must determine to have as unfaltering a resolution in the
field, though you may pray that it may have a happier issue.
And, not contented with ideas derived only from words of
the advantages which are bound up with the defence of your
country, though these would furnish a valuable text to a
speaker even before an audience so alive to them as the
present, you must yourselves realize the power of Athens and
feed your eyes upon her from day to day, till love of her fills
your hearts; and then, when all her greatness shall break upon
you, you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty and
a keen feeling of honour in action that men were enabled to win
all this and that no personal failure in an enterprise could
make them consent to deprive their country of their valour,
but they laid it at her feet as the most glorious contribution
that they could offer. For by this offering of their lives made
in common by them all they each of them individually received
that renown which never grows old and, for a sepulchre, not
so much that in which their bones have been deposited, but
that noblest of shrines wherein their glory is laid up to be
eternally remembered upon every occasion on which deed or story
shall call for its commemoration. For heroes have the whole
earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where
the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in
every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it,
except that of the heart. These take as your model and, judging
happiness to be the fruit of freedom and freedom of valour,
never decline the dangers of war. For it is not the miserable
that would most justly be unsparing of their lives: these
have nothing to hope for; it is rather they to whom continued
life may bring reverses as yet unknown and to whom a fall, if
it came, would be most tremendous in its consequences. And
surely, to a man of spirit, the degradation of cowardice must
be immeasurably more grievous than the unfelt death which
strikes him in the midst of his strength and patriotism!
“Comfort, therefore, not condolence, is what I have to offer
to the parents of the dead who may be here. Numberless are the
chances to which, as they know, the life of man is subject;
but fortunate indeed are they who draw for their lot a death
so glorious as that which has caused your mourning and to
whom life has been so exactly measured as to terminate in the
happiness in which it has been passed. Still I know that this
is a hard saying, especially when those are in question of
whom you will be constantly reminded by seeing in the homes of
others blessings of which once you also boasted; for grief is
felt not so much for the want of what we have never known as
for the loss of that to which we have been long accustomed. Yet
you who are still of an age to beget children must bear up in
the hope of having others in their stead: not only will they
help you to forget those whom you have lost, but they will be
to the state at once a reinforcement and a security; for never
can a fair or just policy be expected of the citizen who does
not, like his fellows, bring to the decision the interests and
apprehensions of a father. While those of you who have passed
your prime must congratulate yourselves with the thought that
the best part of your life was fortunate and that the brief
span that remains will be cheered by the fame of the departed.
For it is only the love of honour that never grows old; and
honour it is, not gain, as some would have felt it, that
rejoices the heart of age and helplessness....
“And, now that you have brought to a close your lamentations
for your relatives, you may depart.”
These words spoken twenty-three centuries ago ring in our hearts as
though they were uttered yesterday. They celebrate our dead better than
could any eloquence of ours, however poignant it might be. Let us bow
before their paramount beauty and before the great people that could
applaud and understand.
XI
THE DEAD DO NOT DIE
1
When we behold the terrible loss of so many young lives, when we see
so many incarnations of physical and moral vigour, of intellect and of
glorious promise pitilessly cut off in their first flower, we are on the
verge of despair. Never before have the fairest energies and aspirations
of men been flung recklessly and incessantly into an abyss whence comes
no sound or answer. Never since it came into existence has humanity
squandered its treasure, its substance and its prospects so lavishly.
For more than twelve months, on every battlefield, where the bravest,
the truest, the most ardent and self-sacrificing are necessarily the
first to die and where the less courageous, the less generous, the weak,
the ailing, in a word the less desirable, alone possess some chance of
escaping the carnage, for over twelve months a sort of monstrous inverse
selection has been in operation, one which seems to be deliberately
seeking the downfall of the human race. And we wonder uneasily what the
state of the world will be after the great trial and what will be left of
it and what will be the future of this stunted race, shorn of all the
best and noblest part of it.
The problem is certainly one of the darkest that has ever vexed the minds
of men. It contains a material truth before which we remain defenceless;
and, if we accept it as it stands, we can discover no remedy for the
evil that threatens us. But material and tangible truths are never
anything but a more or less salient angle of greater and deeper-lying
truths. And on the other hand mankind appears to be such a necessary and
indestructible force of nature that it has always, hitherto, not only
survived the most desperate ordeals, but succeeded in benefiting by them
and emerging greater and stronger than before.
