characterized by brevity. For the mercenary man, the law and the
prophets are contained in this one axiom: _With money you can get
anything._ From a surface view of our social life, nothing seems more
evident. "The sinews of war," "the shining mark," "the key that opens
all doors," "king money!"--If one gathered up all the sayings about the
glory and power of gold, he could make a litany longer than that which
is chanted in honor of the Virgin. You must be without a penny, if only
for a day or two, and try to live in this world of ours, to have any
idea of the needs of him whose purse is empty. I invite those who love
contrasts and unforeseen situations, to attempt to live without money
three days, and far from their friends and acquaintances--in short, far
from the society in which they are somebody. They will gain more
experience in forty-eight hours than in a year otherwise. Alas for some
people! they have this experience thrust upon them, and when veritable
ruin descends around their heads, it is useless to remain in their own
country, among the companions of their youth, their former colleagues,
even those indebted to them. People affect to know them no longer. With
what bitterness do they comment on the creed of money:--With gold one
may have what he will; without it, impossible to have anything! They
become pariahs, lepers, whom everyone shuns. Flies swarm round cadavers,
men round gold. Take away the gold, nobody is there. Oh, it has caused
tears to flow, this creed of gain! bitter tears, tears of blood, even
from those very eyes which once adored the golden calf.
And with it all, this creed is false, quite false. I shall not advance
to the attack with hackneyed tales of the rich man astray in a desert,
who cannot get even a drop of water for his gold; or the decrepit
millionaire who would give half he has to buy from a stalwart fellow
without a cent, his twenty years and his lusty health. No more shall I
attempt to prove that one cannot buy happiness. So many people who have
money and so many more who have not would smile at this truth as the
hardest ridden of saws. But I shall appeal to the common experience of
each of you, to make you put your finger on the clumsy lie hidden
beneath an axiom that all the world goes about repeating.
Fill your purse to the best of your means, and let us set out for one of
the watering-places of which there are so many. I mean some little town
formerly unknown and full of simple folk, respectful and hospitable,
among whom it was good to be, and cost little. Fame with her hundred
trumpets has announced them to the world, and shown them how they can
profit from their situation, their climate, their personality. You start
out, on the faith of Dame Rumor, flattering yourself that with your
money you are going to find a quiet place to rest, and, far from the
world of civilization and convention, weave a bit of poetry into the
warp of your days.
The beginning is good. Nature's setting and some patriarchal costumes,
slow to disappear, delight you. But as time passes, the impression is
spoiled. The reverse side of things begins to show. This which you
thought was as true antique as family heirlooms, is naught but trickery
to mystify the credulous. Everything is labeled, all is for sale, from
the earth to the inhabitants. These primitives have become the most
consummate of sharpers. Given your money, they have resolved the problem
of getting it with the least expense to themselves. On all sides are
nets and traps, like spider-webs, and the fly that this gentry lies
snugly in wait for is _you_. This is what twenty or thirty years of
venality has done for a population once simple and honest, whose contact
was grateful indeed to men worn by city life. Home-made bread has
disappeared, butter comes from the dealer, they know to an art how to
skim milk and adulterate wine; they have all the vices of dwellers in
cities without their virtues.
As you leave, you count your money. So much is wanting, that you make
complaint. You are wrong. One never pays too dear for the conviction
that there are things which money will not buy.
You have need in your house of an intelligent and competent servant:
attempt to find this _rara avis_. According to the principle that with
money one may get anything, you ought, as the position you offer is
inferior, ordinary, good, or exceptional, to find servants unskilled,
average, excellent, superior. But all those who present themselves for
the vacant post are listed in the last category, and are fortified with
certificates to support their pretensions. It is true that nine times
out of ten, when put to the test, these experts are found totally
wanting. Then why did they engage themselves with you? They ought in
truth to reply as does the cook in the comedy, who is dearly paid and
proves to know nothing.
"Why did you hire out as a _cordon bleu_?
