forever beginning a new spiral
which penetrates deeper still into the abysses of abomination, for the
circles of hell have this property--that they have no end. It seems as
though divine perfection were an infinite of the first degree, but as
though diabolical perfection were an infinite of unknown power. But
no; for if so, evil would be the true God, and hell would swallow up
creation. According to the Persian and the Christian faiths, good is
to conquer evil, and perhaps even Satan himself will be restored
to grace--which is as much as to say that the divine order will be
everywhere re-established. Love will be more potent than hatred; God
will save his glory, and his glory is in his goodness. But it is very
true that all gratuitous wickedness troubles the soul, because it seems
to make the great lines of the moral order tremble within us by the
sudden withdrawal of the curtain which hides from us the action of those
dark corrosive forces which have ranged themselves in battle against the
divine plan.
June 26, 1865.--One may guess the why and wherefore of a tear and yet
find it too subtle to give any account of. A tear may be the poetical
_resumé_ of so many simultaneous impressions, the quintessence of so
many opposing thoughts! It is like a drop of one of those precious
elixirs of the East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a
single aroma. Sometimes it is the mere overflow of the soul, the running
over of the cup of reverie. All that one cannot or will not say, all
that one refuses to confess even to one’s self--confused desires, secret
trouble, suppressed grief, smothered conflict, voiceless regret, the
emotions we have struggled against, the pain we have sought to hide, our
superstitious fears, our vague sufferings, our restless presentiments,
our unrealized dreams, the wounds inflicted upon our ideal, the
dissatisfied languor, the vain hopes, the multitude of small
indiscernible ills which accumulate slowly in a corner of the heart
like water dropping noiselessly from the roof of a cavern--all these
mysterious movements of the inner life end in an instant of emotion, and
the emotion concentrates itself in a tear just visible on the edge of
the eyelid.
For the rest, tears express joy as well as sadness. They are the symbol
of the powerlessness of the soul to restrain its emotion and to remain
mistress of itself. Speech implies analysis; when we are overcome by
sensation or by feeling analysis ceases, and with it speech and
liberty. Our only resource, after silence and stupor, is the language of
action--pantomime. Any oppressive weight of thought carries us back to
a stage anterior to humanity, to a gesture, a cry, a sob, and at last
to swooning and collapse; that is to say, incapable of bearing the
excessive strain of sensation as men, we fall back successively to the
stage of mere animate being, and then to that of the vegetable. Dante
swoons at every turn in his journey through hell, and nothing paints
better the violence of his emotions and the ardor of his piety.
... And intense joy? It also withdraws into itself and is silent. To
speak is to disperse and scatter. Words isolate and localize life in a
single point; they touch only the circumference of being; they analyze,
they treat one thing at a time. Thus they decentralize emotion, and
chill it in doing so. The heart would fain brood over its feeling,
cherishing and protecting it. Its happiness is silent and meditative; it
listens to its own beating and feeds religiously upon itself.
August 8, 1865. (_Gryon sur Bex_).--Splendid moonlight without a cloud.
The night is solemn and majestic. The regiment of giants sleeps while
the stars keep sentinel. In the vast shadow of the valley glimmer a few
scattered roofs, while the torrent, organ-like, swells its eternal note
in the depths of this mountain cathedral which has the heavens for roof.
A last look at this blue night and boundless landscape. Jupiter is just
setting on the counterscarp of the Dent du Midi. Prom the starry vault
descends an invisible snow-shower of dreams, calling us to a pure sleep.
Nothing of voluptuous or enervating in this nature. All is strong,
austere and pure. Good night to all the world!--to the unfortunate
and to the happy. Rest and refreshment, renewal and hope; a day is
dead--_vive le lendemain!_ Midnight is striking. Another step made
toward the tomb.
August 13, 1865.--I have just read through again the letter of J. J.
Rousseau to Archbishop Beaumont with a little less admiration than
I felt for it--was it ten or twelve years ago? This emphasis, this
precision, which never tires of itself, tires the reader in the long
run. The intensity of the style produces on one the impression of a
treatise on mathematics. One feels the need of relaxation after it in
something easy, natural, and gay. The language of Rousseau demands an
amount of labor which makes one long for recreation and relief.
But how many writers and how many books descend from our Rousseau! On
my way I noticed the points of departure of Châteaubriand, Lamennais,
Proudhon. Proudhon, for instance, modeled the plan of his great work,
“De la Justice dang l’Eglise et dans la Révolution,” upon the letter of
Rousseau to Beaumont; his three volumes are a string of letters to an
archbishop; eloquence, daring, and elocution are all fused in a kind of
_persiflage_, which is the foundation of the whole.
How many men we may find in one man, how many styles in a great writer!
Rousseau, for instance, has created a number of different _genres_.
Imagination transforms him, and he is able to play the most varied
parts with credit, among them even that of the pure logician. But as the
imagination is his intellectual axis--his master faculty--he is, as it
were, in all his works only half sincere, only half in earnest. We feel
that his talent has laid him the wager of Carneades; it will lose no
cause, however bad, as soon as the point of honor Is engaged. It is
indeed the temptation of all talent to subordinate things to itself and
not itself to things; to conquer for the sake of conquest, and to put
self-love in the place of conscience. Talent is glad enough, no doubt,
to triumph in a good cause; but it easily becomes a free lance, content,
whatever the cause, so long as victory follows its banner. I do not know
even whether success in a weak and bad cause is not the most flattering
for talent, which then divides the honors of its triumph with nothing
and no one.
