If anyone tells you something strange about the world, something you
have never heard before, do not laugh but listen attentively; make him
repeat it, make him explain it: no doubt there is something there worth
taking hold of.
The cult of the soul is a perpetual discovery of itself and the
universe which it reflects. The purest happiness is not a stable and
final frame of mind, it is an equilibrium produced by an incessant
compromise which has to be adroitly reëstablished; it is the reward
of a constant activity; it increases in proportion to the daily
corrections one brings to it.
One must not cling obstinately to one’s own interpretations of the
world but unceasingly renew the flowers on the altar.
In quite another order of ideas I think of those old-fashioned
manufacturers who are immovably set against trying any of the new
machines and perish in their stubbornness. That is nothing but a
comparison: to justify the machine folly is quite the opposite of my
desire. I simply wish to show that routine affects equally the things
of the mind and of the heart, that it is a very formidable thing.
Kipling, I believe, tells the story of a Hindu colony that was
decimated by famine. The poor folk let themselves die of hunger without
touching the wheat that had been brought for them, because they had
been used to eating millet.
If the sacred lamp of happiness some day comes to lack the ritual oil,
we shall not let it go out; we shall surely find something with which
to feed it, something that will serve for light and heat.
X
The will to happiness attains its perfection in the mature man. With
adolescence it passes through a redoubtable crisis.
Nietzsche says: “There is less melancholy in the mature man than in the
young man.” It is true.
Very young people cultivate sadness as something noble. They do
not readily forgive themselves for not being always sad. They have
discovered the mysterious isle of melancholy and do not wish to escape
from it again. They love everything about that black magician and his
attitudes and his tears and his nostalgia and his romantic beauty. They
have a fierce disdain for vulgar pleasures and take refuge in sadness
because they do not yet know the splendor and majesty of joy.
But in their own fashion, which is full of disdain, reserve and
ingenuous complexity, they do not any the less seek for happiness.
With age happiness appears as truly the sole, serene study of man. As
he rests upon the moral possession of the world, he believes that with
time and experience he can remain insensible to the wearing out of his
bodily organs.
He who knows how to be happy and to win forgiveness for his happiness,
how enviable he is!--the only true model among those that are wise.
It is now, just now, that these things ought to be said, in the hour
when our old continent bleeds in every member, in the hour when our
future seems blotted out by the menace of every sort of servitude and
of a hopeless labor that will know neither measure nor redemption.
II
POVERTY AND RICHES
I
The Christian doctrine, which has all the beauties, has all the
audacities too. It has endeavored to make the sublime and daring notion
prevail among the mass of men that salvation is reserved for the
poor. What a magnificent thing! And if this religion of poverty has
degenerated in the course of the centuries, with what consolation has
it not bathed those thrice-happy souls whom an unbroken faith guides
through misery and humiliation!
But there has never been a religion which has been able to found itself
upon renunciation without compensation. Is he poor, this man who
consents to go unclad, roofless, unfed, up to the day when there will
be showered upon him all the riches of the kingdom of God? Has he no
thought of a supreme gift, of a magnificent possession, the man to whom
his master, in person, has given the command: “Lay up your treasures in
heaven, where they will not be lost”?
He does not exist, the hopeless being who does not hunger for some
treasure, even if it is an imaginary one, even an unreal one, even one
that is lost in a bewildering future.
In what an abyss of poverty should we groan if our kingdom were not of
this world and were nowhere outside the world, either?
And now a generation of men has come that no longer believes in the
supernatural felicities of the future life and seems no longer to
have anything to hope from a world consumed by hatred and given over
inevitably, for long years, to confusion, destitution, egotistical
passions.
In truth, the programmes of the social factions have no consolation
for us, there is nothing in them that speaks of love and the true
blessings; all these monuments of eloquence bring us back to hatred and
anguish.
The most generous of them only give us glimpses of new struggles, new
sheddings of blood, when our age is drunk with crime and fatigue. To
whichever side the individual turns he finds himself crushed, scoffed
at, sacrificed to insatiable, hostile gods.
A few years ago Maeterlinck wrote: “Up to the present men have left one
religion to enter another; but when we abandon ours, it is not to go
anywhere. That is a new phenomenon, with unknown consequences, in the
midst of which we live.”
Having quoted these words, I hasten to add that the war is no
particular consequence of this moral state of the world. The question
of religion is not involved at all. The priests are quite ready to
abuse these easy oppositions in order to obtain arguments in favor of
their cause. But they know well enough, alas! that if the teaching
of Christ stigmatizes wars, the religions have only contributed to
multiply and aggravate them. They know very well that, in the conflict
that now divides the earth, the religions have shown themselves
enslaved to the states. No one has wished to take up the wallet and
staff of the dead Tolstoy.
Humanity seems poorer and more truly disinherited than ever. Its
kingdom is in itself and in everything that surrounds it; but it has
sold it for a morsel of bread. And how can one reproach it for this? It
is very hungry and its heart is not open to beauty.