of material forces absorb them, as it absorbs the dew that falls from
the pale morning flower. Boundless as the world may be wherein we
live, it is yet as hermetically enclosed as a sphere of steel. Nothing
can fall outside it, for it has no outside; nor can any atom possibly
be lost. Even though our species should perish entirely, the stage
through which it has caused certain fragments of matter to pass would
remain, notwithstanding all ulterior transformations, an indelible
principle and an immortal cause. The formidable, provisional
vegetations of the primary epoch, the chaotic and immature monsters of
the secondary grounds--Plesiosaurus, Ichthyosaurus, Pterodactyl--these
might also regard themselves as vain and ephemeral attempts, ridiculous
experiments of a still puerile nature, and conceive that they would
leave no mark upon a more harmonious globe. And yet not an effort of
theirs has been lost in space. They purified the air, they softened
the unbreathable flame of oxygen, they paved the way for the more
symmetrical life of those who should follow. If our lungs find in the
atmosphere the aliment they need, it is thanks to the inconceivably
incoherent forests of arborescent fern. We owe our brains and nerves
of to-day to fearful hordes of swimming or flying reptiles. These
obeyed the order of their life. They did what they had to do. They
modified matter in the fashion prescribed to them. And we, by carrying
particles of this same matter to the degree of extraordinary
incandescence proper to the thought of man, shall surely establish in
the future something that never shall perish.
IV
THE PAST
1
Our past stretches behind us in long perspective. It slumbers on the
horizon like a deserted city shrouded in mist. A few peaks mark its
boundary, and soar predominant into the air; a few important acts stand
out, like towers, some with the light still upon them, others half
ruined and slowly decaying beneath the weight of oblivion. The trees
are bare, the walls crumble, and shadow slowly steals over all.
Everything seems to be dead there, and rigid, save only when memory,
slowly decomposing, lights it for an instant with an illusory gleam.
But apart from this animation, derived only from our expiring
recollections, all would appear to be definitively motionless,
immutable for ever, divided from present and future by a river that
shall not again be crossed.
In reality it is alive; and, for many of us, endowed with a profounder,
more ardent life than either present or future. In reality this dead
city is often the hot-bed of our existence; and, in accordance with the
spirit in which men return to it, shall some find all their wealth
there, and others lose what they have.
2
Our conception of the past has much in common with our conception of
love and happiness, destiny, justice, and most of the vague but
therefore not less potent spiritual organisms that stand for the mighty
forces we obey. Our ideas have been handed down to us ready-made by
our predecessors; and even when our second consciousness wakes, and,
proud in its conviction that henceforth nothing shall be accepted
blindly, proceeds most carefully to investigate these ideas, it will
squander its time questioning those that loudly protest their right to
be heard, and pay no heed to the others close by, that as yet, perhaps,
have said nothing. Nor have we, as a rule, far to go to discover these
others. They are in us and of us; they wait for us to address them.
They are not idle, notwithstanding their silence. Amid the noise and
babble of the crowd they are tranquilly directing a portion of our real
life; and, as they are nearer to truth than their self-satisfied
sisters, they will often be far more simple, and far more beautiful too.
3
Among the most stubborn of these ready-made ideas are those that
preside over our conception of the past, and render it a force as
imposing and rigid as destiny; a force that indeed becomes destiny
working backwards, with its hand outstretched to the destiny that
burrows ahead, to which it transmits the last link of our chains. The
one thrusts us back, the other urges us forward, with a like
irresistible violence. But the violence of the past is perhaps more
terrible and more alarming. One may disbelieve in destiny. It is a
god whose onslaught many have never experienced. But no one would
dream of denying the oppressiveness of the past. Sooner or later its
effect must inevitably be felt. Those even who refuse to admit the
intangible will credit the past, which their finger can touch, with all
the mystery, the influence, the sovereign intervention whereof they
have stripped the powers that they have dethroned; thus rendering it
the almost unique and therefore more dreadful god of their depopulated
Olympus.