Paradox is the delight of clever people and the joy of talent. It is
so pleasant to pit one’s self against the world, and to overbear mere
commonplace good sense and vulgar platitudes! Talent and love of truth
are then not identical; their tendencies and their paths are different.
In order to make talent obey when its instinct is rather to command,
a vigilant moral sense and great energy of character are needed. The
Greeks--those artists of the spoken or written word--were artificial
by the time of Ulysses, sophists by the time of Pericles, cunning,
rhetorical, and versed in all the arts of the courtier down to the end
of the lower empire. From the talent of the nation sprang its vices.
For a man to make his mark, like Rousseau by polemics, is to condemn
himself to perpetual exaggeration and conflict. Such a man expiates his
celebrity by a double bitterness; he is never altogether true, and he
is never able to recover the free disposal of himself. To pick a quarrel
with the world is attractive, but dangerous.
J. J. Rousseau is an ancestor in all things. It was he who founded
traveling on foot before Töpffer, reverie before “René,” literary botany
before George Sand, the worship of nature before Bernardin de S.
Pierre, the democratic theory before the Revolution of 1789, political
discussion and theological discussion before Mirabeau and Renan, the
science of teaching before Pestalozzi, and Alpine description before
De Saussure. He made music the fashion, and created the taste for
confessions to the public. He formed a new French style--the close,
chastened, passionate, interwoven style we know so well. Nothing indeed
of Rousseau has been lost, and nobody has had more influence than he
upon the French Revolution, for he was the demigod of it, and stands
between Neckar and Napoleon. Nobody, again, has had more than he upon
the nineteenth century, for Byron, Châteaubriand, Madame de Staël, and
George Sand all descend from him.
And yet, with these extraordinary talents, he was an extremely unhappy
man--why? Because he always allowed himself to be mastered by his
imagination and his sensations; because he had no judgment in deciding,
no self-control in acting. Regret indeed on this score would be hardly
reasonable, for a calm, judicious, orderly Rousseau would never have
made so great an impression. He came into collision with his time: hence
his eloquence and his misfortunes. His naïve confidence in life and
himself ended in jealous misanthropy and hypochondria.
What a contrast to Goethe or Voltaire, and how differently they
understood the practical wisdom of life and the management of literary
gifts! They were the able men--Rousseau is a visionary. They knew
mankind as it is--he always represented it to himself either whiter or
blacker than it is; and having begun by taking life the wrong way, he
ended in madness. In the talent of Rousseau there is always something
unwholesome, uncertain, stormy, and sophistical, which destroys the
confidence of the reader; and the reason is no doubt that we feel
passion to have been the governing force in him as a writer: passion
stirred his imagination, and ruled supreme over his reason.
* * * * *
Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for
our faults--a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our
favorite sin.
* * * * *
The unfinished is nothing.
* * * * *
Great men are the true men, the men in whom nature has succeeded. They
are not extraordinary--they are in the true order. It is the other
species of men who are not what they ought to be.
January 7, 1866.--Our life is but a soap-bubble hanging from a reed; it
is formed, expands to its full size, clothes itself with the loveliest
colors of the prism, and even escapes at moments from the law of
gravitation; but soon the black speck appears in it, and the globe of
emerald and gold vanishes into space, leaving behind it nothing but a
simple drop of turbid water. All the poets have made this comparison,
it is so striking and so true. To appear, to shine, to disappear; to
be born, to suffer, and to die; is it not the whole sum of life, for a
butterfly, for a nation, for a star?
Time is but the measure of the difficulty of a conception. Pure thought
has scarcely any need of time, since it perceives the two ends of an
idea almost at the same moment. The thought of a planet can only be
worked out by nature with labor and effort, but supreme intelligence
sums up the whole in an instant. Time is then the successive dispersion
of being, just as speech is the successive analysis of an intuition or
of an act of will. In itself it is relative and negative, and disappears
within the absolute being. God is outside time because he thinks all
thought at once; Nature is within time, because she is only speech--the
discursive unfolding of each thought contained within the infinite
thought. But nature exhausts herself in this impossible task, for the
analysis of the infinite is a contradiction. With limitless duration,
boundless space, and number without end, Nature does at least what she
can to translate into visible form the wealth of the creative formula.
By the vastness of the abysses into which she penetrates, in the
effort--the unsuccessful effort--to house and contain the eternal
thought, we may measure the greatness of the divine mind. For as soon as
this mind goes out of itself and seeks to explain itself, the effort at
utterance heaps universe upon universe, during myriads of centuries, and
still it is not expressed, and the great harangue must go on for ever
and ever.
The East prefers immobility as the form of the Infinite: the West,
movement. It is because the West is infected by the passion for details,
and sets proud store by individual worth. Like a child upon whom a
hundred thousand francs have been bestowed, he thinks she is multiplying
her fortune by counting it out in pieces of twenty sous, or five
centimes. Her passion for progress is in great part the product of an
infatuation, which consists in forgetting the goal to be aimed at, and
absorbing herself in the pride and delight of each tiny step, one after
the other. Child that she is, she is even capable of confounding change
with improvement--beginning over again, with growth in perfectness.