_It was to get bigger commissions."_
That is the great affair. You will always find people who like to get
big wages. More rarely you find capability. And if you are looking for
probity, the difficulty increases. Mercenaries may be had for the
asking; faithfulness is another thing. Far be it from me to deny the
existence of faithful servants, at once intelligent and upright. But you
will encounter as many, if not more, among the illy paid as among those
most highly salaried. And it little matters where you find them, you may
be sure that they are not faithful in their own interest; they are
faithful because they have somewhat of that simplicity which renders us
capable of self-abnegation.
We also hear on all sides the adage that money is the sinews of war.
There is no question but that war costs much money, and we know
something about it. Does this mean that in order to defend herself
against her enemies and to honor her flag, a country need only be rich?
In olden time the Greeks took it upon themselves to teach the Persians
the contrary, and this lesson will never cease to be repeated in
history. With money ships, cannon, horses may be bought; but not so
military genius, administrative wisdom, discipline, enthusiasm. Put
millions into the hands of your recruiters, and charge them to bring you
a great leader and an army. You will find a hundred captains instead of
one, and a thousand soldiers. But put them under fire: you will have
enough of your hirelings! At least one might imagine that with money
alone it is possible to lighten misery. Ah! that too is an illusion from
which we must turn away. Money, be the sum great or small, is a seed
which germinates into abuses. Unless there go with it intelligence,
kindness, much knowledge of men, it will do nothing but harm, and we run
great risk of corrupting both those who receive our bounty and those
charged with its distribution.
* * * * *
Money will not answer for everything: it is a power, but it is not
all-powerful. Nothing complicates life, demoralizes man, perverts the
normal course of society like the development of venality. Wherever it
reigns, everybody is duped by everybody else: one can no longer put
trust in persons or things, no longer obtain anything of value. We would
not be detractors of money, but this general law must be applied to it:
_Everything in its own place._ When gold, which should be a servant,
becomes a tyrannical power, affronting morality, dignity and liberty;
when some exert themselves to obtain it at any price, offering for sale
what is not merchandise, and others, possessing wealth, fancy that they
can purchase what no one may buy, it is time to rise against this gross
and criminal superstition, and cry aloud to the imposture: "Thy money
perish with thee!" The most precious things that man possesses he has
almost always received gratuitously: let him learn so to give them.
IX
NOTORIETY AND THE INGLORIOUS GOOD
One of the chief puerilities of our time is the love of advertisement.
To emerge from obscurity, to be in the public eye, to make one's self
talked of--some people are so consumed with this desire that we are
justified in declaring them attacked with an itch for publicity. In
their eyes obscurity is the height of ignominy: so they do their best to
keep their names in every mouth. In their obscure position they look
upon themselves as lost, like ship-wrecked sailors whom a night of
tempest has cast on some lonely rock, and who have recourse to cries,
volleys, fire, all the signals imaginable, to let it be known that they
are there. Not content with setting off crackers and innocent rockets,
many, to make themselves heard at any cost, have gone to the length of
perfidy and even crime. The incendiary Erostratus has made numerous
disciples. How many men of to-day have become notorious for having
destroyed something of mark; pulled down--or tried to pull down--some
man's high reputation; signalled their passage, in short, by a scandal,
a meanness, or an atrocity!
This rage for notoriety does not surge through cracked brains alone, or
only in the world of adventurers, charlatans and pretenders generally;
it has spread abroad in all the domains of life, spiritual and material.
Politics, literature, even science, and--most odious of
all--philanthropy and religion are infected. Trumpets announce a good
deed done, and souls must be saved with din and clamor. Pursuing its way
of destruction, the rage for noise has entered places ordinarily silent,
troubled spirits naturally serene, and vitiated in large measure all
activity for good. The abuse of showing everything, or rather, putting
everything on exhibition; the growing incapacity to appreciate that
which chooses to remain hidden, and the habit of estimating the value of
things by the racket they make, have come to corrupt the judgment of the
most earnest men, and one sometimes wonders if society will not end by
transforming itself into a great fair, with each one beating his drum in
front of his tent.