4
The force of the past is indeed one of the heaviest that weigh upon men
and incline them to sadness. And yet there is none more docile, more
eager to follow the direction we could so readily give, did we but know
how best to avail ourselves of this docility. In reality, if we think
of it, the past belongs to us quite as much as the present, and is far
more malleable than the future. Like the present, and to a much
greater extent than the future, its existence is all in our thoughts,
and our hand controls it; nor is this only true of our material past,
wherein there are ruins that we perhaps can restore; it is true also of
the regions that are closed to our tardy desire for atonement; it is
true above all of our moral past, and of what we consider to be most
irreparable there.
5
"The past is past," we say, and it is false; the past is always
present. "We have to bear the burden of our past," we sigh, and it is
false; the past bears our burden. "Nothing can wipe out the past," and
it is false; the least effort of will sends present and future
travelling over the past to efface whatever we bid them efface. "The
indestructible, irreparable, immutable past!" And that is no truer
than the rest. In those who speak thus it is the present that is
immutable, and knows not how to repair. "My past is wicked, it is
sorrowful, empty," we say again; "as I look back I can see no moment of
beauty, of happiness or love; I see nothing but wretched ruins . . ."
And that is false; for you see precisely what you yourself place there
at the moment your eyes upon it.
6
Our past depends entirely upon our present, and is constantly changing
with it. Our past is contained in our memory; and this memory of ours,
that feeds on our heart and brain, and is incessantly swayed by them,
is the most variable thing in the world, the least independent, the
most impressionable. Our chief concern with the past, that which truly
remains and forms part of us, is not what we have done, or the
adventures that we have met with, but the moral reactions bygone events
are producing within us at this very moment, the inward being they have
helped to form; and these reactions, that give birth to our sovereign,
intimate being, are wholly governed by the manner in which we regard
past events, and vary as the moral substance varies that they encounter
within us. But with every step in advance that our feelings or
intellect take, a change will come in this moral substance; and then,
on the instant, the most immutable facts, that seemed to be graven for
ever on the stone and bronze of the past, will assume an entirely
different aspect, will return to life and leap into movement, bringing
us vaster and more courageous counsels, dragging memory aloft with them
in their ascent; and what was once a mass of ruin, mouldering in the
darkness, becomes a populous city whereon the sun shines again.
7
We have an arbitrary fashion of establishing a certain number of events
behind us. We relegate them to the horizon of our memory; and having
set them there, we tell ourselves that they form part of a world in
which the united efforts of all mankind could not wipe away a tear, or
cause a flower to lift its head. And yet, while admitting that these
events have passed beyond our control, we still, with the most curious
inconsistency, believe that they have full control over us; whereas the
truth is that they can only act upon us to the extent in which we have
renounced our right to act upon them. The past asserts itself only in
those whose moral growth has ceased; then, and not till then, does it
become redoubtable. From that moment we have indeed the irreparable
behind us, and the weight of what we have done lies heavy upon our
shoulders. But so long as the life of our mind and character flows
uninterruptedly on, so long will the past remain in suspense above us;
and, as the glance may be that we send towards it, will it, complaisant
as the clouds Hamlet showed to Polonius, adopt the shape of the hope or
fear, the peace or disquiet, that we are perfecting within us.
8
No sooner has our moral activity weakened than accomplished events rush
forward and assail us; and woe to him who opens the door, and permits
them to take possession of his hearth! Each one will vie with the
other in overwhelming him with the gifts best calculated to shatter his
courage. It matters not whether our past has been happy and noble, or
lugubrious and criminal, there shall still be great danger in allowing
it to enter, not as an invited guest, but like a parasite settling upon
us. The result will be either sterile regret or impotent remorse; and
remorse and regrets of this kind are equally disastrous. In order to
draw from the past what is precious within it--and most of our wealth
is there--we must go to it at the hour when we are strongest, most
conscious of mastery; enter its domain, and there make choice of what
we require, discarding the rest, and laying our command upon it never
to cross our threshold without our order. Like all things that only
can live at the cost of our spiritual strength, it will soon learn to
obey. At first, perhaps, it will endeavour to resist. It will have
recourse to artifice and prayer. It will try to tempt us, to cajole.