At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for
self-forgetfulness, self-distraction; he has a secret horror of all
which makes him feel his own littleness; the eternal, the infinite,
perfection, therefore scare and terrify him. He wishes to approve
himself, to admire and congratulate himself; and therefore he turns away
from all those problems and abysses which might recall to him his own
nothingness. This is what makes the real pettiness of so many of
our great minds, and accounts for the lack of personal dignity among
us--civilized parrots that we are--as compared with the Arab of the
desert; or explains the growing frivolity of our masses, more and more
educated, no doubt, but also more and more superficial in all their
conceptions of happiness.
Here, then, is the service which Christianity--the oriental element in
our culture--renders to us Westerns. It checks and counterbalances our
natural tendency toward the passing, the finite, and the changeable,
by fixing the mind upon the contemplation of eternal things, and by
Platonizing our affections, which otherwise would have too little
outlook upon the ideal world. Christianity leads us back from dispersion
to concentration, from worldliness to self-recollection. It restores to
our souls, fevered with a thousand sordid desires, nobleness, gravity,
and calm. Just as sleep is a bath of refreshing for our actual life, so
religion is a bath of refreshing for our immortal being. What is sacred
has a purifying virtue; religious emotion crowns the brow with an
aureole, and thrills the heart with an ineffable joy.
I think that the adversaries of religion as such deceive themselves as
to the needs of the western man, and that the modern world will lose its
balance as soon as it has passed over altogether to the crude doctrine
of progress. We have always need of the infinite, the eternal, the
absolute; and since science contents itself with what is relative,
it necessarily leaves a void, which it is good for man to fill with
contemplation, worship, and adoration. “Religion,” said Bacon, “is
the spice which is meant to keep life from corruption,” and this is
especially true to-day of religion taken in the Platonist and oriental
sense. A capacity for self-recollection--for withdrawal from the
outward to the inward--is in fact the condition of all noble and useful
activity.
This return, indeed, to what is serious, divine, and sacred, is becoming
more and more difficult, because of the growth of critical anxiety
within the church itself, the increasing worldliness of religious
preaching, and the universal agitation and disquiet of society. But such
a return is more and more necessary. Without it there is no inner life,
and the inner life is the only means whereby we may oppose a profitable
resistance to circumstance. If the sailor did not carry with him his
own temperature he could not go from the pole to the equator, and remain
himself in spite of all. The man who has no refuge in himself, who
lives, so to speak, in his front rooms, in the outer whirlwind of things
and opinions, is not properly a personality at all; he is not distinct,
free, original, a cause--in a word, _some one_. He is one of a crowd, a
taxpayer, an elector, an anonymity, but not a man. He helps to make up
the mass--to fill up the number of human consumers or producers; but he
interests nobody but the economist and the statistician, who take the
heap of sand as a whole into consideration, without troubling themselves
about the uninteresting uniformity of the individual grains. The crowd
counts only as a massive elementary force--why? because its constituent
parts are individually insignificant: they are all like each other, and
we add them up like the molecules of water in a river, gauging them by
the fathom instead of appreciating them as individuals. Such men are
reckoned and weighed merely as so many bodies: they have never been
individualized by conscience, after the manner of souls.
He who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according
to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions--such a man is
a mere article of the world’s furniture--a thing moved, instead of a
living and moving being--an echo, not a voice. The man who has no inner
life is the slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is the obedient
servant of the air at rest, and the weathercock the humble servant of
the air in motion.
January 21, 1866.--This evening after supper I did not know whither
to betake my solitary self. I was hungry for conversation, society,
exchange of ideas. It occurred to me to go and see our friends,
the----s; they were at supper. Afterward we went into the _salon_:
mother and daughter sat down to the piano and sang a duet by Boïeldieu.
The ivory keys of the old grand piano, which the mother had played on
before her marriage, and which has followed and translated into music
the varying fortunes of the family, were a little loose and jingling;
but the poetry of the past sang in this faithful old servant, which
had been a friend in trouble, a companion in vigils, and the echo of a
lifetime of duty, affection, piety and virtue. I was more moved than I
can say. It was like a scene of Dickens, and I felt a rush of sympathy,
untouched either by egotism or by melancholy.
Twenty-five years! It seems to me a dream as far as I am concerned, and
I can scarcely believe my eyes, or this inanimate witness to so many
lustres passed away. How strange a thing _to have lived_, and to feel
myself so far from a past which yet is so present to me! One does not
know whether one is sleeping or waking. Time is but the space between
our memories; as soon as we cease to perceive this space, time has
disappeared. The whole life of an old man may appear to him no longer
than an hour, or less still; and as soon as time is but a moment to us,
we have entered upon eternity. Life is but the dream of a shadow; I felt
it anew this evening with strange intensity.
January 29, 1866. (_Nine o’clock in the morning_).--The gray curtain of
mist has spread itself again over the town; everything is dark and
dull. The bells are ringing in the distance for some festival; with this
exception everything is calm and silent. Except for the crackling of the
fire, no noise disturbs my solitude in this modest home, the shelter of
my thoughts and of my work, where the man of middle age carries on the
life of his student-youth without the zest of youth, and the sedentary
professor repeats day by day the habits which he formed as a traveler.