2
We know that peace is better than war; it were madness to compare the
two. We know that, if this cataclysm let loose by an act of unutterable
folly had not come upon the world, mankind would doubtless have reached
ere long a zenith of wonderful achievement whose manifestations it is
impossible to foreshadow. We know that, if a third or a fourth part of
the fabulous sums expended on extermination and destruction had been
devoted to works of peace, all the iniquities that poison the air we
breathe would have been triumphantly redressed and that the social
question, the one great question, that matter of life and death which
justice demands that posterity should face, would have found its definite
solution, once and for all, in a happiness which now perhaps even our
sons and grandsons will not realize. We know that the disappearance
of two or three million young existences, cut down when they were on
the point of bearing fruit, will leave in history a void that will not
be easily filled, even as we know that among those dead were mighty
intellects, treasures of genius which will not come back again and which
contained inventions and discoveries that will now perhaps be lost to us
for centuries. We know that we shall never grasp the consequences of this
thrusting back of progress and of this unprecedented devastation. But,
granting all this, it is a good thing to recover our balance and stand
upon our feet. There is no irreparable loss. Everything is transformed,
nothing perishes and that which seems to be hurled into destruction is
not destroyed at all. Our moral world, even as our physical world, is
a vast but hermetically-sealed sphere, whence naught can issue, whence
naught can fall to be dissolved in space. All that exists, all that comes
into being upon this earth remains there and bears fruit; and the most
appalling wastage is but material or spiritual riches flung away for an
instant, to fall to the ground again in a new form. There is no escape or
leakage, no filtering through cracks, no missing the mark, not even waste
or neglect. All this heroism poured out on every side does not leave our
planet; and the reason why the courage of our fighters seems so general
and yet so extraordinary is that all the might of the dead has passed
into those who survive. All those forces of wisdom, patience, honour and
self-sacrifice which increase day by day and which we ourselves, who
are far from the field of danger, feel rising within us without knowing
whence they come are nothing but the souls of the heroes gathered and
absorbed by our own souls.
3
It is well at times to contemplate invisible things as though we saw them
with our eyes. This was the aim of all the great religions, when they
but represented under forms appropriate to the manners of their day the
latent deep, instinctive truths, the general and essential truths which
are the guiding principles of mankind. All have felt and recognized that
loftiest of all truths, the communion of the living and the dead, and
have given it various names designating the same mysterious verity: the
Christians know it as revival of merit, the Buddhists as reincarnation,
or transmigration of souls, and the Japanese as Shintoism, or
ancestor-worship. The last are more fully convinced than any other nation
that the dead do not cease to live and that they direct our actions, are
exalted by our virtues and become gods.
Lafcadio Hearn, the writer who has most closely studied and understood
that wonderful ancestor-worship, says:
“One of the surprises of our future will certainly be a return to beliefs
and ideas long ago abandoned upon the mere assumption that they contained
no truth—beliefs still called barbarous, pagan, mediæval, by those who
condemn them out of traditional habit. Year after year the researches of
science afford us new proof that the savage, the barbarian, the idolater,
the monk, each and all have arrived, by different paths, as near to some
one point of eternal truth as any thinker of the nineteenth century. We
are now learning, also, that the theories of the astrologers and of the
alchemists were but partially, not totally, wrong. We have reason even to
suppose that no dream of the invisible world has ever been dreamed,—that
no hypothesis of the unseen has ever been imagined,—which future science
will not prove to have contained some germ of reality.”[28]
There are many things which might be added to these lines, notably
all that the most recent of our sciences, metaphysics, is engaged
in discovering with regard to the miraculous faculties of our
subconsciousness.
4
But, to return more directly to what we were saying, was it not observed
that, after the great battles of the Napoleonic era, the birth-rate
increased in an extraordinary manner, as though the lives suddenly cut
short in their prime were not really dead and were eager to be back again
in our midst and complete their career? If we could follow with our eyes
all that is happening in the spiritual world that rises above us on every
side, we should no doubt see that it is the same with the moral force
that seems to be lost on the field of slaughter. It knows where to go,
it knows its goal, it does not hesitate. All that our wonderful dead
relinquish they bequeath to us; and, when they die for us, they leave us
their lives not in any strained, metaphorical sense, but in a very real
and direct way. Virtue goes out of every man who falls while performing
a deed of glory; and that virtue drops down upon us; and nothing of him
is lost and nothing evaporates in the shock of a premature end. He gives
us in one solitary and mighty stroke what he would have given us in a
long life of duty and love. Death does not injure life; it is powerless
against it. Life’s aggregate never changes. What death takes from those
who fall enters into those who are left standing. The number of lamps
grows less, but the flame rises higher. Death is in no wise the gainer
so long as there are living men. The more it exercises its ravages, the
more it increases the intensity of that which it cannot touch; the more
it pursues its phantom victories, the better does it prove to us that man
will end by conquering death.
XII
IN MEMORIAM
Those who die for their country should not be numbered with the dead. We
must call them by another name. They have nothing in common with those
who end in their beds a life that is worn out, a life almost always too
long and often useless. Death, which every elsewhere is but the object of
fear and horror, bringing naught but nothingness and despair, this death,
on the field of battle, in the clash of glory, becomes more beautiful
than birth and exhales a grace greater than that of love. No life will
ever give what their youth is offering us, that youth which gives in one
moment the days and the years that lay before it. There is no sacrifice
to be compared with that which they have made; for which reason there is
no glory that can soar so high as theirs, no gratitude that can surpass
the gratitude which we owe them. They have not only a right to the
foremost place in our memories: they have a right to all our memories and
to everything that we are, since we exist only through them.