Gladly do we quit the dust and din of like exhibitions, to go and
breathe peacefully in some far-off nook of the woods, all surprise that
the brook is so limpid, the forest so still, the solitude so enchanting.
Thank God there are yet these uninvaded corners. However formidable the
uproar, however deafening the babel of merry-andrews, it cannot carry
beyond a certain limit; it grows faint and dies away. The realm of
silence is vaster than the realm of noise. Herein is our consolation.
* * * * *
Rest a moment on the threshold of this infinite world of inglorious
good, of quiet activities. Instantly we are under the charm we feel in
stretches of untrodden snow, in hiding wood-flowers, in disappearing
pathways that seem to lead to horizons without bourn. The world is so
made that the engines of labor, the most active agencies, are everywhere
concealed. Nature affects a sort of coquetry in masking her operations.
It costs you pains to spy her out, ingenuity to surprise her, if you
would see anything but results and penetrate the secrets of her
laboratories. Likewise in human society, the forces which move for good
remain invisible, and even in our individual lives; what is best in us
is incommunicable, buried in the depths of us. And the more vital are
these sensibilities and intuitions, confounding themselves with the very
source of our being, the less ostentatious they are: they think
themselves profaned by exposure to the light of day. There is a secret
and inexpressible joy in possessing at the heart of one's being, an
interior world known only to God, whence, nevertheless, come impulses,
enthusiasms, the daily renewal of courage, and the most powerful motives
for activity among our fellow men. When this intimate life loses in
intensity, when man neglects it for what is superficial, he forfeits in
worth all that he gains in appearance. By a sad fatality, it happens
that in this way we often become less admirable in proportion as we are
more admired. And we remain convinced that what is best in the world is
unknown there; for only those know it who possess it, and if they speak
of it, in so doing they destroy its charm.
There are passionate lovers of nature whom she fascinates most in
by-places, in the cool of forests, in the clefts of cañons, everywhere
that the careless lover is not admitted to her contemplation. Forgetting
time and the life of the world, they pass days in these inviolate
stillnesses, watching a bird build its nest or brood over its young, or
some little groundling at its gracious play. So to seek the good within
himself--one must go where he no longer finds constraint, or pose, or
"gallery" of any sort, but the simple fact of a life made up of wishing
to be what it is good for it to be, without troubling about anything
else.
May we be permitted to record here some observations made from life? As
no names are given, they cannot be considered indiscreet.
In my country of Alsace, on the solitary route whose interminable ribbon
stretches on and on under the forests of the Vosges, there is a
stone-breaker whom I have seen at his work for thirty years. The first
time I came upon him, I was a young student, setting out with swelling
heart for the great city. The sight of this man did me good, for he was
humming a song as he broke his stones. We exchanged a few words, and he
said at the end: "Well, good-by, my boy, good courage and good luck!"
Since then I have passed and repassed along that same route, under
circumstances the most diverse, painful and joyful. The student has
finished his course, the breaker of stones remains what he was. He has
taken a few more precautions against the seasons' storms: a rush-mat
protects his back, and his felt hat is drawn further down to shield his
face. But the forest is always sending back the echo of his valiant
hammer. How many sudden tempests have broken over his bent back, how
much adverse fate has fallen on his head, on his house, on his country!
He continues to break his stones, and, coming and going I find him by
the roadside, smiling in spite of his age and his wrinkles, benevolent,
speaking--above all in dark days--those simple words of brave men, which
have so much effect when they are scanned to the breaking of stones.
It would be quite impossible to express the emotion the sight of this
simple man gives me, and certainly he has no suspicion of it. I know of
nothing more reassuring and at the same time more searching for the
vanity which ferments in our hearts, than this coming face to face with
an obscure worker who does his task as the oak grows and as the good God
makes his sun to rise, without asking who is looking on.