What is it which makes the charm of this existence outwardly so barren
and empty? Liberty! What does the absence of comfort and of all
else that is wanting to these rooms matter to me? These things are
indifferent to me. I find under this roof light, quiet, shelter. I am
near to a sister and her children, whom I love; my material life is
assured--that ought to be enough for a bachelor.... Am I not, besides,
a creature of habit? more attached to the _ennuis_ I know, than in love
with pleasures unknown to me. I am, then, free and not unhappy. Then I
am well off here, and I should be ungrateful to complain. Nor do I. It
is only the heart which sighs and seeks for something more and better.
The heart is an insatiable glutton, as we all know--and for the rest,
who is without yearnings? It is our destiny here below. Only some go
through torments and troubles in order to satisfy themselves, and all
without success; others foresee the inevitable result, and by a timely
resignation save themselves a barren and fruitless effort. Since we
cannot be happy, why give ourselves so much trouble? It is best to limit
one’s self to what is strictly necessary, to live austerely and by rule,
to content one’s self with a little, and to attach no value to anything
but peace of conscience and a sense of duty done.
It is true that this itself is no small ambition, and that it only lands
us in another impossibility. No--the simplest course is to submit
one’s self wholly and altogether to God. Everything else, as saith the
preacher, is but vanity and vexation of spirit.
It is a long while now since this has been plain to me, and since this
religious renunciation has been sweet and familiar to me. It is the
outward distractions of life, the examples of the world, and the
irresistible influence exerted upon us by the current of things which
make us forget the wisdom we have acquired and the principles we have
adopted. That is why life is such weariness! This eternal beginning over
again is tedious, even to repulsion. It would be so good to go to sleep
when we have gathered the fruit of experience, when we are no longer
in opposition to the supreme will, when we have broken loose from self,
when we are at peace with all men. Instead of this, the old round of
temptations, disputes, _ennuis_, and forgettings, has to be faced again
and again, and we fall back into prose, into commonness, into vulgarity.
How melancholy, how humiliating! The poets are wise in withdrawing their
heroes more quickly from the strife, and in not dragging them after
victory along the common rut of barren days. “Whom the gods love die
young,” said the proverb of antiquity.
Yes, but it is our secret self-love which is set upon this favor from on
high; such may be our desire, but such is not the will of God. We are
to be exercised, humbled, tried, and tormented to the end. It is our
patience which is the touchstone of our virtue. To bear with life even
when illusion and hope are gone; to accept this position of perpetual
war, while at the same time loving only peace; to stay patiently in the
world, even when it repels us as a place of low company, and seems to
us a mere arena of bad passions; to remain faithful to one’s own faith
without breaking with the followers of the false gods; to make no
attempt to escape from the human hospital, long-suffering and patient as
Job upon his dung hill--this is duty. When life ceases to be a promise
it does not cease to be a task; its true name even is trial.
April 2, 1866. (_Mornex_).--The snow is melting and a damp fog is spread
over everything. The asphalt gallery which runs along the _salon_ is
a sheet of quivering water starred incessantly by the hurrying drops
falling from the sky. It seems as if one could touch the horizon with
one’s hand, and the miles of country which were yesterday visible are
all hidden under a thick gray curtain.
This imprisonment transports me to Shetland, to Spitzbergen, to Norway,
to the Ossianic countries of mist, where man, thrown back upon himself,
feels his heart beat more quickly and his thought expand more freely--so
long, at least, as he is not frozen and congealed by cold. Fog has
certainly a poetry of its own--a grace, a dreamy charm. It does for
the daylight what a lamp does for us at night; it turns the mind toward
meditation; it throws the soul back on itself. The sun, as it were,
sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist draws us
together and concentrates us--it is cordial, homely, charged with
feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it; that of
fog and mist is elegaic and religious. Pantheism is the child of light;
mist engenders faith in near protectors. When the great world is shut
off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe. Shrouded in
perpetual mist, men love each other better; for the only reality then is
the family, and, within the family, the heart; and the greatest thoughts
come from the heart--so says the moralist.
April 6, 1866.--The novel by Miss Mulock, “John Halifax, Gentleman,”
is a bolder book than it seems, for it attacks in the English way the
social problem of equality. And the solution reached is that every one
may become a gentleman, even though he may be born in the gutter. In
its way the story protests against conventional superiorities, and shows
that true nobility consists in character, in personal merit, in moral
distinction, in elevation of feeling and of language, in dignity of
life, and in self-respect. This is better than Jacobinism, and the
opposite of the mere brutal passion for equality. Instead of dragging
everybody down, the author simply proclaims the right of every one to
rise. A man may be born rich and noble--he is not born a gentleman. This
word is the Shibboleth of England; it divides her into two halves, and
civilized society into two castes. Among gentlemen--courtesy, equality,
and politeness; toward those below--contempt, disdain, coldness and
indifference. It is the old separation between the _ingenui_ and all
others; between the [Greek: eleutheroi] and the [Greek: banauphoi],
the continuation of the feudal division between the gentry and the
_roturiers_.
What, then, is a gentleman? Apparently he is the free man, the man who
is stronger than things, and believes in personality as superior to
all the accessory attributes of fortune, such as rank and power, and as
constituting what is essential, real, and intrinsically valuable in
the individual. Tell me what you are, and I will tell you what you are
worth. “God and my Right;” there is the only motto he believes in.
