The search for happiness cannot ignore the conditions of the material
life. Undoubtedly, well-being, comfort, dispose us to a happy view
of things; but will they ever replace what a poet has called “the
contented heart”?
The Anglo-American peoples, susceptible as they are to all the moral
and religious revolutions, have applied themselves to altering the
original sense of simple well-being so as to identify it with luxurious
comfort. That is a way of giving a moral aspect to pleasure, making an
honest bargain with the corruptions of money.
The exigencies of this sort of life have largely contributed to
involving these peoples in a frenzied whirlwind of business that wears
a man out and bewilders him. The anonymous writer of the “Letters of
an Elderly American to a Frenchman” says to my countrymen: “Your most
beautiful country-houses and your best hotels are occupied most of the
time by foreigners, while your own people have to content themselves
with miserable little cheap holes. Isn’t it absurd!” Perhaps, O Elderly
American, but that absurdity is dear to my heart. May the God of
journeys always turn my path away from the tainted spots where rise
those buildings in which the existence you think so enviable is passed.
If we are to consecrate our friendship we ought to discuss the value
of words: what you call happiness does not tempt me.
The love of nature, the taste for those simple, healthy joys that were
so vaunted by the philosophers of our eighteenth century have been the
laughing-stock of our contemporary writers. A laughable excess has led,
by reaction, to a furious and ignoble excess.
The dramatists and novelists of our time who, by the quality of their
opinions or by their political positions are ostensibly laboring for
a moral or religious end, have betrayed, in most of their works, a
servile and ill-concealed love of luxury. It is useless to give names;
let us say only that none of the modern novels of certain of our
authors lack those descriptions and professions of faith that reveal
the quivering longing of the pauper for the delights and enjoyments on
which all his eager desires are fixed.
It is partly to the influence of this literature that our old world
owes the headlong rush of all classes of humanity toward those
pleasures that are only the phantoms of happiness and will never be
anything else.
If genius wishes to consecrate itself to a labor that is truly
reconstructive, truly pacific, it must discover other subjects for its
works.