It will drag forward frustrated hopes and joys that are gone for ever,
broken affections, well-merited reproaches, expiring hatred and love
that is dead, squandered faith and perished beauty; it will thrust
before us all that once had been the marvellous essence of our ardour
for life; it will point to the beckoning sorrows, decaying happiness,
that now haunt the ruin. But we shall pass by, without turning our
head; our hand shall scatter the crowd of memories, even as the sage
Ulysses, in the Cimmerian night, with his sword prevented the
shades--even that of his mother, whom it was not his mission to
question--from approaching the black blood that would for an instant
have given them life and speech. We shall go straight to the joy, the
regret or remorse, whose counsel we need; or to the act of injustice we
wish scrupulously to examine, in order either to make reparation, if
such still be possible, or that the sight of the wrong we did, whose
victims have ceased to be, is required to give us the indispensable
force that shall lift us above the injustice it still lies in us to
commit.
9
Yes, even though our past contain crimes that now are beyond the reach
of our best endeavours, even then, if we consider the circumstances of
time and place, and the vast plane of each human existence, these
crimes fade out of our life the moment we feel that no temptation, no
power on earth, could ever induce us to commit the like again. The
world has not forgiven--there is but little that the external sphere
will forget or forgive--and their material effects will continue, for
the laws of cause and effect differ from those which govern our
consciousness. At the tribunal of our personal justice, however--the
only tribunal which has decisive action on our inaccessible life, as it
is the only one whose decrees we cannot evade, whose concrete judgments
stir us to our very marrow--the evil action that we regard from a
loftier plane than that at which it was committed, becomes an action
that no longer exists for us save in so far as it may serve in the
future to render our fall more difficult; nor has it the right to lift
its head again except at the moment when we incline once more towards
the abyss it guards.
Bitter, surely, must be the grief of him in whose past there are acts
of injustice whereof every avenue now is closed, who is no longer able
to seek out his victims, and raise them and comfort them. To have
abused one's strength in order to despoil some feeble creature who has
definitely succumbed beneath the blow; to have callously thrust
suffering upon a loving heart, or merely misunderstood and passed by a
touching affection that offered itself--these things must of necessity
weigh heavily upon our life, and induce a sorrow within us that shall
not readily be forgotten. But it depends on the actual point our
consciousness has attained whether our entire moral destiny shall be
depressed or lifted beneath this burden. Our actions rarely die: and
many unjust deeds of ours will therefore inevitably return to life some
day to claim their due and start legitimate reprisals. They will find
our external life without defence; but before they can reach the inward
being at the centre of that life, they must first listen to the
judgment we have already passed on ourselves; and in accordance with
the nature of that judgment will the attitude be of these mysterious
envoys, who have come from the depths where cause and effect are poised
in eternal equilibrium. If it has indeed been from the heights of our
newly acquired consciousness that we have questioned ourselves, and
condemned, they will not be menacing justiciaries whom we shall
suddenly see surging in from all sides, but benevolent visitors,
friends we have almost expected, and they will draw near us in silence.
They know in advance that the man before them is no longer the guilty
creature they sought; and instead of bringing hatred, revolt, and
despair, or punishments that degrade and kill, they will come charged
with ennobling, consoling and purifying thought and penance.
10
The things which differentiate the happy and strong from those who weep
and will not be consoled, all derive from the one same principle of
confidence and ardour; and thus it is that the manner in which we are
able to recall what we have done or suffered is far more important than
our actual sufferings or deeds. No past, viewed by itself, can seem
happy; and the privileged of fate, who reflect on what remains of the
happy years that have flown, have perhaps more reason for sorrow than
the unfortunate ones who brood over the dregs of a life of
wretchedness. Whatever was one day and has now ceased to be, makes for
sadness; above all, whatever was very happy and very beautiful. The
object of our regrets--whether these revolve around what has been or
might have been--is therefore more or less the same for all men, and
their sorrow should be the same. It is not, however; in one case it
will reign uninterruptedly, whereas in another it will only appear at
very long intervals. It must therefore depend on things other than
accomplished facts. It depends on the manner in which men will deal
with these facts. The conquerors in this world--those who waste no
time setting up an imaginary irreparable and immutable athwart their
horizon, those who seem to be born afresh every morning in a world that
for ever awakes anew to the future--these know instinctively that what
appears to exist no longer is still existing intact, that what appeared
to be ended is only completing itself. They know that the years time
has taken from them are still in travail; still, under their new
master, obeying the old. They know that their past is for ever in
movement; that the yesterday which was despondent, decrepit and
criminal, will return full of joyousness, innocence, youth, in the
track of to-morrow. They know that their image is not yet stamped on
the days that are gone; that a decisive deed, or thought, will suffice
to break down the whole edifice; that however remote or vast the shadow
may be that stretches behind them, they have only to put forth a
gesture of gladness or hope for the shadow at once to copy this
gesture, and, flashing it back to the remotest, tiniest ruins of early
childhood even, to extract unexpected treasure from all this wreckage.