Such an ideal is happily opposed to that vulgar ideal which is equally
English, the ideal of wealth, with its formula, “_How much_ is he
worth?” In a country where poverty is a crime, it is good to be able to
say that a nabob need not as such be a gentleman. The mercantile ideal
and the chivalrous ideal counterbalance each other; and if the one
produces the ugliness of English society and its brutal side, the other
serves as a compensation.
The gentleman, then, is the man who is master of himself, who respects
himself, and makes others respect him. The essence of gentlemanliness
is self-rule, the sovereignty of the soul. It means a character which
possesses itself, a force which governs itself, a liberty which affirms
and regulates itself, according to the type of true dignity. Such an
ideal is closely akin to the Roman type of _dignitas cum auctoritate_.
It is more moral than intellectual, and is particularly suited
to England, which is pre-eminently the country of will. But from
self-respect a thousand other things are derived--such as the care of
a man’s person, of his language, of his manners; watchfulness over his
body and over his soul; dominion over his instincts and his passions;
the effort to be self-sufficient; the pride which will accept no favor;
carefulness not to expose himself to any humiliation or mortification,
and to maintain himself independent of any human caprice; the constant
protection of his honor and of his self-respect. Such a condition of
sovereignty, insomuch as it is only easy to the man who is well-born,
well-bred, and rich, was naturally long identified with birth, rank,
and above all with property. The idea “gentleman” is, then, derived from
feudality; it is, as it were, a milder version of the seigneur.
In order to lay himself open to no reproach, a gentleman will keep
himself irreproachable; in order to be treated with consideration,
he will always be careful himself to observe distances, to apportion
respect, and to observe all the gradations of conventional politeness,
according to rank, age, and situation. Hence it follows that he will
be imperturbably cautious in the presence of a stranger, whose name and
worth are unknown to him, and to whom he might perhaps show too much or
too little courtesy. He ignores and avoids him; if he is approached, he
turns away, if he is addressed, he answers shortly and with _hauteur_.
His politeness is not human and general, but individual and relative to
persons. This is why every Englishman contains two different men--one
turned toward the world, and another. The first, the outer man, is
a citadel, a cold and angular wall; the other, the inner man, is a
sensible, affectionate, cordial, and loving creature. Such a type is
only formed in a moral climate full of icicles, where, in the face of an
indifferent world, the hearth alone is hospitable.
So that an analysis of the national type of gentlemen reveals to us the
nature and the history of the nation, as the fruit reveals the tree.
April 7, 1866.--If philosophy is the art of understanding, it is evident
that it must begin by saturating itself with facts and realities,
and that premature abstraction kills it, just as the abuse of fasting
destroys the body at the age of growth. Besides, we only understand
that which is already within us. To understand is to possess the thing
understood, first by sympathy and then by intelligence. Instead, then,
of first dismembering and dissecting the object to be conceived,
we should begin by laying hold of it in its _ensemble_, then in its
formation, last of all in its parts. The procedure is the same, whether
we study a watch or a plant, a work of art or a character. We must
study, respect, and question what we want to know, instead of massacring
it. We must assimilate ourselves to things and surrender ourselves to
them; we must open our minds with docility to their influence, and steep
ourselves in their spirit and their distinctive form, before we offer
violence to them by dissecting them.
April 14, 1866.--Panic, confusion, _sauve qui peut_ on the Bourse at
Paris. In our epoch of individualism, and of “each man for himself
and God for all,” the movements of the public funds are all that
now represent to us the beat of the common heart. The solidarity of
interests which they imply counterbalances the separateness of modern
affections, and the obligatory sympathy they impose upon us recalls to
one a little the patriotism which bore the forced taxes of old days. We
feel ourselves bound up with and compromised in all the world’s affairs,
and we must interest ourselves whether we will or no in the terrible
machine whose wheels may crush us at any moment. Credit produces
a restless society, trembling perpetually for the security of its
artificial basis. Sometimes society may forget for awhile that it is
dancing upon a volcano, but the least rumor of war recalls the fact to
it inexorably. Card-houses are easily ruined.
All this anxiety is intolerable to those humble little investors who,
having no wish to be rich, ask only to be able to go about their work
in peace. But no; tyrant that it is, the world cries to us, “Peace,
peace--there is no peace: whether you will or no you shall suffer and
tremble with me!” To accept humanity, as one does nature, and to resign
one’s self to the will of an individual, as one does to destiny, is not
easy. We bow to the government of God, but we turn against the despot.
No man likes to share in the shipwreck of a vessel in which he has been
embarked by violence, and which has been steered contrary to his wish
and his opinion. And yet such is perpetually the case in life. We all of
us pay for the faults of the few.
Human solidarity is a fact more evident and more certain than personal
responsibility, and even than individual liberty. Our dependence has it
over our independence; for we are only independent in will and desire,
while we are dependent upon our health, upon nature and society; in
short, upon everything in us and without us. Our liberty is confined to
one single point. We may protest against all these oppressive and fatal
powers; we may say, Crush me--you will never win my consent! We may, by
an exercise of will, throw ourselves into opposition to necessity, and
refuse it homage and obedience. In that consists our moral liberty. But
except for that, we belong, body and goods, to the world. We are its
playthings, as the dust is the plaything of the wind, or the dead leaf
of the floods. God at least respects our dignity, but the world rolls us
contemptuously along in its merciless waves, in order to make it plain
that we are its thing and its chattel.