And now it is in us that their life, so suddenly cut short, must resume
its course. Whatever be our faith and whatever the God whom it adores,
one thing is almost certain and, in spite of all appearances, is daily
becoming more certain: it is that death and life are commingled; the dead
and the living alike are but moments, hardly dissimilar, of a single
and infinite existence and members of one immortal family. They are not
beneath the earth, in the depths of their tombs; they lie deep in our
hearts, where all that they once were will continue to live and to act;
and they live in us even as we die in them. They see us, they understand
us more nearly than when they were in our arms; let us then keep a watch
upon ourselves, so that they witness no actions and hear no words but
words and actions that shall be worthy of them.
XIII
THE LIFE OF THE DEAD
1
The other day I went to see a woman whom I knew before the war—she was
happy then—and who had lost her only son in one of the battles in the
Argonne. She was a widow, almost a poor woman; and, now that this son,
her pride and her joy, was no more, she no longer had any reason for
living. I hesitated to knock at her door. Was I not about to witness one
of those hopeless griefs at whose feet all words fall to the ground like
shameful and insulting lies? Which of us to-day is not familiar with
these mournful interviews, this dismal duty?
To my great astonishment, she offered me her hand with a kindly smile.
Her eyes, to which I hardly dared raise my own, were free of tears.
“You have come to speak of him,” she said, in a cheerful tone; and it was
as though her voice had grown younger.
“Alas, yes! I had heard of your sorrow; and I have come....”
“Yes, I too believed that my unhappiness was irreparable; but now I know
that he is not dead.”
“What! He is not dead? Do you mean that the news...? But I thought that
the body....”
“Yes, his body is over there; and I have even a photograph of his grave.
Let me show it to you. See, that cross on the left, the fourth cross:
that is where he is lying. One of his friends, who buried him, sent me
this card and gave me all the details. He suffered no pain. There was
not even a death-struggle. And he has told me so himself. He is quite
astonished that death should be so easy, so slight a thing.... You do not
understand? Yes, I see what it is: you are just as I used to be, as all
the others are. I do not explain the matter to the others; what would be
the use? They do not wish to understand. But you, you will understand. He
is more alive than he ever was; he is free and happy. He does just as he
likes. He tells me that one cannot imagine what a release death is, what
a weight it removes from you, nor the joy which it brings. He comes to
see me when I call him. He loves especially to come in the evening; and
we chat as we used to. He has not altered; he is just as he was on the
day when he went away, only younger, stronger, handsomer. We have never
been happier, more united, nearer to one another. He divines my thoughts
before I utter them. He knows everything; he sees everything; but he
cannot tell me everything he knows. He maintains that I must be wanting
to follow him and that I must wait for my hour. And, while I wait, we are
living in a happiness greater than that which was ours before the war, a
happiness which nothing can ever trouble again....”
Those about her pitied the poor woman; and, as she did not weep, as she
was gay and smiling, they believed her mad.
2
Was she as mad as they thought? At the present moment, the great
questions of the world beyond the grave are pressing upon us from every
side. It is probable that, since the world began, there have never
been so many dead as now. The empire of death was never so mighty, so
terrible; it is for us to defend and enlarge the empire of life. In the
presence of this mother, which are right and which are wrong, those who
are convinced that their dead are for ever swept out of existence, or
those who are persuaded that their dead do not cease to live, who believe
that they see them and hear them? Do we know what it is that dies in
our dead, or even if anything dies? Whatever our religious faith may
be, there is at any rate one place where they cannot die. That place is
within ourselves; and, if this unhappy mother went beyond the truth, she
was yet nearer to it than those despairing ones who nourish the mournful
certainty that nothing survives of those whom they loved. She felt too
keenly what we do not feel keenly enough. She remembered too much; and we
do not know how to remember. Between the two errors there is room for a
great truth; and, if we have to choose, hers is the error towards which
we should lean. Let us learn to acquire through reason that which a wise
madness bestowed on her. Let us learn from her to live with our dead and
to live with them without sadness and without terror. They do not ask for
tears, but for a happy and confident affection. Let us learn from her to
resuscitate those whom we regret. She called to hers, while we repulse
ours; we are afraid of them and are surprised that they lose heart and
pale and fade away and leave us for ever. They need love as much as do
the living. They die, not at the moment when they sink into the grave,
but gradually as they sink into oblivion; and it is oblivion alone that
makes the separation irrevocable. We should not allow it to heap itself
above them. It would be enough to vouchsafe them each day a single one of
those thoughts which we bestow uncounted upon so many useless objects:
they would no longer think of leaving us; they would remain around us and
we should no longer understand what a tombstone is, for there is no tomb,
however deep, whose stone may not be raised and whose dust dispersed by a
thought.