They know that they have retrospective action on all bygone deeds; and
that the dead themselves will annul their verdicts in order to judge
afresh a past that to-day has transfigured and endowed with new life.
They are fortunate who find this instinct in the folds of their cradle.
But may the others not imitate it who have it not; and is not human
wisdom charged to teach us how we may acquire the salutary instincts
that nature has withheld?
11
Let us not lull ourselves to sleep in our past; and if we find that it
tends to spread like a vault over our life, instead of incessantly
changing beneath our eye; if the present grow into the habit of
visiting it, not like a good workman repairing thither to execute the
labours imposed upon him by the commands of to-day, but as a too
passive, too credulous pilgrim, content idly to contemplate beautiful,
motionless ruins--then, the more glorious, the happier that our past
may have been, with all the more suspicion should it be regarded by us.
Nor should we yield to the instinct that bids us accord it profound
respect, if this respect induce the fear in us that we may disturb its
nice equilibrium. Better the ordinary past, content with its befitting
place in the shadow, than the sumptuous past which claims to govern
what has travelled beyond its reach. Better a mediocre but living
present, which acts as though it were alone in the world, than a
present which proudly expires in the chains of a marvellous long ago.
A single step that we take at this hour towards an uncertain goal, is
far more important to us than the thousand leagues we covered in our
march towards a dazzling triumph in the days that were. Our past had
no other mission than to lift us to the moment at which we are, and
there equip us with the needful experience and weapons, the needful
thought and gladness. If, at this precise moment, it take from us and
divert to itself one particle of our energy, then, however glorious it
may have been, it still was useless, and had better never have been.
If we allow it to arrest a gesture that we were about to make, then is
our death beginning; and the edifices of the future will suddenly take
the semblance of tombs.
More dangerous still than the past of happiness and glory is the one
inhabited by overpowering and too dearly cherished phantoms. Many an
existence perishes in the coils of a fond recollection. And yet, were
the dead to return to this earth, they would say, I fancy, with the
wisdom that must be theirs who have seen what the ephemeral light still
hides from us: "Dry your eyes. There comes to us no comfort from your
tears: exhausting you, they exhaust us also. Detach yourself from us,
banish us from your thoughts, until such time as you can think of us
without strewing tears on the life we still live in you. We endure
only in your recollection; but you err in believing that your regrets
alone can touch us. It is the things you do that prove to us we are
not forgotten, and rejoice our manes; and this without your knowing it,
without any necessity that you should turn towards us. Each time that
our pale image saddens your ardour, we feel ourselves die anew, and it
is a more perceptible, irrevocable death than was our other; bending
too often over our tombs, you rob us of the life, the courage and love
that you imagine you restore.
"It is in you that we are, it is in all your life that our life
resides; and as you become greater, even while forgetting us, so do we
become greater too, and our shades draw the deep breath of prisoners
whose prison door is flung open.
"If there be anything new we have learned in the world where we are
now, it is, first of all, that the good we did to you when we were,
like yourselves, on the earth, does not balance the evil wrought by a
memory which saps the force and the confidence of life."