All theories of the nullity of the individual, all pantheistic and
materialist conceptions, are now but so much forcing of an open door,
so much slaying of the slain. As soon as we cease to glorify this
imperceptible point of conscience, and to uphold the value of it, the
individual becomes naturally a mere atom in the human mass, which is but
an atom in the planetary mass, which is a mere nothing in the universe.
The individual is then but a nothing of the third power, with a capacity
for measuring its nothingness! Thought leads to resignation. Self-doubt
leads to passivity, and passivity to servitude. From this a voluntary
submission is the only escape, that is to say, a state of dependence
religiously accepted, a vindication of ourselves as free beings, bowed
before duty only. Duty thus becomes our principle of action, our source
of energy, the guarantee of our partial independence of the world,
the condition of our dignity, the sign of our nobility. The world can
neither make me will nor make me will my duty; here I am my own and only
master, and treat with it as sovereign with sovereign. It holds my body
in its clutches; but my soul escapes and braves it. My thought and my
love, my faith and my hope, are beyond its reach. My true being, the
essence of my nature, myself, remain inviolate and inaccessible to the
world’s attacks. In this respect we are greater than the universe, which
has mass and not will; we become once more independent even in relation
to the human mass, which also can destroy nothing more than our
happiness, just as the mass of the universe can destroy nothing more
than our body. Submission, then, is not defeat; on the contrary, it is
strength.
April 28, 1866.--I have just read the _procès-verbal_ of the Conference
of Pastors held on the 15th and 16th of April at Paris. The question
of the supernatural has split the church of France in two. The liberals
insist upon individual right; the orthodox upon the notion of a church.
And it is true indeed that a church is an affirmation, that it subsists
by the positive element in it, by definite belief; the pure critical
element dissolves it. Protestantism is a combination of two factors--the
authority of the Scriptures and free inquiry; as soon as one of these
factors is threatened or disappears, Protestantism disappears; a new
form of Christianity succeeds it, as, for example, the church of the
Brothers of the Holy Ghost, or that of Christian Theism. As far as I am
concerned, I see nothing objectionable in such a result, but I think the
friends of the Protestant church are logical in their refusal to abandon
the apostle’s creed, and the individualists are illogical in imagining
that they can keep Protestantism and do away with authority.
It is a question of method which separates the two camps. I am
fundamentally separated from both. As I understand it, Christianity
is above all religions, and religion is not a method, it is a life, a
higher and supernatural life, mystical in its root and practical in its
fruits, a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a love which
radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which overflows. Religion, in
short, is a state of the soul. These quarrels as to method have their
value, but it is a secondary value; they will never console a heart
or edify a conscience. This is why I feel so little interest in these
ecclesiastical struggles. Whether the one party or the other gain the
majority and the victory, what is essential is in no way profited, for
dogma, criticism, the church, are not religion; and it is religion, the
sense of a divine life, which matters. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God
and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”
The most holy is the most Christian; this will always be the criterion
which is least deceptive. “By this ye shall know my disciples, if they
have love one to another.”
As is the worth of the individual, so is the worth of his religion.
Popular instinct and philosophic reason are at one on this point. Be
good and pious, patient and heroic, faithful and devoted, humble and
charitable; the catechism which has taught you these things is beyond
the reach of blame. By religion we live in God; but all these quarrels
lead to nothing but life with men or with cassocks. There is therefore
no equivalence between the two points of view.
Perfection as an end--a noble example for sustenance on the way--the
divine proved by its own excellence, is not this the whole of
Christianity? God manifest in all men, is not this its true goal and
consummation?
September 20, 1866.--My old friends are, I am afraid, disappointed
in me; they think that I do nothing, that I have deceived their
expectations and their hopes. I, too, am disappointed. All that would
restore my self-respect and give me a right to be proud of myself, seems
to me unattainable and impossible, and I fall back upon trivialities,
gay talk, distractions. I am always equally lacking in hope, in faith,
in resolution. The only difference is that my weakness takes sometimes
the form of despairing melancholy and sometimes that of a cheerful
quietism. And yet I read, I talk, I teach, I write, but to no effect;
it is as though I were walking in my sleep. The Buddhist tendency in
me blunts the faculty of free self-government and weakens the power of
action; self-distrust kills all desire, and reduces me again and again
to a fundamental skepticism. I care for nothing but the serious and the
real, and I can take neither myself nor my circumstances seriously.
I hold my own personality, my own aptitudes, my own aspirations, too
cheap. I am forever making light of myself in the name of all that
is beautiful and admirable. In a word, I bear within me a perpetual
self-detractor, and this is what takes all spring out of my life. I have
been passing the evening with Charles Heim, who, in his sincerity, has
never paid me any literary compliment. As I love and respect him, he is
forgiven. Self-love has nothing to do with it--and yet it would be sweet
to be praised by so upright a friend! It is depressing to feel one’s
self silently disapproved of; I will try to satisfy him, and to think of
a book which may please both him and Scherer.