I have known, too, a number of old teachers, men and women who have
passed their whole life at the same occupation--making the rudiments of
human knowledge and a few principles of conduct penetrate heads
sometimes harder than the rocks. They have done it with their whole
soul, throughout the length of a hard life in which the attention of men
had little place. When they lie in their unknown graves, no one
remembers them but a few humble people like themselves. But their
recompense is in their love. No one is greater than these unknown.
How many hidden virtues may one not discover--if he know how to
search--among people of a class he often ridicules without perceiving
that in so doing he is guilty of cruelty, ingratitude and stupidity: I
mean old maids. People amuse themselves with remarking the surprising
dress and ways of some of them--things of no consequence, for that
matter. They persist also in reminding us that others, very selfish,
take interest in nothing but their own comfort and that of some cat or
canary upon which their powers of affection center; and certainly these
are not outdone in egoism by the most hardened celibates of the stronger
sex. But what we oftenest forget is the amount of self-sacrifice hidden
modestly away in so many of these truly admirable lives. Is it nothing
to be without home and its love, without future, without personal
ambition? to take upon one's self that cross of solitary life, so hard
to bear, especially when there is added the solitude of the heart? to
forget one's self and have no other interests than the care of the old,
of orphans, the poor, the infirm--those whom the brutal mechanism of
life casts out among its waste? Seen from without, these apparently tame
and lusterless lives rouse pity rather than envy. Those who approach
gently sometimes divine sad secrets, great trials undergone, heavy
burdens beneath which too fragile shoulders bend; but this is only the
side of shadow. We should learn to know and value this richness of
heart, this pure goodness, this power to love, to console, to hope, this
joyful giving up of self, this persistence in sweetness and forgiveness
even toward the unworthy. Poor old maids! how many wrecked lives have
you rescued, how many wounded have you healed, how many wanderers have
you gently led aright, how many naked have you clothed, how many orphans
have you taken in, and how many strangers, who would have been alone in
the world but for you--you who yourselves are often remembered of no
one. I mistake. Someone knows you; it is that great mysterious Pity
which keeps watch over our lives and suffers in our misfortunes.
Forgotten like you, often blasphemed, it has confided to you some of its
heavenliest messages, and that perhaps is why above your gentle comings
and goings, we sometimes seem to hear the rustling wings of ministering
angels.
* * * * *
The good hides itself under so many different forms, that one has often
as much pains to discover it as to unearth the best concealed crimes. A
Russian doctor, who had passed ten years of his life in Siberia,
condemned for political reasons to forced labor, used to find great
pleasure in telling of the generosity, courage and humanity he had
observed, not only among a large number of the condemned, but also
among the convict guards. For the moment one is tempted to exclaim:
Where will not the good hide away! And in truth life offers here great
surprises and embarrassing contrasts. There are good men, officially so
recognized, quoted among their associates, I had almost said guaranteed
by the Government or the Church, who can be reproached with nothing but
dry and hard hearts; while we are astonished to encounter in certain
fallen human beings, the most genuine tenderness, and as it were a
thirst for self-devotion.
* * * * *
I should like to speak next--apropos of the inglorious good--of a class
that to-day it is thought quite fitting to treat with the utmost
one-sidedness. I mean the rich. Some people think the last word is said
when they have stigmatized that infamy, capital. For them, all who
possess great fortunes are monsters gorged with the blood of the
miserable. Others, not so declamatory, persist, however, in confounding
riches with egoism and insensibility. Justice should be visited on these
errors, be they involuntary or calculated. No doubt there are rich men
who concern themselves with nobody else, and others who do good only
with ostentation; indeed, we know it too well. But does their inhumanity
or hypocrisy take away the value of the good that others do, and that
they often hide with a modesty so perfect?
I knew a man to whom every misfortune had come which can strike us in
our affections. He had lost a beloved wife, had seen all his children
buried, one after another. But he had a great fortune, the result of his
own labor. Living in the utmost simplicity, almost without personal
wants, he spent his time in searching for opportunities to do good, and
profiting by them. How many people he surprised in flagrant poverty,
what means he combined for relieving distress and lighting up dark
lives, with what kindly thoughtfulness he took his friends unawares, no
one can imagine. He liked to do good to others and enjoy their surprise
when they did not know whence the relief came. It pleased him to repair
the injustices of fortune, to bring tears of happiness in families
pursued by mischance. He was continually plotting, contriving,
machinating in the dark, with a childish fear of being caught with his
hand in the bag. The greater part of these fine deeds were not known
till after his death; the whole of them we shall never know.