12
Above all, let us envy the past of no man. Our own past was created by
ourselves, and for ourselves alone. No other could have suited us, no
other could have taught us the truth that it alone can teach, or given
the strength that it alone can give. And whether it be good or bad,
sombre or radiant, it still remains a collection of unique masterpieces
the value of which is known to none but ourselves; and no foreign
masterpiece could equal the action we have accomplished, the kiss we
received, the thing of beauty that moved us so deeply, the suffering we
underwent, the anguish that held us enchained, the love that wreathed
us in smiles or in tears. Our past is ourselves, what we are and shall
be; and upon this unknown sphere there moves no creature, from the
happiest down to the most unfortunate, who could foretell how great a
loss would be his could he substitute the trace of another for the
trace which he himself must leave in life. Our past is our secret,
promulgated by the voice of years; it is the most mysterious image of
our being, over which Time keeps watch. This image is not dead; a mere
nothing degrades or adorns it; it can still grow bright or sombre, can
still smile or weep, express love or hatred; and yet it remains
recognisable for ever in the midst of the myriad images that surround
it. It stands for what we once were, as our aspirations and hopes
stand for what we shall be; and the two faces blend, that they may
teach us what we are.
Let us not envy the facts of the past, but rather the spiritual garment
that the recollection of days long gone will weave around the sage.
And though this garment be woven of joy or of sorrow, though it be
drawn from the dearth of events or from their abundance, it shall still
be equally precious; and those who may see it shining over a life shall
not be able to tell whether its quickening jewels and stars were found
amid the grudging cinders of a cabin or upon the steps of a palace.
No past can be empty or squalid, no events can be wretched: the
wretchedness lies in our manner of welcoming them. And if it were true
that nothing had happened to you, that would be the most remarkable
adventure that any man ever had met with; and no less remarkable would
be the light it would shed upon you. In reality the facts, the
opportunities and possibilities, the passions, that await and invite
the majority of men, are all more or less the same. Some may be more
dazzling than others; their attendant circumstances may differ, but
they differ far less than the inward reactions that follow; and the
insignificant, incomplete event that falls on a fertile heart and brain
will readily attain the moral proportions and grandeur of an analogous
incident which, on another plane, will convulse a people.
He who should see, spread out before him, the past lives of a multitude
of men, could not easily decide which past he himself would wish to
have lived were he not able at the same time to witness the moral
results of these dissimilar and unsymmetrical facts. He might not
impossibly make a fatal blunder; he might choose an existence
overflowing with incomparable happiness and victory, that sparkle like
wonderful jewels; while his glance might travel indifferently over a
life that appeared to be empty whereas it was truly steeped to the brim
in serene emotions and lofty, redeeming thoughts whereby, though the
eye saw nothing, that life was yet rendered happy among all. For we
are well aware that what destiny has given, and what destiny holds in
reserve, can be revolutionised as utterly by thought as by great
victory or great defeat. Thought is silent; it disturbs not a pebble
on the illusory road we see; but at the crossway of the more actual
road that our secret life follows will it tranquilly erect an
indestructible pyramid; and thereupon, suddenly, every event, to the
very phenomena of earth and heaven, will assume a new direction.
In Siegfried's life, it is not the moment when he forges the prodigious
sword that is most important, or when he kills the dragon and compels
the gods from his path, or even the dazzling second when he encounters
love on the flaming mountain, but indeed the brief instant wrested from
eternal decrees, the little childish gesture, when one of his hands,
red with the blood of his mysterious victim, having chanced to draw
near his lips, his eyes and ears are suddenly opened; he understands
the hidden language of all that surrounds him, detects the treachery of
the dwarf who represents the powers of evil, and learns in a flash to
do that which had to be done.
V
LUCK
1
Once upon a time, an old Servian legend tells us, there were two
brothers of whom one was industrious, but unfortunate, and the other
lazy, but overwhelmingly prosperous. One day the unfortunate brother
meets a beautiful girl who is tending sheep and weaving a golden
thread. "To whom do these sheep belong?" he asks. "They belong to
whom I belong." "And to whom do you belong?" "To your brother: I am
his luck." "And where is my luck then?" "Very far from here." "Can I
find it?" "Yes, if you look for it."
So he wanders away in search of his luck. And one evening, in a great
forest, he comes across a poor old woman asleep under a tree. He wakes
her and asks who she is. "Don't you know me?" she answers. "It is
true you never have seen me: I am your luck." "And who can have given
me so wretched a luck?" "Destiny." "Can I find destiny?" "Yes, if
you look long enough."