October 6, 1866.--I have just picked up on the stairs a little yellowish
cat, ugly and pitiable. Now, curled up in a chair at my side, he seems
perfectly happy, and as if he wanted nothing more. Far from being wild,
nothing will induce him to leave me, and he has followed me from room
to room all day. I have nothing at all that is eatable in the house, but
what I have I give him--that is to say, a look and a caress--and that
seems to be enough for him, at least for the moment. Small animals,
small children, young lives--they are all the same as far as the need of
protection and of gentleness is concerned.... People have sometimes said
to me that weak and feeble creatures are happy with me. Perhaps such a
fact has to do with some special gift or beneficent force which flows
from one when one is in the sympathetic state. I have often a direct
perception of such a force; but I am no ways proud of it, nor do I look
upon it as anything belonging to me, but simply as a natural gift. It
seems to me sometimes as though I could woo the birds to build in my
beard as they do in the headgear of some cathedral saint! After all,
this is the natural state and the true relation of man toward all
inferior creatures. If man was what he ought to be he would be adored
by the animals, of whom he is too often the capricious and sanguinary
tyrant. The legend of Saint Francis of Assisi is not so legendary as we
think; and it is not so certain that it was the wild beasts who attacked
man first.... But to exaggerate nothing, let us leave on one side
the beasts of prey, the carnivora, and those that live by rapine and
slaughter. How many other species are there, by thousands and tens of
thousands, who ask peace from us and with whom we persist in waging a
brutal war? Our race is by far the most destructive, the most hurtful,
and the most formidable, of all the species of the planet. It has even
invented for its own use the right of the strongest--a divine right
which quiets its conscience in the face of the conquered and the
oppressed; we have outlawed all that lives except ourselves. Revolting
and manifest abuse; notorious and contemptible breach of the law of
justice! The bad faith and hypocrisy of it are renewed on a small scale
by all successful usurpers. We are always making God our accomplice,
that so we may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful massacre
is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting
in benedictions for any victorious enormity. So that what, in the
beginning, was the relation of man to the animal becomes that of people
to people and man to man.
If so, we have before us an expiation too seldom noticed but altogether
just. All crime must be expiated, and slavery is the repetition among
men of the sufferings brutally imposed by man upon other living beings;
it is the theory bearing its fruits. The right of man over the animal
seems to me to cease with the need of defense and of subsistence. So
that all unnecessary murder and torture are cowardice and even crime.
The animal renders a service of utility; man in return owes it a need of
protection and of kindness. In a word, the animal has claims on man, and
the man has duties to the animal. Buddhism, no doubt, exaggerates this
truth, but the Westerns leave it out of count altogether. A day will
come, however, when our standard will be higher, our humanity more
exacting, than it is to-day. _Homo homini lupus_, said Hobbes: the time
will come when man will be humane even for the wolf--_homo lupo homo_.
December 30, 1866.--Skepticism pure and simple as the only safeguard of
intellectual independence--such is the point of view of almost all our
young men of talent. Absolute freedom from credulity seems to them
the glory of man. My impression has always been that this excessive
detachment of the individual from all received prejudices and opinions
in reality does the work of tyranny. This evening, in listening to
the conversation of some of our most cultivated men, I thought of the
Renaissance, of the Ptolemies, of the reign of Louis XV., of all those
times in which the exultant anarchy of the intellect has had despotic
government for its correlative, and, on the other hand, of England, of
Holland, of the United States, countries in which political liberty is
bought at the price of necessary prejudices and _à priori_ opinions.
That society may hold together at all, we must have a principle of
cohesion--that is to say, a common belief, principles recognized and
undisputed, a series of practical axioms and institutions which are not
at the mercy of every caprice of public opinion. By treating everything
as if it were an open question, we endanger everything.
Doubt is the accomplice of tyranny. “If a people will not believe it
must obey,” said Tocqueville. All liberty implies dependence, and has
its conditions; this is what negative and quarrelsome minds are apt to
forget. They think they can do away with religion; they do not know that
religion is indestructible, and that the question is simply, Which will
you have? Voltaire plays the game of Loyola, and _vice versâ_. Between
these two there is no peace, nor can there be any for the society which
has once thrown itself into the dilemma. The only solution lies in a
free religion, a religion of free choice and free adhesion.
December 23, 1866.--It is raining over the whole sky--as far at least as
I can see from my high point of observation. All is gray from the Salève
to the Jura, and from the pavement to the clouds; everything that one
sees or touches is gray; color, life, and gayety are dead--each living
thing seems to lie hidden in its own particular shell. What are the
birds doing in such weather as this? We who have food and shelter, fire
on the hearth, books around us, portfolios of engravings close at hand,
a nestful of dreams in the heart, and a whirlwind of thoughts ready to
rise from the ink-bottle--we find nature ugly and _triste_, and turn
away our eyes from it; but you, poor sparrows, what can you be doing?
Bearing and hoping and waiting? After all, is not this the task of each
one of us?
I have just been reading over a volume of this Journal, and feel a
little ashamed of the languid complaining tone of so much of it. These
pages reproduce me very imperfectly, and there are many things in me
of which I find no trace in them. I suppose it is because, in the first
place, sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy; and in the next,
because I depend so much upon surrounding circumstances. When there is
no call upon me, and nothing to put me to the test, I fall back into
melancholy; and so the practical man, the cheerful man, the literary
man, does not appear in these pages. The portrait is lacking in
proportion and breadth; it is one-sided, and wants a center; it has, as
it were, been painted from too near.