He was a socialist of the right sort! for there are two kinds of them.
Those who aspire to appropriate to themselves a part of the goods of
others, are numerous and commonplace. To belong to their order it
suffices to have a big appetite. Those who are hungering to divide their
own goods with men who have none, are rare and precious, for to enter
this choice company there is need of a brave and noble heart, free from
selfishness, and sensitive to both the happiness and unhappiness of its
fellows. Fortunately the race of these socialists is not extinct, and I
feel an unalloyed satisfaction in offering them a tribute they never
claim.
I must be pardoned for dwelling upon this. It does one good to offset
the bitterness of so many infamies, so many calumnies, so much
charlatanism, by resting the eyes upon something more beautiful,
breathing the perfume of these stray corners where simple goodness
flowers.
A lady, a foreigner, doubtless little used to Parisian life, just now
told me with what horror the things she sees here inspire her:--these
vile posters, these "yellow" journals, these women with bleached hair,
this crowd rushing to the races, to dance-halls, to roulette tables, to
corruption--the whole flood of superficial and mundane life. She did not
speak the word Babylon, but doubtless it was out of pity for one of the
inhabitants of this city of perdition.
"Alas, yes, madam, these things are sad, but you have not seen all."
"Heaven preserve me from that!"
"On the contrary, I wish you could see everything; for if the dark side
is very ugly, there is so much to atone for it. And believe me, madam,
you have simply to change your quarter, or observe at another hour. For
instance, take the Paris of early morning. It will offer much to correct
your impressions of the Paris of the night. Go see, among so many other
working people, the street-sweepers, who come out at the hour when the
revellers and malefactors go in. Observe beneath these rags those
caryatid bodies, those austere faces! How serious they are at their work
of sweeping away the refuse of the night's revelry. One might liken
them to the prophets at Ahasuerus's gates. There are women among them,
many old people. When the air is cold they stop to blow their fingers,
and then go at it again. So it is every day. And they, too, are
inhabitants of Paris.
"Go next to the faubourgs, to the factories, especially the smaller
ones, where the children or the employers labor with the men. Watch the
army of workers marching to their tasks. How ready and willing these
young girls seem, as they come gaily down from their distant quarters to
the shops and stores and offices of the city. Then visit the homes from
which they come. See the woman of the people at her work. Her husband's
wages are modest, their dwelling is cramped, the children are many, the
father is often harsh. Make a collection of the biographies of lowly
people, budgets of modest family life: look at them attentively and
long.
"After that, go see the students. Those who have scandalized you in the
streets are numerous, but those who labor hard are legion--only they
stay at home, and are not talked about. If you knew the toil and dig of
the Latin Quarter! You find the papers full of the rumpus made by a
certain set of youths who call themselves students. The papers say
enough of those who break windows; but why do they make no mention of
those who spend their nights toiling over problems? Because it wouldn't
interest the public. Yes, when now and then one of them, a medical
student perhaps, dies a victim to professional duty, the matter has two
lines in the dailies. A drunken brawl gets half a column, with every
detail elaborated. Nothing is lacking but the portraits of the
heroes--and not always that!
"I should never end were I to try to point out to you all that you must
go to see if you would see all: you would needs make the tour of society
at large, rich and poor, wise and ignorant. And certainly you would not
judge so severely then. Paris is a world, and here, as in the world in
general, the good hides away while the evil flaunts itself. Observing
only the surface, you sometimes ask how there can possibly be so much
riff-raff. When, on the contrary, you look into the depths, you are
astonished that in this troublous, obscure and sometimes frightful life
there can be so much of virtue."
* * * * *