There would be no difference between the living and the dead if we but
knew how to remember. There would be no more dead. The best of what they
were dwells with us after fate has taken them from us; all their past is
ours; and it is wider than the present, more certain than the future.
Material presence is not everything in this world; and we can dispense
with it without despairing. We do not mourn those who live in lands which
we shall never visit, because we know that it depends on us whether we
go to find them. Let it be the same with our dead. Instead of believing
that they have disappeared never to return, tell yourselves that they are
in a country to which you yourself will assuredly go soon, a country not
so very far away. And while waiting for the time when you will go there
once and for all, you may visit them in thought as easily as if they were
still in a region inhabited by the living. The memory of the dead is even
more alive than that of the living; it is as though they were assisting
our memory, as though they, on their side, were making a mysterious
effort to join hands with us on ours. One feels that they are far more
powerful than the absent who continue to breathe as we do.
3
Try then to recall those whom you have lost, before it is too late,
before they have gone too far; and you will see that they will come much
closer to your heart, that they will belong to you more truly, that they
are as real as when they were in the flesh. In putting off this last,
they have but discarded the moments in which they loved us least or in
which we did not love at all. Now they are pure; they are clothed only in
the fairest hours of life; they no longer possess faults, littlenesses,
oddities; they can no longer fall away, or deceive themselves, or give
us pain. They care for nothing now but to smile upon us, to encompass us
with love, to bring us a happiness drawn without stint from a past which
they live again beside us.
XIV
THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS
1
At the end of an essay occurring in _The Unknown Guest_ and entitled,
_The Knowledge of the Future_, in which I examined a certain number
of phenomena relating to the anticipatory perception of events, such
as presentiments, premonitions, precognitions, predictions, etc., I
concluded in nearly the following terms:
“To sum up, if it is difficult for us to conceive that the
future preexists, perhaps it is just as difficult for us to
understand that it does not exist; moreover, many facts tend
to prove that it is as real and definite and has, both in
time and eternity, the same permanence and the same vividness
as the past. Now, from the moment that it preexists, it is
not surprising that we should be able to know it; it is even
astonishing, granted that it overhangs us from every side, that
we should not discover it oftener and more easily.”
Above all is it astonishing and almost inconceivable that this universal
war, the most stupendous catastrophe that has overwhelmed humanity since
the origin of things, should not, while it was approaching, bearing in
its womb innumerable woes which were about to affect almost every one of
us, have thrown upon us more plainly, from the recesses of those days
in which it was making ready, its menacing shadow. One would think that
it ought to have overcast the whole horizon of the future, even as it
will overcast the whole horizon of the past. A secret of such weight,
suspended in time, ought surely to have weighed upon all our lives; and
presentiments or revelations should have arisen on every hand. There was
none of these. We lived and moved without uneasiness beneath the disaster
which, from year to year, from day to day, from hour to hour, was
descending upon the world; and we perceived it only when it touched our
heads. True, it was more or less foreseen by our reason; but our reason
hardly believed in it; and besides I am not for the moment speaking of
the inductions of the understanding, which are always uncertain and which
are resigned beforehand to the capricious contradictions which they are
daily accustomed to receive from facts.
2
But I repeat, beside or above these inductions of our everyday logic,
in the less familiar domain of supernatural intuitions, of divination,
prediction or prophecy properly so-called, we find that there was
practically nothing to warn us of the vast peril. This does not mean that
there was any lack of predictions or prophecies collected after the
event; these number, it appears, no fewer than eighty-three; but none of
them, excepting those of Léon Sonrel and the Rector of Ars, which we will
examine in a moment, is worthy of serious discussion. I shall therefore
mention, by way of a reminder, only the most widely known; and, first of
all, the famous prophecy of Mayence or Strasburg, which is supposed to
have been discovered by a certain Jecker in an ancient convent founded
near Mayence by St. Hildegarde, of which the original text could not
be found and of which no one until lately had ever heard. Then there
is another prophecy of Mayence or Fiensberg, published in the _Neue
Metaphysische Rundschau_ of Berlin in February 1912, in which the end of
the German Empire is announced for the year 1913. Next, we have various
predictions uttered by Mme. de Thèbes, by Dom Bosco, by Blessed Andrew
Bobola, by Korzenicki the Polish monk, by Tolstoy, by Brother Hermann
and so on, which are even less interesting; and, lastly, the prophecy of
“Brother Johannes,” published by M. Joséphin Peladan in the _Figaro_ of
16 September 1914, which contains no evidence of genuineness and must
therefore meanwhile be regarded merely as an ingenious literary conceit.
3