The true reason why we know ourselves so little lies in the difficulty
we find in standing at a proper distance from ourselves, in taking up
the right point of view, so that the details may help rather than hide
the general effect. We must learn to look at ourselves socially and
historically if we wish to have an exact idea of our relative worth, and
to look at our life as a whole, or at least as one complete period of
life, if we wish to know what we are and what we are not. The ant which
crawls to and fro over a face, the fly perched upon the forehead of a
maiden, touch them indeed, but do not see them, for they never embrace
the whole at a glance.
Is it wonderful that misunderstandings should play so great a part
in the world, when one sees how difficult it is to produce a faithful
portrait of a person whom one has been studying for more than twenty
years? Still, the effort has not been altogether lost; its reward has
been the sharpening of one’s perceptions of the outer world. If I have
any special power of appreciating different shades of mind, I owe it no
doubt to the analysis I have so perpetually and unsuccessfully practiced
on myself. In fact, I have always regarded myself as matter for study,
and what has interested me most in myself has been the pleasure of
having under my hand a man, a person, in whom, as an authentic specimen
of human nature, I could follow, without importunity or indiscretion,
all the metamorphoses, the secret thoughts, the heart-beats, and
the temptations of humanity. My attention has been drawn to myself
impersonally and philosophically. One uses what one has, and one must
shape one’s arrow out of one’s own wood.
To arrive at a faithful portrait, succession must be converted into
simultaneousness, plurality into unity, and all the changing phenomena
must be traced back to their essence. There are ten men in me, according
to time, place, surrounding, and occasion; and in their restless
diversity I am forever escaping myself. Therefore, whatever I may reveal
of my past, of my Journal, or of myself, is of no use to him who is
without the poetic intuition, and cannot recompose me as a whole, with
or in spite of the elements which I confide to him.
I feel myself a chameleon, a kaleidoscope, a Proteus; changeable in
every way, open to every kind of polarization; fluid, virtual, and
therefore latent--latent even in manifestation, and absent even in
presentation. I am a spectator, so to speak, of the molecular whirlwind
which men call individual life; I am conscious of an incessant
metamorphosis, an irresistible movement of existence, which is going on
within me. I am sensible of the flight, the revival, the modification,
of all the atoms of my being, all the particles of my river, all the
radiations of my special force.
This phenomenology of myself serves both as the magic lantern of my own
destiny, and as a window opened upon the mystery of the world. I am,
or rather, my sensible consciousness is concentrated upon this ideal
standing-point, this invisible threshold, as it were, whence one hears
the impetuous passage of time, rushing and foaming as it flows out into
the changeless ocean of eternity. After all the bewildering distractions
of life, after having drowned myself in a multiplicity of trifles and in
the caprices of this fugitive existence, yet without ever attaining to
self-intoxication or self-delusion, I come again upon the fathomless
abyss, the silent and melancholy cavern where dwell “_Die Mütter_,”
[Footnote: “_Die Mütter_”--an allusion to a strange and enigmatical,
but very effective conception in “Faust” (Part II. Act I. Scene v.) _Die
Mütter_ are the prototypes, the abstract forms, the generative ideas,
of things. “Sie sehn dich nicht, denn Schemen sehn sie nur.” Goethe
borrowed the term from a passage of Plutarch’s, but he has made the idea
half Platonic, half legendary. Amiel, however, seems rather to have in
his mind Faust’s speech in Scene vii. than the speech of Mephistopheles
in Scene v:
“In eurem Namen, Mütter, die ihr thront
Im Gränzenlosen, ewig einsam wohnt,
Und doch gesellig! Euer haupt umschweben
Des Lebens Bilder, regsam, ohne Leben.”]
where sleeps that which neither lives nor dies, that which has neither
movement, nor change, nor extension, nor form, and which lasts when all
else passes away.
“Dans l’éternel azur de l’insondable espace
S’enveloppe de paix notre globe agitée:
Homme, enveloppe ainsi tes jours, rêve qui passe,
Du calme firmament de ton éternité.”
(H. P. AMIEL, _Penseroso_.)
Geneva, January 11, 1867.
“Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, Labuntar anni....”
I hear the drops of my life falling distinctly one by one into the
devouring abyss of eternity. I feel my days flying before the pursuit of
death. All that remains to me of weeks, or months, or years, in which
I may drink in the light of the sun, seems to me no more than a single
night, a summer night, which scarcely counts, because it will so soon be
at an end.
Death! Silence! Eternity! What mysteries, what names of terror to the
being who longs for happiness, immortality, perfection! Where shall I be
to-morrow--in a little while--when the breath of life has forsaken me?
Where will those be whom I love? Whither are we all going? The eternal
problems rise before us in their implacable solemnity. Mystery on all
sides! And faith the only star in this darkness and uncertainty!
No matter!--so long as the world is the work of eternal goodness, and
so long as conscience has not deceived us. To give happiness and to do
good, there is our only law, our anchor of salvation, our beacon light,
our reason for existing. All religions may crumble away; so long as this
survives we have still an ideal, and life is worth living.